cocaine

1. a exotic derivative of the coca leaf of South America, especially Colombia and Peru;

2. a white corrosive substance that can (a) that cause your boat to be ripped apart even if you don't have any or (b) cause your boat to be confiscated and you thrown in jail if you do;

3. a trading staple of many islands in the Caribbean region.

CUT TO: A quiet, care-worn marina somewhere in the Bahamas.  The names of people and places have been changed to protect the guilty.  So has the name of the manatee.

As manatees go, Buzzy wasn’t special.  He was six feet long and as drop-dead gorgeous as… well, as drop-dead gorgeous as any other out-of-place Florida manatee you may have seen.  But setting up home in a marina and scoring cabbage leaves from itinerant live-aboards was unheard of around Pot Hole Cay. ‘Buzzy’ soon became the centre of attention.  He would put in an appearance, wallow around a bit and suckle on the end of a fresh-water hose.  Holiday-makers in sad shorts would gasp ‘Gee!  Ain’t he cute?’ and treat him to a vegetarian lunch.  However, the sight of a manatee snuffling down the last fresh onion before the arrival of the long-overdue mail boat brought tears to my eyes.

If Buzzy had earned his keep by eating some of the weed growing on the anti-fouling I might have felt differently.  I’d been stuck in the run-down marina so long, waiting for parts, that even the no-see-ums were beginning to amuse me.  Then things changed.

One morning, half an hour before dawn, Buzzy and I were rudely woken by a deafening whine.  It certainly wasn’t the marina's delsalinater plant – that had stopped working long since.  I turned over and tried to get back to sleep.  When the boat started to rock and jerk hard at the shore-lines, I was on deck in seconds.  Something big and black was hovering a few feet above the mast.  My god, I thought, I’m in the Bermuda Triangle!  I looked up and was suddenly transfixed in the beam of an immensely powerful light…

It was the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA.  I clambered onto the coach roof and shone my big light back at theirs.  They retaliated by hovering the CH-46 helicopter even lower and I had to grab the lazy-jacks to avoid joining Buzzy in the drink.  In the distance, a Coastguard C-130 Hercules circled low and slow.  A smaller Blackhawk helicopter made faster passes, its searchlight sweeping the shallow creeks. Now armed Men-in-Black ran through the length of the marina, shining flashlights under the crumbling concrete docks.  Maybe they’d come to serve a warrant on the manatee?  Maybe Buzzy’s tourist visa had expired?  But no.  Amidst all this drama stood an unconcerned woman from a nearby Catalina 42 feeding the aquatic mammal a crisp salad breakfast.  What dressing would you like with that, Buzzy?  Thousand Island maybe?

M-16 assault rifles at the ready, the Men-in-Black closed in on the skiffs tied up by the dockside liquor store and, before long, a voice on VHF Channel 22A announced to the circling Coastguard plane that ‘the bodies are in custody’.  Sure enough, four ‘bodies’ were sitting on the ground, hands cuffed behind their backs, looking glumly up at the troops from the Bahamian Defence Force who had been delivered with such great son et lumière by the DEA choppers and the American tax-payer.  I recognised the ring-leader, the youngest brother of a family whose history went back through rum-running and embargo-busting to piracy.  A bespectacled American agent with ‘Police’ emblazoned across the back of his flack jacket asked the nocturnal traders a few cursory questions before they were rushed to the airstrip in a couple of jeeps.  The US Coastguard Hercules headed off for a hearty eggs-and-steak breakfast on New Providence Island while the DEA choppers made course towards their ultra-secret base at  NATO’s AUTEC airfield near Fresh Creek on Andros.

Exhibit 1 stayed tied to the dock under the bleary eye of a young Bahamian constable armed with a pump-action shotgun older than he was.  The suspects’ boat was a ‘600’ in island parlance, a cigarette boat with three 200 hp Yamahas on the stern and packed beyond the gunn’ls with plastic jerry cans of gasoline.  Another 600 had been recovered from a nearby beach.

‘Why dey have tree outboards?’ quipped a local conch fisherman.

‘’Coz dey don’ have de space for more o’ dem, mon,’ answered the policeman.

No-one laughed except me; it was an old joke from the days when, tied alongside every berth here, was a cigarette boat of much confused ownership: ‘You could buy one for the price of a couple of Kaliks,’ Evan the barman told us.  I was having a lunchtime beer with Dave, the professional skipper from the 85ft ‘stretch’ luxury trawler flying a Cayman Island flag of convenience on the next slip.  ‘They would change hands tens times in as many weeks,’ Evan continued, ‘so whenever the Americans turned up with photographs and demanded to know who owned the boats, everyone would shrug.  How would we know, mon?’

Dave nodded in agreement: ‘Yeah, even I had a 600.’  Evan and I turned and stared at him.  ‘A couple of years ago I woke up and found a cigarette boat on my dock near Lake Worth Inlet in Florida.  I reported it to US Customs who found traces of coke all over it.’  (Dave was talking about the real thing, not the Real Thing.)  ‘Whoever had done the run from over here in the Bahamas had written the boat off as a business expense.  The profit had already been made and banked.  Customs said that if I made an offer for the boat, I could keep it.  One K got me three new 200s.’

I was still working that out by the time I got back to the boat.  The Man was waiting on the dock, his legs dangling over the side as he stared at Buzzy.  Maybe he was planning to send the manatee back to Florida, a packet strapped under each flipper?  The Man knew a thing or two about smuggling.

‘Damn stupid, Cap’n!’ was his greeting.

‘What was damn stupid?’ I asked.

‘Those guys rehearsing the operation last week – damn stupid.’  So I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed.

The story of Pot Hole Cay is the story of the Bahamas cocaine trade since the 1970s.  To the west was another cay that no longer seemed to loom large in the day-to-day life of the islands.  The stories told about it in the dockside bars were fascinating enough though.

Take the pigs for example.  According to Shelley, Grande Dame of the marina condominiums, the place was rife with wild porkers of distinctly unfriendly disposition.  She told me that a friend once went up there to ‘walk’ his hound.  Purely by coincidence, the friend was a retired undercover narcotics agent from Florida.  His dog was one of those aggressively friendly breeds -- enter a room and he’d be around your neck like a favourite old tie.  One day, Shelley’s buddy heaved the dog in his whaler and headed west.  Once they reached the beach at what we’ll call Pig Cay, the dog leaped out and shot off into the brush.  Within seconds, it gave a startled yelp and bounded back across the sand, flew into the whaler and cowered behind the spare gas tank.

It could have been a large tusker.  From time to time local boatmen would take a day off from diving for conch and go to Pig Cay armed with a 12-guage shotgun and a few solid slugs and return with the VIP guest for a hog roast.

What might have scared the wits out of Shelley’s friend’s dog might have been a pig with attitude, but it could have been a snake.  Pig Cay has lots of them.  There are non-poisonous black snakes.  There are also ‘chicken snakes’ – the black and silver fowl snake, related to the boa constrictor.  The Dock Master assured me that chicken snakes are equally harmless.  Unless, of course, you are a chicken.

‘My son-in-law killed one last week,’ he told me.  ‘It was nine feet long, even without its head.’  For fowl snakes still connected to their heads, the problem is this;  they wrap themselves around the chicken and hug it to death.  Then they swallow it whole, bones and feathers and claws.  But instead of crawling off to somewhere discreet, they just lie at the scene of the crime with the chicken in their distended belly while they digest it.  This gives the erstwhile owner of the chicken a chance to get both his revenge and a couple of spicy marinated wings.

But the wildlife was not all that was fascinating about Pig Cay.  A close examination of the chart shows that it has an airstrip.  Shelley, a long-term resident of Pot Hole Cay, told me that she once flew in from Florida with someone she disparagingly described as a ‘kind of student pilot’.  As they approached what the apprentice Cessna-jockey thought was the airstrip on Pot Hole Cay, Shelley tapped him on the shoulder.

‘You goddamned idiot!  Can’t you see the oil drums across the runway?!’  The plane suddenly lurched into the sky again and the ashen-face pilot circled the airplane for hurried ‘finals’ into Pot Hole Cay International.

A chat with The Man confirmed that Colombian Marching Powder used to be flown on ancient DC-3 Dakotas into the Pig Cay airstrip from ‘the south’ and then rushed by sub-contracted ‘600s’ to Florida’s east coast.  In those days, everyone made a lot of money.  But under pressure from Washington DC, the Bahamian government disabled Pig Cay airstrip and closed down the island, driving out the ‘narco-entrepreneurs’.  When the drug-runners left, the pigs took over the attractive real estate and the snakes moved into the smugglers’ abandoned villas and away from the pigs.

‘We call dem de Good ’Ole Days,’ explained The Man.  ‘Dat’s how I paid for de big house.’

‘And got four years in the other Big House?’ I asked.

He grinned: ‘OK, and four years in jail.  But I was just a kid then. Now I’m a respectable businessman.’  Fair enough, but I didn’t bother ask him why he'd needed the waypoints I’d programmed into his Garmin hand-held GPS a few days earlier.   The last one in the route was a few miles off Miami Beach, the equivalent to Florida's front door. Did this make me an accomplice?

The downfall of Pig Cay also spelled the end for Pot Hole Cay as a classy resort.  By all accounts, the development of the small island was no more than a means of laundering money from the Pig Cay drugs operation.  Direct and indirect beneficiaries included professional men and women, Hollywood movie actors, prominent captains of industry as well as rich sports stars.  It would be fun to name names but some of the lawyers were nothing less than media stars and I don’t fancy spending the rest of my days – and sailing budget – in court.  When the drugs profits dried up, so did the laundering and the place fell into decline.

As the sun rose on the day of the big raid on Pot Hole Marina, more light was shed on the pre-dawn drama.  The two 600s had been followed all the way from Jamaica by a high-flying DEA Night-Stalker no-see-um.   Five huge bales of ganja had been sunk on the flats for later recovery (the cops obliged with this chore the following day), but the cocaine had been dumped into the marina right outside the police inspector’s condo.

‘Lots and lots of white powder!’ his neighbour Shelley told me.  ‘It seemed to dissolve very quickly.  Does cocaine do that?’

I had no idea.  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I told her.  But it did occur to me that the high-speed smuggling runs across the Gulf Stream were far from over.  I decided the take a straw poll on the matter.  There was only one question:

Should cocaine be decriminalised?

                                    Yes                  No

Americans                   90%                10%

Bahamians                   10%                90%

 ‘Legalise it?’ laughed The Man.  ‘That would just take all de dollars outa da business, skipper.’  That would seem to explain the viewpoint of the Bahamian on the dock – well, at least some of them.  I just can’t imagine why 90% of the Americans I asked voted the other way…

 It was the highlight of an otherwise boring week waiting for a new propane sniffer and an anchor shackle to arrive from the US.  By Saturday, Buzzy was the centre of attention again.  I was told that he’d been seen racing sports-fishing boats to the cut, sticking his head out of the water and clapping his flippers.  In return for a rare Filet Mignon he would even show off his backward somersault.

“I sure wish I could get a pound of those onions,” commented an American sitting on the coaming of an aging catamaran.

While picking up provisions the day before our departure for Nassau, I bumped into The Man again.

‘Goin’ early?’ he asked.

‘On the tide, such as it is around here.’

‘You gonna get anudder wake-up call, Cap’n.  Tirty-two kees [kilos] comin’ in tonight. Dey get busted again.’

But the bust no-showed and all was quiet in Pot Hole Cay Marina as we cast off the lines and headed towards the cut, Buzzy keeping close escort off our port bow.

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Galapagos Islands and Three-in-a-Bed Sex Romps

[Read Monsoon first.]

The Galapagos Islands are the next stop after leaving the Panama Canal en route to the South Pacific.  You may have thought it was the animal wildlife that was a little curious about the Galapagos.  But that was before the German aristocracy turned up.  In the 1930s there were strange goings-on within the tiny community of Europeans on the islands – especially on Floreana.  Tabloid headlines would have splashed “Three-in-a-Bed Sex Romps on Desert Isle!” and “Sex-mad Baroness in Death Plot!”  (Alright, you and I know the Galapagos are not desert islands, but tabloid newspapers have never let the facts get in the way of a great headline.)

According to the account in my possession, there once stood a sign on the beach by the main landing-spot.  This is what was written on it:

WHOEVER YOU ARE – FRIENDS!

Two hours from here is the hacienda “Paradise”.  It is a spot where the tired traveller has the happiness to find peace, refreshment and quiet on his way through life.

Life – this small portion of eternity which is bound to a clock, is so short – so let us then be happy – let us be good!

In Paradise you only have one name – Friend!

With you we will share the salt of the sea, the vegetables of our garden and the fruit of our trees, the cold water which runs down our cliffs, and the good things friends brought us when they passed this way.

We will spend one or two moments of life with you and give you the happiness and peace that God planted in our hearts and souls when we left the restless metropolis and journeyed away to the quiet of the ages, which has spread it’s cloak over the Galapagos.

(Signed) BARONESS WAGNER-BOUSQUET.

One day in the mid-1930s a handsome young Dane stood before the sign, reading it with bemused curiosity.  It was our chum Hakon Mielche from the ketch Monsoon (see Monsoon, Vanikoro shipwreck) and he had a letter from the Governor on Chatham Island to deliver to the aforementioned Baroness.  He set off up the hill.  This is his account.

 It turned out that in the two hours mentioned in the notice one was supposed to cover exactly ten miles and the marquis gave no shadow.  It was on a large plateau scorched by the sun that I found the first signs of the presence of man.  The skeletons of a couple of wild cows lay there.  At first glance I thought that it was the work of roving wild dogs, but a closer investigation revealed that both thighs and ribs were missing from the assembly of bones, and that in the middle of the forehead there was a hole – the result of a dum-dum bullet.

 The path from the plateau was marked all along its length by perforated skills, from which one might conclude that the Baroness and her archangel lived on something other than cold water and the fruits of the tree.  The road wound on across plateaux, through passes and over rocks, and seemed as if it would never come to an end.  From the position of the sun the business had lasted too long for me already, but, finally, I did reach my journey’s end, with my tongue hanging out and a sucked lemon between my lips – if the reader can imagine such a combination.

 At the end of the path stood an unhappy and curiously out-of-place Japanese gate with “Welcome” painted on it in vulgarly large letters which bored into my eyes that were already smarting from the sun.  A donkey hee-hawed somewhere behind the gate; and there came a spirit lightly tripping over the stones – the Baroness von and zu Wagner-Bousquet and Floreana.

 I fought heroically with my sense of humour and sent it flying into the bushes with a well-aimed upper-cut before I dared look at her again.  She stood beside me, apparently not at all surprised at my coming.  She tendered me a little white hand, and we glided into Paradise, past the local St. Peter who hee-hawed his blessing behind us.

 The Baroness was small, but one could not say that she was beautiful.  In front of her swollen lids she wore strong spectacles and her mouth, though too large, was yet unable to cover her long, yellow, rabbit teeth.  [I blame the in-breeding of Europe’s aristocracy – JL]  Her hanks of hair were kept in place by means of a pink shoulder-strap around her head, and she wore a kind of baby’s rompers, like the trunks the ladies of the chorus wear when rehearsing.  She moved in that hopping manner which jockeys call a “canter”.

I cantered beside her as well as I could, till, by way of a change and to show a little personal character and independence, I tried one or two chassé steps, but unfortunately stumbled over a large lump of lava.

Such was our entry into the hacienda “Paradise”, a wooden hut set in the middle of a vegetable garden, where a powerfully-built, blond youth gave me a paw and was introduced by the Baroness as “My Baby”.

Baby looked as though he had been a gigolo in a very cheap restaurant somewhere in Berlin., W.  His eyes were a watery blue, his hair was curly and his smile much too sweet.  In private life he was Herr Rudolf Philpson of Berlin, aged 28.  A German cook, tubercular and with one foot in the grave, smiled in a sickly way from the background and brought tea.

The Baroness, Hakon learned, had been born about forty years previously in Austria.  She’d spent a lot of her youth in the Middle East where her father supervised the building of the Baghdad railway.  In Syria she met “a daring young French” air force pilot.  Then she met “Baby” – Rudolf Philpson.  “Shortly after the sky went up in flames, as the aviator was not modern enough to tolerate a lover  in his household, and a divorce was put through.”  But the lovers’ soon grew tired of Paris (as you do) and they “decided to find their way back to the bosom of nature.  They spun a globe on its pedestal and, stopped it with a finger and lo! a little, red varnished nail pointed exactly to the island of Floreana in the Galapagos Group.”  Remote the trio may have been, but not beyond the reach of the news-hounds.  In the early 1930s the story of the Baroness began to appear in newspapers throughout the world.

 A woman was supposed to have made herself ruler of the Galapagos, to have proclaimed herself Empress of the Pacific, waged war with Ecuador and with her hordes of indomitable free-booters made the waters of that sea unsafe. Even the old [London] Times fell into the trap and a Copenhagen newspaper turned it into a front page item.  Some young Greek idealists (a hundred lovers of beauty and freedom), formed a league, and offered to help her in her struggle.  There wasn’t a grain of truth in it all, but whoever the Baroness’s publicity agent was, he at any rate knew his business.

The Americans were quite mad about her.  She was the correspondent of several papers in the States, and when the millionaires’ yachts brought the curious to see the lonely Queen of Floreana she received many nice presents.

But the Baroness was not the first to “colonize” Floreana, nor was she the oddest inhabitant.  After taking tea at Paradise, Hakon headed off, more mail tucked into his satchel, to see Dr and Mrs Ritter.

[Dr Ritter] lived a couple of miles away from the Baroness and a notice at his gate said that one should call loudly once or twice before entering.  I roared like a foghorn and there was a rustling in the bushes.  Dr and Mrs Ritter were exponents of the nudist cult, but not exhibitionists.  They received you in more suitable clothing and once you had seem them you were glad.  […]

The Ritters were the first to come to the island.  They constituted the island’s ancient aristocracy and were furious with the Baroness, the parvenu, for taking away half their fame as hermits and the greater proportion of the Americans.  […]

 Ritter was a philosopher.  He was fairly small, his legs had been screwed on wrong, so that his toes pointed inwards.  His nose was long and pointed, he had watery protruding eyes and the hair of a prophet.  His disciple, Miss Dora, smiled a toothless welcome.  The couple had at their disposal only one pair of false teeth and this was Ritter’s day.

 Miss Dora wore beach pyjamas and had large, naked, black feet.  Her neck had not been washed for at least a month, and had been given a marbled effect by the passage of drops of sweat.

 Nudism is above all a healthy movement, but the Galapagos are so short of water!

 Before his exile, Dr Ritter had been a dentist in Berlin.  He had married an opera singer who had had no appreciation of subtle philosophies, and then little Miss Dora came across his path.  She understood him.  They moved together to the Galapagos, although Brunhilde would not consent to a divorce.  So now he was expecting that she would arrive one fine day on Lohengrin’s swan and demand him back.  Her longing for him would drive her to it – or so her said.

One can only hope Brunhilde turns up on a day when the good doctor has the teeth.  But after Hakon and his friends left the Galapagos, the Floreana Madness Index rose alarmingly.  The Danes only learned about the bizarre developments long after they’d returned to Copenhagen.  Hakon received a letter.

The letter was from Captain Alan Hancock who has once again visited the Galapagos in the Velero.  He had visited the colonists of “Paradise” and “Eden” [the Ritters’ place] and this time in tense excitement, for Dr Ritter had sent him a letter asking him to come as quickly as possible, as things had happened and would happen, which were too terrible to be the subject of a letter.

Hancock came, but the evening before his ship anchored in Post Office Bay the philosopher died of poisoning.  Miss Dora sat in their primitive hut, half out of her mind with fright and grief and the story she told was like the feverish fantasies of an overstrung mind.

 One evening Lorenz [the Baroness’s “cook”] had knocked at the door, been admitted and had begged to be allowed to stay.  The night before this, the Wittmer family [another group of German colonists] had been awaked by wild howls and shrieks coming from the Baroness’s property, but had not paid much attention to it as quarrels and dramatic jealousies were nothing unusual in the Baroness’s household.  Every now and again the “Pirate Queen” would simply order her big Baby to hunt the tubercular cook, who was already marked down for death, over the rocks and stones till he finally fell down and unresistingly allowed himself to be beaten, while the Baroness looked on and encouraged her gladiator with wild shrieks.  On this evening Lorenz came to the Ritters quaking all over and begged to be allowed to stay till he could get a ship to Ecuador.

According to his story, on the morning after the Wittmers had heard the wild cries, the Baroness and Baby had disappeared completely.  A yacht had put in at night, they had taken their belongings and left Lorenz to his fate.

Lorenz stayed quite a short time with the Ritters, then one day Nuggeröd, our pilot from Santa Cruz, ran into Post Office Bay in his little “Dynamit” and took him on board.  They never reached Santa Cruz, but for the next three weeks their boat was sighted from several other islands sailing now here, now there, seemingly without aim or purpose, until it disappeared completely.

Captain Hancock looked up the Wittmers, but they could not tell him anything he had not already learned from Miss Dora.  He took her away with him to the mainland and then continued his scientific investigations among the other islands.  On one small, deserted, volcanic island he found Nuggeröd and Lorenz.  They lay a short distance from the shore, their bodies dried up from the sun, but still not so unrecognisable that they could not be easily identified.  Of Nuggeröd’s native sailor there was no trace, nor could the remains of the boat be found.

Captain Hancock had to return without clearing the matter up and the Floreana mystery is today presumably still open to conjecture.  Hancock himself thinks he has built up the right solution.

In other parts of the group nothing had either been heard or seen of the mysterious yacht that was supposed to have taken off the Baroness and Baby.  Nor had news been received of these two originals from other parts of the world, although a search was made for them after Hancock had got in touch with the nearest mainland.  This brought the Captain to the conclusion that Lorenz had finally had enough of the thousand and one little tortures to which he was subjected, that his rage got the upper hand and he had murdered the pair in their sleep, burying the bodies and inventing the story of the yacht.

It is, however, possible that there was something more than jealousy and the desire for revenge at the back of the murder.

The Galapagos have always been a pirates’ nest and the air is still thick with tales of buried treasure.  Was it not possible that Lorenz overheard a conversation between the Baroness and Baby and thought that he had found out where such treasure lay buried?  That he then killed his two competitors in cold blood and came to an agreement with Nuggeröd to go treasure hunting among the islands?

That would account for the curious voyages of the Dynamit which were observed by the other settlers during those three weeks and would also explain why the three inhabitants of the boat landed on an island which otherwise had nothing of interest to offer.

Did Nuggeröd and Lorenz then quarrel about the imagined treasure and kill each other, or were they wrecked and driven ashore on the island?  If so, where is the boat and the native sailor?  It is not impossible that he stole both boat and secret and abandoned his employer to die of thirst under the merciless sun!  Then where is he now?

The whole affair is shrouded in a veil of impenetrable mystery.  Ritter could perhaps have given us the key to the puzzle, but he died the day before he should have spoken and Miss Dora kept on repeating that she did not know what it was that Ritter wanted to tell Hancock, the news that was so revolting that he could not confide it to paper.

What position did Ritter take in the matter?  How much did he know of the murder and the imagined treasure? and why must he die at such a suitable time for him or those who desired silence?

One question piles up on another, the threads grow confused, and the scattered, uncertain material that is at one’s disposal only permits of guesses.

Certainty will surely never be had unless the Baroness and Baby turn up one fine day in some other part of the world and clear Lorenz of a suspicion which undeniably rests on him.  But whatever he may have done, he has atoned for it on a block of lava under the terrible equatorial sun.

               Excerpts from “Let’s See If The World Is Round” by Hakon Mielche

William Hodge & Co Ltd, London, 1944

             (Originally published in Danish, 1938, now out of print.)

 I think Hakon missed something.  Those false teeth had something to do with it.

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Gros Islet

pron. ‘Gross-ee-LAY’.  Gros Islet is a fishing village which you pass to port as you enter Rodney Bay Lagoon, headed for St Lucia’s main, if not only marina. Once tied up you will probably be directed towards the fleshpots of the island’s main tourist area to the south, between Rodney Bay and the capital, Castries.  But if your palette fades, and you are of the right turn of mind, catch Gros Islet on a Friday night.  It’s recommended to go in a group or failing that, get a friendly taxi driver to drive you round there – and stay with you. Shortly after nightfall, the place will be heaving with locals.  Bob Marley will be modulating the walls of the pastel-painted wooden houses and the aroma of exotic cheroots will be hanging in the still air. 

A couple of blocks up from the beach you will find Mama’s Bar in the front room of Mama’s House.  Now I’d like to tell you that Mama will welcome you with a huge smile and offer you fancy expensive cocktails with umbrellas and plastic sticks that poke your eye out.  Not so.  Regardless of any frivolity that might be going on around her, Mama takes a serious view of the human condition.  Tell her you want ‘rum’ and she’ll reach under the improvised counter and produce a half bottle of bootleg dark rum.  Then say ‘mango, please’ and a carton of juice will appear.  Hand over a few dollars and you will get a couple of plastic beakers and you can mix your own Rot-gut Rum Punch.  (Forget about ice; unless Mama is now backed by the Hilton Corporation, she doesn’t have a refrigerator.)  But the main thing is to enjoy the company; fishermen, local wannabe gangsters, off duty cops and the more adventurous tourists all gravitate to Gros Islet on Friday nights.  You can even dance in the streets.

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Hazardous Marine Creatures

The purpose of this on-line tutorial is to provide cruising sailors with information about the most dangerous marine animals they are likely to encounter while sailing in tropical and sub-tropical regions.  The information provided includes a photograph, some essential facts, the threat posed by the creature and details of any first aid that should be administered.

Seafarers, especially those who live aboard their yachts, face hazards not encountered when living in some leafy suburb.  Beyond extreme weather, the first of these is the likelihood of having a close encounter with an unfamiliar marine animal that has the capability of killing you. A second problem concerns the non-availability of emergency services -- even a lifeboat or a Coastguard helicopter is unlikely to be carrying sea snake anti-venom.  

The content of the tutorial is based on material from Jack Lagan's book A B Sea: a Loose-footed Lexicon (Seafarer Books, London and Sheridan House, New York, 2003).
 

Go to the Hazardous Marine Creatures Tutorial

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Monsoon

The idea for the now long-forgotten voyage of the schooner Monsoon started in the head of a Danish school-teacher Alex Möller in the early 1930s.  Möller, the headmaster and owner of Vejlby Village School near Aarhus, organised a meeting of those friends and acquaintances he thought might be interested in sailing with him on an expedition to the South Seas.  The reaction was mixed but generally positive.  Then, to prove his his seriousness, Möller sold the school.  One of his friends, Hakon Mielche said that he was ‘caught by both feet in the birdlime’.  No, I can’t imagine what he meant, either, but in a book he wrote about the adventure, he took up the story thus.

The avalanche gained momentum.  The plan took shape.  The ivory  was jettisoned owing to a certain ignorance of the dental mysteries of elephants and the market for this raw material for piano keys and toothpicks, but the idea of the South Seas was planted more and more firmly in Headmaster Möller’s head.  He wanted to get out into the world and have a look around.

There being a distinct shortage of elephants on Nukunono, jettisoning the ivory (the group’s original source of revenue the trip) was a really smart move.  But they had other ideas.

 How far could we pay for a pleasure cruise round the world by purchasing ethnographic rarities which could be sold to museums and private collectors?  The Etnografisk Samling was, it turned out, interested in the affair, and the inspector gave us several good tips.  Later the Zoological Museum came along and its director declared that he would welcome the opportunity of extending the museum’s collection with a comprehensive exhibit of the fauna of the South Sea Islands.

Was the fauna to include one of the famed elephants of Bora Bora?  A live elephant would demand a big boat.

 One day Möller was strolling along the bank of the Frederiksholm Canal in Copenhagen – and he came across the Monsoon.  It was a case of love at first sight.  She was built forty years ago in Boulonge-sur-Mer from good French oak, and furnished with pitchpine masts made to withstand any storm – which was necessary, too, for she was intended for fishing in the North Atlantic.  Although she had led a restless existence since then and had been put to many other uses, she was still completely seaworthy.  […] 

 Then Mr Möller bought her.  If ships had tails to wag, she would have wagged hers.  She was just the ship for which he had been looking for so long – it was almost as if she had been built for the purpose.  Numerous borings and examinations from stem to stern, from the top of the mast to the keel, showed clearly enough that there was no possible doubt as to her seaworthiness.  She was towed to Erichsen & Grön’s yard, and Mr Möller, taking up residence with his family in the cabin, personally superintended the process of rejuvenation.

As the refitting progressed, Möller made a start on begging, borrowing or even buying provisions.

The results piled up on the Monsoon’s deck.  Guns, revolvers, nautical instruments, fuel oil, charts, tarpaulins and a thousand other things were willingly lent us by the parsimonious Naval Stores in such generous quantities that we began to be seriously afraid of what would happen should war break out during our absence.  A chemical factory sent us vitamins in bottle and pills, both A and B plus the whole alphabet, sufficient to last for many years; while the gifts of friends and equipment we had borrowed flowed in over the rail and filled the hold up to the brim.

A paid crew of five was taken on.  They were as character-full as the Monsoon herself.

Peter Bundaberg Thomsen became skipper.  He was engaged on the warmest of recommendations from Knud Andersen and because he was one of those real good old windjammer men whom it hurts when they see as much as the smoking chimney of one of those modern coal-buckets described in the dictionary as “steamers.”  He had sailed the seven seas, chewed salt horse on his way round the Horn and shortened many a sail in many a squall on the Tasman Sea.  […]  He sang chanteys, but would have done better not to.  His memory was such that he was excellent at forgetting what time it was twenty-four hours ago, or where he had put his foul but beloved pipe; but ask him the name of the ship that passed Cape Hatteras at four o’clock in the afternoon of 4th April, 1898, and, without blinking, he would tell you that it was the Danish barque Margaret, that she had sprung a leak on the starboard waterline three feet below the Plimsoll line, that she was carrying that-and-that sail, that the chronometer lost two seconds a week, and the wind was three points aft, strength seven, and that the master was called Olsen and drank like a fish.

Aquavit, no doubt.  Soon the day approached for Monsoon to set sail.

The Monsoon came to life.  There were sounds of whistling, hammering, cleaning and carpentering, and then came the awful day when the 35 h.p. motor had to be shipped.  That was a bit awkward.  It was something of a sacrilege – like putting steel furniture in a rococo drawing-room.  However, we had no choice.  If we didn’t want to row Monsoon half the way, the 35 h.p. would have to come to our help, for our voyage took us suspiciously near the region of calms round the equator where the wind is one day as incalculable as a woman – according to the classics – and the next week disappears altogether and goes to sleep on the horizon under the clouds drifting with the trades, and laughs at the poor hulk with its fluttering sails and cursing crew.  […]

Dr. Mortensen, an old East Indiaman made a short farewell speech and gave us a word or two of good advice for the road.  It was the first time that the idea of malaria or head hunters occurred to us properly, and the first time that the pleasant shiver of anticipation ran down out spines.  Then came good wishes, port wine, biscuits, emotional returns of thanks by Mr Möller, curious lumps in one’s throat, rapid steps up the companionway and over the bridge.  The deck was cleared, the hawsers drawn in – a bevy of white handkerchiefs – faces which became more and more indistinct.  The first waves in the bay began to splash against the bows: the sails came to life and filled; the voyage had begun.

Excerpts from Let’s See If The World Is Round by Hakon Mielche, William Hodge & Co Ltd, London, 1944 (Originally published in Danish, 1938, now sadly out of print.)

The voyage was to take them via the Salvage Islands and Tenerife, across the Atlantic to St Thomas before passing though the Panama Canal.  Then Pearl Island, the Galapagos, the Marquesas, Tahiti, Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia…  To read more about the voyage of the Monsoon, see Galapagos Islands and Vanikoro shipwreck.

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The Shadwell Prize

For many centuries the British Hydrographic Office relied upon Royal Navy officers to survey distant ports, anchorages and coastlines for inclusion in the charts and pilots they published.  If you look at the bottom right corner of British charts and the sketches in pilots (sailing directions) you will often see a credit to the work of some officer in the 18th or 19th century.

This tradition is probably less important in the era of satellite imagery, but it seems that it hasn't been forgotten.  In December 2002, Commander Tom Tulloch of the Royal Canadian Navy was awarded the Hydrographic Office's Shadwell Prize for his work in surveying little-known harbours and potential terrorist bolt-holes in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea and the Iranian Gulf.  During two tours between January 2001 and March 2002 he systematically surveyed every port entered by his ship -- and had the ship's photographer take photographs.  Cdr Tulloch then filed his reports with the British Hydrographic Office (the Canadian Hydrographic Office only covers Canadian waters).  In return, he was awarded the 'Shadwell Testimonial Prize' which was established in 1888.  Remarkably, this is the second time he has won the prize -- a unique achievement.

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A Treatise on the Astrolabe

by Geoffrey Chaucer (1391)

Was this remarkable little book the first-ever technical user manual?  Decide for yourself by reading the full version here.  (It may be relatively short, but it's too big to include on this page.)  Don't struggle to 'translate' individual sentences, but try reading it aloud and the meaning will come through.  This is a challenge for A•B•Sea's intelligent readers (ie all of them!).

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Vanikoro shipwreck

[Read Monsoon and Vanikoro Shipwreck first.]

The story of the ketch Monsoon and its crew of relentlessly cheerful Danes ends in the Western Pacific.  They are anchored in the lagoon of Vanikoro in the Santa Cruz Group. The place does not appeal and they decide to move on.

When we were still five hundred yards from the entrance there came the most unexpected fierce squall with fearful blasts of wind and heavy rain.  The waters of the lagoon were whipped into a foam in a second, and several of us rushed on deck to see what was happening.  Even below deck we had heard the clap with which the wind and the rain had struck against the ship and forced it to starboard.  It was as though a giant had hit the Monsoon with his fist.

The squall passed as quickly as it had come and everybody breathed a sigh of relief.  It was rotten luck that it came at all, but a good thing that it did not happen a little later when we were in the middle of the passage.

Sonny and I went forward to keep an eye on the channel.  Mr. Möller stood aft beside the mate and Kalle, who had the wheel; Jack stayed amidships, while the skipper was still aloft, from where he gave his orders to the man at the wheel.  The wind was slightly stronger after the squall had passed.  The wheel was put over a shade to port, so that we would be as far as possible on the weather side when we got into the narrow channel through the reef.  The next squall came when we were five yards away from the reef, more unexpected and more violent than the first.  Then events came tumbling over each other like strips of flickering film put together without rhyme or reason and wound off in mad haste.

No one who was on board will forget the minutes that followed as long as he lives.  We were then in the middle of the channel with course set a little to windward, and the hurricane-like blasts of wind exerted a tremendous pressure on the whole port side of Monsoon.  Foam spurted up over the deck, and the sky and sea were one with the mist of rain.  We could no longer see the shore.  The whole world was blotted out in a grey mist in which were only the Monsoon, the sea, the storm and the coral reef shining hungrily through the light green of the water to starboard.

Nearer and nearer came the reef, like in a nightmare when the most terrible dangers came slowly closer without one being able to move hand or foot.  Through the foam we could clearly distinguish the shape and colour of the individual rocks and where the reef plunged steeply into the depths turning a sharp, jagged edge towards us.  The motor hammered at full speed.  We accelerated as much as we could, but the thirty-five horse power was not able to do much against the storm.  We were helplessly, slowly but surely being forced sideways to destruction.  For every inch that we went forwards, we were driven ten to the side.  We could do nothing.  We were the helpless, bewitched spectators of a play which we knew must end  in tragedy unless a miracle happened.

The skipper had long since ordered the wheel to be put hard over to port.  The man at the wheel had obeyed almost before the order had been spoken – but the Monsoon refused to answer.  No power on earth could have forced the stem to windward against the pressure of the mad gusts which howled in the shrouds and rigging.  The rudder was a useless piece of firewood.  Nearer and near came the reef – twenty yards – fifteen – ten  -- seven!  We were in the channel.  There was no turning back.  Even if the ship had obeyed the helm, there was not room to turn.

“Hoist the mainsail and ease the helm!” roared the skipper from his lookout, and in the same instant every man on board hurled himself at the braces, the helmsman eased the wheel to starboard, and the mainsail slid up with a speed unknown in the old ship’s glorious history.  Fourteen hands held and tugged with all their might, sailors, owner, scientist and cook, they all held on for their lives and for the sake of the old boat; but their was nothing to be done.

Before the sail was half up, before there had been the slightest possibility of easing off and trying this last remedy, the Monsoon went aground for the first time with a bump which cut us to the quick, and before the sail was furled the breakers had thrown us onto the reef.

We lay in one and a half fathoms.  It was high tide, change of the moon, the height of the spring tide and the wind blew continually with its full force.  It was clear to us all that this was the beginning of the end, the sad conclusion of an exciting and eventful voyage, and a curious heavy lump came into our throats.

There was no panic.  In fact, apart from a quivering feeling of tension and seriousness, we felt nothing.  Orders followed one another in rapid succession and we obeyed without an instant’s delay.  The breakers thundered against the port side; the keel kept bumping against the sharp hard coral; and yet the motor-boat was into the water like lightening and the mate went with Jack and Kalle to try to drop both anchors in the deep water of the passage, one fore and one aft, which was the only way left of keeping the ship on the edge of the reef and near deep water, the last vague chance of getting her off again when the storm had subsided and the seas slackened.  They succeeded in putting out both anchors, but on the way back the motor-boat was slung against the ship’s overhanging stern and it was only by pure chance that Jack was not crushed against the planks.

Everybody was in the cabins in all haste packing their valuables and those of the ship.  It was only a question of time before she sprang a leak and the water would rise inside.  To be sure, the Monsoon was a miracle of oak planks and strength, but a coral reef is hard and more merciless than anything else in the world.  The squall was over, but the wind still blew as hard as ever.  The seas crashed thundering against the ship’s side and poured continually over the deck, the lagoon was in a state of commotion, the foam flying from the tops of the waves like the manes of white horses, and the whole vessel lay on its port side so that we had to hold on to the rigging and booms if we wanted to cross the deck without falling.

The motor-boat bumped against the planks and Jack sat in her working at the engine, wet to the skin.  There had been no time to put on oilskins; but in such a situation you do not notice that you are wet.  Sacks of clothes, chests of nautical instruments and bundles of papers were thrown into the boat; then Stubbe and Jan jumped in, the painter was cast off and the motor began its struggle against the foaming seas.

            From Let’s See If The World Is Round by Hakon Mielche, William Hodge & Co Ltd, London, 1944

            (Originally published 1938, now out of print.)

All our intrepid Danes (and Bobby the Dog) managed to get ashore, but Monsoon was lost and their great adventure was over.  Such was their luck that they got back to Denmark just in time for the German invasion.  The next time I am in Copenhagen I will try to find out what happened to them.

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