APART FROM THE INSULT AT San Nicolás, our reception and treatment along the Paraná were, in the main, kind and friendly. A river policeman from the patrol boat at Rosario presented me with a hand-driven siren in return for which I gave him my Swiss railroad guard’s horn. Many offers to show us the sights were made, but we took only a few of these, as we were both still suffering from the effects of the heat, the humidity, and the effort to keep going along the strong current of the Paraná.
As we drew closer to the huge delta of the River, we saw more and more pleasure craft, and we were escorted some distance downstream by one of them. By now the whole of the Argentine knew of our arrival; our progress was being reported daily in the press and on the radio.
The pleasure craft, fast outboard-motor boats usually, fascinated Huanapaco. When he saw the first one, north of Asunción, he gawped as it flashed by, throwing up a tremendous wake. He stared after it for two minutes or so, until it disappeared. Then he turned to me with a questioning look on his surprised face.
“It’s a speedboat, very fast, probably belongs to a hacienda owner.” (Later, in southern Paraguay, we saw quite a few haciendas where the owners live in a splendor that would shame the Agha Khan; great rambling estates with two planes standing on the small airstrip outside the house and luxury speedboats moored up to the riverbank.)
“Why does he go so fast?” asked Huanapaco, after another moment.
“He’s in a hurry. Wherever he’s going he wants to get there fast.”
His bronze face furrowed deeply in thought.
“Why does he want to go so fast?” he asked me, half frowning.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, to save time of course!” I replied testily. The hot sunshine was not conducive to long discussions on the obvious.
After another pensive moment, he asked quietly, “What does he do with the time he saves?”
For that there was no answer. I asked him to go forward and set up the anchor line.
In the towns and cities where we went ashore, Huanapaco was all eyes, watching everything. Rosario, for instance, is a much greater city than La Paz. The highest building above street level in La Paz is about fifteen stories high, standing all alone. Here they were skyscrapers fifty or sixty stories high! I knew that Huanapaco compared everything to Bolivia and that this was disturbing him, making him unhappy, for obviously every time he compared his beloved country with anything here, in a modern industralized land like estuarial Argentina, he found Bolivia severely wanting. As he gazed at the skyscrapers, I tried to cheer him up.
“But they are so big. In La Paz—pobre Bolivia? he moaned.
“Pobre Bolivia nothing, amigo! Look, how far above the sea do you think we are standing, you and I?”
“No sé, I’ve no idea.”
“Right, well, let’s see; there’s the river wall, that’s 20 feet high, then there’s the distance to the sea at the delta, that’s about 200 miles; call it 50 feet; so we are 70 feet above the level of the ocean, yes?”
“If you say so, mi Capitán.”
“So that building, that one you’re so envious of, how far above the ocean is it, the top of it?”
He craned his neck and shook his head.
“Let’s say it’s 500 feet, right? Then the top is 570 feet above the ocean, yes?”
He nodded.
“And how high is fucking La Paz above the ocean?” I asked him.
He knew this one. “12,800 feet!”
“Bueno, amigo. And what’s 570 feet from 12,800?”
This one took him some minutes, writing figures on the back of a cigarette pack. Then he replied, smiling, “12,230 feet.”
“And how high is that? Go on, look up in the sky, tell me, point to me where the top of the La Paz building would be if it was here?”
He grinned in happiness for a few seconds, then his face dropped again. “But all that height is the height of the mountains. It wasn’t built by Bolivians.”
“And who built that building over there?” I gestured at the one he was staring at.
“Argentinos.”
“Bueno, and who built the mountains of Bolivia?”
“God.”
“Are you comparing the hijo de puta Argentino to God?”
He laughed uproariously, patting my shoulder. On the way back to the boat he said, “Mi Capitán, I guess that men, too, are like buildings. Some already start off on top of the mountains?”
“Si, amigo, especially the Quechua.” He was silent, pleased.
“Y los marineros ingleses,” he said quietly, after a while.
“Tal vez, perhaps,” I murmured as we climbed onboard.
As we approached the delta of the Paraná, the land again changed, from open, grassy plains to thick scrub and then to jungle, a low, bushy jungle that covers the hundreds of islands which compose the 200-mile-long water maze. On the other side of this last obstacle was the Mar del Plata, the great estuary of the waters of the Paraná, the Paraguay, the Bermejo, and the Uruguay, half the waters of the continent, from as far away as the Andes in the west, the infested Mato Grosso in the north, and even further north than that, right from the very heart of the huge continent. From all over southern Brazil came the rushing torrent, to sweep ever onwards out into the estuary, and so into the Atlantic Ocean. Our job was to make sure that Sea Dart went with the deep water and did not end up being washed onto one of the many islands, rocks, sandbanks, sunken trees, or wrecks as she charged forward in the lively breezes.
At last, on the twenty-third of December, we reached the small but busy fishing port of San Isidro. After staying there overnight, we were off again in the early morning light, down the branch of the delta known as El Tigre. At ten o’clock, on the morning of the twenty-fourth, straining to see beyond the long, dreary stretches of river, weaving our way around the obstacles, at long, long last I sighted, way ahead, a clear horizon—the Mar del Plata, gleaming clear and silver along the horizon, under the rising sun! An hour later Sea Dart shot out of the Tigre like a cork out of a bottle! “Some Bottle! Some Cork!” I thought as we heaved in to close-haul her llama-skin sheet ropes and headed for the port of Buenos Aires, the biggest city in the Southern Hemisphere! At their invitation, we dropped anchor right in front of the Yacht Club Argentino. In the center of one of the busiest seaports in the world, with ocean steamers moored by the dozen, tiny Sea Dart crept in on the weakening evening breeze, her grubby, patched sails only just edging her forward, her worn hull blistered by the hot sun of the pampas, her mast scarred and scratched by the cruel overhanging jungle thorns of the Mato Grosso, and anchored at the guest-of-honor mooring. She crept in like a wayward child and quietly settled down only yards from the haughty clock-tower which sticks up like an admonishing finger in the center of the Buenos Aires docks.
I shook Huanapaco’s hand. He looked up at the Bolivian ensign drooping from the starboard spreader and stuck his thumb up, grinning. I pointed at the red British ensign, now bleached an anemic pale pink, torn and tattered, hanging slackly from the stern, then poked him in the ribs and stuck my thumb up too. We’d done it! We’d reached the bloody ocean!
It was Christmas Eve, and everything except the bars and restaurants was closed. The British embassy, the banks, and the post office were all shut up as tight as a drum. The Yacht Club was deserted. Huanapaco and I, still in our worn and torn, but carefully repaired, rags, celebrated our feat with corned beef and six bottles of cold beer obtained on the slate from the friendly club barman.
We’d done it! For the first time ever in recorded history a sea-going boat had crossed right through the middle of South America! We had sailed Sea Dart thousands of miles where no sail had ever been before!
I had taken the ocean to Bolivia and had brought Bolivia back down to the ocean! I had seized for Britain the altitude sailing record of the world, unbeatable until man finds water on a star! I had reached three impossible destinations—the Dead Sea, Lake Titicaca, and then the Atlantic through the living death of the Mato Grosso! Slowly, little by little, as Sea Dart progressed down the populated areas of the Argentine, she had become a living legend.
In the warm, sticky cabin, among the damp-rotted rags of clothing and the stained charts and papers, was the brightly dyed llama wool blanket which Manco Quispe had given me “to show to the ocean sun” as he made me padrino of Suriqui! Honorary Chief of the Aymara! I sat on it, as the boat danced at anchor in the ocean tide, weary, exhausted, sick to my stomach, trying to grasp the fact that it was over, and feeling humble before the terrible majesty of all that we had seen, all that we had overcome.
“What do you do now, mi Capitán?” asked my Quechua brother.
“Get back home, of course, amigo.”
“Me too.”
“After Christmas?”
“Yes, after Christmas!”
“Feliz Navidad, Huanapaco, jok’halla! Merry Christmas, mate!”
“Feliz Navidad, Capitán Tristan!” He slugged at his beer.
I carefully made my way up the tiny companion ladder for a piss into Paraná waters, and a first one into the Atlantic, under the gleaming bright stars of Argentina. Acrux was winking away in the south to one side of the luminescent night sky of Buenos Aires, a reflection of the glow of a billion electric lights. As I stood there a big ship hooted on her way out to the ocean. She was out of London, her red ensign showing clearly in the light of her stern steaming lamp. It fluttered. I saluted thumbs up across the black, gleaming waters of the night harbor and turned in, thinking of Christmas Eve in Bethlehem four years and forty lives before.