We raised the Canary Islands on a Sunday morning and by mid-afternoon we had cleared the Spanish immigration procedures in Las Palmas. Jackie was wide-eyed with the realization that it was in this ancient harbor that Columbus himself had waited for the trade winds to take him into the unknown west.
Next day, for lack of space in Las Palmas, we moved to the harbor at Mogan, on the island’s south coast. Mogan, like all the other island harbors, was crammed with cruising yachts waiting to make the Atlantic crossing. There had been a time when barely a dozen small yachts a year made this passage, but now the Canary Island ports could scarcely keep up with the demand for berth space. Hundreds of boats would cross with us, making a great flock of sails that would speed across the blue heart of the Atlantic.
“So how long do we wait for the trade winds?” Jackie asked.
“A month? Maybe longer.”
We collected our mail from the English pub where David, God bless him, had sent every available chart of the Patagonian coast. He had also sent me the details of the Chilean government’s regulations for visiting boats, which were complex, together with his advice to see a Chilean consul somewhere in Central America. “I’m going to talk to Peter Carter-Pirie,” he wrote to me, “for his advice on sailing the Patagonian channels. I’ll have his words of wisdom waiting for you Poste Restante in Antigua, with copies to Panama. Betty and I send best wishes to the lady from Kalamazoo, that is if you’re still talking to each other!” I could almost hear David’s evil chortling as he wrote that sentence.
I took the charts back to Stormchild where I planned to spend the afternoon studying the awful coast where the Genesis community had apparently taken shelter. I had Stormchild to myself, for Jackie had taken the boat’s folding bicycle to explore the nearby countryside and to look for shops where she could buy galley supplies. I had also instructed her to buy herself some summer clothes, for the weather was stifling and she could not go on wearing her shapeless sweaters and capacious trousers. I spread the Patagonian charts in Stormchild’s cockpit, over which I had rigged a white cotton awning, then settled down with a tall jug of Bloody Marys.
I discovered the Archipelago of Christ’s Blood to be a tortured group of islands some two hundred miles north of Puerto Natales, which was where the settlements of Tierra del Fuego began. I traced my finger northward from Puerto Natales, across a tangle of islands, fjords, channels, and glaciers, and noted the odd mixture of place names. Some were English, legacies of the great naval explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; thus there was an Isla Darwin, a Nelson Straits, an Isla Duque de York, and an Isla Victoria. The majority of the names, naturally enough, were Spanish; some pious, like the Isla Madre de Dios, and some ominous, like the Isla Desolación, but a good number of German names were also salted among the Anglo-Spanish mix; I found a Puerto Weber, the Canal Erhardt, the Isla Stubbenkammer and the Monte Siegfried; just enough Teutonic names to record how many hopeful people had emigrated from Germany to Chile’s bleak and inhospitable coast.
None of the charts marked von Rellsteb’s finca, but of the score of islands which made up the Archipiélago Sangre de Cristo only one seemed large enough to sustain a ranch. That island bore the ominous name of Isla Tormentos, the Isle of Torments, and I wondered if it had been so named by shipwrecked sailors who had suffered on its inhospitable coasts. The long Pacific shore of the Isle of Torments was shown as a stretch of gigantic cliffs, pierced by a single fjord that reached so deep into the island it almost slashed Isla Tormentos in half. The opposite shore of the island was far more ragged than the ocean-facing cliffs; the eastern coast was a cartographer’s nightmare, for it looked as though the island had been raggedly ripped from the rest of the archipelago to leave a tattered, scattered, and shattered litter of rocks and islands and shoals, which, in turn, were all navigational hazards within the forbiddingly named Estrecho Desolado, the Desolate Straits. The Patagonian coast was thickly printed with such depressing names, but the Archipiélago Sangre de Cristo seemed to have more than its fair share of forbidding nomenclature, suggesting that sailing its labyrinthine channels would be hard and dangerous work. I traced the difficult course of the Desolate Straits to find they were not true straits at all, but rather a blind sea loch that ran uselessly into the heartland of the Isle of Torments.
I was distracted from these dispiriting researches by Jackie’s noisy return. She came laden with string bags that were crammed with papayas, avocados, tomatoes, leeks, pineapples, cabbages, bunches of radishes, and the island’s small, good-tasting potatoes. She was clearly delighted with the Canary Islands. “I got talking to this Dutch lady, who’s on one of the boats moored by the wall over there, and she speaks Spanish and she talked to the lady in the shop, and she told us that everything in the shop was grown organically. Everything! Isn’t that just great, Tim?”
“It’s absolutely astonishingly terrifically wonderful,” I said with an utter lack of enthusiasm. “Did you buy some organic meat for your organic skipper?”
“Yeah, sure. Of course I did.” She produced a cellophane pack, which held a very scrawny portion of tired-looking chicken, then dived enthusiastically down the main companionway with her purchases. “Chicken’s OK, isn’t it? They had rabbits, too, but I really couldn’t bring myself to buy a dead bunny rabbit, Tim. I’m sorry.” She shouted the apology up from the galley where she was evidently storing the food into lockers.
“Did the dead bunnies have their paws on?”
There was a pause, then her small, wedge-shaped face frowned at me from the foot of the companionway. “I didn’t look. Why? Is it important?”
“If the paws are still on the carcass, then it probably is rabbit,” I said, “but if the paws are missing, then it’s a pretty sure bet you’re looking at a dead pussycat.”
A heartbeat of silence. Then, “No!”
“Cat doesn’t taste bad,” I said with feigned insouciance. “It depends on how well the family fed the pussy, really. The ones fed on that dry cat food taste like shit, but the others are OK.”
“Gross me out!” But she laughed, then went back to her chores. She began singing, but her voice faded as she went forward to her own cabin. While we were in port I had taken over the stern cabin to give us both some privacy. At sea I could collapse onto a saloon sofa, but in port it was more difficult to preserve mutual modesty if I was sprawled in the boat’s main living space.
Silence settled on the boat, and I guessed Jackie was resting after the excitement of discovering organic stick-insect food in the middle of the Atlantic. I sipped my Bloody Mary and looked back to the charts of the Archipiélago Sangre de Cristo. I assumed that if the von Rellsteb finca was indeed on the Isla Tormentos, then it must be built on the tangled eastern coast, facing the Desolate Straits, for in the nineteenth century, when the estate wanted to take its fleeces to market, or to ship its quarried limestone to the world, it would doubtless have used coastal sailing vessels to carry the produce north to Puerto Montt. Such ships could never have found shelter on the ocean-fronting western coast, so I could safely assume that the settlement, if it was on the Isla Tormentos, must stand on the eastern shore, where, if the old charts were accurate, several bays looked promising as possible harbors.