20,000 Miles South

by Helen Schreider

  About the only time we had any privacy was during the afternoon rain, when the children ran to the shelter of the village. The seascape became a striped vari-colored scarf with the deep gray of the sky, the faint outline of the dark green mainland, the purple horizon of the sea, the white of the waves lashing the reefs, and the emerald near the beach. And when the rain came it was like a waterfall. In fifteen minutes we filled both five-gallon cans, the gallon thermos jug, and all the pots and pans, with enough left over for a luxurious rain water bath and shampoo. Then with a piping-hot cup of coffee we crawled into the jeep to read and enjoy the solitude.

  It was for moments like this that we had so carefully selected our library, and now, ironically, most of the books were back in California. But the few we had allotted ourselves, Lives of Famous French Painters, Story of Philosophy, the Iliad, and Captain Horatio Hornblower, provided sufficient diversion for these brief interludes.

  Although each day the sky darkened and was filled with thunder and lightning, and the waves rolled into billowy whitecaps, the alcalde told us the real storm was yet to come. One afternoon a fishing boat took refuge in the cove near our camp, and the captain hailed us in English to come aboard. Helen and I swam out to his craft and reached for the ladder. That was when Captain Parker of the Sea Horse welcomed us with his gloomy prophecy, which he repeated even more emphatically after a closer inspection of La Tortuga.

  “I don’t wish you any bad luck, kids,” he said, “but you’ll never make it. No, sir, I’ve got ten to one bet you won’t make it.”

  At those odds we should have taken a little of that bet, but after being turned back by Hellsgate we weren’t too sure ourselves. Instead we comforted ourselves with the thought that he was just an opinionated old goat who had run his own boat aground on the reefs and prided himself on the fact that in forty years in Panama he hadn’t learned a word of Spanish.

  After that our island paradise took on a new aspect in spite of the daily encouragement by the alcalde:

  “Tomorrow will be better, and when it’s calm one can go to sea in the shell of an egg.”

  But tomorrow was always just as bad. We became restless, our sedentary life as beachcombers grew intolerable, so anxious were we to be under way. With the men of the village and those who stopped to chat we studied the charts, and they warned of the dangers ahead:

  “Go out around Punta Manzanilla; don’t put in at Cuanga; be careful opposite Escribanos; and circle the reefs near Porvenir.”

  They told us of their friend who had disappeared among the islands of the San Bias Indians. They cautioned us never to stop on an inhabited island—the opposite of what we had been advised in the Canal Zone. Also that we must never stay on any island more than one night. At the mention of Tiger Island, a possible stopping place, their eyes opened wide and as one they said, “No, no, the Indians of Tiger are very bad.”

  We had been on Isla Grande almost a week when the long-awaited storm came. The children playing in the sand near the jeep sang out, “Ya viene, ya viene [Here it comes, here it comes],” and ran. In a moment a gust of wind ripped the tarp from the poles and the heavy swells from the sea crested with white. The palms bent over, their fronds clacking and glaring in the lightning that cracked from the blackened sky, and thunder rolled like a chorus of bass drums. I resecured the tarp and dropped several large coconuts in the center to hold it down and form a basin for catching the rain that blotted out everything but the small sphere around us, and we climbed dripping into the jeep.

  All that day and the next the storm raged with but brief periods of quiet, when the air hung still and heavy with unfulfilled fury. With each new outburst it became more difficult to read, and we found ourselves just sitting in the jeep watching the tumultuous sea. La Tortuga began to shrink until I could see her as the alcalde’s eggshell.

  On the eve of the seventh day on Isla Grande the alcalde came to us and said that the next day we could travel. That evening, while the sun burst like an orange ball through the purple sky, the villagers came to say good-by, bringing fresh flowers and fruit. Except for cigarettes and soap they had always refused anything in payment. I asked them if there was any favor we could do them. One of the younger men said quietly:

  “You are friends here. Perhaps someday one of us will come to your land and you can welcome him as we have you.”

  At dawn we were up and preparing to leave. The sky was clear from horizon to horizon, the palms were reflected in the still water, and what had for a week been the surging mass of Hellsgate was a tranquil passage around the point. With both sides of the channel spotted with the white of the villagers’ clothes we eased over the reefs into deeper water and headed once more for Colombia, 225 miles away.

  Our schedule had included a short run that day to Nombre de Dios, another forgotten Spanish town, which had preceded Portobelo as a port for the Spanish galleons, but since the alcalde had predicted fair weather we continued past it toward Playa Chiquita, on the mainland twenty-one miles from Isla Grande, and, according to the villagers, a good place to put in.

  La Tortuga was performing beautifully, rolling a bit with the smooth swells, but otherwise very stable. Keeping in mind the instructions of the people on Isla Grande, we steered well away from the coast, watching through binoculars the waves splashing against the rocks. About an hour past the entrance to Nombre de Dios we heard a drone in the sky coming from the direction of Colón. Through the binoculars we could see the dragonfly shape of a helicopter. Helen took the wheel and I got out the handie-talkie and heard:

  “Hello, Turtle, this is Angel. Where are you?”

  I recognized the voice of Chief Karls, one of the Coco Solo pilots. We must have looked mighty small—even with the bright yellow side of the tarp spread over the top of the jeep he couldn’t see us.

  “Make a 45 to starboard,” I instructed. “We’re about a mile off your starboard bow.”

  The helicopter changed course and headed our way. Directly over us it hovered, the blast from the rotors bringing a mist of sea water into the air. Holding the receiver tightly to my ear, I heard Chief Karls again:

  “Stand by for a drop.” The side hatch on the copter opened and, like catching fish in a barrel, a paper bag on a string was lowered right into the hatch of La Tortuga. Inside was a copy of Time magazine with a story about our Panama Canal transit, and written in the margin was “Good Luck,” signed “Mrs. Karls.”

  Chief Karls’s voice chuckled from the receiver. “Look on the back cover.”

  Turning it over, Helen gurgled—a Cunard steamship-line advertisement read, “Getting there is half the fun!”

  We told Chief Karls about our change of plans, signed off, and watched the dragonfly whirl back toward Coco Solo. Those brief contacts with civilization were reassuring even though we knew that in a storm they wouldn’t be out, and even if they were La Tortuga would be more difficult to find in a rough sea than the proverbial needle in the haystack.

  As the alcalde had predicted, the weather was good all day and we made the twenty-one miles to Playa Chiquita in six hours, an average speed of three and a half knots. As we neared the sheltered cove by the village, a handful of Negroes waved frantically for us to drop anchor. Having been told on Isla Grande that there was a sand bottom, we kept going. When we rolled up on the beach, they scattered and ran, and it was several minutes before they recovered enough to come back and see who we were.

  That night another torrential rain fell, and the next morning the sky was dull and gray with a steady drizzle, but what little wind there was was from the land. The villagers said no storm that day so we left early to reach Porvenir, twenty-five miles away. It was a longer run than we had wanted, but we were trying to make up for the time lost on Isla Grande.

  Up to that time we had had no difficulty conversing with the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of the coast, but from Porvenir for more than a hundred miles we would be in San Bias Indian territory, where the Indians’ own dialect, Cuna, was spoken
. From what we had been told in Panama City, we would have to use signs or, if we were lucky, we might find one of the men who had been to the Canal Zone to work and knew a few words of English. With more than four centuries of isolationism the San Bias Indians had acquired a hostile reputation for acts that were natural results of atrocities by the conquistadores in the fifteen hundreds, and the French Huguenots in the seventeen hundreds. The last outbreak came in 1923, when the Indians revolted against the Panamanians for unjust treatment and abuse, and massacred some two hundred officials, as well as their consorts and progeny. After a treaty was signed, the Indians were given the right to self-government with no intrusion beyond Porvenir, the island of the Panamanian administrator. Our route would take us among the more than three hundred islands of the San Bias group.

  The rain that had fallen since early morning stopped about noon, and as the wind from the land shifted the long swells turned into short choppy waves that slapped the blunt bow of the jeep and splashed back over the muffler and windshield. With the change in the sea the jeep pitched more violently, rocking and yawing until Dinah, usually content to sleep on the bunk, stuck her nose out the window for some fresh air. Helen scrambled through the medical supplies for Dramamine and we each took a tablet while we were still able to swallow. Although La Tortuga spent a good portion of the time with her bow submerged, when I engaged the power-operated bilge pump little water was ejected from the outlet beside my seat. With each hour we gained more confidence in our amphibious apartment.

  After eight hours we were still several miles from Point San Bias, where we would change course for Porvenir. Though we were still pumping periodically and apparently taking on no water, La Tortuga seemed more sluggish than usual, and seemed to be settling deeper in the sea. It was not until water seeped through the floor boards that I realized that we were slowly sinking. No wonder that no water had been coming from the bilge outlet. It was clogged. There was no place within miles where we could get through the reefs to shore.

  There was too much water in the bilge to locate the leak, but I knew it must be a small one or we would have sunk long before. We were in no immediate danger, but the sea was increasing. I unfastened an inspection plate in the floor board in front of the right seat and inserted the hand bilge pump. For the next two hours Helen and I alternated pumping. When we rounded Point San Bias, there was only a small stream of oily water flowing from the hose of the hand bilge pump.

  In keeping with beachcomber tradition, I had not shaved since leaving Coco Solo nine days before, and Helen had been chiding me with the Burma Shave slogan, “If Crusoe’d kept his chin more tidy he might have had a lady Friday.” Still a half hour from Porvenir, she started again.

  “If you want to keep your lady Friday, you’d better shave. Besides, you want to be presentable when you meet the officials on Porvenir. They could refuse us permission to continue.”

  I wasn’t too concerned about losing my lady Friday—there wasn’t anyplace she could go—but the thought of the officials persuaded me. “Okay,” I grumbled, “but it will spoil a wonderful passage of time sequence for our movies. Are you sure you understand how to approach the channel to Porvenir? The last time I tried to clean up aboard ship you nearly threw me in the river.”

  There were two entrances to Porvenir: one, with no reefs, for strangers, and the other, about five miles shorter, for those who knew their way. The latter was a narrow meandering channel lined with coral to the surface on either side. We planned on taking the longer way. We studied the chart together, and Helen assured me that she knew which island to sight on and at which point to turn. Sadly I began scraping away with salt water soap and Dinah’s pan full of ocean. I was just half shaved when Helen let out a dismayed wail. “Frank, we’re in the wrong channel.”

  We weren’t in the wrong channel. We weren’t in any channel at all. We were in the middle of a bed of coral. I climbed out on the bow with the bamboo pole and pushed off, searching for the entrance to the channel. When a short bull-necked native paddled near in a cayuca, I hailed him in Spanish:

  “Where’s the channel to Porvenir?”

  He looked at me blankly so I tried it in English, but still no response. I made motions with my hands, but he paddled away, leaving us to figure it out for ourselves. After running up on the coral three times we found a patch of clear water and headed cautiously toward Porvenir, a half mile away. When we reached the deeper water near the dock three uniformed men signaled us to drop anchor, but the beach was clear and I had to get ashore to fix the leak and the bilge pump. Dragging a harvest of seaweed, I steered La Tortuga up onshore to where the three men had increased to a dozen, most of them armed. Leading the group was a short, mustached, swarthy-skinned fellow in a soiled white suit. One look at them and I knew that Helen needn’t have been concerned about my being unshaven.

  Expecting at least a civil greeting, I introduced myself, told them our destination, and asked permission to spend the night. They acted as if they hadn’t heard me. The fellow in the white suit drew himself up to his full five feet three, and with an air as if he were pounding his chest he said, “I am the secretary to the administrator. I am in charge here in his absence.”

  I groaned inwardly. We had had experience enough with petty officials who were given a bit of authority.

  “Excuse me, Excellente,” I said. “With your kind permission we would like to spend the night and continue through the San Bias Islands tomorrow morning.”

  “There are no accommodations here.”

  “We aren’t expecting any; we have our own.” I opened the door of the jeep so he could see the bunks inside. Then I produced a letter of introduction that had been given to us by the Governor of Colón.

  “Perhaps this will explain our presence.”

  Before White Suit could read the letter a uniformed man with a Sam Browne belt and a .45 pistol stepped forward. “You have to have my permission too. I am the Captain of the Police.”

  White Suit finished reading the letter and with a sneer handed it to the captain, who looked at the signature and carelessly stuffed the letter in his pocket. Whereas before they had treated us as intruders, after reading the letter they made us feel like spies, which is probably what they thought we were. Every boat that entered the San Bias territory was required to stop at Porvenir for clearance. Isolated as they were, it was an ideal situation for a bit of collusion.

  “You can stay there,” White Suit condescended, indicating the far end of the island.

  Porvenir was a narrow strip of sand and coral with a half dozen wooden frame buildings and a hundred or so coconut palms. Our host could not have chosen a spot farther away from his activities unless it was in the middle of the palm grove, and then he couldn’t have kept an eye on us.

  By the time we were situated the sun was low in the sky. The trip from Playa Chiquita had taken ten hours, and except for a few crackers we had eaten nothing all day—we hadn’t wanted anything. But with the ground solid beneath our feet once more, our appetites returned, and we fixed a C-ration dinner of canned spaghetti and meat balls. We were still taking Aralen and vitamin tablets, although the latter had cracked from the heat. As we were putting things away we saw black cayucas skimming under sails tinted pink by the sun, moving over the green water from the dozens of islands that surround Porvenir.

  In a few minutes we were hemmed in by a horde of chattering Indians, their dialect sounding all the stranger in their excitement. I felt I was watching a spinning color wheel as they milled about us. The women touched Helen’s clothes and her hair and pointed, giggling, at her red lips and white clown’s nose—a triangle of zinc oxide. Helen was just as fascinated by their make-up, a black line carefully drawn down the bridge of their noses. Under their headdresses, a rectangle of red and yellow cloth, their black hair was cropped in long bangs. Heavy gold rings dangled from their noses and rested on their upper lips; four-inch discs of hammered gold hung from their ears. Around their necks were strings of brilli
ant beads and silver coins, and their arms and ankles were bound with bands of tiny orange and scarlet beads so tightly that the flesh swelled around the edges. Knee-length skirts were wrapped around their waists. With an exquisite color sense they had appliquéd orange, purple, fuchsia, yellow, and blue bits of cloth over backgrounds of scarlet to make primitively symmetrical patterns on their loose blouses.

  Inside La Tortuga, Dinah growled at the commotion. The jeep was getting its inspection from the men. Looking drab beside their technicolor women, the short thick-necked, barefoot men wore felt hats and nondescript pants. Their saving bit of individuality was their necklaces of barracuda teeth. They kept a good distance from the jeep until Helen took Dinah out, opened the doors wide, and with a gesture invited them to look. Screwing up their courage, they touched the tires, twirled the propeller, and peered inside, clapping their hands gleefully.

  About eight that night the end of the island cleared sufficiently so that we could go to bed. The next morning I inspected the hull for the leak, but there appeared to be no holes. The spring hanger bolts were tight, and the rubber seals were intact. I finally located the trouble in the waxed flax packing around the propeller shaft. A few turns of the packing-gland nut fixed the leak, but it took a little longer to remove the wad of Dinah’s hair that had clogged the bilge-pump screen. She had been shedding steadily for two months, and despite the daily brushing a good portion of her coat had sifted through the cracks in the floor boards into the bilge. While I had the floor boards open I made a general check-up and greased the fittings on the pump and propeller shaft, and added oil to the transmissions.