Adrift Part 3

1981

    The blackness was a cliff.  I lost it for a moment behind the tattered remnant of mainsail.   The time must be nearing 3:00 a.m. and I was siting in chest-deep water, trying to steer the swamped CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE clear of the island, which, after promising life when I first spotted it the preceding morning, had become just another face of death.

    Death at sea is protean.  I had known it as water slopping about EGREGIOUS’s bilge off Cape Horn; and the innocent-appearing crack at the trailing edge of the keel when I dove overboard in the horse latitudes; as disorientation when EGREGIOUS capsized in the Roaring Forties; as the sound of breaking waves when in the Southern Ocean I lay in my bunk and EGREGIOUS lay ahull, helplessly awaiting the wave that would finish her; as the incomparable force of wind south of Australia, ripping the surface from the sea, filling the air with water, making breathing all but impossible, as it drove EGREGIOUS beyond hull speed under bare poles; as the suddenly flooded cabin in the cyclone in the Tasman; as the slab side of the tug that almost ran CHIDIOCK down off Tahiti.  And now as this shadow, barely discernible against black sky and black sea.

    Through rain-streaked glasses, I caught a glimpse of the ghostly line of surf at the base of the cliff, less than a quarter mile away.  If we drifted much closer, I would have to abandon CHIDIOCK and take my chances in the inflatable.  But I did not know if I could row the dinghy in such waves, now more than ten feet high and growing steeper as the long swell from the open ocean touched the rising seabed below.  Perhaps I had already waited too long.

    My body was filled numbness and pain.  I had been trying to steer CHIDIOCK for twelve of the past eighteen hours and for the last five hours continuously.  The tiller and all of CHIDIOCK but the mast were below water.  There was an illusion of great speed caused by the waves rolling over us.  One of the waves crashed through the jib and tore what was left of it to ribbons.  We were ‘sailing’ on the twenty or so square feet of chaffing patch on the mainsail.  We were not truly sailing at all.  I only hoped that by keeping the bow pointed generally in the direction of a broad reach, we might clear this first island.

    From the waist down I had lost sensation, except for agony when I bumped the ulcers on my feet and ankles against the fiberglass floor.  Moving the tiller through the exaggerated sculling movements necessary to control the swamped yawl took both hands, which had also lost feeling.  I smiled inwardly when I recalled steering CHIDIOCK with a single finger.  My back and neck were on fire.  Always the fire smoldered and at intervals it flared into spasms of white-hot pain.  There was nothing to do at such moments but hang onto the tiller and wait for the pain to pass.  Don’t fail me, body.  Don’t fail before the sky begins to lighten.

    A wave loomed high above me, the highest wave I had seen from CHIDIOCK, a wall of water as high as the yawl was long.  Here we go, I thought.  This one is going to break.  CHIDIOCK started up the steep rise.  The wave lifted me from her.  I clung to the tiller, no longer steering, just hanging on until the tiller pointed straight up and I was floating at arm’s length above the submerged hull.  I was afraid not for CHIDIOCK but for the dinghy.  Where was it?  Downwind where it would be squashed beneath the yawl?  I was nearly at the soaring crest.  I had to let go of the tiller.  CHIDIOCK turned beneath me, riding sideways up the curl.  If only the oars weren’t washed from the inflatable.  Then I was through, sliding down the foaming back of the wave.  Somehow it did not break, and an instant later CHIDIOCK and the dinghy came through unscathed.

    I floated back aboard CHIDIOCK.  Within a few yards the comber disappeared in darkness, but I heard its roar at it slammed into the cliff.

    We were not going to clear this end of the island.  There was so much noise--sails, waves, surf, wind--that it was impossible to know whether my efforts were doing any good.

    Under her scraps of sail I could not tack the yawl.  I could not point any higher than a beam reach, which was not pointing at all, but merely CHIDIOCK’s natural drifting position.  Presumably I could gybe.  I had not tried, for the wind was at right angles to the cliff and I was trying to clear the closer end.  There seemed to be no advantage in gybing, and a clear disadvantage in that we would be in danger for a mile before reaching the far end of the island, rather than the two hundred yards to this end.  But, as I hardly needed to remind myself, we were not going to reach this end.

    I pushed the tiller over, held it there, and waited.  Another wave came and pushed CHIDIOCK in the opposite direction from the way I was trying to turn her.  I kept the tiller over and kept waiting.  With the next wave, the rudder gripped and her bow swung slowly off the wind.  The motion, once begun, was assisted by a third wave; and with a fourth, the chaffing patch gybed and, from force of habit, I shifted to the other side of the cockpit.

    The maneuver had cost distance.  The cliff was now less than three hundred yards away and the waves were becoming steeper.  I wondered if we had even a safe three hundred yards, if rocks or coral did not lie hidden beneath the breakers.  CHIDIOCK was too low to provide an unobstructed view to the shore.  I debated again whether I should abandon her and try to row free in the dinghy, since on this apparent course I was lengthening the distance to safety.  Everything was ‘apparent’ because I simply did not know.  Only after long minutes could I form any impression of true movement.  Part of me screamed to get into the dinghy before it was too late, and part remained calm and said to wait a little longer until it was certain we could not clear the island this way either.

    Without warning a wave broke.  Because she was already beneath the sea, CHIDIOCK could not really capsize, but she rolled ponderously onto her side and I was washed away.

    My legs were useless, circulation so impaired that commands to swim brought no response.  They trailed like vestigial appendages on whatever form of life I was evolving into, as I fought first to keep myself afloat inside cumbersome foul-weather gear and then to swim back to the yawl using only my arms.

    CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE remained on her side.  This view of her no longer seemed odd.  If anything, in the thirteen days since the pitchpole, I had come to have unlimited confidence in her.  The sea could strip everything movable from her, toss her around like a toy, fill her with water; and she would patiently survive.

    My legs persisted in their refusal to function, so I could not stand on the centerboard, but the weight of my upper body was enough to right the yawl.  She actually had less water in her when I managed to get back aboard than before.

    We had drifted closer to the island, but we also seemed to have drifted along.  What was the direction?  Days earlier I took the compass bracket to the dinghy in order to preserve it for my next boat.  My exhausted mind worked slowly.  With the coming of the first line squall last night--or rather, this night, but long ago, when I was resting in the dinghy--the wind had backed east, which meant that on a starboard reach we had been trying to clear the north end of the island, and now on port, the south end.  I had thought that the current would likely follow the trend of the trade wind we had experienced for most of the two weeks adrift and tend north.  But perhaps it divided.  Perhaps there was a tidal variation.  Perhaps all my struggling had been unnecessary.  Perhaps if I had simply let us drift, we would have been saved by blind chance.  For it was now obvious that we were being carried along the coast faster than we were being carried in.  I could not yet be certain that we were being carried along fast enough, so I remained at the tiller, more or less holding the bow in the right direction.  Even if this did no good, at least it did no harm.

    Riding sideways up great curling waves just beyond a line of thundering surf, I fell asleep.  My eyes closed and my head fell forward.  Reflex snapped it back, which ignited the flames along my spine.  Each spasm had been worse than the one before, and this was a summation.  I wondered if it would ever end.  Could so much pain come from a mere spasm?

    Whatever the cause, the pain served to keep me awake until we sailed, drifted, and were carried safely past the island, and I was able to collapse into the dinghy and rest.

    Dawn was delayed by a squall.  When it passed I saw that we were drifting down a great corridor of sea, bounded on the north by a line of four islands, and to the south by a large island in the far distance and several close rocks, one of which was so white with guano that I mistook it for a sail. Six or seven miles directly ahead of us lay two more islands:  one, a small, sheer peak jutting from the sea; the other, five miles long and with three 2,000-foot peaks, about which the squall line lingered.  In the pallid light all the land was gray and showed no sign of habitation.

    I pushed myself up and ate a breakfast of half a doze crackers, raspberry jam, a can of pears, and a handful of peanuts, washed down with unlimited water.  At the first sight of land rationing ended.  The need for energy far outweighed the possibility that I might not be able to get ashore and have to drift on.  I even drank two of the precious bottles of Coca-Cola.

    When I completed this feast, I opened the navigation bag and studied the chart.  There were only two groups of small islands, such as those surrounding us, shown in the New Hebrides.  One was too far north, so we must be among the other group, just fifty miles north of Port Vila, the capital.

    I found some small satisfaction in having my dead reckoning proven  accurate.  I had predicted landfall in two weeks from the pitchpole, and here we were on Saturday, May 24, two weeks later to the day.  My self-satisfaction was short-lived when I recalled the past night.  I still had to reach shore alive.

    I stared back at the islands behind me.  With the coming of day, I was not certain which cliff had almost destroyed us.  I turned to the island ahead.  Rain was falling on the peaks.  People must live there, I told myself.

    Throughout the morning, waves marched forward regally and carried CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE with them.  I felt as though we were being escorted along a marble corridor in a great palace.  The waves had not diminished,  but now in deeper water, they were no longer breaking.  The motion was stately; the mood, solemn, as I lay resting in the inflatable and watched the nameless land come nearer.

    The size of the waves worried me, as did the nature of the shore.  I knew little about the New Hebrides, except that it was at that time under joint British and French rule and was soon to gain independence and be renamed Vanuatu.

    Of a few things I was certain:  beyond the island ahead of me lay only open ocean for fourteen hundred miles to Australia; landing would be safer on the leeward side of the island; I must be on land before night; I dreaded the physical pain of returning to CHIDIOCK.  At 11:00 a.m. I did so anyway.

    The ocean felt cold as I settled beside the tiller, perhaps because I was running a fever caused by the infection in my feet.  With movement, circulation and sensation returned.  A necessity, but a mixed blessing.  Who would expect that the feet are the body part to suffer most in sailing an open boat?  The familiar needle and pin pains shot through them.  They were swollen with edema.  And the ulcers, particularly on both ankles, where the rotten skin was easily bumped, were filled with pus.  The first moment of reimmersion was almost unbearable, but then my feet and legs went numb and I forgot about them.

    As I tried to sail CHIDIOCK, the sun broke through the clouds and turned the small island bright green.  For another hour the larger island remained shrouded, but then the sky cleared and it too turned emerald.  And I saw a house.  I could not take my eyes from it, the first outpost of man, which during the days adrift I had thought I might never see again.  It was just a small house in a clearing on the side of the northernmost peak, and yet proof that someone actually did live on the island; and where they could live, I could live.  A while later, a column of smoke rose from father up the mountainside, where someone was clearing brush.

    By then conditions had changed.  Once again, no matter how I tried to sail, CHIDIOCK was carried sideways by the current.  If in the night the current had saved us, now the scales balanced, for we were being carried too far south, away from land, which now meant life, not death.

    When there were only three hours of daylight remaining, I knew that I could not get CHIDIOCK ashore before dark, if ever.  Sadly I returned to the inflatable, cast off, and began to row.  The gap between the boats widened.  The dinghy rowed well as I quartered wind and wave.  I was still too far off to determine anything of the shore, except that midway along the island mist filled the air as though from heavy surf.  There was no question of rowing around to the leeward side.  I had neither the time nor strength, though I was buoyed by the certainty that an end would come before sunset.

    As I rowed I gazed back at CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE.  Perhaps her loss had been inevitable since the pitchpole.  If I had been rescued by a ship, she would probably have had to be abandoned.  And even if I had managed to maneuver her to land, if there were a reef, I would have had to let her go.  But we had been through so much:  seven thousand miles since San Diego.  And at this very moment she was still sound.  Despite everything, with a few replacements and a few repairs, she could continue the voyage.  From only a short distance away, she was mostly hidden in the troughs, and I realized how unlikely had been the possibility of ever being spotted by a ship.  Already she seemed well to the south on a course that would carry her outside the offshore peak.  I waited for one last glimpse of her.  There she was on a crest, torn sails fluttering, awash, valiant.  I engraved this image on my mind and then deliberately turned away.

    For an hour I rowed hard, managing to get across wind and current.  Then I rested and drank a Coke as we drifted closer.  Individual palm trees became distinguishable, and a second house on the hillside not far from the first, but no other signs of man:  no fishing boats, no village that might mark a pass or a landing.

    The waves started to build before I saw the beach and the reef.  I was almost directly below the house, which stood perhaps a quarter mile back from the shore and a few hundred feet up the mountainside.  The beach ran from the northern point, was obscured by brush, then appeared again for two hundred yards of pure white sand, before being lost in a jumble of rock.  For a quarter mile out from the beach lay the smooth turquoise waters of a lagoon.  Life.  And between me and the lagoon lay the reef.

    When I was close to the surf line, I began rowing along the shore, searching for a pass.  There was none.  Soon we were around the rocks, and the shore and reef fell away to the west.  I could see an unbroken line of surf, between three and five breakers deep, increasing in violence in the distance.

    I turned and tried to row back; but the dinghy was caught in the sweep of the seas.  Suddenly the ocean changed color and I saw coral reaching toward me.  Any place was as good as any other.  The coral would slice me up, but if I could protect my head, I should survive.  I turned in.

    At first I went slowly, trying to get a feel for the rhythm of the waves.  I backed water as the dinghy trembled on a crest that almost broke beneath us; then I rowed as hard as I could.  The next wave rose.  Still rowing I noted the lovely translucent blue of the water as it climbed to the sky.  I even had time to think that this might be the last thing I ever noticed  The wave toppled and threw us out, up, and forward.  The dinghy’s bow was dropping, and I dove toward the stern in an attempt to balance it.  Everything was roiling water.  It passed and I came up for a breath, surprised to find myself still inside the dinghy, the oars still gripped in my hands.  Another wave was coming and I resumed rowing.

    The second wave was worse than the first.  My sense of direction was lost.  I fell backwards as the dinghy stood on its head while the wave swept us along.  I forgot my intention to protect my head with my arms, and rose once again with oars in hand, rowing.

    The third wave was smaller than the first tow and less dangerous.  I was able to keep my head above water, though neck deep in foam.  Then it too passed and instinctively I was again rowing for my life.  The moment when I realized that there was no need, that we were through, that we had made it without even a scratch, came abruptly.  The wild ride over the reef, the days of doubt adrift, the solitary struggle, and now I was going to live.  I really was going to live.

    Once again I found myself chest deep in a swamped ship.  Kneeling in the bottom of the dinghy, I rowed slowly across the lagoon.  I was amazed that we had not capsized in the surf and that the oars had stayed in place.  I owed much to that dinghy.  If only I could have saved CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE.

    A speck of color caught my eye.  Several huts stood among the palm trees at the point; from one of them hung a line of drying clothes.  Those pink and blue and white bits of cloth were symbols of normalcy that filled me with comfort.

    I drifted the last few yards.  Sand grated beneath the dinghy.  I stepped ashore, my dead legs collapsed, and I fell.  I lay there laughing.

(A longer version of this, including how CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE followed me ashore, is found in my books, A SINGLE WAVE, which is published by Sheridan House and still in print, and THE OPEN BOAT, which isn’t, but can be found used at Amazon.)