Chapter 16 tells of our time aboard The Aegre in the Marquesas Islands and then sailing to Tahiti, 700 nautical miles south.
In 1975, the only visitors to the Marquesas came aboard small yachts that had sailed thousands of miles across the eastern Pacific or on the occasional small trading vessel from Tahiti. Long before GPS was available, yacht numbers were limited, and there were no commercial flights or cruise ships. In no sense was it yet a tourist destination. Most of the small number of visiting yachts went to the main island, Nuku Hiva.
We’d landed on the island of Hiva Oa, one of the small islands in the south of the Marquesas group. Few yachts went there, and these islands were the most remote place we sailed to aboard The Aegre. In the book, I write about dropping anchor in a small bay surrounded by forest and young men paddling a pirogue out to The Aegre, wanting to trade almost anything we had.
The Marquesas feature in literature as perhaps the epitome of the remote islands of the South Pacific. Therefore I’ll try to give a bit of an overview of them as they were, and still were to some extent when we visited in 1975. Bear with me. There’s some interesting stuff here.
1,296 kilometres (700 mi) northeast of Tahiti and about 4,800 kilometres (3,000 mi) west of Mexico (the nearest continental land mass). Hawaii is 4,326 km (2,336 mi) to the north. The group includes fifteen small islands of volcanic origin, so they are mountainous. The highest peak is on Ua Pou, at 1,230 meters (4,035ft). The Marquesas Islands are one of the most remote island groups in the world.
According to archaeological research, voyagers from West Polynesia colonised the islands in the 10th century AD. Over the centuries that followed, the islands seem to have maintained a remarkably uniform culture, biology and language, probably due to their remoteness. The Marquesas were named after the wife of the 16th century Spanish Viceroy of Peru, the Marquis of Cañete, by the navigator Álvaro de Mendaña, who visited them in 1595.
Herman Melville (‘Call me Ishmael‘) brought the islands to the attention of the reading public in the West in his first book, Typee published in 1846. It was based on his experiences ‘among the cannibals’ on the Marquesan Island, Nuku Hiva, when he and another jumped ship (a whaler) to live ashore in the valley of the Taipi tribe in 1842. There has been a fair degree of debate about its authenticity but it was his most popular book.
As the sea charts of the Marquesas that we were using aboard The Aegre were based on a French survey of 1882, we probably no more information about the islands than Melville had as we approached them.
Apart from Melville, other early Western visitors of note include James Cook, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Gauguin. Here is a wonderful overview of their involvement with the islands.
A not-so-well-known writer today, Frederick O’Brien, wrote about life on Hiva Oa in 1919. See White Shadows in the South Seas.
O’Brien was critical of the influence of ‘Western civilisation’ on the islands. Here is a synopsis.
Subsequently, in 1928, an American silent film was made, largely filmed on location, loosely based on O’Brien’s book. It was directed by W.S. Van Dyke and starring Monte Blue and Raquel Torres and was produced by Cosmopolitan Productions in association with MGM and distributed by MGM. It is known for being the first MGM film to be released with a pre-recorded soundtrack. Clyde De Vinna won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography. For more on the movie see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54DNu-9loGg . You can watch the movie itself here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SErJnXmFkSA . Pretty amazing IMO.
Junk
In Chapter 16 I mention a cruising couple, Tom and Jerry, who sailed into Atuona on a ferro-cement Chinese junk, called simply Junk. We went aboard.
I found the photo above online. The vessel is un-named online but looks exactly like Junk from 1974.
Tom Blackwell and his yacht Islander.
In the book, I mention meeting the solo cruising sailor Tom Blackwell on his large 1930s-built ketch Islander, first in Madeira, then Barbados and Panama. We’d passed through the Panama Canal lashed alongside Islander. We became good friends with Tom. He headed off from Panama across the Pacific a few days before us. In Chapter 16 I tell what befell him next. As I write, we eventually met up again in Nuku Hiva. But what happened to him and Islander after the Marquesas?
Tom Blackwell recovered (from injuries he sustained aboard Islander far out in the Eastern Pacific), but no one in Nuku Hiva could repair his badly distorted mainsail mast track or broken topmast. He sailed to Australia (to Brisbane, I believe) to repair them both. Then he must have sailed north, up through the Great Barrier Reef, through the Torres Straits, and across the Indian Ocean. But perhaps his injuries were more serious, or maybe he just lost heart for it all because he then sailed into Durban, South Africa, where he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and eventually died. Tom blamed his cancer on the preservatives in canned food and is said to have donated the proceeds of the sale of Islander to fund dialysis machines and the Cancer Society.
In 1980, Cruising World published the story below about Tom Blackwell. (Click to enlarge)
Islander was bought by a Durban attorney John P Mathews. He recruited a crew to help sail the boat to New England (USA), where he planned a refit. However, en route, in the Canary Islands, there appear to have been disagreements between the crew and Mathews. After two months of waiting and unfulfilled promises, a new team from England took over the ship. The new crew took Islander to Barcelona. In 1981, Luis Gar found her deserted in the Carabela Shipyards of Barcelona and bought her. In 1989, he sold her to Ricardo Albiana, the current owner (2012), who restored her former beauty and kept her in Barcelona. See: https://classicyachtinfo.com/yachts/islander/ and also https://www.puigvelaclassica.com/legends/islander-3/
The passage to Tahiti
As I tell in the book, during the passage to Tahiti, we came the closest ever to losing The Aegre. This was during a short passage through the northern end of the Tuomotu archipelago of coral reefs and low islets. We planned to pass between Rangiroa and Arutea, but ended up passing between Arutua and Apataki, then Kaukura. The map below shows our planned and actual course. A nerve-wracking night and day that inspired new thinking in us at the time along the lines of Desert Island Discs.
Many vessels have not been so lucky. One such story is that told in Minerva Reef.
Minerva Reef by Olaf Ruhen tells how, on the night of 7 July 1962, the twenty-ton cutter Twaikaepau, sailing from Tonga to Auckland, ran hard upon the outer edge of Minerva Reef, 380 miles south of Suva in Fiji. Heavy seas and the sharp teeth of the coral quickly broke the cutter to pieces, and her complement of seventeen Tongans found themselves without even a small boat on a reef that was totally submerged except during a few hours of low tide each day.
They had neither food nor water; their only shelter was the distant hulk of a Japanese trawler wrecked on the reef long before. Using the wreck as a base, thirteen of the seventeen survived for one hundred and two days. Eventually, using tools they made themselves, they had built a small outrigger vessel from the heavy timbers of the wrecked trawler, and three of the crew set sail to Fiji, nearly 400 miles to the north-west, with a chart drawn from memory inscribed on a piece of timber, a sextant, a compass and some collected rainwater and fish. To say they made it is to understate the incredible skill and fortitude of these men. Those remaining on the reef were rescued. A gripping tale.
Aboard The Aegre, we avoided such a fate, passing safely between the reefs and sailing on. A few days later the light on Venus Point, Tahiti, was on the horizon ahead. We were safe. Phew.
Today Minerva Reef is deliberately visited by cruising yachts but still seems to retain its sense of isolation and surely still creates a sense of wonder.
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