Ghosts of the Pacific (11 page)

ON THE SECOND
day of garbage I was sick to my stomach
with worry. I had sailed past dozens of carcasses of dolphins,
turtles, sharks, even a small whale. Some had been caught in
nets and drowned. Pieces of netting floated with them,
wrapped around them. With some I couldn't tell what had
killed them. They were all drifting with the garbage and rotting under the sun. There weren't any smaller fish eating them
as there would have been in cleaner, healthier water. I was
worried to death. And then, for the first time since we left
the circus ship, I heard a beep on the radar. Thank heavens,
I thought! I would go out of my mind all alone out here.

The vessel was ten miles away when it hopped onto the
radar screen. I sailed straight towards it. I wanted to know
what it was. I didn't care about submerging. I was too upset.

She was a small ship, about the size of a coastguard ship.
I could tell from five miles away through binoculars. But I
couldn't see any markings. It was twilight by the time we
were close enough for her to spot us. She would have seen
us on radar at the same time we had seen her. I didn't know
what she was doing here but I knew it wasn't fishing. The
only thing you could fish for here was garbage.

As it turned out, that's what she was doing. When I drew
the binoculars across her bow I read, “Environmental Protection Ship – 
Phoenix
.”

I felt a burst of hope. She was here to clean up the garbage! Then I thought for a moment: how could she do that?
The garbage stretched forever. She was just one small ship.
Still, the fact that she was here filled me with hope. It meant
that somebody knew about it; somebody cared. I pulled up
under the shadow of her bow, cut the engine, climbed the
portal and stood up. There were half a dozen people on deck
leaning over, staring, smiling and waving. They had watched
us come in.

“Ahoy! Submariner! Ahoy! Where are you from?”

“Canada.”

“What brings you out here?”

“I'm exploring.”

The sound of voices brought Seaweed up the portal. He
took a quick peek and jumped into the air. Then Hollie
wanted up. I climbed down and carried him up.

“Will you come aboard?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

They dropped a rope ladder. I tied up to it, put Hollie in
the tool bag and swung it over my shoulder. I couldn't wait
to get on deck and ask them about the garbage. But climbing the ladder was difficult. I could only hold on with one
arm.

There were seven people on deck: four men and three
women. They told me their names and I told them mine but
I couldn't remember any of theirs, except for one, Carl, who
was older than the others and probably from Sweden. He
was one of those sailors who spent so much time in the sun
his face looked like an old leather boot. He was waiting at
the top of the ladder to help me up. “You're just a lad! What
happened to your arm?”

“I uhh . . . was shot.”

I had to bite my lip, not because I had been shot but
because I had been sailing through garbage for a day and a
half and it felt like it was the end of the world. I hadn't realized how upset I really was.

“Ho! How did it happen?”

“I was freeing turtles and dolphins from a trawler net.”

“Oh! Good for you! And they shot you?”

“Yes.”

He looked angry enough to kill somebody himself. “Shrimp
trawlers! They're the scum of the earth! Let me see it.”

I raised my arm. He lifted the bandage and looked at the
wound. It was covered with a scab. I would carry a deep scar
for the rest of my life. I didn't care.

“You realize they were trying to kill you, right?”

“Yes.”

“They'll kill anything that gets in their way, anything between them and their pursuit of money.”

“But why do they kill turtles and dolphins? If they're after
shrimp, why don't they let everything else go?”

“They're supposed to! They're supposed to have holes in
their nets that let the turtles, dolphins and sharks escape.
But they don't work very well and they get impatient. The
turtles get tangled in the nets. The dolphins and sharks too.
Rather than look for a humane solution, they just slaughter
them and discard them. It's madness. They're murderers!
They don't care. But it's only short-term gain. In the long
run they're killing the very food chain that's feeding them.
We're in a fight to save the oceans, my friend. It's a fight between those who want to make a fast dollar and those who
want to save the planet.”

I looked around at their staring faces. These were the people who wanted to save the planet.

“But what about this garbage? Do you know where it has
come from? Do you know why there is so much here?”

Carl nodded up and down and frowned. “This, my friend,
is an island of plastic the size of Texas. Some say it's twice as
big as that. We're not really sure. We call it an island but it's
more like a carpet, as you can see. You can't stick your hand
into the water without touching something. It's here because plastic floats. It breaks down into smaller and smaller
pieces but it never biodegrades. So, it's always here. The
island has been growing since the 1950s at least. Every day it
pulls more plastic into it like a black hole, except that it
doesn't disappear, it grows.”

He picked up a jar of sea water. “See how murky it is? It
looks like silt, right? Well, those are particles of plastic. The
fish eat that and they die. Dolphins eat it, sharks eat it, turtles eat it, whales eat it, seabirds eat it. They all die.”

He slammed the jar down with a bang.

“But . . . where does the plastic come from? And why is it
here
?”

Carl raised his hands in front of his face and spun them
in circles in opposite directions. “We are in a vortex. The currents of the Pacific spin like wheels, this way and that, around
and around, but here, they don't spin. This is the centre. Not
the geographic centre, just the centre of the currents. The
garbage gets swept here by the currents, becomes trapped
and just stays. You can find pieces of plastic here that were
thrown into the sea fifty years ago.”

“Wow.”

“Yet most of the world doesn't even know it's here.”

“Can't we tell everyone?”

“We're trying. You'd be amazed how difficult it is to get
people to hear something they don't want to hear. The average person contributes about two hundred pounds of plastic to the garbage of the world every year. That's a
lot
of
plastic. Since it doesn't biodegrade, it has to end up somewhere. A lot of it ends up here. But since people don't see it,
they don't care about it.”

“If it kills the oceans they will care.”

“Yes, but by then it will be too late.”

The
Phoenix
was part of an international environmental
protection organization. Each of the crew was a researcher
from a North American or European university. One of the
women was from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She was studying the effects of ocean garbage on sea
turtles. I told her about Hugh and asked her if she put
transmitters on turtles. She said no, but other people did.
Then she asked me about my sub. “Are you a . . . I mean,
you're so young and everything, but . . . are you a vigilante
environmentalist or something?”

“No. I'm an explorer.”

“But you're fighting with fishing trawlers. And you just
got shot. And you're way out in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean all by yourself, except for a dog. Or did we see a seagull climb out of your submarine too?”

“Yes. That's Seaweed. He's my first mate. Hollie is my second mate.”

I opened the tool bag and lifted Hollie out. His tail was
wagging like a ribbon flapping in the wind. She patted him
while he tried to give her a bath with his tongue. “What a
cutie! Please, come inside and let me take a closer look at
your arm.”

I followed her inside the cabin, sat down at a table and let
her unwrap the bandage and examine my arm. She took my
temperature, felt my pulse and measured my blood pressure.

“Are you a doctor?”

“No, but I studied to be a paramedic before I studied
oceanography. When did it happen?”

“About ten days ago.”

“Can you use your hand?”

“A little bit. It's getting better slowly. I had acupuncture a
few times on another ship.”

“You had acupuncture out here? That's funny. One moment you get shot, the next you get acupuncture. That's the
Pacific for you. I can give you some tablets for pain if it starts
to hurt again. And I can give you an antiseptic cream to rub
over it. That will help protect it from infection. You're doing
a good job keeping it clean. How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Pretty young to be so far from home all by yourself.
Where are your parents?”

“My father lives in Montreal. I was raised by my grandparents in Newfoundland. I left home at fourteen.”

“Have you been at sea ever since then?”

“Pretty much. I visit with friends a lot.”

“Where did you get the submarine?”

“I made it with somebody. I had a lot of help.”

She paused while she watched the blood pressure gauge.
“Your story is amazing. I have a nephew who's sixteen—I
wish he could see what you are doing with your life. Some
one like you could really make a difference in the world,
Alfred, if you don't get killed first. It's dangerous out here.”

“I know.”

“Yes, I guess you do. Do you ever think of what you might
do when you finish exploring?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you should consider environmental protection.
You obviously care a lot about animals and the environment. And we sure could use you on our side.”

I nodded my head but didn't say anything. I wanted to
think about it.

“I hope you will think about it. Where are you going
next?”

“Bikini Atoll. Then Saipan.”

“Boy! You're not exactly looking for the pleasure spots,
are you?”

“I guess not.”

I stayed just a few hours on the ship. When the crew
started to get sleepy I thanked them for their help, climbed
down the rope ladder and sailed away. They were going to
bed but it was our morning. Besides, I had even more
things to think about now.

By sunrise we had sailed free of the island of plastic.
According to the crew of the
Phoenix,
we had passed through
just one corner of it. I was so happy to see clean water again
my heart lifted and my hopes did too. I couldn't stop thinking about what the woman from Vancouver had said: that I
should consider a career in environmental protection. I
loved the sea with all my heart. I planned to spend my whole
life on it. I wanted to protect it and all the creatures that
lived in it: the turtles, whales, polar bears, seabirds, dolphins,
sharks. I wanted to stop the trawlers from killing everything
in their way. I wanted to stop people from polluting the sea.
Maybe Ziegfried could invent something to help clean it up.
Perhaps he could design a ship that would suck up plastic,
recycle it and filter the water until it was clean again. World
War Two minesweepers searched for and gathered up explosive mines that had been dumped into the sea during the
war. And they found most of them. Couldn't a ship do the
same thing with plastic?

Maybe I could be both an explorer
and
an environmentalist. Why not? I would ask Ziegfried and Sheba their opinion, although I could guess what they would say. Both lived
in houses full of animals and birds they had rescued. Both
were dedicated to living in ways that didn't harm the environment. They would like it.

AS WE SAILED SOUTH
to Bikini Atoll the sun grew hotter
every day. The hull heated up so much I had to carry a t-shirt
up and lay it on the metal when I wanted to lean against the
hatch. How hot could it get?

Bikini Atoll is the top of a seamount that broke the surface in several places, each one creating a tiny island. Bikini
Island is the biggest of them, although it is still pretty small.
The islands form an oval, with a lagoon in the middle twenty
miles long and ten miles wide. We were in the Marshall
Islands now, where Amelia Earhart probably crashed into
the sea before she was picked up by Japanese sailors and
taken to Saipan. That was one theory. Perhaps she actually
drowned. Nobody knew for sure. Saipan is also in Micronesia but a thousand miles away, on the other side of the
Marianas Trench, the deepest seafloor in the world. Nothing about the Pacific is small.

Earhart left New Guinea in her small twin-engine plane
and planned to land and refuel on Howland Island, a tiny
island halfway to Hawaii. But she couldn't find it. She sent
a few broken radio transmissions from her plane saying she
couldn't find the island in the dark so she was flying north.
But she was running out of gas. She probably tried to make
it to the Marshall Islands, which are in a straight line between
New Guinea and Hawaii, but were occupied by Japan at the
time. Since the Japanese were preparing for war against the
Americans they probably thought she was a spy.

Islands like Bikini are not easy to spot at sea because they
are so small and flat. They don't have hills or mountains,
and, like Sable Island, are often surrounded by rocky reefs
that trick even the most experienced sailors. How many
thousands of sailors had been shipwrecked on gentle looking islands? The lucky ones would have made it to shore, if
they were able to swim, then spent the rest of their lives as
castaways. That's what some people believe happened to
Earhart: that she crashed close enough to an island to make
it onto the beach, then lived as a castaway until she died.
But maybe she crashed into the jungle of an island. No one
will ever know—at least not until someone finds her plane.

Bikini Lagoon was one place I just had to see, even
though it was supposed to be the most contaminated place
on earth, and you couldn't eat anything that grew there, not
even the fish. And you'd get radiation poisoning if you hung
around too long. I was dying to see it. In 1946, the Americans sailed seventy-six warships there and moored them in
the lagoon. Then they detonated a couple of atomic bombs.
They wanted to see if a navy could survive a nuclear attack.

Ten of the ships sank right away. Fifty-three were so hot
with radiation they had to be towed to deeper water and
sunk. One of them, the USS
Arkansas
, a huge battleship, was
lifted vertically into the air during the explosion. Wow. The
Americans set off over twenty atomic bombs on Bikini Atoll
in twelve years. Then, they detonated a hydrogen bomb.
That vaporized three islands. They don't exist anymore.

Twenty-three giant warships are still lying on the bottom
of Bikini Lagoon, untouched since the bombs exploded. The
biggest one, the USS
Saratoga
, was an aircraft carrier eight
hundred and fifty feet long, just a few feet short of the
Titanic
. She was bigger than Sheba's island. And yet she
could cut thirty-three knots through the water. That was
unbelievable. She would have looked like an island racing
across the sea. Now, she was lying on her keel, her bridge just
forty feet beneath the surface.

I had to see that.

Another thing Bikini Lagoon was famous for, according
to my guidebook, was its sea life. Since all the Bikinians had
been taken away and relocated somewhere else, and no one
fished there because no one could eat the fish, the lagoon
was so full of sea life it was like nowhere else on earth. That
was ironic.

All I wanted to do was sneak into the lagoon, have a look
around and sneak out. It shouldn't be too difficult to do. The
lagoon was ringed with sandbars like a lasso but my map
showed that there was open water on the south side between
the tiny islands. The atoll was uninhabited, except for occasional tourists and divers. I planned to sail in at night, have a
look around when the sun came up, then sail out.

When the seafloor began to rise into a seamount I felt
excited, even though it was a couple of hours before we saw
anything. Hollie was excited too. He could smell land.

Eventually I saw a few scattered trees that looked as though
they were sticking out of water from the distance. Probably
they were coconut trees. They grew in the sand. You wouldn't
know they were contaminated to see them. Now I could
guess how the three islands had been vaporized. They were
made of sand. The explosion just blew all that sand up into
the sky, it drifted away in clouds, then rained down on the
sea over hundreds or thousands of miles, like ashes from a
volcano. That's what I imagined, anyway.

It was hours before dark but Hollie wanted out so badly
that I dropped anchor off the sandbar, inflated the dinghy
and rowed to shore. I was surprised there weren't any old
shipwrecks here, since the sandbar was invisible from the
sea. Without sonar there was no way to know it was even
here. On the other hand, how many sailing ships would have
come across the Pacific this way? And if there had been any
old wrecks they probably would have been vaporized too.
In any case, there was nothing here but sand, and no sounds
but the lapping of waves on the beach. Even the sound of
our feet in the sand was swallowed up in the vastness and I
couldn't hear it. Hollie ran down the beach and he was the
only thing that didn't look like sand. In the other direction
there was a coconut tree. I walked that way.

It was hot! The sand was so hot I had to walk where it
was wet. Seaweed landed on top of the coconut tree. Maybe
the sand was too hot for him too. What a weird place. It was
so quiet and empty. I stopped and turned around. This was
the spot where over twenty nuclear bombs had been detonated. It was so peaceful now it was hard to imagine. Hollie
started running towards me. He was still far away and he
made no sound. This was surely one of the quietest places
on earth.

After we returned to the sub, we sailed to the south side
of the lagoon and waited until dark. Once twilight had appeared, darkness came quickly. We stood in the portal and
watched the sun sink into the sea. Pacific sunsets were more
spectacular than any other ones I had ever seen. They turned
from yellow to purple, with shades of orange, red and every
other colour in between, but mostly yellow and purple. And
the colours spread out in shapes like wings and sails and
long rolling scarves. I wondered if there was so much colour
because of the heat.

When the last traces of colour disappeared I shut the hatch,
submerged to periscope depth and entered the lagoon. I
didn't enter on the surface because I didn't want any vessels
that might be there to know by radar that we had come in.

The floor of the lagoon was a hundred and eighty feet
deep and was a smooth and sandy surface. I picked up what
I thought was a rocky promontory on sonar but as we
motored closer I realized it was one of the ships. I couldn't
believe how big it was. It was almost a thousand feet long,
which meant it must have been the
Saratoga
. I felt butterflies in my stomach.

I wanted to touch the deck of the ship, which was ninety
feet down. Although I could dive a hundred feet, I only had
one good arm. And there were lots of sharks around. And it
was the most contaminated place in the world, or used to
be, even though it didn't look it. I also didn't want to get
spotted and chased out of the lagoon by a bunch of excited
tourists in fancy speedboats.

We hovered above the
Saratoga
and I hit the floodlights.
I couldn't see much, even though she was right outside the
window. She was too big and we were too close. I decided
to motor around and locate some of the other ships. There
was an airplane next to the
Saratoga
, which must have
blown from her deck or hangar when the bomb went off.

I scouted around for a few hours, found two submarines
and a bunch of huge ships which on sonar looked like monsters sleeping in the lagoon. There were so many of them. It
was really spooky. I couldn't wait for the sun to come up.

When it did, I was sitting on the hull with the hatch wide
open. We were right above the
Saratoga
again. There was no
current in the lagoon so I felt no need to drop anchor. Besides, I didn't want to get it tangled up in an aircraft carrier.

Morning is when sharks like to feed, but sharks, as a rule,
don't make a habit of eating people, especially small to medium sized sharks. I wasn't expecting to see any great white
sharks here, though I'd be watching closely. Hollie was sitting at the bottom of the ladder looking up. He wanted
another run in the sand, and he would get one soon. Seaweed was sitting on the hull. He looked like he was thinking,
“What are we doing here?”

“I just want to make a few dives, you guys. Then we'll go.”

I went inside, took off my t-shirt, sneakers and bandage.
Ziegfried had said that, though the water here was contaminated, it wouldn't hurt to dive a few times. I figured the salt
water would be good for my wound. I went back out. The
sun was coming up over the horizon. It streaked across the
water. The water was so blue! I climbed down onto the hull
and got a fright. The
Saratoga
lay beneath us as clear as could
be and she was so enormous I couldn't believe it. It looked
as though I could just reach down and touch her. But there
was movement in the water all around her. I slipped into the
water and saw thousands of fish disappear in a flash, then
return just as quickly. Schools of them turned together with
lightning speed. I saw sharks further below over the edge of
the deck. Further below that I saw the airplane sitting on the
lagoon floor, one hundred and eighty feet down!

The water was thirty degrees Celsius, or eighty-five degrees
Fahrenheit. It was like a bathtub. I remembered falling in the
Arctic Ocean and turning numb in less than a minute. Arctic
water might be cleaner, but it sure would kill you a lot faster.

The deck was ninety feet down but the bridge was only
forty, off to one side. I decided to dive to the bridge first. I
took some deep breaths, calmed myself and went under.

My arm was still very sore, and I had to use my left hand
more and kick harder with my feet. I swam about twenty
feet in an angle towards the bridge, then up again. Now it
was directly below me. I poked my head out of the water.
There were no tourist boats around yet. I took a deep breath
and went under.

It felt very strange touching the metal skin of such an
enormous ship. The guidebook said that the
Saratoga
had
been torpedoed several times yet survived. When the war
ended she carried home more troops than any other ship:
hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Then, she was ordered to
take part in the atomic tests here. But she didn't survive that.
She might have if they had been able to climb inside and bail
her and fix the leaks. But they couldn't touch her; she was
too hot with radiation. All they could do was sit back and
watch as she sank. And it took eight hours before she slipped
beneath the waves and settled on the bottom. She has been
lying here ever since. Touching her gave me a creepy feeling,
as if I were touching a mechanical giant from another planet.
Maybe any moment her lights would come on and she would
start to rise. Now that was a scary thought.

It took forty-five minutes and six dives to reach her deck.
It was a lot harder with only one good arm. When my feet
touched the deck I looked up. Ninety feet above, on the surface, the sub looked so small. Schools of fish swam above
me in walls of bright colour. When the sun streaked through
the water they looked like they were on fire. Sharks glided
among them like miniature black submarines, but calmly.
This was a place with lots of food. The sharks were well fed.

Back on the sub I sat on the hull and stared across the lagoon. Two thoughts ran through my mind. I loved machines.
I was in awe of big mechanical giants like the
Saratoga
.
They fascinated me. I thought they were beautiful in an odd
way. This lagoon was full of them. It was like a museum of
monstrous mechanical inventions. It was probably the oddest museum you could ever visit. That was one thought.