by Otto Penzler
Macapá, population 250,000, is the capital of Amapá, the most godforsaken of the Brazilian states. The only way in or out is by plane or boat. They tried to build a road to the city of Manaus, a thousand miles away, but a couple hundred miles out the thing sank into the Amazonian swamp. Santana is ten miles from downtown Macapá, and the intrastate epicenter of crime. Most weeks, says a doctor at the Santana hospital, a dozen people are murdered. “Mostly it’s by machete. I had to help a guy yesterday who had had seven hacks taken out of him. It was because he’d killed the attacker’s brother the week before. Neither of them has been arrested.”
On the Sunday after I arrive, my translator, Marcelo, and I are approached by a drunk guy with a puffy face and a T-shirt that says Santana will be AIDS-free by 2001. He asks for money, and when we say no, he pushes Marcelo. A shipping porter comes over and chases him away before anything else happens. The porter and Marcelo say this is by far the most common kind of robber: a sort of aggravated begging. Santana is a place where you need to know where you are all the time, Marcelo says, and it’s good to be able to tell when the mood of a place is changing.
Late one night, I can’t sleep and decide to take a walk around the neighborhood, though I’ve been warned against it. On the front porch of my hotel, I meet a woman named Rose, a Mormon missionary. She has soft lines on her face, gray hair, and a low-wattage beatific smile. As it turns out, she is a first-rate insomniac and has stood watch over the darkling streets of Johannesburg, Manila, and New York, among others. I ask her why Santana seems to be such a dangerous place and she says that poor rural villages the world over are pretty safe. It’s the poor people in the cities, the transients, the have-nots in plain sight of the haves, who become antisocial.
When I leave for my walk (which lasts about thirty-seven seconds), Rose puts her hand on mine and says, “Careful, dear, they’ll shoot you in the face.”
When Sir Peter Blake pulled his boat into Macapá, it was the last day of the Seamaster’s two-month mission through the Amazon basin. The crew had sailed 1,200 miles upstream and back again, making a documentary about the Amazonian ecosystem to teach the world, as Blake said, that “the earth is a water planet: good water, good life; poor water, poor life.” The size of the crew fluctuated between ten and twenty people throughout the expedition, but the core was men Blake had known for years—Don Robertson, his best friend; Errol Olphert, who had sailed with Blake on his America’s Cup team—and for whom the Seamaster voyage was a kind of reward.
Things on the Amazon hadn’t gone exactly as Blake had planned. He had hired a diver to do some filming, but the Amazon was so murky with silt that they’d been unable to get any good footage. Plus, says Robertson, “With wildlife, it’s not like the zoo; the animals don’t just line up so you can take their picture.” But they did see a few pink dolphins—strange, shy animals that live more than a thousand miles from the ocean. Throughout, Blake ran the expedition with an abiding professionalism—the crew rose at dawn each morning to clean the boat, chart the course, set up for the filming.
Blake was possibly the greatest sailor who ever lived. There are people who would argue this point—some would say it was Dennis Conner, or maybe Sir Francis Drake—but there are about four million people who wouldn’t. Blake was from New Zealand, and after winning the Whitbread around-the-world race in 1990, the Jules Verne Trophy in 1994 (in the process breaking the record for circumnavigating the globe), and, most famously, the America’s Cup in 1995 and 2000, he became a national hero. “Most kids in New Zealand will have a bit of a grasp on who the heroes are,” says Don Robertson. “And they’ll tell you it’s Edmund Hillary and Peter Blake.”
Blake did not become the greatest sailor in the world by being the best technical sailor. It was a greatness achieved more by force of personality. He was an extraordinarily striking person to meet. He stood six feet four inches tall (his friends sometimes called him Six Four) and had worn his hair in a Beatles-esque mop since the seventies. Steve Fossett, who holds world records for sailing and ballooning, says it made him look like a Viking. People who met Blake say he possessed a spiritual energy, as if he were sprinkled with a kind of fairy dust that could make almost anyone a true believer. Michael Levitt, who’s written eleven books on sailing, tells this story: “I met him in Philadelphia when he took one of his early Whitbread boats around. He’d put this project together, built this boat, and he was off to win this race, and you could just see it in him. You didn’t know what to make of it then, because he hadn’t actually accomplished anything yet. But he just radiated.”
Blake had an uncanny ability to get very rich men to give him millions of dollars to build and race boats in exchange for a company logo painted on the hull, and to convince the best yachtsmen in the world to sail with him. David Alan-Williams, who crewed with Blake on his record-setting around-the-world voyage in 1994, says, “There were a lot of us who used to say that if Peter came to us and said he was going to sail a boat to the moon, we’d go, ‘Okay, when do we start?’” Levitt thinks people became devoted to Blake partly because he acted as if he had never in his life experienced a moment of doubt.
Blake endured a great deal to be a long-distance sailor. In an ocean race, you are expected to shrink your existence to its smallest and most portable form. Peter Blake was not designed for the quarters on racing yachts; the ceilings on the ENZA New Zealand, for instance, were less than six feet high. So Blake spent thirty years of his life on metal schooners and catamarans doing thirty knots, bent at the waist, sleeping in beds in which maybe 80 percent of him fit comfortably. And most of those races he did not win—he lost the Whitbread four times before he won it. “Every time I’ve done a round-the-world race, I’ve said it’s the last,” Blake said in 1987. “It’s the highlight of your life, but it’s crazy.” At some level, Blake was carrying on a war of attrition against the Big Forces of the world: weather, ocean, time. His greatest skill may have been his ability to ignore conditions, failure, and, according to the sometimes dismal logs of his races, broken masts, disintegrated hulls, and spells of hypothermia. The will to move forward was possibly Blake’s most basic impulse.
The Seamaster was a retirement from professional racing. Blake felt he’d accomplished everything he could. (As Don Robertson says, “Would Hillary climb Everest twice?”) Instead of puttering about in the garden or sinking into a fit of drinking and self-pity, as some retired athletes do, he decided to launch the Seamaster. “I sailed all over the world,” Blake said, “but I never got to slow down and look at anything.” He was able to convince the Omega watch company to give him the money to buy a boat from the Cousteau Society, which he painted, stamped with the name SEAMATER, after Omega’s $3,000 flagship watch, and launched under the imprimatur of Blakexpeditions, which he figured on building into his own Cousteau Society. Not that retirement didn’t have its benefits. Instead of eating freeze-dried soy protein, as he had when he raced, on the Seamaster he had a full-time cook, a Brazilian named Rizaldo. When they brought the boat to South America, the crew built canvas shades against the tropical sun, and stocked the fore freezer with loads of meat and the aft refrigerators with greens and tropical fruit and milk and cold beer. Robertson says, “The conditions were positively luxurious compared to the other boats we’d sailed on.”
Because they didn’t really have anything to document in Macapá (the main tourist activity is straddling the equator, which runs through town, at the visitors’ center), the Seamaster’s crew had designated the day for running errands and generally screwing around. Sam, the shipping agent, drove them to the big grocery store in town, where they bought fruit, gas for the grill, and bottles of local rum. Blake and six of his crew spent a few hours at a restaurant at Fazendinha Beach, across from their new anchorage, eating fish and rice and drinking caipirinhas.
“Mr. Peter docked his dinghy right there and stayed from 5:30 P.M. until 8:00 P.M.,” the waiter who served them tells me. “He was a very tall man, much taller than us, ver
y white and very strong, much stronger than us. It was easy to see he was the leader. All the attention was on him.”
Around Blake at the table were most of the crew of the Seamaster, who were also his good friends. Leon Sefton, the cameraman, was his longtime business partner’s son. Blake had invited Robin Allen, because at 19 he was a promising young sailor, and Rodger Moore, an Auckland plumber with little sailing experience, because Blake had worked with his son. Don Robertson was staff photographer.
“We were all quite relaxed because it was the end of the trip,” Robertson says, “and all we had to do was sail around the corner and up to Trinidad and Tobago, where some of us were going to have a Caribbean Christmas.”
The waiter says, “They had a very good time, laughing always. They drank, too. They had ten caipirinhas and fourteen six-hundred-milliliter bottles of beer between seven of them. You see that waitress over there? She served him.” He calls the waitress over. She’s in her forties and wearing stained yellow spandex pants and a white shirt that laces up the front. “We danced together a little bit, and I gave him his last kiss, on his cheek, of course,” she says.
When the crew got back to the boat that night, Blake and the others turned on the CD player, opened a few beers, and installed themselves in their hammocks. The cook began preparing a light dinner.
“The night in Macapá started so great,” says Robin Allen, who lives near the Blakes’ home in Hampshire, England, and is close with their children (James, 15, and Sarah-Jane, 18). He says, “You know, there was absolutely no alcohol allowed while we were under way. Peter would kick you off for that. The main partying took place when he would say, ‘Okay, tonight is for having a good time.’”
“They had a nice party,” Sam, the shipping agent, says. “They drank beer. If there was one thing they had a lot of, it was beer. When I came on the boat later, I saw a bucket with fifty empty beer cans in it. But this was a party, and we know we can’t just have two beers when we are having a party.”
At nine o’clock, six men met at the port in Santana: Ricardo, Isael, José, Reney, Rubens, and Josué. They were local guys, between 20 and 30 and mostly unemployed. Ricardo had been working as a receptionist at a computer school his cousin owned, until he was fired the month before. Reney sometimes helped his father with electrical work. Most of them had a history of crime, especially armed robbery. Isael had been out of prison for only two months and seven days.
Some of the men brought their motorcycle helmets to Santana. Others had cut their wives’ and mothers’ pantyhose to make masks. Rubens, 20, had gotten use of his boss’s boat, a twenty-foot wooden catraia, the most common kind of boat on the Amazon. The men pooled their money, bought five reals’ ($2.15) worth of gas, and then pointed the boat toward the ocean. At close to ten o’clock, Rubens drew the catraia flush with the far side of the Seamaster, away from the lights of Macapà so that only the monkeys and birds of the jungle could have seen the men climb on board. He killed the motor and lashed the catraia to Blake’s boat. As always in Macapà, it was hot and windy, and the water, which carries so much silt it looks like roiling, molten peanut butter, was covered in baby whitecaps. The six of them sat quietly for a few minutes, observing the crew. Everyone on the Seamaster was listening to what Ricardo called “loud foreign music.” Some of them were dancing, and many of them were talking in loud foreign voices.
The first two aboard were Ricardo and Isael, each with a 7.65-millimeter pistol; Reney, Josué, and José followed. Rubens stayed in the boat and waited for the getaway. Almost immediately, things got complicated. “This is a robbery!” Ricardo screamed. “Everyone get down on the floor!” But the crew did not speak any Portuguese and didn’t seem to understand what these men were doing on their boat, wearing stocking masks and waving guns. One of the crewmen tossed a can of beer at the intruders. Someone else threw a jar of mayonnaise at them.
Later, none of the crew would talk specifically about what happened that night; they were worried about the effects it might have on the trial, which, when this story was written, was still in progress. According to one person on the boat, “The crew were totally out of their depth. When someone comes on board with a gun, there’s a certain script you’re supposed to follow, and they didn’t follow it. It could have been worse than it was.”
Rodger Moore, 55, decided to fight. He pushed Ricardo, and Ricardo shoved back. The operation seemed on the verge of chaos, so Ricardo pistol-whipped Moore and knocked him out. While Ricardo herded the rest of the crew together, he saw a tall white man run downstairs. He figured the man was going to radio for help and sent Isael to follow him.
As soon as he saw Moore being pistol-whipped, Blake had turned and gone downstairs. One of the crew members heard him saying, “Is this for real?” Blake was going for the Winchester .308 rifle he kept in his cabin. Before he and his wife, Pippa, had left on their honeymoon, sailing around the pirate-rich Red Sea in 1979, Blake had trained on a rifle range so he could protect them.
David Alan-Williams says, “Peter was always quick to identify a problem, and he’d often fix it himself. If something was wrong at the top of the mast, he was the first to go up there, even if the boat was pitching back and forth in storm conditions.”
Leon Sefton had been below deck reading a book when he heard the commotion. He got up to investigate, and as he neared the stairs he saw Isael, short and taut, with a mask obscuring his face. Isael pointed his pistol at Sefton’s head and Sefton got on the ground. Then Blake’s cabin door opened, and he came out. He leveled his gun at Isael and said, “Get the fuck off my boat.”
Sefton watched Isael break for the deck and, in a moment, Sefton heard shots. He can’t say who shot first; he doesn’t know the sounds of guns well enough. A spokesman for the federal police says, “Probably it was Peter Blake who shot the first time. Maybe if Mr. Blake did not shoot, maybe if he did not have a gun, maybe the criminals would not have shot anyone.” But the prosecutor trying the case says, “Isael behaved as if he were leaving the boat, and Peter Blake followed him. Then, once he got to the top of the stairs, Isael turned and shot at Peter Blake.”
One way or another, Isael and Blake began shooting at each other, Isael at the top of the stairs and Blake behind the wall at the bottom, turning to shoot upward. Rubens, in the catraia, heard the gunfire, jumped into the river, and hid beneath his boat. In the confusion, the Brazilian cook got into the control room, locked the door, and radioed for help, but the radio was still tuned to the wrong frequency and he could raise only the harbormaster in Manaus, nearly a thousand miles away.
Isael’s bullets made holes in the aluminum walls of the cabin, and shots from Blake’s Winchester tore through the canopy. Blake hit Isael in two places—piercing his forearm and blowing off two fingers. The prosecutor says this was a show of both Blake’s restraint and, as he would write in the indictment, “utmost precision.” A defense lawyer says that Blake shot at Isael point-blank, and would have killed him had he been sober. After Isael was hit, Ricardo ran to the stairway and began shooting into the cabin.
Sefton saw Blake banging his gun against the floor. He tried to give him some extra ammunition, but Blake said he didn’t need it—his gun was jammed. Sefton went back down the hall again, and when he came back a minute later he found Blake on the floor, shot in the back. The police say Ricardo confessed to shooting Blake, but he later denied it.
A few of the criminals kept watch over the crew, who were lying on the deck, while Ricardo and Isael gathered what they could—some cameras, a couple of Omega Seamaster watches, CDs, and Blake’s Winchester. They took one of the Seamaster’s dinghies, a rigid-hull inflatable Zodiac, and made their escape in two boats. They fired back at the Seamaster (they claim someone was shooting at them with a second rifle) and grazed Geoff Bullock across the back. As they were making their getaway, Reney said to Ricardo, “Why did you shoot [Blake]!” and Ricardo said, “It was either me or him.”
Peter Blake lay at the foot of the stairs,
bleeding from twin holes in his back. The boat was quieter now, and the movement of water was audible. At its mouth, the Amazon is tidal, and the river was now flowing backward, raising the Seamaster five feet an hour. Sefton found Blake with his head cocked awkwardly to the side. He straightened it and watched as Blake took a few labored breaths. One bullet had traveled through his left lung and superior vena cava and come to rest just under the skin of his armpit; the other had pierced his lungs and aorta, and remained in his upper right chest. Either one would have been enough to kill him, says Dr. Carlos Marcos Santos, who arrived on the Seamaster at 10:40 and tried to resuscitate him. He estimates that it took Blake about fifteen minutes to die. He says that Blake had alcohol on his breath (though the crew says he wasn’t drinking on the boat), and that the others seemed very drunk—unsteady on their feet, bleary-eyed, slurring.
“When I got there, Mr. Blake was faceup, below deck,” Dr. Marco says. “He was wearing shorts, either blue or khaki, I can’t remember. And no shirt. You could tell he had a great deal of strength for a man his age. But he was out of shape. He had a prominent belly. His face had seen the sun, you could tell that. There were many deep, permanent lines around the eyes.”
At near 11:00 P.M., Marcos pronounced Blake dead. As they were taking the body off the boat, Rizaldo, the cook, said to the doctor, “These guys have no idea what they have done. He is a national hero, like Pelé is to this country. Everybody loves him. They have no idea what they’ve done.”
The news of Blake’s death reached the rest of the world in the morning. In England, where Blake had been knighted for his accomplishments, The Daily Telegraph wrote that “Blake towered over the sport” of sailing. In New Zealand, Parliament was canceled for the day and the government flew at half-staff a pair of red socks—Blake had worn red socks nearly every time he raced. The prime minister, Helen Clark, speaking at a memorial two weeks later, said, “He put New Zealand on the map.”