I WAS hardly out of Lautoka harbor, the sun not an hour above the horizon, when a strong southeast wind came out of nowhere. It whipped the sea into twenty-foot swells with whitecaps. Dove began to take a lot of water and was really shuddering. I was feeling seasick for the first time since leaving California.
Now I had a new shipmate. Two days before I left Lautoka Patti had come down to Dove with a little spitting kitten. It scratched my arm as soon as I had taken it from her. “We’ll call it Avanga,” she said. “That’s the Tongan word for bewitched.” I was to find out how well she had named him. Avanga was now bouncing around the cabin, and when I opened the companionway he looked at me with murder in his eyes.
It was easy to believe that the wind and the sea were trying to beat me back to the Fijis. I was pushing the boat too hard and began to hope that the mast would break so that I could have an excuse to turn the boat about and return to Lautoka or the reef. Just when I felt I couldn’t take the weather any longer the wind dropped and shifted to the northeast. I put up twin genoas, and Dove logged 120 miles in the first twenty-four hours.
But the easier weather turned my thoughts inward and then to Patti. A desperate feeling of loneliness overcame me. I made some cinnamon toast, enough for two people, and pretended Patti was there to share it with me. I was going crazy with the pain of missing her, so I began to write her a letter. That helped. Patti had given me a small picture of herself, and I put it in front of me as I wrote:
…It is real hard to put into words how much you mean to me, how much you are now part of my life. I was hoping when I left Lautoka for a real strong wind that would blow me up on the reef so that the trip would be finished…. I want to talk my father into changing the route of my voyage so that I can take in Darwin in Australia. Would there be a chance of your getting to Darwin so that we could be together again? Perhaps I could find a job there, in a uranium or gold mine or something, and we could live together—live in truth and happiness as we did in the Yasawas…. I’ve got up twin genoas now and Dove is going like fun, but the wind is taking me further from you. When I think of this I could die from the pain of being torn from you like this…. I manage to keep myself from crying out loud, but inwardly I cry—especially when I look at some of the things you left on the boat…. Only you will understand what it means not to have you here with me, not to have someone to laugh with, to talk to, to whisper to….
The next day I continued the letter:
Last night I went to bed at six o’clock, but I didn’t sleep well. I’m reading a book about two young lovers, and the picture of you comes to my mind as I read, and I think how beautiful you are…. It’s night again, the best time, because you somehow feel closer to me at night. As I write I feel I’m almost talking to you—almost…. I know it’s hard to ask, but would it be possible for you to get to Honiara in Guadalcanal? I’ve simply got to see you again. I keep on taking out your picture and searching your face. I wish I didn’t cry so much. I’m just a damn baby, but I miss you more than words can tell….
My father was not in Vila when I arrived but turned up two days later with news of home and friends. It was more than a year since I’d seen him and I realized how much I’d changed. I don’t know that I’d changed so much physically, but I had in other ways. He spoke enthusiastically about Mike, Jim and Art, David and Steve, Judy and the other friends and relatives in California and Hawaii. They seemed somehow locked away in a closet in the back of my mind. I tried to remember their faces, their voices and the parties we’d gone to together. But it was like rediscovering a book I’d enjoyed as a child. The memories were nice but so distant—separated from the present by eight thousand miles of sea and a year of new experiences.
Between “now” and “then” the gulf was deep, and on the other side were bicycles, ice cream cones from the corner drugstore, ball games in the yard, a round of birthdays—all the interests of my boyhood years.
I was glad to hear my father’s news, interested to learn that my brother Michael was now an officer and serving in Vietnam. It was especially good to hear about my mother.
With home news now reported, my father started to talk about his plans for my journey. He was enthusiastic about the National Geographic contract. His traveling bag was loaded with new film, his back with cameras. What was needed, he said, were more photographs of me talking to island natives, pictures of Dove sailing round headlands and up jungle creeks.
The subject on top of my mind never came up at all. I would have liked to speak to my father about Patti, but I was afraid he wouldn’t understand. He was anxious for me to complete my global voyage and was worried about the slowness of my progress. I may have wronged my father. Perhaps if I’d talked to him honestly he would have thought back to his own youth and understood my loneliness. I’m sure we could have been close to each other had things been different at our first meeting in thirteen months. I should have understood his deep personal involvement in my voyage. I should have told him that if I failed then I alone would have to take the blame. I should have told him to trust me and to free me from his control.
But we kept our secrets. At least I kept mine. My father produced maps and charts from his suitcase. Each one was marked with lines and dates. With the Suez Canal now closed, we agreed to plot a different route, around the Cape of Good Hope. As we talked across coffee mugs in Dove’s cabin and looked at the maps spread across the bunk I fingered the gold chain encircling my neck.
Hurricane season had come around again. I was not in a hurry to sail too far from land. My father studied prevailing weather charts and then announced that “risks are minimal.” He boarded a freighter bound for Honiara in the Solomons. I sailed out ahead of him on November 8, expecting to rejoin him in ten days.
Navigation through the islands of Malekula and Ambrim was not too difficult, but staying awake was. I reported into my tape recorder: I’m really nervous and scared because the winds are blowing in all directions. The winds seem to funnel down through the islands and the currents are strong and always changing. I’ve been without sleep now for thirty-six hours. I’m just so tired. I don’t remember ever feeling so tired. I take a long time to write up the logbook. All the islands here seem to have two or three names. I’ve not had much to eat—too tensed, I guess. The volcano on Ambrim has a weird glow. I was going to stop off at Pentecost island to see the famous tree divers. They say that the men leap eighty feet from a treetop and stop their suicidal fall a few feet from the ground with vine ropes tied around their ankles. But the shore looked too dangerous for a landing.
The radio warned of a hurricane buildup and I decided to sail on to Maewo island. Now I had to sleep, so I dropped anchor in the lee of the island and slept from three in the afternoon until five the next morning. I felt much better then and sailed on in lovely weather to Santa Maria.
I told the tape recorder: Everything looks good. These islands are among the most beautiful I’ve seen. The sea is a marvelous blue and so is the sky. The islands are fantastically green with tropical plants and coconut trees. There is a terrific sense of peace here. Some islanders have just waved to me. Now I’m going to wash out my shirts and towels.
Just as I raised Santa Maria, the wind dropped altogether. It was weird because the radio spoke about cyclonic conditions and the barometer began to drop.
As the sea remained millpond calm I powered Dove toward the Torres islands. The night of November 12 was the calmest I have known at sea, with water reflecting back the stars so clearly it was hard to tell where earth and heavens joined. I had a strange feeling of being adrift in space, stars above me, below me and all around. It was like being an astronaut without the cost of rockets or the problems of weightlessness.
Next day the radio reported the hurricane 120 miles to the east and shifting out of my area. The wind picked up so I sailed on more confidently for San Cristóbal. My father’s freighter, I was to learn, had been caught by the hurricane’s tail end. His ship had all but stood on her nose and the sturdy steel railings on the after-decks had buckled under pounding seas.
If that storm had caught Dove—as it would have done had I sailed three days earlier—November 18, 1966, might have been my last logbook entry.
The wind died completely again and I made only thirty-two miles a day between noon and noon. Captain Bligh had moved much faster under oars when he had sailed these waters in an open boat in 1789.
Avanga was no more pleased than I with Dove’s progress, and without provocation he would arch his back, periscope his tail and fling himself at me from the cabin roof. I thought this was some sort of game until I saw the look of cold venom in his eyes and wiped the blood off my arms. The third time he attacked me I was close to proclaiming mutiny and putting him adrift.
I finally reached Honiara, Guadalcanal, on November 20, and broke my pencil with frustration when writing sarcastically: “Not bad at all—an average of forty-three miles a day since leaving the New Hebrides!” My father was not there but had left a note to say he was exploring the island of Malaita for picture possibilities.
At the post office there was a letter from Patti. It almost burned a hole in my pocket as I carried it unopened back to Dove. I wanted to read it quite alone. It was written on the day I had left Lautoka and read in part:
…It has been the saddest day of my life and I find it almost impossible to think of living without you. How wonderfully close we’ve been…. I went through my things this morning to rearrange them, and I found that note you left for me and $20. Why in the world did you do that? You cannot afford to give money away. I immediately thought of sending it back to you, but then I thought, no, maybe I could put this money toward buying a ticket to wherever you go so that we can be together again one day. I promise I won’t spend it until then….
I’ve just been given a Tongan remedy for boils. Perhaps it will help you. You take the white sticky sap from a breadfruit tree and apply it to gauze and then put it on the boil. The sap acts as a drying agent, they tell me. Let’s hope you won’t need this remedy and that your boils are better….
You’ll be brave, Robin, and very careful, for I know one thing for sure. I know we are going to meet again….
A few days later I received another letter from Patti. It was in reply to mine and she turned down my plea that she join me in Honiara.
“No, it’s not yet the right time, Robin. We’ll both know when it’s time, and where we’ll meet….”
She told me how she had actually met my father at Lautoka. My father had stopped off there on his way to the New Hebrides.
It was the strangest thing, but someone introduced me to a man who had just flown in from California. His name was Lyle Graham. Of course I knew at once who he was, but he didn’t know who I was. We talked a while and he is so eager to see you. I’m sure glad he will be with you because he loves you so very much. It’s killing him that he is not able to sail with you….
I hope your father didn’t know who I was because I’m afraid we have created an awful scandal in the Fijis. The people here have branded me as an evil, corrupting girl. Oh my darling, I wish we could tell the world about our love so that the world could understand. I hate the thought of spoiling your reputation. It doesn’t matter about me. But if only they knew the truth….
Last night I went to a Halloween party. My Tongan friends made me a lovely flowered skirt. But the party was just a bore because you weren’t there. If only we could escape from the world and live together in peace and far away from people. Perhaps one day we’ll buy a Tongan island.
Write to me care of the Royal Yacht Club in Auckland. I’ll be finding work in New Zealand and saving every penny so that we can be together again when we both know the time has come….
When my father turned up in Honiara he told me about the great battles fought on Guadalcanal in World War II. It was hard to believe because the islands were so beautiful, so much at peace. My imagination could not picture them raked by shells and bullets.
I teamed up with a young Australian my age. He had lived on Guadalcanal almost all his life and had collected his own museum of war relics—bits of machine guns, backpack radios, rotting boots, even bits of human bone. He had found many GI tags, some on rusted wire and in overgrown slit trenches, and he had mailed them to the Pentagon, from where, I presumed, they had been sent on to the next of kin of men who had died among the palms and in the jungle growth and along the shore.
The Australian showed me one place where the forest had been burned. He was still discovering live grenades. It was a bleak, sad place, full of death. I suddenly felt quite close to Michael in Vietnam—in some ways closer than I had ever been to him when he had roared his beach buggy across the sands of Morro Bay.
I tried to picture Mike hunched here in a jungle ditch, fighting in a war my generation barely comprehended. Perhaps it had been easier for the young men in World War II. Perhaps they had better understood what the war was all about.
We came across some natives wearing patched and bleached GI battle dress, and when I told them I was American the older men brought out souvenirs. One produced a gold watch, which had stopped. He said it was a gift from a GI whose life he had saved. He spoke so simply that I’m sure he told the truth.
These people, looking as they had looked a thousand years ago, had witnessed one of the bloodiest battles of history. They had seen modern weapons tear flesh and steel, heard the cries of men dying, watched aircraft fight it out overhead. In the quiet straits offshore, they had seen warships spit and thunder fire and death.
On the island of Florida, a morning’s sail away, I almost stumbled over a water pipe leading down from an inland spring. The pipe had been built by U.S. Army engineers. Water still gushed from it, so I filled up Dove’s small tanks from an aqueduct that had once filled the tanks of America’s Pacific Fleet.
Solomon Islanders are shy, courteous and a bit nervous at being approached. But once you get through to them they are pleased to see visitors. One old man told me that they had never understood why the Yanks had fought for their land so fiercely and had then left them quite alone.
“Why didn’t they stay?” the old man asked me. “The land is good—much fruit, much fish. The soldiers will be welcome if they come back.”
On Florida island my father bought a pig from a local trader and then invited the islanders to roast it in traditional fashion. It was quite a party. Eighty people turned up, each bringing something along for the party. They brought pink papayas, bele, which is a sort of spinach, kava roots, coconuts, things like that.
First the pig was ceremonially strangled. It took quite a time to die and I felt real sorry for it. Then its hairs were burned off under fired coconut fronds. While it was spread-eagled on sticks, its flesh was tenderized with stones. Finally an underground oven was prepared with heated rocks and the pig was roasted for three hours. The preparation was a bloody business, but the pork had a marvelous flavor—and since we ate it off banana fronds there was no greasy wash-up afterward.
I managed to avoid drinking the kava here because it is traditionally brewed by women who first chew the root and spit it into an iron bowl. It is claimed that the saliva of the women—and only the most beautiful are chosen for the job—adds a special flavor to the drink. I took their word for this.
Savo island was only three hours sailing from Honiara, and I sailed there several times, mainly to study the weird megapod bird. The bird is short-tailed, black and brown, rather like a chicken, and it lays its eggs a foot or so below the sand. Each morning the islanders collect the goose-egg-size eggs from staked-off plots. If the eggs are left in the sand for forty days they hatch and the young birds are strong enough at hatching to take wing.
My father and I watched one fledgling struggle free, but just as it took flight a hovering hawk swooped and claimed its breakfast. I don’t suppose the megapods can long survive the human and feathered predators. Although one of the islanders gave me half a basketful of megapod eggs, I don’t know what they taste like because I lost them in the surf when my dinghy flipped.
The Savo islanders showed real interest when I swam from the beach to Dove, anchored two hundred yards off shore. I was puzzled until one of the older men explained that this was the spot where they threw their dead into the sea and where sharks ate them up. The reason why the islanders ran down to the beach to watch me swimming to and from Dove was that they expected to see me fight it out with one of the ten-foot morticians who patrol this stretch of coast.
In the previous six months thirteen villagers bathing on the water’s edge had been seized by sharks. I heard one story—I don’t know how true it was—that a hungry man-eater had followed an islander halfway up the beach.
A three-masted brigantine, The Californian, chartered by some scientists, was anchored at Honiara when I returned. The interest of the scientists was the weird behavior of a compass in some of these waters. The compass needle often swings all over the dial.
When The Californian sailed for the island of Malaita it gave me a tow. The yacht was crewed by three old friends, Chat Bannister, Larry Briggs and Mike Bennett. The scientists spent a fortnight in the area, and at night some of them drank so much that I wondered how they could carry out their experiments.
There are unusual ways of earning money in the islands. I discovered a very mixed crew of islanders aboard a half-sunk Japanese warship. They were diving to salvage nonferrous metal off the rusty wreck and sending it back to Japan, where the price paid kept a dozen Solomon families in style.
My father left for home a few days before Christmas. He was happy with the pictures he had taken of me feasting on roast pig and dancing with natives. I stayed on in the Solomons to wait out the hurricane season because the anchorages here are quite secure, especially in the salt water channel which cuts through the island of Florida.
No hurricanes came our way and when I felt the danger was over I sailed on to New Guinea. Now I was better off financially, for I had found a buyer who paid me forty dollars for Dove’s inboard engine and I had rented out my spare genoa to another yacht sailing for New Guinea. The crisp Australian notes warmed my pocket.
I left Honiara on March 1, never anticipating that nine windless days later I would still be within sight of Guadalcanal. Dove just sat in the water. It was awful. Light airs just made me think of myself and my problems. On March 5 I celebrated my eighteenth birthday. It wasn’t much of a birthday and I took no comfort from remembering that I now qualified for the draft. Before leaving Honiara I had written to my draft board, who answered that they “understood my situation.” They told me to check in when I got home. I don’t think they realized that it wouldn’t be next week!
On my birthday I had some happy thoughts too. I remembered Patti running down a beach, lying in the shade of a palm, swimming like a dolphin in the surf. I remembered the scent and touch of her and saw her exploding in sudden laughter. I remembered the hurt look in her eyes when we said good-bye. But the distance between us was still increasing.
On the evening of my ninth day at sea a school of porpoises came over for a gossip, and this, I noted in my log, is always a good omen. It was. Dove’s sail, which had hung down like a shirt in a closet, suddenly filled, and my taffrail-log spinner recorded ninety-eight miles. This was better. But on the twelfth day at sea the wind swung the compass around to the bow and churned up twenty-foot swells. Once again I was beaten back on my course by the tail of a hurricane.
The fury of this storm kept me awake for nearly forty-eight hours at a stretch and my blurred memory of this period is of water pouring across the cockpit and through the cowl vent until everything inside the cabin was wringing wet. My precious Coleman lamp was torn from its moorings. It was like losing a family heirloom, because this was the lamp that had lit up Dove every sailing night since I had left Hawaii.
A fortnight at sea and the wind backed to the southeast—just the way I wanted it—and at last I was really on my way to Port Moresby in New Guinea. But man, I was tired! The fatigue had a strange effect on me. I’d have sudden spurts of energy and then a moment later it became an effort even to move a hand.
At no time did I have hallucinations of the kind that other lone sailors have spoken about. When Robert Manry went without sleep for forty-eight hours as he sailed his tiny Tinkerbelle across the Atlantic, he said that some strange people came aboard. I was especially interested in the hallucinations of tough old Joshua Slocum, whose story I was now reading.
Globe-circling Slocum was sailing off Spain when he fell ill after eating a meal of white cheese and plums. He went below and threw himself on the cabin floor in great pain and became delirious. He had no idea how long he had been lying there before becoming aware that his boat, Spray, was plunging in heavy seas. Looking through his companionway, he saw to his amazement a tall man at the helm. The stranger looked like a foreign sailor and was wearing a large red cap. Slocum thought Spray had been boarded by a pirate. According to Slocum’s account, the sailor said that he intended no harm and “with the faintest smile” told Slocum he was a fool for mixing cheese and plums. With the seas still crashing about Spray’s cabin, ailing Slocum went back to sleep. On awakening a second time and going up on deck, he found the stranger gone but Spray was still heading on a perfect course.
Frankly there were times aboard Dove when I wished a helmsman would come aboard. I wouldn’t have cared less if he had been as ghostly as Slocum’s navigator. But I truly did sail every westward ocean mile alone.
This leg of my voyage to Port Moresby seemed to last ten minutes short of forever. I was becalmed again and told my recorder: Dove made eighteen miles today by log but only ten miles by my chart, and since my taffrail-log spinner is mostly hanging straight down astern I have probably gone eighteen miles up and down.
My small shipboard library contained a copy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner,” and I knew exactly what the poem meant where it reads:
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Even Dove began to croak and groan in protest, but these were sounds I welcomed in the silence of an endless sea. Without wind, the temperature began to soar and I recorded:
The sweat is dripping off my nose as I write up the logbook. I have to blow the drops away and I watch them splash against the bulkhead, where they slither to the deck like raindrops on a window. My shirt and pants are so soaked with sweat that I might just as well have had a bath. But what a miserable way to take a bath!
Unexpected happenings helped to keep me from going crazy. On March 19 I taped: Woke up and heard weird noises. I looked over the side and saw a turtle. I grabbed one of its hind feet, but it just kicked a little bit and knocked my hand away. This was a pretty strong guy. Then it returned. I guess it must have been feeding. I grabbed it in the middle with both hands and for about thirty seconds I held it out of the water. Then all of a sudden it pulled out of my hands.
That was too bad. I could have had turtle soup and steaks for a couple of weeks.
I was almost tempted to jump overboard and pull Dove with a painter. Then the wind at last came up again and Dove took a bone in her teeth.
On my twenty-second day at sea I wrote in my log that the journey from the Solomons to New Guinea had taken me longer than my voyage from San Pedro to Hawaii, which is twice as far.
Toward the end of this leg of my voyage I began talking to myself. I guess this would have interested the head shrinkers. I was mumbling away when a sudden increase in wind brought me to my senses. Looking about for the cause of the unexpected blow, I saw on the horizon a sight which just about froze me. It was a waterspout about three miles off the beam, black and snakelike. For perhaps half a minute I simply stared in a kind of daze. I can now understand how a snake is able to hypnotize its prey—why an animal is locked to the ground and fanged down when it might easily have scampered to safety.
I swung the tiller right across and told the tape recorder: Boy, this is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen at sea! It’s really awful, and it’s getting closer and bigger. I can now see the rainwater under the spout pounding into the sea. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ve just stored all the gear away below deck, but I guess if that thing hits me Dove will just disappear. The spout goes up into a huge dark cloud like an umbrella. Anyway, everything is battened down. It’s a real ugly twister…but I think I’m gaining ground on it…. This is the closest I’ve been to disaster…. It’s really scary, man…. Yes, I am gaining on it now…. What would have happened if it had been night?
On the evening of March 24 I entered Port Moresby harbor in a heavy squall and with visibility so poor I nearly hit a wreck. But at ten o’clock that night I tied up to a mooring buoy, and with my last three gallons of fresh water I took a bath. Avanga was stinking too so I doused him with a bucket. His revenge was to chew up my only chart of Darwin’s harbor. If I had caught him at it I would have made him walk the plank.
Next morning, after fixing up my papers with customs, I headed for the post office. Patti had known I was taking in Port Moresby and I hoped that letters not received in the Solomons might be waiting for me there. But everything was closed up tight. When I asked a policeman the reason he looked at me as if I was crazy.
“Good Friday,” he said and, mounting his bicycle, added, “The post office will not open till Tuesday.”
Fed up and tired, I returned to Dove and hit the sack. Perhaps I did wake up in between, but the next thing I remember hearing was the sound of bells on Easter morning.
By chance that Easter morning I met up with a charming Australian lady—I only wish I could remember her name—who had settled in Port Moresby years before. She took me to her home, where I wallowed in a hot tub. A humble hamburger, fresh bread and crisp lettuce were like a Thanksgiving dinner.
My hostess gave me the history of the port and told how an English adventurer exploring the Papuan coast in 1873 had found a break in the coral reef and named the harborage for his father.
The noon traffic jams and ice cream parlors helped me to understand New Guinea’s huge leap from the stone age to the twentieth century.
In the Legislative Council there were men, speaking a lot better English than I did and wearing tailored suits, who, thirty years before, had decked themselves in feathers and pig grease. At the airport I saw tribesmen wearing laplaps coolly climb into aircraft bound for distant copra plantations.
I tried unsuccessfully to hitch a lift and fly to Mount Lamington, a volcano to the north that was famous for the 1951 eruption which killed three thousand people. One of the Port Moresby pilots said that “when you see a cloud over New Guinea you can be sure there’s a mountain right inside it.”
New Guinea is a fascinating frontier between ancient and modern man. Stepping out of modern diesel-engined buses and probably carrying crab folded in banana fronds are women tattooed from neck to thigh. This cosmetic surgery is still done with a thorn and mallet. In the “good old days,” they explained, it was not a painful operation. But one day a young girl being tattooed laughed when she shouldn’t have and the spell was broken. Now, they said, the surgery is just as painful as it looks.
On the Tuesday after Easter I was the first to arrive at the post office. There were letters from home, full of news and encouragement, a letter from the National Geographic, formal but friendly; and another letter which bore a New Zealand stamp. My heart missed about six beats.
Patti wrote of how she had arrived without incident in Christchurch and told excitedly that she had found the New Zealanders warm and hospitable—“really great people.” She had found a job almost at once in a Christchurch hospital, but longed for work in the open air. Her second job was at an agricultural research station in Nelson, and this meant being outdoors all the time: “The sun is marvelous and I’m quite brown again.”
I had written from the Solomons to tell Patti that my new route westward would be via the Cape of Good Hope and that I definitely planned to call in at Darwin in northern Australia. I had asked her if there was any chance of her joining me there.
Now Patti replied: “Darwin, yes Robin, I think I can get there. I’ve really been saving every cent and I have enough for the journey and some to spare. So I won’t be a poor penniless wench when we meet again. After that who knows?”
Cables were exchanged between us, and by the time I sailed from Port Moresby on April 18 I had the best of all reasons for continuing westward.
In the Coral Sea I kept close to the land, remaining awake at night and taking catnaps by day. The moon was full and the twinkle of lights from the islands made navigation comparatively easy. When I needed a rest I would anchor off one of the many islands. At Dalrymple island I went ashore, taking Avanga with me in the hope that a spell on the beach would improve his temper. Avanga’s beach behavior would have intrigued a zoologist. He performed like a dog, chasing lizards and hanging out his tongue, and I could have sworn he lifted his hind leg on discovering a tree. The unmanned light tower on the cliff was easy to scale, but when I reached the top I was alarmed by the view. Dove, far below, seemed to be high and dry. Actually she wasn’t, but the water was so clear that it gave this illusion.
A weird thing happened to me on Dalrymple. At sea I had grown used to being alone, sometimes hating loneliness but learning to live with it. But when I was on land I had expected to see people, to hear voices, perhaps, or at least smell the smells of man—sweat, factories or even frying sausages—something to tell me that I was not the last man left on earth. On Dalrymple’s island I was Robinson Crusoe without Friday’s footprint in the sand. My feeling of being alone almost made me panic.
A day later, though, when passing Roberts island, I was given a clue that a nuclear war had not wiped out the human race. Someone tried to signal me with a mirror from a dark patch of coconut trees. I waved back and felt better.
An east-west current of six knots now began to give me the fastest traveling of my voyage, with Dove shifting over the bottom at about eight knots.
The night of April 28 was dark, and my new pressure lamp, a cheap one bought at Port Moresby, had broken down. At close to midnight I was in the cabin reading Ian Fleming’s Moonraker when I heard a rumbling noise and a swish of water like a tidal bore. Next moment Dove was thrown over at an angle of ninety degrees, water pouring through the companionway. I scrambled to the cockpit to see a huge wave and, behind it, a black wall that seemed to be towering to the sky. Dove was being run down by a freighter.
If I had not been wearing my safety harness I think I would have jumped. All I could do was wait for the fiberglass hull to be crushed like an eggshell.
Miraculously the steamer’s bow wave threw Dove clear and only the top of her mast scraped the freighter’s flank. Dove rolled and bounced, and in seconds the long black shape slipped by and faded into the darkness. I stood there in the cockpit, quite stunned, water still sloshing around my feet, and then I screamed abuse into the darkness. The steamer had not carried any lights at all, and from her bridge there came no shout, no apology. I guess the man on watch must have been asleep.
My throat was as dry as the Mojave desert, my heart was thumping. I decided that from then until I reached Darwin and had bought another Coleman I would stay awake at night.
May 4 dawned beautifully as I entered Darwin’s harbor and tied up at the yacht wharf. Officials were friendly but one demanded a hundred-dollar shipmaster bond for Avanga. I said I would give the cat away to anyone who wanted him. The official looked at Avanga, and Avanga stared right back. There were no takers.
My first business was at the post office, where I sent out two cables, north and south—the first to Hawaii for Mother’s Day, the second to Patti saying, “Arrived! Where are you?”