Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  One morning soon after the German couple had announced ‘Another fifteen thousand British troops landed,’ Mo came into Eric’s office. ‘I say, Eric, what’s all this about the Falklands – have we been defeated or something?’

  ‘Wish we knew, old boy. Haven’t you got a radio in your cabin? We really must get some BBC news.’

  Mo did have a radio. He had bought it in Sydney or Hong Kong. It was big and covered with shining knobs. He wasn’t sure how it worked.

  ‘Never mind, old boy,’ Eric said. ‘Do us all a favour. You two go up top, onto the boat deck or somewhere high, tonight after your act, and fiddle with it. At midnight the airwaves should be calmer, better for reception. Just go up and have a good fiddle, old boy. It’s very important for Britain, I’m sure you agree.’

  That night Eric and I sat through the entire Fiesta cabaret, including a comedian whose jokes – ‘“What should I tip?” said the English aristo about to be guillotined’ – received an ovation. The comic came back for a finale – ‘“My wife’s an angel,” said a man. “You’re lucky,” said his friend. “Mine’s still alive”’ – and in a moment I felt a tap on my elbow. ‘Come on,’ said Mo.

  We lugged his heavy radio up companionways from deck to deck. On the boat deck we paused, but the roar of the funnel was too loud there, so we struggled up to the topmost deck where the wind seemed to be approaching gale force. ‘We’ll never hear a thing up here,’ I yelled into Mo’s ear.

  ‘What?’

  We heaved the set behind the shelter of a liferaft designed to keep sixty passengers afloat, and that gave some protection. Crouching there, Mo twiddled knobs and dials and the set began to whistle and squawk. After a minute or two the wind fell somewhat, but that made things worse – the whistles and squawks grew louder and louder; it sounded as if we were murdering an old woman and cutting her up. ‘For God’s sake, Mo!’ There was not the slightest hint of a human voice reading news in any language. If my hair rose on the back of my head it had nothing to do with the wind. At any moment, I thought, the Russian duty officer on his rounds would hear the noise, summon his men and seize the two Englishmen, one a last-minute boarder from Papeete (said to be a writer), the other the ship’s magician, whom he had surprised squatting over a massive radio receiver with a six-foot antenna. That might be good for several years’ forced labour east of Omsk.

  There was no point in shouting to make this point – I tugged Mo’s coat and made vigorous gestures of instant departure. He nodded, evidently also longing to be gone. We stood up and tiptoed away – in the racket of that semi-hurricane – and not until we reached the warmth of the Friendship Bar did we breathe freely again. Eric sat there, tense, waiting.

  ‘Well, old boy?’

  ‘A drink, Eric, a drink,’ Mo panted. ‘No dice. That’s all there is to say.’

  ‘Oh, blimey. Lud-milla!’

  Across the bar Colonel Sapt, at his cards, ran a long forefinger slowly and delicately along the curve of an eyebrow; then he reached for his glass of brandy and raised it, crooking a little finger like an old lady in a tea room. I suddenly saw that he was not C. Aubrey Smith after all; he probably ran the only unisex hair establishment in Strelsau.

  *

  Next day Eric looked conspiratorial. ‘A word in your ear, Gavin old boy. The captain wants you and me to dine with him.’

  ‘Eric, you don’t think Mo and I were spotted last night?’

  ‘Heavens, no, old boy, I don’t think it’s that.’

  Captain Vitaly Segal was quiet-spoken, about forty, slim, black-haired and could have been Italian or Welsh as much as Russian. Eric and I, in our best clothes, were seated on either side of him; like all his officers, he wore a white uniform jacket without medals, dark trousers and black tie. He had a dove tattooed on one hand. Over the first three or four glasses of Peper vodka I broke the ice with a description of Tolu’s tattoos. Salade niçoise, steak, fruit, came and went. Eric prattled on, completely at ease. The steward came round indefatigably. A sweet white wine followed the vodka and a hefty brandy chased the wine. Towards the end of the meal I was surprised to hear Eric venture a question I had thought was forbidden. ‘I say, Captain,’ he said in his most casual Carrington manner, ‘any news at all of the Falklands?’ It was a measure of his extreme concern, that question.

  Captain Segal’s voice was equally casual. ‘No, Eric. No. We have heard nothing.’ To me he said, ‘There may be some changes in procedure at Peru because of the Falklands business. They must know who, what, enters their waters, and who is coming ashore.’

  ‘I hope that won’t be a problem for you. I am most grateful for your permission to come aboard.’

  He smiled and tapped my wrist. ‘There will be no problem. It is a pleasure to have you with us here. It will be all right.’

  After more brandy, he said, ‘I hear some German talk about the British…. Look, one German has said to me, “See how the British attack?” – as if the Russians will be pleased. You know what I replied? I shook my head, saying, “Why should we be pleased? If the Dutch and the Germans start fighting, is the Soviet Union pleased? Of course not.”’ I told him about Ricci’s retort – ‘Was Hitler a pacifist?’ – and he laughed. The matter ended there.

  Next morning Segal and Sacha the purser came to my cabin to say goodbye. I thanked the captain again and he asked for a souvenir. I gave him a book. In return he signed a large colour photograph of the Alexander Pushkin, and wrote: ‘Dear Gavin! to good memory about your voyage on the Alexander Pushkin, Wish you good luck and many new interesting books! Captain Segal.’ From the purser I got a set of Russian dolls, and from both a firm handshake. What I did not get was the reason why Captain Segal had agreed to come to my rescue in Papeete. No one, not even Eric Hart, had managed to explain that. I am inclined to believe there was one simple reason: Vitaly Segal has a kind heart.

  *

  When the Alexander Pushkin reached Callao, on a pink and misty morning, Eric and I had but a single thought – to get ashore, speed by taxi into the city of Lima some miles away, and find out once and for all if the British nation had suffered one of the greatest military and naval disasters in its history.

  Our landfall was bleak. Captain Segal had allowed me onto the bridge for our approach into the wintry harbour where a hundred or so pelicans covered the water in an agitated blanket of white and grey. On the wharf a stall’s sign said: ‘Inca Cola’, and two policemen stamped about in greatcoats. The formalities were quickly done; I had no problems. Eric had no excursions to organize here, and in no time at all we were leaping out of a taxi at the gate of the British Embassy, urgently explaining our visit to guards who had survived a bomb attack on the building a few days before: Peru, it seemed, had sided with Argentina. Thinking about it now, I suppose we burst into the Ambassador’s office rather like a couple of terrorists. At the first sight of Eric’s sleek white head, bow tie and eyeglass, he might even, for one astonished moment, have imagined that it was Lord Carrington himself who, wild and flushed, was demanding to know ‘just what in the name of heaven is going on down in the Falkland Islands?’ If so, His Excellency in Peru took it in an admirably calm and diplomatic way, grasping at once the nerve-racked state of ignorance we had endured for the last eleven days.

  ‘Gentlemen, be seated,’ he said soothingly. ‘I am pleased to inform you that we have won in the Falklands perhaps the greatest victory since –’ Was it Trafalgar or Matapan? I have forgotten now, and when I asked Commander Hart RNR over a pink gin at the Devonshire Club in London several months later, he, too, was uncertain. In any case, the Ambassador’s words were bracing. They sent us out into Lima like caged birds set free, only coming to rest at the Bolivar Hotel on the Plaza San Martin. There we sat in high-backed chairs in the panelled warmth of the English Bar and breathed deep breaths of patriotic relief under a stuffed antelope’s head. In the Plaza was a statue of General San Martin astride a horse; stall owners sold alpaca and llama skins, and small, highly coloured sketches
of the snowy mountains of the Cordillera de Los Andes, condors and wild bulls. Mo and Diana passed by and we told them the news. More drinks came and then the lady from Vienna and her sweet daughter arrived. There was quite a party.

  Next day, the Alexander Pushkin sailed on towards the Panama Canal. I took a lonely taxi down the long road to the airport.

  *

  In the British Embassy in Santiago I learned that Chile was not Peru. There had been no bombs in the capital – the Chileans were a hundred and one per cent pro-British in the Falklands affair. Since successive Argentine governments had claimed sovereignty over three Chilean islands and the Beagle Channel just north of Cape Horn, and had threatened to invade them despite a ruling from the Pope that the islands were Chilean, there had been no love for Argentina in Santiago. No ships were sailing south from Chilean ports into Argentine waters, or were likely to for some time. The British Embassy people told me that the Argentine forces on the Falklands, though hard-pressed, had not yet surrendered. British paratroopers, marines, guardsmen and Gurkhas were advancing over difficult, boggy ground, but they had not yet re-taken Port Stanley, the capital of the islands. Argentine newspapers on sale in the streets of Santiago boasted: ‘Hundreds of Gurkha Mercenaries Dead Before Our Trenches’. These headlines were blatantly deceptive. But even if the Argentines surrendered tomorrow, the state of hostility and the British naval blockade would continue one month, two, three … who knew?

  I had hoped to reach my last landfall in England at the end of the summer, because winter storms would close the little fishing harbour of Bude, and it was already June. I looked at the map. Chile lay as thin as a snake along the Pacific Ocean – a four-thousand-mile jumble of rock and water. It was the most extraordinary coastline in the world. South from the port of Valparaiso, islands, fjords, bays, inlets and straits were strewn like pieces of a dinosaur’s shattered vertebrae, and at the very farthest tip of the dinosaur’s coccyx lay the tiny Island of Cape Horn, the southernmost part of the earth. I had an ambition to be there.

  Part Three

  Uttermost Part of the Earth

  In these still solitudes, Death instead of Life, seemed the predominant spirit.

  Charles Darwin: Voyage of the Beagle

  Thirty-one

  I had introductions from friends in London to two people in Santiago. Presenting letters of introduction to strangers embarrasses me so much that often I don’t present them at all; but had I not met Tony Westcott I might have missed Alexander Selkirk’s cave, and if I had veered away from Señor Don Hernan Cubillos I would not have slept on Cape Horn.

  I went to Hernan Cubillos first. He had been Foreign Minister and resigned from the post, but I was not concerned with politics. He was also a businessman, but business does not interest me either. The important thing to me was that, apart from being an excellent host and a cultivated and amusing man, Hernan was an enthusiastic and expert sailor. He had served in the Chilean navy and now he owned a fine yacht, the Caleuche, famous in South American waters.

  Nervously I rang him up and he invited me round to dinner in a house full of sailing mementoes, books, music and much more; Hernan’s interests seem inexhaustible. We talked about the Falklands War, the blockade, and the Chileans’ conviction that, if General Galtieri and his colleagues had succeeded in the Falklands, Argentine forces would have been let loose in a similar fashion on the islands of southern Chile.

  ‘From what I hear, your way round to Argentina or Brazil will be blocked by the Royal Navy for some time,’ Hernan said. ‘I suppose you could fly to Rio de Janeiro and get a ship from there across to South or West Africa.’

  He led me into his chart room and pulled out detailed maps of the Chilean coast, particularly of the far south. Below the Straits of Magellan, wider than I had thought but not as far south as I had imagined, below even the big island of Tierra del Fuego at the toecap of the continent, Hernan’s finger moved south. It reached the Beagle Channel and the three pinprick islands claimed by Argentina: Lennox, Picton and Nueva. ‘You could go down there, perhaps,’ he said. My finger moved lower still. To Navarino Island, to Cape Deceit, and at last reached the island to which Wilhelm Schouten of Hoorn in Holland had given a name: Isla de Cabo de Hornos – Cape Horn Island.

  ‘That’s where I want to be, Hernan.’

  He laughed. ‘Yes, well, I see what you mean, but it’s not terribly easy. Particularly now. Still – give me a little time to arrange things. Go somewhere first. Any ideas?’

  ‘Yes. Robinson Crusoe Island.’

  ‘Good. A nice place. I’ve sailed there.’ He shook my hand. ‘But don’t go away too long. Something may turn up.’

  *

  Tony Westcott turned out to be a bluff Chilean Englishman of an extreme good nature matching Hernan’s. He kept a Plymouth-built ketch in a marina south of Valparaiso, Chile’s main port, and from behind his desk in the Santiago printing business he owned with his brother he spent much time dreaming of the voyage he would one day make across the South Seas.

  He was brisk. ‘You have time to spare. Take a ship to the Juan Fernandez Islands. There are three of them, Robinson Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk and a tiny one called Santa Clara, but only Robinson Crusoe is populated. Barely. There’s a ship of some sort. We’ll have to find out about it.’

  We drove together to Valparaiso, an old town that sprawled along the edge of a magnificent bay, its narrow streets creeping inland into encircling hills. The port’s passenger wharfs were reached by way of a plaza dominated by heroic statues; and by probing behind a clutter of warehouses, diligently searching among a number of fishing trawlers, we found the diminutive vessel we sought. She crouched under the stone jetty as if exhausted – a tough but battered sea creature waiting to get its breath back after a long, hard struggle with the waves. She had a nice compact wheelhouse and a funnel like a retired boxer’s nose. She was no beauty of the Seven Seas. But, as far as I was concerned, with her name she didn’t have to be. Carlos Darwin, the painted letters said. She rode up and down in a fair swell, scraping her frayed hemp fenders against the jetty wall; huge gulls wheeled around her or fought screaming over refuse on the oily surface. Men with bored expressions were arranging barrels, crates and tarpaulins on oily, unscrubbed decks.

  ‘Now, let’s find out when she sails to Juan Fernandez,’ Tony said. ‘You never can tell with the Carlos Darwin. The schedule is often, er, elastic’ He waved to a man with a beard who was watching us from the wheelhouse, and the man clambered down a ladder and swung across a rickety metal and wood gangway to where we stood. It was a long conversation, and transferred itself easily to a nearby bar, the walls of which were hung round with nets and fishermen’s floats and lifebuoys from old ships of several nations.

  The bearded man was called Pedro Espinoza Leon. The wavy hair that fell over his forehead and curved over his collar was a fine copper colour, and the bushy beard failed to disguise his relative youth. He was the captain of the Carlos Darwin. He had undertaken to carry a shipful of islanders back to their home four hundred miles away on Robinson Crusoe Island, he said, speaking fair English, but he would certainly find a bunk for me. ‘A too small bunk, not too clean bunk, but a bunk,’ he said, smiling. When would he sail? He shrugged – maybe in twelve hours, maybe later. It depended on the arrival of the cargo. In Valparaiso, you could never guarantee….

  At the gangway, seeing Captain Pedro aboard, a crewman clutching a radio called ‘Buenas tardes. Hey, gringo! You comin’ Juan Fernandez? Okay, see football – Mrs Thatcher play Galtieri. We see, okay?’ he grinned, and we waved back.

  Tony explained. ‘The World Cup’s on. Britain’s playing Argentina or something. Look, when you get to Robinson Crusoe Island, stay with an old girlfriend of mine. Ask for Maria Eugenia at the Aldea Daniel Defoe. Aldea means pension. Stay there. You’ll get on well.’

  *

  The Carlos Darwin sailed well after dark three days later, her decks cluttered with men, women, children and cargo. We sailed out in
to a Pacific that certainly was not the Pacific of Colson or Tolu or Gauguin. It rained and was cold. By the time the battered little bruiser of a vessel finally slogged off into the darkness I had shared a bottle of vodka with a blue-chinned man from Juan Fernandez, and was flat on my back in my clothes on a bunk in a fuggy little cabin without a porthole. I woke up five hours later to a strong smell of wet clothing, sweat and oil. Sea slapped the bulkhead near my ear like a fist; the metal sounded no thicker than a biscuit tin.

  A lazy south-westerly swell accompanied us all the way to Robinson Crusoe Island, and the deck of the Carlos Darwin seemed hard put to it to stay above the level of the ocean. The little ship was full of men in boots and rough, high-necked sweaters that might have been knitted straight off the backs of living sheep. They wore knitted woollen caps, too, with pom-poms of wool on the crown, and anoraks of all shapes and colours. They were nothing at all like Polynesians. The five hundred inhabitants of Robinson Crusoe Island were Chileans of European origin, as racially mixed as you might expect in a country whose navy was founded by Lord Cochrane and whose two principal national heroes are called José San Martin and Bernardo O’Higgins.

  Three times a day I squeezed into the vessel’s cramped mess where two tattooed cooks ladled stew onto greasy plates. A television set high up in a corner poured out pictures of the World Cup without cease, and the hysterical one-note voice of a Spanish-speaking commentator sounded like a fire alarm that had gone off and got stuck. It was difficult for a mere gringo to know who was playing whom. Could England really be playing football against Argentina while there was a war in the Falklands? It seemed almost grotesquely improbable, but the crewman who had shouted ‘Hey, gringo!’ in Valparaiso harbour now shouted again: ‘Hey, gringo! England contra Argentina. Mrs Thatcher against Galtieri – the score: Galtieri zero, Mrs Thatcher uno.’ He held up the first finger and thumb of his left hand joined to make a zero, and the first finger of his right hand to signify the number one. Then he completed the dumb show by stabbing the single finger in and out of the zero, chanting as he did so, ‘Mrs Thatcher uno, Galtieri zero. Uno–zero. Uno–zero…!’ Later he pushed through the crowded mess and slapped my back. ‘Armanduco,’ he introduced himself.