Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (38 page)

The tulips open their mouths and say doh
Misha took this problem back to Hamish for analysis, and he, considering the aggressive brilliance of the tulips in their beds, suggested that the line should read:

The tulips open their mouths and shout doh
If his suggestion was accepted, he received no acknowledgement.

Susan attained 4th grade, Martin 2nd. We acquired another kitten, which the children insisted on naming Tany-Bwlch, after the little railway station on the abandoned Welsh slate line. God knows what the neighbours thought when they ran about calling for it. I worked on
Coromandel!,
finishing the first draft in December. The Book of the Month Club chose
Bhowani Junction
for distribution to their members in March 1954. A little later the British Book Society also chose it, and I felt justified in trading in our 1950 Plymouth for a 1954 Dodge convertible.

I had time on my hands, and Helen Strauss arranged for me to talk with Cal Whipple, the assistant editor of
Life International.
Cal asked me if I would be interested in doing a piece on Cape Horn, then suddenly returned to strategic importance because the Navy's new atomic carrier, the U.S.S.
Forrestal,
could not get through the Panama Canal. For the first time since 1914 the Horn passage would have to be used by American warships travelling between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the U.S.A. Cal was enthusiastic, for sailing was his hobby and Joshua Slocum and Erskine Childers among his gods. I also am a romantic, and my head at once filled with images of China clippers plunging through monstrous seas, the Horn dim on the port bow and the blue-nosed skipper bellowing 'Let out that reef in the mizzen royals Mister Mate!'

'I'll go,' I said, pretending to ignore the pittance that
Life International
paid for such chores. Followed a flurry of letters to the Chilean Ambassador in Washington, an hour's instruction in how to work a Leica (camera and instruction provided gratis by Helen Taylor), on March 14 southward-ho, a couple of days conferring and explaining in Santiago and Punta Arenas, and here I was, supercargo on the Chilean patrol vessel
Lautaro.
She was an ex-U.S. Auxiliary Tug, All Services, of 805 tons, 143 feet long, with a crew of about 45. The Chileans had mounted a small gun on the forecastle, and 20mm. Oerlikons on each flank of the bridge. The captain was LieutenantCommander Patricio Carvajal — short, clean-cut, darkly good-looking, the very picture of a youngish officer of the Royal Navy. He had been a little reserved with me at first, but the ice was melting as the weather grew colder. First Lieutenant Pedro Fierro was tall and vaguely saturnine. The poor wretch had to give up his cabin to me and now shared with the sub., Jaime Germain, an irrepressible young man of about twenty. The ship was on a routine southward patrol from Punta Arenas, the southernmost city in the world. Its first task was to re-supply the crew of the weather station and lighthouse on the Diego Ramirez Islands, seventy-five miles south-west of Cape Horn. My job was to get an insight into the area, find out what it had meant in the past and what it might mean now, and pass it on to the readers of
Life International.

The geography of the area is intricate; but as a generalization, a glance at the map will show that though the mainland of America ends at Cape Froward, close-knit islands small and large continue south-eastward for another 200 miles. One of the islands — Tierra del Fuego — is huge; and others, such as Navarino and Hoste, are large; but most, including Horn Island — the southern point of which is the Cape — are small. The channels between are sometimes broad and straight, more often complex, sharply angled, unmarked and unlighted, and even in bright sunshine extremely dangerous; but the dominant weather is rain, storm, and fog. The best known of the big channels is the 300-mile-long V-shaped passage from ocean to ocean named after the first European to see this land, Ferdinand Magellan. He reached the eastern end of the strait on October 21, 1520, and named the low headland there the Cape of the 10,000 Virgins. He then passed through and on November 18 entered the Pacific Ocean near the Evangelistas Rocks, and sailed on to his death in the Philippines.

Fifty years later Captain Francis Drake followed the furrows of Magellan's keels through the strait, entering the Pacific on September 6, 1578. He was then struck by a gale which blew him south down the coast, and then actually back eastward into the strait between Antarctica and Cape Horn, though he saw neither. This reach of water, 500 miles wide and the stormiest in the world, was later named Drake Strait.

More Spaniards and British — Sarmiento, Cavendish, and others — followed; but the next important discovery was made by the Dutchmen Jacob Lemaire and Willem Schouten. In order to protect the position of the Dutch East India Company the Dutch sovereign had ruled that only the Company's ships (among Dutch vessels) could use the Magellan Strait when on passage to or from the Spice Islands (Java, Bali, Celebes, etc.). Lemaire and Schouten determined to circumvent the edict by finding a way from ocean to ocean farther south, although many sailors of the time said there was no such passage — that the land south of the Magellan Strait was joined to Antarctica. But Hawkins had believed there was a way, and Drake's adventures in the storm pointed to the same conclusion. So the two Dutchmen sailed from Texel in the ship
Concordia,
of Horn, Holland, on June 14, 1615. On May 29, 1616, they rounded the southernmost tip of land of the southernmost American island and named it after their home town — Horn. Weeks later they reached the first Dutch East India Company outpost in the Spice Islands and reported they had found a new way thither. They were naturally thrown into jail as liars.

When the rumour that Drake Strait was an open passage reached Spain, the king sent out two caravels under Nodal to investigate. These two tiny ships sailed in 1618, discovered a small group of islands seventy-five miles southwest of the Horn, named them after the expedition's navigator, Diego Ramirez, and returned to Spain without losing a man after a voyage of nine months.

Since the Spaniards brought back most of their American gold by an overland trip at Panama, the Drake and Magellan straits were used mainly by British, Dutch, and French men-of-war, by privateers and pirates, and gradually by men of science. Anson went round in his great circumnavigation of 1740. Carteret, Foul-Weather Jack Byron (the poet's uncle), Kerguelen, Bougainville, and Cook all passed here. Bligh passed as sailing master under Cook, but when in command of the
Bounty
on the expedition which ended in mutiny, he could not make the passage. After two months striving against gales and head-winds he turned back and headed for Tahiti clear round the world in the other direction.

In the 19th century the Horn passage first came into major use as a sea lane, being used by wool and tea clippers from Australia and China, American emigrants to California, and indeed much other traffic of the expanding nation. The Magellan Strait was less and less used, for it did not offer enough sea-room for the bigger, faster ships; but the Royal Navy had thoroughly surveyed the whole area in the 1820s and 1830s. Most of the work was done by the 10-gun brig
Beagle,
Captain Fitzroy. On the second expedition he too carried a supercargo: a young scientific observer called Charles Darwin. Another ocean-to-ocean passage about halfway between the Magellan Strait and Cape Horn was charted and named after the ship — the Beagle Channel.

The great days were few, for the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Point lessened the Horn's importance, the completion of the Suez Canal hastened its decline, and the building of the Panama Canal finished it off. After the last grain clippers scudded eastbound past the Horn in 1939 it saw no one but a few explorers, warships, solitary yachtsmen, and seal hunters.

As so often elsewhere, the white man drove the original inhabitants of the area to extinction. The Ona lived on the mainland and in Tierra del Fuego; it was from their fires that the first Spaniards named the big island Land of Fire
— Fuego.
In due course someone noticed that the land and climate were suitable for sheep ranching. The Ona tried to prevent the theft, and were duly hunted like animals and killed off. None now remain.

The Alcaluf were called the Canoe Indians. They inhabited the islands, channels, and bays up the west coast from the Beagle Channel northward. It was probably Alcalufs about whom Darwin wrote in a famous passage:

While going one day on shore near Wollaston island, we pulled alongside a canoe with six Fuegians... (they) were quite naked, and even one full-grown woman was absolutely so. It was raining heavily, and the fresh water, together with the spray, trickled down her body. In an-other harbour, not far distant, a woman, who was suckling a recently-born child, came one day alongside the vessel, and remained there out of mere curiosity, whilst the sleet fell and thawed on her naked bosom, and on the skin of the naked baby!... At night five or six human beings, naked and scarcely protected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate, sleep on the wet ground coiled up like animals. Whenever it is low water, winter or summer, night or day, they must rise to pick shell-fish from the rocks; and the women either dive to collect sea-eggs, or sit patiently in their canoes, and with a baited hair-line without any hook, jerk out little fish.

Today the Chilean Navy looks after a settlement of a few Alcaluf at Puerto Aysen, but their culture is to all intents dead.

The Yahgan lived south of Tierra del Fuego, and were wiped out mainly by the kindly efforts of the missionaries who, disapproving of their nakedness, gave them blankets to wear. The blankets came from measles patients and had not been disinfected. To such as the Yahgan, measles is a fatal disease, and in 1954 there was only one reputedly pure-blooded Yahgan left alive.

At the dingy damp museum of the Silesian Fathers in Punta Arenas I had seen a few relics of these unhappy people. They had been big and handsome, and had well adapted their lives to their hard environment. Sometimes they went naked and sometimes they wore guanaco capes or lovely cloaks of rat skins or penguin pelts. I wished I could have seen them as Darwin saw them, but they were gone, all except that lone old Yahgan woman; and I felt that the purpose of the museum, rather than to mourn a vanished race, was to show that it had not been worth preserving.

The
Lautaro
plunged into the Magdalena Channel, and the light strengthened in the north-east. It was inexplicably strange to have the light coming from the north. We threaded down calmer passages, where mountains clothed with beech forest swept down to the water's edge. Snow whitened the trees, 1,000 feet up; a little higher, clouds hid the tops. Squalls rushed at us, buffeted the ship, and passed on without warning or leave. We faced the long stretch of Cockburn Passage, with the wind dead ahead at Force 6, and the
Lautaro
began to pitch heavily. Hail storms swept the deck and churned up the strait astern.

The wind increased to Force 8. At the mouth of the passage, for a couple of miles, we entered the Southern Ocean. The waves ran twenty feet high, dark grey-blue, foam-capped, rolling endlessly in from the south-west. The little grey ship rose, plunged, lurched. Cormorants and seagulls swept past, banking in the wind, to fetch up astern and dip into our wake. We turned south to enter Brecknock Passage and the seas hit us broadside on. I watched the roll gauge on the rear bulkhead of the bridge, by the chart desk: it recorded 20 degrees each way. Below decks there was a continuous clangour of sound. We passed into the lee of Astrea Island and at once the sound and motion ceased. Behind I saw the massive sea breaking against the islands and rocks in the mouth of the Passage. Spray burst a hundred feet in the air and a veil of white water blew across the face of Aguirre Island.

At 4 p.m. we entered Whaleboat Sound. (Here in 1827 Indians stole the
Beagle's
whaleboat.) Seaweed floated in yellow ropes like witches' hair, flat and long and dank. Germain, on watch, scanned the chart as though his life depended on it, for it did: some of these long seaweed locks had been torn loose in the ocean, and were floating free; others were growing from a rock close below the surface, and the weed might be 200 feet long; so the rock could be... where? Some of the rocks were marked on the chart, most were not. The air temperature was 43 degrees. Diego Ramirez, our destination, reported low barometer there, and wind Force 7. If these conditions held we would not be able to land supplies for them in our boats.

At half past six we anchored in Puerto Engaño — a stark little bay sheltered by a low island. I was wearing thick wool underpants, heavy trousers, Viyella shirt, wool sweater, windjacket, and duffel coat, but I wasn't warm. After dinner in the tiny wardroom we played liar dice, and I taught them a form we played in the Indian Army, which they found more exciting than theirs. We talked, too, mainly about Argentina, which was extremely unpopular with all Chileans I ever spoke to. The seeds of the antipathy lay in past and present frontier disputes, but even if there had been none such, Chileans would still have regarded the Argentinians as a bunch of unstable and bombastic sabre-rattlers. At this time Peron was still in power, but his throne was shaky.

I went to my bunk, and lay there a while, hearing the steel murmur of the anchored ship, and thinking that it was these people, Chileans and Argentinians, Ona and Alcaluf, Fitzroy and Darwin, and the blue-nosed skippers, who made the texture of Cape Horn; but what would they matter to the U.S.S.
Forrestal,
hence to my article? I must find a way.

Next day, March 22, we weighed anchor at 7 a.m. and steamed on down the north-west arm of the Beagle Channel in cloud, hail and rain, but not much wind and that from astern. Many dolphins followed us on both quarters and Mono, the shaggy ship's dog of indeterminate but multiple breeding, dashed from side to side barking at them. At 11 a.m. Patricio Carvajal had all the weapons fired for practice (and, I think, in the hope that an Argentine spy was lurking in the seaweed) — the gun with solid shot and the Oerlikons with tracer. Diego Ramirez reported a rising barometer and a south-west wind, the conditions we needed to land the stores. Patricio decided to go straight to Wulaia, a small settlement on Navarino Island, and thence to Diego Ramirez if the weather held. Down in that farther south the weather was king. Fierro told me that the lighthouse on the Evangelistas Rocks, at the western mouth of the Magellan Strait, is sometimes inaccessible for forty-five days on end. I believed him, for every day I had studied the reports we received from various lighthouses and weather stations. Whatever the rest had to say, Evangelistas always reported Wind Force 8, and Sea
Gruesa
or
Boba
(Heavy or Very Heavy).