The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  During the night, we safely sailed past the reef that had just about ended the voyage of Endeavour and continued passing landmarks named by Cook as he limped along with only a sail covering a gaping hole in his ship’s hull. Mount Sorrow, Cape Tribulation, and Weary Bay were all named by a desolate Cook as he searched for a port in which to repair his gravely damaged ship. Then Cook discovered the Endeavour River, and on June 17, 1770, landed at the present site of Cooktown. When he and his men spent the next forty-eight days there restoring Endeavour, they established the first European settlement in Australia. We, too, anchored in the mouth of the Endeavour River, its northern bank looking just as it had in Cook’s day.

  I was particularly curious about Cooktown, once a booming gold rush town but now a remote backwater connected to the rest of civilization by dirt road. Until recently, only four-wheel-drive vehicles had been able to make the journey to Cooktown, and then only in good weather. I was first to set foot ashore, but the intended graceful effect of my elegant leap off Northern Magic Junior was ruined when I landed knee deep in the soft gooey mud of the riverbank. By the time we had disembarked and carried Junior past the high tide mark, we all looked as if we were wearing thick brown knee socks. Now I knew why Captain Cook’s men had carried him ashore.

  As we stood, laughing at ourselves and squeezing sticky mud through our toes, we were met by none other than John F. Kennedy, who turned out to be the harbourmaster. He had a few words of caution for us: only the month before, a 4.2 metre saltwater crocodile had made its home on this very stretch of shore, and the muddy waters into which I had just jumped were also populated by poisonous stonefish.

  “You be careful, mates,” said Mr. Kennedy to our junior crew. “A fellow here two months ago lost a great big dog, bigger than you, to a crocodile. Them crocs would snap you up for a snack, just like that!” Behind him stood a large sign: “WARNING: This river is home to estuarine crocodiles.” We nimbly took our sticky brown feet up to Cooktown’s main street, out of the reach, we hoped, of any reptilian predators.

  The next day was the start of a two-day celebration of the landing of Captain Cook’s Endeavour, and the town of 1,500 really went to a lot of effort to put on a good show. It was a boozy Aussie version of a country fair. There was scarcely an arm to be seen, male or female, that was not amply decorated with tattoos and connected to a can of beer. People even strolled around pulling coolers (which the Australians call eskies) on wheeled carts, enabling them to bring their personal supply of beer wherever they went. We saw one particularly innovative fellow towing a little train of two rolling eskies hitched together. Cooktown’s sizable Aboriginal contingent was there as well, but standing apart from the rest, always hovering in quiet groups on the sidelines like a dark shadow.

  The crew of Northern Magic, with fresh haircuts administered on the dock at Cairns a few days before, felt quite out of place among the rough and rowdy citizens of Cooktown. My favourite part of our visit was a conversation I overheard between two muscular, tattooed, beer-drinking young men waiting for the wet T-shirt competition to start (it was delayed because the organizers forgot to organize the water). To me, this exchange summarized the entire atmosphere of Cooktown.

  Beer drinker number one: “G’dye, mite! What’r you doin’ in this neck o’ the woods?”

  Beer drinker number two: “Oi’ve come to see some tits!”

  Beer drinker number one (with a serious and understanding nod of his head): “Fair enough!”

  Early next morning, we set sail, following the tracks of Captain Cook ever deeper into the no-man’s-land of Australia’s far north. Many people had warned us about the winds in far north Queensland. The fierce, unceasing winds, howling day and night, are said to have driven desperate souls to suicide. In Cooktown, John F. Kennedy had told us that when the forecast predicted winds of fifteen to twenty knots, we should just add the two figures together, thirty-five knots. He was right. For weeks, we never had winds of less than thirty knots.

  Blown by these endless rushing currents of air, we speedily sailed up to the tip of Australia. Between the strong winds and the claustrophobic proximity of the many menacing reefs and islands, I was becoming more and more uneasy about the idea of sailing at night. Everywhere we went, there were reminders of the many vessels that had been lost before us; the Great Barrier Reef is a veritable graveyard of ships. Although Herbert felt confident and even exuberant about our fast sailing times, in the darkness I found myself haunted by history, battling an unshakable sense that we were rushing headlong into disaster, bearing down at high speed on some unseen, razor-sharp reef or an uncharted rock. Even my off-watch sleep was restless and disturbed, filled with unpleasant dreams and premonitions of catastrophe. I knew I was only being spooked by the darkness and the relentless wind – with good charts and GPS it was really no less safe than sailing during the day – but still I could not shake my feeling of impending doom.

  As we continued our trek north up the wild Cape York Peninsula, our selection of comfortable anchorages became more and more restricted. Morris Island, our intended shelter for one night, showed up as just a tiny dot on our chart. After another boisterous day’s sail, making a speedy seven and eight knots under jib alone, we came upon the little speck of sandy earth that would serve as our shelter for the night. On it, a solitary palm tree stood in lonely vigil, bent to the shrieking winds that pummelled it day and night. It felt as if we really had arrived at the ends of the earth.

  Yet even in that desolate, windblown place, a sense of history pervaded. The single surviving coconut palm had been one of many planted a century before to provide sustenance for any shipwrecked sailor unfortunate enough to be washed up on this God-forsaken shore. It was for them, as it was now for us, a tiny port of refuge in a hostile, reef-strewn sea.

  After several long debates and gnashing of teeth (mine), we agreed to make one long last sprint from Morris Island up to the top of Cape York without stopping to rest. This way, we could compress many days of travel into one or two and not have to endure any more long nights in uncomfortable anchorages.

  It was another grim, overcast day. The wind continued to blow like blazes, between twenty-five and thirty-five knots. Northern Magic was once again flying over the water. Hazards were around us on every side, and constant vigilance was required. In particularly narrow channels, we calculated our position every ten minutes.

  I had been lying down most of the day, trying to convince my uneasy stomach not to rebel against the motion of the steep, choppy waves. Finally, I had fallen asleep. In the middle of another bizarre and disjointed dream, I heard Herbert yell, “Oh, no!” And then, “Michael! Switch off the autopilot! Quickly!”

  I staggered to the main hatch. My first thought was that my nightmares were coming true: our autopilot had failed and we were about to crash on a reef.

  I stuck my head up as Herbert took over the wheel. He had been down below, plotting our position. Outside, my blinking eyes took in the scene: the grim, tousled ocean was grey, the hazy sky was grey, the scudding clouds were grey, and the huge container ship that was bearing down on us was grey. We had less than a minute before being ploughed right under its charging bow.

  “Do you want me to radio him?” I croaked, as Herbert attempted to steer us out of the ship’s path.

  “Yes!” he shouted over the screaming wind. The giant ship was heading directly for us, at perhaps twice our speed. Its brutish, gun-metal bow was parting the ocean like a knife, a large white wave curling out on either side.

  I had no time to find out where we were, so I scurried inside, abandoned good radio etiquette, and simply called, “Southbound ship, southbound ship, this is northbound sailing vessel. Do you read me?”

  There was no response, and I waited only a few seconds before trying again, in a voice which sounded to me frantic and high pitched. Finally a man answered, in a calm and professional British accent.

  “This is APL Emerald responding to the sailing vessel. Did you say you
are heading northbound?”

  “Yes, we are! We’re right in front of you! What are your intentions?”

  There was a pause, during which it was clear the captain was trying to locate us. He obviously had no idea we were right in his path. His ship was large enough that even if he ran over us, he wouldn’t have felt a thing.

  Quickly, he was back on the radio and in a rather more clipped and urgent voice than before, said, “I’m altering course to port. I’ll pass on your starboard side.”

  A few dozen seconds later, the ship passed just a stone’s throw away. The air was filled with the throb and drone of huge engines and we rocked in the wave created by this man-made leviathan. In some eerie echo of Captain Cook, this, too, was our closest brush with disaster, the nearest we’d ever come to a collision. What if Herbert had taken just one more minute to make his plot on the chart?

  There was no more sleeping for me, and so I curled up in the cockpit, my body swaying in tune to the waves, and realized it was going to be a long, long night.

  A few days later, we rounded Cape York, the northernmost tip of mainland Australia. We’d promised ourselves a treat of some chocolate-covered marzipan at this milestone, and the kids wasted no time pillaging my chocolate supply. Australia’s a huge country, and with thousands of miles of harsh, bushy, uninhabited wilderness seemingly always ahead of us, we had often despaired that we’d make it around so much land. But now we had done it. As we sailed over the top and turned Northern Magic west once again, we left the vast Pacific Ocean and sailed into the waters of the Indian Ocean. What a glowing surge of accomplishment we felt, and on my fortieth birthday!

  Once again we were in the wake of Captain Cook, who, having used up all the names he could think of in his marathon of discovery, had now resorted to the days of the week to name the islands in the narrow Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea. Thus we passed Tuesday Island and Wednesday Island before finally reaching Thursday Island, with Friday Island almost in sight. Unlike Captain Cook, though, we arrived on a Wednesday.

  Over the previous days, Herbert had again been developing a terrible toothache, and now it reached an intolerable level. In spite of the most powerful pain relievers we had on board, his throbbing tooth had kept him awake all the night before. We just prayed there was a dentist on tiny Thursday Island, which covered three square kilometres and had a population of only a few thousand people.

  The people of the Torres Straight are of Melanesian stock and the laid-back island settlement looked more like Fiji than Australia. As in the other friendly islands of Melanesia, men sitting under the trees at the beach nodded and smiled their welcome to us. Within an hour, a local dentist discovered that the root of one of Herbert’s molars had died and developed gangrene. This was the same tooth that had given Herbert trouble on our stormy passage to Fiji. Now, the root of this troublesome tooth was extracted and the infection drained, giving Herbert virtually instant relief. Appallingly, he could smell the gangrene as the tooth was opened. It still makes me shudder to imagine gangrene festering in his mouth, of all places, especially since we had been out of reach of medical assistance for the previous few weeks and the next large town was Darwin, a whole week away by sea.

  At the front desk of the clinic, I stopped to study a curious sign that said, “If youpela have an appointment, youpela should go to the reception desk and mepela will help you as quickly as possible.” I’d heard about Pidgin English, but this was the first time I’d seen it written.

  From Thursday Island, we continued on through the Gulf of Carpentaria, where the combination of strong winds, shallow water, and the meeting of two oceans often results in abnormally steep waves. We got the wet and uncomfortable ride we had expected, with a gale thrown in for good measure.

  Every now and then an especially large rogue wave would rear up, capped with a miniature surfer’s curl that would break over us and cover our decks with white water. The water would race up and down the walkways and, unable to find its way back out through the scuppers quickly enough, rush into the cockpit instead. Twice, the teak floor grating of the cockpit floated up almost to the level of the cockpit seats.

  Keeping watch under these conditions involved an interesting game of cat and mouse in which these freakish waves would leap up over the side of the boat and attempt to catch us unawares with a saltwater shower. Every time we opened up the hatch to peek nervously outside, we had to be quick in case one was about to pounce. Only if the coast was clear could we actually stick our heads right out, and, even still, we got wet a significant proportion of the time. The boys had great fun keeping score of which of their parents got the most satisfactory dousing.

  By 3:00 a.m. the winds were screaming by at between forty and forty-five knots. Northern Magic shuddered as she was battered by the ugly waves that continually reared up over her. From our bed near the bow it sounded as if we were on a fast-moving locomotive. It felt like we were screaming through a winding, high-speed obstacle course around giants who were taking swings at us with tree trunks wielded like baseball bats. I just lay there, my body braced against the inevitable shuddering blows. Every half hour or so I jumped up and went to see Herbert, who was similarly braced in Michael’s bunk. There, both the motion and the noise were less alarming, but every time I staggered back to our bed I found myself becoming more and more awake.

  Finally I decided to try lying down next to Michael on the narrow salon settee. I curled into a ball and wedged myself under his feet, bending his legs up to make enough room for me to crunch my body in a ball below his. It was far from comfortable, but the motion and sound were less perturbing in the centre of the boat. After fifteen or twenty minutes, interrupted only by occasional skirmishes with Michael’s folded legs, I could feel my tired body relaxing and sleep approaching once again.

  (I asked Michael later whether he knew that he had shared his slim bench with me the night before. “I was wondering about that!” he exclaimed. “I thought something had been pushing my legs in the night, but in the morning there was no one there and I thought it was just a dream.”)

  Once out of the Gulf of Carpentaria we found some additional relief, so our third day of sailing passed more comfortably. The next night, we were sailing along quite contentedly in twenty-five knots of wind. The kids had just gone to bed, Herbert was asleep, and I was curled up happily with a book when suddenly the motion of the boat increased sharply. In the next instant, the shrill off-course alarm of the autopilot began beeping, and I raced to wake Herbert up. Something was very wrong.

  Together, we jumped into the cockpit and discovered that we had no steering. Northern Magic had turned into the wind, sails straining and bucking wildly into the waves. Her steering wheel was loose and flying freely. The great bronze steering arm that connected the shaft of our wheel to the rudder had, for the second time on our voyage, sheared right through.

  Herbert quickly came up with a mess of ropes and a steel emergency steering arm, which he fitted to the floor of the cockpit and led around, in a spider’s web of criss-crossing ropes, back to the wheel. Until our steering arm could be attended to in Darwin, there would be no more help from TMQ. We had no option but to hand steer once again for the remaining days of the passage.

  You might imagine we were upset by this, only the latest in a series of steering disasters that had dogged us since the beginning of our long struggle up Australia’s endless coast. In fact, the reverse was true. For some reason both of us were in a great mood, feeling somehow triumphant that we had known exactly what to do and had done it quickly and efficiently in difficult conditions.

  Herbert offered to steer, but I sent him back to bed after asking him to put on some music for me. Soon a full moon had risen, and mingling with the rush of the wind and the crash of the waves was the sound of my voice, singing as sailors have sung on small boats in vast oceans since time immemorial. My feet were spread wide to brace against the motion, my hands gripped the wheel tightly, my arms wrestled with the waves
for control of Northern Magic, and my face became crusty with salt. Occasionally, I was forced to duck as an especially large wave landed on me, finding sneaky ways in through my foul weather suit. Often, water swirled around my ankles. My bare toes began wrinkling up like prunes.

  I stayed at the helm until 1:00 a.m., waking Herbert every hour to take a plot of our position as we navigated close by small islands about twenty miles off the northern coast of Australia’s wild and mostly unpopulated Northern Territory. At six in the morning, I took over again and had the pleasure of watching the sun rise over my shoulder, casting a glorious golden sheen over the boat and the low islands of Arnhem Land barely visible on the horizon.

  Soon, a little face popped out of the lower hatch. It was Christopher, my sunshine boy, wearing that wonderful smile that lit him up – still lights him up – each and every morning. My pet name for him was particularly apt today, as his rounded little boy’s face caught the golden glow of that spectacular sunrise. I couldn’t help but pause to drink in the beauty of the scene, trying to engrave the image on my memory so I could feast upon it in years to come.

  A few minutes later, Jon appeared through the same hatch, excitedly informing me of the progress he had made on the logic puzzle we had been working on the day before. We had spent many happy hours wedged together in Jon’s narrow bunk with his puzzle book, trying to figure out a series of increasingly difficult problems. To my amazement, he was every bit as good as I was at figuring them out.

  After Jon returned to his puzzling, Michael made his appearance. As usual he was the last to rise and the first to say he was hungry. This was a problem: how to get some food into the kids without leaving the wheel or waking up Herbert? Most of the easily accessible foods had already been gobbled up. Then I remembered a special treat I had bought back in Scarborough and squirrelled away for just such a day as this: a precious box of Fruit Loops, the perfect thing to keep the kids happily munching until I could come down and prepare something better.