Not on your freaking life, I was tempted to tell her, and after a cartoon silence said, “Margaret, there may not be room for everybody out here, but I have a job to do, so there is room for me.” If there was space in the cabin, I told her, she should go ahead and take it, at which point she shook her head in disgust and disappeared down the other side of the boat.
Surveying the losses as food went into the sea, and with no hint of irony, Liz made one of the trip’s more memorable and endearing comments: “Boy,” she enthused in her beaming, childlike way, “there’s gonna be some skinny people around here!” While no one laughed or responded outright, Ernst could barely contain his delight in the comment, and I detected what I believe was a tremor of discomposure, perhaps mere amusement, on the face of one of several people within earshot who would have been quite happy to be among the “skinny people” of Liz’s innocent foretelling.
What I liked best about her comment, however, was not its unintended or inferred humor but her assessment of the ever-moving boat as a locale, as a place, a “here.” To this point in my life, I had too often thought of the Atlantic, its surface, as an expanse of infinite amorphous sameness, a place whose latitudes and longitudes, except in the extreme north and south, were more or less undifferentiable to a landlubber such as myself. But I had been wrong. Happily so. During the first ten days of the voyage I had been deeply impressed by the sense of identity, of locale, imparted to every acre of water by the positioning of, say, the sun and moon and stars, by clouds and horizon, and by our tiny vessel, invariably the center of the universe. Even the waves and whitecaps, always advancing and receding, permitted at least a fleeting sense of position and place. As did the horizon, which at sea level, seen from the boat, was never more than a couple of miles away, forming a visual partition separating us from the vastness of everything beyond.
The whales and dolphins too were in place in these waters, or were at least on their routes and rounds, guided by their own innate sense of global positioning. And we were now seeing five or six sea turtles a day, animals that likewise were on routes as specific as any flight plan from one continent to another. One had only to contemplate the sea floor, with its valleys and mountains and tectonic plates, to understand further that a sense of locale at sea, a sense of place, was more than mere poetics.
The sea turtles were a marvel: stolid and patient, working their fins in an endless slow-motion row as they stroked their way across thousands of miles of open water on their way to exotic islands and shores. From the boat, depending on the light, they looked yellow or rust-colored and, though they can dive to depths of up to 3,000 feet, were most often just an inch or two beneath the surface, sometimes with their snouts up. While birds are thought to migrate visually, and fish in response to water temperature and currents, it is said of sea turtles that their brains contain an iron compound, magnetite, and that this, in response to the earth’s magnetic field, guides them on their routes across the planet.
What mystified us initially was what the turtles were eating out there—apart, tragically, from the plastic bags that they are said to mistake for food and which are ultimately fatal to them. Eventually I learned they eat everything from plankton to shrimp to the ubiquitous Portuguese man o’ war, a neon-pink jellyfish-like creature that floats on the surface, dangling deadly poisonous tentacles as far down as thirty or forty feet. We saw hundreds of them, bright little sailing ships as alluring as crib toys, and only later learned that sea turtles, in eating them, undergo changes of body and stool chemistry that make them more detectable at a distance to sharks and therefore more vulnerable to attack.
A more persistent mystery, meanwhile, was what the turtles were doing out there at all—a mystery not just to us but to scientists through the centuries. What is known about those that live in the Atlantic is that during their early years, aided by the Gulf Stream, they migrate from the beaches of Florida and the Caribbean across thousands of miles of open sea into the coastal waters of west-central Europe, then south down the coast of Spain into the trade winds and, like ourselves, back across the Atlantic to the Caribbean.
Unlike writers, only turtles with a flawless inheritance of brain chemistry survive to tell the tale. During a leatherback or loggerhead’s early years, if the brain’s proportioning of magnetite is not infinitesimally attuned to the ever-shifting forces of the earth’s magnetic field, the turtle on its initial passage east will drift too far north into waters that are too cold for its survival, or too far south, where there is too little food to sustain it.
While the first leg of a young turtle’s long round trip between the Caribbean and Europe can be accomplished in some 240 days, the trip as a whole, it is now believed, can last for years, including long periods during which the turtles take up semi-permanent existence in the food-rich waters of that part of the mid-Atlantic known as the Sargasso Sea. They can live to be a hundred years old and in the years following their gradual maturation will often resume their trans-oceanic migrations, perhaps part of a grand mating or sustenance plan or some heroically protracted effort to sustain their worldwide range.
From the turtle’s point of view, the mystery might well have been: what was Big Blue doing out there? What was any boat doing out there? Nothing in a sea turtle’s deepest inherited memory could possibly explain to it—could ever have explained—the sudden appearance some five centuries ago of large wooden whales and, eventually, steel whales moving across the surface of the tropical Atlantic on more or less the turtle’s own migration routes. From the human perspective, it seems astonishing that it was only 500 years ago that Europeans and Middle Easterners found the courage to venture out into the mid-Atlantic, which for centuries they had referred to as “the outer sea.” The Mediterranean was the “inner sea,” the safe one, a sea that had been enough for them for several thousand years—or at least until 700 BC, when the first Phoenician traders sailed west through the Strait of Gibraltar and down the coast of what is now Morocco. They did so in search of a vivid purple dye that the coastal dwellers had learned to extract from the murex snail—an elegant, fist-sized mollusk that lived off the coast in the vicinity of what is now Agadir. The Phoenicians had long traded for the dye overland, creating a demand for it among the rulers and courts of Babylonia and the Middle East. But they craved more than could be brought back on the long desert treks. So they defied death at sea to get to it and are said to have paid plenty to the coastal dwellers for the right to harvest it directly.
During the ensuing thousand years, the murex trade became so important both to the suppliers and to the Middle Eastern consumers that the mollusk is commemorated to this day on the Moroccan 200-dirham note, one of the fundamental denominations of the country’s currency, worth about forty dollars.
So the starting place for our journey was more significant to the history of Atlantic seafaring than we had known. And also to the broader coastal history of the Atlantic. For it was on the west coast of Africa, south of our departure place, that the earliest human beings first saw the ocean. During a period of hundreds of thousands of years, they had worked their way west across the desert and Serengeti Plain, arriving at the coast some 200,000 years ago. And from there had established the encampments and villages that are today some of Africa’s foremost western ports.
What is commonly misunderstood about the ports and coastlines of the Atlantic is that they are anything but permanent fixtures. Because of the endless eruption and expansion along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge—in effect the meeting place of two great tectonic plates—the Atlantic widens by three or four inches a year, as it has been doing since its formation as a distinct body of water nearly 200 million years ago. When I mentioned to Tom one day that the ocean was at one time just a couple of hundred miles wide, he said immediately, “I could have rowed it by myself!” And he could have, except that until a few million decades ago it was a toxic stew of chemicals that would have immediately dissolved his boat. It is because of this modest annual widening that the A
tlantic will, over the next 200 million years, evolve to where the world’s continents are rearranged and the Atlantic will be reunited with the planet’s other oceans as it was in the days when the earth’s entire land mass was a single great continent, Pangaea.
The Norsemen, we now know, crossed the Atlantic as far as Newfoundland in AD 1100 but returned to northern Europe, leaving permanent settlement to a brace of colonial brigands such as Columbus, Cortés, de León, Cabot, et al. These legendary explorers were for the most part brilliant sailors but greedy and cruel men who brutalized the aboriginals and in some cases their own sailors and subordinates. Cortés in particular was a despot, as was Columbus who, despite his reputation as an American hero and champion of the New World, was known to beat his men for relatively modest offenses, even to blind them or cut out their tongues.
Amerigo Vespucci, the first explorer to touch mainland in the New World, was a talented scoundrel of another sort, reputed to have made his living as a pimp in Florence before setting sail and eventually lending his good name to what is now the Land of the Free. His publication Mundus Novus, written when he returned to Italy, enthuses over the culinary accomplishments of the New World aboriginals, over their immaculate anal cleanliness (always a plus), and over their lurid and joyful sexual practices.
The first rowers to cross the Atlantic, exactly four centuries later, were a pair of Norwegian-born fishermen named George Harbo and Frank Samuelsen, who during the early summer of 1896 rowed out of New York Harbor, heading for England in a custom-built open dory named the Fox. Their aim was to attract the attention of the world and eventually to grow wealthy on the returns they imagined would flow to them on an international lecture tour to be undertaken in the wake of their crossing.
Predictably, the trip was a nightmare. The adventurers had just one pair of gloves between them, had no seat cushions and no room to lie down or even take a step for fear of capsizing their eighteen-foot craft. Getting what sleep they could sitting up, they faced week-long gales, thirty-foot waves, severe headwinds, icebergs, fog, aggressive whales, boils, blisters, bad food, then no food at all after their provisions and fresh water went overboard just a quarter of the way across. Luckily, a ship came along and took them on board, fêting and dining them before sending them off with renewed provisions and water.
When they arrived in England fifty-five days after their departure, the skeletal and exhausted rowers were greeted by a few rubberneckers and were eventually presented with gold medals cast by the owner and editor of the National Police Gazette, Richard Fox, for whom they had named the boat in the hope that he would back them financially, which he never did.
WHILE RELUCTANT to claim kinship with those courageous and durable wild men, I suspect that life on our own rollicking vessel was pretty much as precarious and unforgiving as it had been aboard the Fox. But you wouldn’t have known it on our eighth night out of Tarfaya, as we slid across mirror-calm water beneath a panoply of rising and falling constellations.
On the 2-to-4 a.m., Steve and I had a long, humanizing chat about, among other things, his boyhood aloneness and insecurities. He had grown up on Toronto Island but lived winters in the core of the city, where his dad was a librarian and his mom a social activist who twice ran for political office under the banner of the New Democratic Party of Canada. As a kid, he had possessed little physical confidence until, one spring during the mid-1960s, in his eleventh or twelfth year, a neighbor showed him how to hit a baseball, which he learned to do with proud proficiency. However, he had few chances to demonstrate the skill until one day at Jesse Ketchum School, in central Toronto, he stepped to the plate in an inter-class baseball game, walloped the ball to the fence, and began excitedly to round the bases.
“I got close to first,” he said, turning on the rowing seat, “and suddenly, as a joke, the first baseman yanked up the base, so that I had no place to go and they were able to tag me out.”
No amount of pleading to the teachers overseeing the game reversed a prankish injustice to which Steve responded with what he described as “a frustrated, angry, tearful burst of profanity.” The outpouring, aimed at everybody present, including his teachers, led to the principal’s office, to the strap, to suspension, to his dad’s intervention, to grudging reinstatement—all of this without any expression of understanding or compassion from the principal or teachers that might have restored an insecure child’s faith in a cruel and unaccommodating world.
He recalled with equal solemnity having purchased an entire box of bagged potato chips to give to the island kids in the hope that he might find friends among them. When they’d eaten the chips, he explained, “They tied me up, dragged me to my parents’ home, and left me on the verandah.”
In attempt to brace him, and as a bit of a joke, I quoted him the Robert Frost lines, “Better to go down dignified / with boughten friendship at your side / than none at all...” etc. He responded that the lines had been written for him—would I write them down? They were the first of several such quotations that I would scribble out for him: half-forgotten snippets of Auden and Eliot and Dickinson, and of the Winnipeg poet George Amabile, whose observation that “the heart of existence is untranslatable,” became for us a kind of mantra, a recurring point of reference, during the long nights of conversation.
Steve married for the first time during his early twenties, and now, at 3 a.m., on the high Atlantic, he suspended his oar, turned to me on the seat, and with barely contained glee said, “This isn’t for public consumption, but the day I got married I wore a baby-blue tux with wide velvet lapels.”
I said, “No wonder the marriage didn’t last!” However, it did yield a son, Jeremy, and eased Steve toward medical studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where he met his current wife, Janet.
Like Steve, she is a friend of mine, and as Steve and I spoke, the younger of their two sons, Nigel, was asleep within seven or eight feet of us, on the other side of the cabin wall. It was no secret that Janet had been anything but sanguine about Steve having drawn Nigel into this “crazy-assed plan” to row across the Atlantic. She said to me quite nonchalantly one day about a year before the expedition set off that it was “one thing for Steve to do something like this on his own,” and that if the boat went down and he was lost at sea, she’d be able to handle it (he’d had a good run, his insurance was paid up, thanks for the memories). “But if Nigel was ever lost,” she said, “I’d never get over it; I’d want to die myself.”
What had become obvious by this time was that whereas Steve was generally perceived to be Nigel’s support and guardian on the voyage, Nigel was at least equally Steve’s anchor, and I thought went a distance to keeping his dad balanced with his unwavering equanimity and his refusal to get caught up in cabin politics. In this he was an example to everybody, as was his quiet companion, Zach, a muscular, understated kid, a non-complainer, with a kind of “configurative” habit of mind. “Got any riddles?” he said to me one afternoon when he was rowing and I wasn’t. I had not given a moment’s thought to “riddles” in half a century. However, as I was about to tell him I didn’t know any, one of my great-grandmother’s was suddenly in my head, then burbling off my tongue:
I’m the beginning of every ending,
The end of every place,
The beginning of eternity,
The end of time and space.
“What am I?” I said, and within seconds, everybody on the port hull was fussing with possibilities.
It was Zach who, perhaps five minutes later, as I scrubbed at a few clothes, said quietly, “The letter e”—the correct answer but one that relative to the eloquent expectations raised by the riddle had always disappointed me as a kid.
I had never heard anybody actually “get” the riddle, so that from that point forward Zach possessed for me a level of eminence as the guy who got the e riddle—connecting him of course to my great-grandmother, who would have been impressed by his sagacity, as well as by the fact that Zach’s ribcage
was emblazoned with a tattoo the size of a street sign. The image morphed a range of spiritual and cultural symbols into the word COEXIST and was perfect ink for a guy who got along with everybody and in the summer traveled deep into the forests of northern Ontario, fighting fires, preserving the ecological COEXISTence of timber wolves and black bears and bald eagles.
OVERALL, we were still attempting to move southwest toward the Cape Verde Islands, where our sustaining hope was that we would eventually find our way into the trades. Before sunset on the night of our conversation, Steve had familiarized himself with the boat’s auto-pilot system, and in the middle of the 2-to-4 a.m. had gotten up and adjusted our bearing so that we were moving more directly with a westbound wind that was beginning to swell and to interfere with our rowing. The autopilot was straightforward: a compass with a digital readout, a handful of computerized electronics, and a rather frail-looking hydraulic arm that attached to a brace linking the rudders. The navigator had only to set a bearing (taken in our case from the GPS on the bridge or in Angela’s hideaway) and the little electronic pilot did the rest, compensating constantly for wind and current.
To be clear, Steve’s emergence as a navigator was his own doing, perhaps sanctioned by David, who as the boat’s builder had access to the controls. But it was in no way approved by Angela, our official navigator, or by Margaret, who assisted her with navigation. When Margaret came out at 4 a.m., she assessed the altered bearing and, undoubtedly aware it had been changed, promptly changed it back, making the rowing more difficult again. Steve, to his credit, was unwilling to see Nigel, Zach, and the others on their watch take the spanking we had avoided because he had adjusted the setting. As he rose from the trench, he all but leapt at Margaret on the bridge, challenging her on why she’d do such a thing.
“Because that’s where David wants it,” she said (the subtext of the remark being a rather hearty So shove it up your kazuzu).
Little Ship of Fools Page 11
