Outposts (10 page)

We spent only three days in Port Elizabeth—a dirty dockyard, though with a collection of magnificent old steam engines which clanked and puffed their way between ships and warehouses all
hours of the day and night. A bracket on the autopilot had snapped within hours of leaving East London, and I had to find a mechanic to machine a new one. But we left at the end of the week. By Monday night we were rounding. Cape Agulhas, leaving the treacherous currents and the south-westerly winds behind, and entering the fresh south-easters that should blow us up to Cape Town. And we had left the Indian Ocean, too: the blue waters of the tropic isles were behind us, the grey and chilly waters of the South Atlantic ranged for thousands upon thousands of miles ahead. This was Tristan’s Ocean, and according to the Admiralty
Pilot
the island was but 1,800 miles ahead. The worst part of the trip was abaft; South Africa was still abeam; our goal was a little way ahead.

We put in to Cape Town the next day, revictualled, washed clothes, took advice from the local seamen on how best to approach the island. There were three ships in Cape Town that went with some regularity to the Tristan group: the
Tristania
and the
Atlantic Isle
took supplies to the island, spent three months fishing in local waters, and then took their fish, and such Tristanians as wanted to visit the Cape, back to port. The
Agulhas
, a South African boat, travelled twice a year to relieve the meteorological station on Gough Island—a British possession, but unpopulated save for the South African met men—and then took freight on to Tristan if it were needed. The skippers of the various boats were stern in their warnings to us. Go to Tristan at your peril, they said with one voice: it is difficult to find, often shrouded in mist, has nowhere safe to anchor, is prey to sudden and ferocious changes of weather, and has just one landing beach from which the islanders are only able to set out on sixty days each year. A tiny harbour had been built in the mid-Sixties—named Calshot Harbour, in memory of the military camp at Calshot in Hampshire that housed the islanders for their year’s exile after the volcanic eruption—but it was too shallow for a boat like ours. We drew about six feet: the harbour was perhaps four feet deep, and there was a bar to cross which shallowed to perhaps half of that.

It sounded an uninviting prospect. There was a band of kelp weed around the island, and it was strong enough to tie a small boat
to, the skippers agreed. No good for big boats, which might get their propellers caught in it, but strong enough for us to lash a hawser to, so long as we dropped an anchor as well to limit our circular movement. But one warning dominated all the others: if the wind began to blow from the north-west—and gales from that quarter would arrive with precious little warning and at devastating speed—then move the boat into the island’s lee. No matter how much kelp and how many anchor chains might try to bind us to the spot we had chosen as our mooring—a Tristan nor’wester would tear us away from it and hurl us on to the rocks. We were in a small office when the skippers told us this: a picture was brought out from one of the desks—a picture of a wall of sheer and jagged black cliffs, streaming with falling water, and at their base, patterned with vast lumps of broken stone, a hundred feet of wildly raging foam, blown into sheets by the downdraughts and whipped into a maelstrom by the gales. ‘That,’ the men said in an uncomfortably smug harmony, ‘is what you’ll hit if you forget.’

Although Tristan da Cunha is 1,800 nautical miles west by south of Cape Town, thanks to the meteorology of the South Atlantic Ocean and the patterns of currents, a sailing vessel cannot point its prow to a heading of two-sixty degrees and expect to fetch up at Edinburgh-of-the-Seven-Seas (Tristan’s ‘capital’, named after the first Duke in 1867, visited again by the second ninety years later) after fifteen days. Would that matters were so simple. In the centre of the ocean—and the centre of the North Atlantic is similarly endowed—is an enormous, and very stable area of high pressure. No wind blows there—the charts indicate that totally calm weather prevails for at least one day in ten in December, and that light, variable and navigationally useless winds puff fitfully and occasionally. Of all the hours spent in a yacht, those spent becalmed are the most likely to induce madness. The boat lurches randomly, going nowhere; the sails bang and crump as they catch a molecule of breeze, and the booms swing idly and lethally with the swell. You come to loathe sails and all they stand for: you want the luxury of an engine (but hardly dare use yours for fear of wasting fuel) to take you to a strong and steady breeze; the fish dip cheekily up through
the hot mirror of the still sea, as if to remind you that they are fine, and cool, and can propel themselves at will. To sail straight from the Cape to Tristan would be to risk a week—maybe a month—stuck in such unpredictable regions of the sea. We were already running late, and wanted none of that.

So we planned a longer, though more traditional route, which took us in a great loop, following the winds that blow anticlockwise round the high. For the first 300 miles we would follow the South African and Namibian coasts, driven north-westwards by the cold current that sweeps up from the Cape (and is the oceanic opposite of the terrible Agulhas current on the other coast), and by the prevailing December winds, from the south-east. We would then head up towards St Helena, where the winds begin to turn to easterlies, around the top of the high. We would pass a hundred miles south of St Helena—Imperial remnant herself, and one I would visit later on—heading westwards, until, two thousand miles shy of the Brazilian coast the winds would begin to turn into the northerly quadrant, and the current would too, and we would sweep down in their train.

The winds would become steadily stronger, with more of a north-westerly heading, driving us straight towards our goal. The seas would get grander, the waters colder, the skies greyer. After 4,000 miles—more than double the length of the direct route, and nearly twice the distance of the great circle route taken by motor ships making the passage—we should be able to see Tristan beyond the bowsprit. If, that is, our boat held out: she was a sturdy little steel schooner, ‘a good gunwales-under performer’ they said of her—she liked strong weather, and ploughing through heavy waters with the seas lashing over the guardrails, and with the mainmast boom dipping into the ocean. But she had her limitations. She was steel, and uninsulated, and would be very cold. Her mainsail and foresail were canvas, not too well-stitched in places. There was a small but annoying leak in the stern gland, where the propeller shaft left the hull for the water outside—the gland was lubricated by water, which dripped into the bilges in tiny amounts; here, though, the drip occasionally became a steady stream, and we had to pump
the bilges hourly, or else the boat became heavy and more sluggish than usual. The autopilot, too, was giving problems: it was a British-made device, used by weekend sailors in the easy waters of the Channel; out in the big ocean, where the rudder took continual pounding, and the winds blew strongly and unpredictably, the steel arm—we knew the device as ‘Betty’, and so worried ourselves over the fate of ‘Betty’s arm’—did strange things, and had given up completely on a journey through another ocean some months before. We were concerned, in other words, that we might not make it to Tristan, and wondered how wise we were to press on any further. My inclination—one more motivated by stubbornness than good sense, I came to think—was to carry on; we had already been five weeks in the getting there. To abandon the venture at this stage would sadden me.

So, in the pleasant fastness of the Royal Cape Yacht Club’s little harbour, we waited for the wind to swing to the south-east. Table Mountain gives the first clue: when the wind is from the right quarter a low white cloud, one which almost seems to stick to the flat mountaintop, appears. Locals call it ‘the Table Cloth’, and as the wind begins to blow it starts to fall off the mountain in a wide sheet of whiteness, descending towards the upper suburbs of the Town. It was early on a Monday morning when the cry went up: ‘Table Cloth’s coming off!’—and we stowed our gear, untied the springs, cast off and said our farewells to Port Radio. ‘Whither bound?’ they asked. ‘Tristan da Cunha,’ we replied, cockily—knowing full well that most yachts leaving the Cape in December aim for St Helena, Brazil and the Caribbean, and only the boldest and the bravest made for the wild waters and dreaded anchorage of Tristan. We felt a stirring of pride as the radio operator wished us well, a safe voyage, and urged us to take good care. Our expedition, we knew, was more valorous than most that left this port.

By nightfall, our pride had turned to ashes. We were back in port, the trip abandoned, the five weeks of sailing all wasted. There had been many problems. The autopilot had, indeed, begun to behave erratically, and we balked at the prospect of steering by hand over 4,000 miles of ocean. Keeping watch, turn and turn about, was
tiring enough: to have to handle the tiller at night and through heavy seas would be utterly exhausting. The waters off the Cape were miserably cold, and we were chilled to the bone: the prospect of many more days and weeks spent shivering, above decks and below, suddenly seemed more miserable than it had from the warm bar of the Cape Yacht Club. The stern gland leak had been more serious than we feared, and the bilge was seriously awash after only a few hours’ sailing. And it was brutally rough out there: the south-easterly had piled the waters up into lumpy, icy swells, and we slammed against them, making the slowest of progress.

It was the timetable that finally decided it. It was early December: if I was going to be home for Christmas I would have only twenty days to do the crossing, and get back. At the rate we were going on the first day out there was no possibility we would make Tristan by the New Year, nor be back before the end of January. And so, with more sorrow than reluctance, I swung the boat’s head round and steered to where the coastline of Table Bay—the Lion’s Head, the Lion’s Rump, Table Mountain and the Twelve Apostles—had just vanished below the horizon. Robben Island light soon came on, and guided us in: by midnight we were passing the outer markers, and reported, shamefacedly, to Port Radio. ‘Difficult trip, that,’ commented one of the wireless operators as he tore up our exit card. ‘Thought you were being a bit optimistic.’

I was back in a dank and grey London a week later, certain now that Tristan was beyond my grasp. I felt wretched about it. True, we had made a vague promise that we would meet in South Africa later in the summer and try again. But it seemed more navigationally prudent to try to attack the island from the South American coast—from where you get a straight run, without having to bother about the high. But I had no friends with yachts in Montevideo or Rio, and spent the Christmas holidays morosely coming to terms with the fact that Tristan, for the next few years at least, was to remain a dream. I had wanted to go there since long before the 1961 eruption: the new Imperial Progress was but an excuse to fulfil a long-held ambition. I was cast into the deepest gloom.

But January brought an unexpected letter. Andrew Bell, who ran one of Britain’s most enterprising little shipping lines, Curnow Shipping, based in deepest Cornwall, wondered if I knew that his flagship was making a first-ever journey to Tristan da Cunha, leaving from Bristol in early March? He knew I had been trying to get there: would I by any chance care to go? I was on the telephone within seconds: my cabin was booked, my leave extended. This time I really ought to make it: the only warning came from an item I read in the paper a week later. The Royal Mail Ship
St Helena
had caught fire off the coast of Senegal. She had drifted, powerless and without steering, for four blisteringly hot days before a German salvage tug had towed her into Dakar. The passengers, who had spent some time in the lifeboats, were flown home, and the
St Helena
limped down to Cape Town for repairs. The RMS
St Helena
, of course, was Curnow’s flagship: she was the vessel due to take me to Tristan da Cunha in eight weeks’ time.

In the event she picked up her schedule quickly enough—by dint of cancelling one complete voyage, to the inconvenience of the population of the colony of St Helena, for whom she is the single lifeline to the outside world—and I arranged to meet her on her southbound voyage Number Thirty-Eight at the port of Santa Cruz de la Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. She swept in past the moles just after dusk one mild March Thursday: at four the following morning, after loading some ten tonnes of assorted cargoes and five passengers, she slipped her moorings and rumbled out into the ocean, and the southern seas. I was in the company, I soon found out, of a strange assortment of travellers.

There was the lawyer from Akron, Ohio, named Parke Thompson who was listed in the American edition of the
Guinness Book of Records
as ‘the World’s Most Traveled Man’, and who was to break into a hysterical fury when told it would not be possible for him to set foot upon Ascension Island, even for the ‘single split second’ he considered sufficient for his next record attempt. There was David Machin, England’s greatest expert in the feeding of pigs, and who had developed a diet of mashed fish heads and minced flax leaves, upon which the average porker apparently feasted with Caligulan
abandon. There was a very dour man who ran the Rapid Results College, and turned out to be dour because some crane driver had seen fit to drop the Rapid Results College car into the depths of Number Four hold, and it was sitting down there all the while, a mute reminder that the first job he had to undertake when the boat arrived at the Cape was to spend hours waiting on the services of a panelbeater, when he could have been driving to the vineyards of Stellenbosch.

There were also six Cheviot rams—immense beasts hauled down from Coquetdale to inject some life into the forlorn ewes of Tristan. They sat in cages on deck, nibbled grumpily at pieces of lettuce, and sweated in fleeces that must have been a foot thick until a shepherd from an island we passed came out and sheared them. One of them managed to escape from its pen and leaped around the deck, cornering the captain near the anchor winches and charging him, until the bosun got near enough with a hawser and looped it around its leg. For the rest of the voyage they were more peaceable, glumly contemplating the wearying duties of their calling on the island far ahead.