Dove

by Robin L. Graham

  The radio warned of a hurricane buildup and I decided to sail on to Maewo island. Now I had to sleep, so I dropped anchor in the lee of the island and slept from three in the afternoon until five the next morning. I felt much better then and sailed on in lovely weather to Santa Maria.

  I told the tape recorder: Everything looks good. These islands are among the most beautiful I’ve seen. The sea is a marvelous blue and so is the sky. The islands are fantastically green with tropical plants and coconut trees. There is a terrific sense of peace here. Some islanders have just waved to me. Now I’m going to wash out my shirts and towels.

  Just as I raised Santa Maria, the wind dropped altogether. It was weird because the radio spoke about cyclonic conditions and the barometer began to drop.

  As the sea remained millpond calm I powered Dove toward the Torres islands. The night of November 12 was the calmest I have known at sea, with water reflecting back the stars so clearly it was hard to tell where earth and heavens joined. I had a strange feeling of being adrift in space, stars above me, below me and all around. It was like being an astronaut without the cost of rockets or the problems of weightlessness.

  Next day the radio reported the hurricane 120 miles to the east and shifting out of my area. The wind picked up so I sailed on more confidently for San Cristóbal. My father’s freighter, I was to learn, had been caught by the hurricane’s tail end. His ship had all but stood on her nose and the sturdy steel railings on the after-decks had buckled under pounding seas.

  If that storm had caught Dove—as it would have done had I sailed three days earlier—November 18, 1966, might have been my last logbook entry.

  The wind died completely again and I made only thirty-two miles a day between noon and noon. Captain Bligh had moved much faster under oars when he had sailed these waters in an open boat in 1789.

  Avanga was no more pleased than I with Dove’s progress, and without provocation he would arch his back, periscope his tail and fling himself at me from the cabin roof. I thought this was some sort of game until I saw the look of cold venom in his eyes and wiped the blood off my arms. The third time he attacked me I was close to proclaiming mutiny and putting him adrift.

  I finally reached Honiara, Guadalcanal, on November 20, and broke my pencil with frustration when writing sarcastically: “Not bad at all—an average of forty-three miles a day since leaving the New Hebrides!” My father was not there but had left a note to say he was exploring the island of Malaita for picture possibilities.

  At the post office there was a letter from Patti. It almost burned a hole in my pocket as I carried it unopened back to Dove. I wanted to read it quite alone. It was written on the day I had left Lautoka and read in part:

  …It has been the saddest day of my life and I find it almost impossible to think of living without you. How wonderfully close we’ve been…. I went through my things this morning to rearrange them, and I found that note you left for me and $20. Why in the world did you do that? You cannot afford to give money away. I immediately thought of sending it back to you, but then I thought, no, maybe I could put this money toward buying a ticket to wherever you go so that we can be together again one day. I promise I won’t spend it until then….

  I’ve just been given a Tongan remedy for boils. Perhaps it will help you. You take the white sticky sap from a breadfruit tree and apply it to gauze and then put it on the boil. The sap acts as a drying agent, they tell me. Let’s hope you won’t need this remedy and that your boils are better….

  You’ll be brave, Robin, and very careful, for I know one thing for sure. I know we are going to meet again….

  A few days later I received another letter from Patti. It was in reply to mine and she turned down my plea that she join me in Honiara.

  “No, it’s not yet the right time, Robin. We’ll both know when it’s time, and where we’ll meet….”

  She told me how she had actually met my father at Lautoka. My father had stopped off there on his way to the New Hebrides.

  It was the strangest thing, but someone introduced me to a man who had just flown in from California. His name was Lyle Graham. Of course I knew at once who he was, but he didn’t know who I was. We talked a while and he is so eager to see you. I’m sure glad he will be with you because he loves you so very much. It’s killing him that he is not able to sail with you….

  I hope your father didn’t know who I was because I’m afraid we have created an awful scandal in the Fijis. The people here have branded me as an evil, corrupting girl. Oh my darling, I wish we could tell the world about our love so that the world could understand. I hate the thought of spoiling your reputation. It doesn’t matter about me. But if only they knew the truth….

  Last night I went to a Halloween party. My Tongan friends made me a lovely flowered skirt. But the party was just a bore because you weren’t there. If only we could escape from the world and live together in peace and far away from people. Perhaps one day we’ll buy a Tongan island.

  Write to me care of the Royal Yacht Club in Auckland. I’ll be finding work in New Zealand and saving every penny so that we can be together again when we both know the time has come….

  When my father turned up in Honiara he told me about the great battles fought on Guadalcanal in World War II. It was hard to believe because the islands were so beautiful, so much at peace. My imagination could not picture them raked by shells and bullets.

  I teamed up with a young Australian my age. He had lived on Guadalcanal almost all his life and had collected his own museum of war relics—bits of machine guns, backpack radios, rotting boots, even bits of human bone. He had found many GI tags, some on rusted wire and in overgrown slit trenches, and he had mailed them to the Pentagon, from where, I presumed, they had been sent on to the next of kin of men who had died among the palms and in the jungle growth and along the shore.

  The Australian showed me one place where the forest had been burned. He was still discovering live grenades. It was a bleak, sad place, full of death. I suddenly felt quite close to Michael in Vietnam—in some ways closer than I had ever been to him when he had roared his beach buggy across the sands of Morro Bay.

  I tried to picture Mike hunched here in a jungle ditch, fighting in a war my generation barely comprehended. Perhaps it had been easier for the young men in World War II. Perhaps they had better understood what the war was all about.

  We came across some natives wearing patched and bleached GI battle dress, and when I told them I was American the older men brought out souvenirs. One produced a gold watch, which had stopped. He said it was a gift from a GI whose life he had saved. He spoke so simply that I’m sure he told the truth.

  These people, looking as they had looked a thousand years ago, had witnessed one of the bloodiest battles of history. They had seen modern weapons tear flesh and steel, heard the cries of men dying, watched aircraft fight it out overhead. In the quiet straits offshore, they had seen warships spit and thunder fire and death.

  On the island of Florida, a morning’s sail away, I almost stumbled over a water pipe leading down from an inland spring. The pipe had been built by U.S. Army engineers. Water still gushed from it, so I filled up Dove’s small tanks from an aqueduct that had once filled the tanks of America’s Pacific Fleet.

  Solomon Islanders are shy, courteous and a bit nervous at being approached. But once you get through to them they are pleased to see visitors. One old man told me that they had never understood why the Yanks had fought for their land so fiercely and had then left them quite alone.

  “Why didn’t they stay?” the old man asked me. “The land is good—much fruit, much fish. The soldiers will be welcome if they come back.”

  On Florida island my father bought a pig from a local trader and then invited the islanders to roast it in traditional fashion. It was quite a party. Eighty people turned up, each bringing something along for the party. They brought pink papayas, bele, which is a sort of spinach, kava roots, coconuts, things like that.
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  First the pig was ceremonially strangled. It took quite a time to die and I felt real sorry for it. Then its hairs were burned off under fired coconut fronds. While it was spread-eagled on sticks, its flesh was tenderized with stones. Finally an underground oven was prepared with heated rocks and the pig was roasted for three hours. The preparation was a bloody business, but the pork had a marvelous flavor—and since we ate it off banana fronds there was no greasy wash-up afterward.

  I managed to avoid drinking the kava here because it is traditionally brewed by women who first chew the root and spit it into an iron bowl. It is claimed that the saliva of the women—and only the most beautiful are chosen for the job—adds a special flavor to the drink. I took their word for this.

  Savo island was only three hours sailing from Honiara, and I sailed there several times, mainly to study the weird megapod bird. The bird is short-tailed, black and brown, rather like a chicken, and it lays its eggs a foot or so below the sand. Each morning the islanders collect the goose-egg-size eggs from staked-off plots. If the eggs are left in the sand for forty days they hatch and the young birds are strong enough at hatching to take wing.

  My father and I watched one fledgling struggle free, but just as it took flight a hovering hawk swooped and claimed its breakfast. I don’t suppose the megapods can long survive the human and feathered predators. Although one of the islanders gave me half a basketful of megapod eggs, I don’t know what they taste like because I lost them in the surf when my dinghy flipped.

  The Savo islanders showed real interest when I swam from the beach to Dove, anchored two hundred yards off shore. I was puzzled until one of the older men explained that this was the spot where they threw their dead into the sea and where sharks ate them up. The reason why the islanders ran down to the beach to watch me swimming to and from Dove was that they expected to see me fight it out with one of the ten-foot morticians who patrol this stretch of coast.

  In the previous six months thirteen villagers bathing on the water’s edge had been seized by sharks. I heard one story—I don’t know how true it was—that a hungry man-eater had followed an islander halfway up the beach.

  A three-masted brigantine, The Californian, chartered by some scientists, was anchored at Honiara when I returned. The interest of the scientists was the weird behavior of a compass in some of these waters. The compass needle often swings all over the dial.

  When The Californian sailed for the island of Malaita it gave me a tow. The yacht was crewed by three old friends, Chat Bannister, Larry Briggs and Mike Bennett. The scientists spent a fortnight in the area, and at night some of them drank so much that I wondered how they could carry out their experiments.

  There are unusual ways of earning money in the islands. I discovered a very mixed crew of islanders aboard a half-sunk Japanese warship. They were diving to salvage nonferrous metal off the rusty wreck and sending it back to Japan, where the price paid kept a dozen Solomon families in style.

  My father left for home a few days before Christmas. He was happy with the pictures he had taken of me feasting on roast pig and dancing with natives. I stayed on in the Solomons to wait out the hurricane season because the anchorages here are quite secure, especially in the salt water channel which cuts through the island of Florida.

  No hurricanes came our way and when I felt the danger was over I sailed on to New Guinea. Now I was better off financially, for I had found a buyer who paid me forty dollars for Dove’s inboard engine and I had rented out my spare genoa to another yacht sailing for New Guinea. The crisp Australian notes warmed my pocket.

  I left Honiara on March 1, never anticipating that nine windless days later I would still be within sight of Guadalcanal. Dove just sat in the water. It was awful. Light airs just made me think of myself and my problems. On March 5 I celebrated my eighteenth birthday. It wasn’t much of a birthday and I took no comfort from remembering that I now qualified for the draft. Before leaving Honiara I had written to my draft board, who answered that they “understood my situation.” They told me to check in when I got home. I don’t think they realized that it wouldn’t be next week!

  On my birthday I had some happy thoughts too. I remembered Patti running down a beach, lying in the shade of a palm, swimming like a dolphin in the surf. I remembered the scent and touch of her and saw her exploding in sudden laughter. I remembered the hurt look in her eyes when we said good-bye. But the distance between us was still increasing.

  On the evening of my ninth day at sea a school of porpoises came over for a gossip, and this, I noted in my log, is always a good omen. It was. Dove’s sail, which had hung down like a shirt in a closet, suddenly filled, and my taffrail-log spinner recorded ninety-eight miles. This was better. But on the twelfth day at sea the wind swung the compass around to the bow and churned up twenty-foot swells. Once again I was beaten back on my course by the tail of a hurricane.

  The fury of this storm kept me awake for nearly forty-eight hours at a stretch and my blurred memory of this period is of water pouring across the cockpit and through the cowl vent until everything inside the cabin was wringing wet. My precious Coleman lamp was torn from its moorings. It was like losing a family heirloom, because this was the lamp that had lit up Dove every sailing night since I had left Hawaii.

  A fortnight at sea and the wind backed to the southeast—just the way I wanted it—and at last I was really on my way to Port Moresby in New Guinea. But man, I was tired! The fatigue had a strange effect on me. I’d have sudden spurts of energy and then a moment later it became an effort even to move a hand.

  At no time did I have hallucinations of the kind that other lone sailors have spoken about. When Robert Manry went without sleep for forty-eight hours as he sailed his tiny Tinkerbelle across the Atlantic, he said that some strange people came aboard. I was especially interested in the hallucinations of tough old Joshua Slocum, whose story I was now reading.

  Globe-circling Slocum was sailing off Spain when he fell ill after eating a meal of white cheese and plums. He went below and threw himself on the cabin floor in great pain and became delirious. He had no idea how long he had been lying there before becoming aware that his boat, Spray, was plunging in heavy seas. Looking through his companionway, he saw to his amazement a tall man at the helm. The stranger looked like a foreign sailor and was wearing a large red cap. Slocum thought Spray had been boarded by a pirate. According to Slocum’s account, the sailor said that he intended no harm and “with the faintest smile” told Slocum he was a fool for mixing cheese and plums. With the seas still crashing about Spray’s cabin, ailing Slocum went back to sleep. On awakening a second time and going up on deck, he found the stranger gone but Spray was still heading on a perfect course.

  Frankly there were times aboard Dove when I wished a helmsman would come aboard. I wouldn’t have cared less if he had been as ghostly as Slocum’s navigator. But I truly did sail every westward ocean mile alone.

  This leg of my voyage to Port Moresby seemed to last ten minutes short of forever. I was becalmed again and told my recorder: Dove made eighteen miles today by log but only ten miles by my chart, and since my taffrail-log spinner is mostly hanging straight down astern I have probably gone eighteen miles up and down.

  My small shipboard library contained a copy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner,” and I knew exactly what the poem meant where it reads:

  Day after day, day after day,

  We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

  As idle as a painted ship

  Upon a painted ocean.

  Even Dove began to croak and groan in protest, but these were sounds I welcomed in the silence of an endless sea. Without wind, the temperature began to soar and I recorded:

  The sweat is dripping off my nose as I write up the logbook. I have to blow the drops away and I watch them splash against the bulkhead, where they slither to the deck like raindrops on a window. My shirt and pants are so soaked with sweat that I might just as well have had a bath. B
ut what a miserable way to take a bath!

  Unexpected happenings helped to keep me from going crazy. On March 19 I taped: Woke up and heard weird noises. I looked over the side and saw a turtle. I grabbed one of its hind feet, but it just kicked a little bit and knocked my hand away. This was a pretty strong guy. Then it returned. I guess it must have been feeding. I grabbed it in the middle with both hands and for about thirty seconds I held it out of the water. Then all of a sudden it pulled out of my hands.

  That was too bad. I could have had turtle soup and steaks for a couple of weeks.

  I was almost tempted to jump overboard and pull Dove with a painter. Then the wind at last came up again and Dove took a bone in her teeth.

  On my twenty-second day at sea I wrote in my log that the journey from the Solomons to New Guinea had taken me longer than my voyage from San Pedro to Hawaii, which is twice as far.

  Toward the end of this leg of my voyage I began talking to myself. I guess this would have interested the head shrinkers. I was mumbling away when a sudden increase in wind brought me to my senses. Looking about for the cause of the unexpected blow, I saw on the horizon a sight which just about froze me. It was a waterspout about three miles off the beam, black and snakelike. For perhaps half a minute I simply stared in a kind of daze. I can now understand how a snake is able to hypnotize its prey—why an animal is locked to the ground and fanged down when it might easily have scampered to safety.