10. Pets, Companionship over the Rail
After a couple of weeks I noticed a gooseneck barnacle fixed on the hull below the transom. I named the barnacle “Charles,” I assume because Darwin was into barnacles. That was as close as I came to any kind of pet on board. For the long-distance solo cruisers, though, animal life within or outside the rails of their boats can be a genuine emotional comfort—not to mention a welcome new character to a single-hander’s story.
“Yes, I was often frightened. Yes, I was often lonely,” wrote Ann Davison. “Once I had thought if only there was a rabbit to stroke . . . something reassuringly alive on board.” In other words, caring for some other living thing can provide a welcome distraction from one’s own fears.
After Josiah Shackford’s dog Bruno allegedly sailed aboard in 1787, several other pets have gone to sea with solo sailors. In 1999, for example, American David Clark, in his sixties and sailing alone around the world for a second time, was in his sinking boat off South Africa with his dog, Mickey, a West Highland terrier. The two were rescued by a Russian freighter. Mickey was nearly on board the ship after being hoisted over five stories high—but at the final moment, upon seeing the merchant seamen on deck, he frantically wriggled out of the sling and fell to his death between the boat and the freighter.
The truth is, it almost inevitably ends badly for the animal, who has of course no say in its why-go. The moment some kind of pet appears on board in a solo sea story, be ready for tragedy.
Joshua Slocum had no interest in having a pet on Spray, although in the Strait of Magellan he found a spider that he believed had been on board since Boston. He developed a great affection for the creature, proud of it as a tough survivor. Later in the voyage he was convinced to ship a goat, an animal that ate through its rope leash and then through his charts and his sun hat. Disgusted, he left the animal at the next island he visited. There is something to the fact that he did not simply kill the goat and eat it. He had no problem hacking up a sea turtle on deck or shooting sharks, but as the voyage went on he explained that he had begun to dread killing any animal companions on board. Slocum became a near vegetarian, he said, not even wanting to kill or eat a chicken.
On the way to Hawai‘i out of San Diego in 1965, her first big single-handed passage, Sharon Sites Adams sailed with her pet turtle, named Sarah Beth-Ann. Adams equipped the turtle with a little harness so she could walk on deck. But Sarah Beth-Ann lost her appetite, had no energy, and then died about ten days out. Adams gave the turtle a sea burial and a prayer, and, as she told the story decades later without humor or irony, her pet’s death was “a jarring loss.”
Cats in particular have become popular shipmates for sailors, in the belief they might be the most adaptable pet for life at sea and they could also help with mice, cockroaches, and other pests. Robin Lee Graham, a teenager who circumnavigated the world alone over five years in the late 1960s, began with two sister kittens on board: one jumped ship in American Samoa and the other, Joliette, was impregnated there, but her kittens were stillborn. Joliette was later run over by a truck in Fiji. After a waiter informed him, Graham locked himself in his boat and cried, drinking a bottle of vodka by himself: “I had not felt lonelier five hundred miles from land.” Graham shipped another cat in Tonga, a mean one who hated being at sea. This cat occasionally ambushed Graham, scratched him, tore up his charts, and eventually the sailor gave up and left it on the Cocos Keeling Islands. He learned later that the animal had died the very next day and was found floating in the surf. Yet too fond of feline companionship while at sea, Graham received a gift of two kittens in Cape Town, naming them Kili and Fili after the dwarves from The Hobbit. Fili was practically blind, but both lived well on his boat. Fili later got pregnant during one of the shore visits and gave birth to two kittens. Sailing from the Galápagos back home and through the doldrums to California (with two skinned goats hanging in the rigging for his food), Graham had four cats aboard his little boat, two of which were only just being litter-trained. Not long after Fili vomited some bad goat meat, she disappeared, falling overboard somehow. Kili seemed to adopt the kittens and the remaining three survived to make it back to Graham’s home in California.
I could go on with tortuous cat stories, but there is at least one that ends reasonably well. A decade after Robin Graham, a young American sailor named Tania Aebi, the first American woman to sail around the world alone and the youngest at the time at twenty years old when she finished, also had cats on her solo circumnavigation. Her first, “Dinghy,” was an adult black cat with white paws that she rescued from a shelter in New York City. He became “my closest companion for half the world . . . my only comfort,” but then the cat died of kidney cancer under the care of a veterinarian in Vanuatu. Within days Aebi got a young tabby, who she named Tarzoon. After getting seasick and vomiting in Aebi’s bunk, Tarzoon was fun, adventurous, and seemed to love boat life. Tarzoon survived the rest of voyage—through the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and across the Atlantic—even after going overboard one day (Aebi was on deck and was able to turn the boat around and scoop him up), falling overboard a second time (he managed to clamber back up himself while Aebi slept below, reporting himself back aboard by standing over her sopping wet), and then horrifying his owner when he killed and ate a wild canary that had landed on deck. Tarzoon returned with Aebi to New York and was her companion while she wrote up her account of the circumnavigation. Aebi thanked Tarzoon prominently and genuinely in the acknowledgments.
Solo circumnavigator Naomi James early in her voyage with her cat Boris (1977).
Sometimes wild hitchhikers or regular visitors near the boat become companions as familiar as domestic pets, such as Harry Pidgeon’s Yellow Bill and Blue Bill. During his Southern Ocean circumnavigation, Vito Dumas watched a single “cape pigeon,” known more often now as a cape petrel (Daption capense), visit him regularly all the way across the Indian Ocean and even up until landfall in Wellington. He fed the bird, and it regularly reappeared, sometimes after several days away. “He was a great friend,” Dumas wrote, “I awaited him anxiously and he must have felt as I did.” In the far Indian Ocean, Dumas even found companionship with a fly that must have hatched on board, his “traveling companion,” whom he fed sugar until the fly was blown away in heavy weather.
Not to be outdone by Slocum’s spider or Dumas’ fly, South African Neal Petersen, sailing alone in the 1990s in a technological age in which he could communicate with schoolchildren from his boat out at sea, befriended a cockroach on board. He had difficulty killing it because the kids got behind “Cockie.” That is until Cockie had babies and the lot were heaved overboard as an equatorial tribute to Neptune.
Slocum in 1900 and Pidgeon in 1928 wrote about loneliness in their way, but after their first crossings it did not, they said, seem to bother them. They found companionship in books and the marine life around them over the rail. One day on the open South Atlantic, on a day filled with flying fish, Slocum wrote, “One could not be lonely in a sea like this.”
Tania Aebi in the 1980s, with her first cat safely on board, began to feel a spiritual connection in the eastern Pacific, too, echoing the feeling of Hemingway’s fictional lone fisherman, Santiago, who on seeing birds overhead thinks that “no man was ever alone on the sea.” Aebi wrote of sailing over a “sapphire-blue seaway,” with more than a mile of deep ocean beneath her keel. She was humbled by the feelings of the sea itself, of seabirds, and of bioluminescent plankton. She praised the pilot fish and the dolphinfish following in her wake, her boat a pied piper that “pulled along” soaring flying fish. Pods of dolphins followed her boat so actively and playfully that Aebi was moved to tears. The dolphins stayed with her boat for ten hours. “On the ocean, I never feel lonely,” Aebi wrote, “There’s too much beauty—the sea, the wind, the sky, the animals and fish.”
At one point on this long passage in the eastern Pacific, an enormous sea turtle floated by Aebi’s boat, which elicited a still more significant connection. Aebi saw the sea turtle as female, anthropomorphized: “her horny head straining for air as her stubby legs paddled away, a thousand miles from land.”
“What is she doing here?” Aebi wondered. “How long will it take for her to get where she wants to go? I marveled that she didn’t need to carry around a sextant and chart. On her back would rest tired sea birds, hitchhikers on the seaway.”