Part 16
As Dr. Kartakusuma expressed it, “You are strangers in my country—and in trouble.” He shook hands all around and returned to his supper.
After several days of medication—complicated by the discovery that she had a penicillin allergy—Jessica was recovered enough to pour into her Journal a hundred pages of impressions of Bali, which she has since epitomized in a single word: eerie! The street noises outside her hotel room; a flute and the weird cadence of a gamelin; an old sow who splashed her way up the drainage ditch every morning; the startling cry of a gekko lizard in the night—these apparently had merged in her delirium with distorted memories of ceremonies she had seen, such as the tooth filing and the cremation. Most haunting of all, she and her grandmother had had an experience the rest of us did not share. One night, escorted by a fellow guest at the hotel, they had ridden many miles into the country to witness a kris dance at a village temple. The dancers had gone into trance and ended by plunging the twisted blades of their daggers into their own bodies “right up to the handle!” as Jessica insisted. People near her had fallen to the ground, “invaded by spirits,” and Jessica could actually feel the ground shaking.
As she summed it up, “It was enough to make _anybody_ get tonsillitis—or something!”
We could have spent much longer in Bali, but if we were to get another sampling of Indonesia, the capital, we had to push on. In Jakarta, Marjorie Harris—a childhood friend of Barbara’s—and her husband Mike, of the Ford Foundation, were waiting for us, and Jessica was looking forward to meeting their thirteen-year-old Susan.
Remembering our violently rough entry into Benoa, I put my foot down firmly on Minnetta’s proposal that she return to Jakarta on the _Phoenix_. No matter how indomitable the spirit, the bones of a woman in her seventies are liable to be brittle and the ways of the sea, especially in interisland channels, can be rugged, as we had cause to know. And so, using my authority as captain, I sent her back to Java by plane, to wait for us there.
Actually our passage out through Lombok Strait was gratifyingly easy and, once in the Java Sea, we had fine sailing. Jessica, contentedly convalescent, was busy getting caught up in her Journal or sunning in the cockpit while Ted reeled off fabulous stories on his watch. I, tired for the moment of serious reading, turned to a tale of high adventure at sea. So overloaded was it with drama that I fell to considering the whole difficult problem of trying to communicate a very meaningful experience. How, for instance, could I convey to a reader the wonderful adventure of just _being_ at sea; the thrill I sometimes felt, lying in my bunk and listening to the whisper of water flowing past, in thinking, I’m _doing_ it! I’m actually sailing around the world, just as I planned and dreamed! This is my ship, my life, my adventure, and nobody can take it away from me! Perhaps it is necessary to “juice up” a story, or nobody would ever read it, but although I felt sorry for the hero on the night he _crashed_ into a reef—my _own_ memory of a similar mishap was that it is more like a sickening crunch. And yet, _crash_ or _crunch_, how is it possible to get across a _feeling_ to one who has never been there? More and more I was grateful to Barbara because she had known instinctively that this experience was one that we had to share, since no words of mine could ever have made this vital part of my life real or meaningful to her if she had stayed behind.
That night on watch, still struggling with the problem that confronts any writer, of trying to capture and share an experience through words, I was led to speculate on the subject of sounds at sea. Some are ominous, such as the snap of a jerking anchor chain at an uneasy anchorage or the wind rising and beginning to whistle high in the rigging; others are merely annoying, like the slapping of halyards or the banging of a block on a quiet night, if one is restless. While musing over sounds, it occurred to me that by now I had classified every sound my boat made (I had spent hours tracking down each one in the first months when every noise was a possible harbinger of trouble). At that precise instant, from the darkness of the cabin below, I heard what can only be described as _thump_—pause—_plump_—pause—_plop_—pause—_thud!_ That was a new one! I shone a light below. Nothing. Now I did have something to occupy my mind throughout the rest of my watch.
The next day, during lunch, there was a lull in the conversation. Suddenly Manuia appeared at the porthole. She leaped lightly down to Jessica’s desk—_thump_—then across to the table—_plump_—then down to the plastic-covered couch cushion—_plop_—and finally to the floor—_thud_.
At least one mystery of the sea had been solved!
All along the coast we passed numerous praus. I was always conscious of the possibility of being hijacked by pirates, and whenever one changed course and came over to take a look at us, we mustered all hands—and a couple of rifles—and waved heartily. Invariably, they waved back and shouted cheery greetings and we each went on our way.
A more real danger turned out to be that of running down, at night, an unlighted prau at anchor. On the night of the 29th we had two narrow escapes from such a collision, the second one literally by inches. This shook us quite a bit and I debated following the local example and simply stopping for the night to anchor in the shallow water along the coast. Finally I decided to carry on, stationing a man forward with a searchlight in addition to the man at the helm. Naturally, having made the decision, I began to question my own judgment, with the result that there was still another man on duty for the rest of the night—me!
The next day we were far enough along the coast to hope to reach Jakarta before dark, but the day was misty and, although we were close to shore, it was difficult to tell where the water met the land. We could find nothing that looked like a harbor of the size we knew must be at Jakarta.
At last we spotted a channel through which small-boat traffic was moving toward shore and we worked our way in, sounding as we went. At four fathoms, while still fairly well out, I gave orders to drop the anchor.
“Why we don’t go in until eight feet?” asked one of the crew with sweet reasonableness. “Then anchor?”
Since we draw almost eight feet, that would hardly have left enough margin for error, tide, or rapidly shelving bottom.
“We’ll anchor _here_!” I repeated firmly.
There was such obvious dissatisfaction with my decision and so many allusions to “toi”—with the emphasis meaning _very_, _very_ far, that I picked Ted alone to accompany me in to the shore. We started up the channel, but were quickly hailed by a soldier at a guard station. He spoke no English, but had an efficient-looking gun which spoke an easily understandable language. We rowed over and struggled with a Malay dictionary but were unable to communicate. Finally, soldier-plus-gun piled into the dinghy with us and waved us on up the channel. We started rowing again.
On the way we passed several hundred seagoing praus, brilliantly painted, all very real and all very much lived on. In this corner of the world, at least, the age of sail is far from over. As we toiled up the narrow canal, several of these ships passed us on their way in. It was truly thrilling to see them drive boldly for the entrance, fly up the channel, shedding canvas as they came, to reach their berths with sails neatly stowed and just enough way on to come snugly up to their dock. Such skill, however, doesn’t come from sailing even ten times around the world, but from generations of experience in a vessel which is not just an avocation but one’s whole life.
In the course of an hourlong trip we passed several check points before we reached the inner sanctum and were taken in hand by an English-speaking official. We explained the situation, showed our credentials, and blessed the lucky day that had given us the director of the Ford Foundation in Indonesia as a character reference. We were given permission to telephone Mike, who further cleared up the difficulties and gave us an explanation of what we had done.
We were, it seems, in Jakarta, all right—but in _old_ Jakarta, formerly known as Batavia. Only sailing ships were permitted in here, many of whose crews were not entirely sympathetic to the existing government. During their stay in port all these ships were made to observe a rigid curfew and were kept under close observation. It seemed that _our_ proper port was Tanjung Priok, the large new harbor for overseas vessels, five miles along the coast. Now we could understand the reason for the suspicious treatment, the guards, the frequent check points, and the barbed-wire fences. For all they knew, we were the vanguards of a revolutionary force, come to overthrow the regime.
By the time we got back to the _Phoenix_ it was well after dark and Barbara was frantic with anxiety. Jessica was already asleep and Nick, Mickey, and Moto, quite unconcerned over our prolonged absence, also had retired. Had we been set upon and carved up by pirates? Were we languishing in some moldy Malay jail? Or were we having dinner with President Sukarno, as honored guests of the government? Any of these might have explained the delay, and I’m not sure which possibility caused her more anguish.
Actually, the only danger we ran was on the return trip when, with no flashlight, we were in constant danger of being run down by belated praus charging past in the dark to reach the channel before curfew.
The next morning, under power, we moved to Tanjung Priok in a foggy calm, groped for the entrance, and were met and escorted to a dock within easy rowing distance of the Tanjung Priok “Jachtclub,” one of the few holdovers from the colonial Dutch regime. There the Harrises, Minnetta, and cold drinks were waiting to welcome us, and we were made to understand that all the facilities of the club, including _free_ use of restaurant and bar, were at our disposal!
The location at Tanjung Priok had little beside the hospitality of the yacht club to recommend it. It was steamingly hot, noisy, and odorous. The nights were made miserable by mosquitoes and by the hourly clangor of the night watchman, who punched his time clock every hour by beating a length of pipe upon a metal ring.
Thanks to the Harrises, some of us were spared this discomfort for all or a part of our three weeks’ stay, for they whisked Barbara and Jessica off to Jakarta. Barbara shared the guest room with her mother and Jessica moved in with Susan and began to gain back a bit of the weight and color she had lost during her illness.
I did not feel the same compulsion the girls apparently felt, to desert ship at every opportunity; in fact, I always felt uneasy when I did not sleep aboard. Yet in Java I, too, took a holiday from the sea by accepting the Harrises’ offer of their mountain retreat as a place to do some very necessary writing. (Unless Barbara and I mailed off a couple of salable articles before we left Java, there would be no checks awaiting us in Durban—and no Christmas for the _Phoenix_.)
Our trip into the pundjak, the pass through the mountains of Central Java, was an invigorating change from the fetid city. Each morning we awoke in the crisp, cool air of the hills and were greeted by a magnificent vista of twin mountain peaks thrusting against the sky.
As Barbara expressed it: “Imagine! A view like that just by opening your eyes! What luxury! No getting dressed, no going up on deck—and not a speck of water in the foreground to muck it all up!”
There are times when I suspect that Barbara is just a landlubber at heart.
In these surroundings our writing flourished and almost before we knew it the Harrises’ car had arrived to take us back to the city with our completed manuscripts. Here we rejoined Ted and Minnetta, who had also managed to squeeze in an overland trip, to Jogjakarta, seat of Javanese culture. There Ted, exploring the vast archaeological ruins in the vicinity, had the experience of being accompanied by an armed bodyguard. Being an American, he was obviously a millionaire and a rich prize for kidnapers! (Little did they know!) At night, through the solicitude of his hosts, the bodyguard had slept across the threshold of Ted’s room, but whether such protection is conducive to better slumber Ted didn’t reveal.
Our last few days were divided between laying in last-minute supplies for our crossing of the Indian Ocean and accumulating memories of a diffuse and very confusing place. Jakarta is vast, sprawling, and amorphous. It is a city of beautiful residential areas with red-tiled houses set well back from shaded streets—and of squalid kompiangs where hundreds of families are herded together without sanitation, light, or even air. For these crowded thousands, the canals that traverse the city are laundry, swimming pool, public bath, social center—and privy.
From the deck of the _Phoenix_ we could see, in one direction, the beautifully appointed yacht club where a constant procession of limousines drew up to discharge members and their friends who came to swim, sail, or water-ski, or just to relax with a drink on the shaded veranda. In the other direction, just across the road, a procession of another sort moved slowly from dawn to dark—a long line of tired, ragged women, each waiting with a pail or a battered old kerosene tin to get water at the single faucet which served as the sole drinking and bathing supply for hundreds of people in the dock compound. It was a desperate imbalance, which obviously could not endure for long.
Generally speaking, the officials in Indonesia were very helpful and pleasant. One of them, Commander of the Navy, Jakarta, presented each of us with an imposing document which called upon “Whom It May Concern” to give us all possible aid and assistance. I flashed mine several times in the course of my shopping expeditions, until an old-timer pointed out that, in the present state of the government, there were almost as many to whom a letter from Major Lie would be an invitation to shoot me as there were those to honor it!
The highlight of our stay in Indonesia, and one for which we laid over a few extra days, was the eleventh anniversary of the founding of the republic, on August 17. The entire city was decorated for the occasion with archways of greenery across the streets and parades and festivities in every district. We had received invitations from President Sukarno himself, beautifully embossed with the Indonesian emblem in gold, to attend a program of dances at the palace that evening. It was a splendid affair, staged on the floodlit grounds, beneath the high branches of enormous trees. The variety and fascination of the dances, representing many of the islands of the spread-out archipelago, kept us enthralled until well after midnight.
On August 20 we set out once more, bound for the Keeling Cocos Islands, 740 miles out in the Indian Ocean. It was not by chance that we were crossing this ocean in August and September, but because, as I always tried to do, we had chosen the season when, according to the pilot books, cyclones are “unknown.” As far as we were concerned, they could remain that way. We had had our bellyful of typhoons in Japan and we knew that by any other name—whether cyclones in the Indian, hurricanes in the Atlantic, or typhoons in the Pacific—these tropical revolving storms are nasty customers and nothing to fool around with.
Our first two or three days out of Jakarta were quiet, with little wind and frequent rains. The second evening, after passing through the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, we could see the volcanic cone of Krakatoa with a trailing cloud, like a plume of smoke, rising from its tip. As we ate our supper on deck, Ted read aloud the encyclopedia account of that tremendous eruption, source of such widespread devastation, and Jessica eyed the now somnolent peak uneasily.
“Shouldn’t we turn on the engine and go a little faster till we get past?” she suggested, in a whisper.
“Better not,” Ted whispered back. “The engine might wake it up!”
Jessica, who showed a regrettable tendency to “put down roots” whenever she had been given shore leave, was finding it particularly hard to leave the land—and Susan Harris—behind, but she was not the only one who felt a continuing malaise.
From Barbara’s diary on the third day:
Everyone feels unaccountably under the weather. No active seasickness, but depressed and broody. Hard to carry out resolutions for making good use of my time at sea when each trip seems to involve this period of adjustment after life ashore. By the time the incipient mal de mer and the regrets of leave-taking have subsided, the pattern of lazy, do-nothing days has already taken hold.
Part of the mood was caused, I am sure, because the expected trades never settled down, the seas remained high, and the weather was vaguely threatening. There was a sense of uneasy anticipation which could not be pinned down by any instrument. This is not aftersight, as I noted in my log that on the fourth night I felt so strangely ill at ease that I was awake most of the night and during my early-morning watch Barbara, who also was wakeful, came up to keep me company as she frequently did at sea.
Barbara’s own diary continues to reflect the unusual atmosphere:
A miserable, rolling, wallowing night with alternate rains and high seas, followed by dropping winds. Rolled violently in my bunk from side to side and dozed fitfully. The swift dropping sensation as the boat rolls down, down, goes against one’s most basic instinct, the fear of falling. A queer shuddering seems to have entered the picture, giving rise to night fancies involving a loosened rudder or working keel bolts! What terrors can suggest themselves and become rapidly convincing in the dark!
The day before we were due to sight the islands, Ted and I spent a number of hours checking the charts and making our plans. The Cocos are low islands, with an altitude of only 10 feet plus the height of the palm trees. If the day continued overcast so that we could not get a good position, we might have quite a job finding them. If the weather was bad, we would have to decide whether to attempt an entrance, to lay off until the weather improved, or give the islands a miss altogether, which would mean continuing on to Rodrigues, 2,000 miles to the west.
That night the barometer began a slow, ominous fall. The next morning the seas were high and the wind at gale force. It was time to heave to. With the wind out of the southeast, we lay under mizzen alone, facing south, with a westerly drift of about two knots. The barometer was by now at about 1000. We were riding well, and I hoped that the worst would soon be over and we could continue on our way to the shelter of the lagoon at Keeling-Cocos.
But the worst had just begun. By the afternoon, the barometer fell sharply to 991, and for the first time in our trip we were in conditions that I could honestly call “storm.” The peak hit at 1400 with solid rain, blown horizontal by the wind. I couldn’t see the mainmast from the cockpit and the seas were enormous. The wind, especially at the height of the gusts, had a strength and fury I had never known before, on land or sea.
Faced with this, we at once changed our strategy. The last thing we now wanted was to be anywhere near the reefs of Cocos, especially with night coming on. What we needed was plenty of sea room. The wind by now was out of the northeast and shifting to north. The current in this area, according to the charts, was about 18 miles a day, generally northwest, but there was no telling what the storm had done to the pattern. Our estimated position, about 25 miles east of the islands, was too close for comfort and, if we remained hove to, it was not at all impossible that we might drift down onto the reefs.
In spite of the weather, I decided we must try to make some easting. We set up the storm jib and mizzen and headed east, managing to make good southeast at about four knots even under this scrap of canvas. It was a very bad night and my log book at this point is almost illegible, for the following reason:
1930. Tremendous dollop of water through afterhatch—wet everything—including this book. Gallons and gallons—worst _inside_ wetting I’ve ever had—bunk a shambles.
Barbara’s diary was spared, however, and she describes the same incident with a bit more gusto:
In the early evening, after we had started to sail, a _huge_ wave came aboard and _poured_, steadily and by bucketsful, down the afterhatch on top of poor Skip who had been trying to snatch a brief rest. He landed standing in the middle of his cabin, looking as though he’d just been in for a swim with his clothes on. Even the folded blankets _under_ the mattress were soaked and his pillow and bolster were hopeless. With the patience of Job, he unloaded everything; wiped and blotted his books and instruments; remade his bed—using dry wool blankets on top of the wet mattress; got into dry clothes, and climbed back to continue his sleep. What a man!
Throughout the night I arose frequently and kept an anxious eye on the barometer, which was now slowly rising. By morning it was up to 1004 and our spirits were obviously climbing right along with it. There is a real lift in knowing that the worst is over and I feel sure it is no accident that we refer to spirits, as well as barometric pressure, as being “high” or “low.”
I felt we had made enough easting during the night so we could afford to give everyone a rest by again heaving to. This time we tried a new maneuver—lying atry: that is, taking down _all_ sail and letting the ship take its natural position. It seemed to make little difference to the _Phoenix_, other than that she lay a little bit more in the trough. We rode quite comfortably.