Dove

by Robin L. Graham

  Then suddenly I saw it. Land! Land! I yelled into the recorder. Then turning to Joliette I said: Don’t you see it, you fool? Out there, five points starboard of the bow!

  I had been alone two weeks with no single sign of human life, no ship, no plane, no jet trail, not even a floating beer can. The sight of Fanning, still a tiny nipple, made me half crazy with excitement.

  As the island grew bigger and I began to see the darker shadows of vegetation, I smugly told the tape: Robin Lee Graham, you’re a pretty good navigator.

  I reached English harbor at five in the afternoon of September 29. A white man in a diesel boat came out and threw me a line. When Dove was tied up to a small stone jetty in six feet of water, I climbed the steps. The pilot put out his hand and said his name was Phillip Palmer.

  “Welcome,” he said. “We don’t get many visitors.”

  Just hearing a human voice again was weird. Sure I had listened to the radio, but a voice over the radio is always neutral and bloodless. Mr. Palmer’s voice was warm and friendly. What embarrassed me was how inarticulate I had become. My thoughts seemed ten paces ahead of my tongue, but if Mr. Palmer believed me to be mentally retarded he was too polite to show it.

  The only European on the island, he was a grizzled fellow who supervised three hundred natives, imported from the Gilbert islands to harvest profitable copra crops for the Burns Philip Company. Mr. Palmer was not only harbor master and labor manager, but wore half a dozen other hats. He would settle disputes, regulate supplies, operate communications and, if necessary, set a broken limb. He was also a kindly host.

  I accepted his invitation to sleep in his little house, to have supper with him and breakfast too. The food was prepared by his native housekeeper, Marybell. Her meals reminded me what a bad cook I was. In his beat-up Volkswagen Mr. Palmer drove me around the island to watch native dancing. Fanning is an angler’s paradise; a huge variety of fish, both in the harbor and in inland pools, seemed to want to commit suicide. I could almost hook them on my toenails. The harbor was like a huge aquarium.

  Fanning’s local name means “Footprint of Heaven.” The island is beautiful, and I guess from above it looks like a human foot. Visitors are as rare as rich uncles so I was given VIP treatment. The children at the local school put on a special dance for me. The dancers later invited me to join them in a sort of wild fandango and then, on Sunday, they invited me to their little church. It was weird for a California pagan to hear himself prayed for in the Gilbertine language. But it meant quite a lot to me that these childlike people should ask God to give me safe sailing to wherever I wanted to go.

  I spent six days on Fanning, refilled my tanks with spring water, took on fresh eggs, a terrific bread made with coconut milk and a few souvenirs, including a hand-carved model canoe. My visit to the island cost me exactly twenty cents—one dime and two nickels which fell out of my pocket when I joined the children’s dance. When I left I gave a sweater to kindly Marybell and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt to her little boy who was sick.

  Mr. Palmer refused to take any money from me when I gave him a radiogram to be sent to my parents in Hawaii. I was two days out of Fanning when I remembered I had forgotten to give Mr. Palmer my proper home address. This meant that my parents would not know where I was, and I was so mad that I kicked myself half across Dove’s deck. I never realized though that my long silence would cause huge headlines in Hawaii and California.

  Several weeks later I received a bundle of American newspapers. In inch-high type the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner had told its readers: “BOY WORLD SAILOR IS MISSING,” and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin carried a three-column story headlined: “MOTHER OF ISLE BOY NOT ALARMED AT NO WORD.”

  For two weeks the oldest members at the Ala Wai Yacht Club shook their heads, remembering the HIC episode as they read daily reports, each more pessimistic than the last, that the “teen-age world sailor was long overdue.”

  Meanwhile I was sailing on under jib and genoa, wing and wing, to Pago Pago, and since I carried a bag of mail for Mr. Palmer, Dove could have flown a Royal Mail pennant on her mast.

  I guess it was a conscience pricked by my forgetfulness that made me open my schoolbooks for the first time. With the self-steering gear in operation, I finished part one of my American literature course, reading the lives of Captain John Smith and Benjamin Franklin. (Quite interesting really, I told the tape.)

  Time for study was no big problem when Dove wallowed in the doldrums, and south of Fanning I sailed mostly in light airs. When the occasional winds filled the sails they usually came from the wrong direction. I protested into the tape recorder: The wind blows from all sides. I’ve never had it blow the way it’s supposed to. The wind is really messed up. It’s not supposed to do this at all. It’s just not in the books.

  On October 7 Dove rolled slowly over the equator and I wrote in my logbook: Cats are now officially shellbacks. It was too hot for celebrations, although one Hawaiian reporter recorded later that I had “doubtless dubbed the cats’ paws with peanut butter.”

  At one point I thought I’d gone crazy and that my memory had left me. Someone at Honolulu had given me a cup and ball game, and when tidying up the cabin I found it under the pillow on the quarter bunk. I was absolutely sure that I had parked it on a cabin shelf. Anyway, I put it back in place. Ten minutes later I went below again and found the game under the same pillow. I was really scared. It was weird because obviously there was no one else aboard. A second time I returned the game to the shelf and went back to the cockpit. Then a slight thump inside the cabin disturbed me. It was Suzette. I caught her red-handed. She was pulling the game from the shelf and hiding it under my pillow. I was so relieved to know I wasn’t completely off my rocker that I didn’t punish her—at least not until she discovered my Fanning eggs.

  Mentally I was in poor shape, worried not only by the slowness of my doldrums progress but because I knew my family would soon be thinking that disaster was the only explanation for my long silence.

  A head shrinker would have marked the symptoms. On my sixth day out of Fanning I burst into tears just because I failed to make a milk pudding taste even remotely like the kind my mother made.

  Strangely I wasn’t as worried by more serious setbacks, like when a shark gobbled up my taffrail-log spinner, trailing twenty feet astern.

  I happen to hate sharks. When the five-footer finned at my stern I shot him with my .22 pistol. The brute opened his mouth in surprise, showing teeth that looked as if they could snap a telephone pole. He thrashed wildly with his tail and then slowly keeled over and sank. Then I wondered why my taffrail line was floating on the surface. The shark had bitten the spinner clean off. I had no spare, so from then I had to guess how far I had traveled each day.

  Anyway, the sea looked healthy, and I noted on the recorder: Dove is now slicing through sheets of blue plankton and schools of small fish. Some of the fish are only about an inch or two long. It’s weird how they keep pace with Dove for hours, even when I pick up a breeze and we scoot along at three or four knots. But I wonder why the decks are so dirty. I’m always having to clean them up and it’s not the cats’ fault. The cats are pretty good about using their litter box. Maybe those stinking cities are sending out their smog this far.

  On my fifteenth day out of Fanning I spotted land and my morale shot way up. My voice an octave higher on the tape, I reported: I see it, I see it! It’s right there. It’s a kind of dome-shaped thing, but it’s land. It’s all rainy looking. I had raised Tutuila, the main island of American Samoa.

  To the nonsailor, navigation may seem like witchcraft, but really it’s not at all difficult. The sextant is the key to it all. With this instrument I measure the altitude above the horizon of the sun, moon or stars, then mark the time to the second on my chronometer. After that it’s simply a matter of looking up the nautical tables, making additions and subtractions which wouldn’t strain an average ten-year-old and pinpointing my exact position on the charts.

  That
’s the theory. In practice mistakes can be made. A faulty sextant or chronometer can throw out the result by many miles. The tiny island of Fanning, for example, surrounded by hundreds of miles of water, could easily be missed through careless calculations or a faulty sextant. Missing a landfall in a vast expanse of water could mean death.

  There was no special reason for me to fear missing Samoa, because I was as used to a sextant as a doctor is to his stethoscope. Besides, I had the advantage on sailors of the days before radio because I could check my chronometer against radio signals. But I never quite trusted my navigation, and always had a feeling of achievement when I made my ports.

  Perhaps it was because I was too pleased with myself on this occasion or because I was pushing Dove a little too hard that the accident happened. Dove was closing on Samoa when a squall hit, not a heavy squall but blustery enough to be taken seriously. The upshot was that the lower aft shroud broke. Within an eyeblink the mast buckled and fell overboard, carrying with it the mainsail and the jib. Although the wind was perhaps twenty knots, Dove stopped like a duck full of buckshot.

  I told the tape: Here I was within fifteen miles of Tutuila after five hundred hours of sailing and now I’m not going to make it.

  It took me twenty minutes to heave the sodden sails and broken mast aboard and two hours to raise the boom and set a jury rig with half the mainsail. I was in no great danger, but it seemed a good idea to put out the brilliant orange distress signal. When an aircraft headed my way I lit a flare, but aimed it at my bare right foot. The steam came off my toes as the aircraft headed out to sea.

  Now, with the jury rig I could only sail downwind. A look at the chart and I saw that my only hope of an early landfall was to make for Apia on Upolu island, fifty-two miles distant.

  A jet pilot once told me that he was trained for emergencies. A child, he claimed, could fly an airliner but what separated the men from the boys in the cockpit was the moment that might never happen in a long career—the moment when all the red lights start blinking. It’s the same with sailing. Anyone can learn in half an afternoon to sail around a harbor, but an emergency like a demasting calls for seamanship. I was wondering just how good my seamanship was as the wind drove crippled Dove under her clumsy shortened sail toward Upolu’s jagged lee shore.

  Due more to a lucky shift of wind than to my sailing skill, Dove nosed past Danger Point. At dawn next morning sandy beaches were on my beam and green hills beyond. I celebrated with a breakfast of canned asparagus. By noon I had anchored in the lovely harbor of Apia, right opposite Aggie’s Hotel.

  After going through customs, my first duty ashore was to deliver Mr. Palmer’s mailbag and then to send a cable to my parents—rightly addressed this time. My next worry was to find someone to mend an aluminum mast.

  It would be five months before I could safely sail again.

  The delay at Apia didn’t really worry me because the hurricane season was approaching and I was in no hurry to leave. In the harbor the rusted wreck of a German warship, the Adler, which went down in a hurricane in 1889, was a daily reminder of what hurricanes can do to craft much bigger than Dove. Besides, Upolu, the chief isle of Western Samoa, is really nice and I didn’t plan on being a typical tourist and “doing” Upolu in five days.

  It was important to me, from the moment I set out from California, to get to know the people in distant places, to understand their customs and their life styles, to eat their foods, to bargain in their markets, to listen to their music and to learn their folklore.

  First impressions of Apia were encouraging. Lovely Polynesian girls in vivid costumes looked like butterflies as they walked the streets. At Aggie’s famous hotel two of these girls beat a wooden gong at mealtimes to summon guests to the dining room. Aggie Grey, half New Zealander, half Polynesian, the founder-owner of the hotel, had read about me in some newspaper. She invited me to be her tariff-free table guest for as long as I cared to stay.

  Joshua Slocum, the first American to sail alone around the world, had had a cooler reception at Apia in 1896. The islanders had refused to believe that Slocum could have crossed the Pacific without help and they angrily accused him of eating his crew.

  Aggie’s son, Alan, became my friend and introduced me to Sam Heywood, principal of the local technical school, who said he could mend Dove’s mast. Mr. Heywood took a lot of trouble welding the jagged mast ends together and then pushing a hardwood core up the hollow to the weld. The mistake we made was when we stepped it. I forgot the sailor’s superstition that a coin should be put at the mast’s base—a mistake I was later to remember and regret.

  Another stupid thing I did at Apia was to claim I’d shot the shark with my bow and arrow. I lied because I thought that the possession of a gun would cause me trouble with the port officials. Of course the bow and arrow story was told at the bars and I felt pretty silly.

  Polynesian food is the best in the world. Anyone who challenges this claim can meet me across a table groaning under roasted pig basted in coconut milk, taro, breadfruit and papaya.

  As with all the islands, Upolu is full of legends. The one that I especially liked was about the origin of the coconut tree. The islanders tell the story of a girl named Sina whose beauty was reported to a Fijian king. So fascinated was the king that he decided to marry Sina. To help him win her he changed himself into an eel and swam to Upolu. The eel became Sina’s special pet, but when it began to make passes at her she understandably got frightened and fled. The fable has its variations, but essentially the eel is said to have chased Sina from island to island until he was worn out. In his last breath the eel confessed his love to Sina and that he was really a king. The eel promised that if Sina would bury him in front of her Upolu home he would always provide her with shade, food and drink. So Sina watched a snakelike plant grow out of the grove, watched it throw out shade-giving fronds and strange fruit. This was, of course, the coconut tree, and every time Sina drank from its fruit she knew she was kissing her royal lover.

  One of my first expeditions at Apia was a visit to the tomb of Robert Louis Stevenson, who, like Gauguin in Tahiti, had become a legend in his time. The tomb is quite high up on Mount Vaea, overlooking the town. I could have driven there by way of the tree-lined “Road of Loving Hearts” built by the people of Samoa for their beloved Tusitala (“Teller of Tales”), but I preferred to climb the five-hundred-foot trail up the face of the hill. In the early morning light I read the Requiem carved on the stone tomb:

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  My guide told me how the Scots author had come to Upolu in 1890 for the sake of his health and how the islanders really loved him. Stevenson’s big Victorian home nearby is now a museum.

  I was given an outrigger canoe and paddled to and from Dove every night and morning. One midnight I was awakened by one of the cats crying and found Joliette looking over Dove’s side. Suzette had fallen overboard and was thrashing about in the water. I fished her out and dried her. She would certainly have drowned if Joliette had not sounded the alarm.

  On another occasion when I returned to Dove in the outrigger I found Suzette clinging to the anchor chain. She was just waiting for me to rescue her.

  I don’t know whether it was because of something I ate, or what, but suddenly I broke out in boils. They continued to worry me for a year. I went to find medical help and learned that Western Samoan doctors, some unqualified, have a reputation in the islands for healing people. One unqualified doctor discovered, for instance, that the juice of the coconut is quite sterile and that coconut fibers are as good as catgut for sewing up wounds. I was told that when they ran out of gut in World War II, some GIs had their wounds sewn up with coconut fibers. It seems that the Fijian eel king gave Sina more gifts than she recognized.

  My first Christmas away from home was really quite cheerful. I exchanged gifts with Aggie and Alan, and received from home parcels containing a plastic spare sextant, more recordin
g tapes, a new taffrail-log spinner, heavy-duty shrouds and a Gibson Girl radio—a transmitter that would allow me to send out distress signals.

  A few days before I was due to leave Upolu a young lawyer from Pago Pago, George Wray, invited me to climb Mount Matavanu on the nearby island of Savaii. The mountain rises above a plateau to its volcanic mouth, which occasionally growls. George believed that it had never been climbed. We set out together at dawn, mosquito nets and bedrolls on our backs, and we climbed for twelve hours. Our progress was very slow because of tough ferns and high trees. Every now and then we would break through the ferns and trees and find ourselves in beautiful meadows filled with wild flowers—perfect places for homesteading or for a Robinson Crusoe. When the sun went down George and I slept on the ferns and the silence was weird.

  In the little fishing village below they had told us stories of beautiful women who wandered about the mountainside at night but whose kisses were as cold as the mist. We saw no women, fleshed or otherwise, but imagination can work overtime in such places. We had to return the following morning without making the summit because George was scheduled to defend a man in court in Pago Pago.

  Climbing down this quiet, weird mountain was harder than going up. Eventually we followed a stream, which became a cascade every few hundred yards. When working our way around one of these cascades George slipped. I was luckily able to grab him, because he would probably have broken a leg on the jagged volcanic rocks.

  George really knew his plants and trees. He showed me a jungle vine that provided a thirst-quenching drink. When the vine was slashed near its base it sizzled and hissed for a few seconds like a boiling kettle, and then a liquid poured out as if from a faucet. The liquid had a slight sawdust flavor but was quite refreshing.