Outposts (11 page)
Our cruising speed was fourteen knots. Three hundred miles of white foam unrolled beneath our stern each day, and on all sides the lonely sea stretched far away. Occasionally we glimpsed another ship—once it was a British tramper, and one night a squadron of six vessels, all moving very fast along the same course and keeping strict radio silence. But generally there was nothing to see but the bulging swell in the daytime, the empty green eye of the radar screens by night.
The chief officer taught me how to navigate by the stars—I already knew how to use the sun, but the stars, he promised me, were much more accurate, and considerably more satisfying. Soon I could repeat the mystic astral names by rote—Procyon and Regulus, Achernar and Betelgeuse, Sirius and Rigel and Zubenelgenubi: within a week I could find them all; and tried gamely to plot a position on the sheet which bore an approximation to what the satellite navigator told us was precisely correct. But my seven position lines from my seven stars invariably formed themselves into
some weird kind of parallelogram on the chart, with our good Royal Mail Ship somewhere inside the boundary, give or take five miles or so. It was only after a great deal of practice that the lines began to form themselves into the famous ‘cocked hat’ of more competent navigation students. But I was never able to match my tutor, whose lines would all, as though by magic or by cheating, converge on a single spot, and he would write our longitude and latitude on to the chart to the nearest quarter-minute, and sniff with haughty disdain at the unwinking electronic eyes of the satellite that had dared do him out of his job.
We crossed the equator after a week. The World’s Most Traveled Man had crossed it before, naturally, and was not obliged to suffer the ritual humiliations that mariners inflict on those who have not. But the ever-alert purser discovered a Whitehall civil servant aboard who had never been south of the line, and the poor man was smeared in treacle and flour and had herrings stuffed into his bathing trunks before being dunked in the swimming pool by an officer dressed up as a bear. ‘Wish we could do it to the lot of them,’ remarked the officer of the watch, as he peered down idly from the bridge. He had just been in trouble with the tax men, and had no particular fondness for Whitehall.
The days bled effortlessly into one another as the routines of shipboard life took over from the concerns of the far-distant outside. True, the BBC World Service was broadcast every afternoon, for the benefit of those who cared about Beirut’s collapse, the dollar’s rise and fall, the doings of Charles and Diana and the assortments of famines and earthquakes and typhoons that make up what we call ‘news’ but fewer and fewer people seemed to listen each day, and after two weeks at sea I came into the ship’s lounge at five o’clock to find only a single passenger, fast asleep. The ship’s interests centred on the deck quoits contest and the chess game, on the fate of the engine (which stopped one night, leaving us drifting aimlessly in the swell while mechanics swarmed over a leaking valve), and on whether or not we would be able to land on Tristan da Cunha. Only one day in six was fair enough for a landing: we heard on the radio that the
Queen Elizabeth 2
had been standing off the island a
week ago, between calls at Rio and Cape Town, but that the swell had been too bad for anyone to be brought ashore.
This dire intelligence brought a cloud of dismay to the brow of the World’s Most Traveled Man who was, he insisted on telling the captain, very eager indeed to land. Having failed to trot on to the cinder beaches of Ascension, he was grimly determined to step ashore at Tristan, ‘only for a second, even if it kills me’. His dutiful wife, who was called Babette, showed me a bulletin from something called the Century Travel Club of Los Angeles, which prepared lists of ‘all the World’s Countries, Sovereign and Non-Sovereign States and Islands’, and had a motto about ‘World Peace Thru World Travel’, and urged its members to underline every country they had visited, send photostats of the appropriate passport stamps and receive Handsome Certificates by return. The WMTM, said Babette, had now visited 298 of the 307 possibles—Tristan would make it 299. It was rather like train-spotting. I would ask Babette what Midway Island or somewhere similar had been like, and she would invariably reply that, as far as she recalled, she had only been in the transit lounge for fifteen minutes, ‘but this darling little man had stamped the passports, so we have been there, you know!’
She had no notion of what Tristan might be like. The only man who might was a birdwatcher from Los Angeles with whom I had an uncertain first conversation. I had offered him milk in his coffee and he replied, with stern gravity that, ‘No, I never take lactates. I have Grave Internal Problems,’ and I decided not to pursue further inquiry.
But he knew his birds. There are, he reported, fourteen different types of petrel on the islands, with names like the great shearwater, the Cape pigeon and the snow petrel. The islanders, he said with obvious disapproval, like to catch the shearwaters and boil them down to make cooking oil. There are rockhopper penguins, which are tiny and have wild tufts of hair sticking from above their ears, making them look like small and most eccentric black men. The islanders also boil down the penguins to make oil for waterproofing their famous longboats, which are made of canvas. The mollymawk (the name comes from the Dutch word meaning ‘stupid gull’) lives
on Tristan: it is properly known as the yellow-billed albatross, breeds on one of the island group, and would probably pick us up five hundred miles north of Tristan, to where it ranges, eternally vigilant, like an aerial sentry.
And, the grave American said, there was the wandering albatross, perhaps the most revered of all the world’s birds, a rival in popular esteem to the Californian condor and the golden eagle. Huge, pure white, magnificent, the great creatures of the species
Diomedea exulans
soar for years at a time in the ever-blowing gales of the roaring forties, ranging tens of thousands of lonely miles from their breeding grounds in South Georgia and in Tristan. (I tried to joke that this made them British subjects, but the remark fell uselessly by the wayside.) They never range north of the thirtieth parallel, he said; once south of that line one should join us.
Everything changed at the thirtieth parallel. On the pilot charts for the South Atlantic the wind roses show that the trade winds cease, and that northerlies begin to blow as prelude to the westerlies of the roaring forties. There is an easterly current, too, bringing cold Antarctic waters up to mix with the warmer seas of the tropics. We crossed the parallel at noon, sixteen days out from Tenerife, and it was like passing into another world.
I was on the after deck at the time. On either beam, and to astern, the sea was calm and blue, and the sun—behind us now, since we were in the southern hemisphere—was deliciously warm. But then there came a familiar click, and the ship’s tannoys began squawking. Not, this time, a message about boat drill, or a request for the bosun to check on number three ram, which was becoming rather seasick, but something rather unusual. ‘Passengers are advised that we are about to pass into a heavy rain squall,’ said a voice from the bridge, and we looked ahead and saw, in place of blue skies and calm seas, a ragged line of black cloud, and grey razor-edge to the sea, behind which white horses dashed with silent fury as the wind whipped across the swells.
It was upon us within seconds. The sun was blotted out. It became strangely chill and damp. The silence on deck was broken by the furious lashing of halyards against stanchions, and the crack
of pennants. And the ship, until now so still and level, began to move, slowly at first, as though waking from a deep sleep. She was starting to roll, and her bows plunged into a wave and threw a curtain of spume over the foredeck. And then the rain began to spatter down, and most of the passengers ran inside, bewildered that the benignity of the ocean had so suddenly turned to malice. ‘Welcome,’ said one of the deck officers, as he dived for cover, ‘to the Southern Ocean.’
The next morning four birds were gliding beside and behind us. Three were mollymawks, and the fourth, aloof and higher than the rest, was pure white, with wings each as big as a man: the wandering albatross, guiding us with stately precision on to Tristan.
We made our landfall at dawn on a showery, windy southern autumn morning. At first, there was a patch of settled grey cloud on the far horizon; then, as we rolled nearer, a shape became distinct—a huge cone, its flanks soaring out of the depths with an abruptness that looked almost unreal, as though a child had daubed its idea of an island on the canvas. It had all the appearance of exactly what it was—a vast submarine volcano, poking up from the mid-Atlantic cordillera, and so tall that its summit pierced the sea and rose 6,000 feet into the sky. There was a ring of cloud 3,000 feet up, which girdled the cone like a starched white collar; and then the slope continued, up to a peak that was dusted with early-season snow, and which gleamed in the rising northern sun.
We radioed the island. ‘Hello,
St Helena
,’ said a voice, neither awed nor surprised by our arrival. ‘You’ll have be waiting a whoil. Harbour’s closed. Swell too bad. Might take a day or some. We’ll let you knows soon as we can.’
A wave of disappointment swept the ship, and for the first time I began to wonder if the damnable ‘Tristan luck’ they had told me about might keep me off the island still. But no, I reasoned: we had the Colonial Governor of the island of St Helena aboard, making an official visit to his tiny southern dependency; we had the rams; we had a new island doctor; and we had the World’s Most Traveled Man, who had a look of acute anxiety about him, and seemed quite unable to tackle his breakfast. He even swore at his bloater,
and ordered the waiter to remove it. No, I decided, we would land, sooner or later. I would get to this outpost, now so tantalisingly close.
As the ship neared the northern coast so the island’s only settlement, and thus the Tristan capital, Edinburgh-of-the-Seven-Seas, swung into view. It was just a hamlet, sprawled on a wide expanse of grass at the foot of sheer walls of rock. It looked a neat and tidy place, the houses gaily painted, the little gardens full of flowers. I could see two Union flags streaming south in the breeze—one was over the Administrator’s office, someone said, and the other flew over his house.
But there was no great monument to might or power here. No castle stood in Edinburgh, nor any battlement or cathedral or cenotaph or statue—not that I could see through my glasses, at least. Tristan was first settled by British soldiers stationed here to prevent any French attempts to free Napoleon from St Helena: but they seemed to have left no obvious relic of their stay, visible from the sea. This was the gentler side of Empire and if our motto was ‘What we have we hold’, it was more strongly stated in the guns of Singapore and the forts of old Bermuda than here, where we had just built an English village, and had come to live in peace and quiet comfort.
No one seemed to be around. From here Edinburgh looked a ghost town, as though its people, who had all been evacuated to England when the volcano erupted in 1961, had never returned. (In fact all except five did come back, and more islanders live in Edinburgh today than before the eruption.) The illusion was reinforced when a rain squall swept across the island: two twin cones of the new volcano, which sits brooding on the hamlet’s eastern edge, began to steam and sputter. Wisps of smoke began to blow from a yellow-lipped crater, and I half-expected a stream of magma to snake down towards the sea, and a shower of red-hot boulders to thud down on the terrified villagers, just as it had done all those Octobers ago. The new lava field, under which the old crawfish cannery had been quite buried, and beneath which lay the longboats’ old landing place, stretched black and ugly towards us, ending in a sudden line of cliffs.
The breeze was blowing steadily from the north, and the captain was a little uneasy, lying off these cliffs now less than half a mile to the south. He decided to look for the island’s lee—logic dictated it was around on the southern side—and so we set off, engines half ahead and ship’s head turned to the east, to work our way clockwise around the colony.
The tannoy squawked the strange names of the little headlands and cliffs and bays we passed: Pigbite, Noisy Beach, Deadman’s Bay, and sites that commemorated noted events, and which the ordnance surveyors and the naval hydrographers engraved on their maps without demur—Down-where-the-minister-land-his-things, Down-by-the-pot and Ridge-where-the-goat-jump-off. There was a pine forest at Sandy Point, and we could see a tiny hut in a clearing. It belonged to the island’s agriculture department, and was used by Edinburghers when they wanted to go on holiday. It was four miles away from the capital, and you went there by dinghy.
Back in Cape Town, when we had been contemplating sailing to Tristan, the old mariners had warned us severely of one stark fact: the weather can change in an instant. Never, never leave the yacht unmanned, they all said. If a north-wester blows up it may do so without any warning at all, and a yacht lying off the island’s northern coast would be dashed to pieces on the lava within minutes. I had good cause to remember the advice as we were passing Sandy Point Gulch, and the wind suddenly rose, and all the world went mad.
It had been blowing a steady Force Six—thirty knots of half-gale that kicked up a moderate swell. But, with a rumbling howl that rose steadily to a shriek, the wind began to blow more and more strongly, Force Eight within five minutes, then Force Ten, and then, before a quarter of an hour was up we were in a Storm Force Twelve and the ship was blinded in a rage of white spray, the anemometers had blown off scale and the barograph was recording the pressure dropping a millibar a minute—all the characteristics of a Pacific typhoon, or a West Indian hurricane. None of the deck officers had seen anything like it in their careers—the gale slammed and battered the little ship, heeling her hard over into the sea,
pounding her with mountainous green seas which poured over her decks in thunderous eddies.