They never got past the equator. Hurricane Beatrice did not merely sink the Beagle II, it tore her apart like one of Cassie’s sophomores dissecting a dogfish. As the ship went down, Cassie found herself alone on a frigid sea, clinging to a spar and clutching her Betty Boop towel, bitterly absorbing the fact that among the stratagems by which Maritime Adventures kept its Galapagos package under a thousand dollars per person was the elimination of life rafts, life jackets, and backup batteries for the shortwave radio. Only through a miracle of chance did she manage to fish a hand-cranked transceiver from the flotsam and haul herself aboard the Beagle’s errant dinghy.
“Heading east… last known latitude, two north… last known longitude, thirty-seven west… help, somebody.”
Inexorably, maliciously, the sun came up: her one-eyed enemy, a predator as dangerous as any shark. The Betty Boop towel protected her from the rays, but her thirst soon became intolerable. The temptation to dip her Elvis cup into the ocean and drink was nearly overwhelming, though as a biologist she knew that would be fatal. Consume a pint of sea water, and along with those ten cubic inches of pure H2O she would also ingest a quantity of salt far beyond what her body required. Take a second helping, and her kidneys would now have enough H2O to process the salt in pint number one, but not enough to process the salt in pint number two. Drink a third pint — and so on, and so on, never getting ahead of the game. Inevitably her kidneys would turn imperialistic, stealing water from her other tissues. She would dry up, become febrile, die.
“Help me,” Cassie moaned, painfully rotating the transceiver crank. “Last known latitude, two north… longitude, thirty-seven west… water… water …” I shall not cry out to God, she vowed. I shall not pray for deliverance.
And suddenly they appeared, Saint Paul’s Rocks, six granite spires rising from the equator like aquatic stalactites, their peaks frosted with heaping mounds of seabird droppings. Briefly she savored the peculiar poetry of the moment. On February 12, 1832, the original Beagle had anchored here. At least I’ll go out in Darwin’s shadow, she mused. At least I’ve followed him to the end.
By dusk Cassie had made a landfall, maneuvering the dinghy against the lee side of the islet. Transceiver in hand, Betty Boop towel flung over her shoulder, she dragged herself up the highest spire, the jagged pumice tearing her palms and scouring her knees. An ice-cold can of Diet Coke hovered just out of reach; a frosty pitcher of lemonade beckoned from a neighboring crag; a frigid geyser of Hawaiian Punch spewed heavenward from a tide pool. Reaching the summit, she stood up, the towel spilling down her back like a monarch’s cape. It was all hers, the whole dreadful little archipelego. Her Royal Highness Cassie Fowler, Empress of Guano.
The wayfarers swooped down, squadron after squadron, brazen cormorants perching on her shoulders, bold gannets pecking at her hair. For all her terror and misery, she found herself wishing her students could see these birds; she was prepared to lecture about the Sulidae family in general and the blue-footed booby in particular. The blue-foot was a bird with a vision. While its red-shod cousin laid its eggs in a conventional nest built near the top of a tree, the blue-foot employed a picture of a nest, an elegant abstraction it created by squirting a ring of guano on the ground. Cassie loved the blue-footed booby, not only for its politics (the males did their fair share of sitting on the eggs and caring for the chicks) but also because here was a creature for whom the distinctions between life, art, and shit were less obvious than commonly supposed.
On all sides, the grim Darwinian rhythms played out: crabs eating plankton, gannets devouring crabs, big fish preying on little fish, an eternal orgy of killing, feasting, digesting, eliminating. Never before had Cassie felt so connected to brute evolutionary truth. Here was Nature, real Nature, red in claw, white in ca-ca, stripped of all Rousseauistic sentiment, rhapsodic as a cold sore, romantic as a yeast infection.
With the last of her strength she shooed the birds away, then squatted, Joblike, amid the guano. Ironically, Cassie’s personal favorite among her plays, Bible Stories for Adults, No. 46: The Soap Opera, was a freewheeling sequel to Job. Two thousand years after being tortured, browbeaten, and bought off by God, the hero returns to the dung heap for a rematch.
Her tongue was a stone. She was too dry to weep. I shall not succumb to faith, she swore, staring across the vast, faceless sea. There are no atheists in foxholes. “Help,” Cassie rasped, cranking the transceiver. “Please. Help. The Beagle is a stupid name for a ship,” she groaned. “Beagles are dogs, not ships. Help. Please, God, it’s me,” muttered the lapsed Darwinist. “It’s Cassie Fowler. Saint Paul’s Rocks. Beagles are dogs. Please, God, help me.”
July 4.
Our fair republic’s birthday. Latitude: 20°9’N. Longitude: 37°15’W. Course: 170. Speed: 18 knots. Distance made good since New York: 1106 nautical miles.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say Jehovah himself had sent that hurricane. Not only did we survive, we got carried 184 miles at 40 knots, and now we’re almost a day ahead of schedule.
A loaded tanker probably could’ve smashed those rollers apart, but we actually had to ride them — full speed ahead in the troughs, dead slow along the crests. There was so much foam, the waves turned pure white, as if the sea herself had died.
We had a good man at the helm, a moon-faced Jersey kid named Neil Weisinger, and somehow we bullied our way through, but only after a Marisat dome cracked in two and a starboard kingpost got torn out by the roots. Not to mention 4 lifeboats blown overboard, 15 shattered windows in the deckhouse, 2 broken arms, 1 sprained ankle.
On a normal voyage, whenever the crew gets drunk and rowdy, I can usually scare them into sobriety by waving a flare pistol around. But on this trip, if things go as I expect, we’ll eventually be arming the deckies with those damn antipredator weapons. I’m nervous, Popeye. A potted sailor and a T-62 bazooka are a bad combination.
It doesn’t matter that alcoholic beverages are forbidden in the U.S. Merchant Marine. We’re not a dry ship — this I know. Judging from past experience, I’d guess we left port with about 30 cases of contraband beer and 65 bottles of hidden liquor. Rum is especially popular, I’ve noticed over the years. Pirate fantasies, I think. I myself keep 4 bottles of mescal in the chart room, secluded under Madagascar.
To date we’ve had only one minor setback. The Vatican was supposed to send us the cream of its film collection, but either the reels never arrived or those Carmelites forgot to load them, and the only picture that actually made it on board is a 16mm pan-and-scan print of The Ten Commandments. So we’ve got this fancy theater and just one movie to run in it. It’s a pretty awful flick, and I suspect we’ll be chucking tomatoes at the screen long about the tenth showing.
There are 4 or 5 VCRs kicking around, and dozens of cassettes with titles like Babs Boffs Boston. We’ve even got the notorious Caligula. But such fare tends to leave about a third of the men and nearly all the women cold.
Whenever I slip Raphael’s feather from my sea chest and stare at it, the same questions run through my mind. Did my angel speak the truth? Is Dad really the one who can wash away the oil? Or was Raphael just making absolutely sure I’d accept the mission?