 Photo of the port of the Rock of Gibraltar, from Wikipedia. I first docked where the small boat is shown left of the bow of the tourist liner. When a storm came in from the Mediterranean at top of photo, the resulting waves against the dock forced me to hire a tug to move Swalker to a safer spot.
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We arrived at The Rock, the famous symbol of Prudential Insurance, about March 1. The water was warm enough for swimming. There were palm trees and Europe's only monkeys, carefully nurtured because of the legend that if they disappeared, England would lose The Rock. Since then the primates have done so well that their numbers had to be curbed by "culling", then after that was protested, by a sterilization program.
The Duke of Edinborough (the Queen's husband) had come to the yacht club with his boat, so we were directed to the much more exposed commercial area. One midnight there I was awoken by a sudden storm, whose winds and waves were coming on us unabated from the harbor mouth. By dawn the boat was thrashing up and down 5 feet, breaking ropes that were supposed to tether the Swalker to the concrete dock. The fenders (protective pads placed between hull and dock) were overcome by the steady surges, so for hours I kept pushing Swalker away from the concrete, but on loose tethers to keep it from blowing away. We were offered a protected mooring spot at some distance, but I was concerned that if I cast off to go there, the motor would not keep us from being blown backward into a worse spot. I hired a small tug which towed us out of the maelstrom until we could go to our tranquil mooring, away from the Duke and the docks.
Only once have I sought sponsorship. I approached Nestle headquarters in town. They asked for no contract, but only asked that I mention them in any future lectures, and gave me two cubic feet of Nestle products. The chocolate didn't last long, but the tea did.
Peter was to leave the boat here, but port authorities told me that the law required that a captain take from port on departure all the crew he brought in.
So he and I took Swalker to Tangier, where the laws were more relaxed. A strong current constantly runs from the Atlantic Ocean through the Straits of Gibraltar, known to the ancients as the Gates of Hercules, to replenish water evaporated from the warm Mediterranean. We sailed in the more moderate current close to the Spanish shore until we went directly across to Africa, crabbing 45 degrees to our actual course.
Tangier, once a stateless port, was newly part of Morocco, but the commerce and the people were still international. Ahmed, an Arab teenager, offered his services as watchman, for which I paid him about a dollar a day. He spoke Arabic, English, Spanish, and another language I have forgotten. The devout Sultan had cleaned up much of the sins of the former Tangier, and it was relatively safe to walk the streets.
I became acquainted with an American couple and child who had come to Tangier as tourists, found that the Tangier end of smuggling was legal and lucrative, and established residence.
One afternoon in the narrow shaded alleys of the casbah - the old native quarter - I was concerned to find two people following me through every turn I made. They turned out to be an English couple I had known in Ibiza, so we enjoyed each other's company for a couple of days.
From my letter February 25, 1957: "Recently a Senor Guido Maresca, an Italian who owns one of the better hotels here and one in Capri, came over to express profuse admiration for my boat, which is bigger than his. He suggested I have the hull bottom cleaned of marine growth and painted. He supplied the expertise, the negotiations, and the painters, who are paid about $1.50 a day. He carted me all over town in his Chrysler to do errands, and has served me sumptuous meals at his hotel 5 times. The bar was free. At his English-type teas I met several cosmopolitan people. His elegant friendly wife is 37, she told me, but looks 25. They went with me on a day sail on the Swalker".
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The Swalker precariously careened on the Tangier harbor bottom. When the tide went out twice daily to expose the hull briefly, Ahmed and I worked fast to remove marine growth, and repaint. I didn't know about or use the very expensive toxic paint which inhibits the accumulation of marine growth, so my Atlantic crossing was slowed, and when the Swalker reached the New York boatyard its bottom was festooned.
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Peter got a job on a smuggling boat, to our mutual relief. I replaced him with Rick Heatherly, a young adventurer who had recently ridden a horse down through most of Spain. Rick wrote me 2 months later that Peter died in the explosion of that boat, due to rivalry between smugglers, quite like the wars between drug gangs in modern Mexico.
After a farewell banquet hosted by the Marescas at their hotel, Rick and I left for the 700 mile passage to the Canary Islands.
There was a fine favorable wind, so by midnight we had overcome the current in the Straits, rounded the northwestern corner of Africa, and turned left (port, southwest), on a course on the safe side of parallel to the coast.
After a farewell banquet hosted by the Marescas at their hotel, Rick and I left for the 700 mile passage to the Canary Islands.
There was a fine favorable wind, so by midnight we had overcome the current in the Straits, rounded the northwestern corner of Africa, and turned left (port, southwest), on a course on the safe side of parallel to the coast.
To use the sextant I bought for $8 in Holland I had bought for a dollar "How To Navigate Today", a paperback by "M.R. Hart". This remarkable woman (click here) and (click here for better detail) is one of my heroes. She used the ambiguous initials "M.R." because she figured men wouldn't trust a celestial navigation primer written by a woman. Using the sextant and Marion Rice Hart's book I took two sun shots and calculated my position, which agreed closely with our dead reckoning location. Thank you, Marion !
A storm arose, so we put 2 of the 3 possible reefs in the sails (made them smaller). Rick lost overboard his hat and coat and 1 of our 2 lighters, necessary for starting the auxiliary engine. While putting the third reef in the mainsail he lost his balance and fell on the boom, which broke the topping lift (the rope supporting the boom). Fortunately a spare topping lift was in place to support the boom, but later I had to go to the top of the mast again to repair the broken rope. Rick deplored my non-nautical terminology ("right" instead of "starboard", etc.), since he knew those terms from building boats in bottles. One night while I slept he used the wrong mark on the compass, so we had been closing slowly on the African coast during his watch. Another night, after we had made slow progress by tacking against a contrary wind, I awoke to find we were going downwind, because Rick was using the wrong end of the compass, dissipating our hard won progress as we sped back towards Tangier.
From my March 15 log: "We accosted a fishing boat about midnight, and were told that we were 20 miles west of Casablanca. The wind backed around to northeast, finally the favorable trade wind we had expected. I raised the twin jib sails I had had made in Holland, and, lacking any information from books or people in person, found by trial the arrangement of ropes from corners of the sails to pulleys to the tiller that made the boat steer itself. Rick recorded 3 star shots (measuring their angular altitude from the horizon), but I was too tired to calculate, so went to bed".
March 16 : Calculations from a star shot result in a line on the chart. A second shot is supposed to yield a second line crossing the first, and that's your position. That is, unless either line is in error. So you always shoot a third star, and if all 3 intersect at about the same point forming a tiny triangle, doubt is removed. That morning I calculated lines from Rick's three star shots the previous evening, and found they all crossed close to a point a few miles inside the adjacent Sahara desert. Obviously coincidental errors were made, for we saw no camels around the boat. For safety I had directed a course gradually widening our distance from the coast. We'd been warned that, with the civil war then going on south of Casablanca, we would likely be shot or sold as slaves if we landed at one of the few little ports there. (Slavery is still rife in Africa in 2011).
In the middle of one night we spotted the lights of 3 small boats. They headed towards us, and every way we turned, they followed us. I had read of pirates off that impoverished coast, and will never know if they were. We had a good wind and ran the motor at top speed, so gradually outdistanced the lights. Our maximum speed was about 7 knots (8 mph), which would have been no match for a modern pirate boat.
The date is uncertain, but about March 20 we sighted our first island in the Canaries, Lanzarote. Watching that volcanic mass appear was an epiphany, one of the supreme peaks of pure absolute joy and triumph in my life, exceeded only when I held my daughter the day she was born. I thought if I never were able to do anything else, this was worth it. The sighting showed that my navigation was successful, for I had discovered the Canaries as Columbus did 465 years earlier, and at that distance they hadn't changed at all. The world was beautiful and wide and free, and I felt that all the tribulations behind me were as nothing compared to the euphoria I felt.
The Swalker was moored for about 2 weeks at the yacht club of the principal city in the several islands, Las Palmas, on the island of Gran Canaria. Rick took a job salvaging a WWII German submarine, so I was now prepared to run the next leg, crossing the Atlantic, on my own.
I was befriended by the USA vice consul for the islands, Edmund Orlandini, and his wife, who were from Elliot, Maine. They lived well on $40 a week, which covered their expenses for an office in town, a beautiful flowered villa 1200 feet above Las Palmas, all food and utilities and car expenses and 2 maids and a part-time gardener. What was then called The Almighty American Dollar made one rich in the Canaries. I recorded on paper and memory a 5-course meal for 10 USA cents, tapas (a drink with little snacks) for 3 cents, "a rum and red wine and a plateful of fried fish for 8 cents". It was even more a tropical paradise than Ibiza, for here there were loose camels, and it was cheaper.
Once I was swimming at a public beach with Britt, a Swedish girl, when suddenly I thought I had been attacked by a shark. Something had enveloped my arm, inflicting immediate intense pain. I swam to shore, grabbed a handful of sand, and tried to scour off what I had realized were the filaments of a Portuguese Man-of-war. That, I was later told, was what Nature intended, but the worst thing I could have done, because it drove into the flesh venom more potent than cobra venom. A Spaniard bather immediately realized what had happened, and walked me two blocks to a doctor, in spite of the prohibition against being half naked away from the beach. The doctor administered vinegar, a standard remedy which Google.com tells me has been proven ineffective or counterproductive.
I was about ready to make the Great Crossing. I figured a young healthy person could face just four dangers on such a voyage: falling overboard from a vessel whose speed could outdistance any swimmer, breaking a significant bone (spine or leg), appendicitis, and hurricanes. I would avoid falling overboard, I would move carefully so as to minimize the risk of trauma, my appendix had been removed by a young lieutenant in Greenland, and I would arrive in Florida before the June onset of hurricanes. Only four controllable hazards, or so I thought....
At sea, anarchy prevails. It is hard enough to police the land, but on the liquid 70% of Earth surface there can be little control of transgressors except, sometimes, after the fact. I visited the home of a local family of modest means, the patriarch of which urged that he help me cross the ocean. Out there, asleep, my corpse could be tossed overboard, and he would have a prize that could be repainted, renamed, and sold. So thanks, but no thanks, amigo.
Just before leaving, the yacht club manager asked me to take back to the USA a couple thousand letters that they could not deliver, because the yachts of the addressees had never arrived there. I pondered, and declined. I intended to arrive in the USA, but thought that if I had written one of the letters I might not want the hazard of it being on a little boat in the middle of the ocean. I pored over the collection and found that dozens were for actor Errol Flynn, who had cancelled a visit there on his palatial sailing yacht. I might not have been able to resist steaming open some of those scented missives from his lady admirers.
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Pictured is the "elderly" (60 ?) man I engaged to watch over Swalker at night, and assist me occasionally by day. Just before leaving I paid him a dollar for each day. An hour before I set sail he rowed out to my boat, and gave me a gift of bakery desserts that must have cost him a third of what I had paid him.
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