Fortuitous Failure
By Terry Huntington
My first major travel adventure had a profound impact. This was not in some rare sight-seeing destination, or rugged adventure sort of way, but in a serendipitous, calming way. It handed me something I never anticipated when I set out; a soothing silence, a calming state-of-mind, unlike anything I had known before.
I had booked a seven-week voyage on a tramp freighter from Saint John, New Brunswick, to New Zealand. It was a true tramp, a ship with no fixed itinerary, one that goes where it can find business. It was the tramp’s last voyage before the scrap heap after.
We were scheduled to sail from Saint John to Aruba to pick up cargo, and then on to New Zealand where I would disembark and, with a bit of luck, get a job.
A couple of weeks before I even thought of packing my bags, my venture took an unexpected twist. The shipping agent called to say that my ship, the m/v Eastern Skies, would not be calling at Aruba after all, nor would it be taking me to New Zealand, although they were still lading copper for New Zealand in Saint John. Instead, we would be skirting around Nova Scotia and heading north to Corner Brook, Newfoundland, to pick up newsprint destined for Australia.
But the agent was not finished. Since the ship would now be unloading newsprint in Australia before taking copper to New Zealand, I would have to disembark in Brisbane. He said there was an international agreement whereby freighters carrying passengers to either Australia or New Zealand could not take such passengers on to the other country as the final destination. They must disembark in the first of those countries. I concluded that local lobbies ensured that business for local carriers between those two countries remained protected. So, no Aruba, and now no New Zealand. I was to be dumped in Brisbane.
“So what?” I muttered to myself. “I’ve paid my fare, and I’m itching for adventure. Just take me to the Antipodes!” To this day, decades later, I still have not seen Aruba or New Zealand.
There was still lots ahead on the tramp for this unworldly young man. Raging storm off the Atlantic coast. Crossing the Caribbean Sea. Hi-jacking of the Portuguese liner Santa Maria in the Caribbean south of us. A wild night ashore in Cristobal Colon, Panama. Passage through the Panama Canal. Then westward across the Pacific Ocean until, three days out from Panama, we stopped. Engine failure. We were stopped mid-ocean, with not even a speck of land in sight. I remembered that this old vessel was on its last voyage. Maybe its previous voyage should have been its last one? For three days we just drifted. One does not drop anchor out in the Pacific Ocean.
The aimless drifting produced a travel experience – no, more accurately, a state-of-mind experience – the memory of which has stayed with me these six decades since. Quiet. No constant thrum of engines. No smoke belching from the stacks. Just silence.
There were just a couple of dozen people on the ship, and ship watches still had to be maintained. This meant that at any given time, one-third of the ship’s small complement was sleeping. The engineering crew was very busy with engine repairs below decks. The deck crew was scattered doing tasks here and there. There was one other passenger, old Bob, aged seventy-two.
There was hardly a whisper to be heard. We were the floating centre of a tropical circle whose circumference was the crisp horizon 360 degrees all around us. All was still. I was privileged to be allowed on the bridge, and often stood there turning full circle to take in the entire horizon. Occasionally, we could see dolphins playing in the distance. Silent, dark evenings were especially haunting. Conversation seemed somehow to be muted, as though we feared that any sound we might make would offend silent gods of the sea.
Three days and nights of stillness, as though we had been eerily enshrouded by quiet and serenity. I never experienced anything like it before, and have not since. I imagine that anybody who has sailed an ocean without engine power would, if sails were lowered, have had a similar experience. Perhaps it would stay with them for many decades, or until the end of their lives.
That voyage was a real eye-opener for the naïve young man I was at the time. After sixteen months in Australia, I completed that first circumnavigation of the globe by land and water, another by air decades later, and lots of travel in between. Hitchhiking across Europe. Hong Kong’s hustle and bustle. Work in the Caribbean. Gazing in awe at Himalayan peaks. Exciting adventures, all, but that mid-Pacific interlude has lingered most memorably in my mind.
When propellers churned up the ocean again, we continued on through waters of the Society Islands until, eventually, I disembarked in Brisbane.
That ship’s drifting out in the Pacific was not part of a plan. I could never have planned for that peace of mind and the shimmering experience of deep tranquility.
Terry Huntington is the author of the novella Tales of the m/v Eastern Skies about the life-altering voyage featured in this essay.
