The Long Way: Sheridan House Maritime Classic

by Bernard Moitessier

I heave on the staysail halyard just a bit . . . no, too much . . . I slack it half an inch . . . there, it’s perfect now, and the staysail draws all the wind of the sky and turns it into flecks of foam that come to life in the wake. The whole universe meets in the staysail.

A trifle often irritates me and can send my spirits tumbling. But when things really get rough, I sometimes seem to become a cold, lucid observer from another world.

found myself in water made very light by the millions of bubbles of foam from the enormous breaking sea that had capsized my boat. In a flash, I had glimpsed the cabin hatch cover, ripped off its tracks. With an opening like that, and her keel out of water, Marie-Thérèse II could only go to the bottom. Yet I felt no despair, no bitterness. I just whispered to myself ‘This time, old man, your number is up.’ And I remembered the page on destiny in Wind, Sand and Stars, on the absolute need to follow one’s fate, whatever its outcome.

did not get much sleep last night, thinking all the time about the bowsprit. I had the impression that Henry Wakelam was there, close to me. From time to time I mumbled, ‘Good God, if you were here, you would have already figured a way to straighten it.’ Yesterday, as I worked on the shrouds, the problem of the bowsprit hovered in the background, and I felt my friend’s breath and presence next to me. I talked to him from time to time; I would ask him not to drop the crescent wrench we were using to tighten the cable clamps. And he helped quietly, without lecturing me, without a word on the real problem.

Lots of people experience this in times of crisis.

I like the Cape Town announcer. When he warns of a gale, you can feel the worry in his voice; he gives the warning twice, then repeats it at the end of the forecasts. He is not just talking to hear himself talk, lulling himself with the sound of his own voice. He is communicating with people at sea, and one feels he gives us all he has to give. He brings humanity to his work.

There was this guy standing aft; yes, that’s right, a guy. He looked happy as could be, and he laughingly said (I repeat word for word) ‘Hey there, Good Hope, since your arm’s so long, it must be mighty handy to scratch your ass, eh?’ It was cause for concern, but he vanished without my seeing him go, while I was picking my way aft to shut him up. I threw the empty bottle overboard, and went below. Just then, I saw the Southern Cross to port, Joshua having swung around little by little in the flat calm, unnoticed. So the other guy blasphemed with his back to Good Hope. Nothing serious, thank God!

They were the same water spiders as those in the streams of Europe and Asia. On Marie-Thérèse I encountered lots of them in mid-Indian Ocean, very far west of Sumatra. At first I could not believe it, yet there they were, skittering over the sea on their long, curved legs. They do not dive, and are carnivorous, so there must be invisible lives on the surface of the sea. How could they survive, so fragile in appearance, when the waves turn ugly? Yet they managed very well; there were thousands around Marie-Thérèse. It was a day of calms. The night before, we had been hove-to.

Two tiny things are swimming alongside. One chases the other, catches it, lets it go, catches it again. They fight, I trap them in the bucket for a closer look. They resemble two miniature cicadas. They do not fight, they procreate. Marvellous, to see life going on, so far from everything and against all odds. I look for others, while Joshua drifts in the light airs, but there are just two of them, no bigger than a baby’s fingernail, for the entire sea. Yet they managed to find each other despite the dangers of this great open sea.

There were no compasses on the Gulf of Siam junks, and I did not want it used during my sailing school cruises in the Mediterranean. Instead of bearing 110° from France to Corsica my crew had to steer with the mistral swell very slightly off the port quarter. At night, it was the Pole Star one small hand abaft the port beam. And if there was neither distinct swell nor star, we made do with whatever we had. I wanted it that way, because concentrating on a magnetized needle prevents one from participating in the real universe, seen and unseen, where a sailboat moves. In the beginning they could not understand my insistence on getting away from the compass, that god of the West. But in exchange, they began to hear the sky and sea talking with the boat. And when blue-tinted land appeared on the horizon, looking as it did to the mariners of old, all nimbed with mystery, a few of them felt that our rigorous techniques should leave a door open to those gods which the modern world tries so hard to exclude.

Strong winds in the upper atmosphere cause large density gradients between layers of air at different temperatures. The stars then twinkle more than usual, because of the increased refraction bending the light. And when the high altitude winds blow very hard, this almost always tells of an approaching disturbance, or at least unsettled weather.

I believe that science may someday permit men to reach the stars with their spaceships. I believe above all in the old East, which lets me go there any time I like with a candle and some wind. And I will paint a big black and white eye on Joshua’s bow when she finishes her journey, having found her way among the gods of my native Asia.

I listen to the sea, I listen to the wind, I listen to the sails talking with the rain and the stars amid the sounds of the sea and I am not sleepy. I think of William Willis, alone on his balsa raft in the Pacific for months and months, with the sea all to himself in the middle of the universe. At times, he heard the ‘call’ with every fibre of his being. For some time, I have been hearing it too. And that, perhaps, is the long way. But I must not speak of it or let it be felt when rounding Tasmania; land is so far away compared to the questions the stars are asking me. I can only give them my first log, with birds, sea, daily sights and little everyday problems. My real log is written in the sea and sky; it can’t be photographed and given to others. It has gradually come to life out of all that has surrounded us for months: the sounds of water on the hull, the sounds of wind gliding on the sails, the silences full of secret things between my boat and me, like the times I spent as a child listening to the forest talk.

A chill comes over me. It isn’t the moon playing with a cloud, but something uncanny I don’t know about. Could it be the white arch of Cape Horn, that terrifying thing Slocum mentions, the sign of a big gale? The stars shine with a hard glint and the sea looks menacing beneath the icy moon. A second spire rises next to the first. Then a third. Soon there are a dozen, like a huge bouquet of super-natural light. And now I understand . . . it is an aurora australia, the first I have ever seen, perhaps this voyage’s most precious gift to me.

I planted three sprouted coconuts and a mango pit, so the island of our childhood would also have water and fruits. A coconut tree for each of my brothers and the mango for me. They are 25 years old now, if nothing has happened to them

A sailor’s geography is not always that of the cartographer, for whom a cape is a cape, with a latitude and longitude. For the sailor, a great cape is both a very simple and an extremely complicated whole of rocks, currents, breaking seas and huge waves, fair winds and gales, joys and fears, fatigue, dreams, painful hands, empty stomachs, wonderful moments, and suffering at times. A great cape, for us, can’t be expressed in longitude and latitude alone. A great cape has a soul, with very soft, very violent shadows and colours. A soul as smooth as a child’s, as hard as a criminal’s. And that is why we go.

Fortunately, I had to continue NE in any case for ten days or so to clear the iceberg zone. So I let my mind heave-to for the duration. It was by reading Henri de Monfreid as a kid that I learned the trick: stop thinking, stop acting, make no decisions; time will do its work, soothing everything. Noon sights, food—good, carefully fixed grub, talking to the stove and the pans, asking them for all sorts of advice—long naps, good books and falling asleep after a few pages, climbing to the masthead three or four times a day to look for non-existent icebergs and just to look at things, my yoga morning and evening, which I would forget from time to time . . . Thinking neither about Plymouth, nor the Pacific, nor anything. Gradually the fatigue left my brain, and the question of the route to take was no longer a question.

turn the calm to advantage, diving in my wetsuit to check the bottom. The water is not really cold, but it isn’t warm, either. Lots of gooseneck barnacles. They have grown in serried ranks, the size of a finger joint, all over the after part of the hull, and would have slowed Joshua quite a bit in light airs.

A shark bent on mischief can usually be spotted at first glance by his jerky, nervous swimming, which is not at all like his usual demeanor, full of grace and indifference. But the great majority of sharks are timid, frightened by a man’s sudden movement (except perhaps the very big ones . . .). I was among them so often, spearfishing at Mauritius, that swimming with 2500 fathoms under the keel does not bother me at all, providing I stay on the alert, ready to climb out quickly.

It seems you can’t dream of a dead person; so Loïck must be alive. I am not surprised; he has a good boat and knows how to sail. But where is he? Where is Nicole? When we were leaving Plymouth she was putting the final touches on her steel cutter Esquilo and was soon to leave for the Caribbean. Where is she now? Where are Bill King and Nigel? Nigel is the one I think of most often, yet I have never seen him in my dreams. Good Lord! I hope nothing has happened to Nigel . . .

Some day we will have tiny walkie-talkies no bigger than packs of cigarettes, with a range of thousands of miles. Then pals could communicate without going through the ears of others . . .

She sailed round the world . . . but what does that mean, since the horizon is eternal? Round the world goes further than the ends of the earth, as far as life itself, perhaps further still. When you sense that, your head begins to swim, you are a little afraid. And at the same time, what you sense there is so . . . So . . . I don’t know. Further than the ends of the earth . . .

Nothing has changed . . . Space and time have absolutely ceased to exist, a kind of weightlessness, with the eternal horizon always there.

The wind drops. I throw overboard the 45 pound jerrycan of cement and plaster of Paris intended for underwater repairs in case an iceberg ripped the hull open (see Appendix). No more icebergs, no need to clutter Joshua with useless weight. I absentmindedly knead the lump of clay, useless as well now that the plaster and cement are gone. Strange, this soft, warm thing whose feel I had forgotten. I raise it to my face. The smell penetrates me slowly at first . . . and then I don’t quite know what happens, the whole earth enters me like a flash. All at once I see my Chinese nurse again, teaching me, as a child, to lie face down on the ground when I had worn myself out, or been bad. And when I was bigger, she told me that the earth gives her strength and her peace to those who love her.

The wind is back, nice and fresh, the bow rumbles day and night; all the sky is mine, all the sea is mine and all the earth as well. I am so happy, I would like to tell it to my friends who stayed back there, not keep it just for me; tell them how it is here, at sea, after so long. So long I hardly remember anymore. And that is what counts, what is left when you hardly remember.

remember asking myself, ‘Will you be able to last another four months until Tahiti, including three in these cold waters, with two more great capes to round and gales which will no longer be summertime blows? Remember Tahiti-Alicante, that terrific six day gale . . . remember in The Old Man and the Sea he asked himself pretty much the same question. And his answer: Because I went too far.

She speaks to me then, and I understand that this is no miracle. And she tells me the story of the Beautiful Sailboat filled with men. Hundreds of millions of men. When they set out, it was on a long voyage of exploration. The men wanted to find out where they came from, and where they were going. But they completely forgot why they were on the boat. And little by little they get fat, they become demanding passengers. They are not interested in the life of the boat and the sea any more; what interests them are their little comforts. They have accepted mediocrity, and each time they say ‘Well, that’s life,’ they are resigning themselves to ugliness.

I can’t remember who it was who said, ‘There are two terrible things for a man: not to have fulfilled his dream, and to have fulfilled it.’

Dear Robert: The Horn was rounded February 5, and today is March 18. I am continuing non-stop towards the Pacific Islands because I am happy at sea, and perhaps also to save my soul.