The coast, inhospitable though it is, still has its few inhabitants. A handful of ranches cling to the islands and mainland hills; there is one fishing settlement with the unlikely name of Puerto Eden, and one surviving limestone quarry which still extracts stone, but otherwise the long savage coast has been abandoned to the seas and to the winds, to the smoking vents of volcanoes, to the glaciers, and to the earth tremors, which reveal that this is a place where a seam of the planet is still grinding and tearing itself into ruin. The nightmare coast comes to its end in the “Land of Fire,” the Tierra del Fuego, at Cape Horn where, before the Panama Canal was dug, the great ships used to die, and where the biggest seas on earth still heap and surge through the narrow and shallow Drake Passage which runs between the Land of Fire and the northernmost tip of Antarctica. It is a horrid coast, a bitter coast, a dangerous and rock-riven coast, where men and boats die easily. It was also a coast which, if I was to find my child and let her loose from a madman’s thrall, I would have to search.
“Remember Peter Carter-Pirie?” I asked David.
“I was just thinking of him.”
“Carter-Pirie?” Betty asked.
“He was a mad Royal Marine,” I explained, “who used to sail a wooden boat to unlikely places. David and I met him in Greenland when we were guinea-pigging survival gear for the army, and he rather excited us at the prospect of sailing the Patagonian coast. He’d been there a couple of times, you see, and I remember he told us quite a bit about it.”
“And none of it particularly good,” David said grimly.
“He said the bird life was remarkable,” I reproved David’s pessimism. “Lots of condors, steamer ducks, penguins, that sort of thing. If I remember rightly Carter-Pirie went there to prove that Patagonia was the breeding ground for the greater-crested snipe or something like that.”
“There is no greater-crested snipe,” said Betty, with the easy authority of an expert, “though there is a Patagonian hummingbird; the green-backed firecrown.”
Jackie Potten was staring at the three of us as though we had lost our collective marbles. “Hummingbird?” she said faintly.
“I’d rather like to see that hummingbird,” David said wistfully.
“Patagonia can’t be a very comfortable place for a hummingbird,” I suggested. “I thought they sipped nectar in warm climes?”
“It can’t be a very comfortable place for von Rellsteb and his Genesis community either”—David was peering at the map—“if indeed they’re there?”
“Where else?” I asked.
“But Patagonia means rather a drastic change in your plans, Tim, does it not?” David inquired.
“Not really.” I spoke with an insouciance I did not entirely feel. “It just means that I turn left when I reach the Pacific, instead of turning right.”
“You mean…” Jackie Potten frowned at me.
I glanced across the table at her. “Oh, I’m sorry, I never told you where I was going, did I? When you arrived I was just leaving to find the Genesis community.”
“In this?” She gestured round Stormchild’s spacious saloon.
“It’s a great deal more suitable than a Ford Escort,” I said very seriously.
“You were just leaving?” She ignored my feeble jest. “But you didn’t know where to look!”
“I had a mind to try Alaska,” I explained, “but I would probably have tried to telephone you as soon as I reached the far side of the Atlantic, and I guess you’d have told me to try Patagonia instead.”
“So now you’ll just go to Chile?” Jackie seemed astonished that such a decision could be made so lightly. “How do you get there?”
“Sail south till the butter melts, then turn right.” David offered the ancient joke.
“I’ll sail south to the Canary Islands,” I offered more sensibly, “and wait there till the trade winds establish themselves, then I’ll run across to the West Indies. After that it’ll be a brisk sail to Panama, and I’m guessing now, because I’m not familiar with the waters, but I imagine it will be easier to go west into the Pacific, then dogleg back to South America rather than fight the Humboldt Current all the way down the coast. And with any luck I should be in Chile by March next year, which will be toward the end of their summer and, if there’s ever a good time to sail in Patagonian waters, late summer is probably that time.”
“Wow!” Jackie Potten said in what I took to be admiration, but then it was her turn to astound me. “Can I come?”
Stormchild sailed on the next tide, just after midnight. She slipped unseen down the river with her navigation lights softly blurred by the light rain. Instead of the champagne parting and the paper streamers there had only been David and Betty calling their farewells from the pontoons, and once their voices had been lost in the night there were only the sounds of the big motor in Stormchild’s belly, the splash of the water at her stem, and the hiss of the wet wind. That wind was southerly, but the forecast promised it would back easterly by dawn, and, if the forecast held good, I could not hope for a better departure wind. It was blowing hard, but the big, heavily laden and steel-hulled Stormchild needed a good wind to shift her ponderous weight.
I raised sail at the river’s mouth, killed the engine, and hardened onto a broad reach. The wake foamed white into the blackness astern as the coastal lights winked and faded in the rain that still pattered on the deck and dripped from the rigging. The green and red lights of the river’s buoys vanished astern, and soon the only mark to guide Stormchild was the flickering loom of the far Portland light. I had lost count of how many times I had begun voyages in just this manner; slipping on a fast tide down-channel, making my way southerly to avoid the tidal rips that churn off the great headlands of southern England, then letting my boat tear her way westward toward the open Atlantic, yet however many times I had done it there was always the same excitement.
“Gee, but it’s cold,” Jackie Potten said suddenly.
“If you’re going to moan all the way across the Atlantic,” I snapped, “then I’ll turn round now and drop you off.”
There was a stunned silence. I had surprised myself by the anger in my voice, which had clearly made Jackie intensely miserable. I felt sorry that I had snapped at her, but I also felt justified, for I was not at all sure that I wanted her on board Stormchild, but the notion of Jackie accompanying me had energized David and Betty with a vast amusement, and they had overriden my objections with their joint enthusiasm. Betty had taken Jackie shopping, returning with a carload of vegetarian supplies and armfuls of expensive foul-weather gear that I had been forced to pay for. I had ventured to ask the American girl whether she had any sailing experience at all, only to be told that she and her mother had once spent a week on a Miami-based cruise ship.