Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat

by Peter Nichols

  ‘I’ve got a pain in my tummy,’ I said eventually, ‘and I think it may be appendicitis.’

  Susan did not appear to be as concerned as I thought she would be, and after I had pinpointed the spot she said:

  ‘Well, I’ve had a pain there, too, for the past few days and it can’t possibly be appendicitis in my case, as I’ve had mine out.’

  I felt tremendously relieved, and the final conclusion we came to was that it must be some form of poisoning, possibly due to the Wreck Bay water, even though we had boiled it, and slowly we both recovered.

  Having a companion to see you through such a problem, whatever the outcome, is a comfort. Alone, you have only your imagination. Robin Knox-Johnston, the Englishman who, in 1968–9, sailed around the world singlehanded and non-stop, the first person to do so, had a similar scare. His diet throughout his voyage, on which he thrived, was an unrelieved mix of heavy English institutional fare: beef, pork, stews, curries, solid puddings, which he ate while listening to tapes of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. But on several occasions he developed severe indigestion, and one of these scared him:

  The indigestion developed until I had a permanent pain in the middle of my stomach. I got out my Ship Captain’s Medical Guide and by the time I had finished looking up my symptoms and the possible causes, I was really alarmed. It appeared that I could have anything from appendicitis to stomach ulcers. I put myself on a diet of spaghetti cheese and rice puddings, which was most unsatisfying, but it did ease things a bit. I also started taking indigestion tablets, but the pain remained despite all this. Then its source appeared to shift and I got really scared. I took out the charts and measured off to the nearest decent-sized port, Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, which was about a thousand miles away. That was at least ten days’ sailing, and in ten days if I did have appendicitis without any antibiotics aboard to keep the thing in check, I would be dead. I cursed myself for leaving antibiotics off my medical list, and for not having my appendix out before I set sail.

  On his ‘improved’ diet, Knox-Johnston got better. ‘I think I can, in retrospect, diagnose my trouble as a combination of chronic indigestion and acute imagination, and it shows the dangers of giving a layman a medical book!’

  The danger from appendicitis for a sailor far from land is not what it once was. Antibiotics can in most cases control the infection for weeks until port is made, or clear it up altogether. However, many scientists tell us we are now at the dusk of the antibiotic age, that at some point in the near future mutating bacteria will circumvent the effects of antibiotics, and sailing far from land may become again the more perilous adventure it once was. The most frightening story I know of a single-hander confronting illness is what happened to Argentine Vito Dumas, who circumnavigated in 1942, in the pre-antibiotic age. His arm became so badly infected that he faced the prospect of amputating it himself.

  That night must be the last with my arm in this condition. Land? I could not reach land in time. If by tomorrow things had not improved, I would have to amputate this useless arm, slung around my neck and already smelling of decay. It was dying and dragging me along with it. It was septicaemia. I could not give in without playing my last card. There were several suppurating open wounds … but I could not localize the septic focus in this formless mass. With an axe, or my seaman’s knife, at the elbow, at the shoulder, I knew not where or how, somehow I would have to amputate.

  Stephen King could not have laid out his predicament more gruesomely. But Dumas was spared the horror of self-amputation. He fell into fevered unconsciousness and woke later with the arm half its former size, his bunk awash in pus, the crisis past.

  Sailors have discussed, as Knox-Johnston mentions, having an asymptomatic appendix removed before going to sea. I’m sure this has been done, and it’s a routine operation, but I know of one case where a young man planning to cruise the Pacific had his appendix pre-emptively removed and died of infection as a result of the operation.

  You hear stories from other boaters, read them in the yachting press: a diabetic’s insulin becomes spoiled in the heat of the tropics, and he dies a few days later; a young single-hander with a hitherto unsuspected heart condition is found dead in his boat north of the Caribbean. Singlehanders can have strokes, fall and bang their heads, break limbs, wound and puncture themselves, and then they must look to themselves and some book for a doctor.

  What happened to Mark Spring remains, for me, a mystery. Illness, or accident, or, possibly, incompetence killed him. There are people who go to sea unable to navigate. I’ve met them, and listened to them telling me how they radioed passing ships for directions, and the angel of nincompoops watches over them. But I would not blame the sea for anyone’s death, any more than I would blame a road, even an icy road with a sharp curve, for an accident: it’s up to the driver to approach it accordingly.

  Poor unkempt Mariner is a sad sight.

  July 3

  Klaus Alverman is one of the group that meets at the Café Sport on Sunday morning to walk up to Bob’s house. Klaus built his pretty twenty-six-foot cutter Plumbelly of Bequia on the beach at Bequia, in the West Indies, out of local wood and materials, with the advice and assistance of local boat-builders, and then sailed it, without an engine, around the world. I’ve heard about him from Ed Boden, the limerick-babbling rocket engineer, who circumnavigated at about the same time. Plumbelly has no standing headroom, and Klaus is about six feet three inches tall. He’s dressed in neat slacks and a shirt and looks like a banker on a weekend. He’s on his way to Europe.

  With Klaus and me are two American couples, both from unattractive fibreglass boats in the forty- to forty-five-foot range, featuring all modern conveniences, Buicks of the sea. We walk up a cobbled road into the countryside above town.

  The houses everywhere on the island are built of black volcanic blocks, usually plastered and whitewashed, their windows painted with broad borders of a blue that goes well with the hydrangeas always nearby. Bob and his wife live in a low farmhouse, the walls of most of its small rooms knocked down, making it spacious and bright inside with a farmhouse kitchen that runs into the living room and large windows giving views across farmland down to Horta and the harbour and Pico across the water. It’s exactly the sort of island house I would want to live in if I couldn’t live aboard a boat. We have beer and wine and a local goat’s-milk cheese very like Spanish Manchego, and talk, as boaters incessantly do, about boats and their gear.

  On the way back down to town a few hours later, I remark how much I like Bob’s house and what a great life he and his wife have made for themselves here. They have a nice home, live in a community where there’s an abundance of inexpensive fresh local produce of every sort, and have as much contact as they wish with people sailing through from all parts of the world. One of the American women, Gail, turns and looks at me as if I’ve just farted.

  ‘But to live here? With these people?’ she says. ‘That poor woman.’

  ‘What do you mean? You don’t think she likes it here? What about these people?’

  ‘Peter, they’re peasants. She’s an American. She’s miserable.’

  ‘Really?’ I’m amazed. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She didn’t have to say anything.’

  Maybe she’s right. But now I know how Gail and her husband can be happy aboard their horrible plastic boat with its big windows and ten jerry jugs tied to the rails down each side, and a profile that’s against nature. ‘It should be at the bottom of the sea immediately,’ Mike Underhill, my literate hermit friend who lived in a tin shack on Tortola, used to say of such boats.

  Gail’s remarks bother me. I don’t believe Bob’s wife is unhappy. But I start thinking about isolation, and back aboard Toad, looking around my little home, it’s Klaus’s face that appears before me and disturbs me. He seemed aloof and unengaged up at Bob’s house. Although polite and pleasant, he appeared to derive little joy from the company. I wonder why he came with us, particularly as Bob didn�
�t give us lunch.

  I begin to wonder if after years alone at sea, with short jumps ashore, Klaus has lost the knack of being with people. Maybe he tagged along with us out of a sense that when ashore that’s what you do. The idea frightens me. I know I’m projecting my state of mind onto Klaus. He may be perfectly happy, but I’m still feeling terribly lonely in Horta, far more so here, surrounded by people, than out at sea alone. Already I want to set sail again as soon as possible. I can see myself turning into what I’m now imagining Klaus to be: an oceanic satellite, circling the earth at four knots, the ultimate example of Robert Louis Stevenson’s notion that travelling hopefully is better than arriving. Leaving could grow better than staying. There is much I find attractive in the idea – that sort of self-sufficiency is anyway a big part of the attraction of cruising in a sailboat – but I see that I could sail too far, perhaps, and not come altogether back.

  Or I might turn into Wilfred, from Mylor, another spectre of what I’m afraid I could become as a singlehander, a nautical hermit crab aground in some backwater, seedy, reduced, unloved.

  Or perhaps not. I’m alone. I miss J. terribly, particularly here where we were so close and had so much fun together. I want to connect, as E. M. Forster put it, and I feel so disconnected. I’ve come away from the Silverman house warmed by the life Bob and his wife have made for themselves here. I envy them for it and for having each other.

  Lying in a glass case in the Café Sport are sperm whale teeth, and oval sawn cross-sections of these teeth, etched with scrimshaw. Every time I go into the café I peer at them through the glass, as I would if they were displayed in a museum. And I’ve seen scrimshaw in the whaling museums in New Bedford and Nantucket and these seem to me to be of museum quality. Scenes of men in whale-boats, breaching sperm, square-rigged ships, accurate in form and scale, beautiful in composition, all minutely etched in these smooth round four- and five-inch teeth the colour of the dense cream that sat unmixed at the top of milk bottles when I was a boy in England. They are all done by local scrimshander Othon Silveira, and they are all for sale. I would love to own a piece of scrimshaw, but these are far beyond my price range. However, as a distant second-best, I ask where Othon lives and walk to his house on the west side of Horta, a short distance from the port, in hopes of seeing and photographing this artist at work.

  Ever since I saw Azorean whaleboats two years ago and watched them set out from Fayal’s beaches after spouting spermin the PicoChannel, I have been fascinated by whaling – not the horror of factory whaling, but the Moby Dick kind: oar-propelled boats, hand-held harpoons. What I saw in Fayal that year (and it was the last year the Azoreans went whaling before a world wide moratorium stopped them, probably for ever) was an exact, unimproved living example of the method used by Yankee whalers of centuries past. I’ve read some books about whaling in the past two years, and I’ve grown to love the whaleman’s art of scrimshaw. It seems t ome the saltiest of all the sailorman’s many and beautiful arts.

  A year ago, sailing out of the Mediterranean on our way to England, J. and I stopped in the Spanish port of Motril, where I had a discussion about scrimshaw with another yachtie, an American named Whit, who was headed east into the Mediterranean with his wife. Whit was morally perturbed by the issue of scrimshaw. He became surly and said that it was scrimshaw lovers like me who perpetrated the slaughter of whales. I told him that while I deplored the killing of whales by anybody on any scale, I didn’t think the Azoreans did it to pull teeth to sell to tourists, but that scrimshaw was simply a utilization of an otherwise useless whale by-product, and beautiful and historically interesting. However, Whit grew angry with me and my atavistic rationalizations, and I thought: You self-righteous jerk; look at the petroleum-derived dacron lines and sails all over your non-biodegradable fibreglass boat, which itself will find its most lasting incarnation as landfill to offend humans and maggots for a thousand years; these aren’t by-products of the automobile industry; people are polluting the world and rendering life on earth untenable just for you.

  Othon is middle-aged and lives with his mother. His studio is in the basement. Like every Azorean I’ve met, he has a sweet, open appreciation of any foreign sailors who make their way to his door. When I arrive, a German couple off another boat is already there, buying up whole pounds of scrimshaw. There’s an air of rapacious glee about them, as if they know they’re paying far less than the pieces are worth in the outside world, and are dying to sail away and tell everyone they ever meet what a great deal they made for themselves. They’re dealing with Othon as if he were an uneducated Bantu holding an armful of elephant ivory. I say hello and tell him I just wanted to see what he did, and maybe photograph some pieces, but I can come back another time. I am obviously not a paying customer, but Othon takes the time to gather some fine pieces and a strip of black velvet and tells me to take everything outside and photograph the scrimshaw on the velvet in daylight.

  The Germans pass me outside on their way out, squealing and guffawing, hurrying, with their eyes down.

  Back in Othon’s studio, I talk to him while he cuts an oval cross-section of a large sperm whale tooth and polishes the flat sides smooth on an electric buffing wheel. I photograph him working as we talk about scrimshaw, whaling, the moratorium and about sailing. He asks me chattily if I have a photograph of my boat. I do: in my wallet I carry a picture I took of J. sailing Toad in the cruisers’ race in the Pico Channel two years ago. I show it to him. Othon now covers one side of the tooth section with black waterproof ink and begins to scratch away at the tooth through the ink. For this he uses a thick carbide-tipped needle held in something like an X-Acto knife. Gradually a white-negative scene evolves on the black-inked side of the whale tooth – I’m stunned when I see that Othon is drawing Toad: its bowsprit, bobstay, boom gallows all there in the proportions I know so well, three sails filled, a little figure – J. – at the helm, a billowing cloud rising behind the sails, small choppy waves in the foreground. All this in an oval shape an inch by inch and a quarter, with about a quarter of an inch of untouched black surrounding the scene.

  ‘What is your boat’s name?’ asks Othon.

  ‘Toad,’ I say, feeling my heart wanting to burst.

  Othon has me spell it out as he engraves the letters between inverted commas at the bottom of the scene on the tooth. Then he covers the whole side again with black ink. In a moment it dries and he takes it to the buffing wheel. All the ink is polished off, except the ink in the etched lines and there is Toad with J. at the helm in the Pico Channel scrimshanded on a creamy section of sperm whale tooth. Othon hands it to me.

  I don’t know how to word a sufficient thank-you, but he seems to know what I’m feeling and he smiles and looks almost as happy as I am.

  Back aboard Toad, rocking a little in the anchorage, I look at my priceless and personal piece of scrimshaw and wonder what to do with it. Finally, I decide to use it as I imagine a Yankee whaleman might have: I drill a small careful hole in the top of the scene, above Toad’s mast. I run a piece of tarred marlin twine through the hole, knot it and pull it over my head. My scrimshaw hangs around my neck.

  It hangs around my neck now as I write.

  Here in Horta, when my thoughts aren’t tortuously tied up with J., they tend to turn in the direction of other women.

  There’s a red boat in the anchorage called Jeshan, a hard-chine steel cutter. I’ve heard that it has been built by a woman and sailed halfway around the world, from Australia, by her alone. This is unusual: there are far fewer women than men in the pantheon of singlehanders, and at sea in general. Britain’s Naomi James – subsequently Dame Naomi – circumnavigated alone, with only one stop, in South Africa; American Tania Aebi circumnavigated in a boat smaller than Toad, setting off while she was still a teenager. Ann Gash, the ‘sailing granny’ from Australia, sailed alone most of the way around the world; Isabelle Autissier and Florence Arthaud, both from France, are formidable competitors in long-distance grand prix singlehanded ev
ents. And there are others, but these women are a minority in a statistically male-dominated field. Yet there’s no good reason for this; physically, women are just as capable as men aboard a boat. Mentally, I imagine, they would be stronger and more tenacious. Yet there is an initial self-conscious, self-aggrandizing boldness of intent in sailing across an ocean alone and this may be more of a male trait – it has the smack of machismo about it.

  A female single-hander, therefore, would be someone I’d like to meet. Perhaps she and I would run into each other again, in more distant ports. Already I can see us in the South Pacific, waving at each other across half a mile of ocean as we raise the palms on Aitutaki. But every time I row past Jeshan on my way to or from shore, there are at least five other dinghies tied to its stern and a large band of men surrounding the blonde in the cockpit. I row on.*

  On several evenings I go to eat at a small hole-in-the-wall café off the Praça do Infante where J. and I used to go.

  The food is dirt cheap and not very good, but it’s frequented by other boaters and I go there in the hope of talking with someone. One evening I meet three Germans there, a young man and two girls, tourists without boats, which is unusual in Horta. They’re intrigued by the cruising life and I invite them out to see Toad. I quickly figure out who’s with whom and begin to get hopeful about the other girl.

  We walk down to the harbour and pile into my dinghy. This is a small sailing dinghy, with a centreboard case. As I row us away from shore, I see that the weight of the four of us (the girls are large bovine German girls) has lowered the top of the centreboard case until it’s below the surrounding sea level: water is flooding in over the case. I try to get my passengers to bail with the bottomless plastic bleach bottle I use as a bailer, but they’re unaware of the sudden urgency of the situation, and I don’t want to frighten them by shouting at them to bail for all they’re worth. I turn the dinghy around and head back towards shore, but we are still well out in the anchorage. As water comes in, the weight in the boat increases and the situation deteriorates with exponential speed. The end comes abruptly as the gunwhales reach sea level and water pours over the top and the dinghy disappears beneath us. The water is cold, we all gasp. The Germans are completely surprised, but even treading water they remain polite and good-natured, and still defer to me as the nautical authority. They ask me what we should do. I suggest swimming ashore. Fortunately they can all swim. The dinghy, which has some flotation built into its seats, reappears half-submerged back on the surface and I tow it after me, following my guests ashore.