When, in 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, peering out of the jungle of Darién toward the west, saw a great expanse of blue water, it was calm, sparkling, seemingly friendly. So he called it El Mar Pacifico, the quiet sea, the peaceful sea, the Pacific. He had no idea what the Pacific could do when it is consumed with rage. The Indian Ocean is the same.
As with all oceans, the Pacific can be flat as a lake, or moved only by a gentle swell, blue under the sun, welcoming, gentle, inviting the mariner to share its calm and splendor. Or it can rise in terrifying mountains, lashed by deranged winds, prepared to seize that same mariner, crush his presumptuous craft, swamp him, consume him, and consign him in perpetuity to a cold black grave, where he will never be seen again. That is why men who sail the oceans hope there must, please, be Something even mightier Who will protect them and bring them home to safe haven.
With hindsight, that twenty-twenty vision that we all have but too late, it was unwise of me to disregard the maps and go game fishing off the Mauritian coast in 1985.
We had gone as a family, two parents, two small boys, to the Saint Géran Hotel on the east coast. The weather programs had mentioned a cyclone, but it was well to the north and heading in a straight line east to west, and a hundred miles north of the island. So I decided to go game fishing.
The resident game boat Chico chugged out of the lagoon just after dawn, my favorite hour, through the usual cut in the reef and out to sea, heading east. At the helm was Monsieur Moun, whom everyone called Mr. Moon. He was elderly, dark, wrinkled—a Creole who knew his sea and his island and had never been anywhere else nor wanted to.
It was a one-client charter and the wireman was his son, who was sharing the afterdeck with me to tend the four big marlin rods, the lines, and the lures, and who would help swing the catch aboard. The breeze was light, the swell gentle, the sky blue, and the sun hot—a recipe for paradise. We trolled patiently for two hours, always eastward until Mauritius was a dim smudge on the horizon. It was at about noon that the sea calmed even more, down to a flat and slightly oily sheen. Mr. Moon spotted the danger sign; I did not, too busy scanning the four lures astern for a hoped-for strike.
I noticed only when his son began staring at his father, perched cross-legged upon his revolving office stool, adapted to a captain’s seat behind the wheel. Then I, too, followed his gaze. Mr. Moon was looking straight toward the north. Along the horizon was a very thin dark line, like a bruise between the sky and water. I realized it might be serious when he uttered a series of orders in Creole to his son, who began to bring in the four lines and the Chico swung in a circle and pointed back to the west. The smudge on the horizon, the island of Mauritius, had almost disappeared.
I did not know what had happened to change both the mood of the sea beneath us and on the deck on which I stood. The cyclone had swerved through ninety degrees. It was roaring down from the north.
The Chico was not one of those modern techno-wonders with two huge chunks of Japanese technology bolted to the stern, capable of sending a GRP-hulled fishing boat screaming across the sea at twenty knots in choppy water or thirty in flat. It was an elderly workboat of plywood with an internal chugger of an engine. A chugger it might be, but Mr. Moon moved the throttle to full ahead, max power. The chugger did its best and we increased speed to ten knots.
The black line on the horizon widened to an inch and the sea changed from an oily calm, not to a snapping chop (that would come later) but a rolling swell that became ever deeper. At the top of the peaks one could see the horizon smudge, but seemingly no closer. In the troughs, the sea was no longer blue, but valleys of moving green, growing deeper and darker. Indian Ocean cyclones take no prisoners.
Mr. Moon said nothing, and nor did his son. The lad took the rods out of the holders where they usually traveled and stowed them in the small forward cuddy cabin. The Chico pounded west as best she could, and with agonizing slowness the smudge became the principal mountain peak of the island. The northern sky darkened and clouds appeared, not white and fluffy, high against the blue, but dark and hunched like a fighter entering the ring.
There was nothing to do but stand and watch. I tried to converse with Mr. Moon in his other native tongue, French, but he was too absorbed to reply. His gaze just flickered from the island to the cyclone, calculating speeds, angles, and engine revs. So I walked back to the stern and joined his son.
It may be thought that a Creole, descendant of the native Africans, cannot go pale. Not true. The lad had a sickly pallor. He was badly frightened and we both knew why. The island came into closer view as the old engine banged and hammered under its casting. It was clear our lives were going to depend on this old mariner. The island became more distinct, but so did the black-clouded fury behind us. Whatever speed it was moving at, it was well above ten knots, and we could go no faster. We rose on swell after swell, seeming almost stopped at the peak, then plunged down into the valley and up again.
Somewhere ahead was the coast of Mauritius and the lagoon from which we had come. Between us was the reef and the gap in the coral through which we had to pass to stay alive. At last we saw it, but then my hopes plunged. It was clear I would probably not see my family again.
For the wind had taken the waves and tormented them into a frenzy of white water. This white wall was slamming into the reef, where it exploded upward thirty feet. But the roaring crosswind from the north was pulling the wall like a curtain across the entry gap in the coral. The gap had vanished.
If we hit the coral, the Chico and her three passengers would be torn to pieces. Coral may only be made of trillions of polyps, but it is hard as concrete and fanged with teeth that can cut steel. Few vessels that have ever hit a coral reef have not been torn open. I walked up the deck to stand next to Mr. Moon, hunched upon his stool like a brooding cormorant.
His eyes were darting forward to the mountains of his native land, not behind to the menace from the stern.
He was calculating angles from the mountain peaks behind the wall of foam to the dimly visible roof of the hotel. He was trying to work out where, in the liquid insanity ahead of him, lay the thirty-yard-wide gap where the coral grudgingly offered a free passage to an incoming boat.
I turned to look behind and realized that if he missed it, we were dead. There was no possibility of turning away to find another haven down-coast. None either of turning back to sea. Behind us, the cyclone had caught up.
There was a gigantic wave, a vertical wall of rolling green, twenty, maybe thirty feet high and foaming at the top as the base responded to the shallowing beach beneath, about to break forward and crash down. It was like the Empire State Building on its side, rolling at forty knots.
I never saw the Chico hit the foam wall. One second it was in front of us and death behind, then the whiteness enveloped the boat, tumbling onto the afterdeck and frothing onto the scuppers. The whiteness cleared and there was blue sky ahead and above. Jagged shards of coral flashed past, barely six feet from the hull.
The oc
ean spat the Chico like a cork from a champagne bottle into the lagoon and then the Empire State hit the reef with enough force to make thunder seem halfhearted. Observers on the shore later said the spray went up a hundred feet.
The Chico slowed, engine back to cruise revs. Along the shoreline were gathered the full clientele of the hotel. I could see my wife with her hands over her face and two small boys jumping in the shallows. We tied up at the dock to meet an ashen-faced activities manager.
The cyclone locked down the island of Mauritius for forty-eight hours, then passed through, as they all do, and a tropical resort island was restored, as they always are. Takeoffs were resumed from La Plaisance airport and we flew home to London.
There is no way to reward a man like Mr. Moon, who wanted no reward at all, but I did my best. I also learned two things that day. If going out to sea, check the weather; and why men who go onto the ocean in small boats believe in God.
BACK TO ZERO—START AGAIN
It was on a bright, sunny morning in the spring of 1990 that I learned that financially I had been completely and utterly ruined.
In 1988, my first marriage had sadly but amicably ended. In an uncontested settlement, my wife and I had split everything we had into two equal halves. Very shrewdly, my wife had taken the large London apartment in which we lived and a bloc of investment portfolios. The latter she encashed and invested in property, which increased hugely in value.
I had taken the balance entirely in managed funds, all invested in a series of carefully chosen portfolios. In the same year, I acquired a small farm in Hertfordshire and moved there. In 1989, I met the lady who would become my second wife and to whom, twenty-six years later, I am still married.