15. The Sheltering Atoll
Here we will
moor our lonely ship
Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands.
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The Coral Sea heaved and rolled to a fresh trade wind as Atom sledded downwind from Port Moresby towards the mass of disconnected reefs, low islets and rushing currents of the Torres Strait. Before the age of GPS satellite navigation, the seas separating New Guinea from Australia were as dangerous to ships as any in the world. When Cook sailed these waters he noted, “incessant and prodigious dangers.” One of Bligh’s officers wrote, “Perhaps no space of three and a half degrees in length presents more danger.” The salt-stained photocopy of the chart I plotted my estimated position on gave menacing warnings of the hornet's nest ahead: “strong currents, numerous shoals, coral patches.”
The sun poked through a gap in the gray overcast, just long
enough for me to get a measurement with the sextant. The resulting line of
position I drew on the chart ran close to a reef I expected lay far to the south
of my position. This is a time when you really need faith in your calculations. I
confirmed the sextant sight soon after when I spotted a shipwreck through the binoculars
sitting on the reef two miles away. To counter the south-running current that
carried me off course, I drew a new course line a few miles north of Bramble Cay where the chart
indicated a flashing light warned mariners of the
surrounding reefs.
That night the sky remained black overcast, the only light
coming from luminescent organisms sparkling on the breaking wave crests. With
tired eyes I stood in the cockpit straining to see Bramble Cay Light, which
guards Bligh Entrance to the Torres Strait. Presumably this is where Captain
Bligh entered the strait in Bounty’s overloaded lifeboat after mutineers
set him adrift near Tonga.
French solo sailor Jean Gau missed sighting this light and
soon was tossed up on Warrior Reef where he made a narrow escape. His heavily
built wooden ketch pounded on the reef for half a day before floating off at
high tide. My fiberglass hull might not take such abuse. As I recalled Gau’s
book chapter “Incident on Warrior Reef” my hair stood on end. Either the light
would appear soon or I'd feel the keel-splitting reef when I landed on it.
Tortured with indecision, I prepared to turn away and heave
to for the night and carry on in the morning. On a final look into the blackness
ahead, with great relief I spotted the faint white beacon. From here I safely
tacked back and forth through the night to hold my position upwind of the reefs.
At dawn I entered the strait and altered course to the
southwest. As if trying to prevent my passage through this Devil’s necklace of
islets and reefs, the winds veered to south and blew forcefully for the next two
days. We pressed on under reefed sails sheeted in tight, heeled over hard on
the wind, checking off the sandy islets as they passed. On the lee side of
Rennel Island I saw a local fishing boat anchored off the beach. I could not
safely carry on among the reefs here at night so I tacked over and anchored in
the slight shelter it provided from the seas and currents. The uninhabited
palm-covered isle looked like a perfect South Seas setting for a native village.
A pair of barely visible coral stone buildings marked an abandoned settlement
where pearl gatherers had lived until the pearls became scarce and they moved on
to another island.
My alarm clock announced the sunrise, but I was so fatigued
and drunk with sleep I slept on until the morning sun struck my eyes through the
open companionway. I thought of waiting another day to get an early start, but
decided to make a dash for the next anchorage some forty-five miles away before
darkness fell.
The current running at an angle across the wind, forced
waves to pile up steeply and close together. Atom lurched in a quick jerky
motion, burying her bow then lifting it up to fling back the seas pressing her
down. If I slowed down to ease the motion the current would gain the upper hand
and drag me off course so I held her nose hard into the wind. Fortunately, in
Port Moresby I had installed that used cockpit dodger over the companionway so I
could huddle behind its vinyl covered aluminum tubing frame, staying partly dry
as sheets of spray flew past overhead. Every five to ten miles another island
drifted past, sometimes a mere stone’s throw away, providing a welcome brief
few moments of calm water on their lee side.
As the tide fell it revealed extensive tidal flats
encompassing each island that increased their miniscule land area up to five
times. On one of these dry reefs lay a mighty freighter on its side, high and
dry, hundreds of feet in from the sea. Fascinated, I sailed by the rust-streaked
hull as close as I could, wondering how a full size ship with 20-foot draft
landed on a reef covered by only a few feet of water at high tide - my guess is storm surge
from a passing cyclone.
By late afternoon I came upon the sister islands of Bet,
Sue, and Poll. The only anchorage here was a tiny scrap of sandy ledge close to
Sue where I dropped Atom’s anchor precariously close to the reef edge. To the
east of the island tidal flats lay exposed for two miles. Through binoculars I
watched two women carrying baskets on their backs, bending over to pick mussels
at the sea’s edge. As they roamed over the newly exposed flats, clouds of
spray rose like smoke signals where waves hit the wall of dry reef. With full
baskets the women retreated home before the rising tide engulfed this largest
portion of their island garden. The settlement contained a couple fishing boats pulled
up on the beach next to three whitewashed houses and matching church. If I had
been tempted to go ashore, I was dissuaded by an Australian Navy plane labeled “COASTWATCH”
that buzzed low overhead and circled back a second time. I had
heard from other sailors that trespassers were not welcome ashore and the official port of entry
for the region was miles away downwind.
That night the southerly swell that hooked around the
island at high tide sent Atom rolling so badly I was pitched out of my bunk onto
the cabin sole. Since I could fall no further I spent the remainder of the night
there, not sleeping, just listening to the wind howl in the rigging and waiting for
dawn. At first light I hoisted anchor and got underway. My immediate goal was to
gain ten miles to windward without letting the five knot crosscurrent pull me onto
the reef.
With #3 jib and triple reefed mainsail, Atom lay over and
dove into the slab-sided waves. Coming on deck to check my position with compass
bearings I looked up to see a vertical wall of water rise above me and
momentarily hang there blocking out the sun before collapsing and submerging the
deck. The force of water threw me to the opposite side of the cockpit where I came up
tight on my safety harness. Atom came to a halt, then popped up as a cork and
carried on as if nothing had happened. Bending low to see under the sails, I
spotted what the chart labeled Harvey Rocks, rising in jagged spires off the
starboard bow. Surf beat furiously against the rock pinnacles, sending my heart
rate up as I calculated my chances of weathering it or being crushed against the
rocks. It seemed I could clear it, just barely. Several soul-wrenching minutes
later, we did, with a few yards to spare. I cheered the victory against the
rocky executioner and gratefully
turned downwind to less restricted waters.
Later that day I breathed a final sigh of relief as I
passed Thursday Island and exited Torres Strait. Perhaps the most dangerous part
of the world voyage was behind me. Once again I traipsed through the Lion’s
lair and escaped unscathed. As wind and current flushed me at ten knots out the
straits and into the Arafura Sea, I watched Cape York, Australia’s
northernmost point, drift by ten miles to the south. Hours later I passed
solitary Booby Island, previously used as a refuge for shipwrecked sailors.
Passing ships left food supplies in a cave there and retrieved letters to
forward home. Here I closed the log on the Pacific and Coral Sea and opened a
page to a new ocean.
The trade winds moderated and hung steadily in the
southeast as we crawled along just out of sight of Australia’s interminable
northern coast. During my five days on the Arafura, I seldom touched the sails.
In these calm waters, far from the steaming heat, insects and fevers of New
Guinea, I felt freed of nature’s savagery and happily fell back into a
familiar and comfortable sea routine. I didn’t feel bothered at all here when
I saw brightly colored poisonous sea snakes tumbling on the wave crests in the
Arafura - until that night I dreamt a snake washed aboard on a wave and fell
into my bunk. My only other visitors were the familiar thump of those
evolutionary half-stepping flying fish and the lighter plunk from squid falling
on deck.
Atom entered the Timor Sea at a point midway between the port of Darwin and
the islands of Indonesia. I had
attempted to gain an Indonesian visa at their embassy in Port Moresby, but the
functionaries there filed my application under “security risk”, took my
twenty dollar application fee and never
replied. Though Indonesia was out, I might have stopped in Australia. The people
of Darwin I’m sure are friendly enough, but their harbor was not convenient
with its high tidal range and mud flats. Besides, the image it represented to me
was not unlike small-town America with a different accent. I kept Atom’s
bow pointed towards Africa.
Fifteen days out of Port Moresby I left the green shallow
waters of the Timor Sea and sailed over the abyssal Java Trench. During the
night I passed south of the ex-Portuguese colony of East Timor and its ongoing
guerilla war and slipped unnoticed into the wide embrace of the Indian Ocean.
Ahead lay some 5,600 miles to South Africa with only a handful of islands
between. I laid my course now for Cocos (Keeling) Islands, which I expected to
reach in about two more weeks.
A comfortable southeast wind brought the clear, almost cool
weather of the Southern Hemisphere winter. Atom’s tiny deck was my observation
platform to the vast wilderness of sea and sky. By night I checked our
constant westward course, keeping Acrux, the pointer star of the Southern Cross,
on the port beam. Each morning and evening twilight, when clouds permitted, I
shot a three star position fix – Achenar to the northeast, Antares to the
southeast, and Acrux to the south. The daily x-marks on the chart crept their
way westward.
Here I sailed into an utterly barren stretch of water. I
saw none of the familiar fishes and even the birds were absent. Sailing past the
longitude of Bali marked the halfway point of the circumnavigation – some
thirteen thousand miles out and thirteen thousand to go. This little milestone
had seemed impossibly distant on those early days sailing on Lake St. Clair;
days when I sailed alone, going nowhere just for the joy of sailing and dreaming
of faraway seas. Now I was as far away from that little lake as I could be and
oddly took comfort in the thought that each mile sailed carried me closer to
home as I scrawled in large print in the logbook: HOMEWARD BOUND.
My string of fine weather was disrupted by a high swell
rolling in from the east that collided with the regular southeast wave pattern.
This was fair warning of dirty weather headed my way. A day later the swell was
higher yet; now and again a broken wave crest tumbling into the cockpit with
much foam and hissing drama, but little punch. Low clouds scudded overhead as
the wind backed to east and rose to gale force. As the barometer dropped, I
tapped it hourly with my finger in some vain hope to reverse its fall. But
sailors know a gale of wind from behind and plenty of sea room ahead is not such
a bad thing. It speeds you on your way and punctuates a too easy life.
The wind continued to build, lifting the seas and lashing
their breaking crests to streaming spray. Under storm jib alone Atom’s rigging
hummed and moaned as the wind brushed it’s hand over every wire. Over and over
we rose stern first, gaining height until the breaking crest foamed all around
us, then plunged down the face into the trough, sometimes digging the bow into
the wave ahead. Moving on deck was done by crawling on hands and knees. Growing
weary of the roller coaster, whenever I wasn’t needed on deck I retreated to
the cabin sole where I wedged myself in with cushions and sailbags between the
bunks.
From below, sounds were muted, but the vibrations of mast
and rigging seemed to penetrate through my bones. With only the false serenity of the
cabin visible to my eyes, my ears concentrated on the mad symphony of flapping
canvas, drumming of lines and rig and groaning and creaking within the hull.
Unable to relax to a deep sleep, with eyes closed I mentally worked as an
orchestra conductor, counting over twenty individual sounds before losing my
point of concentration. The noises I could do nothing about – the breaking
waves, the wind whining in the rig, the whirling of the speed indicator
propeller – didn’t bother me much since they were unavoidable. But the dozen
or so noises originating inside the boat aggravated me to the point I repeatedly
set out to silence them. Some were easy to find and eliminate, like the rhythmic
clank of a pot in its locker or a book sliding on the bookshelf. One by one I
tracked them down until only a few mysterious creaks and taps remained.
Satisfied with my efforts I finally fell into a light and uneasy sleep.
After a week of heavy weather and twenty-eight days alone,
the idea of a respite from the sea was welcome. Approaching Cocos Atoll I
seriously doubted I could find its low line of palm trees between high running
seas and low clouds. Getting an accurate position fix each day was doubtful as I
popped my head through the hatch to measure a star or sun against a rolling
indistinct horizon. If I missed this atoll, the next island was two thousand
miles beyond.
Just before another gray dawn, I was relieved to sight the
flashing beacon of Pulo Panjang, or West Island, and took a compass bearing on
it before another curtain of rain hid it from view. Later, the green tops of palm
trees
appeared on the crest of a wave and disappeared as we dropped into the troughs.
As I rounded the north coast to enter a gap in the reef leading to Port Refuge
the sky went black as a violent squall of wind forced me back out to sea. The
horizontal rain stung my skin like a thousand shots from a BB gun as I reefed
down, hove to and retreated to the cabin. Outside was zero visibility in rain
and spray thick as smoke. I felt I was being drawn towards the reef. As soon
as the squall let up I tacked again towards the inlet. Minutes later I was
anchored in two fathoms of clear, calm water close under the lee of
horseshoe-shaped Direction Island. I waved at the two other yachts already
anchored nearby. Then another squall arrived and it rained so hard and long I
wondered if the little sand island would melt into the sea.
I slept deep through the night, oblivious to the weather
and awoke the next morning to clear skies. A Custom’s launch from West
Island motored across the lagoon and into the anchorage. The officer
handed me a line to tie the launch alongside, heaved himself aboard, knocked the
air from my lungs with a good back slap and bellowed, “Names Harry, welcome to
bloody paradise, mate.”
He pulled a can of Australian beer from his bag, saying,
“How ‘bout a tinnie of blue - my shout, mate?
When I said I hadn’t drank any alcohol in over two years
he looked at me with pity and disbelief. As he stamped my passport he said,
“You’re the first God damned Yank to pass through this year. Not carrying
any of that funny stuff, are ya?”
Assuming he meant marijuana, I assured him I had none and
he said, “Good on ya, mate. There’s bugger all to do here,
but stay as long as you like – no worries,” then added something about
enjoying this job “way out to buggery on Cocos.” The next day the two
Australian yachts departed and I was the sole inhabitant of Harry’s so-called
paradise of buggery.
Cocos is rare - the world’s remotest atoll and only
recently inhabited by man. If the ancient Polynesian canoes did stop here, they
left no trace. The privately owned island group that voted to join Australia the
year before I arrived, is a seven-mile wide lagoon encircled by a dozen sandy
islets, called motus. Of the two presently inhabited, West Island is the
administrative center where about 400 Australians live, mostly on temporary work
contracts, with “bugger all to do”, as Harry put it. Home Island, at the
opposite end of the lagoon, is home to an equal number of Malays, brought here
generations ago to work the coconut plantations. There was a rigid
apartheid-like separation here – all white Christians keep to West Island and
Muslim Malays live on Home Island. As the Malay population increases, some are
sent off to live in Australia, apparently so the government is never in the
awkward position of being a white minority in charge of a Muslim majority.
Actually, the Australians main purpose in buying and governing the island is to
keep it out of the hands of their unwelcome neighbor Indonesia. So cleverly
progressive – so bizarre.
The atoll is easier to understand than the people that live
on its fragile foothold in the sea. One part land to many parts water, it’s
simply the eroded remnants of a larger volcanic island in the final days of its
existence. The central lagoon mirrors a big sky where clouds, stars and wind
pass by unobstructed. The motus are just a few feet above sea level now and are
destined to drown under rising sea levels and eventually disappear. For now the
motus lay like a necklace of pearls on an azure sea, providing a sanctuary in a
vast watery desert for fish, birds, plants and people. Long before the people
arrived, a single coconut carried on ocean currents from far away, settled into
the sand and took root. A thousand years later and all the motus in the group
are lined with “that giraffe of vegetables”, as Robert Louis Stevenson so
aptly described the life-giving coconut palm.
There is an anchorage in front of Home Island as well, but
of course, special permission from the Malay council is required to use it.
Remember this is South Seas apartheid – Westerners to the west island,
Easterners to the east island, and those troublesome visitors on yachts, well,
they can have the northern island. To reach Home Island I rowed my plastic
dinghy, little more than a toy when exposed to wind and wave, for a mile along
the inside edge of the reef, ever mindful of the sea battering the reef with
thunderous fury not far away. Landing on Home Island, I dragged the dinghy up a
long sloping beach and secured it to a bush above the high tide mark.
As I had learned firsthand, gales and violent squalls of
wind are common in this part of the Indian Ocean, not to mention occasional
cyclones. Along the windward shore of Home Island was the sobering sight of a
small sailing yacht dashed to pieces on the reef, probably within the past year
or two, judging from the bits of unrotted wooden cabinetry strewn about. Back on
the lagoon side I found two rusted iron rails of an old slipway and wondered if
this was the spot where Joshua Slocum hauled the Spray when he visited here
during the first ever solo circumnavigation. His historic book, Sailing Alone
Around the World, was always at hand on my bookshelf and I was thrilled whenever
I called at one of his ports.
I walked through coconut groves where five elderly Malay
women in colorful dresses and straw hats worked separating the coconut meat from
the husks. Next to them a flatbed car loaded with copra sat in the sun to dry.
Steel rails allowed it to be pushed under an open-sided shed at night or on
rainy days. Since the sale of the islands to Australia, this aging group of five
women were all that remained of the plantation’s workforce, most of the others
preferring welfare checks from their new landlords to the hard physical labor of
harvesting copra.
Nearby I paused at a graveyard under the palms. As a
distant loudspeaker called the faithful to perform one of five daily prayers, I
stepped over a low wood fence for a closer look at the Malay graves. Many of the
sites were adorned with offerings to the dead – full cans of peaches were a
favorite, one grave was topped with a broken electric fan and a child’s grave
was marked by jars of candy and peanuts, a broken doll, a wooden spoon and a
mirror.
Nearby, but separate, was the abandoned Christian cemetery. One of the marble headstones read: “In memory of Maria, relict of Capt. James Clunies-Ross, 1899”. For over 150 years these islands were the private territory of the Clunies-Ross family who imported the Malays to run their sole industry of exporting copra.
As I walked through the Malay village of new government
supplied prefabricated homes with indoor plumbing, I couldn’t help but notice
the contrast to the friendly people of Polynesia and New Guinea – the few
people I saw pretended to take no notice of me at all. With less than a mile of
road that leads to nowhere, the Malays rush about on motorized bicycles as if on
some urgent business. At the south end of the island a low wall of coral stones
fenced off a corner of the lagoon into a large, and empty, turtle pond. The
Malays now prefer their turtle soup in cans flown in on the weekly flight from
Australia.
Through their long years of isolation the shy and handsome
Cocos Malay had been self-sufficient. Besides the hard work of producing copra,
the men were skilled woodcarvers and built their jukong sailing canoes for
fishing and even operated the blacksmith forge to produce any needed brass and
iron fittings. Thanks to new government handouts this was all rapidly changing.
The once sail-powered jukongs I saw on the beach were now all powered by large
outboard motors. The few Malay men that work at all do so by commuting daily to
West Island on the high-powered ferry to perform such indispensable labor as
watering the governor’s lawn. The VCR in every house has largely replaced
neighborly socializing as surely as hot metal roofs have replaced the cool
thatch. The government policy for pacifying the Malays has worked so well I
wouldn’t be surprised if one day they all packed up and moved to a slum
outside Sydney.
I passed several carefree days on Direction Island, jogging
barefoot along the beach, harvesting ripe coconuts with machete, and snorkeling
over the reefs among shimmering schools of fish. One day I sailed Atom across
the lagoon to West Island for provisions. Atom heeled to the fresh trade wind
and skipped over the shallow waters. Widely scattered coral heads stood out as
yellow-brown clumps among the pale green waters and were easily avoided with a
sharp lookout ahead. My silent approach startled several sea turtles basking on
the surface, who upon seeing me almost on their backs, took a gulp of air and
dove underwater. The southern half of the lagoon was not navigable, being mostly
shallow coral studded with deep pools, but its silent remoteness looked worth
exploring by sailing dinghy. The winds picked up by the time I neared the West
Island pier where the anchorage was exposed to six miles of fetch across the
lagoon. Too choppy to safely land the dinghy, I turned around and tacked my way
back to Direction Island.
Still needing to resupply with fresh fruit and vegetables,
the next day I rode with Harry in the Customs launch back to West Island.
Disembarking at the jetty at the island’s north end, I walked four miles
through scented pine forests and along the empty ocean side beaches. Next to the
mile-long airstrip I visited the weather station to read the long-range
forecast. More of the same was basically what it said. At the island’s sole
settlement I bought a small bag of produce imported by plane and got taxed 150%
on it because I was “from a yacht”. I then walked back north and boarded the
launch just as Harry was casting off for Home Island and he kindly detoured to
drop me off at Direction Island.
In these few days I had come to think of Direction Island
as mine alone, a little piece of Eden inaccessible to the
thundering hordes of the outer world. In the cool evening breeze I rowed the
dinghy over to Prison Island, which is no more than a lump of sand sprouting a
dozen palms and scrubby bushes. I walked from one end of the islet to the other
in less than one hundred steps. It was inconceivable that this is where such
drama played out in the early 1800’s.
Back then, Alexander Hare, a wealthy ex-governor of the colony of Borneo landed on uninhabited Home Island with a private harem of forty Malay women. Two years later a ship landed Capt. James Clunies-Ross, his family and eight sailors to settle the same island. There was understandable animosity and disputes between the two camps and the lusty sailors could not keep their hands off Hare’s Harem. Hare and his few remaining women eventually retreated to what became known as Prison Island where he lived a short time until retiring to the Dutch colony of Batavia.
Prison Island
Standing in the center of tiny Prison Island I could not imagine Hare’s group living on such a tiny scrap of land. Later, when I compared the latest chart to an earlier survey it was apparent the island had eroded considerably over the years and may one day disappear, adding its sand to one of it’s neighboring motus.
I camped overnight on Prison Island, setting up my one-man tent on the beach. On this windy night the rustle of palm fronds and incessant drone of surf seemed mixed with voices from the past – “Ahoy, you there on Prison Island!” I looked to Home Island and saw no one there. A coconut fell to the ground and I cracked it open for a drink and a taste of its oily flesh. I thought how Atom so resembled this isolated islet, seemingly pushing its way as a ship into the steady trade winds. They both held the same serenity and shelter and promise of deliverance. At sunrise I packed my dinghy to leave. The rising tide soon erased my footprints from the beach, and like Alexander Hare, gone was the physical record of my having passed this way.
Atom and I were refreshed and ready for the next sea passage, yet I took one more night here to sleep on deck and soak up the atmosphere of the tropic isle. Under a magnificent southern sky, a cascade of stars spilled to the horizon. After moonrise the transparent waters took on a luminous glow, the boat seemingly floating on air, casting a moon shadow on the rippled sand below. Ashore, the palms gently bowed before the wind, mixing the rustling of the palms with the murmur of surf in a captivating voice of mid-ocean solitude. With fully restored mind and body I sailed away the next morning on a light wind, headed for a distant island of a million people.
Atom
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