“I expect nothing. So I am not ever disappointed.”
He waved at my newly installed ensign. “I fly the same flag. I am a grand admirer of your Mrs. Thatcher.”
“Are you?” That wasn’t the message I’d meant to convey.
“Yachts are full of socialists nowadays.”
“Really? Socialists?”
“But yes—socialists! You are varnishing your boat and the guy says, ‘May I have some of your varnish?’ You know? It happens all the time. They want your paint, your wine, your coffee … Socialists.”
“Ah, that kind of socialist.”
“I detest socialism. So I am glad to meet another admirer of Margaret Thatcher.”
We shook hands warmly in the fog. “You have such a pretty boat—please don’t tell me you are a socialist.”
Oread was the adventurous nymph.
Shortly after noon, a shining slab of rock, topped by a madrona tree, appeared in the sky overhead. A few minutes later, the lamppost at the head of the slip began to cast a stunted shadow and Sidney emerged looking pale and bright, as if in convalescence after a high fever. I got the engine started and unwrapped the ropes from the cleats on the dock.
To the south, a low fogbank, brilliantly white in the sun, and as solid-looking as the chalk cliffs of Kent, blocked the channel. The masts and top deck of a multi-story ferry showed above the fog, moving fast. To the north, rags and patches of fog clung to the islands, snagged in the trees. To reach one of the two broad channels that ran north through the Gulf Islands, I had first to thread the boat through an eight-mile obstacle course of islets, kelp beds, rocks drying and submerged, and a confusing thicket of buoys and markers. The exact direction of the flood tide, as it swept at three knots through these rock-strewn shallows, was doubtful, but it would be more help than hindrance, though likely to drag the boat sideways from its plotted course.
Half an hour and three miles out from Sidney, I was passing a rusty iron cross, not marked on the chart, that was attached to a drying rock the size and general shape of a hippo taking a mud bath. Fifty yards off, the rock sank abruptly from sight, but the iron cross remained, mysteriously, in view. It took me several moments to figure that a long white scarf of fog, only four or five feet high, was now trailing through the islets and had already covered the last buoy on my route, which I had passed, in good visibility, five minutes before.
Fog, says Lecky’s Wrinkles in Practical Navigation (1881), is “so very embarrassing at sea”—and never more so than when it suddenly enfolds you in a narrow channel littered with obstructions and in continuous use by ferries, tugs, fishing boats, and pleasure craft. As the iron cross faded out to starboard, I swung the wheel to port and brought the boat onto a reciprocal course of 170°, trying to grope my way back along the path I’d taken on the way out. The long bleat of my masthead horn went unanswered, and I raced downstairs to switch on the radar.
The radar, which had come with the boat, was elderly, slow to warm up, and tricky to use properly when I was sailing alone. The set was tucked into the aft-starboard corner of the saloon; to read the screen, I had to leave the wheel, dodge down the companionway steps, jam my head into the rubber hood, then race upstairs again, holding on to the memory of what I’d seen. In water as tight as this, with radar-echoes cluttering the screen in every quadrant, its use tended only to add to the embarrassment of disorientation in fog. But it was a comfort to know it was there: if worst came to worst, I could stop the boat, map the echoes on the screen, then match them to the chart up in the doghouse.
For now, though, I concentrated on trying to glue the number 170 to the lubberline on the compass as the tilting card shifted and wobbled in its bowl. From its mounting over the chart table, the Garmin reported that the tide was sliding the boat westwards; 170 through the water was more like 190 over the ground. I was relieved, though, to see that, running against the flood at a reduced speed of about four knots, our real speed over the ground was only 1.5 knots, which should soften the bump if an unexpected rock loomed under the bow.
Inching down-channel on apprehensive tiptoe, I had to steel myself against the tempting deceptions of the fog. The boat was turning to starboard in a circle, with the compass card apparently stuck on a piece of grit—no, trust the compass! The fog was swirling, not the boat. More than half a mile off, by my eye, a distinct horizon became visible—a dark threadline joining air and water. But a common loon, or huart à collier, coming up close under the port side, faded into gray within a boat’s length. The perceived horizon was a wishful fantasy.
I strained to listen over the mutter of the half-speed engine, and watched the water for the betraying ripple of another vessel’s wake. My feeble horn was joined by several deeper blasts, but they sounded consolingly far off; probably ships moving in the Haro Strait, three miles and more to the east. Though lightning-visits to the radar screen revealed no alien blips in the sea immediately ahead, I kept on seeing things: rivets and bleeding gobs of rust on the immense brick-colored plates of a freighter bearing down on me at a distance of around thirty feet; the dark stain in the water of a ragged shelf of rock, thinly covered by the tide. I steered, heart in mouth, between fog-chimeras, waiting for the crash.
I could hear the warning howl of the diaphone on Danger Shoal in Haro Strait. In one of the Alice Munro stories I’d been reading, a character described a foghorn, heard from inside a house in suburban Vancouver, as “the sound of a cosmic boredom.” I had news for that woman. The only time I’ve ever heard a foghorn exactly replicated in nature, it was at a branding at a ranch in North Dakota. Just at the instant when the red-hot iron was thrust into the calf’s flesh, a nanosecond before the puff of barbecue-smelling smoke rose from its fur, the animal did a pitch-perfect imitation of a diaphone in fog. There wasn’t a trace of boredom in it.
A moving blip resolved into the shadow of a fishing boat, faintly imprinted on the fog, but at a reassuring distance of about a hundred yards. Watching the depth-sounder, checking the radar, I felt my way cautiously inside the sheltering arm of Sidney Spit—a mile-long drying sandbar that ran out from the northern end of Sidney Island. Using the depth-sounder like a blind man’s stick, I tap-tap-tapped around a broad apron of ground in a steady fourteen feet of water, where I let go the anchor, switched off the engine, and found that my hands were incapable of striking a match to light a cigarette. They blundered about in the air, a pair of shaky fists, obstinately declining to take orders from the brain.
With the boat swinging nicely to its anchor, I sounded the horn. A mushy echo came back five seconds later from the invisible woods on Sidney Island, half a mile away.
Sound travels through the air at around 1,100 feet per second—a fact to cling to in this foggy and steep-sided part of the world. Indian navigators were expert at using voice-radar: letting the canoe drift in silence, they yelled into the vacant gray; the returning echo gave them their distance from shore; its sound quality told them if they were passing bare rock, a timbered hillside, or a cliff of sand and shale. In home waters, they could paddle from point to point in zero visibility, knowing exactly where they were over distances of many miles.
Until the 1970s, when radar came into general use, white fishermen emulated the Indians whenever fog closed in. In 1961, my friend and mentor Mike Wollaston went north for the first time aboard the gill-netter Alaska Seas, owned by Bob Kohlase. The two men, both in their early twenties, learned to navigate long stretches by ear and nose. Every ten minutes, they’d shut down the engine and sound the Cunningham air whistle. Each second taken by the echo to bounce back was reckoned as 200 yards—a cable. Then they tried to match the character of the echo to the topography shown on the chart, guessing at a forest here, a sheer bluff there. They followed the advice given in The U.S. Coast Pilot: “In narrow channels with steep shores the vessel can be kept in mid-channel by keeping in such a position that the echoes from both shores return at the same instant.”
Every so often, they’d get a welcome confirmation of their position from noxious or noisy features ashore. “You’d get the whiff of a cannery or a pulp mill. Woodsmoke from a logging camp … Waterfalls give good fixes. They’re precise on the chart, and you can hear them from a long way off.”
Fog breeds an anxious hyperalertness of the senses. The continuous danger of grounding and collision wakens you to powers and instincts you barely knew you had. Ears cocked, nose twitching, eyes peeled for the slightest movement, darkening, or differentiation in the gray, you find yourself moving like a wild creature. This is how the badger must feel as it prowls through the darkness.
On Alaska Seas, as on every fishing boat of that time, the Hansen Handbook was kept propped open on the shelf beside the wheel. Mike had lent me his copy to take on my own trip north: bound in bottle-green leatherette, the 1951 edition looked like on old family hymnal. First published in 1917, Captain Sofius Hansen’s Handbook for Piloting in the Inland Waters of the Puget Sound Area, British Columbia, Southeastern Alaska, Southwestern Alaska, and Western Alaska was used by every fisherman and towboatman on the Inside Passage, before radar made it obsolete. Captain Hansen reduced all the major routes between Seattle and the Bering Strait to lists of landmarks, compass courses, and exact mileages. His book gave you Alaska-by-numbers. Using Hansen and dead reckoning, you could safely ditchcrawl your way along 2,500 miles of chronically fog-ridden coast.
For his 865-mile route between Seattle and Juneau, Hansen gave some 350 changes of course. Here we are in Haro Strait, for instance, with Kellett Bluff half a mile off on the starboard beam. A carefully measured run of two miles on a course of NW ¾ N, or 323° Magnetic, will put us two miles abreast of the bell-buoy (as it was then) on Danger Shoal. And so it goes: past Turn Point Light, Pelorus Point, Canoe Rock Light, Mouatt Point … The margins of the text are crammed with the captain’s pen-and-ink sketches of the lighthouses, islands, headlands, waterfalls, cliffs, and rocks that mark the passage to Juneau, mile by annotated mile.
In rough weather and thick visibility, Hansen was the ancient mariner at one’s elbow in the wheelhouse. His voice was gruff and calming. “Start turn when light is 2 points forward of beam.” “Change course when light is 045° on bow.” His drawings of the passing landscape took a seamanlike, no-nonsense view of nature, as a string of signposts conveniently engraved on the hills. He boiled down John Muir’s romantic wilderness to postage-stamp-sized outlines, severely crosshatched, with little arrows pointing to their distinguishing marks. The sea in each picture was shown by four lines, closely ruled in parallel.
Hansen’s sketches gave his Handbook its engaging personality: they were dogged, painstaking, and free of any facile touches of art. Looking at them, I could see the captain squinting, breathing heavily, his fist bunched around the pen, as he peered through the wheelhouse window. Small wonder, then, that people were fond of Hansen and kept it on their shelves at home, as they kept no other, more official, pilot-book. Wanting a copy for myself, I posted an ad on the notice board at Fishermen’s Terminal. I got half a dozen calls in reply, from retired fishermen and fishermen’s widows. Each caller said that I could look at his or her copy, and perhaps borrow it for a few days, but it was too precious to sell. Years after the boat had been broken up for scrap, the Hansen Handbook, its pages crinkled with damp and ringed with coffee stains, remained as the last evocative memento of the annual voyage north; opening it at random could set off a flash flood of memory. Every secondhand bookstore in Seattle carried bashed-up copies of The U.S. Coast Pilot and The British Columbia Pilot, but none carried Hansen. The friend of one’s youth, he was not for sale.
Meanwhile, I was stuck in fog that thinned and thickened but would not lift. The beacon on the islet at the end of Sidney Spit made a brief, ghostly visitation, then faded out. The wake from something large rolled smoothly through the anchorage. I listened to it break, close by, on sand, the splash of the waves defining the shape of the beach. The town of Sidney was only two miles across the water, and I could easily have tapped my way back to the boat harbor, the Chinese restaurant, the gift shop, the next back issue of The Times. But the boat was safe here, displaced from the world in its cocoon of fog, and I was glad to stay.
I kept house: tidied the cabin, swept the floor, wax-polished the saloon table. By the time the last of the daylight drained out of the fog, leaving the boat in thick, furry darkness, there was a casserole, loosely based on Elizabeth David, bubbling on the stove. A cone of primrose light from the bulkhead lamp fell on the pages of an open book. I could hear the mooing of the traffic out on the strait, and the links of my anchor chain rearranging themselves on the sandy bottom as the boat swung to the tide. With the boat sashaying gently on a swirl of current, I poured a drink and settled down to read.
In this dreary and comfortless region, it was no inconsiderable piece of good fortune to find a little cove in which we could take shelter, and a small spot of level land on which we could erect our tent …
Sailing north, the crew of Discovery again felt the weight of their old cargo of bad feelings. The elation that swept through the ship when it arrived in the Northwest had evaporated, as the survey trips in small boats grew more repetitive and exhausting, contact with the natives became routine, the supply of fresh food dwindled, and the surrounding land steepened forbiddingly, offering ever fewer prospects of future settlement. The winds were fitful and contrary. The expedition hauled itself slowly forward through a blur of mist and rain. Spirits were low, tempers short. On the quarterdeck, the short, fat, florid captain put an increasingly frigid distance between himself and his officers and midshipmen, and the air was charged with acrimony.
Six months had passed since Vancouver ordered the flogging of Midshipman the Hon. Thomas Pitt, in January 1792, when Discovery and Chatham lay at anchor in Matavai Bay, Tahiti. The incident, festering in the memory of the ship’s company, wasn’t the cause of the bad feelings so much as the nucleus around which they cohered. When the gentlemen aboard Discovery tried to justify their dislike of Captain Van, their minds instinctively went back to Matavai Bay: to the moored ship rolling uncomfortably in the swell; the steam-bath heat; the full complement of officers and midshipmen formally assembled in the main cabin; young Pitt, stripped to the waist and spreadeagled on a gun-carriage; the lash in the hand of John Noot, the bosun’s mate.
Pitt had joined Discovery at Falmouth, the ship’s last English port of call, from the family seat at Camelford in Cornwall. Vancouver had looked forward to having him aboard: the sixteen-year-old was heir to the Camelford barony and a cousin to William Pitt, the prime minister. He hoped to inspire in the well-connected young aristocrat the kind of devoted admiration that Captain Cook had roused in the midshipmen on Resolution, twenty years before. As his naming of the Pacific Northwest betrayed, Captain Van had a middle-class weakness for lords and ladies, especially when their titles were linked to political clout in Parliament and the Admiralty. As a career naval officer, without a private income, without relatives in high places, Vancouver was mournfully conscious of the loneliness and vulnerability of his position. In 1796, he would complain in a letter to Lord Chatham that he was “as it were insulated, from all connections with persons of consequence.… I know no friend in power, on whom I can call.” So—on paper, at least, Midshipman Pitt seemed quite a catch.
But Midshipman Pitt in person was not at all what Vancouver had in mind. The boy, at six-feet-plus, towered over the man: languid, willowy, with a Roman nose and a petulant curl to his upper lip. Vancouver had fondly anticipated a manner of well-bred deference—head becomingly tilted downward, eyelids at half-staff, in the presence of a superior officer, et cetera. Instead Pitt (along with an objectionable quantity of luggage) came up the gangway as if he owned the ship, and spoke as if he’d absentmindedly mistaken his captain for a tenant farmer. Vancouver, always prickly, and too quick off the mark at divining signs of insubordination, loathed what he interpreted as the
boy’s loud, braying insouciance. The lieutenants on Discovery, who saw more of Pitt than Vancouver ever did, didn’t think him particularly difficult or disobedient. The general view was that he was larksome, a little wild, good company but sixteen.
During the voyage south to Cape Town, Tom Pitt emerged as the spokesman for the midshipmen—a further irritant to Vancouver, who suspected that his young gentlemen were being set against him, and corrupted, by this gangling, arrogant, offensive boy. Pitt, he believed, was behind every outbreak of juvenile roughhousing, as he was at the center of the games of whist and loo played for insolently high stakes. He had only to set eyes on the midshipman to feel obscurely taunted by him.
Pitt on the quarterdeck, talking to his cronies in his born-to-rule voice, set Vancouver’s teeth on edge. In every interview with the boy, Captain Van felt his own want of inches, money, social standing, and natural authority; and he conceived of Pitt as a danger to the good order of the ship.
Pitt fell asleep on watch.
Pitt, ragging late at night with two other midshipmen, broke the glass of the steering compass.
Pitt, on watch in the forecastle, failed to answer his captain when hailed from the quarterdeck.
The multiple offenses of Midshipman Pitt became Vancouver’s haunting obsession.
Discovery and Chatham reached Tahiti (then known as Otaheite) in December 1791. Vancouver had last seen it fourteen years before, as a midshipman on Cook’s third voyage. Nearly all the islanders he met on that visit were now dead, and the Tahitian women—remembered for their loveliness—now appeared to Vancouver as gross, unattractive, riddled with syphilis. “The extreme deficiency of female beauty on these islands,” he wrote, “makes it singularly remarkable, that so large a proportion of the crew belonging to the Bounty, should have become so infatuated as to sacrifice their country, their honor, and their lives, to any female attachments at Otaheite.”
Passage to Juneau Page 15
