Blue Water

by Lindsay Wright

  Fish have a protein-rich liquid between the vertebrae of their spines — maybe enough to keep us going until we were rescued. Tantalizingly distant sea turtles could be glimpsed offshore, unhurriedly making their way past the end of the peninsula. The turtles have a reservoir of oil under their carapace which enables them to live for up to a year without food or water. This trait made them convenient provisions for the whalers and sealers who plied Galapagos waters in their sailing ships. The slow-moving turtles were easy game, and could be stacked in a hold and slaughtered whenever fresh meat, on the flipper, was needed.

  With the fish trap completed, we crept back under the bushes while the midday sun baked Punta Suarez and a light breeze rustled through the brush behind us. Next morning we tried making fire by reflecting sunlight through a bit of broken bottle onto a small bed of tinder-dry brush. The tension was palpable as we squatted around the glass. With a fire we could boil salt water in a can and lick the condensation off a bit of Greg’s PVC rain-jacket rigged above it to catch the steam. We took turns at holding the glass, or propping it on pieces of wood, but there wasn’t even the slightest indication of smoke from our tinder, and eventually we slumped back beneath the brush for our midday siesta.

  Later that afternoon I took my by now pretty ragged underpants off, dropped them on the sand, and plunged into the water to cool off and maybe scare some fish towards our trap. As I bobbed a few metres offshore, a big seabird, a booby I think, swooped on my underpants and laboured skywards, squawking victoriously, with my sorry knickers dangling from its beak. I watched helplessly as my only apparel flew off to a new life, then spluttered with laughter as I imagined the parent arriving home to a nest-full of ravenous chicks with a battered pair of Jockey Y-fronts.

  My sudden and involuntary nakedness called for a redistribution of our sartorial assets. Greg, who had been on watch at the time of Sereno’s smashing into the cliff, was dressed in shorts, underpants and T-shirt and had managed to grab a parka before fleeing the wheelhouse. Dave and I, fresh from our bunks at the time, had only underpants, though Dave had grabbed a pair of shorts as he made his escape. After several minutes of hilarity and joking, Greg kept the shorts, T-shirt and parka but I took his underpants, along with a fair bit of ribbing about leaving them on the beach unattended.

  One bonus of the cool water that surrounds the Galapagos are the colonies of seals and sea lions which make their home on many of the beaches and feed on the plentiful sea life. Our sitting in the water at midday had left us with huge, water-filled blisters on our backs and shoulders — dehydration was seriously becoming an issue. We craved food — real protein, not just crunched crab meat — and moisture, any moisture. Our lips were dry and painfully cracked and it was getting harder and harder to hoist ourselves out from our sand hollows under the brush and work at survival.

  A small sea lion colony, a beachmaster and his harem, spent their days sunning themselves on the rocks at the northern-most extremity of Punta Suarez. We’d been eyeing them for a day or two, somehow reluctant to kill the only other mammals for miles around; but on the morning of the fourth day, we decided that it was time to kill one and drink its blood. I fossicked among the flotsam at the head of the beach for a suitable club, while Greg worked on sharpening our biggest bit of glass against a rock; then all three of us began to walk slowly down the beach to where the sea lions lolled in the sunshine like giant brown slugs. We formulated a plan of attack — I would club the most likely victim between the eyes, Greg would saw through its throat with the glass and Dave would catch the warm, delicious blood in our rusty can as it spurted out in a life-saving stream. As we trudged along the beach we recalled great meals we’d eaten, the food we’d eat when we were rescued; or thought about what we’d do if we weren’t.

  The nearest sea lions lifted their heads and fixed us with big brown eyes, while what seemed like querulous smiles formed on their cupid’s bow lips. ‘Well, boys,’ I hefted the hardwood club and moved towards the nearest mammal, surely the most reluctant sealer ever to encroach in that marvellous place.

  Suddenly Greg shoved me in the back. ‘Look,’ he yelled, gesturing wildly out to sea, ‘look!’ Away out, barely above the horizon, a small dark-blue ship led a thin trail of smoke in a southerly direction towards our island. I whooped. Dave whooped. I dropped the club and followed Greg, hobbling over the sharp rock past the mildly curious sea lion populace to the end of Punta Suarez. Greg hurriedly peeled off his red parka and began waving it from side to side above his head. Dave and I kept whooping; alternatively cursing the ship for its indifference and then imploring someone to look in our direction. We took over from Greg as his arms tired from waving the parka, and raged at our lack of a fire, flares, mirror or torch to attract their attention. We laughed and speculated about cold drinks with moisture running down the sides of the glass. Beer, fruit juice, water … it wouldn’t matter. Our mouths seemed especially dry at the prospect.

  The ship steamed blithely by, across our patch of horizon and beyond the high rocky point on the other side of the bay. We were beaten. Too drained even to curse or rail at our fate. We dragged our feet back past the sea lions, past where I’d dropped my club, and back along the soft sand of the beach to slump back into our sand hollows.

  After a while, I picked up Greg’s parka from where he’d thrown it down on the sand and strolled back along the beach to escape the oppressive atmosphere under the thicket of brush. As I climbed the rock outcrop a marine iguana swung towards me, breathing salty mist from the desalination glands in his nose. I wondered what he’d taste like. Atop the rocks, I turned and swept the horizon with shaded eyes. Above the peninsula to our west were two trees I’d never noticed before. Or … masts? I stared, and the trees moved — a ship, our ship! I yelled maniacally at the top of my voice and began excitedly waving the parka. Dave and Greg crawled out from under the brush and began ambling along the beach.

  ‘The ship, you dopey bastards, the ship!’ I pointed off at the masts. ‘Yeeehaaaaa.’ Greg clambered up beside me. ‘Look,’ he yelled and pointed at a small open boat which was disappearing into a small bay west of us. He had the gumboots on, and jumped down to the beach to began a clumsy shambling run around the shore towards the bay where the boat had gone.

  Squinting into the sun, I followed his progress until he rounded the point. Just Dave and I were left on the beach. With a strange feeling of desertion and loneliness, I trudged back along the beach with Dave walking silently by my side. He went back to his sleeping hollow while I squatted and began half-heartedly weaving sticks together for the fish trap … looking up every few seconds towards the bay where the boat had gone.

  Soon, a small black speck came into view around the point and quickly grew to be a lifeboat, crammed with swarthy seamen in bright-orange lifejackets with Greg grinning broadly in the bows. I stood up and waved my arms, and the boat altered course towards me until her forefoot ground into the sand a few metres from my feet.

  ‘Buenos días, señores,’ I said, exhausting my entire Spanish vocabulary in the first sentence. From further back in the boat a plastic container, encapsulated in blue polystyrene insulation, was passed forward through many hands. It seemed like everyone in the boat wanted to touch it. Finally it was thrust into my hands, cool against my palms, and I could feel the moisture and hear the ice cubes rattle against the plastic walls.

  Somebody reached across and unscrewed the top. I leaned back and tilted the neck towards my mouth. ‘Drink slow, drink slow … small drink,’ many voices urged. I took two, three, small sips and wiped my lips as the moisture surged through me. I felt like I was digesting a sumptuous Christmas dinner. More brown hands prised the container from my grasp and passed it to Dave, who was grinning maniacally beside me.

  The beaming Ecuadorians helped us into the boat and made room for us among them before heading east around the rocky extremity of Punta Suarez. The sea lions lifted their heads to watch us pass and I felt a great warmth for them — and a deep reli
ef that I hadn’t been forced to kill one.

  The lifeboat motored slowly around the coast, all eyes scouring the shoreline for our Sereno shipmates, Peter Berry and Kirby Ingelse. Binoculars were passed from hand to hand as we motored slowly beneath the soaring cliff where the stately schooner had met her end, and past other cliffs which were topped by white drifts of nesting albatross.

  We rendezvoused with other boats from the dark-blue mothership, Bucanero, a Galapagos cruise liner. Finally, off Española’s south-western coast, our boat met a small Ecuadorian fishing boat plunging heavily through the ocean swell. Our two boats came close amid a clamour of Spanish, but we picked out the ‘Hey … youse guys,’ yelled out in Australian English. Peter, clad in tattered shorts and T-shirt, stood on the fishing boat’s rail and dived in to swim the few metres between the boats. Greg, myself and half a dozen Ecuadorian seamen hefted him aboard and he slumped on the seat between us. Peter, in the flesh. The same Peter I thought had slipped between Sereno and the cliff as they smashed together with such sickening force.

  ‘It was bloody terrible.’ He rubbed his face with his hands. ‘I got sucked out to sea with Kirby — I helped him get onto a door that was floating round, but all he could say was that he had swallowed a lot of water.’ Peter had stayed with Kirby all night, but lost contact just after daybreak and was washed ashore. The last he had seen of Kirby was his life-jacketed form, slumped face forward in the water, being swept northwards by the current. ‘I got onto a ledge on the cliffs,’ Peter recalled, ‘and sat for ages watching wreckage float past.’ He had climbed the cliff to the albatross colony on its brow and lived off albatross eggs until spotted by the fishermen.

  Bucanero, her boats and the fishermen continued searching the coastline until dark when we transferred to the mother ship; to drinks, beds, food and the cossetting of dozens of sympathetic American tourists. Speaking with her master, Captain Michael Gordon, on the bridge as we steamed away from Española’s ragged profile towards Guayaquil on the Ecuadorian mainland, I asked why he’d decided to start a search for us. ‘The ship’s just arrived back from a refit in Miami,’ he explained, ‘and we decided to hold a lifeboat drill. The coxswain in one of the lifeboats picked up a big bit of wreckage and brought it up to the bridge. We noticed that the damage was fresh and there was no marine growth on it, so we plotted the current and deduced someone had run into Española, so we steamed up tide and began a search.’ I wrung his hand, awestruck, speechless and close to tears.

  The prospect of a náufrago (castaway) wandering through their ship clad only in his underpants at first bemused, then worried, the Ecuadorian crew. Finally they led me down to the crew accommodation, a crowded area right in the bows, and took turns pulling trousers from their clothes lockers and holding them up to see if they would fit. None came anywhere near fitting my scrawny, gangling form until one seaman, a bit taller than the rest, found a pair that were close. Pulling a sheath knife from his belt, he quickly slit the seams. Someone else held out a needle and thread and, while I waited, he tailored the trousers to fit. When he’d finished I tried them on — they were a perfect fit — and received a muted round of applause, broad smiles and back slaps from the crewmen crowded around.

  Sereno had been registered as a British vessel, and so we were classed as distressed British seamen. The honorary British consul in Guayaquil, a merchant banker in his other life, lost no time in telling us what a pain in the posterior we were and had us billeted at a city hotel. I, barefoot but in my tailor-made trousers and a borrowed T-shirt, set out to explore the city. However, in a short time I had collected a Pied-Piper-like gaggle of children who chased me, laughing and excitedly chanting ‘zapatos … zapatos…’. People laughed at me and tooted car horns. A policeman directing traffic stopped for a few minutes and smiled indulgently. Workers at a building site wolf-whistled and jeered as I strolled past.

  Finally, I passed a shoe stall. The proprietor leaned in the shade of a nearby verandah, holding an open newspaper before him. ‘Hah,’ he yelled, ‘náufrago.’ He held up the paper with a photo of Greg, Dave, Captain Gordon and me on the front page, bustled across to his booth, selected a pair of his largest jandals and thrust them into my hands. ‘Zapatos,’ he said, ‘shoes.’

  I arrived back at the hotel half an hour later with three pairs of sandals and arms full of gifted fruit and vegetables — from some of the poorest people in South America.

  DO YOU SAMBA?

  I was in Rio de Janeiro in 1984 as crew on a luxury yacht. Jorge lived near Copacabana Beach, where we’d met. He was short and coffee-coloured with a mass of wild black hair, while I was tall and a sun-bleached blond. We were both in our 20s and had little language in common but, squatting in the sand and communicating with pictures, sign language and smiles, we became mates. In the climate of pre-Carnival tourist paranoia, I instinctively trusted him and he must have felt safe with me.

  Jorge took me home, where his mother, father and a crowd of siblings lived under rusty sheets of roofing iron and a faded shop sun-awning spread across a nest of boulders at the end of the beach, weighted down with rocks. Most of the family sprawled in the shade, wrapped in light, colourful tropical cloth, but Jorge’s mother stirred the ashes in a fireplace and produced a tasty snack of fish (I think) pieces, which we ate off plastic bags with our fingers.

  I drew a map of the world in the sand with an oversized New Zealand, and the smaller children were summoned to witness this new wonder. Some touched my hair and ran away giggling at their bravado. There was a peace among those boulders, and I spent the midday siesta there dozing lightly, lulled by wavelets slapping the sand nearby. Further along the beach the beautiful people paraded in minimal bikinis and high-rise hotels soared into distant smog.

  Eventually I left. I wanted to give them something, but wasn’t sure how to go about it and gave a round of hugs instead. Jorge walked me back to the yacht club marina and I tried to show him where I lived, but the marina guard, caressing his pistol holster, wouldn’t let him through the gate.

  We met again in the evening cool. ‘Come,’ he smiled, ‘to favela for samba rehearsal.’ Favelas are populous shanty-towns clinging to the hills around downtown Rio. Established by freed slaves in the 1890s, each favela fields a team in the samba (dance) competition for the annual carnival, and Jorge’s team was practising in a school playing-field on the Hill of the Singing Rooster. Somehow, I forgot the favelas’ reputation for violent crime and squalor.

  We jogged along city streets in the sultry air, then left the lights behind and joined the throng of black faveladors trudging uphill towards the rehearsal. I dogged Jorge’s footsteps as he wound up malodorous alleyways between a crooked collection of makeshift homes. People brushed by in the dark and, through unglazed window frames, I glimpsed men in white singlets, hunched over tables lit by kerosene lamps and laden with bottles.

  We filed through a narrow gorge between two rough adobe walls into an area about the size of a rugby field and crowded with hundreds of black people. Jorge led me to a low concrete-block bunker — and several dark forearms, pink palms outstretched, reached down to help me up. They were the first black people I’d met.

  From my elevated position, I peered uncertainly down on a heaving mass of humanity. Large women in bright Mother Hubbard dresses and gangly headdresses swayed their hips in anticipation, and clumps of men huddled, sharing cigarettes.

  Then the drumbeat began. Moonlight helped flaming torches spread some light over the playground as the drum pulse deepened and the tempo picked up. A shadowy mass of swaying, clapping people kept time with the beat and white smiles flashed from hundreds of faces. A small area was cleared in front of the building where I stood with a dozen or so local dignitaries.

  The warm air, moonlit sky and the omnipresent drumbeat took control and I began to dance, wooden and self-conscious at first but loosening up as the drum pulse infiltrated my veins. Soon I’d been hefted down to the clearing, and giggling women — from huge matriarchs to
tittering teens — sashayed forward to dance. Some taught me their moves and the crowd shrieked with hilarity when I tried them.

  We samba-ed into the night. Time became irrelevant; we lived by the beat of the drums. Sweat streamed, my blood pounded and I was absorbed into a swaying wheatfield of dancing Brazilians. The ground shook under the stomp of a thousand bare feet. Straight from Africa, filtered through generations of slavehood and poverty, the drums were the living pulse of triumphant survivors.

  Scores of people taught me the shrill ululating cry, created by holding your tongue to the roof of your mouth while forcefully exhaling, that passes for applause in Brazil and which I still instinctively use to express my appreciation for a performance to this day.

  Some time just before dawn, a beaming Jorge took my arm and led me back down through the slumbering favela. Faveladors loomed out of the night, and patted my shoulders or lightly punched my arms until we emerged from the dark alleys of the favela into the lamplit city streets.

  Somewhere near the yacht club gates, Jorge gave me a shy hug, said ‘Ciao’ and walked off towards the beach. My whole being thrummed with the passion of the samba, visions of a school yard thronged with writhing black bodies, streaming sweat and white smiles, drums pounding like some giant’s heartbeat. Sleep was out of the question.

  ‘Where you been?’ the guard demanded, as I walked through the marina gate. ‘Hill of the Singing Rooster,’ I replied cockily, ‘samba rehearsal,’ and showed him a few moves. ‘Whaaat … man — you lucky to be alive,’ he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  Back on board, air-conditioning emitted a gentle hum, polished teak joinery gleamed and the tart smell of leather upholstery tickled my nose. Next day, I scoured the beach for Jorge, but the family had gone — back to the bosom of the favela maybe, where samba reigns supreme.