It was Rose who answered the door. Andy wasn’t there and they didn’t have a world atlas. But she gave me a cup of tea and after leaving me for a while returned with the Digest World Atlas borrowed from a retired lighthouse keeper a few doors away, a man, she said, who had never been outside of British waters but liked to visualize where all the ships passing him had come from. I opened it first at the geo-physical maps of Africa. There were two of them right at the end of Section One, and on both coasts there were vast blanks between the names of ports and coastal towns. The east coast I knew. The seas were big in the monsoons, the currents tricky, and there was a lot of shipping. The Seychelles and Mauritius were too populated, too full of package tours, and the islands closer to Madagascar, like Aldabra and the. Comores Archipelago, too likely to be overflown, the whole area liable to naval surveillance.
In any case, I thought the rendezvous would have been planned much nearer to the target, and if that were Europe then it must be somewhere on the west coast. I turned then to the main maps, which were on
a larger scale of 197 miles to the inch, staring idly at the offshore colouring, where the green of the open Atlantic shaded to white as the continental shelf tilted upwards to the coastal shallows. I was beginning to feel sleepy, for we were in the kitchen with the top of the old-fashioned range red-hot, the atmosphere overwhelming after the cold and the fog outside. Rose poured me another cup of tea from the pot brewing on the hob. Tristan da Cunha, St Helena, Ascension — those were all too far away. But on the next page, the one for North and West Africa, there was Hierro, Gomera, Palma, all out-islands of the Canaries and on the direct route. The Selvagens, too, and the Desertas, and Porto Santo off Madeira. Of these, only the Selvagens, perhaps the Desertas, could be regarded as possibles, the others being too well populated.
The tea was strong and very sweet, and I sat there wrapped in the cosy warmth of that hot little kitchen, my head nodding as my mind groped for something I knew was there but could not find. Andy came back and I stayed on and had a meal with them. By the time I left, the fog had cleared and it was very close to freezing, the stars bright as diamonds overhead and the flash of the Longships and other lights further away, the glimmer of ships rounding Land’s End, all seemingly magnified in the startling clarity.
Next morning I went up to the main road at first light and hitched a ride in a builder’s van going to Penzance. From there I got the train to Falmouth. I needed charts now and a look at the Admiralty pilots for Africa, my mind still groping for that elusive
thought that lurked somewhere in my subconscious, logic suggesting that it was more probably a rendezvous well offshore, some fixed position clear of all shipping lanes.
The first vessel I tried when I got to the harbour was a general cargo ship, but she was on a regular run to the Maritimes, Halifax mainly, and had no use for African charts. The mate indicated a yacht berthed alongside one of the tugs at the inner end of the breakwater. ‘Round-the-worlder,’ he said. ‘Came in last night from the Cape Verdes. He’ll have charts for that part of the African coast.’ And he went back to the job I used to do, checking the cargo coming out of the hold.
The yacht was the Ocean Brigand. She flew a burgee with a black Maltese cross with a yellow crown on a white background and a red fly. Her ensign was blue and she had the letters RCC below her name on the stern. She was wood, her brightwork worn by salt and sun so that in places bare wood showed through the varnish, and her decks were a litter of ropes and sails and oilskins drying in the cold wind. The skipper, who was also the owner, was small and grey-haired with a smile that crinkled the wind-lines at the corners of his eyes. He had charts for most of the world, the pilots, too. ‘A bit out of date, some of them,’ he said. ‘But they cost a fortune now.’
He sat me down at the chart table with a Bacardi and lime and left me to find what I wanted. ‘Still some clearing up to do.’ He smiled wearily. ‘We had it a bit rugged off Finisterre and the Bay was mostly between
seven and nine. Silly time of year really to return to England, but my wife hasn’t been too good. Packed her off to hospital this morning.’
I had never been on a real ocean-going yacht before, the chart table so small, tucked in on the starb’d side opposite the galley, yet everything I’d ever needed in the way of navigation was there — except radar. He hadn’t got radar, or Decca nav. And there was no gyro compass. But everything else, including VHF and single-sideband radio.
