INTRODUCTION - FROM CABIN BOY TO FIRST MATE
by Robert Stedman
I must have been about twelve years old when news reached our family that my uncle Harold (only our immediate family called him Harold) was building a sailing boat. We were at the dinner table--my mother, father, brother and two sisters--when my grandmother phoned. They were all disturbed, especially my grandmother. My uncle had been roaming around the world, from Tahiti to Bangkok, for a good number of years and all my family thought it was about time he settled down and gave up his wandering ways. He was always up to something. If it wasn't driving a jeep across Russia or floating on a raft down the Amazon it was building an adobe ranch house in the mountains overlooking the Mojave Desert to living in a grass hut on a beach in Tahiti. I should say everyone was against him, except me. Uncle Harold was my hero. But I couldn't admit it.
The books my uncle wrote about these distant places, and the adventures, could not match seeing him in person, and letting him tell his tales. It seems we all have admiration for travelers and adventurers, and we admire them when we see them on TV or in the movies, but when they are members of our family, well that's something altogether different. "What good did a college education do him?" I remember my father asking. My mother didn't have an answer.
I remember when the boat was under construction in Singapore (what a romantic sounding name) that Uncle Harold came home for a short visit. He was on his way to Vancouver in Canada to confer with his boat designer and he invited me to join him. My mother refused to let me go. I guess she thought he might be a bad influence. But no amount of scoffing would discourage my uncle. "There's a magnificent world out there for anyone who wants it," he would whisper to me and go on doing what he set out to do. He was enthusiastic, and didn't care what others thought. He seemed to have some secret about the world that no one else knew. But he was under criticism constantly. "What do you know about boat building?" "Do you know how to sail?" "What about navigation?" There were all kinds of questions. His answers were to the point--"I'll learn!" And when they asked him, "What about money? Where are you going to get all the money?" He merely replied, "I'll find a way!" He did.
Once when he was visiting home, Uncle Harold asked me to accompany him to buy boat parts. He was looking for electronic equipment. "Can't get everything in Singapore," he said. I was thrilled. I had won an award in my science class in school and this was now my chance to show him what I could do.
We bought a depth sounder, and to test that it worked, my uncle suggested we use the toilet. We did, and blew it up. Everyone laughed, but my uncle thought it was the funniest thing he could have done.
He returned to that mysterious far off place. "You know where Singapore is, don't you," he said to me before he left. "You want to go? I'll take you there one day."
The boat was launched. Letters kept coming, with strange stamps and markings. They became more exciting as time went on. They came from distant places, Hong Kong, Borneo, Bali, New Guinea, the Solomons, Tahiti. Tahiti, my uncle was in Tahiti aboard his boat. No one ever goes to Tahiti. You only read about the place in books and magazines. My uncle was there. How exciting.
Years passed. Schooner Third Sea was sailing the high seas, making news and a name for itself, and everyone forgot what they had said, that it couldn't be done. Now they looked for other faults. "He's crazy. You can't sail a schooner up the Sepic River in New Guinea. That's impossible !" When he did it they would find something else to criticize.
I never really thought I would see the schooner. But then, no one back home ever thought they would see it either. To most people she was a myth and no more.
Then a telegram arrived. My mother had passed away and my uncle asked if I wanted to join him on a writing assignment in Southeast Asia, and then would I like to help sail Third Sea from Samoa to Hawaii. I accepted. We toured Asia and then I flew ahead to Samoa. I signed aboard as a deck hand. My uncle, the captain now, showed me no favoritism. The voyage over, I returned home, knowing now that he had been right. There was another world out there. A year later another telegram arrived. Would I accept a position as First Mate aboard Third Sea. Would I! I sold everything I owned and flew to Hawaii where the schooner was waiting.
One thing I learned aboard Third Sea is there's no such word as can't. Nor is there a task that's impossible. My uncle learned it from his father, my grandfather, and he passed it on to me. "You can do anything you set your mind to," he would say, "except, maybe, if you want to be a ballet dancer." Today, when I hear someone say they would like to go to sea in their own boat, if they only had the money, I tell them about Third Sea. The schooner was the greatest influence in my life. It had an effect upon everyone, me and the many hundreds of others who sailed about her. Third Sea taught us all about this wonderful world we live in. All one needs do is go out and find it. And there is nothing except yourself to hold you back.
Chapter 20: RETURN TO ASIA
When William A. Robinson sailed the South Pacific in 1928, he made repeated references in his book Ten Thousand Leagues Over the Sea to how friendly and generous the islanders were. When he went ashore, all he had to do was admire an object and it was his. Every time he set sail he was loaded down to the gunwales with stocks of bananas, taro, jams, coconuts and even live chickens and suckling pigs. The world Robinson knew certainly doesn't exist any longer and we can only lament its passing. But we could hardly expect the same conditions to exist under present day conditions. When Third Sea was in Papeete on her last voyage, the harbor master revealed that he had checked in nearly four hundred yachts that year, and it was only July. We counted over a hundred yachts at anchor along the waterfront. Thirty years before, when I first arrived in Tahiti, there were less than half a dozen. When Robinson arrived, his was the only yacht in the harbor.
But the surplus of cruising yachts doesn't have to detract from the pleasures of sailing the South Pacific. There's no question about it, French Polynesia is still a great cruising ground for wayward yachtsmen. The sad part, as always, is leaving, and leave I had to do. It was Herman Melville who wrote in Moby Dick, "Push not off from that isle, for thou canst never return." The island, of course, was Tahiti, and Melville didn't follow his own advice. Once he left he never returned.
So was I to listen to Melville and never leave, or would I take my chances? Leave I had to, like the countless others before me. I would have to take the chance that one day I would return behind the helm of Third Sea. After six years of cruising the Pacific, Third Sea was in need of repairs, and I missed her when I was in Asia. My reporting for the Bangkok Post required that I spend a couple months a year in Asia, and, it seemed, the flights across the Pacific were getting longer and longer. It wouldn't be easy to say goodbye, and the thought of the long and difficult voyage ahead began to weigh heavily on my mind. Would I have to pay a penalty for the easy life, the good sailing we had in the Pacific? The answer, unfortunately, was a harsh and cruel Yes. The sea that we found so kind was to become mad and merciless and, as Melville said, "with no power but its own to control it." It was to be schooner Third Sea's struggle for survival. But there was more than typhoons and raging storms. There were pirates this time. You read and hear such things, that others have faced, but you never believe it will happen to you, until it's happening. Dying, I'm sure, is the same.
Third Sea was anchored in Hawaii when I made plans to return. It meant recruiting and training a new crew and taking on supplies that could carry us for eight months across the Pacific to the Philippines and then to Hong Kong and finally Singapore. It meant planning a course to take advantage of the currents and winds and to avoid the hurricane seasons in both hemispheres.
My plan was that we would sail to Tahiti in time to arrive for the Bastille Day Fete, bid our last goodbyes, and depart for the leeward islands--Moorea, Huahine, Raiatea and Bora Bora. Then to Tongareva in the northern Cook Islands, and northwest to the Samoas--Pago Pago and Apia. From there it was the long haul past the Ellice Islands and the Solomons to Rabaul in the Bismark Archipelago, and finally to the Philippines and Hong Kong. We expected to reach Manila by Christmas--ten thousand miles in six months--not an impossible endeavor--and the last three thousand from Manila to Hong Kong and then to Singapore, another two months.
I considered recruiting Don Perkins to be my first mate gain, but I heard he was back with his wife and I didn't want to tempt him away. Besides, I had someone else in mind, my nephew, Robert Stedman. When Robert was till in his teens, he had toured Asia with me, and he crewed aboard Third Sea on our first voyage from Samoa to Honolulu. He had adapted well to the sea and proved to be invaluable. I could use him now. He was a jack-of-all-trades and could fix most anything. He had that rare, innate ability to fathom the workings of the most complicated machinery and electrical gadgets. He understood radio waves and the meaning of things like decibels; navigation to him wasn't an orange but spherical triangles with graphical solutions; and electricity was more than alternating and direct currents--it was resistors, transistors and capacitors.
Robert had been a terror around the house when he was growing up. He took everything apart. One Christmas, his mother received one of those perpetual motion clocks mounted beneath a glass dome. They put the gift on the mantel above the fireplace for all to see. Curiosity got the best of Robert. When his mother and father returned home one evening, they noticed the clock was missing. They found it in Robert's room, hidden in a drawer. It was in a dozen pieces. Even the watch repairman couldn't get it back together. But the most trying time was when Robert's mother bought an upright piano so that Robert could "learn how to play." It was an old piano and Robert convinced his mother that he could refurbish the antique instrument. Unfortunately, how the thing worked was more interesting than just sanding and varnishing so and he took it apart piece by piece, and couldn't get it back together again. When his mother called in a piano technician, the man simply looked at all the parts that were once a piano and said to forget it. But, for sure, it was all part of the learning process. Fortunately, he was well advanced when he joined the crew, although when he appeared with a screwdriver in his hand, I had sudden flashbacks.
"You sure you want to take Robert?" my mother asked the first time I took him to sea. I was hard on Robert that voyage. I didn't want to show favoritism with a crew that had been with me for so long. Robert took it all and responded without a grudge, but I felt sorry for him when he returned home. He had a great story to tell, about sailing the South Pacific before the mast, trading with natives for pearls, dancing with long-hair island girls on a coral beach, fighting storms, rowing through a surf to bring needed supplies to the schooner, and so many more things that teenage boys dream about but never do. He did all these things, and the sad part was no one cared. His peers were more anxious to tell him about the new sets of tires they got "at a good price" for their sports cars and the wonderful time they had at a local disco. "You should have been there!"
Robert started college but dropped out after a couple years. He planned to return to his studies, but instead ended up with a job, an apartment, a live-in girlfriend and credit cards. He found himself getting further and further into debt, and he was bored.
Our family was against Robert joining me the second time. "He has to face his responsibilities, not go running off to the South Seas." I wonder if someone had given the same advice to Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London? If they had, and these men had heeded their advice, today we wouldn't have Moby Dick, Treasure Island and The Cruise of the Snark. Nevertheless I too wondered if I might be doing the right thing. Working against Robert was his age. He was barely twenty-one, the drinking age in California, and now I was giving him the responsibility of serving as first mate aboard a hard-driven schooner, a responsibility that was not only for the safety of the boat but also for the well-being and lives of everyone aboard. In his favor was his experience. He was the only crew who had sailed aboard Third Sea before. But more important than anything else, I could put trust in him. I was sure he wouldn't bail out when the going got tough.
No sooner had I sent Robert the cable from Honolulu than he responded. "I'll be there as soon as I can get ready," he replied. He gave up the lease on his apartment, quit his job, sold everything he owned and found an excuse for his girl friend. Two weeks later he was covered with muck, scraping barnacles from the bottom of Third Sea at the boat yard in Keehi Lagoon. He may have regretted his move but he never mentioned it.
The new crew began to arrive. From Washington came Ken Sippel, an old friend whom I knew when I was living there. Ken had somewhat the same dream as I had, to one day sail the South Seas. Instead he went into law and was nearing retirement after twenty years' service with the Department of Land Management. He had traveled with his wife to Bangkok a few years before to make the maiden voyage aboard Third Sea to Singapore but we were running behind schedule. He did present Third Sea with a heavy brass ship's bell that the watch ceremoniously rang every two hours at sea. Ken had eagerly waited, until now. He would sail with us to Tahiti.
Another crew member was Eric Rimby, an enthusiastic young man from Florida. Eric arrived in Hawaii with two mates who were looking for passage aboard a sailing boat to Tahiti. During a shakedown cruise in the rough Molokai Channel, Eric's mates changed their mind and backed out. But not Eric. His had the type of determination that would later see us through some trying and difficult hardships.
A third member was Matt McCoy from Bakersfield, California. Others joined and dropped out at various ports along the way. Some came for short passages only. They had jobs back home to return to, college to finish or families waiting. And there were the few who found sailing the bounding main not exactly what they had envisioned.
With four tons of fuel, water and tinned and dried goods stored aboard, we left Hawaii on our stern and pointed south on a beam wind to Bora Bora, 150 miles to the west of Tahiti. It was a happy moment for everyone aboard. In a grand and proud gesture, I handed the helm to Robert as we were leaving Ala Wai Yacht Harbor. "First Mate," I said to him, "take her to sea, and back to Asia."
It's nearly three thousand miles, from Hawaii to Tahiti. Usually to break the passage, I make island stops en route--Christmas Island discovered by Captain Cook; Fanning, inhabited by Ellice Islanders; and Caroline, an uninhabited atoll.
But now time prohibited us from lingering at any one place for too long. Currents and winds in the western Pacific could change on us. With Tahiti an exception we would remain no more than three or tour days at any stop.
Then twenty-five days out of Hawaii we sighted the jagged mountain peaks of Bora Bora. That night with a full moon lighting our way we entered the narrow pass through the reef and dropped anchor in a still lagoon. Dawn brought the loveliest sight that could befall any sailor. For most of the crew this was their first tropical landfall, and for certain one that could never be equaled.
That morning we hiked up a high promontory and located a World War II gun emplacement with a five-inch brass canon. We climbed out over the long barrel and looked down at the schooner. So clear was the lagoon the schooner seemed to be floating in mid air.
We sailed from Bora Bora and three days later brought up the peaks of Moorea. She appeared more like a mirage, a never-never land. Was she more beautiful than Bora Bora? Visitors will forever argue that point. No one will ever settle it.
Beyond Moorea loomed the undulating hills of Tahiti, her tallest mountain peaks bathed in clouds. We sailed into Papeete Harbor and tied up stern-to along the quay. Immediately friends began to arrive. The fete was about to begin.
We were greeted by happy Tahitians. They came and gathered under the awning on the aft deck. They came with demijohns of red wine and gigantic meals they had prepared ashore, and with bundles of fresh flowers for making leis and guitars for background music. Sometimes the music never stopped . . . The frenzy of the fete builds with each passing day. What excitement! The dancing competitions are the most dramatic. A team may have fifty or sixty dancers and a dozen drummers. Teams compete for six days, and on the seventh the best dancers are chosen.
Competitions last for seven nights, and in keeping with customs of old, dance teams present themselves before Queen Pomare, the last reigning queen of Tahiti, and the French Lord Admiral, the governor of French Polynesia. The role of Queen Pomare, who died in 1877, is reenacted, always, by a lovely Tahitian woman. She is seated in a fanback rattan chair at the edge of the stage, and seated next to her, in white naval uniform, is the Lord Admiral. The greatest honor I could have had was to be asked to play the part of the Lord Admiral for the fete. For seven nights I sat with the beautiful queen, in our rattan chairs, while the dancers and drummers made their presentations to us. Who could ask for a better honor, or a better seat?
Homer Morgan's dance team won the competitions that year, and they celebrated their victory aboard Third Sea. Wine flowed and the music and drums continued all night. When the last visitor stepped ashore we untied the mooring lines and pulled up the anchor and set sail. No ship had a more glorious departure!
We cleared French Polynesia from Bora Bora and with a following wind and a current in our favor, sailed direct for Tongareva in the northern Cook Islands. We sailed not only forward over leagues of sea but backward through passages of time. Again, so striking was our approach to this lovely, forgotten coral atoll, so powerful, that some of the crew wept. Imagine, seeing the speck of island at the first light of dawn, and as we close the distance, the island takes shape and form. Palms line the shore, swaying gently, and white sand beaches glitter in the morning sun. We followed the coast, all so familiar to us, searching for the opening in the reef, and when we found it, we cautiously edged our way into the lagoon. The white coral church appeared, and further along the lagoon was the village nestled among tall palms .
Then the islanders saw us. They recognized the schooner. A launch set out with half the village aboard, threatening to swamp the vessel. They came alongside, shouting and waving, and then they all tried to scamper aboard Third Sea. More outriggers arrived. Young boys swam out from the shore. Papa Beer, my old friend, a barrel-chested pearl diver, gave me a bear hug that almost broke my ribs. He recognized Robert and grabbed him. We were back! We had a feast that night that topped all feasts. Food baked in an earth oven included chunks of kape wrapped in banana leaf and lu ika, fish drenched with coconut milk and sealed into a taro leaf. All this was served on raw banana leaf with an assortment of mullet, kape, papaya and breadfruit. We were also served chicken, bananas, and lu pulu, a boiled confection of sweetened taro greens. Young pig, roasted on a spit, was the prime delicacy.
I wanted to trade for pearls, but an Australian buyer by the name of Peter was on the island. Papa Beer told me about him. He arrived on the island with a suitcase filled with money and bought up most of the pearls. The islanders were no longer interested in trading with me for an undershirt or a pair of shorts. I met Peter in the village and he invited me to his house. I was anxious to get to know him. I said I'd come visit him the next day.
The hut where he lived was away from the village along the windward shore. He was sitting on the verandah when I arrived. He now wore a large straw hat, and I must say, he even looked the part of a pearl trader. On a table in front of him was a small weighing scale. He explained how he paid the islanders a fair share by the carat weight for their pearls. He had arrived with a quarter of a million dollars in small bills, most of which had been paid out by then. He pointed to a shoe box on the table. It was half filled with pearls. "More than eight thousand of them little babies," he said proudly. "Bought up nearly every pearl on the island."
For certain, the contented islanders would no longer be interested in trading with me. They had money and were waiting for the trading boat to arrive any day.
Peter, the buyer, hadn't seen a white man in months. It was obvious he was a shrewd trader, and I had the feeling the islanders weren't too fond of him. He did have an arrogance about him that set him apart from the natives.
He was pleased to have our company, and he admitted he hadn't had a drink in months. When he heard we had rum aboard, he suggested we come for dinner and have a party in his hut that night. We accepted. I brought a couple bottles of rum from our ship's stores.
We all got a bit tipsy after dinner, but Peter got wildly drunk, singing and shouting, and falling off his chair. He had one more week to go on the island and he was as happy as any man could be. A ship was coming to pick him up and take him back to Sydney. "One more week," he shouted. "One more week and I'll be away from this bloody place and these bloody people. Let's have another drink." He reached for the bottle, but while leaning forward he knocked the shoe box off the table. Pearls rolled under the table and chairs and into the cracks in the floor. I expected Peter to go into a rage, but instead be began laughing. "Well look at that," he shouted and laughed louder. "Never mind. They' re not going any place. I'll pick them up in the morning. How about another drink." He was totally drunk now.
It was hard to believe. Perhaps two million dollars worth of pearls were scattered around the room and under the house. I looked at Peter, swilling down his drink, and I realized at that moment the wild and rambunctious days of the Pacific are still with us.
The next morning we were having coffee under the awning on the aft deck, hashing over the details of the night before, when we heard shouting from the shore. A young boy who I recognized as having been at Peter's the night before, was motioning to me. He seemed very excited. I quickly rowed ashore.
"Hurry, hurry," he shouted when I stepped from the dinghy. "Something terrible has happened," he kept saying over and over as I followed him down the beach. I couldn't imagine what could be more terrible that hadn't already happened. Had someone come during the night and taken the pearls?
Peter was draped in a sarong and sweating profusely when I reached his hut. I could see a look of terror on his face. Standing at a safe distance behind him were dozens of natives.
"Pay us, pay us," I could heard one of them shouting.
Pay them for what? Hadn't Peter already paid them?
"No," he shouted when I asked him. "No, not for the pearls. I told you I already paid them. Now they want to be paid for their chickens. Twenty Australian dollars each chicken."
"What are you talking about?" I asked. Had he gone rock crazy?
"The chickens," he said. "The chickens came this morning and ate all the pearls that fell through the cracks."
For the next few days we ate well aboard Third Sea. We dined on baked chicken, fried chicken, barbecued chicken, chicken a la king, chicken fricassee and chicken cooked ways you've never heard of. Peter ran out of money buying up chickens and had to re-sell some of his pearls. I must say the natives were honest about it. They could have kept the chickens.
The day of our departure came. Trader Peter was due to leave a few days later. Papa Beer and family came aboard, and with their outrigger in tow, to guide us through the pass. Our ship's log sums up our mood. "Robert has the helm. Papa Beer on the bow pointing out the direction. We enter the pass. The tide coming in. White water churning everywhere. We crashed through and found ourselves in calm water in the lee of the island. Cut the engine and drifted. Bid our good-byes to Papa Beer and his family. Both Papa Beer and I broke down in tears. They placed flower leis around our necks and then climbed into their outrigger which we were towing. We hoisted the main jib. It filled and pulled us away from the island. We then tossed our leis into the sea, the custom in these islands. As the flowers floated upon the blue swells, Papa Beer and his wife picked them up, kissed them and threw them back into the sea. We hoisted more sail and turned southeast towards Pago Pago. I leaned against the rail until their little canoe blended into the island and the island into the horizon. The boat and Tongareva were gone, much like a dream goes, and I wondered if I did dream it all."
I never saw Peter the pearl trader again.
Papa Beer had prepared a meal for us, wrapped neatly in banana leaves. We ravishly opened the packets but never touched a bit. It was baked chicken.
In tropical downpour we anchored in Pago Pago, which is nothing unusual. It rains all the time there. We intended to resupply here. Three days at most. But there was no cooking gas on the entire island. We had to wait eighteen days for a ship to come in from Honolulu. The delay was to cost us dearly.
From Pago Pago we made an overnight passage to Apia, Western Samoa. We visited with Aggie Grey again and climbed to Robert Louis Stevenson's grave. In Apia a few crew dropped out. We were now down to six, shorthanded but still enough to handle the schooner safely.
Now came the long sail, from Apia to Rabaul in Papua New Guinea. The passage took thirty-three days.
It takes a long passage to feel you've come to grips with the sea. You forget the outside world. Nothing matters except what is happening around you and your ship. You stand your watch, you cook or help with the cooking, you eat, you read. You might go for a swim over the side or change the lures on the fishing lines. You respond to the call "porpoise" or "whale," and you might go up on the bowsprit and sit. Or maybe even climb the rigging to get away. You become relaxed and a bit lazy. You don't want things to change. You want to finish that book, and begin another. You have five hundred more to choose from in the ship's library. Maybe you might decide to bake bread, or write a poem. But reading is the most desirable.
We crossed through the doldrums, where there might be thunder and lightning storms, or else no wind at all. At the equator, with the sun overhead, the heat became unbearable, burdensome, like a weight. The sky was lacquered. The horizon floated. For exercise, when we were becalmed, I lowered the longboat and had the crew take turns rowing, with the schooner in tow. Or if fish came in close we speared them, until the sharks caught the scent of blood. Then it was back to reading. In the afternoon we had a concert hour on stereo, maybe Tchaikovsky, and after that an hour of the helmsman's choice, most likely the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper." In the evening, after sunset, we listened to the "Mystery Theater." The manager of the Bora Bora Yacht Club gave us several dozen taped radio programs, all classic dating back twenty or thirty years.
Once we were out of the doldrums, the schooner sailed herself. No tending sails, not even touching the helm. The wind carried us across the northern Ellice Islands, a few miles south of Naumea. We looked up the island in the Sailing Directions: Population 1,200. Micronesians. No vehicles, no electric power, no port facilities. Not even a doctor. A trading boat comes once every six months, but maybe as seldom as once a year. Why not visit them! What an experience!
We altered course. Before noon we were running north along the lee shore, a half mile from the reef. The main village came in view. Lovely. Very South Seas. Set back from the beach among palms. A massive stone church with a bell tower. It looked Spanish. Houses constructed from thatch, saddle-back roofs with a high pitch at both ends. We sailed closer.
Nothing happened. We saw not a soul. Still closer. No one. We could have sworn the village was abandoned but smoke rose from several chimneys. Suddenly an outrigger came from around the island. We waved but the two people aboard ignored us, almost like they didn't see us. Soon we were past the village. We tacked and made another pass, and now the outrigger had disappeared. What was it? Didn't they see us? It was all so strange, like we are in a time machine. We left the doldrums and sailed into another era. Disillusioned, we hoisted all sails and turned toward Rabaul, another 1,500 miles distant. For the first time I wished we had a radio aboard. I had a navigational set for receiving time ticks and weather but none for broadcasts. We seriously wondered if something might not have happened in the world. An atomic blitz! Were we all that was left?
Things do begin to work on your mind at sea, and this was only a forerunner of what was to come.
The difference between the eastern Pacific and the western Pacific is like night and day. We found ourselves sailing from one world into another.
Tahiti and the other islands of French Polynesia are in the eastern Pacific, and they lie outside the hurricane belt. Even gale-force storms are rare. The islands here are lovely, and free from most tropical diseases. And the Polynesians are the most fun loving and generous people in the South Seas.
The western Pacific can be the complete opposite. Hurricanes, or typhoons, rage uncontrolled for half the year below the equator, and above the equator the other half. They originate mostly in the Caroline Islands above the equator.
Navigators find the western islands a nightmare. Many reefs are uncharted. Ships are compelled to stay in shipping lanes. Islands appear and disappear overnight. I asked natives about islands we could see but couldn't locate on the charts. Their answer: They rose up from the sea.
The reason is no secret. The western Pacific is in the most active volcanic region on this planet. Islands of the Pacific are themselves tops of volcanoes sticking up out of the water. Rabaul, where we were heading, suffers two or three earth tremors a week. When I was anchored there before we could actually feel shock waves through the water. From one undersea eruption our schooner became engulfed by a sea of floating stones--pumice stones. We came out of it without a fleck of paint on the hull.
Diseases are another drawback. Malaria. Yaws. Ugly skin ulcers. Most everyone has some type of intestinal parasite. You must be careful with the water you drink and the food you eat.
The Melanesians, called Kanakas, are not always friendly. Some groups live in the Stone Age, and you hear tales about cannibalism. The Sailing Directions warns sailors to steer clear of their shores. At one island I visited in the New Hebrides on a previous voyage, I asked about a missionary who presumably lived there. "Him go," I was told. When I asked where he had gone, the headman patted his stomach and replied, "Him belly full up." If I understand my pidgin correctly, the poor devil was eaten by his hosts.
But still, there's something exhilarating about sailing among these strange islands. After leaving Samoa we sailed schooner Third Sea along the northern Solomons. One by one islands slipped by--Santa Isabel, Choiseul, Bougainville, Buka. How we wanted to stop but we were far behind schedule, and unless we kept moving we would lose our wind and current before reaching the Philippines.
Nevertheless, I spent hours scanning the coasts with my binoculars. What forlorn islands they are. Heavy jungles. No roads or trails. No towns, not even a village. Man has not yet marred the pristine beauty of this primeval world. But you know savages live somewhere in those hills. You wonder about being shipwrecked. Could one survive? I found myself constantly checking the charts.
But there are things you can't check, things that aren't in the book. We discovered this when we entered St. George's Channel for the final run to Rabaul. It was a calm night with little wind. Shortly after midnight the watch called me on deck. I expected a squall but it was nothing like that. The night was totally black, but on the horizon we could see a dark, flat object hanging over the water. What was it? I had never seen anything like it before. Then we noticed the black "thing" was moving slowly towards us. Fearing another encounter with a floating pumice island we motored away as fast as we could. By dawn the "thing" was gone. Then came another fright.
We were ghosting along under light sail when dead ahead a bank of white fog rose up from the sea. Then it spread out in all directions, and now the sea began to bubble. It was like being in a kettle. Fish floated to the surface. We were over an undersea eruption. But which way do we run? We couldn't start our engine for it was cooled by sea water. It would boil over. All we could do was wait, and hope another eruption didn't put Third Sea on a mountain top like Noah's Ark. We were more fortunate however. The current carried us away and that evening we sailed into Rabaul.
