Wooden Boats

Nat Benjamin, age twenty-one and a little banged up after his tête-à-tête with the Fiat the week before, arrived with his sea bag in late summer 1968 in the Sovereign State of Malta, which comprises three treeless, sandstone islands sixty miles south of Sicily and about twice that distance north of Libya, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. He was looking for his boat. Tappan Zee was said to be tied up at an ancient stone wharf called Ta’ Xbiex, in the capital city of Valletta. Originally a Phoenician and Carthaginian colony, Malta was captured by the Romans in 218 B.C. and fought over periodically throughout its history until the nineteenth century, when the British got their hands on it and developed it into a major naval base. This function lasted through World War II, when it became the most bombed spot in the world. In the decades after the war Great Britain more or less ignored Malta until it claimed independence in 1964, by which time its economy was ragged due to the abandonment of the naval bases.

Malta’s situation in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, however, made it a magnet for an international community of sailors. These sailors were quite a bit different from the standard Newport or Long Island yachtsmen Nat had been associated with. In baking-hot Malta he found a gathering of Europeans, South Africans, Australians, and New Zealanders, most of whom had sold all they owned in their homeland and simply sailed away. He also found his boat.

Tappan Zee had been sailed by its current owner only once, for a month in the Aegean Sea a few years earlier; since then she had been tied up here and more or less abandoned to the Mediterranean sun. She was being looked after by an agent—a quirky Maltese crook, according to Nat—named Greengrass. Mr. Greengrass was charging the New York owner for her upkeep but doing little on his behalf. Nat tracked down Mr. Greengrass, who explained that the boat had been hauled, recaulked, painted, and put back in the water. He then handed Nat an enormous bill. Nat tried to explain to Mr. Greengrass that the bill was the owner’s business.

Nat wrote to the owner and got to work on the boat, the likes of which he’d never before seen. He’d sailed as a teenager in little wooden boats (his family occasionally rented a summer place on Martha’s Vineyard), and his first charter had been on a wooden boat, but his real experience came from fiberglass boat deliveries and charters in the West Indies. Tappan Zee was an old, husky, plank-on-frame vessel with a schooner rig, and Nat had to set about fixing her parts. The first priority was to make a little home for himself below before he began work on the countless chores that a neglected boat requires. The sails were tired and the integrity of the rigging was dubious, and Nat had only a vague idea of how to evaluate at this stage what was safe to sail with and what was not. The engine didn’t run; the stove didn’t work. Everything—the ground tackle, the lifelines, deck and cabin top, plumbing—seemed to need some sort of fixing, cleaning, or painting. The navigation equipment, an old sextant and a compass, appeared to be in working condition; he couldn’t say one way or the other, though, about the vintage radio direction finder. And so Nat taught himself how to fix these things and began slowly to bond with the boat. And, too, with the community—“destitute international boat people,” as he describes them.

Most of these yachties were tied up in the downmarket end of Manoel Island Quay, and their ramshackle vessels were typically spread with broken-down toilets and engine parts. For the most part they were in their late twenties and their thirties, many with young children, though some were in their seventies, like the couple on the boat next to his, an Australian man and his veddy prawpaw British wife, who invited Nat to tea regularly and became surrogate parents to him.

Likewise tied up here were Tim and Pauline Carr, who had bought a 28-foot, seventy-year-old cutter, a Falmouth Quay Punt named Curlew, for $1,500. They were twenty-six and twenty-one years old and destined to become one of the best-known blue-water sailing teams ever. Setting out from Malta, Tim and Pauline would sail the oceans of the world for decades in their old cutter, a boat with no engine and no electronic navigating devices. (The Carrs now live on Curlew in the waters off the Antarctic island of South Georgia, a beautiful, glacier-covered spot of earth, rich in wildlife, that they have written about in their book Antarctic Oasis: Under the Spell of South Georgia.)

The Carrs regarded Nat curiously. To this day they recall the “unforgettable and charismatic character” with the long blond hair and the “swashbuckling” boat, but back in 1968 they remarked to each other how intriguing it was that even though Nat had a daunting workload, he seemed to spend most of his time on what seemed to them cosmetics.

Nat thrived on these eclectic lives and stories as well as on the communal, all-for-one-and-one-for-all ethic of the wharf. If you had a mechanical problem, the person with the mechanical expertise was there to help you out. An issue with rigging could be solved by someone else. And at the end of the day all would gather on one or another’s boat, or occasionally meet at a bar, Britannia Bill’s, for a cheap supper and some “Lacrimae Vitis,” or plonk—cheap wine. For the young Nat this combination of food and drink and people and cultures in a faraway land was heady and intoxicating.

Moreover, he wasn’t just hanging out. He had a purpose, like everyone else here—a job to do each day. Fixing up an old boat so that he could sail it to America required Nat to learn how things worked; if he couldn’t figure a problem out himself, there was always someone nearby who could. Time was a factor. He had to leave before winter, when the weather would grow dangerously unpredictable.

Nat went through one storm right there at the wharf when a gregali, the local term for a nor’easter, roared through and taught him how to hold on to a yacht. The boats there were tied stern-to along the stone wharf, and some were destroyed by the storm surge. Here again the rule was, When it’s all you can do to keep your boat, your home, from being destroyed, you learn what matters.

“We made one trial sail before we left,” Nat says. “A whole gang of people hopped on, and we took a sail out of Valetta to one of the islands off Malta. Everything seemed to work out. It was a nice day. Wind wasn’t blowing real hard.” (Tim Carr went on that shakedown sail and recalls numerous green faces, Nat’s evidently not among them.) “Boat didn’t leak too much,” says Nat, “and I even took a sight. The old Australian guy who was with me, he was watching me as I was working it out, and he said, ‘Yeah, that looks pritty good, mite!’ That made me feel pretty good—it’ll be all right.”

They returned to the stone wharf, and Nat set about preparing to leave. Many in the group were concerned. The weather in winter was at best unpredictable and usually just plain lousy. His friends, all of whom had more sailing experience in these waters, told him flat out not to go until spring. “You’re crazy,” they said. “This old boat, you really shouldn’t take it this time of year.”

But Nat had a job—he’d agreed to deliver the thing. The owner was expecting her to show up on Long Island at some point. But more significant, Nat had received a letter from Pam, who explained that she was on an idyllic island called Formentera, on the other side of the Mediterranean, just off the coast of Spain. This was too enticing for young Nat. He wasn’t going to spend the entire winter in Malta.

There was another problem besides the weather: Mr. Greengrass and the unpaid bill. The owner had not come through. Greengrass saw Nat working hard on the boat and loading it with provisions. The agent knew he was getting ready for more than a day sail. Every day Mr. Greengrass walked out to Tappan Zee, visibly anxious about what he was seeing. The situation grew tense. Nat couldn’t wait any longer because of the weather, but every day Mr. Greengrass, the bizarre Maltese-African, badgered him.

Winds hammered Nat and the Englishman almost immediately upon their setting out. They got such a thrashing, in fact, that Nat questioned whether they should have left at all. They bashed westward through the waves, and the wind kept coming at them and coming at them. And the waves grew rougher and rougher. The boat was leaking badly from all the smashing about, and the old sails were scarcely holding together. The Englishman was not pleased. Tappan Zee beat three days and nights into the wind before reaching the nearest land, the southern coast of Sicily, where she staggered into the harbor of a tiny town called Agrigento. The two young sailors were greeted like heroes.

Nat, too, was reconsidering the trip—seven hundred miles over water he wasn’t familiar with, in a leaky old wooden boat he’d never seen the bottom of, at the worst time of year, by himself, with no working engine, no ship-to-shore radio, nothing but a compass, a sextant, and his wits. Nat worked a couple more days on the boat, lunching and hanging around the café with the crazy Sicilians, and mulled over his situation.

A couple of days out of Agrigento he found himself off the coast of Tunisia, near enough to pick up some gorgeous Arabic music on his shortwave radio as he bombed through the Mediterranean, and for a moment he had a fine sail. But then the wind picked up again, and another gregali tumbled in. He made his way to the Gulf of Tunis and hove to in the lee of a little island not far from the city of Carthage. He’d wait this one out here, pump the boat—she leaked quite a bit more than he’d counted on when the wind blew—and sew the sails he’d blown out.

Sailing in the Mediterranean was considerably different, he noted, from sailing in the West Indies, where you could all but set your watch by the winds. There you knew that every day it would blow between 15 and 25 knots out of the east; you could plan your arrivals and departures almost without exception. The Med in winter was proving to be completely unpredictable.

When the gregali settled down, Nat set out again. When he was about twenty miles off the coast, a sirocco, a powerful southern wind, thundered off the Sahara, tearing his sails and stinging him with sand. It blew hard. Nat made some headway, but he couldn’t carry enough sail to stay his course and so was blown north.

The weather could be sunny and beautiful one minute, and then out of nowhere a gregali or a sirocco would start shrieking through the rig. The wave pattern of this sea was inscrutable. In the Atlantic the waves were nice and big and spaced out; the Med was shallow, and so the waves were short and steep and you got a nasty chop. To windward, Tappan Zee slammed hard into the waves, which intensified the leaking.

And yet in a strange and beautiful way, Nat enjoyed this sailing deeply. Part of the beauty was that it was scary. The boat leaked, the sails blew out, and the winds pushed him off course. But what was he going to do? He fixed the problems because he didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t suddenly say, “Just kidding,” switch the boat off, and step back onto Malta—or into Garrison, for that matter. There he was. Middle of the sea—him, his wherewithal, and a boat. And he enjoyed this elemental thrill. He sensed he was accomplishing something, learning something useful.

Once he got off the coast of Tunisia, and land was out of sight, he had some truly exquisite sailing and logged great distance. He’d created a fine little cabin for himself, and an efficient galley—a comfortable home. While along the coast of Tunis, he’d kept his bearings from lights on land, but now he was using Tappan Zee’s sextant. His noon sights were coming out well, making sense, giving him his latitude, but his morning and afternoon sights were doubtful. He had the RDF, but it was highly inaccurate and out of range. And he was occasionally hallucinating, all alone on the boat, seeing the glow of a lighthouse far off in the night and sailing toward it and sailing toward it and sailing toward it, and then the sun would rise and there would be nothing there, just the infinite stretch of sea and sky.

After he’d been sixteen days at sea, the sight of Majorca, the largest of the Balearic Islands, gathered in the distance, right on course. Tappan Zee reached along its southern shore and sailed into the Bay of Palma, and there was the old city and chief trading port for sugar, olives, figs, apricots and almonds, leather, pottery, silks and woolens, basketwork and jewelry, a city where the palaces of the Majorcan kings and the Moorish palace, the Almudaina, still stood. Palma was a beautiful city, made more so by the fact that Nat was sailing into it after sixteen days alone at sea. Landfall. Arriving by his own means on a small boat in a foreign country of such visual and sensual and historical riches was unspeakably exhilarating.

Nat dropped anchor in the Bay of Palma and went ashore, and the first soul he met was an Englishman named Tim Light. Nat and Tim became fast friends almost immediately. Tim had been living in Spain for several years, spoke fluent Spanish, and knew his way around the islands. Nat had left one little international community and sailed right into another. He outlined for Tim his plan to get over to Formentera, about eighty miles southwest of Majorca. He knew from the charts that there were no good harbors there, so he asked Tim to help him find a safe mooring for Tappan Zee and someone to look after the boat and keep her pumped out over the winter. Nat then took a ferry from Palma to Ibiza, and from Ibiza took Joven Dolores, an old fishing boat-ferry, to Pam on Formentera.

Formentera was a rural outpost, barely forty miles square, inhabited by fewer than three thousand people, fishermen and farmers and their families. There was no electricity, no cars beyond a mile radius from the port. Plows were pulled through the soil by donkeys. Pam had traveled there with friends and liked it so much she’d simply decided to stay. Nat and she rented, for 500 pesetas a month (about eight dollars), a tiny, two-room cottage with a dirt floor, tile roof, and wood and adobe walls. A small vineyard grew out back, and a wheat field in front. They got their drinking water from a nearby well. Two minutes’ walk from their cottage lay a pristine sandy white beach.

“Ibiza was the hippie capital of the world,” Nat says. “We settled into this community which was really crazy. If you wanted a place to watch people, you would sit on the main boulevard in one of the cafés and watch the parade of lunatics wandering back and forth from all parts of the world on every kind of drug you could imagine. It was hysterical to watch this scene.

“I don’t think we spent more than three or four hundred dollars in four months. Food was cheap. Cigarettes cost four pesetas a pack. The wine and brandy were cheap. It was just very easy to live there. For that period of time, it was paradise. And it was interesting because of these crazy people from all over the world showing up.”

And yet there was a sense of being lost, too, among so many people—“mostly European,” Nat recalls, “some Israelis, Africans from black Africa, a few other Americans, artists, your token drug dealers, your rogues and rascals, everybody”—among so much drug taking, then, in 1969, under the guise of spiritual questing, and with no real work to do other than reading and walking and spiritual questing, some of it genuine, some of it, well, less productive. “Those are confusing times,” Nat says, recalling his search for direction and his hedonistic appetites.

He hooked up with Tim Light in Majorca and initiated a plan to get Tappan Zee safely Stateside. Nat knew the boat wasn’t ready for an ocean crossing; he’d need to haul out somewhere, inspect the hull, and stop the leaks. Tim had been to the Moroccan city of Ceuta, on the northern coast of Africa across from Gibraltar, and he knew a boatyard there where they could get work done cheaply and well.

He and Tim gathered a few friends for a sail—Maureen, a Scottish lass they knew, and Dick, another American—and set out on the five-hundred-mile journey. Pam stayed behind, planning to fly back to the States, meet up with Nat upon his return, and spend the summer working in New England. The weather was splendid, the winds fair, the voyage pleasantly uneventful. And they found the shipyard welcoming, with its set of rails on which to haul Tappan Zee, and a flamboyant Spaniard who ran the hauling with the gesticulating vigor of a mad orchestra conductor. After nearly a thousand miles of sailing, this was the first time Nat had seen her hull.

She was a simple, old-fashioned, straight-keel schooner. But other than that, he didn’t really understand what he was looking at. He knew she needed work, but he didn’t know if she needed recaulking, refastening, replanking, or what. A little of everything, according to the camel-driving shipwrights of the yard. The boat obviously had not been recaulked, as Greengrass had claimed, only reputtied. All the rotted caulking had to be reefed out and replaced.

Nat watched the shipwrights work, and worked himself. He noticed a forward plank that looked suspect. When he pressed it with his knife, water poured out of it. As he examined the hull, though, he found that all the planks dumped water like a sponge when pressed. “Anyway, let’s take out this suspect plank,” he said. He didn’t like the looks of it; it didn’t look solid. And so they went after it, discovering as they did so that the planks were fastened with iron nails. But they couldn’t get the plank out. They hacked away at it and still it wouldn’t come. It was hard and sinewy. You could wring it like a washcloth, but it held fast to the frames. One of the shipwrights explained why: the wood was cypress. Its nature was to soak up water. Nothing wrong with that. Soaked up a lot of water. But Nat was fascinated to see the frames and the fastenings. And the Moroccan shipwrights quickly spiled a new plank into place.

And so Nat learned about cypress, and about iron fastenings, and old caulking and new cotton caulking. And he learned about a good boatyard. This one had a planer and a band saw for power tools; the rest were common shipyard hand tools—planes, broadax, adze. It was a simple fishing-village boatyard. People did their work by hand, were generous with what they knew, and let you work on your own boat. With her garboards, stem, sternpost, and butts fastened, several new planks installed, much of her hull recaulked and puttied, and her topsides painted a deep blood orange, Tappan Zee was afloat again two weeks after arriving in Ceuta.

The four-man crew first sailed to Gibraltar. Here Nat found a ship chandlery and made two important purchases. He’d written the owner asking for money to repair the boat, and the owner had sent $500. Nat spent $200 of it on a Heath sextant, made in England, and $50 on a Breitling wristwatch chronometer. One of the first things he did was compare the sextant readings with those from the one he had on the boat. His brand-new sextant worked perfectly. The one he’d been using, he discovered, was accurate in measuring the sun at high altitudes but way off in measuring low ones, which explained why his morning and afternoon sights on the way to Majorca had never made sense. Nat probably could have had the sextant on the boat fixed, but he felt he needed his own brand-new instrument. This might seem uncharacteristic of a sailor who put so little stock in fancy or expensive equipment—Nat almost always tended toward the ragged, the handmade, the used. But not in this case.

The sailing was beautiful, and they boiled through the Atlantic on a starboard tack, in a fresh northwest breeze. Suddenly, without warning, the starboard foremast shroud parted. Without that wire rope, they stood to lose the mast, so Nat quickly released the sheet and came up into the wind, tacking to put the strain on the port shrouds. You don’t want to lose a mast a hundred miles offshore.

Over the next few hours they limped along on a port tack while jury-rigging a new shroud with some clamps. Once it was repaired, they resumed their course, again bombing along through the Atlantic toward Madeira. But some hours later—pop! The starboard upper shroud on the mainmast blew. Nat couldn’t believe it. What is going on? he thought. They repeated over the next several hours the same jury-rigging aloft they had used on the foremast, first dropping the jib and the foresail. Nat left the mainsail up to steady the boat—“otherwise you’re rolling like a pig,” he says.

Once this shroud was fixed as well as could be expected in a rolling sea, Nat was no longer keen to charge out into the Atlantic on a starboard tack. He examined the charts, estimated the vessel’s position, and saw that they were just sixty miles or so west of Casablanca. He could put the boat on a port tack, straining the good shrouds—they hadn’t broken yet, anyway—and they could be in a fairly big port soon, a port with the supplies to repair the rig properly. So Tappan Zee slid onto a port tack and sailed east for Casablanca.

When you arrive as a stranger in another country by plane, train, or car, you’re a tourist. You have to find a taxi or a bus, and then a hotel, and then a restaurant to eat at, and all the while you encounter only those natives who are there to serve you and other tourists. When you arrive under sail, you by necessity become an immediate part of the community. You must find a hardware store, a marine supply store, perhaps a blacksmith. You talk to people on the working waterfront, you gather information, and you begin to understand this foreign land with greater intimacy and in less time than you would if you’d come by any transport other than a boat.

The crew of Tappan Zee found a small Moroccan yacht club and a safe harbor to secure the vessel. Nat examined the old shrouds. Before the nineteenth century, masts were held up by rope made of hemp, a vegetable fiber that was very strong and had little give. Metal rope began to appear on British ships in the 1840s, changing the way a lot of things were made (bridges, for instance). The critical step in making wire rope useful for rigging ships is the creation of the loop at the end. That’s what allows you to use it. The traditional method is to form the loop by weaving the strands of the end back into the cable. This splice must then be secured and protected against the corrosion of rain and salt water. First, some form of tarred hemp is “wormed” along the spiral grooves where the strands of cable meet, to prevent water from leaking into the center of the cable. A linen cloth, the same kind of material used in bookbinding, is wrapped around the worming like a bandage, in a process called parceling. The splice is then “served,” with a cotton or hemp string soaked in linseed oil being wrapped tightly around the parceling; this tacky string will eventually melt into itself and harden into a primitive form of linoleum, creating a completely waterproof seal. A shroud that is properly wormed, parceled, and served will have an all-but-permanent splice.

Finding themselves in Casablanca, the sailors decided to see the country. Who, after all, really wanted to be in America, with all those protests going on, Vietnam raging? Nat was designated 1Y because of a torn knee cartilage, so he wasn’t concerned about the draft. But neither did he really want to get all caught up in protests or civil rights demonstrations, much as he might sympathize with them. Much better to sail.

The international crew of Tappan Zee, with new upper shrouds, set sail once again, now bound for the Canary Islands. Four days later, they anchored in Las Palmas, the capital, and rerigged her for the crossing. It had been a long trip already, and it was time to get this vessel to the other side of the Atlantic. Tim and Maureen returned to Majorca, leaving the two Americans, Nat and his friend Dick Darrow, to finish provisioning the boat. Dick was about Nat’s age, a skinny, blond all-American gone hippie, with a straggly beard and a thorough enjoyment of recreational drugs. The two young men spent their last few dollars on provisions, filled the water tanks, and headed west into the Atlantic Ocean, Nat plotting a course south of Bermuda that would keep them in the trade wind for as long as possible. And off they flew, yielding only occasionally to recurring thoughts of how great a distance they must travel in so small a ship.

Conditions that season—it was by now late July of 1969—were perfect, and they boomed through the waves, pressed forward by east winds in fair weather. They mostly ran during the first days and had to steer continuously as they slid down the face of the big rollers coming off of Africa. It was hard work during that first week, but the work made them stronger and fitter. As the days wore on, they developed a routine that felt more natural to their bodies than their routine when they were at anchor. They took longer shifts at the helm. They ate exactly what was necessary for the work they needed to do—far less than they were used to eating. Their skin gradually became coated with salt, their long, thick hair grew stiff with it, and the salt felt good to them, natural. There were no noises other than the boiling of the sea, the wind, and the sounds of a wooden boat. They were taking on the rhythms of the sea. They felt elemental, almost primordial. This is the sense at sea in the middle of an ocean. You feel as though you might exist almost out of time. It could just as well be the beginning of time—you move through the same wind and water that were here when life began and that in all likelihood will be here till the sun burns out. It’s just you, wood, wind, water.

Tappan Zee held up well, proving herself dependable and seaworthy after all the work on her. The sails, abstract artworks of Nat’s impromptu stitching throughout the Mediterranean, were now holding, and the rigging was strong. When they sailed close to the wind, they could adjust the tiller with lines and leave it for short stretches.

By the time Tappan Zee had crossed a thousand miles of ocean—about a third of their intended passage—Nat and Dick Darrow had developed an easy routine with the boat, felt by then entirely at home on her on the water. At midday, on a clear day, with the wind singing at their back, the sun warm on deck, Nat would be down in the galley fixing himself a sandwich, and he would not expect to hear any sound other than that of water rushing against the wooden hull. But on one such day he did hear something: Dick’s voice—“Nat!”—strangely high-pitched and light, as if from a distance. Nat hustled above and scanned the deck. Dick Darrow was gone. Then, directly astern—there he was, like a bobber. Nat threw him a life ring, but the boat was already racing down the next wave, and Dick vanished in seconds.

With 20-plus knots of wind at his back and a significant Atlantic swell, Nat had to change a baggy old headsail and put up a smaller jib—and do it fast—before he could head back onto the wind. Every second mattered, and the work felt like it was taking forever—he had to bring down the one sail, unshackle the halyard, change the sheets, then set the new jib. His fingers felt thick and clumsy. But once he had the best sail configuration and had headed the boat to windward, he felt better. He didn’t know how far down he’d been blown from where Dick went overboard, but he felt reasonably sure Dick was directly upwind. It was imperative now, in beating back to windward, that he steer a course reciprocal to the one he’d made from the point of Dick’s falling overboard, and not overshoot him one way or another. The ocean took on its appropriate dimensions of vastness, with no markers of any kind, no guideposts, jagged and endless. Nat could only guess to make short tacks of five to ten minutes. They had to be pretty close in time and had to cover the same distance. If he went on a starboard tack longer than a port tack, he might miss Dick altogether. It wasn’t a rough sea, but it was big. How long could Dick tread water? Nat would ride up to the top of a wave, tip over the crest, and slide down. But throughout all this he remained relatively calm, quietly praying that he’d find his friend. Half an hour passed, four or five tacks. An hour passed.

Dick Darrow, meanwhile, was treading water, clad only in shorts. He floated on his back to rest and conserve energy, not knowing how long he’d have to wait. Then he would look up, hoping. He saw Nat before Nat saw him. Tappan Zee’s masts were visible first, and so he knew Nat was close. He could only wait and pray that those two tips of mast tacking one way would turn and tack back.

The sea from Bermuda all the way north to the coast of Maine and Nova Scotia is notoriously dangerous in late summer and fall. Some sailors claim that this part of the world’s oceans—where the Gulf Stream, up to fifty miles wide and as many as two thousand feet deep, courses like a bloodline through the western Atlantic—sees worse weather on a regular basis than any other spot on earth. Ask East Coast sailors with worldwide experience about their worst storms, and they will almost invariably tell about getting caught between Bermuda and New England. This whole voyage had taken long enough that summer was approaching autumn as Nat and Dick crossed the ocean—hurricane season. And the season of 1969 was especially fierce, with the National Hurricane Center’s monitoring eighteen different tropical storms and hurricanes in the North Atlantic between August and November, or roughly one a week. Sure enough, Tappan Zee sailed into the tail end of one of these hurricanes, Hurricane Debbie. Debbie’s winds made the gregaliss and siroccos of the Mediterranean feel like summer breezes. Nat dropped the sails, dug out an old canvas storm trysail that hadn’t been used in decades, and set it on the foremast, and that husky old wooden schooner rode the waves with an easy, predictable motion. It was her beaminess, her fatness and her graceful double-ended hull, that made her so stable in a storm, Nat saw. And he’d never forget that kind of comfort in those conditions, he and Dick both by then exhausted and anxious for landfall.

When the storm had passed, they still had nearly eight hundred miles of ocean to cover and had by now seen nothing but ocean for more than a month. A huge freighter passed near enough to spot them and altered its course to steam their way. Tappan Zee was something to see, this far out, and worth a detour for the freighter, if only to say how d’you do and make sure all was well, especially given that the crew couldn’t reach the old little sailboat on any radio channels. Tappan Zee had no communicating device other than the cupping of hands to mouth. Nat and Dick waited till the freighter was close enough to shout to. They called ahoy to the crew, and the crew of the freighter called back to them, asked if all was well, and, hearing that it was, steamed off again.

Just after Nat had watched the freighter disappear over the horizon, he was below deck. He sensed his feet getting wet. Very and suddenly wet. He dropped to his knees and tore the cabin sole apart to find out where the water was coming from. He discovered the source near the foremast, one of the most stressed parts of the hull. Tappan Zee had sprung a plank, and water was gushing in like a fountain. Having no engine, no radio on which to call for help, and no life raft, they had no other choice but to fix the hole fast, one of them working while the other one pumped. There they were! No choice but to work like mad or the boat would go down and they’d die. They dropped jib and foresails and hove to under mainsail in a confused sea. Nat found some canvas, slathered it with whatever kind of water-insoluble goop and putty he could lay his hands on, and gathered tacks and a hammer. Dick Darrow tied a line around his torso and went overboard with mask and fins. Between waves, he could go under long enough to press the sticky canvas to the hull and hammer a tack into it; then he’d come up for air, let another wave pass, and do it again, wishing to God each time he went under that they’d had a staple gun. But Dick got that canvas fixed onto the hull, and it stanched the fountain enough so they could get by with a makeshift repair job on the inside and frequent pumping, and there that canvas stayed for the final six hundred miles of ocean.

Forty-one days after setting sail out of Las Palmas, and more than a year after Nat had been mowed down by the Fiat on his way to meet his ship in Malta, captain, crew, and ship ghosted tired but safe into the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island, now enveloped in fog. They could scarcely see the Brenton Reef tower. They’d been in this fog for more than twenty-four hours, but Nat had managed to take a sun and moon sight just before fog shut out the light, and had been able to set an accurate course. They anchored off the Ida Lewis Yacht Club, checked through Customs, and went ashore. Nat called Pam, who’d been waiting nervously to hear from him. Then he called his parents to let them know he’d made it. His mom, unworried and unimpressed, asked him if he had a job yet. Then he and Dick found their way to an old watering hole Nat knew from his bartender days. There at the bar was his first good captain, Christopher Fay, the man who’d said to him two years earlier, “Why don’t you stay?” and thereby set in motion what would become Nat Benjamin’s life on boats. Fay stared at the bedraggled, exuberant ocean vagabonds and told them he was buying them dinner.