Once Is Enough

by Miles Smeeton

  ‘Still we should be able to get into the Golfo de Peñas without trouble.’

  ‘I don’t know. If you are thinking of going into the Golfo de Peñas, it can be very bad there, and difficult to see the mouths of the Channels. Perhaps it might be better to go in at Trinidad Channel, which is straight and easy to find, but no further south than that. If it is bad in the Golfo de Peñas, then you must go in here behind the peninsula Tres Montes, and wait.’

  The Admiral knew the Channels well, and was a mine of information about them, and we learnt as much as we could.

  It may seem a little foolhardy that the two of us should have undertaken this trip alone, after our previous warning, but then, before Clio was old enough to be a useful hand, the two of us had sailed Tzu Hang a long way. We were also certain that the accident that we had met with before was because we were running before a heavy gale, and that if we had followed our usual custom by lying a-hull it would never have happened, or at least in not such a violent manner, and we believed also that we had met an exceptional wave.

  I have heard it said that there are no such things as exceptional waves, but I believe that it might also be said about the sea as about the weather, that the only thing constant about it is its inconstancy. Scan the horizon for a time during heavy weather and sooner or later some distant wave will hump up above its fellows and an underlying swell or a change in the wind may turn this wave into an exceptional and terrifying monster.

  It was such a wave that Sir Ernest Shackleton met with during his open boat journey from Elephant Island, and I believe that we met another just at its most dangerous time and shape. With more experience I do not think these waves are so rare, especially in that particular piece of ocean, but perhaps it is exceptional that a yacht and such a wave should meet, and I’m sure that a small ship may go through many gales, even there, without meeting one.

  At any rate, whatever sort of a wave had overtaken us, the result to Tzu Hang had made a deep impression on Beryl and me, and we both dreaded another big storm in those waters. It was this fear of another big storm that made us feel we must face the danger again, but we didn’t speak about it to each other because we do not discuss our private fears, and to go and do something at our age because we were afraid of it seemed a little immature.

  As far as I was concerned, to take the ship south and through the Straits of Magellan was all that I needed to get this feeling out of my system, and I didn’t mind how soon it was before we got into the Channels, but Beryl wanted to get out to sea, well out, and to have her storm, which we were almost bound to have sooner or later, and then to run as quickly as possible through the Straits of Magellan, watch and watch if possible, until we reached the Atlantic.

  For Beryl the Atlantic counted as home waters. She wasn’t keen on the Channels as she had already made the trip in a steamer, and it had been wet and cold with poor visibility all the way. She wanted no fooling about with anchors and dinghies and lines to the trees, which would have been very tiring for the two of us, with more opportunity to get into difficulties than we would normally experience at sea.

  We could make the Channels at the Golfo de Peñas, at Trinidad passage, or right into the Straits, where the lighthouse at Los Evangelistas, well out from the entrance, was a good landfall but where the average wind force at 7 a.m. was 5·7 Beaufort Scale. It would depend on how the ship was sailing, the weather, and how we felt about it when we got to sea. At any rate we both felt the same about the trip north and through the Panama Canal. We had made that decision some months ago. Now we thought that it was time to make our first move, and to take Tzu Hang to Coronel for an initial test, and to complete the odds and ends of fitting out there.

  In order to fill up with water we went alongside Esmeralda, and she topped up our tanks with her hoses. Jim Byrne, who wanted to make the trip with us to Coronel, arrived on board with a duffel bag, in time to relay to the seamen at the water cock, on the other side of Esmeralda, the agonised shouts from below, as our tanks overflowed. Only two of the water tanks are filled by deck fillers. Captain Bonnafoss looked over the rail for a moment and called down to us to come on board for tea, and later Admiral Young arrived too, and we talked until it was time for dinner. The talk went round to heavy weather and to what was the best action for us to take during a storm.

  ‘I know what I’m going to do next time,’ I said, ‘I’m going to have the father and mother of a sea-anchor made, and no more running.’

  ‘But why do you want to use a sea-anchor?’ asked Captain Bonnafoss. ‘I don’t believe,’ he said, ‘that the sort of sea-anchor you two could handle would ever hold a ship like yours up to the sea, except by the stern. She is bound to fall off by the bow, and then you would be opposing some resistance to the sea, and you would be in a far worse position than if you just took everything down and let yourself drift away from it, broadside on to the sea. We have had Esmeralda stopped in a gale, and lying broadside to the sea, and she drifted away sideways, her drift making the water smooth to windward, so that there is no danger from the waves.’

  ‘Well, that’s what we’ve always done before, but I don’t know how it would be further south in those big seas. The smooth made by Tzu Hang’s drift is so small it has no effect on the big waves at all.’

  ‘Just take it easy, take it easy,’ said Captain Bonnafoss, ‘take down all sail and wait for it to pass.’ He was a big confident man, and he made us begin to feel that it was all quite easy after all. Admiral Young, in his gentle way, agreed, but we all knew that as long as he had some canvas left to spread, he would keep on going. ‘You are really a little late for the Channels,’ he said, ‘and then if you have a gale outside, you must wait, not true? Do not try to make them if it is blowing hard.’

  Next morning, long before the bugles had sounded on Esmeralda or Latorre, we cast off our lines and made for the narrow entrance to the docks. There wasn’t a breath of wind and we motored quietly along outside the breakwater and up into the Boca Chica, but before we turned the end of the breakwater we gave old La Fortuna a wave.

  It was full daylight by the time we were level with Admiral Young’s house, and in spite of the early hour we could see a white sheet waving. We dipped our ensign and hoped that they could see. A small boat detached itself from the shore and we could hear the purr of an outboard engine. It was the Admiral and his daughter coming out to see us off in the smallest boat that could possibly hold an admiral and his daughter. They escorted us towards the mouth of the Boca Chica, and some porpoises came rolling alongside.

  ‘That’s the best possible luck,’ the Admiral shouted. ‘They only come inside for exceptional luck. Everything is going to be all right.’ He turned his little boat round and waved goodbye.

  When we got outside the Boca Chica, our old friend the fog rolled up and we beat away from the shore, in poor visibility and with a light wind from the south. The regular summer southerly swell was running, and Jim, who had been steering with a salty, weather-beaten look on his face, began to look green. The wind strengthened, and Tzu Hang began to pitch awkwardly into the sea. Beryl and I were very interested in her performance under her new rig. With the working staysail she seemed to go well enough, and also to balance well, but I didn’t think that she was as fast. Beryl thought that there was so little difference that she couldn’t notice it, and she accused me of thinking that she was slower because I expected her to be. She wasn’t so fast, but she had never been a fast boat anyway, and it made little enough difference.

  We were soon on the other tack, past Ramuncho Light on Punta Gualpen, the northern entrance to Arauco Bay, and the hills looked green now, which had looked so brown from the sea eight months ago; then we ran into smoother water as we came into the shelter of the bay. The Genoa has always been Tzu Hang’s best sail, and when we set it now, it pulled her along as before. As I stood in the bow against the pulpit rail and looked down at the forefoot hissing cleanly through the water, I didn’t regret the vanished bowsprit, althoug
h bowsprits have all sorts of valuable uses, because Tzu Hang was sailing herself quite easily and without any fussing with the tiller, and that and the uncluttered foredeck and the ease in tacking were compensation enough. Jim began to feel better. A short time before he had had some trouble with an incipient appendix, but now he felt sure that even his appendix had gone over the side.

  We tied up to the coal wharf at Coronel with two long warps to the wharf and a stern-line to a buoy, but the swell came roving in, and it was a most uncomfortable berth. Bob came on board next morning with three engineers, to check on anything that still needed doing, so that we could get off with the least possible delay. The spare generator had to be wired up, in order to be able to charge up the batteries with the shaft disconnected and the propeller free, and the lights had to be wired. The tiller was slightly crooked on the post so that the casting required fairing, and we were going to make a sea-anchor out of metal pipe and thin galvanised sheeting. Bob was quite oblivious of the motion below, but his engineers passed out one after the other, and I began to feel seasick myself.

  We went ashore for lunch, and Bob’s bright-eyed, sparkling wife, Lila, said to Beryl, ‘And if there is anything you want, a bath or anything, you must come to me, Mijita, and I want you to stay with me; now hold my hand,’ she said, ‘I say it truly, but truly, I want you to stay with me, and we have, if you want a doctor, a very good young doctor at the coal-mine, very good-looking, and we have a very good and modern hospital too.’

  ‘And we’ve got a very good cemetery just above,’ said Bob. ‘You can stay there too if you want to.’

  A few days later, when we were almost ready to leave, Beryl felt suddenly ill when she turned in, and was sick during the night. I didn’t realise how ill she was until the morning, when I saw that she wasn’t absolutely conscious of what she was doing. I got the thermometer out of the medicine cupboard, but it was in a foreign scale, which meant nothing to me, except that it looked alarmingly high. I rowed ashore to ring up Bob, and Lila answered.

  ‘But Mijito,’ she said, ‘that is terrible, isn’t it? I mean a little higher and it is death. Now listen. You must bring her ashore to me at once. Bob will send you the launch, and you must take her to the other pier so that she hasn’t to walk too much, and Bob will meet you with the car. Now I will arrange for the doctor.’ Lila was just the person for an emergency.

  Almost as soon as I was back the launch arrived, and Beryl got up from her bunk, but no sooner had she got to her feet than she fainted, clean out, to the cabin floor. When she came round we helped her up and loaded her on to the launch. She looked desperately ill, and I had to half carry her down the wharf. Bob was waiting for us with the car, and I saw from his face that he was shocked at her appearance, but she was soon in bed, with Lila, the gentlest of nurses to fuss over her. The young doctor tried every drug in the book but she reacted immediately to injections of emetine. She had had a virulent attack of dysentery, which had flared up suddenly, when her resistance was low from a cold.

  In a few days she was on her feet again, and soon seemed to be quite recovered, but we put off the sailing for another week. I thought that if she didn’t seem really well, when we got to sea, I would take her up north, but she knew what I was thinking, and said to me, ‘If you think that you’re going north after this, you can go by yourself, because I would regret it all my life.’

  ‘Well, what will you do then if I go by myself?’

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’m not supposed to go into the tropics. They’re bad for dysentery.’

  The truth of the matter was that neither of us were thinking very rationally about this trip now. Getting away had been too much of a struggle, and Beryl regarded this illness as just another obstacle to be overcome, which made her all the more determined to go south, and I had a feeling, too, that to take the easier way would end in bad luck.

  One day she said to Bob, ‘You know, when I was ill and you met me on the wharf, you were thinking about that nasty crack of yours about the cemetery, weren’t you?’

  ‘By God, I was,’ he said.

  At the end of the week we could look around Tzu Hang and feel that she was really ready for the long passage, in better shape than she had ever been before. We had had a long piece of angle-iron, curved to fit the cracked deck-beam, made for us in the workshops. It was bolted on to the deck-beam, and the two ring-bolts, to which the twin forestays were fastened, were bolted through it. Two ring-nuts were screwed on to the lower end of these bolts, and wire leads led from these to two rigging-screws which were fastened to the iron floors of the ship. Whatever happened to the mainmast, the deck-beam couldn’t be pulled up again now.

  The height of the masts had been reduced, which was an improvement for the southern trip, and, as we had already discovered, there didn’t seem to be a great difference in her sailing. The doghouse was lower, without the loss of any comfort, and it was more securely fastened than before, and so were our cabin skylights. The working sails were all new, or nearly new, and of terylene, as were the sheets and halliards; and the stays and shrouds, and the wire parts of the halliards, had all been renewed in stainless steel, except the lower shrouds, which were galvanised.

  The sea-anchor, which was made out of light steel tubes, and thin galvanised iron sheets, set at right angles with a gap between, was stowed just behind the mast and in front of the dinghy, with its rope coiled inside it, with the thimble shackled on to the wire leads of the sea-anchor. It was all ready for use, except that it needed a spinnaker pole to float it, and was light and strong. Bob thought that it would stand up to any strain we could subject it to, but as we never used it, I cannot say how effective it would have been. The dinghy, lashed upside down on the deck, we had never been in.

  Below decks Tzu Hang was the same as before except that we had taken one of the water tanks as an extra petrol tank. The planking that we had used for the masts and spars had all been replaced, and she looked snug and comfortable once more, with a brightly coloured Chilean rug on one of the bunks. In the main cabin two gaily painted little lifebelts, modelled out of wood, were hanging on each side on the bulkheads. They had been given us by one of the officers in the Arsenale, as a remembrance of our stay in Chile. The word ‘Hang’ was neatly painted on the top of the ring, and ‘Talcahuano’ underneath. They were the only lifebelts that we had.

  One member of the crew had yet to join us. Pwe was still leading a luxurious life in the Avenida Pedro Valdivia. At night the ginger tom fought desperate battles on her behalf and by day, battle-scarred and exhausted, he slept in the garden, but he never won the least sign of approval from the lady who had brought such a turmoil into his life.

  The three maids were there to see her off, when we took her away, hoping perhaps that she would be allowed to remain with them, for they were all very fond of her. After so much pampering and attention, we wondered how she would take to the ship again, and during the drive to Coronel, shut up in her basket, she screamed the whole way. She yelled even louder when we put her on the launch and the engine started, but the moment that she was on Tzu Hang, she sat down and purred and purred.

  Beryl and I felt absurdly grateful to her, as if she had given us a present, she was so very pleased to be home.

  Edward, who had driven the three of us back from Concepcion, had brought us a case of Pisco, and Molly Byrne now brought us a specially sweet and sticky cake for the voyage, and we had bought two even sweeter and stickier called torta Doña Paulina. They were supposed to last indefinitely, but they were so good that we were unable to test their capacity for endurance. They consisted of glutinous layers of something brown and unbelievably good. Last of all Marta arrived with a Christmas parcel done up in special wrappings, and with instructions that it should not be opened until Christmas Day.

  We sailed on Monday, December 9, with a very light breeze from the south. We cast off the buoy, hoisted the Genoa, and slid quietly away. Then we went about, hoisted the main and mizzen, and sailed back p
ast the end of the pier. A collier was coming in to load, and she discharged a lot of evil-smelling oil into the bay. We sailed sluggishly through it, and slowly turned our head for the entrance to Arauco Bay. We could see some people waving from the seafront by Bob’s house, and then Tzu Hang began to quicken her pace, and we were off. It had been a long time.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  NOT AGAIN!

  WE were off … and yet, except for the first time that we set sail in Tzu Hang, I have rarely felt less confident at the start of a voyage. It was nothing to do with Tzu Hang, and a look round the decks was enough to convince anyone that she was in as good shape, or even better shape, than she had ever been before. Certainly there was less clutter about the decks, she was obviously going to be easier to handle, and there was no doubt about the strength of her masts—in spite of the knots—nor of her stays. The feeling was partly due to reaction after the long effort to get away, partly to worry about Beryl’s recovery, and partly to a doubt of our own ability if it came to another struggle with those cold southern seas.

  We were later than ever now, so we decided to go straight down to the Straits of Magellan. One of the factors in this decision was that we had had no confirmation that the two drums of gasoline that I had ordered had been delivered at Puerto Eden, half way down the Channels. I wished now that I had made arrangements direct with the Chilean Navy, who would have dropped them for me without any doubt.

  The route south is against the prevailing southerly wind and the north-setting current, so that a sailing ship sails to the south-west, close-hauled until she gets down to the favourable westerly winds, and the westerly drift of the current. By the time the wind is fair for the Horn, or for the Straits of Magellan, and it is time to go on to the starboard tack, a ship may be 300 or 400 miles offshore, and I should say that a small yacht should be at least 200 miles otherwise it is getting too close to a lee shore.