who knew his way around.
“We’ve been saving a spot for you, right off the clubhouse in
Rushcutter’s Bay. We only just heard you’d arrived—sorry if you’ve been
kept waiting. And, by the way—we have a couple of gentlemen from the
press who asked to come along. All right if they come aboard?”
“Sure—come ahead! Boys, throw them a line!” And the fun began.
8 —AND BACK UP:
THE GREAT BARRIER REEF
“Better men than we had come to grief....”
Sydney, like most cities, is big, bustling, and impersonal, but it has
its own atmosphere and flair. The hills, covered with typically
red-roofed houses; the extensive harbor, with its multitude of bays and
sheltered coves, dominated by the magnificent arching bridge that is
Sydney’s pride; the breezy friendliness of the people—all these give
Sydney a unique character.
Our own location, in quiet Rushcutter’s Bay, less than fifteen minutes
by bus from the heart of the city, was as lovely a spot as one could
hope to find in or near a metropolis. Through the kindness of Mr.
Packer, editor of the Sydney _Telegraph_, whom we had met first in
Honolulu, a company car was put at our disposal during our entire stay
but, due to the trauma of driving on the left—and a vague fear of
getting involved in some accident that could wipe out our entire
savings—we depended mostly for transportation upon the scarlet
double-decker buses that moved majestically through the streets.
One of the disappointing realities of travel is the impossibility of
ever seeing as much of any country as one had hoped to do, and Australia
was no exception. We had come armed with addresses: friends who had
worked with me at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Japan; the
Japanese wives of Australian servicemen whom Barbara had taught in Kure.
All of them had said, cheerfully, when we parted: “See you when you get
to Australia!” But now we discovered how widely scattered these friends
were and how impossible to see them all. A few of the Japanese brides
lived in or near Sydney, and through them Barbara was able to get news
of many more, but the two friends Jessica had most looked forward to
seeing lived near Melbourne and we had no time to sail farther south.
At last it was decided that Barbara and Jessica would travel overland to
Melbourne for a short holiday from boatkeeping. Barbara stayed only a
few days, long enough to fall completely under the spell of the city,
which was in a fever of preparation for the Olympic Games, but Jessica
was so delighted to be with Carol Exton, whom she had known when we
first went out to Japan, and Clare Davis, the pen pal whose father we
had first met in Tahiti, that we didn’t have the heart to tear her away
while both families were urging extended hospitality. As a result,
Jessica stayed on for the better part of two weeks in the army town of
Puckapunyal and went with Carol to the dependent school, where she
learned to figure in pounds, shillings, and pence. Then she switched
families for a visit with Clare in Melbourne. By the time she rejoined
us she was talking like a “proper Aussie,” throwing around such
expressions as “beaut,” “terribly posh,” “it’s a dill” (meaning no good
or stupid), or “let’s have a gig”—in Yankee talk, “let me see.” In
addition, she had persuaded the Davises to let Clare sail with us up to
the Great Barrier Reef—and now all she had to do was convince the
Skipper that we needed a subdeb hitchhiker for a change. Since Clare’s
parents were quite willing to pay for her to return by air from one of
the northern Queensland ports before we set off for Indonesia, I was
more than willing. One of the inevitable drawbacks to such a trip as
ours is the lack of companionship for those who are under age. Ted and
Jessica got along far better than most brothers and sisters with a
five-year gap in their ages—but the gap was there. And although Barbara
had found an amazing number of interests, confidences, and giggles that
she and Jessica could share, we knew that even the best mother-daughter
relationship is no substitute for an intimate of one’s own age.
At every port there are dozens of things on the list of Things to Do and
Things to Buy. Sydney was no exception. Again we hauled out and gave the
_Phoenix_ her biannual face lifting, using the Cruising Club’s slip. I
arranged, at last, to replace the faulty chain plates that had been much
on my mind for a reason which is obvious: there are two things that
_must not_ fail on a seagoing yacht—the masts and the rudder. The chain
plates hold the shrouds that support the mast. Period.
I laid in a supply of essential navigation aids for the next stage of
our trip—pilot books, light lists, tide tables, and nearly a hundred
charts, enough to get us to Durban, South Africa. As was always the
case, many of the charts were for places we did not expect to visit, but
plans have a way of changing—or of being changed—as one goes along, due
to weather conditions, local advice, or dire necessity. Not too long
before us, a yacht bound for Australia had been blown off course in a
storm and had tried to put in to Lord Howe Island—without a chart. It
had ended up on a reef, with the vessel a total loss.
There were the usual visas to arrange for, too. South African officials
raised no objections, in spite of their well-known color bar, and even
assured me that Japanese citizens were considered “European.”
The very young fellow at the Indonesian Consulate, however, was
hesitant.
“Just why do you wish to visit my country, sir?” he asked politely.
I had a sudden hunch that the usual reasons would not be enough. It is
one thing to fly to Jakarta, like any self-respecting tourist, there to
follow the beaten track on conducted tours before flying home
again—having “seen” Java. It is quite another to request permission to
_sail_ in, to poke around in ports where there are no other foreigners
and no liking for them, possibly to get oneself in a jam and even create
an international incident. (Only recently, exactly that did happen, the
yacht ended up a wreck and the yachtsman landed in jail.)
I reminded myself that, once again, we were going against all local
advice in going to Indonesia at all. “Give the whole bloody place a
miss!” was the way one recently returned Aussie phrased it. “They’re
insolent puppies, the whole bloody lot of them. Threw me passport right
on the floor, they did, and made me pick it up myself!” But we had heard
similar unfavorable comments about almost every port on our
itinerary—and since our informant had struck me as rather an “insolent
puppy” himself, we reserved judgment.
The young Indonesian was waiting, not at all insolently, for my reply.
“The main reason we want to go is because Indonesia is a young republic.
You won your independence as we did, by revolution, but you’re still
having a lot of problems to face and the going is hard. Back in the
United States, we’re not young and eager any more—we’ve forgotten our
beginnings. We’d like to see how it’s going with you—and how you’re
meeting your problems. And we’d like to be in Indonesia on August
seventeenth to help celebrate your eleventh birthday.”
There was a long pause. Then the young man said, “Could you come back in
two weeks?”
I could and did, to be handed a visa for every member of our _Phoenix_
party, without qualifications. Across the visas was written, boldly,
“Guests of Indonesia.” There was no charge.
While in Sydney, I bought an additional dinghy, a flat little skiff that
was promptly christened Flattypus. I also added a “gadget,” a small,
kerosene-burning refrigerator. It seemed to work beautifully—in port, at
least—and Barbara was ecstatic. Knowing who would have to service it for
the rest of its natural life, I withheld my enthusiasm, but I had to
admit that it cooled the beer nicely and hoped that happy condition
would continue.
By late April (corresponding to October in the Northern Hemisphere) the
weather was getting nippy and we accelerated our preparations for
departure. Once again, Barbara drew up her commissioning list, making
adjustments according to whatever “tinned goods” and staples were
available. By now, she was quite an expert in estimating our needs for
weeks or even months at a time, and the provisions she laid in now would
be required to carry us all the way to Durban—an eight to nine months’
supply. Even in English-speaking countries, however, it is not always
easy to find what one needs. Baked beans and spaghetti, for instance,
were sold in tiny cans like potted meats and were used in much the same
way—for sandwiches. And canned food for cats was practically unheard of.
“Cat food—in tins?” one wholesaler repeated incredulously. “Now, why
don’t you just nip down to the butchery and ask for a tuppenny-’orth of
scraps?”
When we sailed from Sydney it was our plan to make no stops until within
the Great Barrier Reef, almost a thousand miles to the north. We all
looked forward to a restful period at sea to recover from the gradually
accelerating pace of life ashore which inevitably becomes frenetic as
departure nears. Especially after a prolonged stay in port, the last few
days are a rat race, complete with “little lists” and a constant,
gnawing worry lest something vital may be overlooked—either socially or
from a subsistence point of view. Have all thank-you’s been said—or
written? All engagements remembered and kept? All necessary supplies
purchased—and _delivered_? Human nature being what it is, there are
always a number of items we tentatively check off because someone or
other has said, helpfully, “Oh, I can get that for you wholesale—just
leave it to me!” or “I’ve dozens of those lying around, I’ll bring you
all you can use.” But, as sailing day approaches, where are they? If it
is an important, but expensive, item, you find yourself torn between
laying out money for it unnecessarily or running the risk of sailing
without it.
As departure draws near, the visitors increase, as do the number of
invitations, until at last every waking minute of every day is filled
and only the nights are left for worrying over things-to-be-done and
things-to-be-bought. In the end there is a real sense of relief when we
shove off and know there will be no more chance callers, no more
absolutely necessary places to go or things to see, and no temptation to
rush downtown for one last vital item.
Naturally, there is never any way of knowing whether a given trip will
be pleasant or not. We usually have some control over the first day or
two, in that we can wait for a favorable weather forecast or a fair
wind, but after that it’s anybody’s guess.
On our run up the east of Australia we had generally good luck and
racked up an auspicious record of 600 miles in the first five days,
which was not bad against the current and in variable winds. Young
Clare, who had never been away from home before _or_ on a ship, was both
homesick and seasick for the first few days, but she was a game sport.
Gradually she perked up, and before long she and Jessica fell into an
easy routine of schoolwork and play in a most congenial vein.
We all joined in studying the geography and history of the areas and
towns we passed, for most of the time we were in sight of land and able
to get a good idea of the vastness and, in the northern reaches, the
desolation of the continent. Even Clare was properly impressed that it
took the better part of four days to leave New South Wales behind—one of
the smallest of Australia’s seven states. As Jessica observed, “Texas
would certainly have its nose put out of joint down under!”
By day we passed mile after mile of white sand beaches, backed by
rolling hills and occasional sharp, mountainous profiles. By night we
could spot our position at any given time with the help of well-marked
coastal lighthouses and beacons that made coastal cruising a pleasure.
On May 8 we entered the wide southern mouth of the Great Barrier Reef.
Here the seas were calm, as quiet as any we have ever experienced, yet
we were twenty miles offshore and well out of sight of land. The wind
died away and for the next two days, by going absolutely nowhere, we
managed to get back to our usual long-term average of four knots.
Actually, we were drifting slowly northward, for here the current goes
up the coast rather than down as it had to the south.
By May 10 we could see the five high islands of the Percy group, with
grassy, wooded slopes, brilliant white beaches, and inviting bays.
Jessica and Clare, who had laboriously made a pirate flag, complete with
skull and crossbones, wanted to land and take over an uninhabited
island. Barbara, too, had land fever and the islands looked so tempting
that we yielded to their lure. Picking one from the charts at random, we
cast anchor in a lovely bay off the west side of Middle Island.
A mile away, Pine Islet has a lighthouse and, through the binoculars, we
could see a number of houses grouped about it. On Middle Percy, however,
the only sign of civilization was an apparently deserted shack set well
back from the beach with a big sign: TELEPHONE. This, we assumed, was
connected in some way with the lighthouse settlement.
The surf was too high to carry four in Flattypus, so I rowed Barbara
ashore first, promising to return for the excited girls. First, however,
I decided to take a look at the shack. Inside was the telephone, looking
as tempting as Alice’s cake marked: “Eat me!” How could I resist
following the directions: “Wind crank and lift handset.”
At once I found myself talking to the sole family on the island, a
Canadian sister and two brothers who lived high in the interior. They
knew all about the _Phoenix_, as soon as I mentioned my name, having
read my series of articles in the _Saturday Evening Post_.
At their invitation, and under the guidance of Claude and Percy White,
who came down to the shore to meet us, we all trooped up to the White
home, a good stiff hike. There we were able to send off a message of
reassurance to Clare’s parents by the interesting expedient of flashing
a message in Morse to the lighthouse of Pine Islet, from whence it was
relayed by radio to Mackay on the mainland and thence overland to
Melbourne!
This taken care of, we settled down to enjoy three days of wonderful
hospitality, climaxed by a wild-goat hunt—or I might say a wild
wild-goat hunt—which ended successfully with a barbecue on the beach.
Now began a new and delightful stage in our travels, island hopping,
with a different anchorage every night. Our first call after the Percy
Islands was at Lindeman, a resort island where Clare’s father “shouted
us” by means of a cable to the management instructing them to entertain
the entire crew of the _Phoenix_ in style. They did, and Clare took
great pleasure in her role as hostess at a sumptuous dinner in the
hotel.
From Lindeman we made our way gradually north, with occasional stops to
explore scattered and mostly uninhabited islands. Barbara, especially,
took great pleasure in “fossicking” on the reefs at low tide and
invariably returned to the _Phoenix_ with pailfuls of live shells which
we had no convenient way of cleaning while underway, since the approved
method is to bury them for a week or two and allow ants and nature to do
the job. As a result, we sailed always with a more or less pervasive
odor of decaying animal life and, try as she would to keep her trophies
downwind of our living quarters, she insists that many of them were
given the deep-six by unnamed members of the crew.
Our next major stop was Townsville, on the mainland, where we spent four
days, catching up on baths, laundry, fresh vegetables, and the news of
mutual friends.
A day or two beyond Townsville we made one of our most interesting stops
in the Barrier Reef, at Great Palm Island, the largest aboriginal
settlement in Queensland. Great Palm is strictly _not_ for the tourist.
There are no accommodations for overnight guests and no public services.
Only those who, like ourselves, come in by boat and are
self-sufficient—and who are able to obtain the permission of the
superintendent—are allowed to remain after dark.
During our stay at Great Palm, we gave an evening of slides and movies
in the outdoor theater, a program which was an outstanding success. For
the first time, we ran the movies we had taken of the Bastille Day fete
in Tahiti and the response of the Australian aborigines to the Tahitian
belles and their vibrant hula was such that we had to run that
particular reel three times! I made a special trip out to the _Phoenix_
at anchor to bring back the slit drum from Uturoa and the cowrie-trimmed
grass skirts from Bora Bora, and these exhibits were passed around and
tried out by every man, woman, and child in the settlement, to the
accompaniment of much giggling and many gibes.
By the way of return, the native population put on a “corraboree” for
our benefit. A great deal of care and elaborate preparation had gone
into the costuming and make-up of the aborigines, whose black faces,
ribs, arms, and pipestem legs were outlined in strange patterns of white
paint. At the last minute, however, and when all was in readiness for
the dance, it seemed that a native drum and drummer were not to be
found. A plea for one, repeated several times over the loud speaker,
finally turned up a volunteer who used, as his drum, that universal
instrument—an empty kerosene tin!
From Great Palm Island to Cairns, the next mainland port on our
itinerary, was only a day’s sail. My log notes that the seas were short
and choppy after we had left the shelter of the island and we rolled
considerably with the resultant sound of numerous crashes from below,
“particularly,” as I remark smugly, “in the ladies’ cabin.” A couple of
weeks of quiet sailing, plus sheltered anchorages, had made us all a bit
careless in stowing.
We reached the outer lights of Cairns channel at 2:30 in the morning,
but I refused to transit the narrow passage, five miles long, until
daylight, especially with a balky engine. Again, my possibly
overcautious decision to anchor and wait out the night was at odds with
the ideas of my Japanese companions, who were all for going right on in.
They grumbled a bit about waiting, and even more over my insistence on
the ever-unpopular anchor watch, but I remained adamant. The _Phoenix_,
with 30 tons displacement and a 25-horsepower engine (18 when using
kerosene), is sluggish under power and coming in to a strange anchorage
is always tense under the best of conditions. Channel markers, docks,
and shore lines may be well marked on the charts, but neither chart nor
pilot book can give advice about such imponderables as weather, poor
visibility, the movements of shipping, or the vagaries of our own
engine.
Since I was engineer as well as skipper, and since the engine is under
the floor of the after cabin with no remote controls, coming in to a
dock or mooring demanded a high degree of cooperation between the
lookout forward, the man at the tiller, and myself.
The next morning, with the wind dead ahead, and the engine still acting
up, we limped down the long corridor to town, stopping once to make a
quick spark plug change. I think that even Nick was grateful for good
visibility as he helped pick out and guide us past the intricate system
of buoys that marked the channel.
As we entered the harbor we had another of those experiences which can
only sound routine in the telling but was nerve-racking in the extreme.
In Cairns there was a solid line of docks and warehouses along the shore
to starboard, but nothing to indicate where we should go. Barely
crawling, we moved down the channel, scanning the land. At last we saw a
man in uniform emerge from one of the buildings. Waving a paper in one
hand, he signaled to us to come in. I dived down the afterhatch, put the
engine in reverse, ordered the helmsman to put the tiller over, and we
began to maneuver our way alongside the dock. The current was strong,
but we finally succeeded in bringing our boat up neatly, almost abeam of
the uniformed official.
Moto made ready to throw a line.
_“Phoenix?”_ The official demanded. At my affirmative, he leaned over
and handed me a letter. For Jessica. No greeting. No word of
explanation. Just a letter.
I shoved it into my pocket while I prepared to cut the engine and make
fast to the dock.
“You can’t tie up here!” the official told us, shocked. “This is the
main dock!”
“Where then?” I asked.
He looked amazed and nonplused. At last he suggested that we had “best
move right on down.” He gestured down the harbor into infinity.
I put the engine in gear once more and we headed away from the dock and
on up the channel. At last, almost at the end of the harbor, we found an
old jetty that seemed to be sufficiently out of anyone’s way. A couple
of bystanders helped us come alongside, but we had barely made the lines
fast and put the engine to bed when our friend the official arrived,
panting.
“You’ll have to move on back,” he told us. “You can tie up where you
first came in, for a few hours. Then you’ll have to move along, because
there’s a big ship coming in.”
He also said we would be charged “regular docking rates” while there. I
was a little annoyed by then and retorted that, if this were the case, I
would have to charge admission to come aboard the _Phoenix_. (I had a
wonderful precedent for that action: old Joshua Slocum himself did it,
when officials tried to gouge him.)
After we had moved back to our original spot, I visited the dockmaster,
who decided that if other ports in Australia had not charged the
_Phoenix_ a docking fee, neither would Cairns. I then graciously invited
him to come aboard at any time—no charge. He hardly seemed to know what
to do with a yacht, and was concerned because we might interfere with
the berthing of two big ships that were due in at the same time. I
assured him that if they came close enough to interfere with us, they
would be too dangerously close to each other. He finally agreed to
permit us to remain where we were, which would put us right between
them. And so it worked out very nicely—our forward lines shared the same
bollard with the after lines of _Manunda_, while our after lines kept
company with the bowlines of _Taiping_.
We spent ten days at Cairns, which was Clare’s last port of call before
flying home to her family. Just before leaving us, she confessed that
she had been “a little bit scared” when she started off with an unknown
family—the first Americans she had ever known.
“I’d heard a lot about Yankees,” she admitted, “and I just didn’t know
_what_ you’d be like.”
“What do you think about Yankees now?” Ted asked her teasingly.
Clare almost stammered in her eagerness to reassure us. “Oh!” she cried.
“I’d like you now even if you were French or Turquoise!”
We made several trips into the magnificent Atherton tablelands of the
interior, where dense jungle, crater lakes, rolling grassland, giant
anthills and, everywhere, the typical dusty gray-green of the
ever-present eucalyptus trees gave us a different feeling for the
Australian scene. It was frustrating to be unable to get even farther
from the seacoast, to experience the peculiar isolation and beauty of
the “outback” and the renowned hospitality of those who live there.
During this stopover we had another flare-up of crew trouble, or rather,
a lot of suppressed minor grievances had accumulated and become
critical. This was something we were beginning to recognize as a pattern
in our East-West relations, inevitable because of our very different
backgrounds and philosophies. The American way (or, at least, _my_ way)
is to speak freely and openly, to discuss problems as they arise, and to
leave little doubt in anyone’s mind about my reactions to events. Our
companions, on the other hand, had been reared in a tradition of
reticence, submission, and fatalism. They kept their feelings to
themselves and looked upon my occasional outbursts as signs of weakness.
Moreover, the idea of a free and open discussion of differences of
opinion was completely alien to them. They did not overlook or forget,
however, with the result that every once in a while the pressure of
accumulated misunderstandings or dissatisfactions would mount until some
ridiculously small incident would bring our relations to a head.