Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (40 page)

At about 2 p.m., being full of eager impatience to see the most famous — and infamous — headland in the world, I went out on to the starboard wing of the bridge, and stared through binoculars into the east. At 3.20 p.m., cold and battered by the violent heavings of the ship, a pale shape took form, and my weariness and my bruises were forgotten. 'Cape Horn, bearing 85 degrees true!' I yelled into the bridge.

'Gracias,'
Patricio said with a humouring smile, 'And it's fifteen nautical miles distant.' We drove on. A dismal grey light hung from low clouds, the island peaks were black cut-outs against the sky, the cloud base sinking lower and lower to merge into the dark sea. The great waves abated as we passed into the lee of Hermite. At 5 p.m. we anchored.

St Martin's Bay is a narrow cut, steep-sided, with trees growing from the sea up to 600 feet. Strong squalls blew down the sides upon us without any previous sign, just as the old sailing directions warned. The
Lautaro
heeled over to these sudden vicious blasts — Patricio had two bow anchors out — and it was easy to imagine the danger to a sailing ship. Many were overturned even under bare poles, and when they were wearing any sail the peril was great. The difficulty of the Horn passage, westbound, was that the skipper had to set a certain amount of sail to make headway against the prevailing winds and the eastward set of the Horn Current; then the winds could dismast him. The danger eastbound was simply driving the ship under: a blue-nosed skipper carrying a press of sail would refuse to reef, a heavy squall would strike, and the ship did not rise to the next wave. Instead, forced on by the great power of the wind, she simply drove in... and under.

Next day, which was the date of publication of
Bhowani Junction,
we sailed for Wulaia, going round Cape Horn first for my benefit. Horn Island is covered with brown-green grass but has no other vegetation. The south face of the cape is a giant cliff of grey and black rock, 1,350 feet high. The eastern ridge of this cliff is a steep cascade of turrets and pinnacles. At two miles out from it we were in fifty fathoms, on the continental shelf. A hundred miles south the shelf ends and the water is more than 2,000 fathoms deep. Seas were breaking heavily over two isolated rocks south-west of the cape, but I stared at the dark pyramid of the Horn, my thoughts full. I saw the glimpses men had had of it between storm wrack and wave. I sensed the terror and rage and courage and skill it had inspired. I tried to imagine the loom of it of a sudden, this close, under sail, a southerly gale blowing, as Darwin had seen it:

We stood out to sea, and on the second day again made the land, when we saw on our weather-bow this notorious promontory in its proper form — veiled in a mist, and its dim outline surrounded by a storm of wind and water. Great black clouds were rolling across the heavens, and squalls of rain, with hail, swept by us with... extreme violence.
It is as imposing as its legend and I am privileged that I have seen it.

After passing the Cape we headed north and northwest round Horn Island, leaving Deceit and Hershel Islands to starboard. Soon fog and mist hid the Horn. Squalls of rain and hail hammered the
Lautaro's
steel deck and rattled the bridge glass. The ship passed, silent, gleaming grey and wet, down a formless aisle of black capes, deserted headlands, and grim rocks intermittently hidden by bursting spray. The radio operator came up with a cable for me that had been radioed to ship from Punta Arenas. It read:

BHOWANI JUNCTION PUBLISHED TODAY GENERALLY GOOD REVIEWS CONGRATULATIONS LOVE HELEN KEITH I read it again, and put it away in my pocket. The words remained imprinted, a little out of focus, on the wild seascape around us. I heard them, as though whispered, under the brief commands of Germain to the quartermaster at the wheel. The book was going to be a big success. In some ways it already was. I could write.
Bhowani Junction
had not been difficult to write — I had finished the first draft in ten days, at about 12,000 words a day — but it would be more acclaimed than any of the other three, if only because it dealt with the present.

'Babor cinco — así!'

'Así, así, así!'

This was what I had given up — my executive power and skill, the ability to cause masses of men and machinery to work efficiently together for an object higher than themselves, transcending themselves and their own desires or thoughts. The captain and crew of the
Lautaro
were more important to the world than I was, and a great deal less selfish, but when would any of
their
names appear in
Who's Who,
as mine already had? I wished I could exchange my small fame for that sense of doing a public work, and doing it well, which I had once had. I missed it. But it was gone, beyond recall, and I would have to live with nothing more than the memory.

Now it was my turn to stand champagne all round, and we repaired to the ward-room. There Patricio pored over a chart, found our exact position, off the western shore of Deceit Island, and then picked out a small unnamed island nearby. He pointed it out through the porthole and formally named it on the chart
ISLOTE MASTERS.
We had another drink.

The beat of the engines suddenly slowed, and a voice called, 'Captain, to the bridge!' — but Patricio was already there.

Fierro on watch, pointed to the echo-sounder. It had been recording 30 fathoms under our keel. It was now down to 12, and as we watched it recorded 8. Fierro had the engines to slow and we inched forward. The echo-sounder gave 5 fathoms and Patricio had his hand ready to signal 'Full astern' on the telegraph, for we drew about 15 feet. We glided on...
5...
6...
5... 10
... 15... 30... 30. After a quarter of an hour Patricio ordered speed resumed, while Fierro carefully plotted and recorded the position of the unmarked reef. Then we went back to our champagne.

By mid afternoon we were approaching Navarino Island, and were surrounded by whales. All around us the choppy surface of the sea was marked by little puffs as though of steam, rising six to twenty feet above the water. The nearest was a quarter of a mile to port, but barely a hundred yards away I clearly saw three huge blue-black backs rolling along just below the surface.

We entered the Beagle Channel, and puttered eastward, stopping off at a couple of two-house settlements, before reaching Puerto Williams. This was named after one of the Chilean admiral heroes, most of whom were of British descent. Here Chile was building a small naval base and colony, complete with a hospital and maternity ward, in competition with Ushuaia on the opposite, Argentine, shore.

Until then women from the little estancias tucked into these bays and fiords would go to Ushuaia to have their babies, who were thus automatically born as Argentine citizens. Now they would be Chileans.

A mile or so east of the new colony was the settlement of Mejillones, where the last of the Yahgans, about thirty in number, lived. It was a sad place, tenebrous with the blight that has stricken all American Indians since the white man came. I spoke with a wrinkled brown-skinned crone who was said to be over 100 — that last pure-blooded Yahgan of whom I had heard in Punta Arenas. Then I walked alone on the bleak shore, my mind full of the desolation which had come upon the Yahgan, the Ona, and the Alcaluf, all once, like the seals and the eagles, living parts of this savage southern world.

It was raining next morning when I awoke, determined to climb the low mountain behind Puerto Williams. Germain and a Lieutenant Portilla, stationed at Williams, agreed to go with me, and soon we set off into the forest, armed with sandwiches,
botas
of wine and, in Germain's case, a new Spanish automatic. The drizzle continued, and we came to a wide stream. Germain fell in, but was no wetter than the rest of us. We left the edge of the sea and turned inland, among great fallen trees, moss swaying from the standing beeches, and began to climb on faint and sometimes confusing animal trails. The trees were dense at first but gradually grew smaller and more widely spaced as we climbed. Here, as everywhere in that wind-dominated region, some trees grew vertically while others had bowed to the constant force and grew almost as creepers or bushes.

We reached the tree line about noon, some 11,800 feet above the Beagle Channel. Germain was indecently full of energy, singing songs, making funny noises, imitating his instructor at the naval school, and shooting off his automatic in all directions. He made me feel about eighty-five years old.

Above the tree line the mountain went on up in shale, gravel, and thick springy moss, with occasional small streams. Soon the mist thickened and we could no longer see the crest above us. We decided to turn back. Back in the trees we sat on a fallen trunk for a rest. Germain suddenly gasped, and pointed. A large animal was staring at us from the forest thirty yards off. Germain and Portilla both cried 'Llama!' but it was a guanaco, for there are no llamas that far south. It wandered off, not very alarmed, making a harsh, strange cry, something like a parrot's. I ran after it and got a dubious photograph. For fifteen minutes afterwards we heard five or six guanacos calling down the hill, but never saw any more.

Next day the
Lautaro
set off on a cruise whose main purpose was to establish, once more, Chile's claim to the three small islands at the east end of the Beagle Channel — Nueva, Picton, and Lenox. When asked to arbitrate the original boundary dispute between Argentina and Chile in this area, King Edward VII of England ruled that the Beagle Channel should be the frontier. That seemed clear, since the Channel runs almost dead straight, and due east and west, all the disputed islands lying well to the south of it, that is, on the Chilean side.

Then Argentina claimed that the Channel did not go straight out to sea, but turned sharp south, narrowed from three miles to 500 yards, and passed between Navarino and Picton, leaving Picton and its two small companions on the Argentine side. Chile rejected this ridiculous claim, and kept a few retired sailors and marines living on the islands to confirm its ownership.

It was a beautiful day, a strong west wind blowing us down the Beagle Channel, the mountains of Argentine Tierra del Fuego a wall of snow to the north, the small one we had climbed on Navarino yesterday now clear in purple and russet autumn colours to the south, the white cavalry of the sea cantering eastwards beside us, the sun shining. Looking down the Channel towards the sun there were times when I could not see the surface for the luminous curtain of spray, 300 feet high, hanging over it. Water devils, like tornadoes, were being formed continually, to pirouette off down wind, half obscured by whirling rainbows.

We anchored in a tiny cove on Picton Island, and at once a dozen sailors went off in the whaleboat to look for
erizos.
These sea-urchins, together with the Alaskan king crab or sea-spider, are common in those cold waters, and that night we had
erizos
in scrambled eggs as well as the usual way, that is, cold with lemon, chopped raw onions, and brown bread on the side. The night was as lovely as the day, all the stars a-glitter and the Southern Cross directly overhead.

Next day a smoke signal on Nueva drew us in to pick up a colonist who wanted to go to Punta Arenas. On Lenox we embarked a sergeant of marines and his wife, and the radio operator went ashore to examine another settler's radio transmitter, which was giving trouble. He came back an hour later and reported briefly to Patricio. 'It won't work now.'

'Good,' Patricio said, dismissing the man.

We were alone in the ward-room, and I raised an eyebrow. 'We suspect that settler of communicating secretly with the Argentine navy in Ushuaia,' Patricio said. 'It's difficult to prove... but easy to stop.'

We made a night passage, steering by radar only for practice, across Orange Bay. After learning how to read and operate the radar scanner, I went to bed. I heard the anchor go down at midnight, awoke again at 4 a.m. to a fearful howling of wind, and went up to the bridge, where I found Patricio and Germain. Five minute squalls were hitting us from the west-south-west at Force 10. Patricio was putting out a starboard bow anchor and lengthening both anchor chains to 8 cables (120 fathoms, or 720 feet). Seeing that he was making the right decisions without me, I went back to sleep.

Next day we visited a small settlement on Hoste, then passed through the Murray Channel and anchored in Yendegaia Bay, barely two miles from the Argentine border on Tierra del Fuego. It was a wild, grim place, the water milky-green from the glacier whose snout lay just behind the estancia at the head of the bay. To the east a cathedral-like spire of rock was rapidly sinking into the evening dusk.

The owner of the estancia, Rudolf Serka, invited the officers and myself ashore for dinner. The food was good, but the house bare, comfortless and cold, except for the small hallway where a little stove was kept burning. I learned something of what was needed to survive as a settler in these parts. Serka's father, a Serb, started the estancia in 1914 with 300 head of sheep. The next year he had 150 left. It took father and son forty years to build the herd up to 7,000, plus a few cattle. They lost an average of 10 per cent of their animals every winter, as there was really not enough food for them. In the very hard winter of 1930 they lost over half. The Serkas were now Chileans, but their natural communications were with Ushuaia, which was just behind the cathedral mountain and easily reachable, there and back, in a day, by boat or on horseback. The nearest Chilean town, Porvenir, was a severe and dangerous seven-day ride away over snow-covered mountains. There was no road anywhere, except about five miles on the estate, which Serka had built, and now maintained himself. Supplies came once a month by an incredibly old ex-German tramp steamer called the Micalvi. I saw her at Puerto Williams and wondered that she could survive waves more than two feet high or an adverse current greater than two knots. I asked Serka about a small sailing boat lying on its side in the mud by the jetty. He said it was a seven-ton cutter, with no auxiliary engine. A couple of his men owned it, and used it for sealing on the Diego Ramirez Islands. They go there in
that?'
I cried.