We knew that at the time we were somewhere south of the Maldives, five hundred miles or so away from the American military base on Diego Garcia, and we had the vague idea we might eventually reach one of the South African ports, perhaps Durban. We had no radio, nor much of a schedule. Drifting through the doldrums, we hoped for a breeze to fill our sails.
We were—or so we thought—miles away from any shipping lanes, and in consequence our seamanship had become slack. Though generally we had taken two-hour turns at watch, our laziness—coupled with the oppressive equatorial heat, the tedious slap of the waves against the hull, the occasional thwack of the sheets against the mast—led to a dangerous dawn ritual: whoever was on watch when the sun rose would set the sails and rudder and then join the other below, both of us sleeping until breakfast time. We told ourselves that the sea was quite empty. There was no danger whatsoever of being run down.
But one morning it happened that we both overslept. It was almost ten when I turned in my bunk, squinted at my watch—and then in terror rushed up to the cockpit. Four hours late, and without a single eye cast over the horizon: to any serious sailor this was quite wantonly irresponsible, beyond foolish. I was at first quite relieved: I stood at the yacht’s starboard side, gazing across at limitless expanse of gray ocean, happy to see that there was not a vessel of any size in sight, anywhere. But then I turned around. And, all of a sudden, on the port side of our boat, there simply was no horizon.
Instead, a huge wall of dark green steel rose high above me, blocking the view entirely. The steel was close enough for me to reach out and touch, which I did. I looked high up toward the sky, and the wall went on and on until there was an overhang, the wing of the great ship’s bridge, and there were men leaning over it, cheering and laughing. We were safe. All was fine, and shipshape.
But it well might not have been. She was a Japanese car-carrier, on passage between Yokohama and Rio de Janeiro, and she had been plowing a lonely southwesterly furrow across the ocean at a steady twenty knots, when the officer on watch noticed a tiny blip on his radar. He had called out on his VHF radio but heard nothing. He looked through his binoculars, finally seeing a small yacht, its sails flapping uselessly, rolling gently on the swell. There was no one on deck, no sign of humanity. Abandoned, he thought. He gave orders to the helmsman to change course so as to come alongside, then slow to just enough speed to allow for steering-way, and sidle up beside us. On our port side.
He was just preparing to send down a boarding party when he spotted me, newly wakened and now standing with blithe innocence with my back to him, looking out to starboard. He thought for a moment to sound his steam horn but figured I’d have an instant heart attack. He knew I’d be surprised enough when I turned around.
The next fifteen minutes were devoted to the kind of camaraderie you seem only to find out in midocean, where the dangers and risks of the peacetime sea equalize everyone, bend all to a common purpose. They found ropes and lowered to us food and drink (a frozen leg of lamb, bags of strawberries, bottles of Asahi Super Dry), charts (ours had blown overboard some days before) and (for my traveling partner) some kind of shampoo that lathers up in seawater. And then they made preparations to leave. Before spooling up their engines, however, the captain, a stern Japanese officer of some years, leaned over: “Be more careful,” he said, with some solemnity. “Don’t take the sea for granted.”
He then shouted down the coordinates of exactly where we were and signaled that he would push gently away from us, using only a feather touch from his bow thruster. Once there was ten feet of water between our two hulls, we could hear him call down for slow ahead both, and there came a shudder in the sea, and from the stern a huge froth of white water boiled up, and his vessel began to slide away. The white water then began to boil up ever more furiously, the commands grew steadily fainter, the ship—which we could now see whole for the first time—began to shrink away in our field of view until within no more than ten minutes it had quite vanished: there was just a smudge of smoke on the western sky, a steel-flat horizon, and the sea all around us—port, and starboard too, this time—was quite empty once again.
It was then that I vowed to get to know my charts, and to learn how best to navigate. To take the Japanese captain seriously, in other words. My companion was well up to the task—she had already sailed singlehanded all the way up from Australia—and she happily agreed to teach me the rudiments: how to use the sextant, how to sight the sun at noon, how to calculate the hour angle and read the sight-reduction tables, how to tell Betelgeuse from Aldebaran and Rigel and make them work for me, nudging me toward finding my place out here on the high seas.
Once trained, I was to be given no help. She agreed still to stand watches, to make sure I did not put our seven-ton sailing vessel directly in the way of a two-hundred thousand-ton supertanker. But otherwise she would leave me alone—to find and swing the sun, to calculate and estimate and compute and draw on the charts those lines that began as wide-spaced triangles—the cocked hats of many a midshipman’s early attempts—but which day by day edged closer and closer until they intersected in a neatly drawn point and I could answer with some precision, I hoped, her inevitable question.
Which came after a week of steady westward sailing. Just where are we?
The sea around us on that hot tropic afternoon was empty, once again. It had been so for all of the previous seven days. But now I ventured a suggestion. I said that I believed that at about two a.m. we would see a lighthouse, fine on our port bow. It would flash twice every ten seconds. It would be on the island of Mauritius.
At a little after two in the morning we did indeed spot the flashing light, in the Mauritian capital of Port Louis. And we did open at least one bottle of Dom Perignon for breakfast to celebrate. By using only glass and brass and a series of otherwise incomprehensible numbers, it turned out that I, ingénue extraordinaire, had managed to bring a boat across a thousand miles of trackless sea, and had persuaded it to find its destination with precision of geography and timing, just as a million mariners, from Pytheas and Hanno onward, had done before me. I had become conjoined with the navigators’ community, and colorblind or not, I could now claim, at least on one level, to now know the sea and her ways.
And for many years following, this is what I fully believed. I would wander ceaselessly about on the world’s oceans, in a variety of boats, in all weathers and seasons and climates. I sailed the Drake Passage in a vicious August gale. I passed south through the Sunda Strait, with ash from Anak Krakatau raining down on our craft. I slunk north through the Bering Strait in an icebreaker, dodging bergs under a blanket of thick fog. I went twice on passage to Pitcairn Island in the middle of the Pacific nowhere, and managed almost to founder our boat in search of whirlpools south of the Lofoten islands, off Norway.
Every sea, every year, every season, every latitude. And yet steadily, as I wandered ever more distantly, the inevitable happened. The early conceit of knowledge began to fade; new, unimagined mysteries began to scrape away the veneers on the surfaces of received truths, and over the years I slowly came to an entirely new acceptance—one that I now know is common to all who are properly fascinated by and respectful of the sea: that what we know of her, in truth, is just about nothing. To think otherwise is truly quite preposterous.
by Simon Winchester, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Man holding up a model of sixteenth-century ship, 1934 (Australian National Maritime Museum)
