Stormchild (17 page)

“Right, Tim,” she said, and went to do it.

By the time we docked in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, I had developed a healthy respect for the frail-looking Jackie Potten. Not that she looked so frail anymore, for fifteen hundred sea miles had put some healthy color into her cheeks and bleached her mousy hair into pale gold. After her complaint about feeling cold on our first night out she had uttered not a single grievance. In fact she had proved to possess a patient tenacity that was well suited to sailing and, despite her fondness for a diet that might have starved an anorexic stick-insect, she had a stomach that could take the roughest motion of the waves. In the beginning, as
Stormchild
had thrashed into the great gray channel rollers with their hissing and bubbling white tops, Jackie had been nervous, especially when the first sullen dawn showed that we were out of sight of land. That, to me, is always a special moment; when at last you can look around the horizon and see nothing but God’s good ocean. For Jackie, when all she saw was the cold crinkling heave of the careless waves, her overwhelming sensation was the terror of insignificance.

The terror did not last. Instead she began to enjoy the challenge, and learned to have confidence in the boat and in her own ability to control
Stormchild.
Within two days she was watch-keeping alone, at first only by daylight, but within a week she was standing the night watches and all traces of her initial nervousness had disappeared. She was a natural sailor, and, as her competence grew, her character hardened out of timidity into confidence. She even talked less, and I realized her previous volubility had been merely a symptom of shyness.

We marked off our private territories within the boat. Jackie had excavated a sleeping space among the heaped stores in the starboard forward cabin where she settled like some small cozy animal. Once in a while I would hear her speaking aloud in that cabin. At first I thought she was just chattering to herself, but later I learned she was dictating into a small tape recorder. She was making a record of the journey, but would not let me listen to the tape. “I’m just making notes,” she said disparagingly, “only rough notes.”

We raced across Biscay where Jackie, equipped with
Stormchild’s
copy of
The Birds of Britain and Europe
learned to identify the various seabirds that kept us company. There were fulmars on either beam, storm petrels flickering above our wake, and handsome, slim-winged shearwaters effortlessly skimming all about us. As Jackie learned to identify the birds, I taught myself more about
Stormchild’s
character. She was a stubborn boat, good in heavy seas, but sluggish and sullen when, ten days into our voyage, we encountered light winds north and east of Madeira. The winds eventually died to a flat calm and the sails slatted uselessly to the boat’s motion on the long swell. I was tempted to turn on the powerful engine, but there was no point in wasting fuel, for nothing would hurry the establishment of the trade winds and I reasoned that we might just as well wait it out at sea than pay daily harbor fees of seventy pesetas per foot of boat length in a Canary Islands port.

After three days the winds came again and
Stormchild
dipped her bows to the long ocean swell. The weather had turned fiercely warm. I changed into shorts, but Jackie had no summer clothes so stayed in her usual baggy attire. I stored our foul-weather gear in a hanging locker and suspected that, storms apart, we would not need the heavy warm clothes again until we had long cleared the Panama Canal, for now we were entering the latitudes of the perpetual lotus-eaters and would stay in these warm latitudes for weeks.

We raised the Canary Islands on a Sunday morning and by mid-afternoon we had cleared the Spanish immigration procedures in Las Palmas. Jackie was wide-eyed with the realization that it was in this ancient harbor that Columbus himself had waited for the trade winds to take him into the unknown west.

Next day, for lack of space in Las Palmas, we moved to the harbor at Mogan, on the island’s south coast. Mogan, like all the other island harbors, was crammed with cruising yachts waiting to make the Atlantic crossing. There had been a time when barely a dozen small yachts a year made this passage, but now the Canary Island ports could scarcely keep up with the demand for berth space. Hundreds of boats would cross with us, making a great flock of sails that would speed across the blue heart of the Atlantic.

“So how long do we wait for the trade winds?” Jackie asked.

“A month? Maybe longer.”

We collected our mail from the English pub where David, God bless him, had sent every available chart of the Patagonian coast. He had also sent me the details of the Chilean government’s regulations for visiting boats, which were complex, together with his advice to see a Chilean consul somewhere in Central America. “I’m going to talk to Peter Carter-Pirie,” he wrote to me, “for his advice on sailing the Patagonian channels. I’ll have his words of wisdom waiting for you
Poste Restante
in Antigua, with copies to Panama. Betty and I send best wishes to the lady from Kalama-zoo, that is if you’re still talking to each other!” I could almost hear David’s evil chortling as he wrote that sentence.

I took the charts back to
Stormchild
where I planned to spend the afternoon studying the awful coast where the Genesis community had apparently taken shelter. I had
Stormchild
to myself, for Jackie had taken the boat’s folding bicycle to explore the nearby countryside and to look for shops where she could buy galley supplies. I had also instructed her to buy herself some summer clothes, for the weather was stifling and she could not go on wearing her shapeless sweaters and capacious trousers. I spread the Patagonian charts in
Stormchild’s
cockpit, over which I had rigged a white cotton awning, then settled down with a tall jug of Bloody Marys.

I discovered the Archipelago of Christ’s Blood to be a tortured group of islands some two hundred miles north of Puerto Natales, which was where the settlements of Tierra del Fuego began. I traced my finger northward from Puerto Natales, across a tangle of islands, fjords, channels, and glaciers, and noted the odd mixture of place names. Some were English, legacies of the great naval explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; thus there was an Isla Darwin, a Nelson Straits, an Isla Duque de York, and an Isla Victoria. The majority of the names, naturally enough, were Spanish; some pious, like the Isla Madre de Dios, and some ominous, like the Isla Desolacion, but a good number of German names were also salted among the Anglo-Spanish mix; I found a Puerto Weber, the Canal Erhardt, the Isla Stubbenkammer and the Monte Siegfried; just enough Teutonic names to record how many hopeful people had emigrated from Germany to Chile’s bleak and inhospitable coast.

None of the charts marked von Rellsteb’s
finca,
but of the score of islands which made up the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo only one seemed large enough to sustain a ranch. That island bore the ominous name of Isla Tormentos, the Isle of Torments, and I wondered if it had been so named by shipwrecked sailors who had suffered on its inhospitable coasts. The long Pacific shore of the Isle of Torments was shown as a stretch of gigantic cliffs, pierced by a single fjord that reached so deep into the island it almost slashed Isla Tormentos in half. The opposite shore of the island was far more ragged than the ocean-facing cliffs; the eastern coast was a cartographer’s nightmare, for it looked as though the island had been raggedly ripped from the rest of the archipelago to leave a tattered, scattered, and shattered litter of rocks and islands and shoals, which, in turn, were all navigational hazards within the forbiddingly named Estrecho Desolado, the Desolate Straits. The Patagonian coast was thickly printed with such depressing names, but the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo seemed to have more than its fair share of forbidding nomenclature, suggesting that sailing its labyrinthine channels would be hard and dangerous work. I traced the difficult course of the Desolate Straits to find they were not true straits at all, but rather a blind sea loch that ran uselessly into the heartland of the Isle of Torments.

I was distracted from these dispiriting researches by Jackie’s noisy return. She came laden with string bags that were crammed with papayas, avocados, tomatoes, leeks, pineapples, cabbages, bunches of radishes, and the island’s small, good-tasting potatoes. She was clearly delighted with the Canary Islands. “I got talking to this Dutch lady, who’s on one of the boats moored by the wall over there, and she speaks Spanish and she talked to the lady in the shop, and she told us that everything in the shop was grown organically. Everything! Isn’t that just great, Tim?”

“It’s absolutely astonishingly terrifically wonderful,” I said with an utter lack of enthusiasm. “Did you buy some organic meat for your organic skipper?”

“Yeah, sure. Of course I did.” She produced a cellophane pack, which held a very scrawny portion of tired-looking chicken, then dived enthusiastically down the main companionway with her purchases. “Chicken’s OK, isn’t it? They had rabbits, too, but I really couldn’t bring myself to buy a dead bunny rabbit, Tim. I’m sorry.” She shouted the apology up from the galley where she was evidently storing the food into lockers.

“Did the dead bunnies have their paws on?”

There was a pause, then her small, wedge-shaped face frowned at me from the foot of the companionway. “I didn’t look. Why? Is it important?”

“If the paws are still on the carcass, then it probably is rabbit,” I said, “but if the paws are missing, then it’s a pretty sure bet you’re looking at a dead pussycat.”

A heartbeat of silence. Then, “No!”

“Cat doesn’t taste bad,” I said with feigned insouciance. “It depends on how well the family fed the pussy, really. The ones fed on that dry cat food taste like shit, but the others are OK.”

“Gross me out!” But she laughed, then went back to her chores. She began singing, but her voice faded as she went forward to her own cabin. While we were in port I had taken over the stern cabin to give us both some privacy. At sea I could collapse onto a saloon sofa, but in port it was more difficult to preserve mutual modesty if I was sprawled in the boat’s main living space.

Silence settled on the boat, and I guessed Jackie was resting after the excitement of discovering organic stick-insect food in the middle of the Atlantic. I sipped my Bloody Mary and looked back to the charts of the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo. I assumed that if the von Rellsteb
finca
was indeed on the Isla Tormentos, then it must be built on the tangled eastern coast, facing the Desolate Straits, for in the nineteenth century, when the estate wanted to take its fleeces to market, or to ship its quarried limestone to the world, it would doubtless have used coastal sailing vessels to carry the produce north to Puerto Montt. Such ships could never have found shelter on the ocean-fronting western coast, so I could safely assume that the settlement, if it was on the Isla Tormentos, must stand on the eastern shore, where, if the old charts were accurate, several bays looked promising as possible harbors.

“Tim? What do you think?” Jackie’s oddly coy voice startled my somnolent researches. She had appeared on deck, but instead of using the main companionway she had climbed through the forward hatch into the bright sunlight of
Stormchild’s
foredeck. I looked up from the Estrecho Desolado to blink at the sudden brilliance of the tropical daylight, in which, to my considerable surprise, a very shy Jackie Potten was standing in a newly bought bikini. “You don’t like it,” she responded anxiously to my half second of silence.

“I think it’s very nice,” I said with clumsy inadequacy, and I knew I was not referring to the bikini, which was yellow and more or less like any other bikini I had ever seen, but to Jackie herself, who was unexpectedly revealed as sinuous and shapely, and I had to look quickly down at the charts as though I had noticed nothing out of the ordinary. “I hope you bought some good suntan lotion.”

“I did. Yes. Lots.” She sounded very chastened, and I guessed she had never worn anything as daring as a bikini before. “The Dutch lady made me buy it,” Jackie explained. “She said it was silly to wear too many clothes in the tropics. I’ve bought some shorts and a skirt as well,” she added hurriedly, “because the lady in the shop said that it’s kind of respectful to look pretty decent in the town, but that the bikini’s OK on the beaches or on board a boat. Is it really OK?” She asked very earnestly.

“Yes,” I said very truthfully, “it really is OK.” She needed still more reassurance. “It’s a very, very nice swimsuit,” I said inadequately, “and you look terrific,” and the realization that I had spoken the truth was suddenly very embarrassing because Jackie was only a year or so older than my Nicole, and I also realized that I was blushing, so I looked hurriedly down at my charts and tried to imagine the speed of the winds funneling through the Estrecho Desolado, but somehow I could not concentrate on winds and tides and currents. I looked back to the foredeck, but Jackie was lying down, hidden from me by the thick coils of halyards that hung from the cleats at the base of the mainmast. I sighed and shut my eyes. I told myself that bringing her on this voyage was a mistake, that it had always been a mistake, and that now it suddenly threatened to be an even bigger mistake, because I could feel the temptation to make a damn bloody great fool of myself over some crumpet from Kalamazoo.

So I poured myself a great drink instead.

We waited for the winds to take us away. My birthday came, and Jackie had somehow discovered its date and solemnly presented me with a book of Robert Frost’s poetry that she had miraculously discovered in a secondhand bookshop in Las Palmas, and that night she served me a birthday dinner of rabbit stew, the cooking of which was a real triumph of friendship over conviction, and she invited the Dutch woman, who had helped her shop, and whose boat was moored nearby, to join us with her husband. The four of us sat round a dining table under the cockpit’s awning, and three of us drank wine until, at last, Jackie decided that she would not die if she tried it too, after which four of us drank wine and told tall stories of far seas and I felt the subtly pleasurable flattery of being mistaken for Jackie’s lover.