The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  As the crowd thinned out, Christopher suddenly realized that he had lost track of Boniface. Our boys had by now grown incredibly fond of Boniface and Mark, both of whom had the patience and the good nature to engage them endlessly in stick fights, wrestling matches, and games of catch on the beach. The minute Christopher saw one of them, he would automatically launch himself into their arms. Somehow, I was finding myself turning into a mother of five.

  “Mom! Where’s Bonnyboy?” Christopher had said in alarm, as if his special friend had gotten irretrievably lost among the throng in the matatu.

  “He’s sitting right beside us,” I answered, flicking my head to the right.

  Christopher looked over and saw, to his relief, that Boniface was indeed there, safe and sound. What happened next engraved itself forever into my memory.

  Christopher’s soft little white hand had quickly and quietly nestled itself into Boniface’s big brown one. It was the most natural gesture in the world. As everyone else in the matatu stared at this unaccustomed sight, I had the feeling that for that one tiny snapshot in time, all was right in the universe.

  We were down to our last days before setting off on the ocean once more, with only a few items remaining on our to-do list, such things as “do oil change,” “tune rigging,” and “buy cow.”

  Yes, we were in the cow business. Now that Boniface’s school fees were taken care of, we were seeking ways to help Hamisi earn an income. We set him up in a shark-tooth jewellery business, turning those precious fossils into jewellery that he could sell for a much higher price. During one of our weekly trips to Mombasa, Herbert and I had found a bead shop, where we rubbed shoulders with brightly robed, long-eared, and bead-bedecked Maasai tribeswomen who were, like us, stocking up.

  We had a great time choosing a variety of beads, clasps, and earring-making supplies. Boniface and Hamisi wasted not a moment putting them to use. Resourcefully, they used old shoe leather and glue made from sap of the cashew tree to attach tiny rings to the stone fossils and turn them into smashing necklaces and earrings. I donated my old sandals to the cause. We printed up and photocopied little cards to accompany the shark teeth, explaining that they were real, rare fossils. We bought some other presentation materials so that the treasures could be better displayed.

  Hamisi, who was serious and quiet, seemed ready to burst with pride as his new business took off. After the first batch of earrings sold out – to tourists as well as to Africans – he predicted that one day he would be travelling all over Kenya selling his jewellery to shops. We launched the little business for a total investment of one hundred dollars. In the first week, Hamisi earned almost thirty dollars.

  But with the extra funds that had poured in from Citizen readers, we found ourselves in a position to do something more substantial. Hamisi wasn’t interested in school, and we figured there was no point in imposing it on a family that wasn’t already convinced of its value. Maybe in a generation or two, they would be ready. After many meetings and days of deliberations, including advice from aid workers at the local office of Plan International (Foster Parent’s Plan), who had spent days showing us their excellent programs and helping us develop similar ones for our friends, we decided to buy Hamisi a cow. It would be the start of a dairy cow herd that would provide him with capital growth and a steady income base. There was a big market for milk in Kilifi, and Plan International was already doing similar projects with their foster families, so we all agreed that it was a good plan.

  Early one Sunday morning, we surprised Hamisi by walking into his village unannounced to ask whether he wanted to buy a cow that day. We were very pleased to see him already up and outside his hut, working diligently on making more shark-tooth jewellery. Hamisi packed up his jewellery-making supplies, and we all marched purposefully to the Plan office, where Kenneth Muriithi, the head of the Plan office, and Kalimbo, Plan’s professional farm adviser, were waiting for us on their day off. Kenneth had made the facilities of his office available to us, even though Hamisi lived outside Plan’s boundaries. “We’re happy to help,” Kenneth had said, “after all, your objectives and ours are exactly the same.” Kalimbo had gone all over the countryside on his own motorbike to find the perfect cow.

  Just as we were turning down the road to the Plan office, Herbert turned abruptly to Hamisi and said, “You do know the money is only a loan, don’t you?”

  Hamisi’s jaw dropped and his eyes opened wide. This is the first time anybody had said anything about a loan. He thought he was getting the cow for free.

  “Well, there’s nothing free in this world,” Herbert continued. I didn’t dare look at Hamisi, for fear of cracking into a grin and messing it all up. Hamisi couldn’t see what I could, which was that Herbert’s eyes were twinkling wickedly.

  “Oh yes,” said Herbert mercilessly, “this is a loan. And I’ll tell you how you have to repay it. You will repay it by taking good care of this cow, growing a herd, and making enough money from selling the milk to send your future children to school. You only went to grade eight, but the condition of accepting this cow is that you send your own children at least to the end of high school. If you do that, we will consider this loan repaid.”

  Hamisi’s relief was palpable, and he nodded his head vigorously. He was a young man of few words with puppy dog eyes, one droopy eyelid giving him a rather sad look except when he smiled his big, bright smile. He was smiling now.

  “Oh yes, I agree,” he said eagerly. “I’m planning to have a herd of thirty cows. When you come back to visit next time, you will see.” We had become very fond of Hamisi, who, it seemed to us, had much untapped potential and ambition underneath his shy and unassuming exterior. To the end, he remained quite deferential to us, continually referring to me as “Madam.” Even though we’d shared chili in the cockpit of Northern Magic, he couldn’t quite bring himself to address me by my first name. We had settled on having him call me “Mamma Michael” in the traditional fashion of his tribe, where women are identified by the name of their firstborn child.

  Two days later, we all hiked over to see the new cow. Hamisi and a brother had walked for six hours the day before to lead the heifer to her new home. She was eighteen months old, not quite fully grown. The cow gave us a great moo of welcome and followed us faithfully around. Perhaps we were partial, but she seemed to be a very attractive animal, as cows go, with great big liquid eyes and a pleasing light brown hide. In fact, I’d go so far as to say this was the nicest cow we had ever bought. We asked Hamisi what her name was, and he looked at us queerly. So we grabbed the chance and dubbed her Magic, a name she shared with a certain little gibbon in the wilds of Borneo.

  By buying Hamisi’s cow, some veterinary supplies, and the jewellery supplies, we had used up almost half of the contributions that had come in, which now totalled $1,070. We decided the most effective use of the remaining money was to establish a scholarship fund for Boniface’s family to give him and his brothers access to post-secondary education. Within a few weeks, Mark began attending a hairdressing college.

  We were now at the end of our intense, often heart-breaking, and ultimately rewarding experience in the village of Kilifi. As we said our final goodbyes to our friends, who assembled on the beach to see us off, hugs were exchanged, tears were shed on both sides, and promises made for letters, e-mails, and future visits.

  But this was only the beginning. Within a few weeks, even more people sent in money, more than six thousand dollars in total. Among them was a contribution from one young Ottawa family who, after reading about the plight of Kitsao, couriered a cheque for a thousand dollars so that he would not be deprived of the life-saving surgery he needed. A warm-hearted Ottawa hairdresser also responded to the challenge and sent in more than enough to cover the cost. “I cannot get their father’s plight out of my mind,” she wrote, “and with Christmas coming, I find it hard to justify buying presents when his life might be saved.”

  Thanks to their generosity, Kitsao did get the life-sa
ving surgery he needed. Those tears we had shed in the hospital had not been in vain.

  We were overwhelmed, awed, and humbled by the faith and generosity of these strangers who saved Boniface’s father’s life. Our having come to Africa could not have produced a better result. I believe it was in Kenya that we discovered the very purpose of our trip, the reason why our magnificent dream had pulled at us so powerfully to leave our home behind and come so far in our little boat. Maybe we were meant to find ourselves in that dusty little African village. Maybe we were meant to leave a part of ourselves behind.

  Perhaps that is why, when we finally made our way back out into the ocean, our hearts, once so weighed down by all we had seen in Africa, no longer felt quite as heavy. All we did was plink one little stone down a mountain. Maybe it would help start an avalanche.

  21

  Pirates and Terrorists in a Lawless Sea

  It was several months since we had last been at sea. We set out for Lamu, a town on the northern Kenyan coast. To our dismay, however, we discovered that we had all lost our sea legs. Every hour on this overnight passage trudged by as slowly and ponderously as a day. We couldn’t help but think about our next long passage, coming up so quickly, along the entire coast of Somalia. How would we ever survive days and days of this?

  We arrived at the entrance to Lamu Island exhausted, bilious, and feeling as though we had come through a storm. This was depressingly far from the truth, which was that the passage had gone very well. Northern Magic had fairly flown through the water. Our sturdy boat was ready for anything; it was her crew, too long at anchor, that was lacking.

  As we closed on the coast, we found ourselves in what looked like Arabia, with undulating brown sand dunes and hardly a tree to be found. A heavily loaded train of donkeys trotted along the base of the dunes, flogged mercilessly by their whip-wielding driver.

  The next day we went ashore among the huge gleaming houses that dotted the shoreline, looking like Arabian palaces with onion-shaped arches and shining white façades. Lamu was very similar to Zanzibar, both of them being old Arab towns. It featured the same warren of two- and three-storey buildings, seemingly leaning towards each other so as to almost meet over the narrow alleyways. The women were robed in black, and covered their faces if they saw you looking at them. There were no cars, so people went by dhow, on foot, or by donkey. We loved the donkeys, with their silly floppy ears and their attempts, mostly ineffectual, to go more slowly than their drivers wanted. It was up to you to keep an eye out for some heavily whipped donkey appearing unexpectedly over your shoulder as it made its way at high speed through the tangle of narrow streets.

  We were captivated by Lamu. But somehow we didn’t enjoy it as much as we should have. It was because something was hanging over us, something we dreaded but couldn’t escape. With each passing day, the prospect of our next passage loomed larger and larger until it seemed our emotions became entirely tied up worrying about it.

  We had more than one reason to dread this passage. The first was the sheer size of it: 1,600 nautical miles, the second longest voyage of our circumnavigation. Our recent experience with that rough and uncomfortable Indian Ocean had not led us to look forward to that ordeal.

  Another reason was weather: the winds where we were heading were notoriously strong, especially around the Horn of Africa. There was even a slight chance of encountering a cyclone.

  But what really had us spooked were the pirates. We’d gone through pirate country before, in Indonesia and the Malacca Straits, but those poor Indonesian fishermen armed with knives seemed like kindergarten pupils compared to desperate Somalis armed with AK-47S lurking near the coast and at the bottom of the Red Sea. There had been at least eight attacks on private yachts in the previous twelve months, two of which had involved machine-gun fire. Some years earlier, a yacht had actually faced a barrage of mortar fire and only escaped unscathed thanks to a last-minute rescue by the Canadian naval ship Fredericton. Attacks on merchant ships were virtually a daily event. More than once, we wondered whether we had made the right decision in going so far off the beaten path, on a route that forced us to trace a thousand miles along the lawless Somali coast. If we had followed the more traditional route, we would have gone up the Red Sea in company with other sailboats, would not have had to sail along Somalia, and would not have had to face these dangers alone.

  But no matter how we looked at it, we had no choice now but to go right through the ominous collection of “x ”s I had been marking on a map, one “x” for each recent attack on a yacht or a commercial ship, which were reported to us daily by the International Piracy Centre via Inmarsat. We just had to run the gauntlet and hope for the best.

  So our minds were preoccupied with preparing for a voyage that scared us more than any other had before. We made the decision to remove our radar reflector and not to use our VHF radio or our navigation lights in order to make ourselves as invisible as possible. We devised plans to protect the most important equipment on the boat. We found a little cubbyhole under Michael’s bunk that the pirates would be unlikely to find and stashed in it our handheld GPS, our handheld VHF, and our camera. We made room there for our laptop computer and satellite e-mail system. We had a dry run to see how long it would take to stow these things away if danger threatened. We removed our wedding rings, gathered most of our cash, and hid them in another place no one would ever find. We hid a smaller stash of cash and traveller’s cheques somewhere else, to sacrifice if need be.

  Finally, we all wanted to leave, just to get it over with. So, when every contingency had been thought of, prepared for and fretted over, when we were as ready as we ever would be, we set off. All we could do now was pray.

  Our route to Yemen and the Red Sea forced us to make a frustratingly long easterly backtrack around Somalia and the Horn of Africa. The Piracy Reporting Centre in Malaysia was advising all ships to avoid Somalia like the plague and stay a minimum of fifty miles – and preferably a hundred miles – off the coast. Anyone venturing nearer was in danger of being looted or taken hostage by armed Somalis who had lived the previous ten years without benefit of law and order.

  On the other hand, the nearer we stayed to the coast, the more we would receive the helping push of the north-going Somali current, which would shorten the number of days we would have to stay in these troubled waters. In the end, we decided that a sixty-mile buffer would provide both a measure of safety and one to two knots of current helping us on our way. As we sailed, we kept a wary and watchful eye in the direction of that unseen and unhappy country to our west.

  On our first day out, Herbert broke the little toe on his left foot. He stubbed it viciously, and the poor toe was bent right over on top of the next one and twisted grotesquely so the nail faced the outside. We weren’t sure whether we ought to attempt to straighten it ourselves or wait until we got to Aden in two weeks and have it seen by a doctor. We considered turning around, but it would have been several days of struggle back to Lamu against wind and current, so this was not an option.

  Over the next day, the little toe gradually worked itself back into a more normal position, and by the time we received e-mailed instructions on setting it, it had practically done the job itself. Herbert finally gathered the courage to make the final adjustment, twisting the toe so that its nail faced upwards instead of sideways. Later, he had it x-rayed, and the doctor pronounced the break cleanly set. But it hurt him for weeks afterwards, something we noticed most keenly by the volume of Herbert’s yell when one of us accidentally stepped on it.

  The wind was at our back, and the waves as well, so we flew up the coast. Northern Magic heaved effortlessly up and over the waves as they rolled under our keel, giving us the rush of a powerful forward shove each time. The winds were light, around ten to fifteen knots, but still we made great time, especially as we sailed north of Mogadishu, over the equator and in the northern hemisphere again.

  On our sixth night on passage, we spotted a big south-going ship, headi
ng on a collision course. Taking evasive action, we were highly conscious that we would be invisible to the ship until it was close at hand, since we were travelling without lights. The onus of watchkeeping was entirely on us.

  The ship was safely abeam, a mile and a half away, when suddenly a huge spotlight burst awake on its mast and began sweeping the ocean until it settled accusingly upon us. Clearly, the ship’s radar operator had discovered us and been alarmed at finding an unlit boat just off their beam. We switched on our masthead lights, which clearly identified us as a sailboat. The searchlight went off. It seemed they were just as twitchy about pirates as we were. We felt a little sheepish, being responsible for their scare, but considering that we were so much more vulnerable to attack, we felt our strategy of cloaking ourselves in darkness was more than justified. We continued on our northbound track, silent and invisible.

  As the days went by, the wind grew stronger, and Northern Magic continued to heave effortlessly up and over increasingly large following seas as they rolled under our keel. On Day Eight, sailing wing and wing, we logged 184 nautical miles, a record for us.

  On Day Nine, we were nearing Socotra Island, our first real danger point. Lying off the tip of the Horn of Africa, 235 kilometres from the Somali coast, Socotra had a long-established reputation as a hotbed of piracy. We had debated for months whether to head inside Socotra or outside, a detour which would have added at least four days to our passage and expose us to the North Indian Ocean’s most notoriously windy stretch of ocean. Most of the cruising wisdom suggested it was better to head outside rather than risk being spotted by pirates.