BY DUSK OF JULY 23, I had made a good offing from Floreana. I stood due south of the cluster of lifeless cones on Albemarle. Sometime around midnight, I expected to nose free of the westernmost point of charred lava forms and push into the sea stretch to westward—3000 miles of open water to my next landfall: the Marquesas Islands.
The wind was in the south: Pagan slid blithely over a beneficent sea. The end of the Galápagos bird squadrons bent their homeward course around the mast and swooped away sternward. Darkness curtained off the last glimpse of the “ash heap” I suppose I shall ever have.
The heavens cast themselves with a measles of guiding lights. A waning moon softened the night. The ocean undulated lightly, at the behest of a fresh breeze. The spill of wind out of the sail made my skin tingle. The night was made glorious in the thought that I was nudging into the locale of the trade winds: that I was starting across the big ocean to Mary. The seas ahead of me were well known for their tranquillity. The current, though setting to northwest for the nonce, would soon straighten out and shove me due west, at an average rate of 30 miles daily, free of charge. With the wind expected to push me at a rate of 90 to 100 miles a day I would be amassing a daily average of 130 miles—wonderful for my purpose of speed across the ocean.
That night was the most roseate of the whole voyage. A letter was on its way to Mary, explaining all. The hull was clean, and sliding blissfully through the seas. I had gaffed a great sea turtle early in the afternoon. I would have fresh meat for three days. After that I would have dried meat—sundried after the style of Indian jerky—for the full passage to the Marquesas. The weather was lovely. What more, excepting the presence of my wife, could I ask?
Unhappily, my bliss was to be short-lived. I had overlooked the fact that first I would have to find the trade winds. In the Eastern Pacific, the trades don’t always reach as far north as the equator. They are where you find them. In between is an airless patch known as the doldrums.
Trudging across the doldrums into the trades is a sore-footed task. When you pick up a cat’s-paw for a few hours, you think you’re in the trades. Then suddenly the wind elopes; and the ensuing glassiness of the sea, its silence, the boat’s unending clatter, run roughshod over your nerves. A slatting sail, rattling blocks, slapping halyards, slack sheets have an indescribable nuisance value. Each calm found me drifting with the current to the north.
Not once did a fresh wind curve the sails and bend Pagan to her work but that I felt it was at last the trades. Again and again, however, the wind died away. In a few days I found myself north of the line. The tremendous letdown of the trades was doubly exasperating since I had expected such a sterling performance from them.
My intention had been to stay close to the equator in sailing west; to avail myself of the strong westerly current near it. Even seventy-five miles south of the line, the extra push on the keel slacks off a dozen miles daily. Better to go south and lose some force of current than to stay up here in constant calms, on a heat-reflecting sea. Reconciled to the wisdom of a steady wind rather than a stronger current, I waited on the next wind. It came not at once and not steadily but in faltering episodes. Each time, under flattened sails and a neutral tiller, I hauled into the southwest.
With each puff of wind I added to my southing: with each calm I drifted back north again. The doldrums played with me as a cat devils with a mouse. Hours on end I drifted under spars stripped to the standing rigging, unable to bare the monotony of flapping sailcloth and clattering tackle. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t nap, I couldn’t think; I could only grope with slit eyes hour on hour for a hint of wind on the polished water.
At the onset of a stir of air I ran up every square inch the rigging could hold and nurtured every pulse beat out of the sky, pushed doggedly on in search of the diffident trades.
On the afternoon of July 27, four days out of Galápagos, irritation aboard reached its climax when Gawky, after several weeks of languishment on Pagan, suddenly soared from the deckhouse and made a bee line for the horizon to eastward. He departed with too much energy and determination for it to be a routine flight. I watched him to the last, to the point where he sparkled in the white glare, then dropped below the horizon.
That night I made a sad entry in the log.
Still three more days ground painfully on my hopes. An occasional sky breath teased me. I sat out the days on deck, gnawing at dried strips of the turtle and playing at patience. Then quite suddenly the wind in a summary movement jumped out of the southeast. I eased away the sheets for the very first time and caught the breeze astern and, with way on, ran down the wind. It was a pleasure to see Pagan actually running off before it. I put her on a course between west and west southwest so that she would make the traverse, arriving off the Marquesas in 9° south latitude.
That night I exultantly entered the momentous news in the logbook—the first happy entry in seven days.
My noon sight for August 4, the twelfth day out, put me 1010 miles offshore—a greater distance than I had traveled in the thirty days from Perlas to Galápagos. Hereafter followed 2000 miles of the pleasantest sailing I probably shall ever experience. For days on end, the boat sailed itself. The only times I came on deck were practically of necessity. Pagan ran off before the wind, chasing columns of wind-pushed rollers and wind-driven clouds that never varied—in short, she sailed it as “harbor circumnavigators” do it on yacht club verandas. Life those days ran on an amazingly even keel.
At sunup I always came topside to collect the night’s catch of flying fish trapped on deck. During the night the prow, slicing open the water sent them skittering like quail from the wave tops and often they flew blindly into the sails and expired in the waists or on the forepeak. Never a morning but there was at least one. If more than one were found, I enjoyed fresh fish, otherwise the hungry maws of my Flotsam and Jetsam yawned.
The flying fish is delicious food. I found them bony but worth the pains incident to enjoying their soft sweet meat. I liked them best boiled in salt water and eaten with ketchup and crackers. They were delicious fried in bacon fat, too. Many was the time, with only one fish found on deck, I regretted having my hungry kittens aboard.
Out there I had lots of time on my hands, far more than from Perlas to Galápagos. Keeping my plucky little cutter eating at the westing was routine work of a few minutes each day. With sails curving full and the tiller lashed slightly aweather, Pagan floated along unheeded and free at a laughing speed. Each morning and night I glanced at the compass; at some time in the day I sauntered over the sloping deck from stern to bow and back with eyes aloft, searching out a weakness that might interfere with the peace and purpose of my little Pacific world. Here too I usually found all okay. No more work till next day.
I altered the lashings on the tiller but a very few times the whole crossing. Not once did I lower sail or reef down. The only real work of the cruise was with chafing gear on the shrouds to protect the sail from wearing through. I know there is a way of using rope yarn to make chafing gear, but being a greenhorn I didn’t know how it was done and I couldn’t figure out how to do it, so I ripped up my two bed sheets into one-foot strippings and wrapped them around the shrouds as a sort of padded sleeve. I bound each pad with string at top and bottom and middle; then scaled the mast and slid them up the wire where the sail chafed and made them fast to the shroud itself with line again. They did me yeoman’s service; my sails right to the last were as good as the day I swung round before the southeast trades.
The weather was ideal. The days were warm and fresh, bathed by sun and the purest air. The nights were cooled by the chill current under the keel. The cool of night was a sleep-inducing cool, just enough to need a blanket and clothes on deck.
I came often on deck of biological necessity. This I took care of by use of the bumkin spread. I kept a board with a sizable hole in it on the stern. When the need arrived, I laid the board on the bumkin arms and straddled it saddle style, with the sternpost for a horn.
About the only other time I came on deck was to navigate or bask in the sun, watching the dolphin at their kill, or to play with the cats. Now that Gawky was gone, they had free run of the boat. For hours they would romp over the canvas-covered decks. I would crawl along the cabin top spying on their kittenish whims and gambols.
When Flotsam and Jetsam were out on deck, I always spent time below making friends with Stowaway. He was a most reluctant fellow, and no wonder. The kittens were in constant prowl around his abode—things had come to such a pass that I was forced to place his food and drink inside his house, so seldom was it safe for him to venture forth for it.
I tried painfully to teach him to nibble from my fingers, but with the kittens aboard it was a lost hope. He was trustless: the poor fellow had gone cynical; he was disorganized; he considered friend and enemy alike, and chose to fritter away his life in isolation.
Since I was only on deck a few hours each day, the remainder devolved to whatever suited my fancy. I perused everything from crossword puzzles to Shakespeare and Mary’s old letters which I always kept in my sea bag. When I tired with reading, I pieced together the same jigsaw puzzle over and over again. For fun I turned it over and did it the hard way. These days of peace and speed were dreamlike in their constancy.
I was never bored: it is impossible for a person with an active mind to be bored with his own company. The days went too quickly. I hadn’t time to do all I set out to do each morning. Besides, my early days of work had forced me upon myself, and the aloneness was something I had known before.
An average day went along something like this: I awakened usually with the first graying of dawn, inspected the course from the compass beside my bunk and went on deck to check the tiller and sails and to look for flying fish that might have landed aboard in the night. If there were two fish—and nearly always there were—I gave one to the kittens in the morning and one in the afternoon. If more than two, it meant fresh provisions for breakfast—either fried in bacon fat or boiled in salt water.
Invariably breakfast consisted of a cooked cereal. I mixed about six parts of fresh water with one of salt, boiled it on the Primus, and stirred in the cereal—corn meal, oatmeal, and such—with a heaping spoon each of powdered milk and sugar. I ate most of my meals out in the cockpit in the wash of the tropic air.
I whiled the morning at reading, at playing with my crew, at coaxing my hopeless passenger, or at watching the death chases out ahead of the bows.
Lunch was the simplest meal of the day. It was only a matter of marking an X on the stores list, then selecting a likely-looking can from the former icebox. The thing I liked about the noon meal was the surprises I often got when I opened the wrapperless cans.
In the early afternoon I napped; in midafternoon I took a sun sight and pin-pointed myself on the chart; in late afternoon I sat on the cabin peering around the sea rim in hope of a smudge of smoke or a sail. Or I sat watching the lonely, impersonal sea birds who glide their lives away over the barren Pacific wastes.
My night meal was a warm one. I fried a slice of bacon or ham and heated something from a can. There was always a pot of coffee or tea with which to wash down a couple of hard sea biscuits. Often I made a kind of stew with leftovers and a bit of salt pork or fish.
In the evening, after checking the set of the sails, and the lashed tiller, I lay on my bunk to read for an hour in the dim light of my barn lantern swaying from the overhead. When I tired, I merely pulled up the blanket and blew the lantern out. I didn’t have to undress for bed; I didn’t wear clothes in the tropics.
But one day I was jostled from my settled world. I found during my daily inspection that the bobstay had loosened at the stem and that the chain was dragging free from the end of the bowsprit. It was a job of the type a novice knows nothing about, but which cries out to be mended. I looked it over and started repairs with my usual trial-and-error methods. I lowered myself into the water and fidgeted and tinkered, trying to join the connections of stay and stemhead, while the rollers of the trade winds skewed me from side to side of the bow. In two hours of futile fidgeting and cursing under water, I decided to give it up.
But it was a thing one couldn’t give up. The bobstay bolstered the bowsprit; it in turn supported the topmast stay; which in turn secured the mast against rearing backward and snapping off. I couldn’t hazard being dismasted out on these lonely wastes. So back to work I went. It turned out to be a job more distasteful than shoveling fertilizer. Need is a harsh driver. The need to repair this impediment drove me to a merry ride, hanging onto the bowsprit and clinging to the stemhead. But working under water on the dancing object was worse. Eventually I got the ringbolt fitted into the cutter’s stem . . . and dragged myself over the rail.
The jib rattled up the head stay; other sails were soon atrim and curved to the wind, and with laughing heels Pagan tore away to the blank horizon.
There then followed more days of peaceful sailing. Pagan scudded on before the southeast trades, with hardly a variation in wind and sea. Ahead, shoals of flying fish sprinted from the sea and floated away to port and starboard, slipping into the wave tops one at a time, or en masse like bird shot. And what masses of flying fish they were. I was amazed as every hundred yards, day on day, a gleaming squadron of them flashed into the sun and glided horizonward in a dozen directions.
Harassing them from dusk to dusk was Old Death and his lesser dolphin, who prowled ahead of the bow and streaked into the unsuspecting schools. For two thousand miles now, I had watched this game of stalking and hunting: a vicious circle of dog-eat-dog, among the creatures under the sea. The dolphin has a blunt, stolid face trailed by a beautifully lithe body. Along his back lies a weblike fin which ordinarily lies flat but which he flares into use in the hairpin maneuvers employed against the flying fish.
I have sat on deck hours on end watching these fascinating creatures give the flying fish the chase. Singling out a lone flyer, the dolphin will stay on his tail for five hundred yards before giving up. As the flying fish clears the water in mortal haste, his apt enemy is just behind and below. The stalk is on—a stalk of speed and thrills where a single slowing or stopping by the flying fish means death. Occasionally the dolphin sails free of the water for a twenty-foot leap to see his victim.
Spotting his game ahead in the air he returns to his element and with a few powerful thrusts rides up under him, eying him, waiting for the drop into the water. As the flying fish falls from his glide, he is set upon, and there ensues a terrifying encounter of champing teeth, flaring fins, swirling wakes, and the dolphin comes away grinning.
I have seen this tragic episode a hundred times, and only a dozen feet away. Once I saw a flying fish nipped neatly in half by Old Death. In a flash it was done—in fact with such suddenness that the fish didn’t suspect what had happened. Another dolphin took him in on the run before the poor flying fish had time to realize he was already half eaten.
Once, a huge squid bolted from the water off aport and glided a hundred feet in toward Pagan. On plunging he espied a grim assassin close behind and threw himself, horror-stricken, twenty feet straight up into the air. The dolphin spun around and with a terrific thrust hurtled himself up out of the water. They met in mid-air: the dolphin shooting up, the squid falling. The shock of impact nearly choked the dolphin. What was left of the squid fell thirty feet away, and was gobbled up by another dolphin as it hit the surface.
Another time one of the largest flying fish I have seen, and judging his size a veteran of many a fracas with death, soared out of a wave far ahead. I watched him soar on the wind, making a clean half circle that only the wariest pursuant could follow. He slowed himself in mid-air and made to plop into an oncoming sea. What he didn’t know was that he was followed: not by one, but by four dolphin, shouldering one another aside for the choice lead spot.
He settled lightly in the water. There was a rush, a flurry of fins and flukes, the chop and smack of spiny teeth, then confusion so great that it seemed the dolphin themselves didn’t know which one had snared the prize.
Another day a shoal of flying fish were flushed very near the bow. As the dolphin streaked among them in their berserker way the flying fish literally went crazy. Some of them leaped straight up only to fall straight back. Others, in their terror, only stumbled along the surface, unable to break into flight. One small squadron bolted off the water straight into Pagan’s sails. Twelve of them. Old Death and his crew often helped me out like this.
One day Old Death ran short into a small flying fish. They met face to face, then the chase of death began. I could see them from where I stood on the cabin peering into the air-clear water. The little fish skittered to his wings and soared in toward Pagan’s beam. The gnarled old killer flashed in pursuit. He lunged into the air and struck the fish as he sailed, upsetting him, tumbling him into the sea. A scrimmage for life ensued, and the little fish got somehow into the air again. Old Death, in a rage, was close behind. Suddenly the flying fish saw he was gliding straight into Pagan on the beam. He wavered in flight. Beneath him was the inexorable hunter, ahead Pagan’s hard, dry decks. He could have dropped to the water and jockeyed for a new take-off—but he didn’t. He knew the outcome. I am sure the decision was his to smash his head against the cabin and drop quivering to the deck.
Not a day passed but that a number of such deathly encounters occurred an eye distance away.
On numerous occasions, when an overwhelming desire for a change from flying fish obsessed me, I sought to harpoon the dolphins; but I landed only three of them the whole trip. They are explosive energy keyed to high sensitivity. Hardly does a spear near them when they thrash away. I speared Old Death at least ten times. Each thrust into his ancient sides proved only another tattered scar, and didn’t diminish his love of Pagan’s company a jot. He followed me to the very reef where I nearly drowned.
Those of the dolphin I speared I cut into strips and dried on strings tied between deckhouse and traveler. The meat kept indefinitely if redried often enough. I alternated this with my decreasing supply of turtle, which too I had to keep drying over and over again.
During this time, about a week out of the Marquesas, I fell often in reverie . . . with the past . . . the future . . . the present. I reacted on the immensity of watery wastes by seeking an escape through thinking. Long hours out there lent themselves to retrospect and iteration. I fell to thinking of the days of crowded happiness of my romance with Mary, our courtship, our marriage. The whole panorama of unfortunate circumstances that had kept us apart but which I was now overcoming in crossing the Pacific.
I sat on the cabin, lounging under the sun and breeze, listening to the slap and smack of water against the planking, and watching the ripple thrown out by the bow. Sitting so, it was easy to think. Thoughts came uncalled for. What I thought wasn’t important, but the fact that I thought was vastly important.
The morning of August 18 found me an estimated three days out of the Marquesas. My ninety-page logbook was nearly filled—I was eighty-five days out of Panama and this was just five days from the day I had expected to arrive in Sydney when I sailed. Mary was expecting me. I hoped my letter from the Galápagos had reached her telling of the upset to my timetable and explaining the new arrival date.
My sights at noon of August 20 estimated my position at 9°5′ south latitude, 138°50′ west longitude. The Marquesas were hard by. I climbed the mast often and swept every horizon for an object grayer than the clouds and stiller than the rearing seas. By nightfall land hadn’t hove in sight. There were plenty of land birds around: bosun birds, gannets, gooneys, man-o’-war birds, terns. I was certain that not too far south of me was the lush tropical island of Hiva Oa I had heard spoken of in Panama. And somewhere near, probably just under the horizon on the starboard bow, was Ua Huka, and just to westward, Nuku Hiva.
That night I came on deck often to sweep the frail horizon to starboard for land and listen for the hollow boom of tradewind seas on coral reefs. I neither saw nor heard anything, but I knew it was there.
Daylight found me under the shadow of land to the north . . . land after twenty-nine days.