CAT’S-PAWS dappled the round crests of the hurrying rollers as a light air whisked out of the north. The breeze was strong enough to steady the staysail. It had a dampness that hinted at rain and it stirred a heavy cloud to motion, which soon proved to be a squall. It came on, closed over me, and wrapped me round with wind and rain. I stayed on deck despite the wet. Inwardly I felt apprehensive; and I couldn’t go below.
In a way I was wishing I had a barometer so I could have some proof of what was afoot. As it was, I was now suspecting that I was being stalked by a hurricane. But at what rate, or from what precise direction, I couldn’t know; only a barometer could tell me.
The area north of the Cook Islands, where I was, has a notorious reputation for cyclonic disturbances. If there was a hurricane in the locality, there was nothing I could now do but sit tight. I couldn’t counter it. I was glad I had no barometer. Knowledge of a falling glass would only have verified a foregone conclusion. As it was I could sit minimizing the unmistakable symptoms, and hope to the very last that my fears were ungrounded.
My hands were tied, there was nothing I could do to avoid whatever it was that caused the northerly swells. Conditions of the sea and weather were not such that I could move profitably under sail. And I didn’t want to be caught with my sails up, so I doused them, put them in stops, and watched and listened . . . denying every ominous sign.
I was soon encountering a series of nasty squalls, lowering skies, and hurrying of seas. Hours later still nothing definite could be read in the skies. I was forced to wait.
I strained at every nerve to know what was coming. I read from every shift of wind, every lessening of distance between the seas. I recalled everything I knew, little though it was, of hurricanes and their peculiarities.
A hurricane is greatly like the little whirlwind which dances along the street on a summer day, only it is infinitely larger. Its small round center is an area of low barometric pressure and calm air. The outer reaches of the disturbance have a high barometric pressure. As the barometer falls you know you are nearing the “eye” or center of the storm. Working from the outside of the hurricane, in a circular motion, are prodigious winds which intensify right up to the edge of the calm inner area. The whole system of terrific winds and calm central sector is usually little more than three hundred miles across. The duration of a hurricane depends upon the speed it travels—anywhere from five to thirty miles an hour.
A striking peculiarity of the hurricane is that in the northern latitudes its winds are counterclockwise, and in southern latitudes they are clockwise. Also, the portion of a hurricane nearest the equator is generally its least violent part, the portion farthest from the equator being especially dangerous because cyclonic tracks tend away from the equator, and thus advance across anything in its way. The thing to avoid is the center. If you face the wind in southern seas, the center is on your left. The dangerous semicircle would depend on the path of the storm’s center.
By evening the last of the squalls had passed and the worst of my fears took shape. Rain poured heavily from the jagged, lowering clouds and a mild gale-force wind set in, whipping the seas so that they charged down around me. It was no guesswork about the hurricane. I was certain that I had one right in my lap. I took my anchor below and lashed it to the mast and made a last check of all gear to see that the precautions I had made against the storm were in readiness. I unlashed the rubber raft from the mast, pushed it off the foredeck, and strung it from the stern . . . just in case.
Gray tooth-edged clouds raced past barely above the mast top. They unburdened themselves of torrents of stinging water. The wind had steadied in the north; and the fact that it hadn’t changed direction in an hour disturbed me. I rigged my storm sail on the mast, sheeted it flat, and crammed the staysail below. My last move was to cinch the tiller down doubly secure. I went forward, seated myself on the deckhouse, and with arm locked about the mast watched over the bows for what was coming.
Night closed in and heavy rollers, growling a flashing gray, were the only indication that the night was anything else but wind and rain. I went below to lie in my bunk, stare at the overhead, and wait.
About an hour later, Pagan commenced dancing nervously. Instead of rising gently to the oncoming crests she broke abruptly into them. Instead of a quick roll before the more forceful seas, she made a sharp lurch which found her often heeled over far enough to throw me. In my bunk I was forced to grip its sides. It was obvious I was in the center of the gale winds which lie just outside the perimeter of the oncoming hurricane winds.
After a while more occasional strains shivered the boat when the storm sail cringed before the wind. The brewing hurricane was slamming with ever greater intensity. I checked the watch and saw it was just before eight. That was the last time I looked at the watch; from then on there was too much excitement, too much violent motion.
Opening the hatch doors, I peeped into the garrulous night. Hissing rollers worked with a heavy swish beneath my boat and ran growling into the blackness. The wind pursued them with the persistence of a bully. Pagan lay as though still; now on a hillock, now in a ravine of water . . . as yet not pitching, but rolling mightily.
She was no longer riding comfortably. Her bow was lying five points off the wind, which still persisted from the north. The port rail was under, and the windward bow was throwing spray high into the rigging, and beating into the seas. Rain was the heaviest yet. It was impossible to look straight into that wind and rain.
With the wind holding for so long from one direction, I was certain that the track of the hurricane lay directly over me. I could figure on three phases of behavior from it. The first: the infernal winds of its dangerous semicircle. The second: the lull of the hurricane’s center where winds from a dozen directions send great rollers crashing into a small, crowded arena. The third, and least vicious: the navigable semicircle or tail end of the storm.
Seeing that all was well as could be expected on deck, I pulled my eyes in and closed the hatch. I braced myself against the low overhead, and flashed my light over the airless interior. For the first time I lashed myself in my bunk and waited.
Two hours later Pagan was slapped by severe bursts of wind and sea that rattled her like sudden earthquakes. I was sure now that I was entering the first of the hurricane winds.
At a hidden hour, sometime later, Pagan heeled mightily, yawed and pounded. I loosed the hitches across my chest and legs and peered into the thick weather. The storm sail had failed to hold its own in the high wind and had blown to loose ends.
It meant going on deck again. I set my sea anchor—a homemade job, rigged coming over from the Galápagos—and veered it out on a hundred feet of line. Pagan rounded up successfully, though she was taking heavy, noisy water over her gunwales.
Below decks I lay lashed in my bunk once more listening to every creak and groan that shot past the hollow din of shrieking rigging and rumbling seas. I could hear the churning water surging over the decks. When the heavier gusts struck, I listened deepest. I was alert for any structural defects. I had learned to know my boat by the very feel and sound of her. After sleeping for more than two months with my ears tuned to her every murmur, I knew what each sound meant and from where it came.
My great concern was for Pagan’s twenty-six-year-old, aging, tired timbers. It was hard to believe as I lay there that night listening to the inside sounds of a small craft under extreme stress that the planks surrounding me had been spreading water for those years. But Pagan, for all her age, was a well-found boat.
Along about two in the morning I heard a quivering shriek—the loose ends of a snapped shroud. It whined like something wounded. I opened the hatch and peered out. Giant wind-whipped seas surged to port and starboard. The wind, growing harsh and harsher, had the force of solidity.
Pagan was falling away laboriously. Her mast was describing a widening arc: she heeled to such an angle under the heavier gusts that the mast nearly lopped off the wave crests.
She pointed in a fast glide down the back side of a moving mountain. She plunged bow-on into the base of the next, submerging the forepeak, and quaking under the load of tons of green water. Pitching her bow out of the water to the keel, she sent a rivulet rail-deep cascading along the deck and pouring over the stern.
In the deep trough formed by the hills of sea, the wind was unable to strike; and Pagan righted abruptly. As she neared the curled peak on the climb up the oncoming roller, she once more encountered the blast. She careened before it. I couldn’t stand. Too, she was struck by the thundering wind-driven comber which broke in a heavy continuum atop each hurricane swell. It was then Pagan pounded most. Her bow was pitched up as though dynamited, and she yawed wildly until heavy seas, boarding her, weighted her down so that she wallowed clumsily, her lee rail out of sight. Then she would shake herself free of her load and go reeling down the back side of another great, rolling swell of water.
The broken shroud—the forward one on the starboard side—was flailing like a whiplash. It cried the danger to my thirty-five-foot mast jolting at the storm blackness with only one shroud holding it on the starboard side.
The wind snatched my close-fitting watch cap from around my ears and threw it into the venting clouds. In a second I was drenched to the shoulders by flying spray.
I stared into that disjoined sea and saw instantly the uselessness of my life jacket. I stripped it off.
Before jumping on deck I bound a heavy line around my middle, and made it fast to the handrail on the deckhouse. I awaited a moment when the decks were water free and leaped out of the hatchway, closed it, jumped into the windward waist, and lay flat, facing up deck. The prying fingers of the wind caught the loose folds of my shirt, filling it at the front, tearing away the buttons, and ripping it down the back and sides. It hung by tatters. My full strength was required to lie flat on deck. I didn’t dare stand into that wind, or even sit. When I looked into it for a second, I could feel my eyes depress; I could feel my hair whip against my cheeks.
I had strung a life line above the rails—from the bow to the shrouds and to the sternpost. Two more life lines lay strung on deck from the forward bit along each waist to the rudderpost. These latter lines had double knots tied in every two feet: and to these I clung each time a swirling sea charged along the deck.
I pulled myself ahead a few feet and locked myself, feet and hands, around the knotted line. When the decks spilled themselves of eddying water, and when for a moment I could expose myself, I freed my waistline on the handrail, moved it forward a length, and slid up under it. Movement was slow. It had to be. Thus I worked my way to the starboard shrouds to examine the damaged member.
I found that the turnbuckle on the after shroud had loosed. The shocks of the mast, reeling in a wide arc, had been absorbed by the forward, weaker shroud, weakened in the encounter with the devilfish, and it had parted.
The mast was held only by the one shroud, and it wasn’t tight as it should have been, since the turnbuckle had unscrewed. The load on it was terrific. It couldn’t sustain that tremendous load for long. Each time Pagan pitched her heel clear of the water and twisted over into a flat beam roll, the mast looked as if it would jump out of its stepping. I could feel the timbers in the deck beneath me crawl.
I tightened the turnbuckle as well as I could by hand. But it wasn’t enough. The single shroud couldn’t hold out alone. There was only one desperate move I could make to save the mast: loosen the forestay at the stemhead and bend it to the chain plate as a jury shroud.
As the next heavy sea went crashing around my shoulders and over me, I made ready to loosen my body line and fasten it a few feet ahead so that I could snake my way to the bow. I moved slowly and carefully across the open deck. Between seas I shifted my line from one secure fastening to another—and more than once, but for the line, reaching green waters would have snatched me over the stern.
Scrambling from the mast across the fore scuttle to the bitt was a risky business. It was then that I was clinging only to the deck lines, having nothing to which to attach my waistline. I watched the seas overspilling the rails, and timed the intervals . . . then jumped. I made it. The seas growled unhappily and continued to be unhappy, sniping at me as I worked. I loosened the forestay as quickly as possible and, gripping it fiercely, slithered back to the shrouds.
I lay on my back on the blown decks working with only my hands and forearms in the wind. I took my time; thought carefully over each job before I did it. When I finished, Pagan was bolstered by full shrouds and I was eased of mind. The decks, aheave and awash, didn’t seem so bad with the mast safely held. The job completed, I made the gross error of sitting up to check it. An explosive wind bent me to a helpless angle. A flurry of bubbling water lifted me bodily and bounced me against the deckhouse and into the shrouds, then whelmed me over the rail onto a churning sea.
The line was around my waist, fortunately. The pull of the sea spun me upside down, wrenched at me, and tore. Pagan submerged her rail and I found myself clawing in a surging froth, closing my throat against the water. I was hard against the hull, being slammed against it, one minute under water and one minute not. A heavy sea dropped down on Pagan too perpendicular to be climbed. I saw it curl over, towering before me. Pagan had just heeled obliquely, throwing her windward rail high. I was yanked from the water, and had it been possible to stand in the wind I could have walked down the hull. Above me I could see the curling lip of descending water.
My tiny craft, caught between sea and wind, sank bodily beneath the impact of her decks. I was glad I wasn’t on the open deck, as the flood engulfed the bow and rolled heavily against the bulkheads.
Another drink of salt was choked down me as the boat was dragged by main force before the ungovernable sea. My arms and legs were thrown at will. She sidled and broached about as though she would wallow and founder.
The high strain of fighting back had pared my strength away in a few short minutes. I was choked with water in lungs and stomach, and flopping against the hull had set my head to spinning. I was giving it up, I knew it, but I couldn’t resist longer; the thing was I didn’t want to resist longer. I could see Pagan close by and I could see the gray loom of seas, but I couldn’t reach toward one or lean away from the other. I relaxed. I became part of the sea. I could hear the singing siren.
Pagan’s white hull was only a foot or two away, looking like a high wall. I wanted to touch it and climb over it. I closed my eyes, wondering what would happen next. A dollop of seas whirled broadside onto Pagan. I struck the rail and floated against it. The deck tilted steepily; I slipped somehow inboard and brought up against the deckhouse. Pagan came out of the hollow between the seas cringing before the winds.
I knew immediately that I was safe on board. I remember vomiting the water I had swallowed, and tugging faintly at the hard wet knot on the handrail. The next thing I knew I had toppled through the hatchway, had somehow closed it, and had tumbled in a heap on the cabin floor. I was too sick and weak to care what happened next. For long hours I rolled to and fro on the floor knocking against the bunks as Pagan tilted high. Finally I crawled into my bunk and bound my lashings over me.