How wrong I was! Throughout her pregnancy Patti glowed with health. Her skin took on a fresh childlike bloom and there was a sort of peace about her I hadn’t recognized before. My fear for her simply melted away. She didn’t have to lecture me or anything or tell me I was just being a fool. I began to see that the baby was part of our lives, part of our love.
We spent two months exploring the Panama islands, sometimes staying on Dove, more often in the homes of new friends. The few Cuna Indians who had not come in contact with the tourists were helpful, artistic and friendly. On the tourist tracks, though, we found them infected by the discourtesy and greed of the western world.
Patti had picked up quite a lot of Spanish and was able to bargain successfully for provisions and souvenirs. At Tigre island, just off the mainland, we found whole families of albinos, descendants of the ones the Spaniards had found centuries before, who had given rise to the report that a lost white tribe had settled in the San Blas islands.
Among our new white friends were Tom and Joan Moody, who had sold their business in the United States and built a fascinating resort at Pidertupo. Wisely they had patterned their cottages on the local architecture. They had built a small airstrip on an adjacent island so that tourists could fly in and “go native” a few hours after leaving the concrete jungles to the north.
I sailed Dove to Cristobal in the Canal Zone and there we spent Christmas in an American home. A candlelit tree, carols sung round a piano and the exchange of presents recalled the happiest moments of my boyhood.
On New Year’s Day Patti and I decided to return some of the hospitality we’d received and invited about thirty people to a Hawaiian luau with Polynesian overtones. What our planned party amounted to was a pig feast on the beach, but first we had to find the pig. We went to a small farmhouse in the country, knocked on the door and an enormous black man appeared. He was dressed in full armor like a conquistador. The armor had been beaten out of tin cans, but his sword was real enough and when he drew it from its sheath we beat a fast retreat. Eventually we found a pig of the right size and built an umu (underground oven) in the sand, then pushed the pig between hot rocks to roast. Without a luau recipe book we had to guess the roasting period. Our guesswork was about an hour out, and the pig was so well cooked its head fell off.
We learned, too, never to roast a pig in sand. The noise of about six hundred teeth, real and false, crunching sandy pork was like a heavy truck on a newly graveled driveway. The guests were marvelously polite and assured us that there was no sand at all—in the beer.
Unrelated to this experience was a long session for me at the local dentist. For eighty dollars the dentist extracted two aching molars and filled ten cavities. The surgery was good but one of my gums would not stop bleeding. Back at the yacht club I was being offered Kleenex and sympathy when I suddenly keeled over and passed out. When I came around there were half a dozen uniformed firemen fussing over me.
When I’d fainted a fireman at the next table had caught me and instead of getting a doctor he had summoned the local fire brigade. Presumably because they were short on first aid drill, the firemen forced an oxygen mask over my face. Whether it was the oxygen or a couple of shots of brandy that put me on my feet again was a question noisily debated by the retreating brigade. The upshot was that within the hour I was able to take Patti to a James Bond film. We quite enjoyed it too.
Actually, before we left for the movie a doctor arrived to check me over. By strange coincidence this was the doctor who had flown Patti from Panama to the San Blas islands. He had given Patti a pregnancy test but it had proved negative. But Patti had gone back for a second test two weeks later and had bet the doctor a dollar that she wasn’t going to have a baby. When the doctor saw Patti at the yacht club he wrote out a note, folded it over and handed it to her with a grin. We read it as we drove in a taxi to the theater. The note read “You owe me a dollar!”
Spare parts for Dove’s broken wind vane arrived from England in mid-January and I was at last ready to sail through the Canal. One question to be decided was where to go when Dove had reached the Pacific. I looked forward to journey’s end because I’d been at sea (more or less) for nearly a quarter of my life. But now there was another factor which decided our immediate future.
“What about the baby?” I asked Patti as I signed up the documents to get us through the Canal. “Shouldn’t it be born in California? I mean, you’ll need the best medical care, a hospital and all that.”
“Women have babies in treetops and probably at the North Pole,” she said. “Anyway, I bet he’ll whistle sea chanteys before he talks.”
“He?” I said.
“Fifty-fifty chance.” She laughed. “If it’s a girl she’ll be a tomboy for sure.”
Her eyes were far away when she added, “I wonder if there’s any truth in the theory that a child is prenatally influenced by its mother’s environment. I remember reading somewhere about a pregnant woman spending all her time in art galleries and listening to Beethoven. The child turned out masterpieces and played piano concertos before he was ten.”
“You believe that?” I asked.
“I’d like to. And if it’s true what would you like your child to be? Disc jockey, president or candlestick maker? I could probably fix it. Supposing I looked at the stars all night—do you think he’d be the first man to walk on Jupiter?”
I bent over the top of the chair and kissed her forehead. She looked like a blond madonna. “I’d want him to love nature. I’d want him to love animals, mountains, clean water, sea life. I’d want him to understand all these things,” I said.
“That’s easy. Let’s go to the Galápagos islands,” said Patti lightly.
This wasn’t the only reason why we decided on the Galápagos before turning north for the run to California. Patti had been there five years earlier and had absolutely loved the islands. She knew that I would love them too.
Getting through the Panama Canal in a small boat is not all that simple. When the water level changes in the locks it becomes very turbulent and there is a real risk of crushing a hull or losing a mast. The law forbids you to sail your own boat through the Canal and I was forced to hand over Dove to a pilot and four linesmen. So long as I did not interfere with the navigation, the Canal Company would be responsible for any damage, but it was not easy to keep my hands off the tiller when Dove rolled about in the swirl of water in the Gatún Locks and was threatened by other ships.
With barely a hull scratch we reached Balboa, on the Pacific side, on January 17. Before I sailed for the Galápagos, Patti and I spent a terrific ten days together anchored off Taboga island, a two-hour sail from the Canal. On Taboga we mostly lay around in the sun and read. One thing the long voyage had done for me was to give me a pretty wide taste in literature. I had gone through quite a library in five years and been introduced to authors ranging from Robert Louis Stevenson to Ruark, from Hemingway to Agatha Christie. If I ever returned to school I would have a lot of catching up to do in the math class, but at least I’d have a head start in English literature and geography.
We returned to Balboa to drop off Patti and to arrange for her to travel to the Galápagos islands by steamer and by plane.
“And don’t forget,” I said, as I boarded Dove on January 30, “to bring along my son.”
“No problem,” Patti laughed. “He’s still very attached to me.”
10
Creatures That Hath Life
DARWIN HAD BEEN only six years older than I now was when he first set foot in the Galápagos. But he was a scientist and I was a sailor. I’d been reading his journal while I was on the eleven-hundred-mile, eight-day sail from Panama to San Cristóbal. My voyage was almost trouble-free except when I nearly knocked myself out on the tiller.
It sounds a bit heavy, but I liked one phrase Darwin used about the Galápagos. He said: “Here we seem to be brought to that great fact of history—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of a new being on this
earth.”
In the Galápagos I often thought I was pretty close to the “mystery of mysteries.”
The depth-sounder helped me feel my way into Wreck Harbor on an inky night and next morning I went ashore to check up on news of Patti. There was none and the next mail wasn’t due for several days. I was sour and a bit worried. I hadn’t a clue where she was.
The cats wanted some attention. Blind Fili was pregnant. She had picked up some infection, but a few shots of an antibiotic provided by a doctor in Ecuador put her on her feet again, and she later gave birth to two live kittens—Pooh and Piglet. I knew the kittens’ father because I’d caught Fili with a midnight-cowboy sort of cat on the Atlantic side of the Canal. At the time I had thought it was a pretty lousy thing to take advantage of a blind lady who’d gotten lost on her way home. Anyway, the kittens were cute.
A cable arrived from Patti to say she would be flying out from Guayaquil in Ecuador the following day. The only airport in the Galápagos was on Baltra island, fifty miles away, so I ran all the way back to Dove and sailed under full canvas. I was just in time to see the plane touch down, but Patti wasn’t among the passengers. I discovered later that although she had had her reservation she had lost her place to Ecuadorian servicemen, who always have priority. She sent a message to me by another passenger to say she would be on the next plane, two days later. Two days is a long time to hang around an airport.
When the next plane arrived Patti disembarked with her father and stepmother. For the next ten days the four of us explored the islands. The Ratterrees were great company. Right from the start there was a fifth member of the party—the ghost of Charles Darwin, who breathed down our necks.
We saw Darwin’s “finches that shook the world.” Darwin had listed thirteen different types of finches and they helped him build up his theory which challenged the age-old belief that the world was created in six days.
The most fascinating finch is the Santa Cruz woodpecker, which uses a twig or cactus spine as a tool to burrow into trees for grubs. This bird uses twigs as easily as a carpenter uses a screwdriver.
On reaching Plaza island we had a marvelous time playing around with sea lions. They were more like puppies in the way they picked up sticks and brought them back to us.
Patti was no longer bikini-trim, but she almost held her own in an underwater tug of war with a young sea lion that never tired of playing. When we had enough of the game the sea lions sulked and then began to catch the waves and surf to the shore in a style that would have won the Malibu beach title.
Because it comes in on the Humboldt Current, the water around the Galápagos is quite cold. We found we could not swim for long. Like the marine iguanas we sought out rocks, which reach a temperature of 120 degrees in the noonday sun. When I discarded my shorts in a secluded cove I discovered how hot the sun can be in these tropical islands. That night I couldn’t sit down.
Most evenings our dinner menu was fresh fish or lobster which I’d caught or speared an hour or two earlier. No one has really eaten lobster until he has tried the Galápagos variety. I discovered my first one by accident when looking for groupers in a pool off James Bay. Patti and I had speared so many groupers that day that there was no more freezer room to store them, but I went on diving because I could not tear myself away from the fascinating colors and lava formations beneath the surface. Then on the edge of a shelf I spotted an extraordinary prehistoric creature.
Back on Dove’s deck I taped: Went looking for starfish species when I saw something strange lying in a foot of water. It looked like a crayfish but there was something very weird about it. Instead of antennae up front it had flippers like a sand crab’s and its shell was quite different. I touched it cautiously and then grabbed it and threw it in the dinghy. I thought: Well, if there’s one of these there might be a relative close by. Sure enough I found number two. The third one was suspicious of me and almost escaped, but within ten minutes I had caught five of these weird creatures…. Patti barbecued them (they’re really hard to open) and we’ve just eaten them for dinner. If one of those Hollywood restaurateurs gets to hear about the Galápagos lobsters they’ll be breeding them in basement aquariums.
With such discoveries I often felt I was looking at evolutionary potter’s clay. The “gentle dragons”—the marine iguanas—seemed to waddle right out of the mists of time. No wonder the Spaniards called this corner of the world Las Islas Encantadas (“The Enchanted Isles”). The thirteen islands of the archipelago (five are volcanic) have created the world’s best natural history laboratory. Fortunately Ecuador has recently declared the islands a protected reserve and has given the wildlife legal defense against the worst of predators—man.
Galápagos was first ravaged a long time ago when English pirates used the islands as a base for attacking the treasure-laden ships of Spain. These pirate ships probably brought the rats which have wiped out much of the wildlife. Baltra island was occupied by the United States in World War II and the land iguanas were used as pistol targets by bored servicemen. Only a handful of the land iguanas survived the Baltra massacre.
For more than a century whaling ships and merchantmen have stopped at the Galápagos to take on provisions, and too many captains’ logbooks speak of taking huge numbers of land tortoises. Typically, Captain David Porter, who commanded the U.S. Navy frigate Essex, recorded in 1815: “Here to be obtained are land tortoises in great numbers. They are highly esteemed for their excellence and weigh three to four hundredweight each. Vessels…generally take aboard two to three hundred of these animals and stow them in the holds where, strange as it may appear, they have been known to live for a year without food or water.”
One estimate is that 400,000 have been slaughtered or seized in the past century and there are now not 10,000 left. I get angry when I find statistics like these and I just hope that enough of my generation get as stirred up as I do to prevent the world being stripped before it becomes as dead as the moon.
While we Americans self-righteously point our fingers at Japanese whalers scouring the oceans for the last of the whales, we like to forget what we did to the great herds of buffalo! As we explored the Galápagos my anger mounted against all who ravage our planet.
With the islands’ weird currents and with rocks just below the surface, sailing around the Galápagos can be tricky, so we decided to leave Dove for a few days in Academy Bay at Santa Cruz and sail in a local powered boat, the Vagabond, chartered by National Geographic. The advantage of the charter boat was that it allowed me to relax for a bit and not worry about the chores of sailing Dove. I had more time to appreciate this strange and magic world. On the tape recorder I reported our day-by-day adventures:
FEBRUARY 26: Went ashore on little Hood island, the southernmost of the group, and was fascinated by the mockingbirds, which crave fresh water. If you hold a teaspoonful in your hand they fly down and suck up the drops. The booby birds were just as tame.
Climbed lava rocks and came across a colony of marine iguanas, incredibly colored in reds and greens. It’s their mating season and they have put on all their war paint to go courting…. Discovered a blowhole in the cliffs where the surf sweeping in from the Pacific is thrown up thirty feet. A baby fur seal nuzzled up to Patti and nibbled at her fingers.
FEBRUARY 28: Back on Dove. I powered to James Bay on San Salvador island. We were pretty pooped after a tiring trip, but we went ashore to watch the turtles laying eggs. Bob Madden [a National Geographic photographer] tried to get up close but one turtle did not like him and kicked sand into his eyes. Bob had red eyes for quite a while and I’ll bet there’s a moral here somewhere.
MARCH 1: Went ashore looking for pigs. The pirates or early settlers brought in the first pigs and goats, which have gone quite wild and now threaten the indigenous wildlife. I borrowed an antique rifle and managed to shoot two goats. The herds of goats have to be thinned out, and the shooting sure helps to keep down our meat bills.
MARCH 2: A local man has been telling me o
f a salt mine near here where ten miners live off the land. It seems that they each ate ten doves a day for ten months. Total cost 30,000 birds. Walked for half a mile to a beautiful pool where seals were diving around and playing. Sailed to Buccaneer Cave, named for seventeenth-century pirates who hung out here. It’s weird and you can easily imagine pirates with wooden legs and patches over their eyes walking among the dark lava rocks.
MARCH 3: Ashore and had a terrific dinner (Al Ratterree the cook) of wild goat ribs and then powered back to Baltra island to see Al and Ann off by plane.
MARCH 4: Returned to Academy Bay to haul out Dove. This turned out to be an interesting operation. I tied Dove to a pier, and when the tide went out she was left almost high and dry. I was cleaning off the barnacles and standing in a foot of water when a puffer fish sneaked up and bit my toe. Oh! the hazards of the sea!
MARCH 5: My birthday, so Patti baked a cake. The boat was tilted over so the cake was shaped like a door wedge, but it tasted a lot better than it looked. Painting a boat is an awful way to spend a twenty-first birthday!
MARCH 6: All the populated islands have a seacoast town and an inland town. In the seacoast towns the people live off fishing and tourists and in the inland towns they are farmers. Took a day off from cleaning up Dove and went up to a farming town and then trekked to the rim of a dead volcano. Got pretty thirsty but the island’s water is hard to drink. It’s brackish and awful, but the islanders don’t seem to mind. In fact, when they drink fresh rainwater they put salt in it to make it “nice.”
MARCH 7: Last night Bob Madden tried to take pictures of a yellow warbler nest and climbed a poisonous tree. His neck looks as if it’s been badly burned. Found a doctor, whose injection helped.
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