Passage to Juneau

by Jonathan Raban

  In twilight I let go the anchor in Cornet Bay, just around the corner from Deception Pass; a scoop-shaped hollow in the bluffs, it was protected by a jagged reef that blocked most of the entrance. A heavy sea was running in Juan de Fuca Strait, and a good deal of slop was finding its way past the reef and into the bay. The saloon filled with noises. The anchor chain grumbled as it shifted, link by link, on the hard-sand bottom. The contents of the lockers rattled. Each incoming wave broke against the hull with, first, a muffled thump, then a long sibilance, like a sack of spilling rice. A loose halyard whanged against the mast. The lamps tipped in their gimbals, sending beams of light racing from ceiling to floor.

  Out of practice at living on the boat, I had forgotten its enormous complaining repertoire of creaks and groans, its capacity to make even a placid anchorage feel like a continuous small earthquake, up in the high 4’s on the Richter scale. This isn’t to disparage it. Being afloat gives me, at least, a heightened sense of being alive moment to moment. As small earthquakes do, it keeps you properly aware of your precariousness in the world.

  I cooked up a forlorn bachelor’s supper of dried linguine and Paul Newman’s marinara sauce, and uncorked a bottle of wine from the cellar in the bilges. Never before seriously homesick on my travels, I now was afflicted by pangs of anxious disconnection from the house on Queen Anne Hill. I badly wanted to talk to my daughter.

  I called the marine operator on channel 28, but my radio signal bounced off the high cliffs of the cove and went nowhere. My only answer was a throaty purr of static.

  As much for my own consolation as for Julia’s eventual entertainment, I slotted a fresh microcassette into the tape recorder and told it a bedtime story—a revisionist version of the tale of Kokwalalwoot (“Kokwalalwoot. Kokwalal-what? Nobody could say her name. They called her Koko for short …”), the girl who loved water.

  III. SAILING INTO THE

  SUBLIME

  The early morning was paint-white veined with streaky pink, like the inside of a mussel shell. Rosario Strait was ribbed with swell left over from the previous day’s gale in Juan de Fuca, and the boat rolled badly in the airless calm as I made the crossing to the San Juan Islands. Downstairs, all the loose bits of my life were on the move: books spilling from their shelves, a stack of dinner plates slithering back and forth inside a locker, the drumbeat slamming of an unfastened wardrobe door. It sounded as if a poorly executed robbery were going on down there.

  Feet planted wide apart, I leaned into the chart table in the shelter of the doghouse and tried to plot my courses for the day. Persuading the parallel rule to do its crabwise march from the penciled course-line over to the nearest compass-rose required some patience and cunning under these conditions, and being able to inscribe the number 283 beside the course was a small triumph. I measured off the miles with a pair of heavy brass antique-shop dividers (one minute of latitude is a nautical mile). I factored in the distortions that would be caused by tidal current, for the sea on which a vessel rides is always itself in motion; it’s like trying to walk in a straight line from A to B across a giant conveyor belt.

  None of this was really necessary. My labors were mocked by the push-button, digital face of the GPS mounted above the chart, its stubby black antenna summoning a continuous stream of signals from the heavens. The GPS knew exactly where the boat was at any given moment, could lay a course to any point on the globe, altering it as necessary for the vagrancies of tide and leeway, could reel off the distance traveled, the distance still to come, and the estimated time of arrival to the nearest minute. The affectless GPS—whose brand and model, a Garmin 45, made it sound like a handgun—was the midget omniscient narrator of my voyage.

  Yet I went on ruling lines with a freshly sharpened HB pencil. On one particularly nasty roll, the dividers leaped from the chart table and came within an inch of impaling my foot. The “hockey-puck” hand-bearing compass, worn round my neck, thunked me in the chest at metrically regular intervals. The pencil point broke twice. Doing navigation the old way in a running sea was no fun, and carried a distinct risk of painful bodily injury.

  I did it because the activity had a magical importance for me. It was a way of warding off bad things, from wind squalls to blocks in the fuel line. I had a deep, unshakable superstition that failure to honor the sea with this daily morning ritual would cause the sea to rise up and drown me. Using the old-fashioned instruments, hefting brass and boxwood in my hands, gave me courage and reassurance. I felt like a craftsman working at a real trade. Proud of my clumsy skills at the chart table, I considered them my entitlement to be at sea; and if I lost them, surely I would come to a bad end.

  Every half-hour, on the dot, I took bearings on three widely spaced landmarks and transferred them to the chart, where they converged in a triangle known as a “cocked hat.” In theory, the position of the boat had to be somewhere inside the cocked hat, which usually covered about a quarter square mile of sea.

  Then I’d look to the Garmin 45, whose latitude and longitude readings were spelled out to the second decimal place of a minute, putting the boat within about sixty feet or less of where it truly was. This made my efforts with magnetized needle and parallel rule look so approximate, so hit-or-miss, as to seem worthless. As omniscient narrators tend to, the Garmin rendered the hero of the story as a foolish, purblind creature, unaware of the surprise in store for him at the next twist of the plot.

  Once upon a time, people made their way across the sea by reading the surface, shapes, and colors of the water. On clear nights, they took their directions from the stars; by day, they sailed by the wind and waves. In the Homeric world there were four reigning winds: Boreas blew from the north, Notus from the south, Eurus from the east, Zephyrus from the west.

  Wind made itself most useful for navigational purposes by generating swells. Whatever the fickle gusts of the moment, the prevailing seasonal wind was registered in the stubborn movement of the sea. Swell continues for many days, and sometimes thousands of miles, after the wind that first raised it has blown itself out. Islands, because they deflect the direction of swell, can be “felt” from a great distance by a sensitive pilot. As the depth of the sea decreases, the swell steepens, warning of imminent landfall.

  Sailing by swell entailed an intense concentration on the character of the sea itself. Wave shape was everything. A single wave is likely to be molded by several forces: the local wind; a dominant, underlying swell; and, often, a weaker swell coming from a third direction. Early navigators had to be in communion with every lift of the bow as the sea swept under the hull in order to sense each component in the wave and deduce from them the existence of unseen masses of land.

  David Lewis, a New Zealand—born doctor who gave up his London practice to become a freelance ocean adventurer, sailed in the 1960s with some of the last traditional Polynesian navigators in their outrigger-canoes. We, the Navigators is his firsthand report, from the Pacific Ocean in the mid-twentieth century, on how sailors like Odysseus crossed the Mediterranean circa 700 B.C., before the invention of the magnetic compass. Most importantly, Lewis’s book conveys how the open sea could be as intimately known and as friendly to human habitation, as a familiar stretch of land, to those seamen who lived on its surface, as gulls do, wave by wave.

  Seamen. For the testicles were, Lewis wrote, the instruments best attuned to picking up slight variations in the rhythm of a swell—a sudden steepening, an interlocking of two opposed wave-trains. Rest your balls lightly on the top of the stem-post and feel the jaunting upsurge of the bow, then its sudden, precipitous collapse into the trough … As a four-year-old, I keenly anticipated the approach to humpback bridges in my mother’s lightly sprung 1938 Ford. Taken a mile or so too fast, each bridge induced a moment of exquisite, unmentionable pleasure; it was like finding a small but energetic tree frog trapped inside one’s scrotum. Had I been blindfolded on these car rides in 1946, I believe I could have identified half the humpback bridges
in Norfolk by my genitals alone.

  So did Lewis’s Polynesian friends feel their way across the humpbacked ocean. On these voyages, Lewis—a vastly experienced small-boat sailor—often found himself totally disoriented, as the wind changed direction, the sea got up, and the underlying swells became confused or imperceptible. Yet his guides could sense a regular grain in the roughest, most disorderly sea. Time and again they’d sail through fifty or more miles of murky overcast, without sight of the sun, and make a perfect landfall at—in one instance—a narrow passage between islands, breaking into sudden visibility less than two miles off.

  Sailing with no instruments, the primitive navigator knew his local sea in the same unselfconscious way that a farmer knows his fields. The stars supplied a grand chart of paths across the known ocean, but there was often little need of these since the water itself was as legible as acreage farmed for generations. Color, wind, the flight of birds, and telltale variations of swell gave the sea direction, shape, character.

  Here, where you feel the intersection of two swells, each deflected by islands far over the horizon, you make your turn … Now you search for toake, the tropic bird, and follow its homeward flight until the sea begins to brown with sand.… In Polynesian Seafaring and Navigation, Richard Feinberg, an anthropologist, includes a sequence of interviews with navigators from the island of Anuta in the Solomon Islands. One of these, Pu Maevatau, says of sailing under a cloudy sky that “the expert navigator … will make his bearer the ocean.”

  That sense of being borne along to your destination by the ocean itself is strong in Homer, whose voyagers are seen as creatures of nature assisted, or impeded, by the gods. When the gods are with you, the winds and the sea conduct you onward, like thistledown blown from wave to wave. For Odysseus, as for the Polynesian navigators in the books of Lewis and Feinberg, the ocean is a place, not a space; its mobile surface full of portents, clues, and meanings. It is as substantial and particular, as crowded with topographical features, as, say, Oxfordshire.

  The arrival of the magnetic compass caused a fundamental rift in the relationship between man and sea. Europeans were sailing with compasses in the eleventh century, and may have used them even earlier. Once the compass became established on the quarterdeck, snug in its wooden binnacle, the whole focus of the helmsman shifted, from the sea itself to an instrument eighteen inches or so under his nose. Suddenly he no longer needed to intuit the meaning of the waves; he had become a functionary, whose job was to keep the ship at an unvarying angle to the magnetized pointer with its scrolled N. First he steered by letters, E by S, W by N; later, by numbers assigned him by the officer of the watch. Holding the bow to the sea at a steady 195, the helmsman was performing a task that eventually would be done more efficiently by a machine.

  Such a simple invention, or discovery, the compass. One wet Saturday afternoon, I made one for Julia: we rubbed the eye of a sewing needle against a magnet on the fridge door; slipped the needle into a sawn-off drinking straw to make it float; and launched it in a water-filled salad bowl. Breasting the resistance of the surface-tension, the needle obediently swung slowly around to align itself with the earth’s magnetic field, pointing 21½° east of True North. With the sofa to the south, TV to the north, bookshelves to the east, and dining table to the west, I set Julia to walking the room on a succession of compass courses. Preschool Navigation: Lesson One.

  Possibly we were merely replicating, by mechanical means, a piece of equipment that we both already possessed somewhere in our bodies. A recent study conducted at the University of Auckland in New Zealand shows that rainbow trout have built-in sensors composed of magnetite cells, with nerves connecting the sensors to their brains. With a Pavlovian regime of rewards and punishments, the experimenters were able to persuade the fish to swim on any given compass course; for the food pellet, take 195. When last heard of (on the BBC World Service), the scientists were busy dissecting migratory birds, hoping to isolate similar magnetic sensors, and speculating that humans, too, might be born with such navigational devices, at least in vestigial form. If so, the classic description of Columbus, as a man implanted with a compass-rose inside his head, will turn out to be a statement of literal fact.

  But the external compass—the magic gizmo in a box—put man at a remove from his surroundings. A compass course is a hypothesis. It has length, but no width. It can’t be seen or felt (though once, perhaps, we could feel it, as the rainbow trout appears to). It cannot even be steered. The autopilot on my boat leaves a cleaner, straighter wake than I can manage, yet it keeps “on course”—as I do—only by making continuous mistakes. Each time the vessel falls sufficiently away from its heading for the autopilot to notice the error, the machine administers a corrective turn of the wheel which points the bow to the far side of the notional course. The wheel, attached to the autopilot’s motor by a strop, spins now to port, now to starboard, now to port again, making a monotonous hee-haw, hee-haw sound, like an ailing donkey. The real track of the boat through the sea is a weaving zigzag path whose innumerable deviations define the idealized pencil line of the course as it appears on the chart. Steering a compass course, by machine or hand, it is by indirection that one finds direction out.

  So the helmsman looked away from the sea, wedding himself instead to a geometrical abstraction that had no tangible reality in nature. Possession of a compass soon rendered obsolete a great body of inherited, instinctual knowledge, and rendered the sea itself—in fair weather, at least—as a void, an empty space to be traversed by a numbered rhumb line.

  Too little has been made of this critical moment in the history of navigation. Because the compass has been with us for a thousand years, we’ve lost sight of the mental revolution it caused. The figure of the helmsman, his eyes glued to the tilting card in its bowl, turning the spokes of the wheel to keep the assigned number on target against the lubberline, is an early avatar of modern man. The compass has turned him into a steering machine. He is the direct ancestor of Thomas MacWhirr, the dim, unimaginative son of an Ulster grocer who captains Nan-Shan in Conrad’s Typhoon.

  Bound for Fu-Chou, on a northeasterly course through the South China Sea, MacWhirr (whose name gives the game away) drives his ship straight through the eye of a hurricane. He has a timetable to meet, and a steam engine with which to meet it; and so he refuses to budge from the course of 040° that leads across the chart to the approaches to Fu-Chou. To MacWhirr, the compass course has become a blind imperative; he cannot deviate from it for a spot of what he calls “dirty weather.” Jukes, the chief mate, urges him to turn the ship’s head to the east, to meet the huge cross-swell that is the first sign of the coming typhoon.

  “Head to the eastward?” [MacWhirr] said, struggling to sit up. “That’s more than four points off her course.”

  “Yes, sir. Fifty degrees … Would just bring her head far enough round to meet this …”

  Captain MacWhirr was now sitting up. He had not dropped the book, and he had not lost his place.

  “To the eastward?” he repeated, with dawning astonishment. “To the … Where do you think we are bound to? You want me to haul a full-powered steamship four points off her course to make the Chinamen comfortable! Now, I’ve heard more than enough of mad things done in the world—but this … If I didn’t know you, Jukes, I would think you were in liquor.”

  MacWhirr is Conrad’s archetype of the modern technological mariner, blithely, ignorantly divorced from nature. His sea is a placid vacancy, its terrors conquered by the compass and the engine. Nan-Shan, built of iron at a great industrial shipyard on the Clyde, crosses the globe in inflexible straight lines, reducing the ocean to a neutral medium for the commercial enterprises of men as literal-minded and mechanical as MacWhirr himself. The whirling cyclone that Conrad brews up to engulf the stupid captain and his crew is the ocean’s revenge for the hubris of the steam turbine and the ruled line on the chart.

  Aboard Discovery and Chatham were t
he latest Admiralty-approved compasses, quadrants, chronometers, artificial horizons (trays filled with mercury to catch the reflections of sun, moon, and stars), peloruses, engraved horn protractors, dividers, rulers—all the instruments necessary for reducing the globe to a two-dimensional mesh of intersecting lines. White invaders from the Age of Reason burst into an Indian world of primitive, animist, sensory navigation. Naval ships and cedar canoes, though afloat in the same water, were sailing on two different seas. Whites and Indians inhabited parallel universes, and the behavior of each was a source of mystified anxiety to the other.

  From the quarterdeck, as from the launch and cutter, movements of canoes were closely watched and logged, though no one could figure what they were up to. “Canoes passing and repassing,” noted Captain Van, when Discovery lay at anchor not far from a big Indian village. The native craft were as inscrutable as water beetles in their multitudinous comings and goings. Full of obscure purpose, they paddled out to an arbitrary point in midstream, stopped for half an hour, then paddled off at another angle. They darted and scuttled, continually changing course for no apparent reason. Their insect-like motion, observed through the officers’ spyglasses, gave rise to many alarms: the Indians were preparing to attack; they were just being curious; they were fishing; they were visiting their neighbors; they were on some kind of aquatic picnic; they were mounting an ambush.

  Many sleepless nights befell the surveying expeditions in the small boats. Armed guards were posted around the tents to keep watch for canoes in the dark, and rarely did an hour pass without the muffled splash of paddles, low voices, stealthy silhouettes. Peter Puget spent half his time trying to seduce the canoeists into friendship, the other half trying to frighten them away. Often, scaring the Indians off wasn’t easy. One evening, camped on the shore of what is now Carr Inlet in Puget Sound, Puget was troubled by the presence of two canoes lying motionless in the water a hundred yards from the beach.