IT WAS NOW MID-FEBRUARY 1974 and the rainy season was more than half over. Our exploration of the Colla coast and the islands of Soto, Amantani, and (for want of any other name) Alpha, Baker, and Wight had found Sea Dart, Huanapaco, and me alternately soaked in bitterly cold showers and perspiring in hot sunshine. Now, as we left Taquila to head for the Island of the Sun, we were seen off by all the able-bodied people. The men wore their best caps, woolen and long, like a stocking with a bobble or pompon on the end. They had their fiesta clothes on, brilliant woven belts of llama wool and black llama wool trousers. Banging tambourines, they lined up along the miniature port and, with the kena flutes piping, played for all they were worth. The women and girls kept a discreet distance, laughing and joking among themselves. One of the prettiest looked long and hard at Huanapaco who, of course, pretended not to notice. The women wore black mantillas, llicllas they call them, fastened across the breast with a beautiful ornamental pin either of gold or silver, the putu, their most treasured possession. This was the only time in eight months on the Lake that I ever saw Indians actually change their clothes. Even for one of the frequent fiestas, they put their magnificent sequined dancing costumes, together with devils’ masks and all the other paraphernalia, straight on top of their filthy rags.
Soon the morning breeze picked up Sea Dart and sent her dancing over the short chop of Lake Titicaca, heading south towards the Island of the Sun. While cruising the Colla coast, we had encountered some very wild storms indeed, with savage winds blasting down from the frozen Andes peaks onto the sun-baked Altiplano, where the difference in temperature between the sunny and shady spots was as much as seventy degrees! I was glad that I had curved the mast in order to spill the wind quickly, for often these devil winds would come out of a clear, sunny, blue sky, with absolutely no warning whatsoever. One minute Sea Dart would be ghosting along in a zephyr and the next be almost heeled, over flat in a gust of a hundred miles an hour or more. It was exciting, exhilarating sailing, even though I was always short of breath, especially when working the sheets. When the going was steady it was gravy-sailing, and to the amusement of Huanapaco I would whoop and sing at the pure joy of sailing free on the wind across the roof of the world, bound for the Island of the Sun, the legendary Inca birthplace of the world!
There are several kinds of fish in Lake Titicaca; the boga, tiny and bony, similar to a pilchard; the suchez and the amanto, both somewhat larger, but much rarer; and the rainbow trout, huge, up to two feet long, but even rarer still. However, there was no point in trailing lines astern, for the rainy season had washed all kinds of foliage into the Lake, such as the branches of the kenua, the wild olive tree, which bears a tiny, bitter version of that fruit and which the Indians eat with the roots of the totora reed, stewed with green peppers and boga fish. To this stew they add mancha, a sort of red-clay soil! A noisome gruel, but filling when you’re hungry. This ad hoc stew is usually cooked, by the Aymaras at least, on a fire fueled by taquia, the dried dung of the llama. The stench of the Aymara cooking area has to be imagined! In addition to which, neither the men nor the women ever move very far from the fire to relieve themselves!
As Sea Dart moved closer to Bolivian waters and the Island of the Sun, I felt better. As we passed the frontier line I felt easier at heart than I had since I loaded Sea Dart onto Salomon’s wagon in Callao almost two months before. I also felt more than a mite triumphant, for I had been the first to reach Bolivia in an ocean-sailing vessel, or indeed ocean vessel of any kind, in almost a hundred years, ever since Bolivia lost her Pacific Ocean coast to the Chileans in the Bird-Shit War of 1879!
Just before dusk, as the wind finally dropped to a silent calm, Huanapaco and I paddled the boat into Kona Bay on the south side of the Island of the Sun, well protected from the harsh, bitterly cold night winds, and anchored only fifty yards from the spot where Kon-Tiki is sworn by the Indians to have landed.
As the moon, waxing now, shone pale silver over the deep head of the Bay of Kona, we saw fires lit all along the sides of Yumani hill, where the Aymara settlement lay. Setting the snake-painted hatch cover in its place, we turned in to sleep in darkness, after allowing the flame from the kerosene cooker to warm up the tiny cabin. Before he dropped off, Huanapaco said to me, softly and seriously: “Macchu Cuito, I know this island. Let me speak to the Aymara; it is better that way. Let me speak to them before you go ashore, or they may not let you see the things you want to see.”
“Right, you do that,” I replied in English, for I was drowsy and already half-asleep, dreaming of green English cricket fields and foaming pints of beer, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. It was almost spring in England, and everyone would be looking forward to April and the vernal burst of flowers. Here, in the remotest cruising ground imaginable, surrounded by primitive, alien mentalities, I was dreading the coming of winter. Meanwhile, I had fetched the Island of the Sun and would make a marine chart of its coast! The call of the choca, a night bird, finally lulled me to sleep, rocking away in Kona Bay.
After breakfast of fried oca and boga. fish, caught on bottom lines overnight, Huanapaco paddled ashore in the rubber dinghy. Under the suspicious gaze of several Aymaras, he climbed the steep path leading to the main settlement, Apachinaca, a widely strung-out village of adobe huts, thatched with totora reed. Through the binoculars I followed his progress as he jumped from rock to rock, sure-footed as a mountain goat, until he finally disappeared behind a bluff and I was left to gaze at the surly faces of the Aymara gathered on the stony beach and the dozen or so pigs rooting in the ground around the huts.
After an interminable wait Huanapaco, appeared again, this time standing on the bluff, waving to me to come ashore and up the hill. “Bloody fool,” I thought, “does he think I can walk on water?” Finally he remembered the dinghy, and dashed down the hill and paddled out to Sea Dart, grinning.
Once on the beach, he told me that the alcalde, or chief of the clan, had invited me up to see him. Huanapaco said that the alcalde seemed well disposed, but would probably expect a gift, for the Aymara has only three moving spirits—cupidity, alcohol, and bloodlust, in that order. I was to discover that although they were in the main highly intelligent people, for the most part their intelligence was employed in doing evil. There were striking exceptions, of course, but they only served to prove the rule about the Aymara in general. I do not believe that their viciousness is a reaction to ill treatment by the Spanish conquerors, because the Quechua do not share in this partiality to the evil arts. Neither do the other tribes, the Chibcha, the Colla, and the Uros. It is something in the genetic makeup of the Aymara, in their racial characteristics.
The assertion that the Spaniards killed millions of Indians in Latin America is not borne out by the historical records. Many spot censuses were taken by Jesuits in the mid-1500s, and if the figures are examined and computed, it will be found that the population of the Andes Indians has increased greatly since those days. Certainly they were exploited in the mines of Potosí and under the Encomienda system, which reduced them to serfdom under the great Creole hacienda owners; but the records do not bear out stories of intentional cruelty or genocide. It would have been to the Spaniards’ detriment to have done this, for because there were so few whites or members of other races in the Andean countries, they would have deprived themselves of a strong, cheap labor force. The increase in population cannot be explained away by a high birthrate, because among the Indians inordinately large families are not the rule, and the natural attrition of disease and disaster, until recent times, has kept the population within reasonable bounds.
In a very large area, the Spaniards left the Andes Indians almost completely alone, with a great measure of autonomy; this was the case on Lake Titicaca. This is the reason that the ayllus, the clans, still exist just as they did under the Inca in 1532. Most of the Aymara were left alone completely; the argument that their hostility to strangers, their greed, their drunken savagery is a reaction to white exploitation just does not hold. The exploitation of Aymara by Aymara is far greater than anything imposed from the outside. The llaycas, or medicine men, have most of the clansmen in a grip of terror, and the llaycas wax fat. Although to the traveler they may seem poverty stricken and raggedly picturesque, I have been told that some of them could afford to retire to La Paz tomorrow if they wished, but they choose to live in rags, fleas, dirt, and disease.
The alcalde, a big man with heavy jowls and the face of a power-seeker, looked me up and down as if trying to weigh my worth from my appearance. He spoke rapidly in the slurring and guttural sounds of his language, the hardest of any to listen to, whether you understand it or not. Huanapaco explained to me that if I wanted to visit the sacred place I would have to give money to the ayllu. I said that I was a poor man who had sailed far to visit this island and that I wanted only to visit the holy places and that I could do this without a guide, for my friend Huanapaco knew the island and would guide me.
The chief said this would not do; many gringos (he was the only Indian on Lake Titicaca I ever heard use that word, as offensive to a white man as “nigger” to a black man) had come to the island but they never gave the ayllu anything. He said this to Huanapaco in Aymara, but I did not believe he could not speak Spanish, so I blurted out, “Entonces no quiero ver esta isla de mierda!” (“Then I don’t want to see this island of shit!”) I said it looking the alcalde directly in the eye. He faltered in the midst of a long spiel to Huanapaco and said, “Qué dices?” “What did you say?”
“I said that you are not a truthful man, Señor, because you have pretended to us that you do not speak Spanish, when, by my mother you do, so how can I believe anything else you tell me? If you do not let me pass to view Titi-cala, the sacred rock, then I will, when I see President Banzer in La Paz, inform him of your action and your attitude.”
At this his face dropped and he spoke rapidly to Huanapaco, asking him if I really was going to see the president. Huanapaco, catching on quickly, swore that I was a personal friend of Presidente Hugo Banzer Suárez, an honored guest in Bolivia, and there would be all sorts of hell if I wasn’t treated properly. The chief’s expression changed to one of creeping humility. He turned to me and said, “Señor, I myself will escort you to the Titi-cala sacred stone. Not only that, but I shall also show you the fountain of the Inca on Yumani point, and the ancient Inca road on the ridge of Kakao Kena!” And so, with an expert guide anxious to please in every way, we viewed all day at our leisure the wonders of the Inca legends and later returned to Sea Dart heavily laden with gifts of oca, potatoes, and a great trout.
Now that Sea Dart was out of Peruvian waters, she was safe from the fifty percent import tax on her value, the iniquitous toll demanded by the rubber-stamp caesars of Lima. She was, at the Island of the Sun, not yet officially in Bolivia, although she was in Bolivian waters, for there were no entry facilities until Tiquina, well inside Bolivian territory.
Before sailing through the Strait of Tiquina, which separates the two parts of Lake Titicaca like the stem of an hourglass, into two semi-equal halves, Chucuito and Unimarca, I intended to explore the coastline of the Island of the Sun. The rain showers were becoming less frequent, the sun shone brilliantly in the daytime, the winds were easing off, and I still had enough food supplies to live, though modestly.
For eight days we worked our way around the Island and its nearby neighbors, Kochi, Pallaya, Chuyu, and Lauassani, small islands which support nothing but birds, mainly chocas. Huanapaco and I would sound the depths in the early morning from five until nine, before the wind had risen and while the Lake was like a smooth sheet of glass, with the early morning mist suspended thinly above it and the other islands seeming, in the distance, to hang in thin air, as in Chinese paintings. Huanapaco dipped the lead to the bottom and sang out the depths while I sculled the boat this way and that in the time-honored “square search” method. Often I would look up and see, far away in the distance to the north, islands beyond the horizon, Soto and Amantani, apparently hanging upside down on the indistinct horizon, for it was impossible to see where the lake and the sky met. This was the fata morgana phenomenon, caused by the refraction of light waves by differences of temperature. The last times I had seen it were off Madagascar and Sicily.
About ten o’clock the wind would slowly increase, and during this time we would lay off, quite close to the Island, which is, all around, very steep-to (the Lake water is deep right up to the shores). I would set to work with the sextant and hand-bearing compass, fixing the different headlands and peaks in their correct relation to one another on the chart and calling out the numbers, in my turn, to Huanapaco, who would make note of them neatly on the chart.
Hove to, bobbing up and down in the short seas off the Island of the Sun, at early afternoon we would take turns making a mid-day meal. I would usually make fish and chips, while Huanapaco would come up with a Quechua concoction of totora reed roots, green peppers, and oca. By now I had run out of tea, except for a tiny amount which I was hoarding for use in case of a disaster.
From two in the afternoon until four we would sail round to the next anchorage. This was usually not far. We would arrive there at the full blaze of the sun. On the shore off the anchorage there would usually be a stream or a small waterfall where we could bathe and relieve ourselves of some of the ever-increasing livestock on our heads and bodies brought on board by visiting Indian fishermen and smugglers. There was no way we could refuse them aboard. They were very conscious of the rules of hospitality, and word passed quickly around the Lake. We had many interesting, sometimes funny, chats with the smugglers, who worked under sail, sliding through the Tiquina Strait at night under the noses of the Bolivian navy, carrying meat, flour, coca, and sugar to Peru and returning with clothes, chicha, beer, radios, and textiles. It is estimated that in 1973 seventy percent of Bolivia’s imports were smuggled in and fifty percent of its exports were smuggled out! Most of this trade took place in the frontier waters of Titicaca, under sail! Very often a sailboat, with a great lugsail, would appear on the horizon, becalmed in the dawn. She would work her way in, come alongside, and the crew would greet us like lost friends, especially the Quechua boats from the north. They had heard of the strange “gringo” with the even stranger boat, which, like a bird, could actually sail into the wind. They would pull up shouting my Quechua name, “Macchu Cuito,” and we would spend an hour or more gossiping through Huanapaco in the clear limpid light which the Lake, like a golden chalice, held cupped in its liquid hand until the sun rose over Copacabana Peninsula, forcing us to seek the shadows.
At dusk we would make another meal. The wind would drop, silence would descend all around us, except for the rustling of the reeds. Huanapaco would wrap his poncho around himself and fall asleep; I would light the oil lamp and work on the chart or write up my log. After that I would work on a magazine article to send off when we again returned to the twentieth century. About nine o’clock, after listening to the world outside and far below us over the radio, I would warm up the cabin with the kerosene stove and turn in.
Sometimes in the afternoon, after anchoring the boat safely, we would climb to the heights of a nearby island. Often this was to survey the surrounding area, but many times I would clamber up the steep, rocky mountainside and collapse, exhausted, at the top with the lack of oxygen. The view was astounding. Whenever the sun shone, which now was almost all day, the scenery from the heights of Titicaca was magnificent. We could see mountains, far to the east and north, 350 miles apart; and it seemed that we could just reach out with our hands and touch them, the air was so clear. Sweeping away at our feet, the azure blue Lake stretched on into the far distance, dotted with islands, most of them surrounded by beds of reeds, glistening emerald and gold as the breeze riffled across them. Far below in the bay, Sea Dart, like a tiny toy, bobbed in the wavelets, her red ensign fluttering on the stern, scaring the storks and dipper-birds, who loved to perch on the masthead and shit all over the topsides when there was no one onboard.
At this height there were two very obvious phenomena; the first was the effect of the sun’s rays on color, which was much more dazzling in the sunshine and subdued in the shade. The difference between light and shade was much sharper than at sea level, and I came to the conclusion that a painter would find the color contrast on the Lake even more intense than Van Gogh found the country around Arles.
Another not so obvious effect in the thin, clean air was the difficulty in judging distance. As a navigator of small craft for many years, I can normally gauge a distance, especially from seaward, to within a few yards, even at six or seven miles’ range. But up on Titicaca I found myself very often fooled, underestimating distances by anything up to three miles! It seems that the abnormal angle of the light rays, together with the magnifying effect of the clear, clean, dry air, causes this. When surveying I had frequently to pace the distance between two points of land, or actually sail between two islands to log the distance between them, instead of just taking a sextant angle.
The clearest night skies I have ever seen anywhere were over the Lake. Out in the ocean, well clear of the land, perhaps a thousand miles out, the skies are crammed with stars, but on Titicaca there was hardly room for the black sky among the stars! The bright planets and all the major stars were like small moons, their rotundity clearly delineated. The man-made satellites were immediately obvious, like taxicabs on the Epsom Downs course on Derby day. There were literally a million bodies in the sky. I cannot think of any finer place for an observatory to be erected. Many a time I would go topsides and be struck with wonder at the display of the heavens, beautiful beyond words, awe-inspiring in its magnificence. When the moon rose, I could see every crater and every blemish on its ravaged face.
On February sixteenth the survey of the Island of the Sun was completed, and I determined to make for Tiquina. There lay the Bolivian naval base, perched on a cliff overlooking the lovely, mile-wide Strait which separates Chucuito Lake from Unimarca Lake.
One may well wonder why a landlocked country like Bolivia has a navy. It has very little to do with the contraband which passes over the frontier waters with Peru. It has, indeed, hardly anything to do with a naval threat from Peru, for none exists. The reason is that the region that in 1825 became Bolivia once had a seacoast on the Pacific; her national territory, as originally parceled out upon the conclusion of the wars of independence against Spain, included a large stretch of the Atacama Desert, in what is now northern Chile. On this most miserable and Godforsaken coast, dry and parched after centuries without rain, a small hamlet was built by a safe roadstead, a huddle of hovels among burning boulders and baking sand, with the grandiose name of the Port of Antofagasta.
For two centuries it was the territory’s only outlet to the sea. Apart from a dribble of contraband, it was never used for international trade. Soon after the South American republics gained their independence, the Industrial Revolution in Europe caused an unprecedented burst in population growth. A means had to be found of increasing food production in Europe, for this was before the days of steamships and refrigeration. What better way than finding good fertilizer? On the west coast of South America were hundreds of square miles of barren shore, offshore rocks, and islets thickly covered, often to a depth of two or three feet, with guano, bird-shit.
In 1842 the only ocean-sailing vessel, apart from Sea Dart in 1974, arrived in Bolivia. The only one on record, that is. She was the Hapsburg, a four-masted brigantine out of Glasgow. She had sailed in 1841 laden with slate for roofing as ballast, crewed with the dregs of Barlinny Prison and the Gorbals, skippered and officered by the hardest men on the Clyde. By November 1841 she was beating her way around the Horn, where she lost three men, one washed over the side, one fallen from the top-gallant-royals, and one knifed in a brawl in the reeking forepeak. In January 1842 she fetched the roadstead of Valparaiso, Chile, and offloaded her slate, which can still be seen on the roofs of the fine, stately homes of that port. With no cargo for the voyage home, her captain, with true Scots ingenuity, bore away north to the coast of Bolivia. There, at Antofagasta, he met the Chilean bird-shit poachers and arranged with them to load the Hapsburg with the white gold of the Atacama. No bills of lading were made out, no entry was formalized, no crew-list was rendered to the Bolivian harbormaster.
Laden with six hundred tons of bird-shit, the Hapsburg weighed anchor after long weeks of shoveling dusty guano and wheeling tons of the stuff out to small barges and hoisting it on board. (Half the crew was sick with dehydration on that waterless desert shore. “Half a pint o’ water, half o’ whiskey” was the rule when taking on the Guano trade.) With a diminished crew she bore away for Cape Stiff, as they called the Horn. After losing two more crew in the savage April winds, she arrived home in Glasgow in August of 1842, working her way up the Clyde, weather-beaten, triumphant, and stinking for miles around of Bolivian bird-shit!
Meanwhile, word of the theft had leaked out to the Bolivian government in La Paz. Representations had been made to the British ambassador, who had swiftly transmitted to London word of the Hapsburg’s unauthorized entry into Bolivian territory and, more seriously, the theft, in effect, of six hundred tons of Bolivian bird-shit. A messenger had been sent on horseback to Argentina and the dispatch carried back to Her Majesty’s Government in London by a swift grain-carrier, a “greyhound of the seas,” a three-sky-sail-yarder, bound direct for the Thames. The grain ship, with her cloud of stud sails and bucko skipper, made the distance back to England in no time at all and was sitting in the Isle of Dogs, with the dispatch delivered safely, long before the lumbering Hapsburg, short of crew, limped into the Glasgow docks. As the Hapsburg was warped alongside, the bobbies were waiting to board; the captain was seized, the crew returned to Barlinny Prison, and the cargo handed over to the Bolivian consul in London. This gentleman, whose name is unfortunately not preserved, promptly sold the cargo to a German firm in Hamburg and took off for Paris with the wife of his partner. For generations his memory was desecrated in Bolivia; he was known as the Benedict Arnold of that never-never land, the man who elegantly sipped absinthe for years in the cafes of the Champs Elysées with the proceeds from six hundred tons of bird-shit!
For three decades after this incident, the Bolivian government tried to remove the Chilean bird-shit poachers from her territory. Finally Chile, with the backing of England, whose ambassador to Bolivia had been tied backwards onto a donkey and displayed, fully and formally uniformed, through the narrow, winding streets of La Paz in revenge for the stolen bird-shit, lost her patience. Chile declared war on Peru and Bolivia. In a quick campaign lasting only a few days she beat the living daylights out of the Bolivian army and annexed the coastal province of Antofagasta.
The repercussions of this squabble are still felt in western South America. Peru, with millions of semi-starving peasants crowding into Lima, Arequipa, and Cuzco, squanders vast sums of money on jet fighter planes; the military of Chile murders the legally elected head of state; and Bolivia rattles a rusty saber.