Atlantic High Read online

  DANIEL : No. Our position is Latitude 38 degrees 42 minutes north, Longitude 27 degrees 11 minutes west.

  WILLIAM: Yes, it is.

  RICHARD: And the definition seems satisfactory?

  WILLIAM: I think so, Richard.

  EVAN: Count your silver when he says that, Richard.

  RICHARD: Haven’t we also said that the gods are divided, William, and disagree with one another, and feel enmity toward one another?

  WILLIAM: Yes, we have.

  RICHARD: What sort of disagreement is it, my good friend, that causes enmity and anger? Let us look at it in this way. If you and I disagreed about the question which of two numbers was the greater, would this disagreement make us hostile and angry with each other? Shouldn’t we quickly settle a dispute of this kind by having recourse to arithmetic?

  REGINALD: Maybe I can help? I went to M.I.T.

  WILLIAM: Certainly.

  RICHARD: Then what would be the subject of dispute about which we should be unable to reach agreement, so that we became hostile to one another and lost our tempers? Very likely you can’t say offhand; but consider, as I suggest them, whether the required subjects are questions of right and wrong, honor and dishonor, good and bad. Isn’t it when we disagree about these, and can’t reach a satisfactory decision about them, that we become hostile to one another (when we do become hostile)—both you and I and all the rest of mankind?

  REGINALD: Stand by to come about. Toss Anthony the winch handle, Richard, and grab the sheet winch.

  WILLIAM: Yes, that is the sort of disagreement, Richard, about the subjects that you mention.

  RICHARD: (panting as he tails the sheet) And what about the gods, William?

  WILLIAM: The what? I can’t hear with the mainsail luffing. RICHARD: (shouting) The gods! the G-O-D-S. If they do disagree at all, won’t it be for just these reasons?

  WILLIAM: Quite inevitably.

  RICHARD: Then on your view, my worthy William, it follows that the gods too hold different opinions about what is right, and similarly about what is honorable and dishonorable, good and bad; because surely they would not be divided if they didn’t disagree on these subjects. Isn’t that so? WILLIAM: You are quite right.

  DANIEL: I don’t see why. They might be divided because they don’t like each other.

  RICHARD: Then does each faction love what it considers to be honorable and good and right, and hate the opposite?

  WILLIAM: Certainly.

  EVAN: Assuming they’re Republicans.

  RICHARD: But according to you the same things are regarded by some of the gods as right and by others as wrong; I mean the things about which they dispute, and so are divided and fight one another. Isn’t that so?

  WILLIAM: Yes.

  RICHARD: So apparently the same things are both loved and hated by the gods—that is, the same things will be both god-beloved and god-hated.

  WILLIAM: Apparently.

  RICHARD: Then by this argument, William, the same things will also be both pious and impious.

  WILLIAM: Perhaps so.

  RICHARD: (smiling) Then you didn’t answer my question, my talented friend …

  EVAN: Let’s go over that one again, Richard? Don’t you agree, team?

  (CHORUS) Yes! Yes! Again! Again!

  And then Van gave me his disappointing news. He had been living in London with his wife and three children (John is only four) for ten years, and was repatriating to the United States. He had to undertake a mission to Tokyo before the whole family got into the QE2 for the return voyage. So he would have to leave the ship at the Azores. The thought was very nearly unbearable, as Van is the source of unparalleled gaiety. Already I had assimilated the disappointment of traveling without my sister-in-law “Bill” Finucane, the devoted den mother of our first voyage (her husband was ill, and I could not even ask her). In any event, on April 21, 1980, another memorandum goes out:

  MEMO TO: Reggie Stoops, Danny Merritt, Tony Leggett, Christopher Little, Van Galbraith, Dick Clurman

  FROM: WFB

  Random notes re The Crossing…. I have listed you beginning with those who are going all the way, ending with those who leave us first. To demystify the above, Clurman leaves us on reaching Bermuda, Van on reaching the Azores.

  The Sealestial (iron rule: pronounced Celestial by anybody who intends to board and stay aboard) will be docked at Yacht Haven, to which we should repair by cab.

  We will set out for Bermuda at 10 A.M. on Friday, May 30. It is not known whether we shall have to sail for an hour or two for the benefit of helicopter photography. If so, we shall be returning to St. Thomas to pick up Christopher Little, the cinematographer, and the sound man. The latter two will be sailing with us as far as Bermuda, disembarking there. We plan a documentary one-hour television program based on the first leg of the trip, supplemented if necessary by home-movie shots of especially exciting events from legs two, three and four.

  Leg one: St. Thomas to Bermuda

  Leg two: Bermuda to Horta

  Leg three: Horta to São Miguel

  Leg four: São Miguel to Marbella

  I calculate arrival in Bermuda late Tuesday evening, June 3. We will tie up at St. George’s, and bring Sealestial into Hamilton Harbor Wednesday A.M. I have reserved the dockside at the Princess Hotel where I have also reserved a suite, two bedrooms, one living room. The beds will be for Stoops, Clurman, Galbraith, and me, lest the younger members get out of training. We will depart Bermuda Saturday morning, June 7.

  We should arrive in Horta on Tuesday, June 17.

  We will leave Horta on Wednesday, the 18th, and cruise to Sao Miguel, with intermediate stops, arriving Friday the 20th.

  We will leave São Miguel on Monday, the 23rd, arriving late Saturday, June 28th, in Puerto Banús, Marbella.

  For the benefit of those of you inclined as I am to the natural sciences, some figures:

  St. Thomas is at 18-22 N., 64-56 W. St. George, 32-24 N., 64-42 W.

  —Distance, 842 miles (nautical) at initial heading of 000 deg. Horta is at 38-32 N., 28-40 W.

  —Distance (from St. George), 1,785 miles at heading of 67 deg. São Miguel is at 37–33 N., 25–27 W.

  —Distance (from Horta), 163 miles heading of 110 deg. Gibraltar is at 36-09 N., 5-21 W.

  —Distance (from São Miguel), 966 miles at heading of 88 degrees.

  I have an extensive memo on safety from Reggie. But I shall wait to remit an edited version of it until I speak with Dr. Papo on his return from Antigua early in May. At that time I will have the opportunity to question him about what gear he has and what he hasn’t. You should bring your own foul-weather gear and boots. All luggage should be in duffels.

  Watch captains will be Reggie, Danny, and Tony.

  Assistants will be Van, Christopher, and Dick. I’ll make up a duty roster with variable combinations. Four hours on, eight hours off, with standby duty by the watch that has been off duty the longest.

  No one is to sleep in the saloon, which will be the decompression chamber for watches going off duty.

  Everyone will infinitely oblige me (which is Very Important) by keeping a loquacious diary from which I will draw in putting together the book to finance this extravaganza. I will supply hard-cover diaries, but if you are addicted to a particular kind of notebook, please bring it.

  Van Galbraith will serve as meteorological officer, and will acquaint himself with the vessel’s Weathermax and keep a weather log.

  When Van departs, Reggie will take over that responsibility. More in due course.

  4

  It doesn’t pay to arrive at your vessel too soon before a departure, because, as in so many other matters, the Parkinsonian principle will apply, namely that enough things to do will turn up to fill the time available to do them. The trick is tunnel vision: tell Danny that you need a size N spare battery for the Hewlett-Packard 41C, and if such a thing exists or can be flown over in time from Puerto Rico, he’ll have it there. Try to find something specific for everyone t
o do. Make as few collective rendezvous as possible, but these should be firm. “We all meet at my suite at 7 P.M. At what time do we all meet at my suite, Tony? Very good, Tony. 7 P.M. is not 7:30 P.M., is it, Reggie?” Of course, when you say things in that tone of voice, it pays to make the schoolmasterliness hyperbolic, in which case it is all accepted in good humor. I mean, accepted in good humor by the kind of people I sail with, who are all splendid, having in common their recognition of my unique qualities.

  And we made it worth their while to be there at 7 P.M. because Reggie, Dick, and I had undertaken to provision the wine cellar of the Sealestial. This is very serious business. On the one hand, money is very definitely a consideration. Anyone can provision a wine cellar successfully by averaging ten or fifteen dollars per bottle. My aim was to average $3.50 per bottle, and I can report that superb wines were drunk for twenty-nine days, at least by those who were not, at the relevant moments, emptying their stomachs rather than filling them. But as we all know, at three to four dollars you can with some effort get some of the best and with very little effort get some of the worst wines in the world, and at St. Thomas there is a most extraordinary profusion of the worst wines in the world. At any rate, at 7 P.M. we all gathered in front of twenty bottles of wine, half of them white, half red, for a grand tasting session, the results of which, on a point system of one to twenty, are faithfully recorded in my journal. My grading system was ostensibly democratic; and it was, in that everyone’s vote was recorded. However—especially since no one else could see—I simply threw out the anomalies. At least, the negative anomalies. I tasted first, and secretly recorded my vote. If I gave wine a ten and someone then gave it a four, I’d throw out that four. But if I gave a wine a ten and someone gave it a seventeen, I’d taste it again, thinking that perhaps I was mistaken, that the wine had a delayed and highly positive reaction.

  We were all sprawled about in the one-room suite, on chairs, beds, a couch, the floor, including Captain Jouning and the two girls, Judy Harman and Diane Bowlus, cook and stewardess, and David Murphy, the first mate, and two movie men. At the end of an hour not only the wine but the bonhomie flowed freely, and the tasters provided dithyrambic pronouncements on the virtues or vices of the wine freshly poured into a plastic glass, of which there were at this point about 300 in the room. Van gradually felt it necessary to contribute an appropriate facial expression to characterize the wine he had just tasted, and in one case merely smelled, reacting in such mephitic disgust that I thought he might take the next plane out to the offending vineyard in France to beat up the owner. I told him the story, which he much enjoyed, about the fury with which Toscanini read in the papers one morning in Milan, midway through rehearsing what he had understood would be the world premiere of Der Rosenkavalier, that the opera had been performed the evening before in Vienna. Without notifying a soul or picking up so much as a briefcase, he hailed a taxi to the station, traveled to Vienna, then took a taxi to the house of Richard Strauss, rang the bell and, finding himself face to face with Strauss, exclaimed in reverent tones, “As a musician, I take my hat off to you.” Toscanini removed his hat. “As a human being,” Toscanini’s eyes spat out the fury, “I put it on ten times!” And ten times Toscanini removed and emphatically put on his hat; turning, then, back to the taxi, and to Milan to resume rehearsals. Van thought it was a funny story, but said he couldn’t think of any reason to take his hat off as a gesture of respect to this particular vintner, and Dick said maybe the vintner should be respected for the sheer audacity of getting his grape juice all the way to the Virgin Islands without being arrested. Dick noted in his journal, “Van refused to rate one Chablis, spurning it with the comment, ‘This horse definitely had diabetes!’” We were in a fine mood, but agreed that of the twenty wines only four were suitable for mass purchase, and Dick and I agreed to do some more scouting about the next morning for a wider selection, which we would taste at 5 P.M. the next day aboard the Sealestial (“At what time will we meet aboard the Sealestial tomorrow to resume our wine tasting, Tony?”); and we adjourned, my companions and I going off to a fancy restaurant for dinner as guests of Dick, going (some of us) early to bed, waking in time to resume our chores.

  The following day we set out. I had all along scheduled a 3 P.M. take-off and there were reasons for this beyond the obvious one that there are always things left over to do in the morning, so it is better to plan to leave after noon. Along the way, during the preceding months, I had decided to attempt a documentary. Ever since, years ago, I saw the surfing film The Endless Summer, I have wished that something of the sort might be done for ocean cruising. The Endless Summer had one irreplaceable quality, and another which could conceivably be imitated. The first was the advantage of showing the viewer what it is like to visit the surfing beaches of the world. Each is in its way different. The beaches in Oahu are visibly different from those in southwestern Australia. But the oceans of the world, after you have left land, although they are capable of greater volatility than anything in biology, greater even than the caterpillar-turned-butterfly, are indistinguishable as to location, so that a scene of a sailboat between the Azores and Gibraltar would, ceteris paribus, be identical with a scene of a sailboat in Block Island Sound or between Tasmania and New Zealand. Problem number one.

  The second quality of The Endless Summer is the breathless excitement of the narrator, whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten. He had a kind of husky, romantic, understated exuberance that made the viewer—in my case someone indifferent to surfing—suddenly care intensely about the sport, appreciate it hugely. But in surfing, the virtuosity is most obviously that. Virtuosity in a successful cruise comprises the interaction of a few dozen elements, none of which is in itself photogenic or discretely romantic.

  Still, I thought it worth attempting. My first, naïve notion was that Christopher Little should also take movies. I learned, rather abruptly, that I might as well have suggested to Isaac Stern that he also play the French horn. Photographers do one thing, cinematographers do something else, and the generic statement that both after all use film is as helpful as observing that ballet dancers and joggers both use their legs. That wasn’t all. Apparently no cinematographer worth hiring will travel to the bathroom without a sound engineer. This is not, I learned quickly, an affectation. You cannot do first-rate cinematography while also worrying about the infinitely complicated business of getting first-rate sound. And without that, no exhibitor will show anything not shot by Zapruder.

  So Christopher Little brought to my house in Stamford for lunch a youngish cinematographer of vast experience who had won all kinds of prizes and had a chestful of credits, and we talked—or, more properly, I listened—for three hours. It was heady stuff. He talked blithely of spending one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand dollars. He would certainly need one assistant but would prefer two. He had visions of midnight filming during which I and someone else—“maybe Gore Vidal, somebody really interesting, somebody you disagree with”—would discuss Immanuel Kant, or Joe McCarthy. It would be absolutely smashing, but absolutely the best documentary ever. Eventually he left, and I called Christopher into my quiet little music room so that we could decompress for a little while, and I thought long and deep on the subject and said that we should indeed attempt a documentary, but that it must be restricted to the first of the four legs of the passage. No point in ruining the entire trip for the sake of a documentary, even a great one. The man who came to lunch was not interested in the proffered terms, so I wrote out (to whom it may concern) a memo and, at his urging, sent it to Walter Cronkite, with whom I share a friendship focused to a considerable extent on our common thralldom to the sea:

  MEMORANDUM re a proposed one-hour documentary

  FROM: William F. Buckley, Jr.

  I propose to produce a one-hour documentary, most of which will be filmed aboard a 71-foot racing-cruising ketch bound from the West Indies to Spain. I say most of which, because the closing few minutes will be still photograp
hs of the last two legs of a three-leg journey, with voice-over bringing the narrative to a conclusion.

  The legs of the journey will take us, aboard the Sealestial, from St. Thomas to Bermuda (1,000 miles), from Bermuda to the Azores (1,900 miles), and from the Azores to Spain (900 miles).

  Aboard the boat will be six members of my party (hereinafter “owner’s party”) and four crew. The owner’s party will be responsible for all the sailing, all the navigation and piloting and, I hope, all of the revelry. The crew will look after the maintenance of the vessel, cook and serve and, in case of emergency, help as required.

  I shall be the captain of the vessel, the producer and director of the film (except that I shall rely heavily on an expert cinema-tographer-director for guidance), the scriptwriter, and the narrator.

  The owner’s party consists of three men approximately my own age (54), and three young men age 25-30. All of us have sailed extensively. I am a personal friend of every member of the owner’s party, including Christopher Little, a professional still photographer who will collaborate with me in the production of a trade book on the crossing, which Doubleday will publish in 1982.

  I have sailed all my life, and have skippered ocean racing boats for twenty years, and served as captain and navigator of a transatlantic sail in June 1975. That voyage produced a book, Airborne, which sold 100,000 copies hard-cover. Excerpts from the reviews of the book are attached.

  I have in mind an hour devoted only in part to the mechanics of sailing. These would be touched upon only insofar as they enliven the narrative. The documentary will be the story of six friends sharing an experience about which many people dream. The inevitable themes will be touched upon—the perils of the sea, the nature of the sea’s emergencies, the precautions one takes, the mysteries of knowing where you are by celestial navigation, the telltale signs of wind changes and hazardous weather, some of the electronic and other gear that are fashioned to maximize safety, the design of the sail and the basic rigging, the transmogrification of the canvas and cable into the motive force that propels 60 tons of boat at twelve knots; and so forth. But I have in mind something extremely personal: my own reactions to the experience, my relationship with my friends, what we talk about during the hours we share together, whether at meals at midday or sunset, or at night during the long watches. Every member of the owner’s party will keep a diary, and selected portions of it will be integrated into the final script, as deemed advisable. This technique was extremely successful in Airborne.