Atlantic High Read online

  (* 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?

  A good question, for which no one was volunteering an answer. It ran through everyone’s mind, of course, that an American or a British submarine would have done exactly that.

  A Russian submarine? Better that a sailor, nationality unknown, perish at sea, than pick him up and permit him to descend into the Stygian mysteries that comprise those vessels that slink, unseen, about the oceans of the world, coiled to do things far more unpleasant than merely leave one young man gasping for life in the middle of the Atlantic….

  Well, there it is. Someday a generation hence, some researcher, going through old submarine logs in Vladivostok or wherever, may stumble across an entry for 0300, May 19, 1980; 31°5’ N, 63° W: “Collided with small vessel. Vessel sank. Survivor XX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (BALANCE OF ENTRY EXCISED, BY ORDER OF NAVAL SECURITY COUNCIL).”

  The adjacent vessel was about the same length (286 feet), but could stay out at sea a full ninety days. The Wyman was built to conduct hydrographic, oceanographic, and geophysical surveys, and my own feeling—almost but not entirely unfounded—is that there is a whole lot that is secret that goes on aboard the Wyman, but let it go; you would never find out if it were so, not from teetotaling Captain John W. Arens, recognized as the foremost expert in the West on Arctic scuba diving; a sky diver: paratrooper; racing-car driver who headed a demolition team during the Korean War; about whom nothing unpleasant could be said, save that when they all came aboard the Sealestial for our little cocktail party, Captain Arens took one look at Dr. Papo’s chair, that monstrously comfortable thing I sit in when I write letters, and announced, in accents threateningly realistic, that he intended to steal it that very night, substituting a facsimile made of papier-mâché. When, the following day, moments before we cast off on our last leg, Captain Arens slipped a bulky envelope into my hand containing, I correctly supposed, technical literature on his ship the Wyman, I received it with routine obeisance. But I would learn that it contained, also, a very beautiful and magnanimous personal tribute, which I shall not publish, but will always cherish.

  After dinner at the hotel following Captain Hiller’s cocktails we all felt, I think, a joint suspension, an unrootedness, a carefree languor. There would be no watches that night, and the following day our responsibilities were light. We found ourselves strolling through the park, toward the boardwalk. Jutting out of it is a mini-park given over to amusements, rather like the country fairs in America a generation ago. The central activity was the Dodg’em arena, and we all clambered in, each with his own Dodg’em. To my astonishment Tony proved to be too young ever to have driven a Dodg’em, and so he was easily victimized until he began to catch on. Maybe because his face is so cherubic, I decided to make Christopher my special victim, and managed a few first-class collisions, which I wish he had photographed. I told him, as we wandered over to the shooting gallery, that it was a pity each car didn’t come equipped with an Impact Meter, so that at the end of the round a winner could be proclaimed, which winner, I suggested, would clearly be me. He did not demur. At the shooting gallery we were given BB guns of sorts to shoot at collapsing ducks, candle flames, the lot. I was an infantryman during the longest year of my life and offered free lessons to anyone who desired them on the proper way to hold a rifle, but since Reggie was proving more accurate than I in snuffing out the candles, my ministrations were received lightly. A young and street-wise Portuguese, whose English was picturesquely imperfect, offered to take us to the town’s special delights, and we dispatched him to bring us beer, which we sat lazily and drank, in the city park—the first time I have sat in a city park, that I can remember, since my nurse used to take me to one in London when I was six. It was very pleasant, and our Portuguese cicerone kept describing, with increasingly voluptuarian imagery, the objects that lay at his command. But—I speak for myself and those responsible elements with whom I mingle—a sudden but quite unmistakable fatigue seized us, and we ambled over to the hotel. We forgathered in the lobby the next morning to go with the Matthewses first to inspect their brand-new, solid-wood, stormproof residence; then to John (Canadian) and Liz (English) Gladwin’s beautiful villa where a half-dozen expatriates joined us.

  In the Azores, notwithstanding the unpleasantness of the political spring of 1974 in Portugal, there is a special sense of security, though the islands suffer from progressive emigration by skilled workmen. The English-speaking colony there is heavily influenced by people who otherwise live either in Bermud
a or in St. Croix, and the consensus is that in St. Croix, what with the burgeoning Caribbean nationalism, life is becoming dicey. The patio outside the villa is bursting with flowers—can there be, in all the rest of the world combined, as many flowers as on the island of São Miguel? John took me through the house and showed me the sextant of his grandfather, who in 1880 at age sixteen shipped out from Halifax on a whaler, and next saw land 247 days later, when the boat pulled in to Saigon. Saigon! Two hundred and forty-seven days at sea! I said to John it was hard to make appropriate comment, but could only say that I very much hoped his grandfather liked the sea.

  The following day, Sunday, had been designated our sight-seeing day. Danny and I went to Mass at ten, and I was glad I didn’t understand Portuguese, because the priest was very hot under the collar about something, and I was in no mood to contemplate my sins. Then, in two small rented cars, we began the enchanted trip. You go to the west of the island, rising through curved roads to about five thousand feet (I brought along my altimeter). Then you look down on what was once a crater and is now the most beautiful valley in Christendom, with the lake in the center, the greens of pastureland emerald in their brightness, the graceful trees lining the country roads, the little white village. We had resolved to swim, and descended to the lake’s edge, but finding no place ideally designed to protect us in our nudity and not wishing to get our undershorts wet, we decided to postpone the swimming until after lunch, and with much effort found our way back over the mountain edge to the west-east road on the northern shore, itself a continuing spectacular.

  We had been told to look for a restaurant called Cabalho Blanco. It was harder to find the Cabalho Blanco, setting out from Punta Delgada, than it was to find the Azores, setting out from Bermuda. But we did find it, and the busy lady serving the Sunday crowd turned out to be an assistant to Ruth Matthews during the weekdays, helping her mother run the restaurant on weekends. If challenged on it I will hold my wrist unflinchingly over a burning flame: the fried fish we ordered at the Cabalho Blanco is the finest, in taste and preparation, available anywhere, a proposition on which there was a quite unusual consensus. We traveled east, found an exciting beach with great breakers, swam in our shorts (the beach was public), dried off as best we could, and returned to Punta Delgada, because that evening at seven the Sealestial was having a party! To it we had invited the ranking people on the two naval vessels, the Gladwins, the Matthewses, and the Queen Mother of Punta Delgada, who is Mrs. Bunny Olsen, a name that Fortune had tossed our way, via Tony. She lives in a picturesque penthouse apartment opposite our hotel, and part of the year in a converted windmill in Horta, and the rest of the time in St. Croix. We reminisced at some length about Charles Blair, killed two years ago when his airplane, ferrying passengers from St. Croix to St. Thomas, failed, landing Charlie and six passengers in the water where a wave knocked him out, drowning him and three others.

  Charles F. Blair, Jr., had been the leading pilot for Pan American, and for three years after we purchased our property in Stamford, Connecticut, Charlie and wife (number two) rented our garage apartment. Charlie was half Gary Cooper, half Clark Gable. In 1948 he won the Harmon Trophy, which is given to the aviator who that year has made the most spectacular achievement (Charlie flew single-handed over the North Pole, a remarkable navigational feat at that time) and there was a picture in his little apartment of President Truman handing it to him. He flew Pan Am’s prestigious Flight #1 to London every Monday, on the old Boeing Stratocruiser—sleeping quarters, Pullman style, all first class—and back Tuesday, with nothing to do until the following Monday.

  Nothing to do, my behind. He would disappear on Wednesday and go to Georgia where, he said, he was doing a little moonlighting, training pilots for Eastern Airlines. He was doing a little moonlighting—for the CIA, I discovered many years later: training Francis Gary Powers and his colleagues to fly U-2S over the Soviet Union.

  We saw Charlie only once after he left Stamford. It was seven or eight years ago and Pat and I were at the pool, and a familiar figure, tall and handsome, strolled down. We were glad to see him, and he chatted, perfectly relaxed, for at least half an hour, then said suddenly, “Oh, my wife Maureen is in the car—okay to bring her down?” Down he came with Maureen O’Hara, whom he had married a year or two earlier; together, now that he was retired, they were going down to St. Thomas to start up a local airline.

  Bunny said the story didn’t surprise her a bit, that Charlie was thataway with his wives, and that Maureen became so fixated about his casual coming and going that, during the last six months he served Pan Am, she bought a first-class ticket on every flight Charlie commanded. There were pictures of Charlie everywhere in her apartment.

  The guests inspected every corner of Sealestial with gasps of joy and admiration, even from the wizened captains of our ultramodern research vessels. The girls had prepared nice hors d’oeuvres, and we served assorted booze, and white wine. I proudly showed off my computers; I was pleased that Allen had on display the scrimshaw I had ordered for him (Allen communicates to you by little gestures of this kind). We had made a dinner reservation at what was said to be the gourmet center in the Azores, the Chez Shamin, so the problem was to bring on an emigration. I devised a plan that so pleases me, I think I shall institutionalize it, though it is not really a good idea to give it too much publicity. I whispered to Christopher, and he got the attention of the milling crowd of fifteen to twenty by banging on a bottle. “Everybody on deck for a group picture, please.” Everyone submits readily to the discipline of any photographer, so all of them climbed up the companionway to the forepeak, by the boarding ladder that rose to the Wyman. Christopher climbed halfway up the ladder to focus his camera on the crowd. I said, “Now, everyone look as though you had just gotten the news that Ronald Reagan had won the national election!” Christopher snapped the picture. I am anxious to see it, because to half the guests President Carter was commander in chief, and to the Matthewses he was chief employer. But the smiles were good-natured of course—and at that point there was nothing to do but say goodbye and leave. Ken Galbraith and I have in common what strikes some as a disadvantage, but isn’t, really: namely our plainspoken bias, which gives a harnessing energy to our work. It is a terrible pity that he uses his talents to such subversive ends.

  Except for one scene at the restaurant, the meal was splendid. The rather self-important young owner served us an excellent red wine which, however, was too damned warm, and I told him so. He proceeded to give me a lecture about the proper temperature for red wine. I was nine years old when my father, after deep researches, installed year-round air conditioning in his wine cellar, a practice I duplicated in my own cellar about the time the man from whom I was receiving a lecture was given his first popsicle, so I overreacted, embarrassing myself and my companions, I’m sure, though they mention the incident very calmly in their journals, and are united in believing that, on the issue of the wine’s temperature, I was dead right.

  I went directly back to the hotel. The others sauntered. Tony writes in his journal, “On the way back, Reg, Chris, and I were in one car, so we stopped at the village before Punta Delgada and joined in the festivities of some obscure saint. In the middle of thevillage on the only street, a band had been set up which was pumping out some dreary martial music. There were lights, and a little stall for an auction, and people weren’t doing much but looking at each other a little depressed. So Reg started working the crowd and I followed in. We soon had a rag-tag bunch of urchins who seemed mesmerized by Reggie’s size and tricks, and whatever else he does.”

  The following morning I wrote the last two of the three columns I needed to telephone in to New York, and at twelve Danny picked me up to drive me to the Sealestial for the last leg of our journey. There was great underground amusement aboard our vessel because (Danny swears to the truth of it) late the night before, after the meal, and preparing to retire, Tom Wendel began questioning Dan. The ship’s company, slouched about the saloon,
reading, drinking, heard the conversation in the cockpit.

  “Danny, when you are ‘On watch,’ what is it that you watch for?”

  Danny, whose sense of humor is highly developed, is incapable of sarcasm with anyone who is being entirely ingenuous. He explained that you watch out for things like other ships, changes in wind direction, sails that blow out, men who fall overboard, that sort of thing.

  “When you are on watch”—Tom, the scholar, persevered—“do you have to go outside?”

  Danny told him that someone was always “outside,” but that the second watch member frequently went below, to make a log entry or fetch up some coffee or whatever. How Van and Dick would have enjoyed it all.

  I like to take off on a boat not more than five minutes after boarding it, and this time we very nearly made it, but for a slight delay caused by Allen’s retrieval of our passports from Immigration. The wind was blowing us into the Wyman, so we had to spring ourselves out, a nice maneuver involving a spring line (a line from the stern of the boat to a bollard forward on the “dock”), and reverse engine until the bow, there being nothing else it can do given the vector of forces, eases out: then rudder amidship to permit you to move out straight ahead, so that your stern doesn’t scrape against whatever you were tied up to. Thirty seconds into the harbor and I headed the boat into the wind, Allen and I having decided we would depart like true sailors. In two minutes the mainsail was up. In another two, the genoa; the wind was blowing smartly from the north, and within three minutes we were passing by our two naval vessels at hull speed, waving at everybody in sight, trying, even, to catch sight of a red handkerchief or something from Bunny at her penthouse apartment. Tom was utterly elated as, just past the harbor entrance, I set my course east, the girls brought out the wine and soup and sandwiches, and, traveling a half mile south of the island, we spent the next two hours watching São Miguel slide by, with all its greenery, its vineyards, the noble houses, the fincas, the sheep. The high cheer of Tom was precious, because moments after we slid past the lee of the island I had to call for a reef in the mainsail. Before the evening was out, I called for a second; and then a third reef. We blew out the main genoa that night and rigged a topsail and a staysail. We were embarked on one hundred hours of the damnedest, steadiest, hardest, most sustained wind I can remember. I knew, I knew, that the ocean would not let us get away with the cotton-candy stuff we had had that last week reaching the Azores. I was right. But then what else is new.