Dove

by Robin L. Graham

  I swung the tiller right across and told the tape recorder: Boy, this is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen at sea! It’s really awful, and it’s getting closer and bigger. I can now see the rainwater under the spout pounding into the sea. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ve just stored all the gear away below deck, but I guess if that thing hits me Dove will just disappear. The spout goes up into a huge dark cloud like an umbrella. Anyway, everything is battened down. It’s a real ugly twister…but I think I’m gaining ground on it…. This is the closest I’ve been to disaster…. It’s really scary, man…. Yes, I am gaining on it now…. What would have happened if it had been night?

  On the evening of March 24 I entered Port Moresby harbor in a heavy squall and with visibility so poor I nearly hit a wreck. But at ten o’clock that night I tied up to a mooring buoy, and with my last three gallons of fresh water I took a bath. Avanga was stinking too so I doused him with a bucket. His revenge was to chew up my only chart of Darwin’s harbor. If I had caught him at it I would have made him walk the plank.

  Next morning, after fixing up my papers with customs, I headed for the post office. Patti had known I was taking in Port Moresby and I hoped that letters not received in the Solomons might be waiting for me there. But everything was closed up tight. When I asked a policeman the reason he looked at me as if I was crazy.

  “Good Friday,” he said and, mounting his bicycle, added, “The post office will not open till Tuesday.”

  Fed up and tired, I returned to Dove and hit the sack. Perhaps I did wake up in between, but the next thing I remember hearing was the sound of bells on Easter morning.

  By chance that Easter morning I met up with a charming Australian lady—I only wish I could remember her name—who had settled in Port Moresby years before. She took me to her home, where I wallowed in a hot tub. A humble hamburger, fresh bread and crisp lettuce were like a Thanksgiving dinner.

  My hostess gave me the history of the port and told how an English adventurer exploring the Papuan coast in 1873 had found a break in the coral reef and named the harborage for his father.

  The noon traffic jams and ice cream parlors helped me to understand New Guinea’s huge leap from the stone age to the twentieth century.

  In the Legislative Council there were men, speaking a lot better English than I did and wearing tailored suits, who, thirty years before, had decked themselves in feathers and pig grease. At the airport I saw tribesmen wearing laplaps coolly climb into aircraft bound for distant copra plantations.

  I tried unsuccessfully to hitch a lift and fly to Mount Lamington, a volcano to the north that was famous for the 1951 eruption which killed three thousand people. One of the Port Moresby pilots said that “when you see a cloud over New Guinea you can be sure there’s a mountain right inside it.”

  New Guinea is a fascinating frontier between ancient and modern man. Stepping out of modern diesel-engined buses and probably carrying crab folded in banana fronds are women tattooed from neck to thigh. This cosmetic surgery is still done with a thorn and mallet. In the “good old days,” they explained, it was not a painful operation. But one day a young girl being tattooed laughed when she shouldn’t have and the spell was broken. Now, they said, the surgery is just as painful as it looks.

  On the Tuesday after Easter I was the first to arrive at the post office. There were letters from home, full of news and encouragement, a letter from the National Geographic, formal but friendly; and another letter which bore a New Zealand stamp. My heart missed about six beats.

  Patti wrote of how she had arrived without incident in Christchurch and told excitedly that she had found the New Zealanders warm and hospitable—“really great people.” She had found a job almost at once in a Christchurch hospital, but longed for work in the open air. Her second job was at an agricultural research station in Nelson, and this meant being outdoors all the time: “The sun is marvelous and I’m quite brown again.”

  I had written from the Solomons to tell Patti that my new route westward would be via the Cape of Good Hope and that I definitely planned to call in at Darwin in northern Australia. I had asked her if there was any chance of her joining me there.

  Now Patti replied: “Darwin, yes Robin, I think I can get there. I’ve really been saving every cent and I have enough for the journey and some to spare. So I won’t be a poor penniless wench when we meet again. After that who knows?”

  Cables were exchanged between us, and by the time I sailed from Port Moresby on April 18 I had the best of all reasons for continuing westward.

  In the Coral Sea I kept close to the land, remaining awake at night and taking catnaps by day. The moon was full and the twinkle of lights from the islands made navigation comparatively easy. When I needed a rest I would anchor off one of the many islands. At Dalrymple island I went ashore, taking Avanga with me in the hope that a spell on the beach would improve his temper. Avanga’s beach behavior would have intrigued a zoologist. He performed like a dog, chasing lizards and hanging out his tongue, and I could have sworn he lifted his hind leg on discovering a tree. The unmanned light tower on the cliff was easy to scale, but when I reached the top I was alarmed by the view. Dove, far below, seemed to be high and dry. Actually she wasn’t, but the water was so clear that it gave this illusion.

  A weird thing happened to me on Dalrymple. At sea I had grown used to being alone, sometimes hating loneliness but learning to live with it. But when I was on land I had expected to see people, to hear voices, perhaps, or at least smell the smells of man—sweat, factories or even frying sausages—something to tell me that I was not the last man left on earth. On Dalrymple’s island I was Robinson Crusoe without Friday’s footprint in the sand. My feeling of being alone almost made me panic.

  A day later, though, when passing Roberts island, I was given a clue that a nuclear war had not wiped out the human race. Someone tried to signal me with a mirror from a dark patch of coconut trees. I waved back and felt better.

  An east-west current of six knots now began to give me the fastest traveling of my voyage, with Dove shifting over the bottom at about eight knots.

  The night of April 28 was dark, and my new pressure lamp, a cheap one bought at Port Moresby, had broken down. At close to midnight I was in the cabin reading Ian Fleming’s Moonraker when I heard a rumbling noise and a swish of water like a tidal bore. Next moment Dove was thrown over at an angle of ninety degrees, water pouring through the companionway. I scrambled to the cockpit to see a huge wave and, behind it, a black wall that seemed to be towering to the sky. Dove was being run down by a freighter.

  If I had not been wearing my safety harness I think I would have jumped. All I could do was wait for the fiberglass hull to be crushed like an eggshell.

  Miraculously the steamer’s bow wave threw Dove clear and only the top of her mast scraped the freighter’s flank. Dove rolled and bounced, and in seconds the long black shape slipped by and faded into the darkness. I stood there in the cockpit, quite stunned, water still sloshing around my feet, and then I screamed abuse into the darkness. The steamer had not carried any lights at all, and from her bridge there came no shout, no apology. I guess the man on watch must have been asleep.

  My throat was as dry as the Mojave desert, my heart was thumping. I decided that from then until I reached Darwin and had bought another Coleman I would stay awake at night.

  May 4 dawned beautifully as I entered Darwin’s harbor and tied up at the yacht wharf. Officials were friendly but one demanded a hundred-dollar shipmaster bond for Avanga. I said I would give the cat away to anyone who wanted him. The official looked at Avanga, and Avanga stared right back. There were no takers.

  My first business was at the post office, where I sent out two cables, north and south—the first to Hawaii for Mother’s Day, the second to Patti saying, “Arrived! Where are you?”

  6

  The Hobo Makes It

  THE FIRST FEW DAYS at Darwin were spent enjoying land legs and exploring this rugge
d frontier town. The surprise was the mixture of the population. Discovery of uranium at nearby Rum Jungle had attracted a lot of immigrants after World War II. At the local bars, cafés or in the fish and chips shops I would find myself talking to Poles, Czechs, Germans, Latvians, Hungarians, Greeks, Frenchmen and of course plenty of British settlers. The New Australians really seemed to fear the Chinese. A popular subject was the shortage of women. One of Darwin’s suburbs is called Bachelor.

  Several cruising yachts turned up in the harbor and there were old friends among the crews. One morning I was showing two attractive young girls over Dove (there are always girls ready to cook for a lone sailor) when I heard my name called from the wharf. I climbed through the companionway and squinted across the water and there she was—Patti, I mean.

  Dove was moored quite a few hundred yards offshore. I rowed across and climbed the wharf. We just stood staring at each other. Patti looked terrific. She was so brown, so pretty. I couldn’t believe she was really here with me. Then we flew into each other’s arms. Of course I had to explain that the two girls who had come up out of Dove’s cabin were ten-minute visitors. We had so much to talk about.

  Patti had had quite an adventurous journey from New Zealand by plane, train and bus. A small aircraft had hopped her from Adelaide to Alice Springs in the heart of the Northern Territory, but still hundreds of miles south of Darwin. She was saving every hard-earned dollar, so typically she had slung her rucksack over a shoulder and had started walking north. It was just as well that this was the day when a bus ran on the isolated road. The sight of a young blonde in the wilderness is rarer than a billabong. The bus driver had rubbed his eyes, pulled up and invited Patti to jump aboard.

  Patti then explained to the bus driver that she had been hoping for a car lift as she had already spent too much of her money on tickets. It seems that Australian Outback drivers have their own code of chivalry. He promised her that this leg of her journey would be free.

  Covered with Australian dust and ten pounds under her best weight, she had reached Darwin’s inner harbor two days ahead of schedule. Before hailing me on Dove she had found a wharfside ladies’ room where she had bathed in the washbasin, set her hair and changed from her jeans into her only dress (very mini and feminine). She looked as if she had come right out of Saks Fifth Avenue by the time she shouted my name across the water.

  We had a few terrific days together alone and we dreamed up schemes to buy a motorcycle and ride all the way down to Queensland. We actually bought one—from a con man, as it turned out. The machine was missing vital parts and never worked. You have to learn some things the hard way.

  Then Charles Allmon flew in from Washington. He was a National Geographic picture editor and was loaded down with cameras. Charles was everything I wasn’t. He was fortyish, crew-cut, very tidy. He had been assigned to get pictures for my first feature for the magazine.

  The trouble was, I think, that Charles had his own idea of whom he would find in Darwin—a schoolboy who had been president of his class and made the athletic team, a youth so full of daring that he had to be first cousin to the boy in the poem who had stood on the burning deck. Charles did his best to hide his disappointment on finding Dove’s skipper looking more like an Indonesian pirate and, after being so long at sea, not much more articulate than his cat.

  I felt sorry for Charles but resisted his demand that I cut the hair off my ears and put on pressed shirts for his camera. He wanted better backgrounds for his pictures than the wharfs and main streets of Darwin.

  “Amhem Land,” pronounced Charles over a dinner of inch-thick steaks. “Yes, that’s what we need—pictures of you among the aborigines.”

  “How long will it take?” I asked suspiciously, calculating the time I would have to be away from Patti.

  “Oh, just a few days,” he said, focusing his eyes on the straggly ends of my sun-bleached hair.

  Charles bought two air tickets and I was fascinated to circle over the north Australian coast along which I had sailed a few days earlier. In a few minutes the plane had traveled over as much ocean as Dove had managed in hours.

  I turned to Charles. “I’ve decided to complete my voyage by air.”

  He didn’t understand I was joking and for the rest of our air journey to an aborigine mission station I was given a sermon on perseverance, illustrated with stories of every adventurer from Columbus to Edmund Hillary.

  “It’s the next horizon that matters,” said Charles. “Just think of it that way and you’ll be home before you know it.”

  Charles was such a decent person, so full of optimism—of the kind of people who from their armchairs in Boston and Philadelphia had encouraged my forebears to open up the West.

  He was a good photographer, passionate about lenses, light-meters and fields of vision. Actually I enjoyed our time in Arnhem Land and learned something of the art of the aborigines, who are trying to keep their history alive with drawings worked on the bark of eucalyptus trees. After cutting down the bark they bury it in sand to dry. When the “canvas” is ready, they make fresh paint from crushed colored stones and the juices of plants. Their paint-brushes are made from women’s hair.

  Popular subjects for aboriginal art are their folk tales. One artist was illustrating the fable of the sun woman, who lights her torch each morning in the east and travels across the sky. At noon the heat from her cooking pot is so fierce that men are driven to the shade. The sun woman puts out her torch each day in the western sky, and at night she travels through a long underground tunnel until she is ready to light her torch again.

  “Now why,” I asked Charles, “should the astronomers have spoiled such a nice explanation of the day and night?”

  Charles then gave me a long explanation of planetary mathematics. He was eager to see me properly educated.

  When we returned to Darwin there was another problem for Charles. Patti didn’t fit into his pictures—especially Patti aboard Dove. So each evening I would make a pretense of dropping Patti off at a harbor boardinghouse and then, after I’d said good night to Charles at his hotel, I would return and pick her up.

  Patti was quite a cook. Each evening she would spread a folded pareau cloth across the orange crate table I’d fixed up in Dove’s cockpit. She would fix candles in bottles and then serve up a really good meal. A special favorite was steak and mushrooms with tossed salad and the local champagne. The people on the other yachts looked at us enviously. One night we invited Charles to join us. Patti offered him some local wine. Charles arched his eyebrows in disapproval. I could tell that in his mind we were like kids who had raided the cellar while our parents were at the local Rotary Club dinner.

  The best spot near Darwin is a pool fed by a cascade of spring water. Patti, bikini-clad, found some ropes twisted around an over-hanging branch. Playing Tarzan and Jane and making baboon noises, we swung out over the pool and dropped into the lovely clear water. It was a bit childlike but we were having a ball, while Charles snapped pictures from the bank.

  The upshot of these days in Darwin was that a report got back to my father in California that my morals were shot to hell and that I had a girl in tow who was giving me booze and dope (I’d asked someone for Benzedrine to help me keep awake at sea). The report may have issued from one of the people on a visiting California yacht. There were several who looked down their noses at me.

  Awful letters arrived from some of my relatives. I guess they had my welfare at heart, but what hurt most were the adjectives they used to describe Patti. They hadn’t even seen her! She was the girl I loved! Even my inquiries about Benzedrine were interpreted as a warning that I was becoming a junkie. I couldn’t believe that anyone, especially some of those closest to me, could make such accusations without hearing my side of the story.

  One result of these accusations was that I resolved to try to become financially independent. An old cruising friend, Stewart (“Mac”) McLaren, and I found a construction job at the Darwin power station. They were sho
rt of labor and no one asked me for my qualifications. I was told, though, that I had to wear shoes on the job. This was a bit of a problem as I didn’t have any but I solved it when I found a pair exactly my size in a trash heap. I laced them up with copper wire and presented myself for work.

  The work paid well and amounted basically to putting up steel girders. I was quite surprised to discover that without any training I could do more in a day than much of the local trained labor force. Mac was the foreman and I was described as “fitter’s assistant.” The job gave me confidence that I could at least earn my own way.

  I was in funds again because before Charles flew back to Washington I’d been given an advance on royalties by National Geographic.

  One evening when I returned to Dove I found my father aboard. He met Patti for the second time and recognized the girl he had met casually in the Fijis.

  I was sure my father would at once credit Patti with all the virtues. He took me aside and made it clear that his main worry was that Patti might make me abandon my plan to sail around the world. He told me that he was going to stay in Darwin until I sailed.

  Contrary to my father’s fears, Patti never held me back. I knew though how deeply she dreaded being blamed if I failed to continue the voyage. If my father had known it, Patti was really his ally. She gave me strength, and was always ready to let me go.

  My father speeded up the provisioning of Dove, and he was standing there on the wharf when I boarded the boat, unfurled the new mainsail and heeled to the east wind. I’d been in Darwin just two months. Before leaving I shared my savings with Patti. This money, added to her own savings, would allow her to join me, if she would, in Mauritius—an ocean, eight weeks and about 4,300 miles away. It was just as well that I couldn’t see the troubles ahead. Our next meeting did not work out the way we’d planned.