BETWEEN COETIVY ISLAND and Madagascar’s northernmost part, Hellville, there are 610 miles of ocean. Around the area are several groups of low-lying coral islands, none of which are lit at night. These include the Farquhar Group, the Cosmoledos, Cerf, and St. Pierre Islands. During the day you can see the palms that grow on most of these coral islets, but at night it is impossible to know how near they are until you hear the surf beating against the reefs. With the treeless islets, this is also the case in the daytime. If you can hear the surf, then you are lost, for it is a lee shore. With the wind blowing onto the reefs, together with the westerly set of the Indian Ocean current in those latitudes, your craft is likely to be thrown onto the jagged coral and you will be in for a diet of coconut and fish for several weeks, until the next craft comes along—if you’re lucky.
The best thing to do is head as far to the east of this archipelago as is prudent, and this is what we set out to do in Barbara. For the first two days we had good southeasterly monsoon winds, from thirty to thirty-five knots, and we were covering 144 miles a day, but on the third day we got our first cyclone. It came up on the shoulders of clouds black as the back of a fireplace, full of menacing thunder and lightning. Within an hour we were battling winds of seventy knots with tremendous seas. In order to miss the reefs we had to stay as close hauled as we could so as to make southing; for to give way and drift southeast would have set us right down on the hazards of Farquhar.
We reefed down to working jib, one-third of the main, and the mizzen, and kept on going, hard. The storm slashed and howled; the Indian Ocean, relatively shallow, rolled up into tremendous mountains of dark blue, heaving water. It was as if God himself was having a fit. But in Barbara, though uncomfortable, we were not unduly fearful; our gear was good and we had learned to be very patient. My main concern was not to lose ground to the west; as it was, we cleared the easternmost reefs by about fifteen miles. As soon as I knew we were well clear of the Farquhars, we handed the working jib, which by this time was straining like a brewer’s cart-horse, and hoisted the storm jib so as to let her ride easier. And so we passed through our first three-day cyclone.
From the foregoing no one should imagine, if they have never experienced a full-blown storm at sea, that the ocean voyager becomes blasé about it, or that the living fear of Christ does not enter into his soul and emerge down his spine to his balls. Because he doesn’t and it does. Every time. At least in my case. Most of the ocean voyagers to whom I have talked about this agree with me, but there are some who tend to play down their true feelings. Curious that women never do; they are one hundred percent truthful when it comes to admitting fear. I suppose some guys still have the remains of shore-side machismo in them. Not me; when I shit I shit, and I don’t give a damn who knows it. If they think any the less of me for being honest about it, then let them take off and navigate in a rip-roaring cyclone, with certain death under the lee in the black, stormy, rain-lashed, uncertain depths. Let them peer, eyes aching with want of sleep, into the darkness in a heaving, crazy, thundering hull in God’s vastness; let them strain their ears away from the roaring wind and try to pick out the sound of surf on the deadly reefs. Then they can look down their noses, if they like. But don’t let them tell me they were not afraid up to a certain point.
I say a certain point, because there comes a time when, without any diminution of the dangers, you get beyond fear. You come to realize that it interferes with logical thought and isn’t solving anything. You’ve done all you can do to avoid disaster, now you are in the hands of God. When this moment comes, a man feels the greatest peace of mind that is possible for him ever to experience. At that moment he realizes that death is not terribly important, even though it is inevitable, and that he has lived his life as well as he could in his own way. If this is the end, then fair enough, he’s lived this life, now for the next. Then some regret; not at the thought of losing your life, but because you have put yourself in that situation. You determine to survive. In extremis, survival is the result of being angry with yourself for being a bloody fool!
I have very often been in a situation in which I did not think I would survive, but, by God, I would go on trying—I was going to play the bloody game right down to the bottom line, because it’s fun. Also it’s very interesting. Also, for the time being, it’s all we have.
The storm eased off for one day and then we got another cyclone. By the time we wore around into the lee of Cape Ambre we were, all three of us, like half-drowned dogs. In the second cyclone, with plenty of room under the lee, the wind rose so high I decided to run before it under storm jib alone. Between two very sure fixes we covered 178 miles in twenty-four hours, running northwest before the wind, with roller-coasting seas threatening to overwhelm the stern every three seconds. We had to struggle with the wheel the whole time, arm-breaking work, for a shallow-draft boat like Barbara will always try to broach, or turn sideways to the wind, and then she would lie in a trough between hellishly high seas and be overcome and turn turtle.
Alem, while all this was going on, had to be prodded and cajoled into action, for his natural inclination was to give up easily. This took a lot of energy from me.
At last we got under the protection of Cape Ambre, in fairly flat water, with the sun shining. We took every blanket, every sheet, every book, every chart out of the cabin and dried it in the sunshine. Everything in the boat was thoroughly damp, for we had taken quite a number of seas over the stern. At least a dozen times the cockpit had been filled, with the helmsman, roped to the binnacle, up to his waist in water and seawater pouring down the companionway, so that we would have to pump out by hand for an hour, five or six tons of seawater at a time.
I took Barbara into a well-protected bay, Nosy Mitsio, and dropped anchor. The weather, with the cyclone passed, was beautiful—green hills; deserted, sandy beaches; clear, clean sea; plenty of fish; a blue sky with the monsoon clouds scudding overhead. The boat’s gear still was in good order. What more could a man want? A pretty girl? Well, this was Madagascar, where live the most beautiful women on God’s earth. Majunga, the chief port, was only two hundred miles away. We could wait. Meanwhile, we got the gear dry and the boat shipshape. I’m a great believer in arriving at a port as if we had had nothing but gravy-sailing all the way, regardless of the distance. There is no point in looking bedraggled. It’s not pretty and it’s impolite to the onlookers, if there are any, if there aren’t it’s impolite to your vessel.
We had a good, fair-wind sail down through the island to Majunga. As there was much tide there, I determined to clean the bottom.
At the harbormaster’s office, I found my old friend Christian Joubert. He was from Brittany, and I had known him when that beautiful, friendly French peninsula was my old stamping ground. Many a cargo of home-distilled whiskey straight from the Hebrides I had landed at L’ Aberwrach right under his very nose. Now here he was, lording it over a tropical port, living like the bloody Kublai Khan himself. He was delighted to see me and arranged for Barbara to be leaned against a tug while the tide went out so that we could clean the bottom.
The bottom of Majunga harbor is the most foul-smelling mud it has ever been my misfortune to be up to my knees in, full of minute crabs, which would, when we sank into the soft mud, ooze over the top of our sea boots and nip our legs. Despite the stinking, hot, muddy slime, we scrubbed off all the grass, barnacles, and growth that had accumulated since we left Israel, nine months earlier. Then we slapped on the antifouling, a thick, red copper paint which you must be very careful not to get into your eyes, lest you be blinded.
We cleaned off the propeller, smeared it with thick grease, and inspected all the underwater fittings, particularly the rudder pintles and the seacocks. Then we painted on a new waterline of blue. Soon Barbara looked as pretty as a well-loved boat can look. But not half as pretty as the lasses in Madame Chapeu’s, the premier établissement of Majunga. Half-Polynesian, half-Arab, they were a sight for sore eyes. Famous throughout the Southern Hemisphere, Madame Chapeu’s was the biggest whorehouse I’d ever seen—until I reached Belém, in Brazil. Alem, overcoming his Coptic bias on this occasion, had a ball.