Little Ship of Fools

by Charles Wilkins

  As a young man Tom studied Berber carpet-making as it occurs in the Atlas Mountains, eventually became a carpet layer, and for forty years as such has spent ten-hour days on his knees, without pads, on concrete floors, often in Toronto hotel towers. One of the impressive results of this monastic-level self-torture is that he has developed a kind of natural knee pad, a callused thickening of the skin and bone, that reminded me of the knee pads of elephants and camels. One day in the boatyard in Agadir, while he worked on the tramps, I watched him kneel for three hours straight on rough concrete, in shorts, without flinching, while I lasted less than a minute before running for a knee pad.

  Of all Angela’s speeches to the crew, I most appreciated the one she delivered that afternoon, as the wind drove us with ever-destabilizing fury toward the west. We had resumed rowing—or rather poking our oars into the sea, hoping that somehow we’d be able to retrieve them without mishap. “OKAY, EVERYBODY!” she called from the bridge, where she could be heard both in the cabin and in the trenches. “It looks like we’re on our way, that this is it! There’s no turning back!” As far as she could calculate, we had a twenty-four-day supply of food for a journey that we should now be able to complete in twenty-two days.

  The latter estimate sounded rosy to me, but right now neither I nor anyone else was of a mind to quibble. “As for rowing,” she yelled above the wind, “We’re gonna do it when we can! I don’t wanta risk lives or injury! But with practice you’re going to get better in these conditions. Some of you are already rowing better!”

  She asked for questions, but with the exception of a comment uttered sotto voce about the weight of food still aboard, any of the dozens that might have been asked went unspoken.

  “I’m proud of you all! You’re an amazing crew!” she proclaimed in summing up. “It’s gonna be hard! It’s gonna be dangerous! It’s gonna be tiring! But I know you guys can do it!”

  At that point, as in a skit out of Monty Python, Angela called for “three cheers for Big Blue,” drawing forth one of the measliest expressions of confidence I have ever heard, really less a cheer than a kind of discharge, a growl of the sort one might expect to be induced by an exorcist. Anyone who’d witnessed it would have been convinced that the boat’s next solid landing was scheduled not for Barbados but for some spiny outcrop on the lightless floor of the Atlantic.

  14

  AS IT TURNED OUT, Angela was not far off in her predictions: we did get better on the oars. And it was hard. And it was dangerous—more so than I had imagined. Indeed, from that point forward, for fifteen days straight, we were pushed—and pushed around—by winds as high as fifty knots and by rollers the height of houses. The onslaught at times bashed the boat so relentlessly that, particularly during the next few days, I had doubts, as did others, that our eccentric little craft could possibly hold together. It wasn’t uncommon for a wave to roll right over us in the trenches or come up under the cabin and hit it with such force that from inside it sounded as if a grenade had been detonated beneath the floor.

  One person I had not expected to blow under the pressure was Liam Flynn. But a few days into the wild ride, on I think the 10-to-midnight, he took several awful dousings and quite suddenly ripped his oar out of its lock and, with a scream, drove the end of its handle like a javelin into the cabin wall. And then did it again, then again, making a terrible racket and causing me to think that he was going to keep hammering till he broke through the wall. But instead, after the third convulsive pitch, he flung the oar onto the tramp, jumped out of the seat, beside himself with frustration, and disappeared to the other side of the bridge. Meanwhile, it was a tribute to the strength of the resin-coated plywood that the oar did not penetrate it and spear either Nigel or Margaret, whose bunks, one above the other, were immediately inside that part of the wall.

  As the ride grew hairier, Dylan and I worked up a little exchange of gallows humor. “Isn’t it great that the boat hasn’t fallen apart?” one of us would say, to which the other would respond with vaudevillian gusto that for sure it was, that it was everything we could have hoped for—or we’d agree that boy, this ten-thousand-dollar cruise was good value, and we were just so happy we hadn’t wasted our money on the deluxe cruise, the one with the toilet paper and the better chance of survival, and so on.

  On the tougher watches, or in gloomy moments in the cabin, I occasionally found myself thinking about what lay below—mountains, valleys, impenetrable pressures and darkness; blind sea creatures so far down that they breathe sulfur gases instead of oxygen; and drowned seamen and the ships that took them to the bottom.

  Such vessels are down there by the hundreds. Because of the trade winds they are concentrated on the very route we were traveling, a kind of sailing lane followed for centuries by the likes of Columbus, Vespucci, da Gama, Cortés, Pizzaro—and later Darwin and Maury—as well as by thousands upon thousands of now-forgotten trading, passenger, and naval vessels, many of which went to the bottom. There were some 40,000 slave-ship crossings alone on the route, carrying 11 million slaves, between 1550 and 1860.

  IN THE GRIP of the trades, as Angela had mandated, we rowed when we could—essentially when it was safe. And as she had speculated, the periods of rowing got longer. By the third day of our new lives as swashbucklers, we were again rowing around the clock. And paying for it in bruises, battered backsides, and exhaustion.

  The following afternoon, a day on which flying fish were in the air in battalions, as I stood on the bridge in a kind of trance, a pair of killer whales arced out of the swells fifty yards off the port rudder. I remember them because at that moment, behind me, there was a hammering from within against the sliding cabin door which was sometimes jammed and needed opening from the outside. I pried it back, and the captain, whom I had not seen upright for a day, emerged onto the bridge in a kind of duck squat. As always, to get around the boat, she was wearing her leg braces.

  If she seemed distant or impassive it was perhaps the medication she was using to control her back pain, which had intensified with the increased pounding of the boat. Or perhaps for the moment she was simply floating free above her pain.

  In her hand was a green nylon bag of a size that would comfortably have held a pair of shoes. Protruding from its puckered mouth was a foot or so of orange neoprene rope.

  She looked at me as if at a rare insect and said quietly, “I want to review our man-overboard procedures,” and she asked if I’d help her get everybody to the bridge. The word “review” was a misnomer, in that there were no man-overboard procedures. At least nothing specific. At Shelter Island in calm water, we had performed a mock rescue when Ryan, under instruction, had leapt into the channel in a survival suit. But his rescue was really little more than a charade, certainly nothing that could be applied now. The problem was that during the past few days, the likelihood that someone might actually go overboard had increased tenfold—as had the odds against their survival.

  I summoned the crew, and a minute later a loose gaggle of them had gathered at the rear of the cabin.

  “This,” Angela said without enthusiasm, “is our man-overboard emergency bag.” She held up the bag, looking at it not as if people’s lives might depend on it but as if she couldn’t quite remember whether she had packed the pastrami. “In the event somebody goes over,” she explained, “all you do is yank the bag from the stern rail and let ’er fly.”

  The hope, she said, was that the rope inside, the near end of which would be knotted to the rail, would uncoil, all hundred feet or so of it, and that the person in the sea would be able to grab it and hang on. Suddenly, she was demonstrating—not with the bag, just with the coil of rope, flinging it into the wind in such a way that, at best, perhaps twenty-five feet of it fluttered off the bridge, settling in a loose tangle on the water.

  “Well, so much for that,” she said solemnly, adding that “everything flies better with the weight of the bag attached.” In other words, even though there were difficulties enacting a significan
t life-saving maneuver under no pressure, in full daylight, it would all certainly work better in life-and-death circumstances, in the dark, in the cold, in a gale.

  Almost as an afterthought, Angela informed us that the bag contained an EPIRB, which would, if activated, send a signal to people on land that a human being was in distress at such-and-such coordinates. The drearier awareness here was that in such a circumstance said human being would almost certainly be in the direst of straits, perhaps even without a life jacket, since he or she had been aboard a boat whose safety protocol could have been inked tout complet on a grain of rice or written out longhand on a three-mil chad.

  “May we see it?” Ernst asked in reference to the EPIRB.

  “Sure,” said Angela, holding it briefly aloft and then tucking it back in the bag.

  “How does it turn on?” asked Tom Butscher, to whom Angela responded that there was a button, “actually two buttons,” and that it took both hands to press them simultaneously.

  As she began fastening the bag to the rail, I said, “Wait, Angela! Hold on a second! Show us how it turns on.”

  “The two top buttons,” she said.

  “But you’re in the ocean,” I protested. “It’s rough, it’s dark, you’re confused. Am I supposed to have a headlamp and glasses on when I go overboard?”

  “Only if you intend to do some reading,” she joked. “There’s a flashlight in the bag.”

  “A flashlight!” hooted Ryan.

  “It’s waterproof,” she said. “It’s one of those you crank.”

  “So you need a third hand to do the cranking!” he exclaimed.

  “And one to swim,” added Tom.

  “If anybody wants to look in the bag,” Angela said, “it’s here on the rail. You can play with the stuff. Just make sure the rope’s not tangled inside.” And with that she ducked into the cabin and was gone.

  That evening as we rowed, I asked Steve if he didn’t find her evasiveness pretty bizarre.

  “No more bizarre than most of what goes on out here,” he shrugged.

  I asked why he thought she wouldn’t answer questions—or was it possibly just my questions she wouldn’t answer?

  He rowed a few strokes, hoisted his blade, and turned in the seat so that his voice wasn’t lost in the wind. He said, “What you were asking was basically how any of us is going to survive out there on our own, in high seas, in the dark, with no help and no protection from either the elements or the sharks.”

  I told him I thought it was a good question—always had.

  “The problem,” he said, “is that like a lot of good questions it’s one for which there isn’t any answer.”

  I was thinking about this when he called over his shoulder, “At least none Angela can provide. Thank God she’s honest enough not to try.”

  WITHIN FOUR hours, we were back on standing watch—at least through the wee hours. And the next day barely rowed at all. You couldn’t get an oar in the water. The good news was we were rocketing toward Barbados. After five days in the trades, we had doubled our mileage (another five and we would be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean).

  Hard though it may be to fathom, one of the more compelling debates through these early days of transition and thrilling new progress was whether or not our rowing was actually doing us any good, was making the boat go faster. There was a smattering of evidence, or at least conjecture, that sticking the oars in the water was in fact impeding our progress as we plunged along on the surf. On I think the fourth day in the trades, Steve conducted some simple experiments, measuring our progress during a ten-minute period of rowing against our progress during a ten-minute period while we were not rowing—all of it at equivalent wind speed and direction. He did this three or four times in succession, and came to the enlightening if disheartening conclusion that under these preposterously favorable conditions, rowing added a grand total of 0.1 (maximum 0.2) knots to our speed—in other words 4 or 5 percent. Meanwhile, Angela, as skipper, with her reputation as an ocean rower on the line, declaimed that the rowing was adding 1.5 knots, or nearly 40 percent, to our speed.

  I myself suspected that the tiny advantage of having rowers in the seats, oars engaged, was a matter more of “windage” or sail value than of the rowing itself—in other words that each rower, sitting upright, with oar extended, was catching sufficient tailwind to help drive the boat forward, even if his or her rowing did not.

  Steve believed that on days when the wind was coming directly from behind, we’d get as much or more speed if, rather than rowing at all, we simply lined up on the bridge, joined arms, stood there in our appropriately named windbreakers, and together impersonated a sail. Which I hasten to point out we never did. Where the integrity of our row was concerned, we were impeccable Popeyes, interested in cheating only the Reaper.

  The hard truth was that on our best day of progress—111 miles over twenty-four hours—no one rowed a stroke, or even got into the seats. It was simply too rough.

  Months later, Roy Finlay, with whom I have kept loosely in touch, emailed me and suggested that because no one had actually rowed on our best day of mileage, the Ocean Rowing Society was considering denying us certification for an ocean crossing. Which did not surprise me, given the society’s idiosyncratic and (in my opinion) rather self-serving standards. What did surprise me was to learn that the world record for distance achieved in twenty-four hours with a crew on the oars, full steam ahead, was just 117 miles, held jointly by the boats La Mondiale and Artemis Investments, both of which were captained by Leven Brown. When they set their respective records, both boats were being pushed by wind and waves approximating those that had been pushing us. Which is to say that some of the best rowers in the world were able to add just six miles a day, or 5 percent, to the speed we reached without oars. It was, as they say, a far cry from Angela’s contention that rowing added 40 percent to the speed.

  Not that I give a hoot about such statistics for their own sake. However, to suggest that the wind, with the waves it tosses up and the currents it generates, is not the most important factor in any ocean row is absurd. All crossings are current- and wind-aided. Or, alternatively, wind-deterred. Many ocean rowboats get hung up on sea anchor for several days, during which no rowing takes place, or get tossed around to such a degree that rowing can become impossible for periods of time. As it occasionally was for us.

  Perhaps the classic example of the effects of wind and current on a boat’s progress was reported by Ponce de León in 1513 off the coast of what is now Florida, when he found his ship moving alternately forward and backward, sometimes at significant speed, or sometimes standing still, under the influence of both a gale-level northeast wind and the varying strength of the northeast-bound Gulf Stream beneath him.

  My point is that under such unpredictable forces, to penalize one boat for a day of unavoidably missed rowing and not penalize a boat on which the rowers were able to be in the seats but were perhaps doing nothing, is amateurish and prejudiced, and, to my mind, renders irrelevant any decision the rowing society might make about our crossing.

  Fortunately, the temporal rewards of ocean rowing still amount to little more than a cheeseburger or two if and when you reach your destination—well, and perhaps half an hour of docking maneuvers if your sweetheart shows up to greet you. However, the moment any significant cash is offered to competitors, those in authority will almost certainly feel compelled to extend their paranoia about cheating into the realm of doping and urine testing and onboard surveillance cameras, and will eventually ruin what innocence might be left to the sport if they’d just leave it alone and let it breathe.

  Beyond all of this, I might add, there was from the beginning a supposition among those who follow the sport that our cabin gave us a “sailing” advantage, which is to say it caught wind. And undoubtedly it did. And yet our true bursts of progress (like a surfer’s) came not from wind directly but from individual waves, some of which pushed us briefly to twelve or thirteen knots, as
Angela would invariably holler out.

  I told Roy I thought the society’s position was a steaming heap. Not that it disheartened me particularly. If anything, it made me appreciate our effort all the more. And our motley little crew. And our boat—our lovely ugly duckling of a boat, which, from the first time I saw her in the boatyard at Shelter Island, had possessed for me a kind of magic. Over the years, I had loved many: a seaflea called Go Man Go that as a kid I worshipped at a neighbor’s boat slip on Clear Lake in Muskoka; a mahogany launch called the Rocket, built by my Uncle Clive in 1950 on the Muskoka River at Bracebridge; a Norwegian mahogany sailing dinghy with a blue gaff-rigged sail, given to me by my parents on my twelfth birthday and still in my possession; a twelve-foot Humber Jewel, the most elegant fiberglass runabout ever made, owned by my sister Ann and me and missed since the day I sold it forty years ago. I had loved them all. However, no boat of my intimate acquaintance had ever quite captured my heart like Big Blue—for its history and vulnerability and eccentricity; and for all it represented in terms of our commitment and effort and hopes. It wasn’t just that our lives were dependent on this extraordinary vessel (as they are dependent on any boat that takes us away from shore) but that they were dependent on it in situations where they were genuinely and imminently at stake.

  David told me that in the days before we launched Big Blue, people would come into the boatyard on Shelter Island and simply stare at it. Or would ask “What is it?” Or “Where’s its engine?” Or “Is it modeled after a spacecraft of some sort?” At the risk of being taken for one of those people who wears a saucepan for a hat, I might point out that Big Blue is undoubtedly the only rowboat in history that bears a conceptual likeness to the ancient Ark of the Covenant, the mythic vessel of spiritual ascendancy. Indeed, if I were the Ocean Rowing Society and had half an imagination, I’d be far more concerned about the powers intrinsic to that likeness than about whether or not the cabin (where, like Moses, we stored the manna) was catching a little more wind than the society liked to see in a boat’s sails. One day in Agadir I had mentioned the likeness to the electrical designer at the boatyard, who prayed five times daily to Mecca. “Yaz-yaz, I’m zeeing it!” he exclaimed immediately. “Eet glow!”