16. Solitary Sailor
I must go down
to the seas again,
to the lonely sea and sky.
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We were bound for Mauritius Island 2,400 miles to the west.
I’d expected a passage of steady trade winds at this time of year in these
latitudes. Then barely one hundred miles past the Cocos Islands the wayward wind
fell away to nothing. For two days Atom drifted within a void of blue sky and
water, sails snapping from side to side as we rolled on the leftover heaving
sea.
A ship appeared on the horizon and I watched him make a
deliberate course change to approach us. She slipped by close enough for me to
see the faces of the crewmen who stepped out of the pilothouse to gaze down on a
boat adrift. When later that day two other ships passed within a mile of us, I
judged by their course I was crossing an Indonesia to South Africa shipping lane
and I kept a more attentive watch.
Within a period of several hours, the calm gave way to a
gale of wind from the southeast. The finest hour of a voyage is when a new wind
arrives and the boat slips quickly through calm water. Again I observed the
magic of cat’s paws wavelets born of the opposing forces of wind friction and
water surface tension. I watch them grow into majestic mature waves now
propelled by even greater wind friction coupled to the restoring force of gravity.
Science easily explains wave theory, but knowing the formula does little to
explain the magic.
As the seas built, their frothy tops tumbled aboard as they
swept past. For five days we eagerly rushed before the blow. A few times each
day a high swell from a distant southern ocean storm synchronized with the
southeast wind-driven waves to produce an episodic wave with shocking impact
against Atom’s beam, skidding us sideways under a cascade of falling water. As
always, Atom and I literally shrugged it off and resumed our course.
A wave’s signature is as individual as a snowflake,
though because of their relatively gigantic scale, waves are endlessly
fascinating to watch. This one building as it approaches at some fifteen to
twenty miles an hour - will it break before or after it reaches us? When not
staring at this blizzard of awesome seas, I mended chafed sails, read books and
pumped water from the bilge that accumulated from leaking deck fittings and
hatches, all the while struggling to hold myself against the boat’s forceful
lurching. Eventually, the rain and spray and deck leaks dampened, if not soaked,
virtually everything inside the boat.
Little miseries and minor emergencies become bigger when
they take place on a stormy night. On one of these nights a steering line on the
winvane chafed through and Atom spun around in an uncontrolled gybe: a stalling
out with sails aback. Within a minute of being snug in my bunk, I hung upside
down from the stern rail, threading a new line as my head dunked under each sea.
Two nights later the drama repeated when the other line broke. The next
thrilling moment came when the shackle on the jib halyard broke, letting the
halyard run irretrievably to the top of the mast. The jib then dropped overboard
and tore a seam before I could haul it aboard. After a half day with palm,
needle and waxed thread, I hoisted the jib on the spare spinnaker halyard,
leaving the jib halyard to be retrieved when I could safely climb the mast in
port.
The next notable event was hearing the speed instrument
propeller ripped from the hull, possibly by some floating debris or the jaws of
a shark attracted by its spin. This speedometer was installed before electronic
speed logs were common and it’s mechanical cable between prop and meter had
rarely gone a thousand miles at a time without snapping in two from fatigue. I
had spent hours repairing it over and over again. From here on out I could only
guess at my speed, which at first frustrated the navigator. By day I judged the
rate of water as it moved alongside. At night the movement of the boat and sound
of the water as it gurgled past the hull were clues that eventually became as
accurate as, and more dependable than, the old speed log. Even laying half
asleep in my bunk I knew the boat’s approximate course and speed within a half
knot by the way she rode over the waves. Like a blind person develops an extreme
ability to sense their surroundings through hearing what the sighted cannot, the
sailor’s natural senses can only fully develop when he sails without instruments.
The night’s moaning gale gradually, almost imperceptibly,
reduced to a strong constant trade wind that sang a less threatening sonorous
note through the rigging. As my latitude dropped to almost 20 degrees South, my
daily bucket showers in the cockpit had the cool signature of the southern
hemisphere winter. Another fifteen degrees of longitude, or about 900 miles,
passed under the keel and I reset my local time back one hour to match the new
time zone. With these strong winds behind me, I crossed into the next time zone
seven days later. A this point I had set the clock back fifteen times since
departing Florida with nine
more hours to bring it full circle.
While traversing over the waves I was fascinated by a
contour map of the floor of the Indian Ocean. Like other oceans I crossed,
beyond the continental shelves the land below me was rarely flat. It’s
convoluted floor held mysterious abyssal trenches between its unclimbed mountain
ranges, only the highest peaks of which broke the surface, like the Cocos
Islands behind me and Mauritius ahead. Those lower mountains lay flooded and
unborn to us, unknown except as irregular soundings under passing ship’s
sonar. Again I was reminded the nearest land was only a couple miles away – directly below me and a world away.
The unmistakable sound of a whale spouting nearby brought
me on deck in time to see him cross my track two waves behind me. Probably it
was a humpback or sperm whale judging by its size of nearly double Atom’s
length. Its colossal beauty was partly lost on me since whales are known to sink
yachts, either accidentally or otherwise. Thankfully, I never saw a whale that
large again, but the next day a group of pilot whales half the length of Atom
encircled us, behaving like overgrown porpoises playing with a big brother.
Either boredom or fatigue at pacing us at 130 miles a day, sent them veering off
in unison a few hours later.
The shifting, fickle gallery of radio stations heard on my
portable short-wave receiver, which only picked up the strongest signals, was
evidence of our progress across the Indian Ocean. Short-wave broadcasts from
Australia and the singsong voices of Indonesia faded into the static. I briefly
heard Sri Lanka discussing their Tamil troubles as I passed a thousand miles to
the south. The powerful transmitters of Radio Moscow, Voice of America and the
BBC were often in range and gave me what I needed for accurate navigational time
with a distinctive beep tone at the top of each hour. The news that followed;
the Holy Wars between communists, capitalists and Islamists, was less welcome
within the serene cocoon of Atom’s cabin and I listened to it sparingly.
In a rising wind I went forward to change down to a smaller
jib. Rigged as usual for downwind, the whisker/spinnaker pole held the sail out
to one side to prevent its flogging as the boat rolled. When I released the
pole’s end latch from the sail, the pole broke free of my grasp, swung from
its topping lift line above my head, and before I could catch it, the tip
punched a hole in the mainsail. I hurried to patch the sail and just as I
finished, looked over my shoulder and sighted Rodriquez Island off the starboard
bow. I had not planned to stop at this island, which at the time had a poor
harbor. I was able to use its cloud-capped peak as a waypoint to confirm my
position. Shifting winds and rainsqualls now compelled me to set a course
passing south of the island.
Once committed to that course, the wind increased and
shifted ahead, forcing me closer to land than felt safe. My relatively new
number two jib was oversized for this wind strength, but there was no time for
changing sails. Fearful of hitting the reefs that extend five miles off the
coast, I sheeted the sails in tight and beat into the wind and waves. A compass
bearing on the island at dusk showed I was gaining distance to windward. Then
the jib exploded under the force of the wind. We slowed to a crawl, drifting
back down on the island as the pieces of sail flogged in the wind. What had been
my best sail, I now retrieved in three pieces. Working frantically, with my back
literally against the wall of reefs, I replaced the shredded sail with the
smaller sail I just repaired. The breakers on the reef were hidden by darkness
as I regained my course. By dawn the island was safely astern and out of view.
The excitement continued as a second gale arrived
unexpectedly. One moment I was putting together a sandwich of cornbread and mung
bean sprouts topped with mustard and pepper. The next moment I was thrown with
pots and dishes against the cabin side as a blast of wind laid us over sharply.
A minute later, wearing nothing but my harness and an anguished expression, I
crouched knee-deep in waves submerging the bow as I fought to lower the flailing
jib. Step by methodical step I wrestled the jib into its bag and dragged it back
to the cockpit locker, pulled the storm jib bag forward, hoisted and sheeted it
in to maintain steerage while I moved on to triple reef the main. Even in my
weariness and anxiety I thrilled to ride the breast of a violent sea displaying
its raw power. The sea, especially in its moments of fury, demands first your
attention and endurance, and finally your patience and acceptance. If you lack
this capacity, you lose your purpose to be out here and the shore is where you
should make your home.
Each day the barometer needle jumped upwards a bit more as
the anti-cyclone passed over us. Between low, scudding clouds I caught the sun
at least twice a day for a shaky and approximate position. Each sight tested my
balance as wind vibrated and spray soaked the instrument in my hands while I
worked to bring the sun tangent to a chaotic horizon only briefly seen from the
crest of the highest waves. In these conditions the delicate maneuver of
twilight star sights was as out of the question as building a house of cards on
a roller coaster.
On the night of my nineteenth day at sea, a dim glow from
city lights on the east coast of Mauritius appeared in the distance ahead. The
gale still hammered at the sea the next day as the island grew from a smudge on
the horizon. Squalls raced by each twenty minutes like commuter trains on a
tight schedule. If I hadn’t seen the island I could still have felt its
presence as the upward sloping seabed heaped up the waves and the bold coast
bounced them back to mix with trade wind driven waves rolling unimpeded
thousands of miles across the Indian Ocean.
By evening I was on the western, or leeward, side of the
island. Protected from the weather by intervening mountain ranges, wind and seas
dropped to give me a calm, peaceful sail up the coast to the island’s capital
and port of entry at Port Louis. By reefing sails, I slowed our progress to
arrive off the port at dawn. When I pushed the starter button to motor up the
port’s narrow channel, the engine coughed once, blew out a puff of gray smoke
and quit. Again I knelt in front of the engine, not in prayer as might have been
more effective, but with arms wrapped around that inscrutable contraption of
grease, iron and rust, vainly adjusting the carburetor. As I disassembled and
cleaned the rusty carburetor, a crucial tiny part rolled out of reach into the
bilge. Turning my back on this truculent iron mule, I went on deck and noticed
we had drifted in the current some ten miles back out to sea. The next several
hours I spent in a more fruitful task of tacking into the unsteady breezes
drifting down the semi-circle of mountains forming the backdrop to Port Louis.
Ahead lay a visual assault, from rolling green slopes and
jagged peaks visible miles away to the closer in spectacle of a busy shipping
port. Men labored unloading ship’s cargo while others loaded a ship with sugar
from quayside storage sheds. A dredger worked at deepening the harbor. An
overtaking tugboat sounded its horn as I zigzagged my way into the small boat
harbor on the city waterfront pier and tied alongside two other yachts on a
cement quay. I had barely finished securing my lines when an Indian man stepped
aboard uninvited and thrust his business card at my face. Probably because it
was his only card he did not hand it to me, but allowed me to read it from the
end of my nose. “Mauritian Laundry Service – Recommended by Her Majesty’s
Royal Navy,” it proclaimed in bold type.
“I sail naked,” I apologized, while holding up a nearly
empty laundry bag, which sent him scurrying down the pier. There went my first
contact with humanity after twenty days alone at sea.
Atom’s yellow quarantine flag flying from the starboard
spreader drew the attention of two French-speaking Indian customs and
immigration agents wearing British-style uniforms. They climbed aboard with that
air of mild suspicion and annoyance common to the breed, their briefcases
stuffed with important documents. I scribbled the appropriate information in
their forms as one of them poked about down below until satisfied I carried
nothing illegal or of dutiable value.
After a brief hello to my neighbors on two Australian
yachts, I prepared a dish of rice using my last onion. Only half-finished with
dinner, the shot of landfall adrenalin wore off and I fell instantly asleep
as I slumped into my bunk. It’s amazing how a steady bunk drugs your sleep
after a long strenuous voyage, particularly as it often culminates in long hours on constant alert
during the coastal navigation of final approach. Finally at rest in safe harbor,
your subconscious tells you the
dangers are past and nothing else is of any significance. I did finally awake
early the next morning to a metallic voice chanting the Muslim call to prayer
from a loudspeaker located on the roof of a nearby building. Its volume was set
at air raid siren level lest any Muslims, Hindus, Christians, or sailors in the
harbor try to sleep through prayer time.
Stepping refreshed onto the pier, I moved past the Indians
and Africans that work and loiter along the waterfront. Back then, before
Mauritius grew a moderately prosperous textile manufacturing and tourist
economy, strolling down the back streets and alleys of Port Louis loosed visions
of old Bombay – Hindus, Muslims, Africans, Chinese and all shades of Creole
crowded the streets where curbside venders sold every kind of cooked and
uncooked foods from roasted peanuts to fiery curries wrapped in tortilla-like
flatbreads. As in India, labor is cheap, people plentiful, and small businessmen
hawk their wares with a sense of urgency. Shopkeepers leaned out of windows and
doorways imploring me to come in and inspect their goods as if our mutual
survival depended on it.
Buses, bicycles and pedestrians jockeyed for right of way
on the streets and motorbikes considered the sidewalks their territory.
Mauritians behind the wheel of cars, trucks and taxis express themselves with
the same impatient jostling as the pedestrians in the crowded markets. I happily
immersed myself in this revolving chaos and with no particular place to go,
allowed myself to be swept along by the human tide. Having spent most of the
last sixty-five days alone at sea since leaving New Guinea, I felt as
foreign as a visitor from another planet.
When I asked a local policeman on the street corner where
to change dollars to local money he openly told me the black market rate was
better than the bank and directed me to the back room of a Chinese Jewelry shop.
With a bulging pocket of Mauritian Rupee notes, I entered the chaotic Indian
market where vendors shouted at me from all sides in a demanding way they knew
was hard to ignore. Here I bought two bags of fruits and vegetables, some
croissants and a crispy French baguette three feet long, and lunched on Indian
curry-filled pancakes known as dhal puri washed down with a glass of fresh
yogurt. At the end of the day I calculated my indulgent shopping spree cost me
only eight US dollars.
Unlike the Pacific, where nearly every scrap of land was
inhabited by the ancient peoples of Southeast Asia before discovery by
Westerners, this 29 by 38 mile-wide island was uninhabited when discovered by
the Dutch some 400 years ago. For a long time French settlers ran sugar cane
plantations with slave labor from Africa and later with indentured labor from
India and China. Even though Britain ruled the island from the time of the
Napoleonic Wars until independence in 1968, the local hybrid population of over
a million people from Africa, Asia and Europe have retained French and Creole as
their daily language.
The noisy, colorful circus of life in Port Louis is squeezed between the sea and the surrounding mountains, each with a distinct name and shape, all beckoning to be climbed. Giant boulders balance on sharp peaks and saw-tooth cliff edges pierce the sky. The thumb-shaped “Le Pouce” stands prominently among the two to three thousand-foot mountain range backed up against the city.
Two and a half hours after lacing up my boots aboard Atom I
gazed down on Port Louis from the narrow sky-piercing tip of Le Pouce. Opposite
the city, to the east, small villages punctuated the checkerboard pattern of
sugar cane fields, some tall and green, others harvested and brown or burnt
black. Shadows raced across the fields as puffs of trade wind-driven clouds blew
past, bathing me in their fine mist as they went.
In succeeding days I climbed to the tops of Le Pouce’s
neighbor peaks, often inching my way along finger and toeholds ascending the
vertical crevassed rock faces. As I carefully made my way up a tricky route, a
group of cane cutters paused to watch me, then waved as I emerged looking almost
straight down on them from an overhanging ledge.
Between rejuvenating sorties to the mountains, I tended to
needed maintenance and repairs on Atom. I climbed the mast to retrieve the lost
jib halyard. In those days, instead of having a helper hoist me aloft in a
bosun’s chair, I preferred the body-strengthening task of free climbing by
gripping the rigging with my hangs and clamping my thighs against the mast to
inch-worm my way up and down. Halfway up I could sit on the spreaders for a rest
and further up I could stand on the upper spreaders to work at the masthead.
With hacksaw and a hammer and chisel I worked to cut an inspection port into Atom’s dirt-clogged fuel tank. The tough monel steel of the tank resisted well any attempts to cut with dull hand tools. My noisy struggle with the tank attracted the attention of a tall, rail-thin Creole man about 20 years old who leapt off the quay into Atom’s cockpit. “Permettez-moi,” he said as he grabbed the hammer and chisel from my hand and struck the tank top with vigor.
How can you not be impressed when someone fishing for a job sees a
task and begins work without negotiation? I hired Anthony for a few days at
the local labor rate of about a dollar an hour to help finish the two-man job of
removing and recaulking leaking deck fittings – a never ending task when the
core of the deck is waterlogged. Instead of making a long walk home each night,
Anthony chose to sleep stretched out on Atom’s cockpit bench.
My conversations with Anthony were all in French, or I
should say, he spoke to me in a French Creole and I blathered like an
unselfconscious idiot in phrase book French. I guess Anthony knew other sailors
before me since he asked if I wanted him to find me a five dollar girl for the
night. I acknowledged the price was fair, but Anthony smiled knowingly when I said I preferred a woman with a
less mercenary approach.
Once our work was done Anthony took me to his family house in the Port Louis suburb of Roche Bois for dinner. “Tonight I will introduce you to my cousin Dolores who is single and almost eighteen, “ Anthony said as we walked the dirt road past decaying houses, little more than shacks of timber and tin. Most of his numerous relatives lived on the same street in adjoining houses.
Inside their house I met several generations from grandparents to
grandchildren, including Dolores, her Indian mother and Tanzanian father.
Dolores was tall and thin with gorgeous dark almond eyes that shyly met mine as
I frequently looked her way that evening. To her family she spoke Creole in
musical tones. To me she used her schoolbook French to be more easily
understood. She would have been in her final year of high school, but was forced
to drop out when the family could not afford the tuition. Now she borrowed
friend’s books and studied on her own at home. While Anthony’s mother served
dinner of rice and spicy curry that brought tears to my eyes, Dolores moved
around fussing over her grandparents and younger brothers and sisters. I could
see why they seemed to love her very much.
With dinner finished, the table was pulled away and the
guitar came out. We sang and danced in the small room as Dolores and her sister
laughed while teaching me the hip-swaying steps to a Mauritian Creole dance. As
I left the house, the grandmother handed me a bag of leftover desserts and
Dolores kissed me innocently on both checks, the memory of which distracted my
sleep that night. There is a richness and joy within these people that remains undamaged
by the poverty surrounding them.
“Be careful you don’t fall in love,” Anthony warned
me the next day with another knowing smile.
“Your warning may be too late, mon ami, “ I replied.
“I’m invited to Dolores’s house for dinner tonight.” When I asked her
that night to come visit me at the boat I quickly learned that there would be no
loose American-style romance. I saw Dolores nearly every day after that, at her
house, my boat, picnics at the beach or mountain, the botanical gardens, and for
the first few weeks, always with at least a Mother, Grandmother or sister as
chaperone.
My frustrated passions had a useful diversion when I got
underway on my long walk across the island’s tilted terrain. I planned an
unhurried foot-paced tour of the southern half the island, some forty miles or
more of twisting roads from one side of the island to the other, including a
detour to the island’s highest mountain, Piton de la Petite Riviere Noire.
Dolores and Anthony joined me for the first day of the trek
starting with a bus ride to our starting point at the coastal village of Grand
Case Noyale. Along the way we crossed the central plateau where Corps de Gaurd,
an impressive flat-sided mountain rose over flat fields of sugar cane. At
Tamarind Bay we passed rubber-booted workers sweeping up piles of salt from
terraced clay and stone floored tidal ponds where a strong sun continuously
evaporated seawater.
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From Grand Case Noyale we set out on foot for the next
village of Chamarel, three miles to the east. The road bent mostly upwards with
occasional welcome breath-catching dips. Higher up we rounded a bend and Dolores
pointed out the seacoast in the distance. There on the southwest corner of the
island stood Le Morn Brabant, a massive square-shaped mountain thrusting out
like an island-size nose sniffing the salt air. Because its cliffs are nearly
unclimable, it had once been a refuge for runaway slaves. When the British
abolished slavery on the island they sent a detachment of police to climb the
mountain and tell the slaves of their freedom. Seeing police coming, the slaves
assumed they would be caught and hung so instead they threw themselves from
the cliffs. The sad ironies of ancient history seemed of little consequence to
my companions who, unburdened by a heavy backpack, teased me for my slow
progress uphill.
From Chamarel, Anthony and Dolores returned home by bus and
I walked alone up out of the valley stopping here and there to pick a ripe guava
from roadside bushes. The road brought me to a clearing at Seven Coloured
Earths, a field of heaped bare volcanic residue where I caught view of my target,
the low-sounding summit of Little Black River Peak.
A few miles on I turned onto a trail and could tell I was moving up along
a narrow ridge, but thick bush prevented measuring my progress until I came out
in a last steep scramble where I pulled myself up onto the island’s most
skyward point. Below me the Black River gorge cut deep through the central
plateau, the river cliffs punctuated with waterfalls in a verdant miniature of
America’s Grand Canyon. My route behind and ahead of me was clearly visible,
as were the jagged peaks surrounding Port Louis standing as distant castle
spires to the north. I sat on this perch a few minutes chewing on a baguette
while listening to a family of monkeys chattering in the bushes below.
With precious few hours of daylight remaining, I descended
the mountain and walked east through a pine forest planted years ago in orderly
rows from seedlings imported from France. In a fit of homesickness the early
colonizers named several towns on the island after corresponding French cities.
With a sense of humor a mapmaker named a nondescript hill Cocotte,
meaning “Prostitute”. Another was named Montaine Duex Mamelles (Two Breast
Mountain), and more remarkably, Tres Mamelles.
As daylight faded I picked up the pace to reach my planned
campsite at the crater lake of Grand Basin. The fresh soreness in my muscles
reminded me how far I had traveled in just one day. A chill rain began as I
unrolled my tent next to an ornate dome-roofed Hindu shrine. Across the pond
stood another temporarily deserted temple. During February, at the Festival of
Maha Shivaratree, Hindu devotees carry flower-covered wooden arches on a
pilgrimage to the lake. Here the largest percentage population of Indians
outside India comes by the thousands to collect holy water in a scene
reminiscent of the rituals on the banks of the Ganges.
Because I had not brought a blanket in my quest to travel
light, I was kept awake by
the cold night air of the high plateau. Rain pattered lightly on my tent as I
lay under my raincoat until dawn when I packed my backpack in the gloomy fog and
scampered off for other places. The road descended into finer weather as I
entered emerald fields of tea plants. The pickers bobbed as they moved among the
low bushes, pulling select leaves from the top and tossing them into cane
baskets tied to their backs. The closely spaced bushes, as even in height as the
pile of a carpet, only just allowed the pickers enough room to push their way
through.
Beyond the tea fields, the road led past a string of dreamy
sounding villages: Bois Cheri, Grand Bois, La Flora and Beau Climat. At each
settlement I received friendly greetings from the people I met and they, correctly
assuming I was not stopping at their particular bend in the road, offered
unsolicited directions to the next village. It was perhaps the people’s
incongruous speech that fascinated me most, especially French-speaking Indo-Mauritians
that predominated in the interior. As I stood in a little country store drinking
chilled soda water, a woman in a multi-colored sari dress came in for baguettes.
The red dot on her forehead indicated more boldly than a ring that she was
married. She wore her wealth as a solid gold ring through the side of her nose.
Her correct French speech indicated she might have been to school in France.
Next to enter was an African boy who called out his request in the rhythmic
Creole patois to the old Chinese shopkeeper who conversed with us all in Mandarin accented French.
Back on the road, sun-darkened men slashed at stalks of
sugar cane with long-bladed knives and filled truck beds and mule carts with the
raw ingredient of the island’s main export of sugar. Since
cane planting began some two hundred seasons ago, these fields have
been cleared of large and small boulders that now stand in pyramid-like piles in
the center of most every field. All roads in this region converged at the stone
arch gateway of the sugar cane processing plant where mechanical crane claws
plucked the towering piles of harvested cane from trucks and creaking
over-burdened oxcarts.
Hot, sun baked cane fields rutted by oxcart wheels
stretched to the horizon as I walked through the dusty village of Rose Belle.
Past Duex Bras, a village so small and nondescript it barely broke the horizon,
I marched out of the cane fields and crossed a river on a bridge of hand laid
stone arches. Walking down a steep one-lane street in Ville Noire, I confronted
a cane truck moving up from the bottom. It was loaded so heavily that its
overhanging cane scraped the stone walls on either side of the road. He could
not stop on his uphill run and I could not back up in time. At the last moment I
dropped to lay flat in the shallow gutter. I turned my head to see if the driver
noticed me near his front wheels. The unconcerned look on his face seemed to say
he often saw pedestrians lying in the ditch when he passed.
Another mile and another elegant old stone bridge passed
under my boots and I was suddenly at the coastal town of Mahebourg. The
briskness had gone out of my step. My leg muscles now ached continuously and my
pack grew heavier with each step. I sat next to a fruit seller’s stand and bit
into a sun-ripened mango while my eyes feasted on the rich scenery of people
moving through the outdoor markets and fishing pirogues drifting inside the reef
line. A bus brought me back to Atom in Port Louis before nightfall where my
3-inch bunk cushions had never felt so luxurious.
I walked the island and stood on its highest point, but
there remained one other peak that captured my attention. Visible from Port
Louis, this slender peak was capped by a massive rock looking like a man’s
head set on the shoulders of the mountain. It seems too delicately balanced and
artful to be a natural formation. I at first attempted this climb alone and
found myself hanging from my fingernails on the wrong approach and unable to
move up the vertical rock wall. On my second attempt I took a bus to the village
of Creve Coeur (Broken Hearted), and wandered around looking for a local guide.
I checked first at the general store where idle old men passed the time
conversing in Hindi while sari-wrapped women came in for daily household
supplies.
I found my guide when 23-year-old Pareep Singh attached himself to me as I walked past his family’s stone house directly under the mountain. Pareep said he had guided tourists up the mountain “many times” and we agreed on a price of 50 rupees, or about three US dollars.
I followed
Pareep down a path along a maze of old volcanic stone walls erected around
family-sized plots of land. Above the cane fields the path forked in several
directions. Here my guide proved indispensable as we made long strides, quickly
working our way through the labyrinth of interlocking trails and up the wooded
ravine. We continued up a steepening dry streambed that showed eroded signs of
turning into a waterfall on days of hard rain. The valley opened up below us,
but my attention stayed focused on the narrow ledge we crept along. As slight
insurance against the unsure footing we gripped handfuls of grass sprouting from
cracks in the rocks.
Once we emerged just below the peak on the shoulder of
Pieter Both, we paused to sort out our climbing rope and eat our lunch of oranges
and bread. As we gazed down on his neighbor’s gardens, Pareep told me the
legend of this man-shaped mountain: “An Indian milkman came upon an angel one
day while making his deliveries. They made love after he promised the angel he
would never speak of it to anyone. Of course, the next day he boasted of his
conquest to his friends and soon the whole town knew about it. In her
embarrassed anger the angel turned the milkman into this mountain. We are
standing on his shoulders here and you can plainly see his neck and head above
us.” Pareep pointed straight up to the head and then added, “Our Creve
Coeur, (Heartbreak Village), is named after their misfortune.”
The overhanging head of Pieter Both, frozen in a geologic
moment, is poised to tumble down one day on the houses in the valley below. They
used to say here that when the head fell it would portend the end of British
rule over the island. Independence has come and still it teeters, buffeted by
storms and rumors.
We tied ourselves together with my fifty-foot safety line and crawled up the neck for a final ascent. Pareep pointed out a bronze plaque placed on the rock as a memorial to a family of four who were killed here in a lightning strike several years earlier.
The final pitch up the face was only
possible because the Royal Navy years ago had cemented iron rungs into the
overhanging rock. These essential handholds had since rusted dangerously thin.
When I mentioned my concern to Pareep, he calmly said, “Never mind”. I
wondered if by that he meant, “It’s okay” or maybe less convincingly
“Don’t think about it.” With me below him at the end of a taut line, Pareep
surprised me by looking down and saying: “I think 50 rupees is not enough.
Maybe you could pay a little more?”
With feet dangling in air at times, I pulled my way up the rungs of this very rusty ladder hanging over a nasty drop, and finally stood on the head of Pieter Both. “You’re right Pareep, 50 rupees is not enough.” The view was worth the little terror of the final pitch and the last minute price negotiation. Below us to the east lay a quilt pattern of cane fields and puffs of smoke from factories processing the cane into sugar or rum. To the south were the buildings and horse race track of Port Louis and beyond it in the distance stood the island’s highest peak at Riviere Noire. Off the northern coast I picked out four islets lying like a fleet of ships anchored on a blue sea.
After our descent from the mountain, Pareep invited me to his home where we drank the cool water from his
well. Together we filled my pack with cabbages, carrots and ginger root from the
family garden.
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The remainder of my days on Mauritius were spent with
Dolores either at my side or in my thoughts. In the cool of the morning just
after sunrise she awakened me with a tap on the cabin trunk window and a soft
call of my name: “Je-mees”. We returned again to the shady and sprawling
Royal Botanical Gardens at the town of Pamplemousses. Hidden among the leafy
Raffia and stubby Bottle Palms, we picnicked on the grass at the edge of a
water-lily pond. We spent hours here, sometimes leaning back on the scrambling roots of the Bo
Tree of Ceylon with Dolores coaching me in French and the Creole patois. Here I
came to view English as the masculine language; descriptive, precise, exact as
science. French is the feminine; mellifluous tones of romance and sensuality,
especially as spoken by an island girl. To compensate for our lack of fluency in
a common language I also grew to learn the unspoken language expressed in the
emotion of the eyes, the knowing smile between friends, the unconscious gestures
of her body and the rhythm of her breathing.
Once we had the long-awaited permission of her parents,
Dolores joined me for a day of sailing around those islets off the north coast
and then to anchor in Grand Bay. Her first day on a sailboat proved her natural
abilities as she learned to hoist and trim sails and steer a compass course, and
without a tinge of seasickness. Away from the dirt and noise and prying eyes of
Port Louis, we swam and played off a powder-soft beach fringed with coconut palms
and casuarinas until the sun set behind mother-of-pearl clouds. Then we hurried
to a taxi stop in Grand Bay village and negotiated with a driver to return her
to Roche Bois before her parents began to worry.
The next day Dolores, her relatives and friends, arrived in Grand Bay by bus carrying cooked food in baskets, blankets and guitars. I joined them for an all day, all night party on the beach. The older folks ate and napped while the younger ones swam and collected driftwood for a fire. After dark, two sets of leather-faced wood drums appeared and guitars were tuned up and the Sega dance began.
Originating from slave-era Africans, this pulsating folk
dance is a fast-paced shuffling and hip swaying while the extremely flexible
dancers lean back on their feet to rest the top of their head in the sand and
thrust their hips suggestively. The provocative and yearning Creole lyrics and
erotic uninhibited movements are like a voodoo party without the dark side. I
was pulled in and clumsily followed Dolores lead while the party goers circled
around clapping hands to the music and shouting encouragement. Sure, I looked
the fool, a happy fool at least.
Later I walked the beach with Dolores under the faint light
of the Milky Way. A warm wind brushed the bay, sending wavelets to lap at our
feet in gentle strokes. We sat in the sand in a secluded spot leaning against a
large rock. The moon began to rise as I listened to Dolores sing in Creole to
the beat of the distant music. Then she asked me why I had sailed so far alone.
“I came to find you,” I said. And at that moment it was as simple and true
as that. There was nothing else I felt I had to do.
She threw her head back and smiled at my silliness. Then
she looked at me and asked, “Do you know of the Chagos Islands? I’ve heard
they are not so far away and nobody lives there now. But the gardens are still
there and fish are in the lagoon. Maybe we could sail there and stay as long as
we like.” She smiled again and I instinctively reached out and pulled her dark
body on top of me.
From other sailors I heard of the charms of those
palm-lined atolls in the Chagos Group, offering wide lagoon anchorages and
seagirt tranquility. The idea of us going there together was powerful. It was no
small thing for Dolores to leave her family to maroon herself with me on a
distant island. No one had offered themselves so completely and unconditionally
to me before. But if we went I would be here through the next cyclone season and
it would be a year later before I could leave for Africa. Regardless how I
interpreted their Sega dance, I knew her family expected us to get married
before we spent one night alone together. I didn’t ask her yet, but felt maybe
I should marry this girl and give up the role of solitary sailor.
I was many miles and moods from America when I wrote and
told my parents of these thoughts. I was an independent adult and could make my
own choice, but I was unsure of the right path. Perhaps I said too much too soon
because the reply I received from home came as a shock. “How can you even
think of marriage to a girl you’ve known less than two months who doesn’t
speak a word of English?” and adding, “You don’t have the money or job
prospects to support a wife and she would feel out of place in this country so
far from her family. Don’t be so foolish and selfish.”
Their message was clear – it’s all right to have your
romance over there, just don’t bring it home with you. I was shocked back to
reality and sad to realize they were at least partially right. It was true,
Dolores would not be happy where I had to go. Taking her away from her family
would be selfish of me. I now wondered if I even wanted to return to America.
Would I ever be content there again? I certainly could not run with the same
close-minded group I had known and even imitated. A storm of emotions brewed
inside me. This was not the time and place to settle down. I knew it, but could
not bring myself to speak to Dolores about my inner turmoil. In Mauritius
tomorrow is a lifetime away and we contented ourselves with the moments that
rushed past.
Bill Tehoko, known also as Tonga Bill, was my age and my best friend among the yachts in the anchorage here. He had little advise to give about my predicament other than to lend a sympathetic ear and advise me not to worry and “do what you feel and it’ll work out just fine.”
Bill and his
new French bride Nicole, that he found on the neighboring island of Reunion,
lived aboard Mata Moana, a little 18-foot plywood and fiberglass sailboat
he built himself on his home island in Tonga. The year before he sailed it alone
across the Pacific and Indian Ocean. He was the only modern Tongan voyager I
ever heard of, but I wasn’t surprised he was here on his tiny boat since his
Polynesian ancestors were the greatest seafaring people in the world a thousand
years ago. The truly surprising thing is that there are not more Polynesians sailing
the seas. Bill supported himself working as an artist, doing carvings and
sculpture and making jewelry from whatever was at hand. Nicole and Bill often
came aboard Atom for dinner with Dolores and I where we had more room to stretch
out.
One of the many humorous stories Bill told was about a
Swedish Navy boat that invited him aboard for dinner in some remote Pacific
port. The captain was impressed by the voyages of Bill alone in his small boat
and asked him to speak of his experiences to his officers. At dinner, the
curly-haired, dark-skinned Tongan said in a straight face; “Did you know,
captain, that I am part Swedish?” With that he had everyone’s attention.
After noting the raised eyebrows, he continued, “Yes, my grandfather ate the
first Swedish sailor to land in Tonga.” Bill said at first the Swedes didn’t
know whether to laugh or throw him overboard.
Bill’s 4-horsepower outboard motor was even less reliable
than Atom’s inboard motor so we decided to build a sculling oar for each of
our boats. This way we could at least maneuver our boats in and out of calm
harbors if the engine was not working. Bill picked out two planks of African
hardwood at the lumber shop that we shaped with handsaw and plane into 14-foot
oars. For a finishing touch, Bill carved an auspicious Tongan motif along the
blade of my oar. After practicing the twisting figure-eight sculling motion with
an oarlock on Atom’s transom, I was able to propel the boat across the harbor
at about one knot. Not fast, but dependable when the wind went too calm to sail.
Bill and Nicole were preparing to depart in Mata Moana for a voyage up the Red Sea to France, a hard trip even in a much larger boat and I worried to myself about their fate. On the morning of their departure, Dolores and I escorted them out of the harbor with Atom. With blustery trade winds astern we sailed side-by-side several miles out to sea, gliding over the waves like two wandering albatross. The twin jibs set out from Mata Moana’s tiny mast contrasted starkly with the empty sea ahead. The contrast grew even sharper as we waved farewell and turned Atom back to Grand Bay. The next time I looked back they were a spot on the horizon and then they were gone.
I found out ten
years later when I met them in Reunion Island on my second circumnavigation that
they had encountered a storm off Madagascar, had some damage to the boat and
diverted to the Seychelles where they lived several years before returning to
live on Reunion Island.
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With Bill and Nicole gone, I fell into an unlikely
friendship with a local Indian named Sunil who anchored his wooden sailboat next
to Atom. Sunil had two French tourist girls living on his boat that he claimed
were both his “girlfriends” and when not occupied with them he spent most of
his time trying to swindle everyone he met. Somehow he had traded a few hundred
dollars to a down on his luck visiting sailor for this old and leaky engineless
boat that he now used to take tourists out for a sunset harbor sail. The first
day we met he left with my spare mainsail and broken VHF radio under his arm,
saying; “Not to worry, I’ll trade you something very valuable.”
The next day we went to Port Louis to his friend’s
antiques shop to get my valuable mystery gift. I gave Sunil 50 rupees for our
taxi after he insisted we shouldn’t take the cheaper bus. “You’re a
tourist, but don’t worry, I know how to bargain for the Mauritian taxi
rate,” he said. Like in much of south Asia, everything is priced in two tiers, local and tourist.
As I got out of the taxi in the busy downtown street Sunil
began arguing loudly with our Indian driver. “But he is a tourist, so it is
100 rupees,” the driver pleaded.
“Oh no, you filthy thieving son of a whore, he is with me and I am no tourist you can rip-off,” Sunil shouted in English for my benefit. I shrank onto the sidewalk as Sunil sucker-punched the driver in the face, and ran away after saying, “You tried to rob me and now you get nothing.” I noticed Sunil kept my 50 rupees for himself.
At the friend’s shop I was
presented with a ninety year old reconditioned gramophone, a couple old records
and spare parts and a repair bill for 300 rupees. I decided I’d pay the bill
and keep the gramophone rather than risk a punch in the nose. That night the
anchorage was entertained with the scratchy, tinny sounds of Perry Como drifting
over the water from the gramophone’s enormous brass horn sitting on Atom’s
cabin top. Hearing it actually play and thinking it might have some value after
all, I boxed it up in the forepeak with the other hoarder’s collectibles I
picked up in the Pacific islands and New Guinea and sailed with them all the way
back to Florida. It still sits as an ornament in my Mother’s apartment and as
a testament to my own bloody-minded stubbornness at not leaving it in the shop
where I found it.
The day was fast approaching when I had to depart Mauritius
in order to make it to South Africa before the cyclone season. A few days before
I left, Dolores and I made one more climb together of Le Pouce Mountain. We
moved easily upward, each step putting the crowds of Port Louis farther below.
Soon the forested upper slopes dropped below us in a feathery blanket of green.
We sat on the grassy ridge a few steps below the peak and let the wind rush over
us. It was warm on the mountain and I noted the nearly indiscernible change from
tropic winter to tropic spring.
I wanted to tell Dolores I would send for her to join me
when I reached home or that I would try to sail back to her the following year.
But these options were more like trying to squeeze and stretch a rainbow than
real possibilities. I was as Captain Bligh to my inner Fletcher Christian in
Tahiti. Finally I spoke and told her I would soon sail alone for Africa, that I
would write her, but did not know if we would see each other again. When I
looked at Dolores I realized my words had been carried away on the wind for I
had been speaking in English. Still, she understood I was leaving alone. With a
smile capable of melting mountain ice, she leaned on my shoulder and whispered
in French, “You’ll come back to Ile Maurice and I will be waiting for
you.”
It seemed it was not paradise I was looking for. Maybe it
was just the search for paradise that feeds the wanderlust to explore. Returning
to sea, I hoped, would untangle the knots in my mind. With Atom back in Port
Louis and ready for sea I said my goodbyes to Dolores and her family the night
before my early departure. Dolores wished me a safe voyage and promised to
write, then turned away with a tear on her cheek.
At the first sign of morning twilight I sculled Atom out of the calm harbor. As the morning breeze wafted down the mountain I hoisted sails and gained the sea. Looking back at the seaward end of the breakwater I thought I could see through misty eyes the dark silhouette of a girl waving goodbye.
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