FROM THE TIME I had collapsed on my bunk boards, while the storm was yet on, I slept twice around the clock. I wakened but once in that time for a couple of hours, at an unholy hour of night, to bail out twenty inches of water in the hold. How it got there I didn’t know. It hadn’t dawned on me that my boat was leaking. I had thought the flooded cabin was caused from a swamping while I slept. But outside there was calm. There were no seas to jump aboard. I was tired, still too tired to reason things out, so I fell again on my hard, wet bunk boards. But now I was aroused from my deep slumber by water slopping over me again.
The floor was flooded. It was dawn, and I was rested. I went on deck for the first time since the storm to pump the bilges, and to see what my boat was like.
Pagan lay in a flat calm. Smooth-crested swells of the after-storm passed under her. The sky was blue and tranquil—here on this wide field of the sea was little to indicate, for one with Olympian eyes, that a violent hurricane had recently passed under Pagan’s near-derelict hulk, heaved into view out of a sea valley onto a glassy roller.
It gave me serious pause just to stand and look.
What I saw was a monument to chaos. A dismasted boat is a naked sight; but one in the condition that Pagan was in—battered and bruised, limping as if wounded—is a heartbreaking sight for a seaman. I walked to the bow and stood looking back over the scarred decks of the little ghost ship. She no longer creaked and rattled from tackle and spars. Her tackle and spars were down, and dragging in the sea with her rigging.
The bowsprit was gone, snapped at the stemhead. There was barely a rail on the boat—only slivers and stubs. The staysail boom was gone, its fastenings broken at the bow. My carefully laid deck canvas was peeled away where it had been caught between wind and sea. The forward end of the deckhouse was caved in, evidently by the mast and the charging seas. The splintered stub of the mast, a foot high, where the stick had twisted off, was the most unreal sight of all. Only one porthole was whole; all others were stuffed with an array of clothing.
Back aft, the cockpit coamings were broken away. The companionway doors were gone. For the second time Pagan’s tiller had been torn off, despite the double secure lashings I had applied before the storm; this time by the boom hurtling at the end of the topping lift. The bumkin was snapped off—this too by the clublike boom. But most representative of the hurricane’s damage were the raffled trailings of Pagan’s rigging in the limpid water. They hung from the port side and trailed astern like tufts of matted hair, clutching the mast, the broken boom, the bowsprit, and splinters of the bumkin.
She had lived through the storm and stress, and I was glad. I tried to depreciate the extent of damage; but somehow my observations weren’t convincing.
My little life raft was still floating astern, partly submerged. Later I learned that one of its compartments had been deflated, probably in altercation with the boom.
The hold had all the earmarks of an Augean stable; a chow-derish mixture of the thousand and one articles of gear I had tucked away in corners, which only an inimical sea could fetch out. It was a fearful sight: a quagmire, one to discourage a battery of janitors. Tools, articles of clothing, oilcans, loose line, crippled fixtures, strips of bedding, shoes, and splintered lumber lay intertwined where they had wrestled during the storm.
The sea was quiet as seas are in the calm, and as I looked out over it, it seemed more quiet than it had ever seemed before.
My main concern was to see Pagan under sail as speedily as possible. Before I settled to my work, my thoughts turned to food. For three days and nights I had not eaten; I was ravenous. I found a quart can of tomatoes and a coconut in the debris and broke into them with the hatchet. After gulping them, I looked for water.
My water breakers, I soon found, had all slipped their bungs, so that the water was either spilled or polluted. But strapped to the carling on the starboard side was a small keg of “emergency water”—four gallons. All I had aboard. “Plenty,” I thought, and took a deep drink. It would last me to Samoa, what with coconuts and other liquid foods that I could dig out later from the mess in the cabin.
I went on deck and pitched into the work of rigging Pagan to sail. This, it seemed to me, was the most important consideration at the moment. There would be plenty of time later, when Pagan was once more fitted out and running before the wind, to clean up below and take stock of food, water, and my position. For the nonce it sufficed to know, by recalling my last determined position before the heavy blow, that I was somewhere in that lonely stretch of the Pacific between the Cook Islands and Samoa; exactly where would be easy to determine when I sought out my navigation equipment and took a sight. Before the sun was fully up I had pulled the mast inboard and lashed it obliquely across the foredeck. I intended to carry it thus to Samoa where I could have it restepped and continue my trip.
The broken thirty-five-foot mast, weighing several hundred pounds, was far too heavy and clumsy for me to set up alone. I thought of cutting off its lower twenty-five feet and stepping that, but even that much, I knew, would be too cumbersome to handle. I was looking hard and stretching my imagination hard to conceive from Pagan’s derelict woods something suitable for a mast.
There was the better half of the boom. I fished it in and trimmed it for an abbreviated mainmast. It was small, hardly fifteen feet. It was all I had. My plan, devised fitfully as I went along, was to rig Pagan as a yawl. A yawl, roughly, is much like what Pagan had been as a cutter, except that a small mizzenmast is located just behind the tiller. Rigged as a yawl she would have a good spread of sail, and would handle easily. I wanted a spritsail, so I cleared away the remainder of the old bowsprit and reset its larger half, but without a bob-stay.
The former shrouds, cut shorter with the hatchet, I used for the new standing rigging. I made my connections at the head of the new mast directly to the main boomdale, using “U” bolts. I sawed out a hole in the deck in front of the broken stump of the mast. The fore side of the stub I shaved flat with the hatchet. I did the same to the after side of the boom, and knitted them together with two heavy bolts and strong lashings. I wedged in the new mast securely at the deck hole. To tighten the stays and shrouds properly I used the heavy turnbuckles at the chain plates.
Thus the storm-ravaged boom afforded a twelve-foot mast, carrying a ten-foot-high trysail. By midday I had rigging up that could hold a mainsail, staysail, and jib.
About this time of day I knew Pagan was leaking. The bilge had filled since I had pumped it at dawn, proof, even to a green horn, of a leak. I pumped the bilge and went below. I spent an hour looking for the leak, pushing through the gear-piled floor and into the mess of the forepeak, and finally decided it was somewhere below the cement-filled bilges where I couldn’t see it or reach it. There was nothing I could do but pump the bilges hourly and hope the seepage wouldn’t grow.
All afternoon I cut and sewed miniature sails from my weather-worn mainsail. For the mainmast I made a trysail ten feet high and seven feet long. She was hoisted on the boom-dale block and belayed at the staysail traveler. One-inch line spliced around the mast served as rings. I sewed each ring into the luff. This sail worked loose-footed, clewed up to an oar stock which I pared down for a jury boom.
I worked the pump from time to time, gushing out the estimated twelve gallons of water that was seeping into the bilges every hour. As I pumped I eyed the full circle of the horizon in hopes a ship might break over it. The hourly pumping, I felt, was a job that in time could grow distasteful, but since I was only some 400 miles from Samoa, by rough guess and assuming that the hurricane had not carried me far from where it found me, I wouldn’t be at it long enough to matter.
Staysail and jib were considerably smaller than the mainsail, looking like pillow slips when they filled away. I sheeted the staysail to the chain plates, and the jib to the bitt. By dusk I had three sails in the wind. An occasional bubble showed in the wake. I lashed the broken tiller so that I made a course, according to the star, of due west. As yet I hadn’t found my compass, but I didn’t worry about it because I knew it was somewhere in the mess below. The important thing at the moment was to get sail up and way on.
Dark was drawing in. I pumped the bilges with a hundred quick strokes. Rifling in the hopeless tangle of the cabin, I came up with a can of peas. It was the first bite since dawn—I had been so busy.
When I had eaten I went on deck. Night had closed in. I sat on the cabin for hours watching the four winds, flashlight in hand, waiting to give a signal. At a late hour I hit the sack—or what I called the sack. I slept on my bunk boards, folded in the one blanket which I hadn’t “deep sixed” during the confusion of the hurricane. This was only a temporary arrangement; I figured I could tolerate it till I lifted Samoa.
Daybreak found me out in the fresh morning air shaping my last oar into some semblance of a mizzenmast. A mop handle served for the boom. I had to build on to the splintered remains of the bumkin in order to sheet the new addition.
I used rope to rig it, and set my shrouds and topping lift from a masthead knot tied and nailed in a groove at the peak. It was stepped just aft of the steering post, going through the deck and bedding in the sternpost.
By noon the jigger was sheeted home and carrying wind. Pagan was converted from a cutter into a yawl, and was limping down wind at an estimated one knot. For the time being I held her on her westerly course, “rail down” for Samoa. The next job was to get the cabin shipshape, take account of the food and water, find the navigational instruments, and grope after my position on the sea.
Before my cleaning job was finished that afternoon I learned some sobering facts. These facts so set me back that I lay awake many long hours that night. I learned, first of all, that I was completely without navigational instruments—not even a compass. Secondly, that I was practically foodless. Thirdly, that the only fresh water aboard was the four gallons in the emergency keg plus a quart of battery water I found in the hold.
On my bunk, in a thin weak line, lay the miserably few articles of food and comfort I had found. There were a bottle of ketchup, two unlabeled cans of food, and a coconut, my total larder!
I could recall that during the hurricane I had heaved many articles out in a frantic haste to lighten my boat—and as I heaved, I realized that items of food were going by the board. But never had I realized I was so completely tossing out my food stores. Further, I had not realized that my jugs and jars, in which were capped my precious staples, were being smashed and their contents mixing with the sea. In the desperateness of the hour there had been no time to so thoroughly think out the possibilities and probabilities of my actions.
Beside my scanty food supply lay my sextant, or rather what was left of it. It had once been a fine precision instrument, but now it was a twisted piece of junk. The index mirror was broken off completely. The telescope was gone. The alidade was bent at a rakish angle and jammed so that it couldn’t be moved. The arc was rippled beyond any dreams of repair with means at hand.
Close by lay the compass—what was left of it, that is. The glass was smashed and the precious liquid had spilled. The guts of the instrument were lost in the disarray of the cabin, and it was the more useless in that it was torn from its gimbals, and they weren’t to be found.
During the day I found no charts, no Sailing Directions, no Light lists; not even my carefully kept log of the voyage. These articles I always kept in the chart rack beside my bunk. When the cabin filled, the rushing water had licked them out.
The tidying process disclosed considerable damage to the interior of my boat: The icebox, lockers, galley, sink board, chart rack, ladder, and floor boards had been torn from their fastenings. They were a mass of amorphous lumber. The crushing weight of the twisting water in the hold had chewed down all my fixtures except the stout bunk.
There were few exceptions to this destruction. Built into the forward wall of the deckhouse, high up, was a small elongated cabinet; of all the inside furnishings it alone was dry. In it were twenty cartons of cigarettes, which I was taking to Mary’s dad, some matches, and my navigation pocket watch. The cigarettes were useless because I have never smoked, and near the cabinet, on the starboard bulkhead just under the portholes, there clung the bookshelf; in it a frowzy mixing of wet pages and crumpled bindings.
Pangs of uneasiness set in. I tried to recall every important tenet a seaman should know for such times as he is lost on the sea, and foodless and waterless. Once, during the war, I was in a lifeboat for a short while. But it had been infinitely different from this. There had been the company of twenty men. We had a regular food and water ration, handed round by the old scoundrel, our captain. And we had our officers, with gold braid enough to defy the devil, to inspire us. The greatest difference between the lifeboat and Pagan was that in the lifeboat we knew we would be rescued. The Army and Navy were looking for us; so we enjoyed ourselves teasing the sharks and regretting we couldn’t feed them!
That night on Pagan I detailed for myself a strict regimen to be followed to the letter. Food and water were to be carefully doled. I suggested a pint a day water ration and a few nibbles of the food, something to take the edge off hunger. With Samoa so near, I wouldn’t be sorely pressed. A matter of two weeks’ discomfort, then port, and the luxury of refitting my boat for the last leg of the voyage. The date was September 9—five days since the start of the hurricane.
I was lost, that was definite. Five days ago my position, according to memory, had been 13° 21′ south, 162° 40′ west. I had then been a bosun’s roar from the Suvorov Islands, a low, nearly barren, uninhabited coral reef. After a long calculation I figured I was somewhere south and west of the Suvorovs, somewhere under their lee. Not close enough to bother or to risk looking for them. Better leave them be, I thought. Do the safe thing, go on west to Samoa.
I guessed the distance to Samoa at about 400 miles. To be on the safe side I put it at 450; actually it was 480. I estimated my progress with sails at twenty-five miles per day. And from what I remembered of the Pilot Chart, there was a current push of from zero to twenty miles per day on the keel. I conservatively planned on five miles a day help from the current, which would jump my daily coverage to thirty miles.
By simple arithmetic, I supposed that in sixteen or eighteen days I should come upon Samoa, provided I was in the right latitude. If I wasn’t, then I would pass by it into landless westward waters. The closest sizable land if I missed Samoa was Fiji, some 600 miles to the southwest. I made up my mind not to miss Samoa, to press every faculty of boat and man to find it. Rigidly rationed as I was in food and water, and at my slow speed, I didn’t dare miss it.
I determined to be as circumspect as possible with my steering; to keep a ready eye for all signs of land and commerce on the sea; especially to husband very closely every morsel and drop of my edibles. There was to be absolutely no physical exertion, aside from pumping out. If my body was to stand the gaff of a sixteen days’ fast, there must be a minimum loss of energy, with plenty of sleep and rest. Also I must attempt to add to my meager provisions; I would fish, and perhaps catch sea birds.
I thought grimly on each possible precaution that would lengthen the supply of food over the next eighteen days. Before me sat the two cans of food, the bottle of ketchup, and the coconut.
Since I had worked the whole day and was tired, and my body was in pressing need of nourishment, I decided to bolster my flagging flesh and spirits with one of the cans of food. Doing so was contrary to the strict ration I had set for myself, but I needed backing up after three days of grueling work. Maybe I was short on resistance and couldn’t face up to the ration; but I like to think there was a real need for that can of food. It would take at least a can; my body felt the need of two or three cans. I hatcheted one of the cans open and found it to be peas. I took them out into the cool night, to dine on the deckhouse, to eat and watch for a chance light. They were delicious beyond belief; there was a sweetness and delicacy I never knew peas could have. I chewed them to a fine gruel before swallowing them, remembering Captain Bligh’s advice to his starving men in their open boat.
The night was fresh. Stars were on the march across the heavens, leading Pagan west. I checked and steadied the tiller. The bow was set on a planet just off the end of Scorpio, giving a nice westerly course. When the planet should fade below the horizon, I could use the Southern Cross, keeping it on the port beam. A spanking breeze welled up from the south. The mast was bent slightly from plumb. I was making good my thirty-mile-a-day clip. I pumped the bilges, took a last look at the unbroken horizon, and went below.
Sitting on my bunk, I had a light nip of water before hitting the sack. I thought that the best method to conserve water would be to drink only when thirsty, and then just a sip, but taking care never to consume more than a pint a day. With that ration I had water for thirty-two days. I fitted the bung to my precious keg of water and rolled in for the night.