Authors: Jr. William F. Buckley
Again we had a suite reserved, to act as headquarters, from which everyone received what Tony calls in his journal “our petites commissions.” I knew I would need a little official cooperation here, as my vacation from column writing was over; so before leaving the United States I had telephoned Hodding Carter at the State Department and asked him please to inform the Consul General at Punta Delgada that I was the nicest person Hodding knew who would be voting for Reagan. Whatever the message, it worked, and Consul General Ruth Matthews, whose charming husband Glenwood is a retired Foreign Service officer, took wonderful, motherly care of us, which included conveying two invitations, one to lunch the following day at a picturesque, flower-besotted villa a few miles from town, the second to join for cocktails, that very night, the captain of the
Knorr
, an official ocean-research vessel from our Oceanographic Institution at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Doing this turned out to be very convenient, because moments after leaving
Sealestial
to go to the hotel, our vessel had been evicted by the harbor police—we were occupying space reserved for commercial traffic, and there was no place to go …except? Allen Jouning approached the skipper of the
Knorr
, identifying our vessel. Might we berth alongside? Not as easy as all that, because already aberth, alongside the
Knorr
, was the U.S. Naval ship
Wyman
, so that the permission of a second captain had to be got; but all this was in fact accomplished by the time we showed up, at seven, for cocktails.
While the others attended to their chores, I took a rented car and went to the airport to meet Tom Wendel. Meeting a plane in the Azores (or catching one) is half a day’s activity, because the planes are regularly late, though not predictably enough to make it safe simply to arrive late. No matter—I had brought with me four back issues of
Time
and
Newsweek
, which I would need to go through thoroughly before resuming my profession as a seer. Besides, waiting for Tom is itself a pleasure because, eventually, Tom arrives; and when you first see Tom—or when you last see him, or for that matter any time in between—it’s good for uninterrupted laughter. We have primarily in common that we find the same things funny, and he is one of those people whose laughter is catalytic. Moreover, we know each other’s reactions so well that we often skip right over the normal catalyst, and simply begin laughing right away.
You would not, from the above description, have any intimation that we are both
very serious men
. I am, among other things, the kind of person who gives Commencement Speeches, in the unlikely event this is not known about me. Tom is a very serious historian, an authority on Colonial history, author of a life of Benjamin Franklin. When I first knew him at Yale I half expected that he would become a performing pianist, so gifted was he; is he. His father, a businessman of great civic spirit, widely admired and beloved, in 1957 was officially designated as the “First Citizen” of Portland, Oregon, and when Tom graduated from Yale, the senior Wendel had it all set for young Tom to follow in the family footsteps and, if memory serves, had a little vice presidency or whatever cut out for him in the department store. Tom summoned all his courage—he practiced for weeks—for the dread moment.
“Dad, I’m not going back to Portland to business.”
Stunned silence. “What are you going to do?”
“I’ve accepted a job as an American history teacher at Putney School.” “What is the Putney School?”
“It’s sort of an advanced preparatory school in Putney, Vermont, for boys and girls, very good academically.”
“What will they pay you?”
“Fifteen hundred dollars.”
“Fifteen hundred dollars every what?”
“Fifteen hundred dollars every year.”
Stunned silence. “Tom, have you no …pride?”
We lost touch with each other during most of the fifties and early sixties, but I rejoiced to get a note from Charlotte, Tom’s superb wife, the development director of the museum at San José at whose university Tom teaches, advising me ten years ago that Tom was coming east for a sabbatical during which he would live at Swarthmore. He brought his two boys, Hal and David, in their early teens, and one afternoon, with Clare Boothe Luce and Pat, the lot of us boarded the
Cyrano
on the East River and sailed to Stamford—which I think was about eighty-five percent of Tom’s sailing experience when, learning finally that Van couldn’t make it on through, I wondered who might be the next best thing, and happily thought of Tom.
He had been much excited by the invitation. His older son Hal, a senior at the University of Washington, an avid sailor, a tournament tennis player, had taken to writing letters to the student newspaper, copies of which Tom would from time to time with paternal pride pass along to me. “Dear Bill [Tom had written me in May]: I am not at all sure that you are thrilled by having another example of my son Hal’s prose—but just in case, I quote a bit of it. At least it’s not another letter to the editor:
‘“I’m still exceedingly jealous over your upcoming adventure. In fact so much so, I’ve been ripping my hair out [Tom is nearly bald] and reading up on Benjamin Franklin. I have also been attempting to develop a potbelly [unfair: Tom’s stomach is flat]. As you can surmise, I’m trying to impersonate you so I can go. I guess regardless of what I do, Buckley is sure to see right through my disguise. First, he will undoubtedly say, “My gosh, Tom, how did you get so handsome?” I’ll have to quickly, and I might add slyly, reply, “Well, Bill, you’ve heard of the fountain of youth? … I drank the whole thing.”’”
Just as Charlotte is a born helper, Tom is a born helpee (the immutable division, taxonomized by the late Sir Arnold Lunn, to assert the principal, extra-sexual cleavage in human beings. Marriages don’t work, Lunn said, when helpers marry helpers, or helpees, helpees). At any rate, my office undertook to make Tom’s travel arrangements, which required that he go to Boston after pausing at my office to pick up a sack of mail for me, fly thence to Santa Maria in the Azores, wait there four hours, and take that flight down to São Miguel where I now awaited his arrival. Tom’s reply relayed a vague skepticism about the proposed arrangements, in the tone of, “Why-can’t-I-just-fly-from-New-York-to-Säo-Miguel?”
| MEMO TO: | Tom Wendel |
| FROM: | Captain Bill |
It is not plain to me what it is that you have against Boston. If you would like to persuade TAP Airlines to institute a flight from New York to the Azores in the place of their existing flight from Boston to the Azores, you are most welcome to do so.
The Captain most politely rejects the suggestion that it is more convenient for him to transport First Mate Wendel’s gear from New York to Puerto Rico to St. Croix to St. Thomas to Bermuda to Horta to São Miguel than it is for First Mate Wendel to transport same from Boston to the Azores. Next question?
Eventually Tom arrived. I drove him straight to the
Sealestial
, introducing him to those who were there and turning over to him Van’s bunk in my stateroom, which Reggie, though senior, had gallantly volunteered to give up in deference to the predictable nervousness of the New Boy. We went, then, to the
Knorr
, which, particularly below, looks like a boat that began small, but was added to, section by section, warren by warren, trying to keep up with the desperate pace of U.S. technology. Actually, it was launched as late as 1968, 245 feet long, displacing 2,000 tons, with fuel enough for sixty days at sea. Eventually we were deposited by our guide in a cozy room, the captain (and his wife’s) stateroom-living room, the kind of room you would expect to find inhabited by a clubbable couple given to much reading and eclectic collecting. It required something of a production to come up with the requisite number of chairs to accommodate Captain Emerson Hiller’s hospitality. I think Tony and Christopher sat on the floor, but the conversation was convivial, and soon the tall craggy Yankee master of the research vessel
Knorr
got around to the adventure of three and one-half weeks earlier….
The next day I got from Captain Hiller the transcript of the log of his vessel for the dramatic day. I reproduce it, with high regard for the spareness of the style by which dramas are routinely recorded on shipboard:
R/V KNORR
At Sea
24 May 1980
KNORR
departed St. George’s, Bermuda at 1630 (+3) [This parenthesis, and others like it, are for the purpose of indicating what adjustments are necessary in order to transform local time into Greenwich Mean Time (
GMT)]
23 May 1980 for work site in Lat 24° N, Long 45° W.
Master’s Statement Re: Rescuing man in lifeboat this date. 24 May 1980
| 0035 (+3) | Full ahead at ten knots steering 117° T. Flare sighted by 2nd Mate about 2½ miles on port beam. Course changed to 020° T and Master called. |
| 0040 | Master on bridge. |
| 0042 | Course changed to 030° T. |
| 0045 | 2nd red flare observed. Between flares white light observed. |
| 0046 | Course changed to 040° T. |
| 0050 | Various courses to pickup life raft with one man on board. |
| 0100 | Raft alongside and man climbs ladder without assistance. |
| 0117 | Raft brought on board with heavy crane. |
| 0120 | Full ahead 117° T. |
| 0145 | Advised US Coast Guard, Portsmouth, Va. |
| 0230 | Advised Bermuda Harbor Radio. Requested airlift to take man to Bermuda—100 miles to N.W. Airlift not available and man agrees to remain on board to Azores. |
Rescued Man’s name:
François Erpicum 27 years old
Address:
107 Ave des Martyrs 4620 Fléron, Belgium
| François’s Statement: | Sailed from St. Martin Isl. in Windward Islands 12 May 1980. At 0300 * (+4) heard odd ringing sound outside, went on deck and at that moment something shook the boat. He went into cabin and found it half filled with sea water. Launched his six-man rubber life raft and boat sank, stern first almost at once. |
(*
19 May 1980)
Boat:
NANESSE
30 foot sloop of fiberglass.
D.E. Position of sinking: 31° 30’ N 63° W
Position of recovery :
31° 45’ N 63-04° W
Time in raft:
4 days 21 hours
Man in good physical condition. No adverse effects.
/s/E.H. Hiller
E.H. Hiller
The above, as I suggested, is a denatured account of what whoever kept the log appropriately designated as the “saga” of M. François Erpicum, of Fléron, Belgium.
Priscilla Hiller—tall, stately, warm, passionate on the subjected the story more graphically. Erpicum, by profession a marine biologist, was married. In the fall of 1979 his young wife died of cancer. François thought to distract himself by undertaking a spartan single-handed sailing voyage to the Caribbean, returning in the spring. All had gone (to the extent one can use the word about sailing boats at sea) so to speak routinely; until the night of May 19, seven days out, on the course from St. Martin to Bermuda. It was at three in the morning that he was struck; by postmortem conjecture, one minute later he was in the water—that quickly did his sloop go down. The log does not record that it happened that a gallon plastic container of fresh water was perched conveniently on the navigation table. François, instantly evaluating the terminal chaos below, grabbed it just before plunging aft to release his emergency life raft, throwing it into the raft.
François’s raft carried one dozen flares. By the night of May 24 he had expended all but two of these. Toward dusk that very evening he had spotted a vessel off at a distance, and taxed himself on whether to let fire with his penultimate flare. But what reason was there to suppose that this time he would be seen, when he hadn’t been the other times? With singular discipline he desisted, hoping for the juxtaposition of the vessel, and nighttime. He was delirious with joy, he later reported most persuasively, when he saw definite movement in response to his flare fired shortly after midnight; and so he fired off his final flare almost by way of celebration, because he knew now that he would live.
He was, on retrieval, in fairly good physical condition, considering that he had been five days on a life raft. That one gallon of water was important. His life raft was providentially of the kind that carries canopy shelter from the sun. Moreover, if capsizing at sea is the sort of thing that’s going to happen to you, better that you should be a marine biologist than, say, a Chaucer scholar. François had contrived to seduce some ocean crabs, which he had greedily eaten.
The important thing, of course, was that François Erpicum was alive.
But what
had
happened?
Captain Hiller and John Arens, the captain of the adjacent naval vessel, declined to speculate on which one of the (only) two plausible alternatives they inclined to. The first is that the little sloop had been hit by a whale. These things do happen, as acknowledged above. But they are very very rare, because whales don’t like to bump into boats, and are born with sensory mechanisms fine enough to prevent such things from happening.
The second alternative is that François’s sloop was hit by a submarine.
But if a submarine knocked the keel off a boat even as small as thirty feet, wouldn’t the submarine know it?
Silence from the officers I put the question to.
The answer is: Yes. A submarine has more electrical capillaries coursing about its carapace than a human being, and will as predictably record impact as the human body would a pinprick.
But then why didn’t the submarine surface and rescue the poor victim?