THE VOYAGE to Hawaii was almost too easy. The Pacific can be like that—days of sailing through nothing bigger than four-foot swells and winds of fifteen knots. Dove behaved well and so did the kittens once they had gained their sea legs.
It was a relief to discover that the steering vane worked well and that I could move about the deck and the cabin confident that I was sailing within a few degrees of my course.
As the sun went down I began to feel sick, a new and surprising experience because I was a good sailor. I thought the symptoms were just reaction to the tension of getting away and to the first chill of loneliness.
Loneliness was to ride with me for a thousand days, and throughout the longest nights. At times it was like something I could touch. Loneliness slunk aboard as the lights of Catalina island began to fade, and I told myself that time and distance would destroy it. How wrong I was. There was no way of striking down this enemy, and my only defense was the business that a boat demands when under way, the activity called for by a sudden squall or the concentration of taking a fix on sun or stars.
At nine o’clock I forced myself to eat a can of stew and then tuned the radio to my favorite Los Angeles rock music station. It was interesting to hear the news announcer report that I was on my way—“the first schoolboy ever to attempt to sail the world alone.” The announcer audaciously guessed a lot too, and guessed wrong when he added, “The most important piece of Robin’s luggage is a shelf of schoolbooks.”
“Like hell,” I told the cats.
At dusk the sea was lit by phosphorescence, tiny flashlights in the folding water which moved away from the rudder. The phosphorescence reminded me of looking down at Los Angeles from an airliner at night. You see things differently when you are alone. The sea seemed to be putting on a special show for an audience of one. Even the stars seemed now to be for my own entertainment.
But into my tape recorder I spoke of simpler things: Joliette has diarrhea. The kittens are not enthusiastic about the spray, which takes them by surprise as it comes over the bow. I have just dried them off with a hand towel and they’ve taken over my sleeping bag. Catalina almost out of sight. Wind a steady fifteen knots.
If any one piece of additional equipment aboard Dove was more important than the rest it was my portable battery-operated tape recorder. With it I not only filled out the bare details entered in my logbook, but I recorded, sometimes too intimately, my fears and hopes, my passing thoughts and deepest feelings. Throughout the voyage at every port of call I mailed the tapes to my home. They make up about two hundred hours or more of listening—mostly unimportant, idle chatter, the names of men and places, sightings of fish, boats and aircraft. But when there was danger and excitement, the magnetic ribbon caught these too. Above the sound of my voice can be heard, at times, the roar and thunder of a storm or the squeaks of dolphins nuzzling Dove’s hull.
On the second day out from San Pedro I recorded: Made 103 miles in twenty-four hours, mostly under a reefed jib. Didn’t sleep till dawn, then slept till ten. Kittens eating now, dancing and clawing at everything that moves. Breakfasted off eggs and potatoes and a tuna sandwich. Spray hit my sandwich as I was putting it into my mouth, so I didn’t need to salt it. I’m worried about the alcohol stove, which last night flared up for no reason. I’m also worried by the amount of kerosene my Coleman lamp is using.
At nightfall I had hung the Coleman aft so that its five hundred candlepower would bathe the cockpit and the sails with light and hopefully provide additional warning to shipping in my path. The lamp had to be pumped every two hours, a chore that soon wearied me.
On the afternoon of my third day at sea the sky clouded over. With the gloom my spirits dropped. Throughout my voyage I was to discover that weather affected my mood. Given a clear sky my morale was good—unless I was sitting in the doldrums. But when the sky was overcast I was often gloomy too and even minor problems worried me.
That third night I recorded: Just had dinner of canned turkey and yams, which stuck to the roof of my mouth. I’ll have to do something about my cooking! Took my first moon LOP [line of position] with a sextant.
There followed several days of the kind of sailing that an elderly aunt would enjoy on a Sunday afternoon in San Pedro harbor—winds strong enough to fill the main and jib but not so strong as to put the gunwales under. From the start I had looked on this first leg to Hawaii as a shakedown cruise, a testing of Dove’s response to wind and water, and of my skills as captain, navigator, mate and cook. Much time was taken up with sextant reading and checking LOPs with the dead reckoning of my taffrail log.
On the tenth day I hit the trades, which pushed Dove along 120 miles in twenty-four hours, and the clear night sky allowed me to take my first star fix. I was really excited about this and taped: It’s two o’clock in the morning and I know exactly where I am. That’s kind of fun.
When I’d been out sixteen days I picked up a Hawaiian radio station and introduced the cats to Hawaiian music. I complained into the recorder: They don’t seem to appreciate the music as much as I do. The Honolulu station has just spoken about me. The announcer read a letter from my father, who’s asked all ships to look out for me. That’s me they’re talking about! They talked for five minutes, really weird! But I haven’t seen any ships anyway. The only way I know that there are other people somewhere is by a jet trail. I’m trying to picture a guy sailing along in a small boat in the mid-Pacific. And that guy’s me!
All along my route I was to find out that the first or the second question a news reporter asked me was what I did all the time at sea. It sounds strange, but I was hardly ever without something to do—usually small things like cleaning up the boat, or mending something, or cooking. If there wasn’t anything to do I’d read or make work, like painting the inside of the cabin or cleaning up the stove.
I would make quite a big deal out of writing a note and putting it into a bottle. The first time I did this was when I was on my way to Hawaii. The note read:
“My name is Robin Lee Graham. I am sixteen years old and sailing a 24 foot sailboat to Honolulu. My position is 127° W; 22° N. If you find this note please write to me and tell me where you found it. Thanks a lot.” I added my uncle’s California address. I never did receive a reply to my bottled notes. Perhaps they are still bobbing about in the Pacific or yellowing in the sun on some distant shore.
My library included Michener’s Hawaii (which I enjoyed very much), Hiscock’s Beyond the West Horizon, Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, Heyerdahl’s story of his Kon-Tiki voyage, Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty. My schoolbooks remained under the used clothing in the cabin—although I was full of good intentions.
So these early days passed, with me writing my log, taking fixes with a sextant, feeding the cats, washing my clothes, always tidying up the boat. Generally I stayed awake at night and slept from dawn till perhaps midmorning. There were a few moments of alarm.
I told the tape recorder: Gosh, I was scared. I mean, all this water sloshing about. I really thought Dove was sinking. What else? I was just about to blow up the life raft when I discovered what was wrong. One of the plastic fittings had melted—I suppose by the engine exhaust when I was charging the batteries. It was fantastic how quickly the water had come through. Anyway, I pumped out the bilge and made another plug out of a little piece of wood. Wow, man! Anyway, it’s all okay now and we’re scooting along at about four knots.
Another question often asked me, at least in my first year of sailing, was what my parents thought about the voyage. Mother never hid her opposition and I believe she actually spoke to lawyers to try to stop my voyage. But Father was always for it. Shortly after he had seen me leave San Pedro, he wrote a letter to my mother to try to stop her from worrying, and he later published the letter in various newspapers, perhaps to answer all the criticism of my parents for allowing a schoolboy to face “not only the dangers of the deep,” as one newspaper correspondent put it, “but the perils of the savages.” Father’s letter read:
Dearest Norma,
Our work is done and Lee has sailed. I watched the boat until it was out of sight in the morning mist. I returned to the slip to pick up some things. All the farewell wishers were gone. The slip was empty.
As I drove home without him sitting beside me as we had done for so many days I had a great big empty feeling. We have been so close and so busy, and now there is nothing. I feel Lee has sailed out of my life. I have lost his boyhood companionship. When I see him again he will be a man, looking for a life of his own with other friends and other interests where you and I are not included.
It happens to all parents, but it is so hard to take when it happens all of a sudden as it did to me, as he moved out of his slip and down the channel. I don’t think I would ever have let him go if I didn’t love him so much. It would have been easier on me to have kept him at home.
In my heart I know it is the right thing to let him go. He was happier today than I have ever seen him, or than he probably ever will be. And happier at sixteen than most people ever will be after living a comfortable life—stretching it to a safe end.
Lee knows the risk he is taking as he knows there are risks to those at home. Nobody can be entirely protected from the mishaps of life.
If anything should happen to Lee—and it would be the end of me if it did—I would still feel that I did the right thing for him.
Success or failure, he is fulfilling his destiny. We all have only one life, some are short and some are long. He loves life and wants a little more out of it than to follow convention out of fear of what others may think, or to be just another face in the crowd that follows the herd.
Please don’t worry about Lee. The boat is as safe as can be. He knows this is the greatest thing that could happen to him and he appreciates what we have done for him to make it possible.
With love, Lyle
I am sure my father wrote that letter quite sincerely. I know he was really worried to see me go. But later, when he still wanted to control me from afar, I had to remind him that he had given me my freedom. I learned that our ideas of freedom were different because later there was to be much hurt to both of us.
Dove continued toward Hawaii at a steady pace, and I continued to record on tape the small happenings of my progress: Cats pounced on a flying fish and look as contented as if they had eaten a jar of cream…. Today is Friday the thirteenth [of August]. Just took down the mainsail—not because of the date but because of a squall. Enjoyed seawater bath—poured buckets of brine over my head. Gosh, it’s good to feel clean…. The smell in the cabin has disappeared, so it must have been me that caused it and not the cats….
August fifteenth and five o’clock A.M. Wow! Just saw my first ship…. That boat reported me. Listening to my radio and heard over Honolulu radio that I have been sighted. The radio said that there had been “some anxiety about my safety.” That’s a lot of bull. Who could get into trouble in this kind of weather?
Anyway, I was ahead of my ETA, because the ship had reported my position only 270 miles east northeast of Oahu.
Newspapers in California and Hawaii were having a field day. What they did not know they continued to guess. One paper, I was to read later, reported me “industriously working at my schoolbooks.” The paper added: “Hawaiian hospitality is famous but Robin Lee won’t be attending all the parties he’s been invited to because he’s anxious to qualify for his high school diploma. He believes that the best way to learn is to get away to a quiet place—like the ocean.”
So many newspapers wrote about me as if I were Little Lord Fauntleroy. Actually I had still not opened a schoolbook. I preferred fishing. My fishing equipment was in Honolulu, but I worked out my own method of changing my diet. One day I put a piece of canned tuna in a plastic bag and trailed it on a string. I gripped the other end of the string in my teeth so that my hands would be free to hold my bow and arrow. A big mahimahi came alongside, sniffed at the plastic bag and then snapped at it. I was lucky not to lose my front teeth and I didn’t get the fish. At that moment a plane circled low overhead. An hour later my radio reported that my mother was aboard. They had been searching for me for an hour.
Easily the best moments of ocean sailing are those when land is first sighted. I saw Oahu at dawn on my twenty-second day at sea and whooped so loudly that the cats arched their backs. Outside Ala Wai harbor a Coast Guard power boat came alongside and offered a tow. With so many small boats around it seemed a good idea to accept.
The press and television must have been short of news. They came out of the harbor in a small armada. One of the reporters shouted across the water, “What are you going to do when you get ashore?”
“Find a men’s room and take a shower,” I said.
Actually I felt terribly tired as I tied up Dove at a slip close to the spot from where Jim and Art and I had sailed out in the ill-fated HIC. I had been forced to remain awake for the previous three nights as I had run out of kerosene for my Coleman lamp. I had taken no more than cat naps by day—perhaps fourteen hours’ sleep in the previous sixty.
It was marvelous seeing my mother again and my brother Michael, and I didn’t mind the pretty girls who necklaced me with leis. Hawaii is always fun. But I was anxious to be away again and to get out of range of people who gushed about my being the youngest solo sailor to make the California-Hawaii trip. A few days later my father flew over from California and helped me prepare Dove for the journey south.
Now I was moving into the big league. Dove and I had to be ready for anything that the sea could throw at us.
The only reason I spent as much as three weeks in Hawaii was that the inboard was causing trouble. It was a lousy engine to start with, worn and ill-used, and the spare parts did little to improve its efficiency. My father and I installed an additional outboard with an extension shaft. The outboard was light enough to be hauled up and lashed to the stern.
I sailed out of Ala Wai at noon on September 14, my destination Fanning island, a tiny speck of coral (actually twelve square miles) 1,050 miles almost due south. With fair winds I hoped to make Fanning in ten days, but in case my navigation slipped I took on provisions for sixty. In my wallet I had seventy dollars—not very much for a global voyager.
How much harder to say good-bye this time. What made it especially hard was that I knew how much my mother hated my going and how she really feared for me. It was difficult to meet her eyes, hidden behind a pair of dark glasses.
A strange woman in a muumuu near the slip began ringing a bell. I was not sure whether this was intended as a salute or a tocsin. Anyway, this time there were no storm warnings hoisted on the harbor wall.
Mother followed me out in a friend’s launch. There were last farewells, final shouts of “Good luck” and “Happy landings” and “See you when you arrive.” Then, following the old Hawaii custom, I threw my leis into the water. Hawaiians say that the traveler who does this will return to the islands again. The cats had been decorated with leis too. I forgot to throw their leis into the sea. The cats did not return to the islands.
Then Dove was away under a main and a blue and white genoa.
Two hours out of Hawaii I realized that I was not as brave as I had pretended. My throat was so tight it was hard to swallow. I told my tape recorder: Sure hated to leave. Wondering if I’ll ever see my parents again. I suppose saying good-bye always hurts. It can’t hurt more than this. I seem to be traveling at only one knot. But at least I’m pointing in the right direction. How long will it take me to sail around the world at this speed? Cats look miserable too. Oh, God, I’m so homesick!
I was not a bit hungry, but I had to do something to stop my misery—to stop me from crying in fact. I made a spaghetti dinner and over my shoulder I watched the glow of Honolulu begin to fade. Fortunately, at the moment when I was just about to break down completely, a squall raced out of the northeast and Dove picked up to four knots. The last lights of Oahu disappeared quickly over the horizon.
It took Dove four days to reach the trades and then the water turned a glorious turquoise blue—the kind of water that tempts you to jump over the side for a swim.
Even wearing a harness—and there were very rare moments when I took it off at sea—to jump over the side would have been crazy, because if there had been a sudden puff of wind I probably would not have been able to haul myself back on board.
Only four days out of Hawaii I saw the most beautiful sunset of the whole five years of my voyage. At least that is the one I best remember. I took a picture of it, but it doesn’t really show up well. There was no one to point it out to except the cats, and they weren’t interested, so I told the tape: The reds and the pinks are sort of coming toward me from the horizon and then the greens and the yellows are moving in and out like they’re being woven.
I needed something like this to cheer me up because I was still so homesick. Loneliness slowed me down. When my morale was low I spent much longer calculating my position and making entries in my logbook.
On days when the cats irritated me I complained into the tape recorder: Suzette and Joliette are so dumb. Why can’t they talk back to me? All they can do is chase their tails and go to sleep…. I don’t know what’s wrong. I don’t even want to eat. Even that fruitcake you gave me tastes like warm water. You know what I mean?
It was weird how when I was on the skids of self-pity something would turn up to distract me. The sunset was one example, and another was when I was in the doldrums under flopping sails, twelve days out from Hawaii: I saw my first school of porpoises.
I recorded: The porpoises are now all around Dove. I can hear their squeaks. It’s amazing how loud they can talk. I guess I can hear them so well because my hull is so thin. I wonder if they’re trying to talk to me. Maybe one porpoise hit the keel, because I heard a thumping and she was squeaking real loud. It was nerve-racking but exciting. It has been so long since I heard any voice, and it’s almost as though someone was trying to answer me.
To celebrate the visit of the porpoises I gave the cats a sardine supper.
At times I was quite desperate to hear a human voice. Sometimes I would talk into the tape for a while and just play it back. I’d hear myself say: Everything okay here, but what’s happening at home? What? I can’t hear you. Why don’t you answer me? Are you sulking or something? Ah, well, if you won’t talk to me I’ll just have to go on talking to myself. Now this is my routine. I get up and put my sleeping bag away. Then I comb my hair as if a girl was coming to breakfast. Wish she was. Some seaweed just passing the boat. First I’ve seen. I’m overcooking my hard-boiled eggs. Perhaps six minutes should do them properly. Seventy-six-mile run in the past twenty-four hours. That’s a little better. Woke up last night and found I was going due north. How long did I go the wrong way? Squall probably turned me around. I have to wake up regularly in the night to check my course and set the sails and pump up the lamp. Reading a book called High Wind in Jamaica. More porpoises came alongside. I paid no attention to them. They seemed to resent that. They began to squeak at me—real high squeaks. They seemed to be saying, “Look at me. We’ll race you to the next seaweed.” They’d win every time. Going to have tuna and yams for dinner.
I was beginning to pick up the lore of the sea, learning to read the clouds, watching the drift of seaweed, marking the movement of the wind. Even my cooking improved. I discovered the best timing for a hard-boiled egg and how much water to add to hot cereal. I developed, too, a special understanding of sound. Even asleep I could sense a change in the wind or sea conditions.
My mother once told me that she could hear a baby’s cry in a thunderstorm. The weird way I could hear the sounds of the sea, the wind and the boat, even when asleep, saved me much time and hundreds of miles, and more than once saved my life. Alerted by a change in wave patterns, I would immediately awaken, sometimes to find Dove pushed off course by a veering wind.
Most of the time Joliette and Suzette were good company and I gave them a good report on the tape: It’s fun to watch them find their sea legs. They’ve learned how to bend their legs and lean over to keep their balance. They don’t like the hot weather, though. When it’s really hot I wrap them in damp towels. They seem to appreciate this. Then when the sun moves over and it gets cooler they creep out and start to play with each other. Both the cats love to watch the water when it runs along the gunwales. They sit absolutely still as if they are waiting to pounce on a mouse or something.
When I’d figured out that I was about fifty miles from Fanning I became really uptight. I taped: I’m somewhere close to the island. I’m sure of that. But where is it? Pity there aren’t any milestones in the sea. My eyes are searching the horizon. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve missed this first landfall…. Every few minutes I stand on the cabin roof but there’s not a bump on the horizon. Oh, gosh, supposing I’m south of Fanning! It sounds crazy, but I’m beginning to look astern. That shows I don’t trust myself too much.
Then suddenly I saw it. Land! Land! I yelled into the recorder. Then turning to Joliette I said: Don’t you see it, you fool? Out there, five points starboard of the bow!
I had been alone two weeks with no single sign of human life, no ship, no plane, no jet trail, not even a floating beer can. The sight of Fanning, still a tiny nipple, made me half crazy with excitement.
As the island grew bigger and I began to see the darker shadows of vegetation, I smugly told the tape: Robin Lee Graham, you’re a pretty good navigator.
I reached English harbor at five in the afternoon of September 29. A white man in a diesel boat came out and threw me a line. When Dove was tied up to a small stone jetty in six feet of water, I climbed the steps. The pilot put out his hand and said his name was Phillip Palmer.
“Welcome,” he said. “We don’t get many visitors.”
Just hearing a human voice again was weird. Sure I had listened to the radio, but a voice over the radio is always neutral and bloodless. Mr. Palmer’s voice was warm and friendly. What embarrassed me was how inarticulate I had become. My thoughts seemed ten paces ahead of my tongue, but if Mr. Palmer believed me to be mentally retarded he was too polite to show it.
The only European on the island, he was a grizzled fellow who supervised three hundred natives, imported from the Gilbert islands to harvest profitable copra crops for the Burns Philip Company. Mr. Palmer was not only harbor master and labor manager, but wore half a dozen other hats. He would settle disputes, regulate supplies, operate communications and, if necessary, set a broken limb. He was also a kindly host.
I accepted his invitation to sleep in his little house, to have supper with him and breakfast too. The food was prepared by his native housekeeper, Marybell. Her meals reminded me what a bad cook I was. In his beat-up Volkswagen Mr. Palmer drove me around the island to watch native dancing. Fanning is an angler’s paradise; a huge variety of fish, both in the harbor and in inland pools, seemed to want to commit suicide. I could almost hook them on my toenails. The harbor was like a huge aquarium.
Fanning’s local name means “Footprint of Heaven.” The island is beautiful, and I guess from above it looks like a human foot. Visitors are as rare as rich uncles so I was given VIP treatment. The children at the local school put on a special dance for me. The dancers later invited me to join them in a sort of wild fandango and then, on Sunday, they invited me to their little church. It was weird for a California pagan to hear himself prayed for in the Gilbertine language. But it meant quite a lot to me that these childlike people should ask God to give me safe sailing to wherever I wanted to go.
I spent six days on Fanning, refilled my tanks with spring water, took on fresh eggs, a terrific bread made with coconut milk and a few souvenirs, including a hand-carved model canoe. My visit to the island cost me exactly twenty cents—one dime and two nickels which fell out of my pocket when I joined the children’s dance. When I left I gave a sweater to kindly Marybell and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt to her little boy who was sick.
Mr. Palmer refused to take any money from me when I gave him a radiogram to be sent to my parents in Hawaii. I was two days out of Fanning when I remembered I had forgotten to give Mr. Palmer my proper home address. This meant that my parents would not know where I was, and I was so mad that I kicked myself half across Dove’s deck. I never realized though that my long silence would cause huge headlines in Hawaii and California.
Several weeks later I received a bundle of American newspapers. In inch-high type the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner had told its readers: “BOY WORLD SAILOR IS MISSING,” and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin carried a three-column story headlined: “MOTHER OF ISLE BOY NOT ALARMED AT NO WORD.”
For two weeks the oldest members at the Ala Wai Yacht Club shook their heads, remembering the HIC episode as they read daily reports, each more pessimistic than the last, that the “teen-age world sailor was long overdue.”
Meanwhile I was sailing on under jib and genoa, wing and wing, to Pago Pago, and since I carried a bag of mail for Mr. Palmer, Dove could have flown a Royal Mail pennant on her mast.
I guess it was a conscience pricked by my forgetfulness that made me open my schoolbooks for the first time. With the self-steering gear in operation, I finished part one of my American literature course, reading the lives of Captain John Smith and Benjamin Franklin. (Quite interesting really, I told the tape.)
Time for study was no big problem when Dove wallowed in the doldrums, and south of Fanning I sailed mostly in light airs. When the occasional winds filled the sails they usually came from the wrong direction. I protested into the tape recorder: The wind blows from all sides. I’ve never had it blow the way it’s supposed to. The wind is really messed up. It’s not supposed to do this at all. It’s just not in the books.
On October 7 Dove rolled slowly over the equator and I wrote in my logbook: Cats are now officially shellbacks. It was too hot for celebrations, although one Hawaiian reporter recorded later that I had “doubtless dubbed the cats’ paws with peanut butter.”
At one point I thought I’d gone crazy and that my memory had left me. Someone at Honolulu had given me a cup and ball game, and when tidying up the cabin I found it under the pillow on the quarter bunk. I was absolutely sure that I had parked it on a cabin shelf. Anyway, I put it back in place. Ten minutes later I went below again and found the game under the same pillow. I was really scared. It was weird because obviously there was no one else aboard. A second time I returned the game to the shelf and went back to the cockpit. Then a slight thump inside the cabin disturbed me. It was Suzette. I caught her red-handed. She was pulling the game from the shelf and hiding it under my pillow. I was so relieved to know I wasn’t completely off my rocker that I didn’t punish her—at least not until she discovered my Fanning eggs.
Mentally I was in poor shape, worried not only by the slowness of my doldrums progress but because I knew my family would soon be thinking that disaster was the only explanation for my long silence.
A head shrinker would have marked the symptoms. On my sixth day out of Fanning I burst into tears just because I failed to make a milk pudding taste even remotely like the kind my mother made.
Strangely I wasn’t as worried by more serious setbacks, like when a shark gobbled up my taffrail-log spinner, trailing twenty feet astern.
I happen to hate sharks. When the five-footer finned at my stern I shot him with my .22 pistol. The brute opened his mouth in surprise, showing teeth that looked as if they could snap a telephone pole. He thrashed wildly with his tail and then slowly keeled over and sank. Then I wondered why my taffrail line was floating on the surface. The shark had bitten the spinner clean off. I had no spare, so from then I had to guess how far I had traveled each day.
Anyway, the sea looked healthy, and I noted on the recorder: Dove is now slicing through sheets of blue plankton and schools of small fish. Some of the fish are only about an inch or two long. It’s weird how they keep pace with Dove for hours, even when I pick up a breeze and we scoot along at three or four knots. But I wonder why the decks are so dirty. I’m always having to clean them up and it’s not the cats’ fault. The cats are pretty good about using their litter box. Maybe those stinking cities are sending out their smog this far.
On my fifteenth day out of Fanning I spotted land and my morale shot way up. My voice an octave higher on the tape, I reported: I see it, I see it! It’s right there. It’s a kind of dome-shaped thing, but it’s land. It’s all rainy looking. I had raised Tutuila, the main island of American Samoa.
To the nonsailor, navigation may seem like witchcraft, but really it’s not at all difficult. The sextant is the key to it all. With this instrument I measure the altitude above the horizon of the sun, moon or stars, then mark the time to the second on my chronometer. After that it’s simply a matter of looking up the nautical tables, making additions and subtractions which wouldn’t strain an average ten-year-old and pinpointing my exact position on the charts.
That’s the theory. In practice mistakes can be made. A faulty sextant or chronometer can throw out the result by many miles. The tiny island of Fanning, for example, surrounded by hundreds of miles of water, could easily be missed through careless calculations or a faulty sextant. Missing a landfall in a vast expanse of water could mean death.
There was no special reason for me to fear missing Samoa, because I was as used to a sextant as a doctor is to his stethoscope. Besides, I had the advantage on sailors of the days before radio because I could check my chronometer against radio signals. But I never quite trusted my navigation, and always had a feeling of achievement when I made my ports.
Perhaps it was because I was too pleased with myself on this occasion or because I was pushing Dove a little too hard that the accident happened. Dove was closing on Samoa when a squall hit, not a heavy squall but blustery enough to be taken seriously. The upshot was that the lower aft shroud broke. Within an eyeblink the mast buckled and fell overboard, carrying with it the mainsail and the jib. Although the wind was perhaps twenty knots, Dove stopped like a duck full of buckshot.
I told the tape: Here I was within fifteen miles of Tutuila after five hundred hours of sailing and now I’m not going to make it.
It took me twenty minutes to heave the sodden sails and broken mast aboard and two hours to raise the boom and set a jury rig with half the mainsail. I was in no great danger, but it seemed a good idea to put out the brilliant orange distress signal. When an aircraft headed my way I lit a flare, but aimed it at my bare right foot. The steam came off my toes as the aircraft headed out to sea.
Now, with the jury rig I could only sail downwind. A look at the chart and I saw that my only hope of an early landfall was to make for Apia on Upolu island, fifty-two miles distant.
A jet pilot once told me that he was trained for emergencies. A child, he claimed, could fly an airliner but what separated the men from the boys in the cockpit was the moment that might never happen in a long career—the moment when all the red lights start blinking. It’s the same with sailing. Anyone can learn in half an afternoon to sail around a harbor, but an emergency like a demasting calls for seamanship. I was wondering just how good my seamanship was as the wind drove crippled Dove under her clumsy shortened sail toward Upolu’s jagged lee shore.
Due more to a lucky shift of wind than to my sailing skill, Dove nosed past Danger Point. At dawn next morning sandy beaches were on my beam and green hills beyond. I celebrated with a breakfast of canned asparagus. By noon I had anchored in the lovely harbor of Apia, right opposite Aggie’s Hotel.
After going through customs, my first duty ashore was to deliver Mr. Palmer’s mailbag and then to send a cable to my parents—rightly addressed this time. My next worry was to find someone to mend an aluminum mast.
It would be five months before I could safely sail again.
The delay at Apia didn’t really worry me because the hurricane season was approaching and I was in no hurry to leave. In the harbor the rusted wreck of a German warship, the Adler, which went down in a hurricane in 1889, was a daily reminder of what hurricanes can do to craft much bigger than Dove. Besides, Upolu, the chief isle of Western Samoa, is really nice and I didn’t plan on being a typical tourist and “doing” Upolu in five days.
It was important to me, from the moment I set out from California, to get to know the people in distant places, to understand their customs and their life styles, to eat their foods, to bargain in their markets, to listen to their music and to learn their folklore.
First impressions of Apia were encouraging. Lovely Polynesian girls in vivid costumes looked like butterflies as they walked the streets. At Aggie’s famous hotel two of these girls beat a wooden gong at mealtimes to summon guests to the dining room. Aggie Grey, half New Zealander, half Polynesian, the founder-owner of the hotel, had read about me in some newspaper. She invited me to be her tariff-free table guest for as long as I cared to stay.
Joshua Slocum, the first American to sail alone around the world, had had a cooler reception at Apia in 1896. The islanders had refused to believe that Slocum could have crossed the Pacific without help and they angrily accused him of eating his crew.
Aggie’s son, Alan, became my friend and introduced me to Sam Heywood, principal of the local technical school, who said he could mend Dove’s mast. Mr. Heywood took a lot of trouble welding the jagged mast ends together and then pushing a hardwood core up the hollow to the weld. The mistake we made was when we stepped it. I forgot the sailor’s superstition that a coin should be put at the mast’s base—a mistake I was later to remember and regret.
Another stupid thing I did at Apia was to claim I’d shot the shark with my bow and arrow. I lied because I thought that the possession of a gun would cause me trouble with the port officials. Of course the bow and arrow story was told at the bars and I felt pretty silly.
Polynesian food is the best in the world. Anyone who challenges this claim can meet me across a table groaning under roasted pig basted in coconut milk, taro, breadfruit and papaya.
As with all the islands, Upolu is full of legends. The one that I especially liked was about the origin of the coconut tree. The islanders tell the story of a girl named Sina whose beauty was reported to a Fijian king. So fascinated was the king that he decided to marry Sina. To help him win her he changed himself into an eel and swam to Upolu. The eel became Sina’s special pet, but when it began to make passes at her she understandably got frightened and fled. The fable has its variations, but essentially the eel is said to have chased Sina from island to island until he was worn out. In his last breath the eel confessed his love to Sina and that he was really a king. The eel promised that if Sina would bury him in front of her Upolu home he would always provide her with shade, food and drink. So Sina watched a snakelike plant grow out of the grove, watched it throw out shade-giving fronds and strange fruit. This was, of course, the coconut tree, and every time Sina drank from its fruit she knew she was kissing her royal lover.
One of my first expeditions at Apia was a visit to the tomb of Robert Louis Stevenson, who, like Gauguin in Tahiti, had become a legend in his time. The tomb is quite high up on Mount Vaea, overlooking the town. I could have driven there by way of the tree-lined “Road of Loving Hearts” built by the people of Samoa for their beloved Tusitala (“Teller of Tales”), but I preferred to climb the five-hundred-foot trail up the face of the hill. In the early morning light I read the Requiem carved on the stone tomb:
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
My guide told me how the Scots author had come to Upolu in 1890 for the sake of his health and how the islanders really loved him. Stevenson’s big Victorian home nearby is now a museum.
I was given an outrigger canoe and paddled to and from Dove every night and morning. One midnight I was awakened by one of the cats crying and found Joliette looking over Dove’s side. Suzette had fallen overboard and was thrashing about in the water. I fished her out and dried her. She would certainly have drowned if Joliette had not sounded the alarm.
On another occasion when I returned to Dove in the outrigger I found Suzette clinging to the anchor chain. She was just waiting for me to rescue her.
I don’t know whether it was because of something I ate, or what, but suddenly I broke out in boils. They continued to worry me for a year. I went to find medical help and learned that Western Samoan doctors, some unqualified, have a reputation in the islands for healing people. One unqualified doctor discovered, for instance, that the juice of the coconut is quite sterile and that coconut fibers are as good as catgut for sewing up wounds. I was told that when they ran out of gut in World War II, some GIs had their wounds sewn up with coconut fibers. It seems that the Fijian eel king gave Sina more gifts than she recognized.
My first Christmas away from home was really quite cheerful. I exchanged gifts with Aggie and Alan, and received from home parcels containing a plastic spare sextant, more recording tapes, a new taffrail-log spinner, heavy-duty shrouds and a Gibson Girl radio—a transmitter that would allow me to send out distress signals.
A few days before I was due to leave Upolu a young lawyer from Pago Pago, George Wray, invited me to climb Mount Matavanu on the nearby island of Savaii. The mountain rises above a plateau to its volcanic mouth, which occasionally growls. George believed that it had never been climbed. We set out together at dawn, mosquito nets and bedrolls on our backs, and we climbed for twelve hours. Our progress was very slow because of tough ferns and high trees. Every now and then we would break through the ferns and trees and find ourselves in beautiful meadows filled with wild flowers—perfect places for homesteading or for a Robinson Crusoe. When the sun went down George and I slept on the ferns and the silence was weird.
In the little fishing village below they had told us stories of beautiful women who wandered about the mountainside at night but whose kisses were as cold as the mist. We saw no women, fleshed or otherwise, but imagination can work overtime in such places. We had to return the following morning without making the summit because George was scheduled to defend a man in court in Pago Pago.
Climbing down this quiet, weird mountain was harder than going up. Eventually we followed a stream, which became a cascade every few hundred yards. When working our way around one of these cascades George slipped. I was luckily able to grab him, because he would probably have broken a leg on the jagged volcanic rocks.
George really knew his plants and trees. He showed me a jungle vine that provided a thirst-quenching drink. When the vine was slashed near its base it sizzled and hissed for a few seconds like a boiling kettle, and then a liquid poured out as if from a faucet. The liquid had a slight sawdust flavor but was quite refreshing.
As it was the first time I had worn shoes since leaving California, my feet were badly blistered. I was close to dropping when we heard voices. The missionary at the coast had sent out a search party of small boys. It was good to see these grinning Polynesian boys, who led us back to their mission. I gave them my tennis shoes, bush knife, mosquito net and my spare pair of Levi’s.
On January 3, 1966, I left Apia for Pago Pago, and I had just got outside the harbor when a tropical squall tested Dove’s repaired mast and rigging. The squall didn’t last for long and I told the tape: Now it’s going to be a lovely sail. The wind is coming out of the southwest. I feel much better equipped for the sea. Trying out my new plastic sextant. It was hard to say good-bye to Aggie and Alan. They’ve been real nice to me…. Heading straight for Pago Pago. Some porpoises have just come up and said hello. They seem to be welcoming me back to the sea again.