by David Jurk
We reached the southern tip of the island in twenty minutes and as we rounded it to the southwest, I saw that this end of the island was quite narrow, no more than a few hundred meters. As we began our trip up the western coast, I took the chronometer, wound it, and started the timer. Then I pulled the taffrail log, attached the three meters of cable that were in the box with it and tossed it overboard, tying off the cable to the stern pulpit. With those two actions, we would know two important facts – how far we traveled along the length of the island and how long it took us. With the knotmeter telling us how fast we travelled, we could easily calculate the size of the island, a critical first step in identifying it.
And, aside from far steeper waves along the reef as they were toppled by the off-shore wind, this southwestern coast appeared identical to the northeastern; very dense foliage at the back of a narrow, white sand beach and still no way through the reef. If an opening didn’t appear, my options for getting ashore would be the kayak or swimming. Neither appealed to me much; even with rubber swimming shoes, the reef could do a lot of damage to me or the kayak, and while I might manage to avoid damage going in, getting back out through the breaking waves would be another thing entirely.
Within two kilometers, though, things began to change. First, the coastline began to flare westward in a pronounced bulge and just at the point where that bulge began, I could see a channel through the trees through which the ocean ran inland – an opening that revealed the interior of the island to be not land at all, but rather a vast lagoon. For a moment, I was hopeful I could steer into it, but as we reached it, I saw that it was still fronted by the reef, and while it let waves surge into the interior, it offered no possibility for Windswept.
Continuing along the coast, I saw several oddly shaped clearings in the heavy vegetation; whether these were a function of nature or man I had no idea. But within ten minutes, I saw something that left no doubt that humans had been here or might still be – a deep channel blasted into the reef, running straight to the beach. Far too narrow to get any kind of large boat into it, it must’ve been intended for a small tender or launch, taking just a small number of people ashore at a time. Here was at least a way to get ashore with the kayak. And within minutes, the scene changed entirely, with the beach broadening and the foliage receding behind it to reveal a wide natural opening leading into the interior and the lagoon beyond. It occurred to me with dawning comprehension that this wasn’t technically an island at all, but an atoll, a narrow ring of land surrounding a central body of water – undoubtedly the remains of a volcano.
But why bother cutting a channel when this much larger natural opening was here? The answer lay before me as I watched the incoming waves stumble and fall over an unseen impediment. The reef had mastered the entire island, including this natural opening - hidden only centimeters beneath the surface, it blocked boats of any size at all from traversing it. Windswept was never going to make it into the lagoon.
Nearly at the northern tip of the island now, having seen nothing but natural forms for weeks, it took me several seconds to acknowledge what appeared just offshore, at the edge of the unseen reef. Rusted metal, obviously the wreckage of what had once been a substantial vessel, lay crumbled, waves rushing over and through it. Its skeletal remains appeared ancient, primordial. Was that a boiler? Drawing abreast it, I was astonished to see that the largest piece of it was a mammoth engine block; an artifact of steam, not fossil fuel.
I was so engrossed in watching the wreckage as we sped past that I nearly forgot I was tracking our progress. But as we reached the tip, I bore off to starboard to round it and remembered to check the chronometer; twenty-nine minutes and thirty-three seconds. We’d been running at a steady eight knots. As I hauled aboard the taffrail log, I turned to the monitor.
“Ray, calculate distance covered in twenty-nine minutes, thirty-three seconds at eight knots. And give me the answer in kilometers, accuracy to one decimal.”
“Seven point three.”
I looked at the log. It said three point nine. I puzzled over it for a moment, then remembered.
“Ray, convert to nautical miles.”
“Three point nine four one six eight…”
“Cancel.”
The taffrail log worked, and the island turned out to be a little over seven kilometers long. It ran from the southeast to the northwest and was an elongated oval. It was an atoll. There had been people here and there was shipping wreckage that had been here for a long time. How hard could it be to figure out what island it was? Ray had charts in internal storage that I could search through. I started with the largest-scale chart he had available and instructed him to search based on the physical facts that were now in hand.
In minutes, I was staring at a detailed chart of an atoll that I was certain was what we had just sailed around. The shape and size of it, the southeast-to-northwest orientation, the two openings into the lagoon from the leeward shoreline – everything was exactly as I’d seen, everything fit. Further, there were annotations that identified wreckage on the northwest shore – the SS Norwich City, an early twentieth century British ship, gone hard aground on the reef in 1929. A steam-powered vessel. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind, none, and as the fullness of where we were and what it meant clarified in my mind, a chill rose along the back of my neck and the warm day turned cold. This error, this capriciousness of the GPS satellites, had brought me to a place of infamy, an atoll bearing a terrible legacy; surely a landfall I never expected to make.
I stood and looked out from the image on the chart to the physical reality of it before me. Off-course by roughly two hundred kilometers to the west of our intended route, we had arrived at one of the Phoenix Islands, comprising what had been, before the Python, the sovereign nation of Kiribati.
This particular atoll, this tiny speck in the great Pacific so benignly laying before us was named Nikumaroro. It was the deathplace of Amelia Earhart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SIX HOURS LATER, the cat and I sat quite contentedly on the white sand beach, watching the sunset. We’d come ashore in the kayak, roaring through the man-made channel a few hundred meters south of where we now sat. I’d waited for low tide, hoping it might lessen the force of waves washing into it, but it had still been a nerve-racking ride – more like a plunge down a flume at a water park than the easy slip onto the beach I’d hoped for. Still, we’d made it without damage to the kayak, and we now had three hours until the tide turned, which I hoped would help us make it back out. There would still be waves to overcome and I wasn’t looking forward to it.
Windswept had been left tied securely with two lines; I’d oriented her stern toward the reef and swam a line over in my hands to the SS Norwich City – or what was left of her anyway – treading water there just off the reef and reaching up to the prop shaft still holding tight to the engine, careful not to let the coral shave flesh from my feet and legs. The bow line was more problematic, as the ocean floor dropped so quickly off the reef that I’d needed to join two one hundred-meter lines together to set the anchor on the bottom, and I had hardly any slack – or reach, as it’s called - out at all. It was a very dicey anchor set and I was worried that the anchor wouldn’t hold in a blow. If it didn’t, it would either foul on the reef or simply swing free, either of which would represent risk to Windswept. The worry over it kept me watching the weather.
The cat and I had done some exploring; while it was difficult making any progress through the vegetation, it was easy walking on the firm white sand, and getting to the lagoon along the natural opening had been easy. It held warm, shallow water – which, despite being sea water and not fresh - had been a pleasure to soak in. The cat hadn’t found it of interest at all.
There were remnants everywhere of the visits that people had made here; some presumably to search for evidence that Nikumaroro was indeed where Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan had ended up, and there were also remains of two obvious settlements of more recent times.
But the island was so vigorous in its growth that even the remains of the settlements had been largely erased, and it was only with careful searching that I turned up some old Army gear, spent ammunition; saw crumbled blocks of foundations turned into little more than lichen-covered humps in the forest. I found no sources of fresh water.
At low tide, the reef had revealed itself to be extraordinarily flat and quite exposed, and in places – especially along the northern end of the atoll – it was as wide as an airfield. It took very little effort to believe that Earhart and Noonan had landed safely on it, only to have the Electra wash free of the reef in the rising tide and slide down into the depths of the Pacific to be lost forever. Sitting here swatting sand fleas from my face, it was also dreadfully easy to imagine what it would have been like to find themselves here with no fresh water pools, no springs, no filtered ground water. Yes, rains would have provided something, but imagine being dependent on rain – completely dependent – for life itself. How many sunny, dry days would it have taken before they died of thirst? And if they did manage to store rainwater, food would also have been difficult; there were birds and fish and shellfish, but over time these would have been exhausted – the island simply was non-sustainable for human beings.
I always wondered what they’d faced psychologically as the days and nights wore on, and they began to acknowledge to themselves that rescue wasn’t coming. Had they found comfort in each other, slept together for the human warmth and closeness? And when the first of them died, what then? Would a person go mad in a situation like that, or calmly go about burying the other and continue hoping for salvation? I supposed, much like facing the Python, how you behaved depended on who you were and how you viewed your place in the world.
I rose from the sand, restless with my thoughts, and waded across the shallow inlet of the lagoon to the beach on the northern side. I walked to a spot abreast the Norwich City, saw that the stern line was still tight; Windswept rocking gently. She was held between two spring lines – free to move a little in the waves, and she seemed, as always to me, as if she had alit on the surface of the sea, rather than float in it.
Behind me, across the inlet, I could hear the cat complaining about my abandonment of her. She’d follow me like a puppy along the sand, but swimming – no, that wasn’t going to happen. I smiled to myself and waded back to her, needing to settle back down in any case and begin planning the next few days. Much needed doing.
As I let the kitten gambol about the beach, delighted in her newfound opportunity to scratch holes in the sand, and pleased that I’d rejoined her, I began in earnest to lay out a plan to overcome the loss of the navigation system. I needed to be thorough about it, and eventually arrived at a plan made up of four steps:
Learn to use the sextant! Begin taking sun sights, reducing them and plotting the position of the atoll until it matches what’s in the charts. Do your own calculations; don’t cheat and ask Ray.
Using the southern hemisphere celestial almanac, begin doing star sights and their reductions in the same fashion. Stars are critical – there are many more of them than the sun and it expands the chances of finding clear conditions when one has the night sky as well as the day.
Once consistently accurate, take short trips from the atoll in Windswept using celestial navigation to plot a course, and work back again. To start, simple day trips are fine, as long as we travel out of sight of land.
Get in the habit of setting the taffrail log. Combined with the compass and chronometer, they form the basis of dead reckoning – the old mariner’s backup for celestial navigation.
I was also determined to start another old sailor’s practice – recording all movements and weather in the ship’s log; positions plotted, distances gained, and progress across the chart annotated. There’s a good practical reason for it; a well-kept ship’s log becomes a set of bread crumbs, a detailed reflection of how you got where you are, and when confusion arises, and you think you’re lost, that trail can make all the difference in re-discovering your place on a very large ocean.
And once I was reasonably proficient in all this, when I could find my way out of sight of Nikumaroro and back again by the sun and stars alone – or if need be through dead reckoning - I’d be ready to resume passage to New Zealand. I would, in fact, be ready to sail anywhere. And I was acutely aware that I needed to learn quickly. Time was passing, and I didn’t want to leave here short on food; we were still hardly half-way to Auckland, with more than thirty-seven hundred kilometers to go. And while Windswept was secure for the moment, she was still anchored in the open sea; should a storm blow in, we’d need to get away from land, need to gain sea room and just hunker down.
And so, for the next fortnight, I took myself to school. I practiced taking sights on Windswept as she rocked in the waves, bracing myself against the side of the cabin and anticipating her movements as I lined up the sun and stars. At first, I used my phone calculator to reduce the sights to latitude and longitude, then remembering the GPS failure, I began using an old solar powered calculator I had.
And at night I learned the stars; at least, I began learning them. There are fifty-seven stars whose positions are charted for navigation purposes and I paid particular attention to the eighteen of those that were prominent in the southern hemisphere, though because of our closeness to the equator, not all were visible.
Once I felt comfortable with the basics, I began sailing away from Nikumaroro each morning, stopping just at noon and shooting the sun. Reducing that sight, I’d plot our position. Often, particularly at first, with the added tension of being out of sight of the atoll, I’d make a sighting error, or a calculation error and the resulting position would show us off the coast of Japan or in the middle of Alaska. I would sail back toward Nikumaroro with my heart in my throat, but there she’d be, rising green and lovely out of the sea. It was wonderful practice, giving me a feel for our wayward drift as I followed a compass course away from the atoll, and the reverse heading back. And each trip, I’d toss the little taffrail log overboard and check the distance I’d sailed, and each return trip I felt more and more certain and less and less frightened that I’d overlooked something, screwed something up. And finally, on the tenth day after landing at Nikumaroro, I headed west, stopped for a noon sight, and this time kept going, swinging southward until the stars rose overhead. I did a sight on the star Achernar, plotted our position on the chart and drew a course line from there back to Nikumaroro. The night sail was lovely beyond description, Windswept and I sailing easily through a benign sea, and it was as if I could see the island there waiting, beyond the horizon. I never doubted. In the morning, the now-familiar green shadow of Nikumaroro rose dead before us on the horizon, and I knew I was ready.
That night, I took the little white cat in the kayak with me for one last trip to the beach before we resumed the voyage to New Zealand with the dawn. I collected some drift wood and lit a fire while the kitten carried out her adventures hunting insects and digging in the sand. I sat quietly and watched the sparks from the fire rise upward into the night sky and saw the quilt of stars spread out above me and realized I no longer saw them as something ethereal and remote. A line from Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore came to me:
“Not just beautiful, though - the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they’re watching me.”
Sitting in the darkness, watching the fire as the Pacific pulsed softly over the reef, I could imagine the comfort the night sky brought the early ocean navigators; the stars not just alive and breathing, but guiding, as they swept across the immensity of the Pacific. I had hardly done more than accomplish the basics, but the difference in me was profound; I was more than a sailor now, I was a true navigator. I sat with my back toward the east, facing the sea, feeling more as one with the ocean than I ever had.
But it was getting late; I wanted to get a good night’s sleep on Windswept and be off with the sun in the morning. There was nothing more for me on Nikumaror
o.
“Cat,” I called into the darkness, “let’s go.”
I waited, but she didn’t appear. Calling her was never a sure thing; if she was in the mood, curiosity would bring her to me, otherwise, I might as well have been whistling at the moon. Getting a bit anxious to paddle the kayak back out of the channel while the tide was slack, the last thing I needed was a long wait for the nocturnal little spitfire to show up. I could hear her in the heavy brush beyond the sand, digging frantically, and crawled toward the sound.
“Come on, you little beast,” I called, “let’s get back to the boat.”
Hearing me coming, she mewed softly, complaining; I could see her eyes reflecting red in the firelight and reached for her through a screen of vines. My fingertips found the soft fur and I turned my hand into a scoop, to lift her from the depression she was making in the earth, but as I did so, I felt the edge of something metallic against my skin. I couldn’t quite reach it and laid down on my stomach in the sand and pulled at the vines, creating an opening. Lifting her with one hand, I scrabbled at the object with the other and in a moment pulled both from the brush.
In the dim light of the dying fire, I sat the cat in my lap and peered closely at what I’d pulled from the ground. Covered in dirt and sand, it took a bit of rubbing against my shorts and some spit applied before I could see that it was a pin of some sort, in the shape of wings, no more than two and a half centimeters long and badly tarnished. In the darkness, there wasn’t much more to be seen of it, so I put it in my pocket. It was time to go.