WHAT TO EXPECT OF AFRICA? Hollywood had fixed images in my mind of tangled jungles and lions under the bed, of natives dancing around big iron pots, of rivers swarming with crocodiles and outpost mission stations manned by men in pith helmets.
The first surprise was on October 21 when I reached Durban. I hadn’t expected a skyline like San Francisco’s. And anyone who has not been to Africa cannot understand that Africa has its own blood beat, a sort of rhythm that you can’t hear but feel.
Beyond the modern high-rise cities where the paved roads lead to red dirt tracks and the huge vistas of the veld, the throb seems to come from deep inside the earth. In Africa you get the feeling that you are seeing the planet earth before man began to ravage nature.
I was to spend nine months in South Africa and I was tempted to stay there until the sun bleached my bones. It was a fantastic time.
I turned into Durban’s broad harbor and as I approached the basin of the Royal Natal Yacht Club a figure on the mole waved and shouted at me. I didn’t take any special notice until I heard my name. It was Mac McLaren, who had worked with me at the Darwin power station. Mac dived into the water and swam to Dove. When I had pulled him aboard he told me that he had been keeping a watch for Dove along with Patti. Between gulps of air he explained how soon after Patti had arrived she had read the newspaper story of Dove’s foundering. Patti, he said, was waiting for me on one of the ocean cruisers in the yacht basin.
After I cleared customs, Mac took me to the yacht where Patti was and there, in the cabin, I held her in my arms again.
Neither of us had ever spoken of marriage Life had seemed too uncertain to be tied by legal bonds. Both of us were cautious of marriage, anyway, for there were too many of our relatives and too many of our parents’ friends whose marriages had broken down. We knew married couples as compatible as a mongoose and a cobra. Then too, by the calendar if not by experience, we were very young.
For both of us it was marvelous just to be together when we could. This was all we had asked for. A wedding and a starchy reception at a country club, a honeymoon car covered with confetti and rattling with tin cans could not pull us closer together than we were.
But at our Durban reunion a new idea crossed my mind. I longed to give Patti a pledge that she meant much more to me than just being a sailor’s wife. I wanted to show her that I believed the day would come when we would not be torn apart by a fair wind and the need to make another port.
We had only ten minutes together in the cabin before someone tapped on the door of the companionway. A staff writer of National Geographic came in and introduced himself. For the next week the writer and I were cooped up together as we worked on the manuscript and captions of my first feature for the magazine.
Patti had found a room in a small hotel two blocks behind the plush ones on the seafront. From there we discovered a side-street café with a fantastic atmosphere where a good meal with wine cost only a couple of dollars. Why pay for orchestras and waiters not worth their tips?
On the day the magazine staffman returned to America, Patti and I strolled down one of Durban’s broad boulevards. As we passed a jeweler’s shop window a gold ring with a strange Oriental design caught my eye. I tugged at Patti’s arm.
Her face was quite a study as I asked the jeweler to put the ring on the third finger of her left hand. It was a perfect fit.
“There,” I said. “As soon as I saw it I knew it was made for you.”
She held out her hand and looked at it a moment, then said, “It’s fantastic, Robin, but what’s it for?”
“We’re engaged, of course! When do we get married?”
She dropped her hand to her side and looked at me. “Now, Robin, don’t let’s be hasty.” She was laughing.
But I was serious. The jeweler shifted from one foot to the other.
“I just want you,” she said gravely, “and of course this absolutely lovely ring.”
When we returned to the hotel the proprietress at once spotted the band on Patti’s finger. “Oh, what a pretty ring, Mrs. Graham,” she said breezily. “I was telling my husband you must have lost it.”
“I didn’t own a ring until half an hour ago,” said Patti with the blandest smile.
The proprietress sniffed, and not knowing where the conversation would take her, retreated behind her desk. But even in the guttural English of the Afrikaner I liked the sound of Patti being called Mrs. Graham. That night when we were in each other’s arms I whispered, “Now, Mrs. Graham, when shall we make it legal?”
She tilted her head and kissed my chin. “I’ve always wondered if your intentions were strictly honorable.”
“Very honorable,” I said, “and I’m quite serious.”
“Are you? Or is it that you don’t like what the hotel proprietress is thinking and the looks they give me down at the yacht club?”
“Forget them,” I said. “They’re jealous of the guy with a beautiful girl in a red bikini.”
Patti was silent a moment, then asked, “How does the song go? Will you still love me when I’m sixty-four?”
“And when you’re a hundred and four if you stay as trim as you are.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I’ll chase you around the island before breakfast.”
Again she was silent and then she whispered, “How big’s the island?”
“That sounds like an acceptance of my proposal,” I replied.
She didn’t laugh this time. She said, “You know it doesn’t have to be marriage, Robin. I wouldn’t want you ever to feel that you can’t leave me. I don’t want you ever to think that you owe me anything. I love you. That’s why I’m here. We’re happy. We’re young. Life is a long time. I hope it’s a long time and that as much as possible will be with you. Please don’t think that by giving me a piece of paper you’ll change what I feel for you. I can’t love you any more than I do now. I don’t think I can.”
Next morning we went to the Durban magistrate’s court to get married. The official immediately asked my age. When I told him I was eighteen he said we would need the notarized consent of parents or guardian, as I was still a minor. This was a shock. I couldn’t understand why anyone should still be able to control me when I was half a world away from home. Patti returned to the yacht club and I went to the post office, where I wrote my parents an air letter and explained I needed their consent to marry Patti.
It was a lovely day and as I walked back to the yacht club I couldn’t think of any reason for waiting for my parents’ reply and all the legal stuff. I found Patti at the club and led her outside by the hand.
“Where’re we going?” she asked.
“You’ll find out,” I said.
She continued to look puzzled but didn’t ask any more questions as I walked her along the beach. We found an empty spot in the sand and sat down in the sun.
I said, “I’ve been doing a bit of thinking and I don’t see why we should wait for anyone’s consent to get married. We love each other. That’s enough. Besides, I hate what people are thinking about you.”
“Do we have to worry what other people think?” said Patti.
“Yes, we do,” I replied, “because it makes me mad.”
I took the ring off her finger and as I put it on again I said, “Patti, I don’t know the words of the marriage ceremony. I just know that I want to spend the rest of my life with you. There now; from this day we are man and wife.”
It was as simple as that.
Actually, when my parents later replied to my letter they refused me permission to marry. They talked about my completing the voyage and that there’d be time enough—that sort of thing. They believed they knew best what was right for me. I wrote back and told them Patti and I considered ourselves married anyway.
When we walked back along the sand of Durban’s beach we felt marvelously happy. It was all so neat. We both knew our marriage would last as long as we lived. I said, “Okay, where do we go for our honeymoon?”
That evening at the yacht club we had a sort of wedding party. Everyone else thought it was an engagement party, but that didn’t matter. Mac was there and some other people off the yachts, and it was fun. The next day we bought a well-used Japanese motorcycle, two saddlebags and a blue pup tent and then we set off at once to explore Africa—or at least the southern part of it.
We traveled up the coast to Saint Lucia and turned north to Umfolosi Game Reserve in Zululand, the home of the rare white rhinoceros. At the ranger’s office inside the reserve we asked for a local map. The ranger was helpful and told us where the rhino were feeding.
“But keep inside your car,” he warned. “Those rhinos can move when they think they’re threatened.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ve got a fairly reliable motorcycle.”
The ranger stopped in his tracks. “Motorcycle? You’re not allowed in the reserve on a motorcycle. How did you get through the gates? No, never mind, just get out of the park as fast as you can—and good luck.”
Since we had traveled half across the world, we decided that before leaving the park we’d do some exploring on our own. Patti had christened the motorcycle Elsa. She named it for the lioness in the film Born Free. With the two of us aboard, Elsa had difficulty making hills steeper than one-in-eight gradient. The trick, we learned, was to approach a hill at full throttle and if it wasn’t too long we usually made the top in the style of the little red engine.
Ahead of us was a hill steep enough to test Elsa’s one small cylinder, but there was a chance to make the crest if I could persuade the machine to touch 45 mph on the downward gradient. Yelling to Patti over my shoulder to hold on to my belt, I turned over the hand-grip throttle as far as it would go. Elsa kicked up a cloud of red dust as we roared into the shallow valley. Just as we began the ascent a huge mud-gray shape as solid as a locomotive ambled out of the tall grass and right across our path.
I had had my share of hazards at sea, but the prospect of hitting a white rhino broadside at three-quarters of a mile a minute looked as if it would top every story in my book.
Patti told me later she had simply closed her eyes. I will swear that Elsa’s starboard handlebar cut a permanent groove in the armored butt of the enormous beast.
We traveled another mile or two in awed silence and then I turned Elsa off the dirt road onto a grass track. We pitched our pup tent under a tree and after a dinner of fried boerewors (South African spiced sausage) we listened to the night sounds of wildebeests and leopards.
Then we slept—but not for long. Patti nudged me awake and I knew at once why she was as coiled as a watch spring. Just outside our tent something very large was tearing up the shrubbery. Pretending courage I didn’t possess, I lifted the flap and shone my flashlight around. About ten yards away the light was reflected back from a single, unblinking red eye.
I am sure there are strategies used by unarmed big game hunters when they see one red eye raised five feet off the ground and within a wino’s spitting distance. But as I had not read up on the travel books, I fell back on the suburban drill when the neighbor’s German shepherd approaches with bared fangs.
“Shooo!” I hissed into the night.
Nothing happened. Without much comfort I remembered that the eyes of a rhino are so placed that when it stands sideways only one eye can be seen. As Einstein said, some seconds last longer than others. At this moment the seconds were beating out at about fifteen to the minute. Then, with a rumble that we felt through our sleeping bag, the owner of the red eye took off into the night.
At breakfast we were heavy-lidded, but felt some kinship with all those pioneers who have braved the perils of the Dark Continent.
We traveled north, skirting Swaziland—the Switzerland of Africa—and meandered through the lush low veld, discovering mountains of fantastic beauty, little African villages of thatched rondawels and places with romantic names—Bushbuck Ridge, Pilgrim’s Rest, Acornhoek, God’s Window, Phalaborwa, Tzaneen. When the sun set we pitched our tent, cooked a meal over an open fire and listened to the sounds of Africa—the howl of jackals, sometimes the beat of drums and, when on the edge of the two-hundred-mile fence of the famed Kruger National Park, the unforgettable roar of lion.
For a few days we took aboard an interesting traveling companion—a chameleon about fourteen inches long. We christened him Clyde, and for many miles he sat perched on Elsa’s handlebars looking out at the countryside through prehistoric eyes. Clyde never recovered his composure after our only mishap. Elsa skidded on a patch of oil and Patti and I were thrown into a ditch with little more damage than a grazed knee and bruised elbow. When we had brushed ourselves down we found Clyde tiptoeing into the bush. Only his dignity had been hurt so we repositioned him on his perch. But from then on Clyde kept one eye anxiously on the road ahead and the other fixed accusingly on my face. Clyde’s leap from the mists of time to the age of the motorcycle was obviously too rapid for his pleasure.
Marvelously content with our own company, we avoided big towns and rarely met up with people, black or white. But whoever we met we found friendly and hospitable. It seemed strange to us and sad that in a country condemned for its racial policies the individuals—the African, Afrikaner and English-speaking settler—should share in common a rare and charming hospitality. Several Afrikaner storekeepers and farmers loaded us with fruit and vegetables and refused to take payment. Africans along the roads greeted us with waves and pearly smiles.
Sometimes we would leave Elsa at the roadside and trek barefooted into the veld to explore grottoes, vast plains, forest trails, all hauntingly beautiful. We would bathe under mountain cascades and stretch out in the sun, and occasionally be chased by a colony of baboons. At dawn we would stalk herds of grazing impala, the most graceful of the antelope. Then, alerted by our scent or the snapping of a twig, the whole herd would bound for the cover of the trees—a flash of sunlit fawn and white against the gray of mountain rocks or the lush green of the new grass and wild mimosa.
We possessed no calendar, not even a watch between us. Time was measured by the angle of the sun and by nights filled with the perfume of exotic flowers, and always the inexplicable throb beating out the rhythm and the harmony of nature.
At one campsite near Acornhoek we so loved the peace and beauty of the land, its warmth and color and great views, that we made inquiries about buying a stretch of the African veld. What, we asked ourselves, compelled us on? Here we could build a rondawel like the ones the Africans build, and plow soil eager to yield all the food we needed. Here we could cut ourselves off from the conformity and drudgery, the smog, smells and overcrowding of the society into which we had been born.
But even as we weighed our arguments and measured out ten acres bordered by a creek, we knew that it was not yet the moment for our retreat. So we packed our saddlebags again, mounted Elsa and headed toward the coast.
Back at Durban I gave Dove a close inspection and realized she was in worse shape than I had at first believed. The Malagasy storm had more than bruised her. Water had seeped into the points where the deck joined the hull. The wood sandwiched between the fiberglass panels had begun to rot. In her present state Dove would not again survive high seas or gale.
For two months I worked on repairing the boat, and before sealing the decks to the hull I lifted out the cockpit and decked her over aft. The cockpit had served me little purpose and was generally filled with gear better stored below. In a heavy sea the cockpit had proved a danger. It was capable of scooping up half a ton of water.
The job of fitting and fiberglassing was hard work and frustrating too, but I had a helpmate now in Patti, who fetched and carried timber, screws and resin and who cooled my temper with cold beer and soft answers.
On March 8, Dove was ready for the sea again. Patti saw me leave the yacht basin and then she set off on Elsa for East London, 250 miles down the coast. If the wind was fair we would be together again in three days. But I’d traveled barely twenty miles before the wind quit altogether and I told my tape recorder:
Good old weather reports! They promised a northeaster, but where is it? There’s a big hotel on the shore a couple of miles away and I’ve been looking at its windows for an hour.
The day of leaving port is always the longest part of a journey. Landmarks along the coast ridicule a small sailboat’s progress. On the first day out you think about the miles ahead and the loneliness.
Toward noon the wind picked up, not from the northeast as promised on the radio but from the southwest. It was coming from the direction I wanted to go.
I taped: I never want to beat. If the wind is forward of the beam and fifteen knots or more, I say forget it. No use fighting this weather. I turned Dove about and headed back to Durban, making the twenty-five-mile return trip in a very fast three hours.
Of course Patti was gone. The sun-washed, sparkling Durban that had welcomed me in October was now drab, cold, unfriendly. It was like returning to a house that had once been a well-loved home, but finding it empty, shuttered, smelling of mice and mildew. How weird, I thought, that one small girl could change the character and climate of a city.
Late that afternoon I walked the beach and found the spot on the sand where we had had our “wedding.” The sand that had been warm and silken on that day was gray now, chilly to the touch.
In the night the wind freshened to a gale, howling through the harbor and thrashing rigging against Dove’s mast—a miserable noise that lasted thirty-six hours. When I sailed again I had little better luck. The sea lanes were crowded with shipping forced around the Cape by the closure of the Suez Canal and I was obliged to stay awake at night to avoid collision. It was pretty hairy sailing. I hate taking pills, even aspirin, but I knew that to sleep for ten minutes could spell disaster, so I swallowed two Benzedrines and peered into the darkness, shifting the tiller whenever I saw or imagined a gray shape ahead.
The wind rose to thirty knots and again came right out of the southwest. Scudding heavy clouds were a few hundred feet above the mast. On my second day at sea I reefed the sails and slept for perhaps three hours. When I awoke the land was out of sight. A current had taken me far out. I told the tape: Now I’m completely lost. I should be somewhere off the Wild Coast…but for all I know I might be off the South Pole.
At Durban they had told me weird tales of ships vanishing without trace on this stretch of ocean between Durban and East London. The best-known story was the one about the Waratah, sailing for Australia in the last century with a large number of women aboard. She just vanished. One theory was that the ship had been wrecked on the Wild Coast, where the men had been murdered and the women seized—accounting for the light skins of the Pondo Africans in this area.
On the fifth day out, without hope of finding my position from sun or stars, I was lucky to pick up a strong land beacon on my radio. By turning my radio to the strongest point of the signal I homed in on the coast and sailed past East London’s harbor wall on March 14.
No sign of Patti. Her route would have taken her through the Transkei, the biggest of the native territories. With racial tension high, a white girl alone on a motorcycle could well have been attacked. I trudged to a police station, where a heavy-jowled sergeant at the desk grunted negatives to my inquiries about road accidents. Miserably I returned to Dove.
That night I had a horrible and vivid dream. I saw Patti crumpled up in a ditch, beside her the twisted frame of Elsa. So clear was the dream that I saw her blood-wettened hair across her face, her fingers stiff and curled, the ring clearly on her finger. I awakened shivering, cursing the sense of duty which had compelled me to sail on alone.
Of course it was only a dream. When the sun was up I walked down the seafront esplanade and we saw each other when five hundred yards were still between us. Both of us began to run. The shipping people had told her that the storm would delay me two more days.
It took ten days before I could summon courage to sail again. It wasn’t that I feared the sea but the moment of our parting. I told Patti, “If I were stronger I wouldn’t need you the way I do.”
She never tried to hold me back. She never clung to my body or my spirit. She was there when I needed her, but ready to free me the moment I was ready to sail on. This time, though, before riding out of town Patti waited on the harbor wall to be sure that Dove was heading westward along the coast. Dove had barely hit the swells outside East London’s harbor when the wind veered to the southwest. I turned back into port once again and Patti helped me tie up Dove for another night. Next day the northeaster held and Dove took only thirty-six hours for the short leg to Port Elizabeth.
Simply knowing that Patti would be ahead of me and waiting at quayside, wharf or on the cliffs along the coast kept me sailing through some of the most discouraging weather I had struck. Home now was where Patti was, and Patti was always a port ahead.
Twice I tried to leave Port Elizabeth and twice I failed as the wind swung the compass around to my bow. The third time out, I still had to beat against a southwest wind. I began to think this was an omen, a sort of warning to stop my global voyage. Suddenly the idea struck me that one sure way to end the voyage was to wreck the boat deliberately.
It would be simple enough to blow up the life raft, scuttle Dove and then paddle to the shore. My mind had already half written the letters I would send home—the story of how Dove must have hit some rock or hidden wreck and foundered, and how happily I had been close enough to shore to save my life. Never again would I have to face the cruel gray sea alone.
In a frenzy of energy I collected my passport, documents, logbook and money and packed them into the raft.
In now confessing this planned deception I would like to be able to claim that a sense of honor eventually prevailed and dissuaded me at the last moment from completing the sabotage. But that would be substituting one lie for another. It was not honor that intervened, but a sudden change of wind. I was within seconds of wrecking Dove and abandoning her to the ocean bottom when the wind backed to the north and then to the northeast—a freak and sudden change I’d never experienced on this coast before. The sails filled at once and white water spewed from Dove’s southwest-bound bow.
I have not before told anyone about this sabotage plan which failed. It is hard enough to confess it now. I do so only because I now believe that nature’s intervention was designed, related in a way (that some will understand and others cynically reject) to the sudden calming of the sea that saved my life in the great storm off Malagasy.
So through a freak wind (or special blessing) I made the journey to Plettenbergbaai and because there were no docking facilities I anchored Dove two hundred yards off the boiling surf. I searched the beach through my binoculars and in a moment focused on a young girl standing quite alone, a girl in blue jeans, her hands shielding her eyes against the glare, her wheaten hair streaming in the wind.
From the beach Patti watched me launch Dove’s small dinghy and paddle shoreward. She saw the swell gather up and arc behind me and then catch the dinghy in its crest. The dinghy somersaulted and as I was hurled into the surf Patti ran to the water’s edge and helped pull me up the beach—a soaked and shivering and very lucky sailor. We salvaged the dinghy too.
“And now,” I said as I gasped for air, “what about some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?”
Patti had found a small room overlooking the bay of this small and beautiful resort. She undressed me and dried me down, but I have no memory of going to bed. I slept for eighteen hours straight and was awakened by a furious pounding on the bedroom door.
Some Cape Colored fishermen had come to tell me that Dove was dragging and would soon be on the rocks. On arriving at Plet (as the locals call it) I had expected the onshore gale and had put out enough chain and line to give two anchors four hundred feet of scope. But against a raging sea this anchorage was not enough.
Still buttoning my pants, I reached the beach. Dove was clearly in the gravest peril. The fishermen gathered around and gave me advice. Even their sturdy powered boats could not cope with the thundering breakers.
The boat I had planned to wreck three days earlier was now about to destroy itself unless I could do something about it in a hurry.
The one hope was to swim through the angry surf. The sea felt cold enough for ice floes and it took me fifteen minutes and all my strength to reach Dove’s rolling gunwale. For a while I simply clung to the side, unable to muster the extra energy to heave myself aboard. Realizing that I would soon simply freeze to death, I found a reserve of strength to scramble to the deck.
One of the two anchor lines had parted, which was why Dove was dragging. The other three-quarter-inch nylon was stretching like a rubber band. If this snapped, as it could do at any moment, the whiplash would make fishbait of my entrails. I went below and got out my big anchor and gave it all the chain I had. The wind was howling like a hundred jackals. A diver in a wetsuit swam out to help. Between us we were able to set Dove’s heaviest ground tackle.
There wasn’t anything else to do. Dove would have to battle out the storm alone. I gave her little hope, and I filled a plastic bag with all my important papers and my money (about one hundred dollars), tied a life preserver around my chest and dived overboard. Without the life preserver I wouldn’t have made the shore.
Once again Patti dried me off, and she massaged my back, which I’d strained when carrying the heavy anchor across a heaving deck. This time I could not sleep, because I worried about Dove fighting for her life.
The storm lasted two full days and nights, but the anchors held. When I swam out to Dove again I was really proud of her. The boat had a courage of her own and, wounded though she was (the anchor’s rope had ripped away five feet of toe rail), she had come through without my help. The decks were again leaking where they joined the hull. The cabin was a mess. My little radio looked as if it had been a monkey’s toy.
While the wind remained in the wrong quarter there was a chance to see this stretch of coast and make friends with the Colored fishermen. On Saturday night they drank themselves under the table, but on Sunday, dressed in starched shirts, their women in flowered hats, they took us to their little whitewashed church. I was surprised to find that all races worshiped here together. They seemed to forget for an hour or so each week the apartheid which causes so much bitterness.
We found kindness everywhere. A group of white women had organized a nonprofit store where the poorest Coloreds could buy staple foods for prices well within their budgets. But the poorest Afrikaners were too proud to buy there. Some politicians had told them they should not mix with those who had darker skins. It was crazy to see how racial issues had been used by the politicians. It seemed to us that unless all South Africans, black, white and brown, began to see each other as fellowmen with common needs, there’d be real danger of bloodshed in their lovely land.
The bell of the little whitewashed church was calling the faithful to the Easter Sunday service on the day I sailed again—this time only forty miles to Knysna. The entrance to Knysna harbor is one of the loveliest in the world and, with its narrow, rocky gateway and huge swells, one of the most dangerous. Patti had arrived ahead of me on Elsa. Next day we hitched a ride to Cape Town to see if there was any mail. There was, and among the letters was one from my parents saying they had had second thoughts about my marrying Patti.
It didn’t matter now because except for “that little piece of paper” we had been man and wife for several months.
Leaving Knysna on April 25 remains one of the special memories of my voyage. Patti had climbed high up on the cliffs overlooking the narrow harbor entrance. She waved down to me four hundred feet below. She had become a good photographer and from her high position took one of the best pictures of Dove, showing the tiny craft against a great rampart of rocks and heading for the open sea.
It always hurt so much to leave Patti behind. We weren’t like an American suburban couple kissing on the doorstep before the husband joins the snake of traffic to his downtown office and the wife returns to her kitchen to wash up the breakfast things. With us there was always the chance of not seeing each other again. I don’t want to overplay the danger, but sailing along the South African coast against the prevailing wind and in a season when storms blow up in minutes wasn’t, as they put it in South Africa, “everyone’s cup of tea.” The headlands here and hidden rocks have wrecked a fleet of ships, ranging from great ocean liners to boats as small as Dove. Few coastlines in the world have more stories of disaster—and of heroism too. I had just been reading the account of the sinking of the Birkenhead, one of the most stirring of all the tales of the sea.
In 1852, not far from where Dove was now sailing, the Birkenhead, an iron paddle steamer of about two thousand tons, had struck the pinnacle of rock called Danger Point. The rock ripped her hull and in twenty minutes she broke in two and sank. Of the 638 aboard, mostly young British soldiers going to the Kaffir Wars, only 184 were saved. The Birkenhead disaster is remembered because every woman and child was saved. The men stood on the deck in line, knowing that most of them were going to drown, while the women and children filled the boats. Copies of Thomas Hemy’s famous Birkenhead picture of a boy drummer beating a final salute to his comrades was hung in the nurseries of Victorian England and children were told that this was the discipline and courage which had created the British Empire.
Each time I went to sea now it was not for myself I feared. I worried what Patti would do if Dove simply failed to turn up at the next port. Dove wasn’t really seaworthy any longer, and a storm could quickly find her weakness—especially at the places where the deck had separated from the hull. A big wave could crush the deck like cardboard. If this were to happen she would sink in seconds.
My plan on sailing out from Knysna was to slip around the southernmost point of Africa, Cape Agulhas (many people wrongly think that the Cape of Good Hope is the southernmost point). Once around Agulhas, the return to California would be, as I told my tape, “all downhill.”
Patti rode the motorcycle to Gordon’s Bay. I told her to watch out for me in three days. My first few miles in Dove proved easy sailing. The wind was on the port quarter. But the second day out the wind came around to the southwest again. By tacking I managed to make eighty-three miles in three days.
I told the tape recorder: Oh, man! This is absolutely stupid! I’ve made thirteen miles in the last thirteen hours!
I pulled into Stilbaai, which is sheltered from the west, to take some sleep. Next morning I tried once again to beat into the wind. That night I could see the lights of Cape Agulhas, still forty-four miles away, bouncing off the bottoms of low clouds, then at dawn the radio crackled a gale warning.
This was what I most feared. I scooted into Struisbaai, just short of Cape Agulhas, and dropped anchor in the nick of time. An absolute fury of a wind roared and wailed about my head for a full week, and although bare-poled Dove was protected by the land, she pitched and rolled, and even at anchor was taking quite a beating. Now I was short of food and the huge breakers hitting the coast made it impossible to get ashore in my six-foot dinghy. Actually there was a real danger of the anchor line parting and of Dove being blown out to sea.
Into the tape recorder I protested: Wouldn’t be surprised if the whole stupid boat doesn’t simply fall apart any minute…. Just lost my coffee pot over the side and I am trying to make some more by boiling percolator coffee in a pan. It tastes like sand. At least it’s warm…. My good food is all gone and I’ll have to eat from the rusty cans left over from the Solomons…. Oh, man, what a bore this is! Patti must be really worried…. Just had some awful soup and will probably get ptomaine or something. I’m just existing….
A fishing boat riding out the storm with Dove came up alongside and the skipper generously threw me a fish. The change of diet helped boost my morale. To pass the time I began to make a pair of leather sandals for Patti.
On the eleventh day after leaving Knysna a red-painted aircraft dipped overhead, and toward evening of that day the sound of voices brought me up on deck. Another fishing boat was alongside. Shouting into the wind, the skipper asked, “Where’s your wife?”
I’d run out of both humor and old groceries. “What business is it of yours? She’s in Gordon’s Bay,” I yelled.
The skipper grinned as Patti appeared on the fishing boat’s deck. “Oh, no I’m not,” she laughed.
When Patti had arrived in Gordon’s Bay she’d guessed I’d been delayed by bad weather, but when ten days had passed without any word of me she was really troubled. She had thought of riding back down the coast to look for a sail or wreckage and was about to set off when the associate editor of National Geographic, Gilbert Grosvenor, turned up at Gordon’s Bay. He had come from Washington to help me revise my first story for the magazine.
Gil had heard that we were married. When he was looking for me someone had casually spoken of Mrs. Graham. This surprised him. Patti did not want to create another scene like the one in Darwin so she thought it was best to tell him the full story. Patti thought Gil looked like the kind of person who would understand and besides she was so concerned about my safety that she felt he might be helpful in finding out where I was.
Gil did understand our situation very well and was quite satisfied when Patti told him that I planned to continue my voyage single-handed. In fact he suggested that the National Geographic articles would gain by the inclusion of a piece about my falling in love with a California girl. But he was worried as well that I had apparently vanished in the week-long storm and he immediately arranged for a search plane to scour the coastline. This was the red-colored aircraft I’d seen. The pilot had spotted me and reported back to Patti and Gil that I was holed out in Struisbaai. Gil then rented a car and brought Patti down the coast for our unexpected and marvelous reunion.
Pretty soon after Patti had turned up on the fishing boat the storm died down and we all went ashore. We stayed in a small hotel and for the next five days Gil and I revised the manuscript.
Then I returned to Dove and, running before a fresh easterly, sailed around Africa’s southernmost tip and anchored within the breakwater of Gordon’s Bay.
We were to spend two months here, readying Dove for the transatlantic voyage. With the cooperation of the friendly port captain, Major Douglas van Riet, we got Dove up on the ways. Technicians from Cape Town helped me fiberglass the deck to the hull and to paint the boat from stem to stern. Dove looked respectable again—and safe.
Gordon’s Bay is a small resort, with cottages built of local stone and fringed by lawns. Usually Patti and I slept on Dove, but our second home was Thelma’s boardinghouse, where we took our meals. Most of the residents at Thelma’s were retired people, old enough to be our grandparents. We got to know them well, often playing canasta with them in the evenings. One man of eighty-five taught me how to crochet, and his wife, perhaps ten years younger, knitted me a sweater. They held hands and looked at each other like a young couple on a honeymoon.
“Is that what love’s all about?” asked Patti, half seriously as we strolled back to Dove one evening. “I mean, two old people holding hands?”
It was partly the married bliss of this old couple that made us think of our own marriage once again—or at least of making it legal.
When we returned to the cabin, where Patti bundled herself up in a blanket against the cold, we talked about my parents’ belated consent to our marriage.
“Maybe we should make it legal,” I said. “After all, I still have to explain you to people. That makes me sick.”
“You prefer a wife to a mistress?” asked Patti, her eyes laughing above the blanket.
“Mistress is a word which always makes me think of dirty old men,” I protested.
Patti was suddenly serious. “Robin, perhaps what’s important is not the marriage certificate. But supposing we have children? Could happen, you know.” She paused and then added, “Let’s never hurt anyone deliberately, not your parents, not anyone.”
That’s what made us decide to go to the magistrate’s office at Hermanus Bay next morning. There I handed over my parents’ written consent to a severe-looking woman with black hair and a sallow skin.
The woman snapped, “When do you want to get married?”
“Today,” I said.
The woman looked us up and down critically, taking in my shoulder-length hair, our baggy sweaters, sea-stained jeans and bare feet. She pressed her lips together in disapproval.
“You’ll need a hat,” she told Patti, “and we need twenty-four hours’ notice of a marriage. The magistrate has other duties too. You’ll also need a special license, which costs ten rand [fourteen dollars].”
I handed over a ten-rand bill. “Okay, we’ll be here at eleven o’clock tomorrow,” I said.
The woman did not smile.
On leaving the magistrate’s court I said to Patti, “Let’s find a honeymoon hotel.” We rode Elsa a little up the coast and found the perfect place—the Birkenhead Hotel. It was named for the ship which went down heroically. As it was out of season, the hotel proprietor invited us to choose our own room. Like kids we dashed about the corridors, opening doors, testing the views and bed-springs. Then, in a corner of the second floor, we found a room so right that it seemed made for us. One huge window looked out across the sea and the other gave a view of the magnificent Hottentots Holland Mountains and a broad sweep of vineyards in the valley.
“Well, which room have you chosen?” asked the girl behind the desk. We told her the number and she smiled, “Oh, that’s our special bridal suite,” she said.
Next day we returned to the magistrate’s office, dressed in our most formal clothes. I was wearing my only jacket and had found a crumpled tie under the canned goods. I discovered too, my Darwin shoes—the ones with copper-wire laces. Patti put on an attractive dress but she had no hat so I lent her my watch cap. The magistrate was a cheerful and pink-cheeked Afrikaner. He put on his black robe and asked two of the girl clerks to come into his office and be witnesses.
We stood there holding hands. At the key point of the short ceremony the magistrate asked me for the ring. Of course, I’d forgotten about that, but Patti pulled the Durban ring off her finger and gave it to me. I returned it to her finger and then we kissed. I think we kissed a bit too early because the magistrate cleared his throat. Everyone signed their names on the certificate. Even the woman with black hair gave us a sort of smile.
Outside the office, I turned to Patti and asked, “Do you feel any different now?”
She laughed. “No different from when we married ourselves.”
Then Mr. and Mrs. Robin Lee Graham (officially) mounted their ancient motorcycle and drove off to their honeymoon hotel.
It was the Cape’s midwinter and pretty cold, but at the hotel we thawed out in front of a huge log fire. When we went to the bridal suite we found hot water bottles between the sheets.
In its own way our second wedding was pretty neat too.