Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  The dinghy splashed into the water. The ship’s dog, a woolly animal with a high-curling tail and intelligent eyes, sprang about barking as though piratical boarders were imminent, appearing to be about to jump onto the gunwhale and down into the sea. I spoke to the woman in halting Spanish. She was bringing some shopping from Puerto Williams, she said, and had been lucky to find this lift home. Usually she couldn’t count on the supply boat, because it sailed at infrequent and irregular intervals, and so she would take a motor boat, or anything going.

  It was difficult to catch all she said, with the wind in my ears, the barking, the shouts of the crew, the crashing of the dinghy against the little ship’s side and, of course, my appalling Spanish. I understood her to say she had a small farm, a husband, and some sheep at Wulaia, that her family came from Punta Arenas, that she would retire there shortly. She was lifed carefully over the side and lowered into the bouncing dinghy, and in a moment I heard the roar of the outboard motor. At the last second the dog did what I had feared. Over he went – up, and – down! I forced myself to look over the side, expecting to see him swimming for dear life, but instead he was seated calmly near the helmsman in what was evidently his accustomed place.

  ‘Our dog, Tom, was born on ships,’ a man said in good English at my shoulder. ‘Engineer Menderez,’ he added, introducing himself. ‘Wherever men can go, Tom, too, can go.’

  ‘A real seadog, then,’ I said.

  ‘Claro.’

  The dinghy’s white wake curved away noisily towards the shore. I stared. Wulaia was just there, on the dark patch of land. Jemmy Button had groaned of his kith and kin ‘Damned fools’ to Captain FitzRoy and Charles Darwin, standing there in his polished shoes and trimmed hair, longing for a quick glance in a mirror. There York Minster had been ordered to pluck out the few miserable hairs from his chin. And there, in that place where the sounds of a half-finished hymn and the cries of the dying had risen to smite the terrified ears of Cole, the cook of the Allen Gardiner, a light – a torch, perhaps – was flickering as our lady passenger was helped ashore with her shopping bags of washing powder, toilet paper, beer and canned meat, and the only sound was the happy barking of Tom the dog.

  *

  A silence like that of outer space accompanied us south through the waters of Ponsonby Sound and into a bay where we could anchor and rest for the main part of the night. I did not sleep much. I hardly seemed to have squeezed into my tiny bunk before the engines were alive once more and it was time to struggle again into sweaters and boots, open the door and feel the blast of cold air like a slab of metal against the exposed bits of my face. No plumes of smoke rose from these shores. Any Indian here now would have to be a ghost. I stood on the deck outside my cabin, shivering with cold and excitement, and watched the oyster-gleam of dawn over the islands of the Horn.

  After breakfast we began our Santa Claus-style round of duty calls. There were small Chilean garrisons on some of these islands, manning lookouts and tending radar installations. The Argentine navy regularly sent warships into these southern Chilean waters – just to provoke, to cock a snook, to say: ‘See! You call these waters yours – and so does the world. But so what? Just try to keep us out!’ Now and again small parties of Argentine seamen landed on Chilean islands, perhaps to spend a night there, perhaps to drink a cup of tea, perhaps just to have a good laugh, urinate, and go away at full speed ahead, curling a bow wave like an arrogant sneer. Contemptuous, buccaneering gestures like that would convey a serious message: Big Brother in Buenos Aires is watching you! The generals and admirals who ruled Argentina thought it was an amusing game; perhaps it made them feel like real warriors. So the Chilean garrisons kept watch and every two weeks or three, depending on the weather, the supply vessel went the rounds, dropping off food, spare parts, fuel, reading material and I don’t know what else. We pottered about desolate bays and sounds and inlets, seeing a Chilean flagpole here and there, the flag a minute splash of red and blue against the white and grey-green of the wilderness. At each outpost our crew lowered the rubber dinghy and loaded it with boxes and sacks. Each time Tom the dog barked with excitement, made his spectacular, perfectly timed flying leap seaward, and sat smiling in his place.

  Muffled figures appeared on beaches hardly bigger than the supply ship itself. Through my binoculars I saw them waving as the dinghy dragged its white wake towards them across the freezing water and the growl of its outboard engine echoed back and forth between the rocky outcrops and the treeless headlands. We scouted Hardy Peninsula’s south-eastern profile from Orange Bay almost as far as False Cape Horn, then turned across to the Wollastons. I shall never forget the scenes of those days – the islands at the end of the earth as silent as the moon, the whiplash of those hungry south-westerlies, green and snow-white patches in the pale blue bays – everything as cold and clear as a diamond. Most extraordinary of all was the stupendous backdrop of the Cordillera Darwin, the frozen chain of snow-covered peaks and ridges that lay across the north-western horizon, dominating everything else in sight like a frozen tidal wave over the icy turrets and battlements of the Snow Queen’s Palace. In that breathtaking place, in that sublime and fearful silence, I doubt whether the Chileans, so accustomed to this routine ‘run’, felt as I did, like a miserable intruder.

  We came down the sound between Herschel Island and Cape Deceit in the middle of the afternoon. The lieutenant tapped my arm and said, ‘The wind is south-west. We can land the engineer, Menderez, from this side of Horn Island – the north-east side. But first, you want to see the Cape from the south side, don’t you?’ We passed the low island to starboard and felt at once the menacing heave of the open sea in Drake Sound.

  There it stood – Horn Island. Low cliffs, a rocky bay, a mound of rock like a fist thrusting south. ‘See the light?’ the lieutenant said. It was not even a lighthouse – I had half expected a tall stone column with a glass crown flashing a thick beam, something like the Wolf on the Eddystone Lights. This little thing was a very modest affair, the southernmost light of the world.

  We couldn’t stay long off the point of Cape Horn; the sea was too high for the little souped-up ex-trawler. We rolled and plunged our way uncomfortably round the island and, arriving off its north-east corner again, lowered the dinghy once more. Men were waving from the shore.

  ‘We’ll drop Menderez here and come for him tomorrow or the next day. If the sea lets us.’

  I decided at once what I must do.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ I said, ‘I’ve come all this way. Drop me off here with Engineer Menderez. Will you?’

  He looked doubtful. ‘Well, if the weather is bad, maybe we come back in three days, or maybe three weeks.’

  ‘Lieutenant, I have all the time in the world. You can leave me on Cape Horn for three weeks or three months.’

  He laughed. ‘Oh, no. Not so long.’ He thought a moment, then took up the radio handset and spoke swiftly in Spanish.

  A hoarse voice answered.

  ‘All right,’ the lieutenant said to me. ‘Have you got a bag? Jump down into the boat with Tom. But don’t take his place, or he can bite you.’

  I think I embraced him, but I know that every member of the crew was laughing and making the thumbs-up sign as I slung my zip-bag over the side and followed it into the swaying dinghy. Tom didn’t resent me at all. He licked my face.

  All the same, when I put my foot on the shore of Cape Horn Island, my first experience was a dog bite in the calf. The aggressor was not Tom, I need hardly say; it was Tony, the fluffy mascot of the seven Chilean marines on the island, who probably thought I was an Argentine invader and decided on the spur of the moment to do his duty. It was a light snap rather than a serious bite, and did no damage – I was wearing far too many layers of clothing for that. In any case, Tony’s attention was immediately diverted in umbrage to the interloper Tom, who was lifting his leg against a packing case.

  The beach was stony and cramped and backed by a low escarpment with a crumbling track lead
ing up to a hut. The tall marine in charge shook my hand and ordered someone to take my bag. Then Engineer Menderez was helped ashore with his bag of tools, and for five minutes we scrambled, panting, up the slope to the unprotected crown of the island. There, as the wind pounded us like breakers against a shore, we turned and waved to the dark blue vessel, by now hardly bigger than a skiff bobbing across the water that separated us from Deceit Island. A moment later I was inside the hut with my hands outstretched to a stove in the centre of a small circle of goggling Chilean marines.

  The tall man introduced himself. ‘Sergeant-Major Nuñez.’ He pushed a mug of tea at me, searching for a few words in English. ‘We say … good morning.’ Everyone began to laugh, and at that early moment the ice was broken. Well, I thought, I’ve done it now: a few gales and I shall be here for weeks.

  That evening and most of the next day, Engineer Menderez rallied a working party to the radio room attached to the little hut, where maintenance work was most needed. In the hut itself there was not much need for exploration. The first room faced south to the Antarctic and was furnished with a few tables and chairs. There was a radio set to listen to and the marines sat there reading sports magazines and comics, or playing patience, or chatting; they ate there, too. Further back there was a bathroom and toilets, and behind that a small dormitory with two-tiered metal bunks, and a smaller room with a similar bunk where the two sergeants slept, and two beds which now were allocated to Engineer Menderez and myself. There were doors to the bathroom – two showers and washbasins – and to the toilets, but no others, at least that I saw closed. Of course there was also a kitchen, from which two sweating marine cooks emerged to gawp at me and then smile and wave their ladles. Through the windows I could see the wave crests being thrashed into spray by the south-west wind, making the greybeards FitzRoy mentions, and from the flagpole the wind-torn Chilean flag flapped its ragged ends towards the north-east.

  The marines were pleased to have a visitor, and I cursed once more my inability to speak even passable Spanish. Somehow we managed to communicate. Sergeant-Major Nuñez was concerned that I might not like their food, but during my time on the island there was little but bread and stews, which suited me perfectly. Nuñez introduced everyone by their first names: Sergeant Carlos, the second in seniority, Osorio, Patricio, Manuel, Miguel, Juan, Gonsalves. The two cooks were Cookie Uno and Cookie Dos, named in that Anglo–Spanish way that is Lord Cochrane’s legacy. I might have called them Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Both were short, inclined to plumpness and particularly swarthy. Like all the others, apart from the two sergeants, they couldn’t have been much more than twenty-three years old and had been posted to the island for the customary stint of duty which amounted to an extraordinarily long stretch. Was it three months? Something like that, I believe. Yet they did more than just survive; they were undoubtedly cheerful. No one has killed anyone else, Nuñez conveyed, laughing. It was a spartan life, of course, and I suppose it was sensible of the navy to ban alcohol on the island. Accordingly, I kept my pisco bottle out of sight.

  The time passed oddly fast. The days are exceptionally short here in wintertime. To my mind, the Horn drew back the shutters to reveal its fullest drama just after sunset. Then the sea had turned its soft oyster-grey and soon, when the sun had quite disappeared, everything – sea, sky and this blunt stub of land – became obscure and drab and unconcerned with any human thing. The only presence then was the sighing, sobbing, nudging, teasing, bullying air. I asked permission from Nuñez to sit outside for a while on my own, not far from the door of the hut, just to admire the sudden black fall of cliffs to the ocean. I sat on a half-rotten bench and Tony came, too, and turned his nose to the wind. It made an odd noise, that wind. I felt the stress of it against me as its great gusts came and went, rose and fell. It was not the noise wind makes in sails, which is the reason for the old sailors’ phrase ‘blowing great guns’; nor had it anything to do with the eldritch howls and moans you can hear in mountains or round old houses (though they came later). Now, quite distinctly, as if they were just the other side of the clenched fist of rock behind the regular blink of the beacon, I heard the eager, deep, musical sound of baying hounds clamouring to be loosed.

  I did not feel like sleep that first night on the Horn. Lying on the twanging springs of the military-issue bed, I slept very little, and when I did finally drop off almost at once a bleary grey dawn broke and the hut, well fugged up, was astir with yawning men fumbling their way out of the tracksuits and longjohns they had slept in into sweaters, khaki fatigues, ridge-soled boots and hooded anoraks to start on their duties outside.

  I didn’t regret the loss of sleep. On the contrary. That night and the next one I far preferred to stay awake as long as I could in order to savour the knowledge of where I was – to listen to the terrifying, unremitting wind that roamed round the island, rattling the flagstaff, roaring round our wooden walls like a monster in a story by Grimm, thrusting claws of steel between the floor and the rock beneath in an effort to wrench the hut loose, to hurl it and all of us into the ocean. That wind, and the thought of what it might do, was frightening and profoundly exhilarating at the same time. But most of all, huddled in my heavy underwear and two pairs of woollen socks, it was the sheer spiritual intoxication of being, of actually lying in a bed, on Cape Horn Island that kept me open-eyed and my nerves wide awake under those musty Chilean navy blankets.

  Next morning Nuñez was busy but the other sergeant, Carlos, took me for one of the toughest walks of my life across the south-east prong of the island. Under a gloomy sky, butted and jostled by gusts of wind, we staggered along the cliffs towards a great knuckle of rock that punches out due south towards the South Pole. Cape Horn Island, I realized, lacks grandeur per se. It is perhaps the size of Hyde Park in London, a Hyde Park with no trees or bushes whatsoever. I had expected snow, but there was none. The wonderful sugary-white barrier of the Cordillera Darwin stood away to the north. Here, underfoot on the island, it was as snowless as a Scottish hillside in a mild winter. Clumps of what looked like heather were interspersed with tuffets of a livid, unhealthy-looking green.

  The island is not quite flat. It undulates; here and there it pushes up hillocks. It looked as though it would be easy to walk from one end of the island to the other, but I very soon realized it was the opposite of easy. Heather doesn’t mean a firm Scottish hillside. The ground was horribly boggy. Each clump of heather or livid green was surrounded by a solid-seeming mass into which, at every step, my booted foot sank at least as far as the calf. Following Sergeant Carlos’s practised progress with difficulty, I squelched my way across Cape Horn Island, trying at times to leap from patch to patch, my lungs feeling more and more like antique bellows that had been left for far too long in somebody’s attic. Oddly enough, the green tuffets which looked so treacherous were in fact the solidest; the trouble was there were so few of them. These marines must be in very good condition, I thought. Three months of pulling my legs out of the bogs of Cape Horn and I would be, too. For now, Carlos treated me with solicitude. So did Tony, who, having given me what I suppose was the statutory defensive nip when I landed, was treating me now as a long-awaited friend of whom he expected much. He was smaller than sturdy Tom and much fluffier; but he had the same curling, feathery tail. He, of course, negotiated the quagmire without difficulty, rushing back and forth on rocks or tufts, looking round at my floundering figure from time to time like an anxious boxing trainer who wonders whether his boy is going to make it. I understood his doubts and summoned up enough breath for an occasional whistle downwind for his benefit.

  We walked to a hilltop and stared at the sea. There had been seals on the rocks in the bay under the beacon, Carlos said, but they had moved on for the winter. There was no sign of life there now. Soon, other marines came out of the hut and began doing physical jerks. Osorio, the marine who had carried my bag up from the beach, came over, smiling ‘Hello’ at me, and began chasing Tony round and round. I watched them for a w
hile, then looked across the sea. We were standing on a point, I saw; the whole of the island itself lay at the point of an arrowhead of islands. Facing south, Cape Deceit was a little behind us to our left, Hermit Island and False Cape Horn rather further behind to our right. (Just there Darwin had seen six naked Fuegians in a canoe, surviving on putrid whale blubber. They slept on the wet ground, he said, coiled up like animals.) Straight ahead – the Antarctic. I expected to see ships passing on the horizon of Drake Sound, but Carlos said he had spotted very few, not more than a dozen in a week. Not simply as a result of the blockade, he thought. They preferred the easier passage over two hundred miles north through the Straits of Magellan.

  Osorio and Tony showed me the island’s church. It was no bigger, I imagined, and probably much smaller, than the first little church at Wulaia the day of the Allen Gardiner massacre. It was simply a wooden hut made by the marines; outside it they had planted a wooden cross that swayed now, silhouetted against a sky the colour of dirty snow. The flagpole trembled beside it, its ragged flag writhing in the wind.

  There is not much to do on Cape Horn Island except walk, run where you can, look at the scenery – and think just how extraordinary it is that you are where you are. Like Osorio, I played with Tony to keep warm, chasing him round the church and the flagpole while the marines peered out from their living hut and laughed. When I went inside I found those not on duty poring over the comics we had brought them from the supply ship the day before. One man was doing a crossword; one was darning a pair of discoloured woollen socks; two or three were interested in my binoculars, the South American Handbook and a few photographs I had with me of Samoa. A picture of Emma sitting on the beach while Fili and Amosa bathed in the lagoon brought whistles and laughter. Calloused fingers reached out to touch her. There could hardly have been a greater contrast between the picture and present reality – this austere hut of pale-skinned men wearing military fatigues in a drab, cold wilderness, and the reds and yellows of Emma’s lava-lava, the glow of sun on skin, the hibiscus in her hair, against the warm blue of the lagoon.