Part 22

We stood watch and watch, spending most of our waking time together playing chess. We held ourselves ready to sail out at a moment’s notice, if necessary, and to cruise on and off until the pilot boat brought back our ship’s company. Rough waters, heavy tides, and numerous squalls kept us company, and the imperative clank of the anchor chain was an ominous and constant sound. Meantime, during the heavy and frequent showers, we filled all the water tanks to overflowing, and, on Jessica’s birthday, we whipped up and frosted a birthday cake for her, which we put away against her return.

We had estimated that the trip to Belém would take three or four hours each way, and allowing one or two days for business and pleasure, we looked for the travelers’ return any time after the second day. Actually, four long days had to drag by before the pilot boat came alongside again, to return a bedraggled and exhausted bunch of excursionists. They had brought with them all the supplies we needed for the next leg and Barbara, guessing correctly that no one would want to make another trip ashore, had attended to the formalities of clearance.

Within half an hour we had everything stowed and, deciding that the mail, the wild tales, and the delayed birthday celebration could wait, I ordered the anchor up and we headed out.

I have never been quite clear about what happened to the rest of the gang during the trip ashore, but twenty-two pages in Jessica’s Journal gave me some idea and Barbara tried to fill me in on the rest. The “bus to Belém,” which I had thought was standard transportation, had turned out to be a private car, for which the driver expected to be paid 40,000 cruzeiros (about $90), in advance. Barbara tells me she had no difficulty in making her emphatic “No!” understood, but after the car had been driven sadly away, she found her phrase book quite inadequate to ask the bewildered but eager-to-help villagers who crowded around, “How do _you_ travel when you want to go to Belém?” The only interpretation she could make from their baffled shrugs was that no one ever wanted to go there. There certainly was no regular bus service, and the railroad, mentioned in the pilot book and shown neatly on the map, had never been developed beyond the ten miles of track laid in a flush of enthusiasm ten years earlier.

By some intricate process I never fully understood, Barbara got her entire gang to Belém, and back. They traveled by truck, by local bus, by passing jeep, and by a number of other unnamed means. In Belém they managed to pick up the mail and supplies and, in the case of the men, to get a smattering of the information for which we had come so far out of our way.

We now set a course for Barbados, 1,100 miles to the northwest. Our route led us across the Great Amazon Bight, a region of dirty brown water and uncertain weather. For the first two days it rained almost continuously, with mean rip tides and cross swells. Our progress alternated between a drift and a fast run, depending on the squalls. Each burst of wind and rain carried us along a few miles and then passed on, leaving us wallowing behind to wait for the next boost. They were not too violent, so we kept up our four lowers throughout.

On the afternoon of the second day, however, we could see a squall approaching which obviously meant business, and we thought it prudent to reduce sail a bit. My log tells what happened:

Biggest squall we’ve ever had, hit suddenly just as we were downing foresail. Ripped main and jib to pieces. Rain torrential and flat out, stung like hail. Continued under foresail and mizzen until things quieted.

The main was a total loss but the canvas scraps, as Slocum philosophically observed under similar circumstances, made good material for pot rags. The foresail was saved, with only minor tears, but the jib was badly damaged and required a complete overhaul. It was an amazing sensation to see a full, billowing mainsail disappear in an instant, and Ted, who was at the tiller, confessed that his first instinct was one of helplessness because bits of canvas were carried out of reach so fast there was no chance to grab and save them!

We bent on our spare mainsail and carried on, working our way across the bight under the three lowers. Frequently we passed boiling patches of confused waters, bubbling in turbulent rips. The water was dirty brown in color and brackish in taste, although closer to shore it may well have been completely fresh, as the stories of travelers claim. Sometime during all this—we could not take sights because of overcast skies—we passed the equator and entered the Northern Hemisphere, but we didn’t feel in the mood to make a celebration of it.

At last, toward evening of the third day, we saw blue water ahead. The line of demarcation was surprisingly abrupt, and as we passed out of the discolored area of the Amazon current the weather, too, settled into an ideal trade-wind pattern. We had left behind one more region of unpredictable conditions which had been considerably on my mind. That night we saw the North Star for the first time in two years.

We made the rest of the trip in good time and even better spirits, reaching Barbados early in the morning of April 23. We stayed a week at this very British isle, not so much because we fell in love with its charms as from the necessity for awaiting the arrival of funds. The authorities in Salinas had managed to extract from Barbara every cent she had, as fees for the trips made by the pilot boat. When she had turned out her purse and pocketbook, and showed that was all the money she had in her possession, the total charges proved to be, by an amazing coincidence, exactly the amount she had.

On our first evening at anchor, while we were eating on deck, we heard a splash alongside and a voice hailed us from the water. “Ahoy, _Phoenix_! May I come aboard?”

Permission being granted, a sunburned face with a white nose (zinc oxide) appeared over the gunwales. The wet and burly stranger introduced himself as Larry Foley, New York correspondent for the Sydney _Daily Telegraph_, now on vacation in the West Indies. He had scented a story in the _Phoenix_ and had swum out to interview us.

We became very friendly with Larry and on our departure from Barbados invited him to island-hop with us for a bit, so he could see how the other ten-thousandth of one per cent lives.

Early on the morning of the 30th we passed between St. Lucia and Martinique, an island of magnificent mountain peaks reminiscent of Hawaii and the high islands of the South Seas. By noon we had put Diamond Rock astern and rounded Cape Solomon. In midafternoon, less than twenty-four hours from Bridgetown, we dropped the anchor in the lee of an imposing gray stone fortress. Fort de France, the port city and capital of Martinique, spread out along the waterfront, looking very much like Papeete in the French Societies. A park along the shore was embellished with an edging of city dump and the buildings facing the harbor bore large signs, in English: “Buy your Perfume from us! Free Port Prices!”

We spent a couple of busy days in Martinique, some of us going overland to visit Saint-Pierre, the site of the tremendous volcanic eruption of 1902 in which some 40,000 lives were lost. Ted decided to spend the night ashore, to get the flavor of the place. What flavor he found, we didn’t learn, but he dragged himself aboard the next morning muttering something about walking all night, deserted roads, and a solitary fellow pedestrian, and spent his second day in Martinique sleeping.

I don’t always know how these things arrange themselves, but on our second afternoon we discovered that we had annexed, for a few hours, a French teen-ager of solid dimensions and stolid personality (and no English) whom we knew only as Mlle. Petite. The arrangements were Barbara’s and had something to do with an exchange visit, Mlle. Petite being traded for a couple of our men. I rowed them out to the _Phoenix_ and had to shove her up the boarding ladder, as she was quite incapacitated by fright. We tumbled her onto the deck, where she promptly became sick from the motion at anchor. Each time she recovered slightly and attempted to go below, the mal de mer returned, which, combined with her embarrassment, reduced her to a state of mute despair. Barbara’s halting French was inadequate to reassure or comfort her, and at last it appeared that the only remedy was to get her back to shore.

Reversing ourselves, we tried to get her into the dinghy. The bay was choppy, and she again petrified, this time clinging desperately to the ladder even when her feet were in the dinghy. The edge of the dinghy caught under the bottom of the ladder and promptly swamped, swamping with it two rather irritated people—the Skipper and Ted, whom we had turned out of his bunk to help us. We clambered on deck, righted and bailed the dinghy, brought it around again, unclenched Mlle. Petite’s fists from the ladder, and dumped her with scant ceremony onto the center thwart. With firm instructions to “Restez la!” Barbara rowed her ashore, to await the exchange of hostages.

Four hours later Barbara returned to the ship, minus Mlle. Petite but with the rest of our crew.

“What did you do all that time?” I asked her.

“Walked!” she snapped, showing some very convincing blisters.

“Did you improve your French?”

“Improve it!” she said bitterly. “How could I? I couldn’t understand a word she said, and she couldn’t understand me!”

We decided to stop the next day in Dominica, a British possession just 50 miles upwind, which is not too accessible to the tourist. It promised to be a good day’s sail, so we weighed anchor at Fort de France at dawn, passing Saint-Pierre Bay by 0730. Crossing the Dominica Channel in moderate seas, we passed close up the west coast of the island and anchored in Roseau Road by midafternoon. Since the bottom slopes steeply here, it was necessary to come close in. By 1500 we were cleared and on our way ashore.

It was obvious, from the attention we commanded at Roseau, that visitors are much less common here than in Barbados and Martinique. A herd of small boys waited at the dock and vied for permission to “look after” our dinghy—which they did by overloading it almost to sinking point and rowing happily around the harbor. A sizable crowd followed us around as we wandered through the narrow streets where we heard our first West Indian calypso singers—on a jukebox. When we returned to the dock we crossed thirteen eager palms with copper in order to ransom our dinghy. Several older boys applied eagerly for a berth on the _Phoenix_. “I work for you _cheap_,” one pleaded.

“I work _more_ cheap!” another countered.

Ted grinned at them as we shoved off. “We’ve already got a crew that works _most_ cheap,” he told them. “For nothing!”

Though we found Roseau attractive and worth exploring further, we decided to move on the next day to Portsmouth, another 20 miles up the coast. That evening, after dropping the hook, we had a swim in the beautifully clear water of Portsmouth Bay and then spent a wonderful evening aboard, playing Hawaiian and Tahitian records.

The next morning we went ashore. It was market day, which meant an unusual bustle in town, or so we were told by the young Britisher in Barclay’s Bank, a one-room, clapboard shack at the end of the dock. We visited the open-air market and had the pleasure of buying an entire stalk of bananas for “30 cents Bee-wee” (B.W.I.), or about 24 cents American. My most vivid memory of Portsmouth is of three young girls, with shining black skin and kinky hair, strolling home from market, each wearing a hand of green bananas on her head, like a hat.

During the day we stopped frequently to drink “punch,” which turned out to be made with the local rum. Punch, at 10 cents B.W.I., was by far the most economical drink, as soft drinks cost 14 cents, gin and brandy 18 cents a shot, and beer a prohibitive 42 cents.

A couple of little girls attached themselves to Jessica and followed her about all day. Instead of asking (or demanding) “few cents,” as children had done during our tour of Roseau, they asked, wistfully, if we had “an old dress.” When we said we could probably find something, their faces lighted like a sunrise.

“I bring you something!” one promised. “I bring you coconut!”

Sure enough, when Barbara came ashore later with several worn and outgrown garments, the two little girls met us at the docks with a coconut, three limes, and five nutmegs—all that they had.

Our next port was the British island of Antigua (pronounced an-tee-ga, and not, to our dismay, a rhyme for “what a pig you ah,” as we had been fondly chanting). We were looking forward to spending several days at Nelson’s Dockyard, in famous English Harbor, so Larry Foley, whose vacation was running out, decided to do the rest of his island hopping by air.

We sailed from Dominica about sundown, setting a course which would take us up the west coast of Guadeloupe during the night. By 0600 we had put that island astern, in spite of a light and fickle breeze in the lee, which kept up most of the night nursing us along, and Montserrat was almost abeam to port. We were finding that Caribbean cruising, as many yachtsmen had discovered before us, has much of beauty and fascination to recommend it. Almost never were we out of sight of at least one island, mountainous and green, each one unique in itself. Only a growing eagerness to reach our own shores, after six years in foreign lands, kept us from stopping everywhere and lingering indefinitely.

The entrance to English Harbor is not too easy to spot from the sea, and even after we had identified its landmarks and knew from the charts that a harbor would open up sharply to port after making the narrow entrance, it took an act of faith to approach what looked like certain disaster. The directions had also been quite right in saying that a head wind usually blows through the pass and that an engine is desirable. It was.

At English Harbor we found a spot so hospitable, so historic, and so quietly relaxing that, for the first time in our mad rush homeward, we were tempted to linger. As Jessica said, it was like _living_ in a museum, for we were surrounded by buildings which had been erected at the time of the British-American “incident” of 1776. A few hundred yards from the _Phoenix_ was the Admiral’s House, where the commanding officer resided when English Harbor was the naval fortress of the British West Indies and Nelson was a young lieutenant.

Jessica had a wonderful time scraping around in the dirt of the ruins and coming up with likely-looking coins and buttons. One coin turned out, upon polishing, to be a beaten-up halfpenny of 1954, but a brass button, bearing a crown and anchor, looked sufficiently authentic to have dropped from the cuff of Nelson himself.

There is no village at English Harbor, no stores, and no accommodations for overnight guests. A single family, the Nicholsons, live in what was once the “Pay Office.” They had arrived nine years earlier in their own yacht, _Mollihawk_, from England and stayed on as “squatters” in the ruins. Now, with their tenure officially recognized and their untiring contributions to the restoration of a historic site commended and encouraged, they remain the sole permanent residents.

From English Harbor we made another overnight hop, this time to St. Martin (or St. Maarten, as the Dutch spell it), an island which is amicably shared by two European powers. The apocryphal story goes that a Dutchman and an officer from a French ship set foot on the island simultaneously. Each laid claim to it, but they agreed to settle the argument by walking in opposite directions from a given point, meeting on the other side of the island. The Frenchman, who walked faster, had secured the larger northern section, but the Dutchman gained the land containing the salt flats, which yield the principal staple of the island.

There is a sand bar across the entrance to the bay fronting Philipsburg, so we entered cautiously, watching the color of the water and sounding as we went. Once inside, we anchored just off the town and were quickly and efficiently cleared by officials who spoke absolutely correct English. We found Philipsburg an exceptionally clean and attractive little town. Jessica and Barbara, who went off for a walk by themselves, claim they even saw women sweeping the beaches. The rest of us were somewhat more interested in looking for a cold drink, but found that because we had arrived on a Sunday no cafés or shops were open. So we strolled the streets, greeted the villagers—who always smiled and gave us a hearty “Good day” in English—visited the salt flats, and wandered back to the beach to meet the girls.

The next noon we left St. Martin, bound for the American Virgin Islands. Twenty-four hours later we had covered the 120 miles and dropped anchor just off King’s Dock in Charlotte Amalie, the port of St. Thomas. With the national ensign and our yellow quarantine flag flying briskly, we waited to be cleared.

Two hours later we were still waiting. There was plenty of activity ashore and we could see officials moving about, but none of the activity seemed to be directed toward us, nor did we get any signals. Finally we upped anchor and motored over to Long Bay, where we could see many yachts at anchor. No sooner had we arrived and anchored within happy hailing distance of the Carstarphens, of _Shellback_ (fellow members of the Seven Seas Cruising Association whom we had long been waiting to meet), than a peremptory message was sent out from shore: “Return to King’s Wharf and go up to the dock!”

With our quarantine flag still flying, we headed back across the bay and nudged our way in among a flotilla of interisland boats, a very tricky procedure. There was less than a foot of clearance between the _Phoenix_ and her neighbors when we finally tied up at the dock.

Eventually we were boarded by an immigration official, who seemed extremely irked because we had not come in at once. Being in an irritatingly mellow mood for once, I did not get my back up but only pointed out mildly that a ship entering from a foreign port does not usually dock until told to do so. We had been waiting to be boarded.

“How could we come out?” the official responded angrily. “We don’t have a boat!”

This seemed a good reason, but I wondered why the Coast Guard, which had three boats tied up alongside the dock, could not be induced to offer the services of one of them to Immigration. Meanwhile Barbara joined with me in applying the soothing treatment to our visitor, by serving tea and cookies, and although he made it difficult, we remained almost unbearably pleasant. At length he was sufficiently mollified to say that we might consider ourselves officially entered.

Once again we motored over to Long Bay and this time were allowed to stay.

Charlotte Amalie combines the bizarre tourist atmosphere of a Waikiki with the indolent, quaint flavor of an old Danish town revamped for a modern age. The stores, remodeled in what used to be warehouses, are deep, cool caverns with great steel doors that fold back by day and close to form a solid wall at night. Inside are subdued lights, tasteful decorations, and a display of wares from all over the world. Because St. Thomas is a free port, it is possible to buy luxury items at substantial saving: perfumes from France, clocks and music boxes from Switzerland, Swedish crystal, Danish silverware, tweeds and cashmeres from Britain, and of course liquor and tobacco from any country you care to name.

At the invitation of our fellow yachtsmen we spent one evening in a night-clubbing expedition to hear the renowned “steel bands” of the West Indies. The instruments themselves are ingenious—being fashioned from the cross section of a large steel oil drum, open at the bottom. Some drums are shallow, some deep, and each is made by the individual player, who tunes it by heating the drum until the metal is soft, and then pounding it until he acquires the exact tone he desires. The actual musical quality of such an instrument is a matter of opinion, but the combined effect of a number of them playing in concert is certainly unusual.

It was fun for an evening, but for me once was enough. The pleasure seemed highly artificial, and I suspected that most of the people packed into the room were there not because they actually enjoyed the heat and the noise and the crowd but because they had never learned how to find pleasure in themselves as individuals—only as members of a swarm. By contrast, I found myself recalling (and looking forward to) our peaceful evenings at sea, with familiar constellations wheeling overhead, the soft slap of the waves against the side, and a game of Twenty Questions or an animated discussion to unite my family in a contented, self-sufficient whole.

We sailed on May 20, bound for NEW YORK CITY, as Jessica announced in very large letters in her journal. Ever since leaving South Africa she had been getting more and more impatient to reach “home,” to renew contact with friends whom she had not seen in six years but who remained as dear to her as her family. One of them, indeed, Joan Clark, was her avowed “blood sister”—they had pricked their fingers and exchanged red smears by mail to prove it; and the first six months of 1957 had been designated, by Jessica: “January, February, March, April, May, JOAN!”

Our first four days were pleasant and we made good distance but as we worked our way out of the friendly trades our speed fell light. The sixteenth day marked our smallest run, when we recorded 16 miles made good. Most of the night was spent in slatting around, which is most unpleasant, as the wear on the gear and sails is excessive, due to the constant motion, and the noise is irritating.

We were sailing slightly to the west of the Sargasso Sea area and a new problem arose—keeping the rotator log free of floating Sargasso weed, which we passed in great patches. Another annoyance that was becoming well-nigh unbearable was bugs. We had gradually accumulated every kind and variety known to man: cockroaches, small, medium, and huge; biting ants, ants with wings, and ants without wings; moths; borers; fleas and bedbugs; weevils; and an infinitesimal insect which Jessica dubbed “red mouths” because they were all red and all mouth. But I am exaggerating; we did _not_ have mosquitoes, sand flies, or hornets—although, as Barbara said, “We hardly miss them.”