CROSSING THE ATLANTIC from Cape Town may be “all downhill,” as I had told the tape recorder, but it’s a very long hill. I figured it was five thousand miles to the north coast of South America.
Concerned for my safety, National Geographic had given me an expensive piece of additional equipment—a two-way radio. When this was installed Patti helped me provision Dove with $120 worth of canned goods. She was careful to include special things we’d enjoyed together: artichoke hearts, sour cream mix, canned oysters and pickled fish—especially pickled fish.
At Gordon’s Bay, Harbor Master van Riet, who loved animals as much as the sea, gave us two kittens, one orange and the other tortoise shell. We named them Kili and Fili, for the youngest dwarfs in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Hobbit book, which we had read aloud to each other in Dove’s cabin. The kittens were born with bad eyes and I don’t think anyone else would have wanted them. We’d taken them to an animal hospital where in spite of skillful surgery Fili lost her sight completely.
There was no room on Dove for the motorcycle, Elsa, which had served us faithfully, so we gave it to Thelma’s son. The old people at the boardinghouse came down to the harbor to say good-bye. Their arms were filled with fresh fruit, candy and knitted things. Patti and I were really touched by their kindness and farewells. I don’t know how to explain it, but we have a special feeling for old people.
When the radio was fixed up it was just a question of waiting in Cape Town for a fair wind—a wind from the south. We counted each of these last days together and we never spoke of the time when we’d have to go our separate ways.
In Darwin Patti had bought a ticket to the Canary Islands, off Spain, at a very low immigrant’s fare. Patti had had a specially frustrating day when the shipping people at Cape Town told her that her ticket was outdated. She burst into tears—a rare thing for Patti to do. One of the men at the shipping office lent her his handkerchief and said he would do what he could to help her. Anyway, they stretched a point and fixed her up without extra charge in a three-berth cabin on the Italian liner Europa.
The Europa was bound for Barcelona, and Patti now had enough cash for a trip through Europe before sailing to join me in Surinam, (Dutch Guiana). At least, that was the plan. It was a question of who’d sail first.
On Saturday morning, July 13, we were walking along a beach with massive Table Mountain in the background when Patti’s hand suddenly tightened in my own. I followed her eyes to the land side of the beach.
“Look at the trees,” she said quietly.
The shorefront trees were bending to the wind. For the first time in two weeks they were bending to the north.
Two hours later I was sailing Dove out of Cape Town’s harbor. I’d left in such a hurry that Patti had not had time to get all her stuff off Dove. But she did take my only comb and pen. Across the Atlantic I tried to control my hair with a primitive Fijian wooden comb and had to write up my logbook in pencil. I could find no use for her toothbrush, her bikini pants or her lipstick.
Patti followed me out for a few miles in a friend’s powerboat. When her boat turned around she blew kisses across the water. Thank God she couldn’t see me cry.
My first logbook entry read: Damn it! Damn it! How I hate to leave!
The Europa was due to sail from the Cape in three days, and with the liner’s radio officer I’d arranged for a schedule of times when Patti and I could speak to each other on my new radiotelephone. We’d figured out where Dove and the Europa would be close enough for good reception. This scheduled radio talk was something to look forward to.
Those first days out of Cape Town there was much to keep me busy. I had to watch for shipping heading north and south in one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. This meant staying up all night every night for the first week. In daylight, when I slept, I hoped Dove would be seen by the steamers and that they would give way to sail. A radar reflector on Dove’s mast should show up on a steamer’s screen. In the first six days I counted fifty-four ships, some so close that they rocked Dove in their wash.
To pass the time I began to crochet a Balaklava helmet to protect my face against the cold. The wind seemed to be coming right out of the South Pole, and when spray came over the bow and swept across the deck it took my breath away.
My first call to Patti was due on July 17 at seven in the morning, and I figured that if the Europa had left on time she would be only about two hundred miles away. The previous night I’d written down all the things I had wanted to say. As the hour approached I was so tensed up I couldn’t force myself to eat and at exactly 0700 hours I turned on my transmitter and spoke into the microphone:
“Yacht Dove calling Europa. Dove calling Europa.”
Silence.
“Dove calling Europa.”
Suddenly the radio crackled, “Europa motor vessel calling yacht Dove.”
Then Patti came through loud and clear. But from the way she spoke it was obvious she wasn’t hearing me. She said, “Robin, where are you, honey?”
I called back desperately, “I hear you, Patti; what’s the matter? Why can’t you pick me up?”
Silence again, then Europa’s radioman cut in and told me to call on another frequency. Frantically I fiddled with the dial, but my radio did not have the frequency he’d asked for. I spent an hour trying to make contact. Finally the Europa said they would call again in two hours.
At 0900 Europa picked up my call. It was fantastic to hear Patti. I’d lost the piece of paper on which I’d written the carefully thought out messages, so we talked about the weather and the cats. Then Patti said, “They tell me you’re only about 140 miles away.”
“Close enough to swim,” I said.
“Okay,” said Patti. “I’ll start swimming too. That’s only seventy miles for each of us. In case you don’t recognize me I’ll be wearing my red bikini.”
“Without your pants,” I said. “You left them in the quarter bunk locker.”
“Okay, without my pants.”
The radioman interrupted to warn that we were speaking on an emergency frequency and that we’d be in trouble if we spoke longer. He promised to make contact again that night.
I told my tape recorder: Just had a long really nice talk with Patti. Gee, it was nice. I really feel good now. I’m so happy I even sing a little. This call was worth all the work and the cost that went into this radio…. I love her very much.
We had another long talk that night but next morning when we again made ship-to-ship contact Patti’s voice was unintelligible. It was the last time I heard her on this leg of the voyage.
The kittens were good company. For hours I would watch them playing with each other, clawing at everything that moved, tumbling into their food. I taped: Fili, the blind one, jumps at Kili and misses by a cat’s length. She bumps into the bulkhead all the time, but even though she’s sightless she never messes outside the litter box. Kili’s eyes are troubling him too. I’ve just been doctoring him and with some tweezers I’ve plucked the inward-growing eyelashes from his eyes.
Man, it was cold! I had built a cozy bunk under the poop deck in the area where the cockpit had been. Patti had dubbed this spot “the cave,” and although I couldn’t sit up there inside the cave, it was a warm spot and it gave me a sense of security. I spent a lot of time reading in the cave or simply thinking about the future.
After a week at sea, and eight hundred miles from Cape Town, the shipping traffic thinned, then disappeared. On my ninth day at sea, Dove’s sails filled with the southeast trades and I put out a jib and a genoa on whisker poles.
On July 27 I taped: Have gone three years from this date, but it seems like half my lifetime…. Last night I put up the man-overboard light, which really floodlit the sails and deck. Felt it safe to take a seven-hour sleep. Self-steering gear working perfectly. Weather has begun to warm up too and I’ve been able to discard my sweater and read again on deck…. Cats are always hungry but I find eating is a drag—even the special food that Patti bought me. Last night I tried some pickled fish, but it reminded me so much of being with Patti in South Africa that I cried like a baby. I couldn’t bear to eat the stuff and threw it overboard…. Loneliness is like a pain again.
Next day I recorded: This morning I saw a brilliant orange thing floating in the water. I moved Dove over and scooped up a Japanese net float. Two crabs were clinging to it. I knew they would die if I flung them back into the water. The sea is a mile deep here and the pressure down below would soon kill them. I gave the crabs a rest on Dove’s stern and then made a miniature raft from the styrofoam top to my ice chest. I hollowed out the little raft and provisioned it with barnacles and then put the crabs aboard. I’ve just watched the little raft floating off behind me. I hope the barnacles will keep the crabs from starvation until they make it to a shoreline.
The radio was important to me now. Although I could not talk to anyone I could listen to other ships talking to each other. A friend in South Africa had given me a collection of taped folk songs, but all I wanted to hear was a live human voice. I picked up the BBC overseas broadcasts and more rarely the Voice of America. I even enjoyed the commercials because they made me feel closer to people. When I couldn’t find an English broadcast I listened to people speaking in languages I couldn’t understand. I taped: At least I know there are other people around.
In the monotony of these days the little things seemed big. With the care of a watchmaker I worked out a special plumbing arrangement for the cats, shaping two pans and perforating the smaller one, which carried the litter. All I had to do to keep the cats’ bathroom reasonably clean was to empty the bottom pan and wash it out over the side.
As the days passed, my reflexes slowed down. I now spent twice as long taking a sun fix and working out my position. My tape recorder gives an idea of my mood: I lost my chronometer today and I panicked when I couldn’t find it. I can’t navigate without it. Then I found it among the food stores. I don’t know why I put it there….
One afternoon when I was filling the canvas bucket with seawater before taking a bath, the handle broke and the bucket floated away aft. I needed that bucket, but it took me several minutes to find the initiative and energy to turn Dove around and beat to windward to retrieve it. The maneuver cost me my supper of dried fish. The strips of fish had been drying on the deck, but when I beat back to windward, heeling sharply, the fish slid into the water. I got the bucket back though.
Saint Helena, where Napoleon had died, hove into sight on July 31. I was tempted to explore the island but knew that to do so would cost me a day or more, so I sailed on to Ascension, 635 miles to the north northwest. I taped: I’m not eager to go to Ascension. I’m just going there to get provisions. As each day passes I get a little more depressed and lonely.
About halfway between the two islands I fell overboard. My fishing line had become entangled with the outboard shaft and in trying to get it free I lost my balance. Dove was moving at about five knots, but I was just able to grab the stern pulpit. Although I was wearing a safety harness I might not have been able to haul myself back on board at that speed.
On this voyage across the Atlantic I read a lot. The book I enjoyed the most in a library that included detective stories, travel books and historical novels was Lloyd Douglas’s The Robe. It made me wonder if there was some sort of purpose to my life. Like many people of my age, I had dismissed God and religion “and all that stuff” as something packaged up with stained-glass windows, dreary organ music and an old man with a beard. The Robe kind of shook me up. It’s the story of the centurion who watched Jesus die and who won his robe in a lottery.
After twenty-three days at sea I dropped anchor in Ascension island’s Clarence Bay. With its moonlike landscape dotted with electronic antennae and the “big dishes” of deep-space-tracking stations, the island looked right out of science fiction.
As it was late in the evening, and too late to go ashore, I started to fish and at once hooked a good-size bonita. While the fish was still hanging over Dove’s side a hammerhead shark snapped it clean in half. When the hammerhead came back for second helpings I shot it through the head, but in case he had any brothers I decided against a swim.
Next morning I pulled ashore in the dinghy and was given a ride to the Air Force base. The people there had heard about me and gave me red carpet treatment. This was rather embarrassing as I did not possess a pair of shoes (I’d thrown away the ones with copper laces) and, after so long at sea, I just couldn’t carry on a proper conversation. I think the Air Force people thought I was Dopey. It was good, though, to eat inch-thick steak again.
I was so glad to get news of Patti and that she had arrived safely in Europe. Her cable said: “Still hoping to see you Surinam on time. Love you.”
One of the technicians took me on a tour of the island. I was much more excited to discover a dump of ancient grog bottles—the relics of a seafarers’ party long ago—than I was with all the scientific apparatus which tracked the hardware up in space. I really wanted to be on my way again because Patti would cross the Atlantic a lot quicker than Dove. I stocked up with fresh milk, fresh vegetables and ice and set sail again on August 16.
These sailing days had a basic routine. I would usually go to sleep at midnight and wake when the sun was fifteen degrees above the horizon—a good time to take a first sun fix and cook some breakfast. Then I would check Dove’s mileage over the twenty-four-hour period and figure out how long it would take me to the next landfall—in this instance Paramaribo in Surinam. If I’d made good progress I was happy; if I hadn’t I was depressed. Then I would sit on deck in the morning sun, collecting an all-over tan, and daydream or read. At noon I would get my LOP and, if I was hungry, eat again and feed the cats. I preferred to plot my position on the larger charts because my penciled markings showed up as a bigger movement across the ocean. In the afternoon I would read again and take a seawater bucket bath. I didn’t have any salt water soap so I didn’t lather up. But the bath was always a high point of the day because it was so refreshing, and there was no shortage of bathwater.
Evening was the time I liked best. Then I would listen to the BBC or the Voice of America and watch the sun set. I felt especially close to Patti in the evenings. If my sailing distance had proved disappointing I’d go to bed early. Depending on the movement of the boat I would sleep curled up forward on the floor of the cabin or in the cave.
The best thing about the cave was its contrast to the vastness of the sky. The head shrinkers would probably tell me I wanted to return to the womb or something.
I explained this routine on my tape recorder and said: You just look at the progress you make each day, hoping to get a little further, which you do most of the time…. I haven’t used much of the stuff aboard that has to be cooked. It’s just a waste of time to cook when you can’t enjoy it. I’d rather heat up a can.
Because of constant trade winds and the east-west current, I generally made good distances on this long leg of the voyage. On August 23—my eleventh day out of Ascension—the taffrail log checked 129 miles but my LOP showed Dove had covered 177 miles over the bottom. The record was broken again on August 30, with a true distance of 185 miles. I rarely had to change sails, the two jibs, wing and wing, bowling Dove along at her best speed.
On my fifteenth day at sea I taped: Just caught a twenty-pound barracuda…the cats liked it too…. Listening to a Spanish program and don’t understand a word. The newscaster sounds excited about something. Am now on the equator and it’s really hot—always hotter in the morning than in the afternoon. Dove’s in a mess. It’s amazing what a mess a little boat can get into! House-cleaning keeps me busy. Every day I’ve got to fight the loneliness of this voyage. It’s a slow torture, not like the sudden fear you get in a storm, but more like a bad toothache. I’m never really free of it.
Blind Fili’s courage amazed me. She knew her way about the boat, though if I moved any piece of gear out of its usual position she would bump into it—but only once. Next time around she would take evasive action.
Unlike her sighted brother, the blind kitten padded about Dove with her whiskers forward like radio antennae. She knew just how close to walk to the edge of the deck, sensing the danger even when chasing Kili. Sightless Fili was more independent than Kili, who would come to my lap and purr, demanding affection and approval. But Fili would move away when I stroked her back.
Perhaps, I reflected into the tape, blind creatures, human or animal, have their own pride, and prefer bruises to dependence on another creature. They are good company, these kittens.
On August 30 I saw the first sign of human life in eighteen days. A Brazilian schooner moved across my port beam. She was sailing wing and wing and looked like a huge white butterfly on the water. When she came close I saw she was aptly called Grace.
At midnight on the thirty-first I spotted the lightship at the mouth of the Suriname River and at dawn I was sailing Dove upstream toward Paramaribo. In the evening I anchored off what appeared to be the town’s main square, hoping that this was the place where Patti would be most likely to find me. Next morning I cleared customs and made for the post office, where the clerk said there was no mail for me at all.
Back on Dove I taped: I knew there must be mail. I could have punched the guy on the nose. That wouldn’t have helped though. I’m just so depressed.
A hostile customs officer came aboard and poked about for contraband and then told me the district commissioner wanted to see me immediately. I could think of no crime I’d committed on the high seas in the forty-four days it had taken me to sail from Cape Town. Anyway all was well: the commissioner, Mr. Frits Barend, had collected my mail for me—including ten letters from Patti.
Patti had spent six weeks in Europe, visiting friends in Switzerland and England. One letter read:
Europe is so lovely, so different. But you weren’t here with me, Robin, and traveling without you is so pointless, so flat, too often just plain boring. I would look up at a Swiss mountain, snow-covered and lovely against a blue sky. I wanted to point to the peak and to find you at my shoulder and tell you all about it.
It was the same in lovely England. Oh, those gentle colors, those thatch-roofed villages, duck ponds and village greens and the gray, old cities full of history with little shops and everyone traveling on the wrong side of the road.
From a train window I saw the green, green fields and hedgerows and a little girl riding a bicycle down a country road. And I thought, this is it. This is England! It was how I imagined it, only better. But you weren’t here, Robin. You weren’t sitting across the corner of the car. And when I looked again it was all so ordinary, so dreary without you. One day you and I will have to come back and see England again. We’ll ride on a motorcycle like we did in South Africa. It’ll all be quite different, all so perfect. I know now what you mean when you say traveling alone is for the birds. It’s funny how traveling used to be great when I was single. But when you are married and alone it’s not fun at all.
I read her letters in sequence, carefully sorting them in order from their dates, and I tried to picture her walking through the hot boulevards of Barcelona, sipping coffee on a veranda overlooking the Lake of Geneva, picking strawberries in an English country garden or looking up at Eros in Piccadilly. I tried to see Patti swinging her slim brown legs along a cobbled street or throwing darts in a low-beamed English pub. I tried to imagine her laughing or sitting alone and sad on a park bench with kids playing on the swings.
Her last letter reported that she had returned to Barcelona hoping to find a ship sailing directly for Surinam, but the best she could do was to get a ship for the Caribbean. She gave a Trinidad address—the home of friends. I sent a cable to await her arrival. The cable read: “Take supersonic plane or satellite for Paramaribo.”
The district commissioner offered to show me a bit of his country, but I was worried that Patti might arrive and find me gone. Only when Mr. Barend had promised that he would have Patti flown directly into the interior to join me did I agree to go with him.
Along with a free-lance photographer, Mr. Barend took me fishing on a huge man-made lake created by damming up the Suriname River. We caught a sackful of piranhas, the vicious fish that can strip a human body to its bones in minutes. They were surprisingly good to eat. Then we took a small plane to Paloemeu and sailed an outboard dugout canoe up the Tapanahoni River to an Indian mission station in the village of Tepoe. The Indians were really hospitable. They let me sleep in the thatched hut of a family absent from the village. The village boys showed me what good marksmen they were with their bows. The missionaries had not, as others had in other places, forced western dress and customs on the natives. Even when the Indians went to church they wore only a tiny covering fore and aft. They still hunted game with bows and arrows. I swam in rapids after being promised three times that piranhas don’t live in fast-moving water.
One of the priests gave me a green parrot. The bird had grown up in the cloisters, so it did not know a single oath. I was standing on a jungle airstrip with the parrot on my shoulder when Patti’s small plane flew in. The plane’s door shot open and Patti jumped out looking gorgeous.
As we ran to each other the parrot screeched in alarm and flew back to the mission station. Anyway, we did not need any company, feathered or in priestly gowns, when we held each other for the first time in two months—to the day.
Patti had started keeping a diary again, and the entry for the day we were reunited reads: “Robin’s nerves seem shot to pieces. The Atlantic crossing has really bugged him. He wants to end the voyage here and has written to his father and National Geographic saying he is not going to sail alone again.”
These letters had fast results. Gil Grosvenor flew out from Washington to persuade me to complete the voyage alone. Both Patti and I liked Gil, and I hope he has forgiven me for the way I treated him. I wasn’t ready to listen to reason, but I really wanted to tell him, “Look Gil, I’m not like this at all. It’s just that I’m uptight now. I know you’ve come an awful long way and I know that you’re an understanding guy. But can’t you see that I’m finished, that I can’t stand going it alone any more? Just give me time and I’ll be myself again. Next time we meet I’ll be quite different, you’ll see. I’ll slap your back and keep my cool. But not now, please not now.”
I didn’t say anything like that. Over dinner in Paramaribo’s best hotel I told Gil that I’d rather face a tank of hungry piranhas than put to sea alone again.
I told him, “I hate that bloody boat. I know her every creak, every bubble of her blistered paint. I know exactly how she’ll behave in every wind and every wave.
“Besides,” I added, “Dove’s no longer safe. I’ve lost confidence in her. I don’t trust her any more.”
Gil quietly suggested that National Geographic might help me buy a bigger boat with advance royalties. The offer sank into my mind just before I drank myself to sleep. Next day Gil flew out, convinced of the failure of his mission.
Of course time is a healer, even when you’re sitting in a small boat on a dirty river. Patti nursed me back to mental health. These must have been wretched days for her as we lived through them on Dove. We sailed to Paranam, the huge bauxite plant upriver from Paramaribo. Red dust was everywhere, staining the houses of the miners, the vegetation and the water—a real James Bond setting in the jungle.
When we’d tied Dove to a wharf we went to sleep. No one had told us about the ten-foot tide. At midnight we were suddenly thrown from our bunks as Dove fell over onto her side. The outgoing tide had left Dove precariously balanced on her keel, and perhaps one of us coughed or stirred in our sleep and upset the balance. Anyway, after the first shock of believing we’d been hit by an earthquake, we lay down across the portholes and roared with laughter. This was the turning point of my mental slide.
The days were happier now. We’d usually go to the Paramaribo market to bargain for food, and find ourselves bidding against Indians and bush Negroes, blacks, whites, Chinese—I’d never come across such a mixup of races. They laughed at me because I was barefooted. The Negroes had been imported to work the canefields, but Surinam was one of the first countries to free the slaves. Most of the Negroes had stayed on. The Surinam flag carries five colors, representing the five different skin colors of the people.
Dove was too small for the two of us. We couldn’t even stand up straight in the cabin. It was like living in a bathroom with nowhere to put my shaving things. Gil Grosvenor’s suggestion of a bigger boat to complete the voyage began to look more attractive. I put a call through to Washington and spoke to Charles Allmon of the NG staff, who liked my idea that I sail Dove to Barbados and from there negotiate for a bigger boat.
I pulled out my atlas. “I suppose California isn’t all that far,” I told Patti. I had sailed 22,000 miles and three-quarters of the way around the world. The last quarter didn’t look too bad.
Patti said quietly, “I believe you’re meant to finish what you set out to do.”
“And prove the world is round?” I snapped.
“And prove something important to yourself,” she said.
We made plans to leave. I would sail to Barbados and Patti would take a boat to Trinidad and then fly over to join me.
On October 12 I powered out to the lightship at the mouth of the Suriname River and waited for Patti’s steamer, a bauxite boat, to catch up. As the steamer passed me and made for the open sea I was attacked by another bout of anger and frustration. I hated to set sail alone again. As Patti waved good-bye from the after rail I got so mad I smashed one of the whisker poles against the mast.
Then the pilot boat came alongside and a man in a peaked cap told me to turn on my radio. I went below and switched it to the frequency the pilot had given me. Patti was on the air.
She guessed what I was going through and said, “Remember, Robin, it’s the last time on the little boat, and really it’s a very short sail.”
“I’m going to be miserable.” I said.
“No, no,” said Patti, “don’t feel like that. I’ll be thinking about you all the time and at six every morning I’ll be thinking about you really hard. You do the same at six o’clock and we’ll sort of talk to each other.”
“Okay, I’ll do that. I’ll try,” I said.
“I’m sure it’ll work, you’ll see. Remember that old man who crossed the Pacific in a raft and how he talked to his wife thousands of miles away.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“And Robin.”
“Yes?”
“I love you very much.”
Then there was silence again.