AUSTRALIAN SAILORS HAVE a term—”seeing the country and meeting the people.” What it really means is going on a good run ashore, having a few drinks, visiting different bars, and making friends, mostly with all the pretty girls that cross your bows. That is exactly what we did in Majunga; for I had earned enough cash to have some to spare, and a bored sailor is a bad sailor. We ate well, for the restaurants are cheap; we drank perhaps a little too much, for smuggled booze is cheap; and we made a lot of friends, fair and dusky. So many, in fact, that when we came to leave, Christian, the harbormaster, actually accused me of not having learned one damned thing in fifteen years!
From Majunga we cruised slowly down what is surely the loveliest cruising ground in the world (or so I thought until Lake Titicaca). The air is so clear that it seems you can touch the Massif Centrale, a range of mountains two hundred miles away. In the mornings the limpid sky and the sea appear to be joined together, so that it is impossible to see the horizon, and all the time you are floating in the clearest water I have ever seen. The bottom at sixty feet is as plainly visible as the floor under your feet. It was as if the boat was afloat in a crystal bowl. The silence was so delicate, a shimmering, trembling silence, that it seemed that the slightest noise would shatter the world around you into a million pieces.
Barbara would ghost along in the lightest of zephyrs, and we would creep around the deck, whispering so as not to shatter the magic. There were hundreds of islands off this coast, most of them uninhabited, full of birds and luxurious vegetables. Sandy, untrodden beaches, coral reefs aswarm with fish, safe anchorages, and the best sailing imaginable, all under the lee of Madagascar, with the monsoon coming off the land and a dead flat sea.
We were in no hurry, for ahead of us lay the long, stormy passage around South Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. It was still only September, the southern spring. It would be best to dally until November before tackling one of the roughest sea passages in the world, the thousand-mile run between Durban and Capetown.
I found out a curious thing while we were visiting these islands. It is always my habit when in remote parts to visit the chief elder of any community. At Nosy Vahalia, because I had nothing else suitable, I took the chief one of my old navy shirts—the old collarless type with a tail fore and aft. The chief, an ancient about ninety years old, was beside himself with delight. These folk are Moslems, and he intended to wear the shirt to the mosque. He first gave me coffee and a cheroot to smoke, then sent for chickens for me to take back. When we awoke onboard out at anchor he next day, we found the cockpit full of vegetables, fruit, and fish. We had enough food for three weeks and it did not cost one cent. When we went ashore we were escorted like princes to other villages, where we were received as honored guests.
Slowly we ambled down the coast of Madagascar for three hundred miles. This is my favorite kind of cruising, among small remote islands, on a weather shore, with a backdrop of mountains. I have known it in Norway, in Turkey, in Madagascar, and in Panama, and it never fails to enchant me. I could stay in that sort of place forever. Maybe I will end my days somewhere like that, perhaps in southern Chile, an area which has always fascinated me because of its thousands of islands and unspoiled natural beauty. For my last voyage I can head out into Drake’s Passage and see and feel the winds of the world as they whistle around the Horn. And my soul can soar like an albatross above the seas of the southern passage, returning north only to seek out the lonely islands and shielings of the Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego.
During this slow passage down the coast of Madagascar we fished a deal and caught many stingrays, the wings of which make delicious eating, something like Dover sole. We also caught dorado, for this is one area where that ocean fish comes in near to shore. The rocky shores were alive with landcrabs, and these, too, made good eating, while on the coral reefs were enough crabs and crayfish to keep us gorged for life. Ashore there were limes, lemons, small oranges, tomatoes, breadfruit, wild pig, and goats. There were few insects, none at all on the islands. Every night we would barbecue on the beach, and the glare of the firelight revealed thousands of landcrabs watching our antics with curiosity. But they were harmless, and would scurry away as soon as we moved towards them. They were ugly-looking devils, gray and hairy, and seemed almost obscene to us; then we remembered that we were brown and hairy too, and that the crabs probably thought the same about us, except for Alem, who was very black and almost hairless, and terrified of the crabs.
The Mozambique Channel is a thousand miles wide. At the time we sailed it there was a full-scale civil war going on in the then Portuguese colony of Mozambique. We decided to give that country a wide berth. After our last call in Madagascar, Barbara sailed 1,468 miles to Durban, encountering four storms en route, two in the Mozambique Channel and two off the coast of South Africa. The worst one was about one hundred miles northeast of Durban, off the coast of Zululand.
Between storms, which in October are regular in this area (we were passing from the cyclonic system into the temperate zone), we had glorious sailing weather. The Indian Ocean is the bluest of all, a deep aquamarine color, much darker than sky blue. The winds, in between tempests, are steady north of the tropic, and there is much more bird life than in the Pacific or the Atlantic. This is because the many reefs and islets are widely scattered, and while this makes for navigational hazards, it means that there are many isolated specks of coral and land for the birds to visit.
I think the Indian Ocean is probably the most interesting area for tropical cruising. Unfortunately, very few yachtsmen pass through this part of the world. Vast areas of these seas are unknown to western small craft. Most of these isolated pinpricks are natural wildlife reserves, as, for example, Aldabra, with its huge turtles, and Bassa de lndia and Europa Island in the Mozambique channel, two completely untouched and unspoiled coral reefs teeming with sealife. The inhabitants of the area are, in the main, some of the friendliest and most hospitable people that you could possibly wish to meet. The few outsiders living among them are surely amongst the most colorful characters anywhere; most of them operate small cargo schooners and steamers between the islands, collecting copra. In particular, I recall one French lady, skipper of a small steamer in the Comoros, who, pistol at hip, kept the whole male population of Mutsamudu hard at loading her vessel for days on end, with never a murmur of complaint. At the end of the day she would drink a bottle of the best whiskey without turning a hair, at the same time preserving her French savoir-faire and elegance.
The history of this part of the ocean is interesting. The Arabs penetrated as far south as Madagascar in the fourteenth century, looking for gold in the Zambezi River and slaves from Mozambique. In the fifteenth century the Portuguese, led by the courageous Bartholomeu Dias and the indomitable Vasco da Gama, finally, after decades of patient and steady exploration down the west coast of Africa, rounded the Cape of Good Hope to the East Indies and China, establishing an empire which did not dissolve until 1975. The Portuguese also built a chain of forts right up the East African coast and, until the British stumbled into the area after the Napoleonic wars, controlled most of the trade in this huge area.
Until the British defeated the French at Trafalgar, there was a running struggle for control of the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope between these two countries (the Dutch having dropped out in the mid-1700s). Finally, the Cape became a British base for the fleet, another Gibraltar, and the French islands of Mauritius and La Réunion were taken over, thus safeguarding the approaches to and from Europe and allowing the British to take over India.
During this time the Cape of Good Hope became a very important sailing route, with ships richly laden passing to and from the East and Europe. With the trade, as always in the days before the steamer, came the pirates, the freebooters, and for well over a century Madagascar was the lair from which they would pounce on the East Indiamen on their way to and from the Cape. To this day in the Comores and Madagascar, a steamship, indeed any foreign vessel of any kind, is called a “mannowarri,” which comes from the old British term, “Man o’ War.” A foreign seaman is known as a “goddami,” for until the nineteenth century “goddamn” was a favorite British expletive. On Madagascar “goddami mannowarri” means a sailor from a foreign ship! This is part of the Swahili language in that area.
On the passage down the Mozambique Channel, which took sixteen days, we blew out the sails a number of times, so that by the time Barbara reached Durban, there were more patches on some sails than original sail.
The great storm of Zululand was a lulu. The Agulhas Current runs south down through the Mozambique Channel, but the axis of the current is close to the African shore, about twenty miles offshore, roughly on the 100-fathom line, where the continental shelf drops off into the deeps. Off Cape St. Lucia, in Zululand, however, the axis of the current approaches close to the shore. Now on the axis of the current, and on the seaward side of it, the seas are so steep, with a full gale or storm blowing against the current, that a small craft cannot survive for long, if at all. Therefore, it is wise to stay close to Cape St. Lucia and that is what we did, hoping to slide past before a “southerly buster” came along to shake us up. One hit us smack on the nose just as we reached the Cape—a real beauty, a real ripsnorter. It was the twenty-first of September; later, after we fetched Durban, I found out that the windspeed at the airport that day had registered eighty-two knots.
So there we were, with huge breakers assaulting the coast of Zululand under our quarter a couple of miles off, unable to make much offing because of the tremendous seas of the Agulhas Current. Right through the middle of this hellish mess runs one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, with huge tankers and cargo vessels passing at the rate of one every half-hour. We couldn’t go in, we couldn’t go out, and we couldn’t stay put.
As the storm increased towards late afternoon, I calculated that if we hove to under mizzen, with the current pushing us one way and the wind pushing the other, we might just stay put while the tide was running out. However, as soon as the tide changed, we would be forced to try to make the offing, come what may. So for six hours, until well after dark, we hove to. Then, about midnight, with the wind slacking off a touch, we started to work our way out, slowly and very delicately, against huge seas, across the steamer track at right angles, to the edge of the continental shelf. We had bent on the storm trysail—a small, heavy-canvas, triangular sail rigged in place of the mainsail, except that it is loose-footed, that is, not hanked onto the boom. With this sail and the storm jib, we crept across the face of the wind and sea. I say crept, but in actual fact, in those seas, we bounced around like a bronco, all three of us lashed to sturdy fittings with our safety harnesses. It was useless to try running the engine, for half the time the stern of the boat was clear out of the sea while the other half of the time the bow was digging in deep, so that the sea washed straight over the topsides. We put out a strong light and hoped that the steamers would see us in time to avoid us. To the mariner, and especially the single-handler, the gravest danger in all oceans is other craft, particularly the monster tankers, for they are so large that from the bridge, with the way ahead obscured by a foredeck as big as Yankee Stadium, the helmsman cannot see anything closer than three miles away. At night he can see nothing at all that is not further than three miles away. The tanker trusts to her radar, and in confined seas, such as we were crashing around in, her officers usually pay strict attention to the radar. But human nature being what it is, there is always the chance that for a few minutes the officer of the watch might be drinking coffee, or reading the football results, and not paying attention to his screen. If a tanker like that touched Barbara, she would not feel the slightest shock in those seas. We would sink immediately.
But that night off Zululand the tanker sailors were alive and well and at least four of them changed course to avoid us. Watching their radar screens, watching this small mysterious blob out there in the frantic sea, they probably thought we were a small fishing boat that had failed to make port, or that we were stark raving mad. When we had made enough offing (and there was no doubt at all when we had, for the movement was violent, the boat actually being tossed up in the air off the tops of the seas), we started toward shore again, across the steamer track. For three days and nights this nightmare continued until, very weary indeed, we found the wind abating down to about force seven. Handing the mainsail we beat our way into the narrow entrance of Durban harbor, over a hundred miles to the southeast of Cape St. Lucia, down a wild, storm-beaten shore. Finally, we tied up in Durban alongside the Point Yacht Club. The first pint of beer was the best I have ever tasted. The second was even better.