Tramp Royale (22 page)

So we compromised her way and I did not regret the choice. The drive is spectacular and exciting. The road is very narrow, barely two cars wide, filled with hairpins and blind corners, and engineered like logging track. It leads through lovely suburban home districts, parks, and virgin tropical forest, past waterfalls and canyons that got me to thinking of Coleridge and
Kubla Khan.
I thought about them still more when we stopped at a restaurant half way up and discovered that the restaurant grounds included a labyrinth grotto that wandered almost endlessly around the mountain-an enchanted place of silence and cool moss and dim, religious light.

The climb was very steep and our ears began to pop. Ticky dug out chewing gum and gave me a piece to relieve the discomfort. We had with us the English lady with whom we had first teamed in Montevideo. She was unattached, a widow, and was good company once she was convinced that we did not sleep in our boots; we had formed the habit of inviting her to go ashore with us. Ticky now offered her a stick of gum.

She accepted it gingerly. "What do I do with it?"

"Just chew it. It will help your ears to adjust to the altitude," Ticky assured her.

"What happens if I swallow it?"

We assured her that every American child had swallowed a piece or two without any ill effects. "Chewing gum is a custom we learned from the South and Central American Indians. It's quite harmless."

I think she tried it rather than risk offending us-she was in all respects a lady. But I am not sure she liked it.

Cars cannot go quite to the top of Corcovado; there are a hundred-odd steps up to the foot of the Christ statue. We climbed them very slowly, as the heat and humidity were bad even on the mountaintop. But the view was worth a much harder climb; we had the great bay spread around us, the great city in our laps. But I balk at describing it. I can think of three city vistas in North America which deserve to be classed with it: San Francisco Bay from the Top o' the Mark, New York from the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, and Los Angeles County from Mount Wilson. The view of New York is equal in interest; none of the three is equal in beauty.

With that I will leave it. Go see it for yourself. Put it at the head of your "someday" list.

The Christ statue is impressive and huge, but as statuary it is a stylized scarecrow, not in the same class with the Christ of the Andes, which is worthy of Michelangelo. It is so posed and simplified as to appear as a cross from the city, rather than as a human shape; to that end it is very effective.

The trip down was even wilder than the trip up. Despite the long drive there was still an hour or so before we were required to be back aboard ship so we had the driver drop us on Avenida Rio Branco, the main shopping street, at the foot of which the
Ruys
was tied. Downtown Rio is not too much to my taste. Basically it is no worse than other big cities and in some respects is better, in neatness and general appearance. Rio Branco, for example, although a skyscraper canyon of a street, is edged with trees right downtown. But city crowds are bad enough at any time; in oppressive heat I find it easy to hate all humanity.

For once Ticky felt too dragged down to shop; her bounce had melted down in the heat. We looked in a few shop windows and I noticed that Rio named streets the way other South American cities did-the 1st of March intersected the 7th of September at a corner of 15th of November Square, also there was a President Woodrow Wilson Avenue, a Buenos Aires Street, and a Uruguay Street all in that one neighborhood. We saw citizens patiently lining up in queues two and three blocks long for the privilege of a seat to get out of the city at the end of a difficult day. Rio is wonderful but they should throw a dome over the whole city and air-condition it in toto-this should not be too hard for people with the energy to build this wonderland in spite of the climate.

We found the flower market, big as a general farmer's market in most cities, and saw orchids too numerous to guess the number. But we did not find a green orchid which was what we wanted. After that we looked in on one of the many fine jewelers, "H. Stern" it was. Rio is the place for amethysts, aquamarines, and topazes; they are magnificent and so cheap that samples are given away to visitors. I risked letting Ticky go in because she does not really care for most jewelry. She has simple tastes and even diamonds leave her cold; all she wants is emeralds, nice big squarecut ones-and Colombia is the place for emeralds, not Brazil.

The ship was an easy walk down the street, provided we took it slowly and avoided sunstroke. But the weather shifted gears and we made it to the ship just in time to be soaked to the skin in the last two hundred yards.

VII
The Farthest Place

There was a feeling of excitement in the
Ruys
after we left Rio, caused by the possibility that we might receive radio orders to turn aside and make an unscheduled call, a stop at the most remote port in the world.

The world is conceded to be a small place these days, with airlines straddling the oceans, with boats and trains and buses linking No Plumbing, Kentucky, to No Hope, New Zealand. No place is more than a week away from the nearest airline ticket office, plus a possible day by bus or train, or at the most three days for some South Pacific islands.

Is there any really remote place left? Behind the Iron Curtain? A political barrier, not a physical one. The North Pole? The North Pole needs traffic lights these days to keep the Russian patrol planes from bumping into our own. Antarctica? Yes, but Admiral Byrd's continent is uninhabited; I had in mind places where people live. There are a number of places very hard to reach which are unfit for human habitation; that is why there is no transportation to them. What is the most remote
settlement
in the world?

There is an Indian village in the Grand Canyon that is almost never visited by outsiders. But you can make it in two days from New York, by airline, by hired car, and by hired mule. There are pygmy villages deep in the Congo, but safari companies will outfit you and provide professional guides. One way or another almost any inhabited spot can be reached by recognized commercial means. But there is one place left on earth which has long been settled and has a recognized, established government which cannot be reached by any regular means whatever, but only through lucky chance.

It is Tristan da Cunha, a British colony in the South Atlantic, almost precisely midway between Antarctica, South America, and Africa. It is 1500 miles from the nearest land, St. Helena, a spot itself so remote that it was picked as a safe prison for Napoleon Bonaparte after he crushed out of Elba.

There is
no
way to buy a ticket to Tristan. No South Sea island is so hard to reach, so hard to leave, so far from other inhabited land. It is the most remote settled spot on this planet. The
Ruys
was being considered for a special stop there because the government meteorologist and radio operator stationed there had been waiting seven months since the end of his three-year tour of duty for opportunity to get himself, his wife, and baby back to the mainland-any mainland.

It meant adding nine hundred miles and about three days to the voyage from Rio to Cape Town, but there was opportunity to pick up fifty tons of frozen lobster tails there for Cape Town; most of the great cost of detouring a big ship could be charged against pay cargo. But the real question was whether the stop could be made at all. Tristan has no harbor of any sort. Sheer cliffs face the sea on all sides; at their feet are narrow beaches. A ship must anchor off shore and send in small boats. But dense fogs, fierce winds, and mountainous seas are common diet there and whole gales, with winds of seventy-five miles an hour or more, blow up without warning from the subarctic regions below it.

For several days after we left Rio the common subject in the ship was the latest radio weather report from Tristan da Cunha. Would the Captain risk it? Or would we turn aside and go on to Cape Town? No company agent could order him to attempt it; he must decide for himself whether the bet was worth taking-not so much risk to the ship, for a ship as big as the
Ruys
would not be risked for all the lobster tails in the South Atlantic, nor to help a family (safe where they were) to get home. The risk was something on the order of $10,000 in ship's operating costs, a fairly big gamble to take on very treacherous weather against the chance of a modest profit.

We discovered presently from radio reports that the islanders were even more excited at the prospect than we were. No ship the size of the
Ruys
had ever called there in all the history of the island. Any ship at all was a great event, but this was the greatest thing in the memory of the oldest inhabitant. The colony was preparing to welcome us in every way that they could.

About two days before we were to arrive Captain Verwijs decided to take the bet-subject to the possibility of pulling out at the last minute and accepting his losses if the weather turned sour.

We all got up early on landfall morning. The Captain must have been living right and saying his prayers; the sky was clear and brilliant, the ocean was blue and calm, Chamber of Commerce weather. Tristan was a great, flat cone in the distance, a textbook volcano. The two other volcanic rocks in the group, Nightingale and Inaccessible, both uninhabited, were on the horizon. We anchored a mile off shore opposite the one settlement-Edinburgh, known simply as "The Settlement"-in water so calm that the ship did not roll at the hook and so clear that we could see schools of fish twenty, thirty, fifty feet down.

The Chinese crew, all who were not on duty, promptly dropped lines out of every porthole on the lower decks. The Chinese ran their own mess and were paid their rations by the company in cash; they fished at every opportunity. But this was something extraordinary; a hook hardly had time to get wet. Shortly passengers joined in the sport-if it can be called sport to get a large bucketful of fish in a few minutes.

The entire able-bodied adult male population of Tristan swarmed aboard. There are only two hundred and seventy-six men, women, and children in the colony; about eighty of these are men old enough and young enough to handle pulling boats in the surf. The oldsters, the youngsters, and the women had to be content with a view of the wonder ship from afar.

They had a rummage-sale appearance in their dress; store-boughten clothes are scarce and precious on the island. Most of them wore home-knitted long heavy white woolen stockings and home-made leather moccasins. A few had shoes for such special occasions. Save for their footgear they looked like anyone else.

But their manner was different. The difference is hard to describe without sounding snottily supercilious since "childlike" is the word that comes most easily to mind. But they are not childlike, not morons, not savages, but they are people who have been out of touch with the rest of the human race, save for rare visits from passing ships, for generations.

Their isolation would have been only a little more nearly perfect had their ancestors moved to Mars. Whatever the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have done to us has not been done to them. Wars, psychoanalysis, mass production, traffic, atomics, Marxism, airplanes, female emancipation, Hollywood, Kaiserism, suffragettes, paved roads and automobiles, market crash and depression, Sex Appeal and "It" girls, ENIAC-these things
never happened.

We are closer to Benjamin Franklin than we are to these people. Although the good doctor was born two and a half centuries ago and knew none of the things listed above, he was up to his ears at all times in the same continuing struggle we are now in, whereas these islanders seceded from it. They have come very close to resigning from the human race, both culturally and biologically; they have been a separate breed and a separate culture for more than a century.

It was very hard for us to talk with them. We shared the same language, English, and their accent and idiom was not as difficult for American ears as, for example, Yorkshire; what we lacked was common experience. A detective in São Paulo could tell us, without language, that he was watching for pickpockets; we both knew what pickpockets were. We shared with the detective a common culture, Western and urban; lack of language was a mere nuisance to be circumvented.

But with these islanders, although our language included theirs (their vocabulary is, for obvious reasons, quite limited), there was very little that could be said with it. We could ask direct questions about simple things-boats, sheep, weather, potatoes, fish. They would answer, readily enough, in simple declaratives-and there the conversation would bog down. Discussion was out of the question.

Chief Repetto, the headman of the island, had arranged for boats to take us ashore. The Captain had not granted permission for this and, while we awaited his pleasure, the breakfast call was sounded. As the islanders had not eaten either, some of the passengers took them in to breakfast as guests; Ticky and I took the headman to our table.

It was a painful meal, at least for us. We tried to bridge the strangeness with social chit-chat, but it was impossible. When I found myself asking for the third time how many people there were on the island, I gave up. But I do not think that Chief Repetto was shy and I think he enjoyed himself-I hope he did. The islanders seldom have meat to eat; the breakfast menu of the
Ruys
was rather lavish, including ham, bacon, several sorts of sausage, and a variety of cold cuts. The Chief started at the top of the page and ate stolidly down to the bottom, neglecting nothing.

To the disappointment of all of us word came from the Captain after breakfast refusing permission for passengers to go ashore. I felt a sharp pain in the pocketbook: the loneliest island looked like a sure-thing slick-magazine article provided I could get ashore and take a few pictures. But the Captain expressed his regrets and explained that his decision was forced by the necessity of being ready to up-anchor and run, with no delay, in case of a shift in the weather . . . to which we had no logical counter argument.