Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nick Thorpe is an award-winning writer and journalist. A contributor to The Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, Scotsman, and BBC Radio 4, among others, he has covered stories ranging from Russian presidential elections to the coca wars of Bolivia, for which he was shortlisted for the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

8 Men and a Duck

Free Press

Prologue

Can I Borrow Your Safety Harness?

I woke in the darkness, groggy yet anxious, to a sound I couldn't place. The usual cacophony of the bamboo cabin, flexing and creaking like a rabble of ancient rocking chairs, had ceased. Instead came a kind of muffled roaring.

Holding back a swill of fear, I groped for the few familiar reference points: the rounded bamboo roof beams; my spectacles hanging from a string; my life jacket used as a pillow; my harness hanging at the end of my bunk. Good: all there. It was 1:30 A.M. I lay there feeling the shift of my body against the safety rope, waiting to remember.

The noise was constant like radio static, yet swelling too, all around us, as if we were inside it. Familiar yet...

Something snatched at the canvas flap of the cabin door, flung it wetly open.

Rain. Torrential rain. A wall of rain so dense that the head which appeared, sleek and seal-like in the magnesium glare of a hurricane lamp, seemed to be suspended behind the glazed panel of an aquarium.

"Everybody up! We have an emergency!" shouted Phil, spitting raindrops into the cabin. Our captain sounded different, his voice stretched tauter than usual. At the other end of the cabin, Marco's buzz-saw snoring had conspicuously ceased. None of us spoke as we pulled on waterproofs. Was this...it? I wriggled into my harness, checked its built-in strobe rescue light, fastened my life jacket, and stepped outside.

The Viracocha was a mess. Both her sails were blown taut against the wrong side of the masts, hollowed out and hugging the shrouds and spars like skin across the ribs of a carcass. We were sliding sideways before the wind, two wooden leeboards hanging splintered in the water at a strange angle. The bundled reed hull rode the swell uncertainly, and the windward foot of the A-shaped foremast was lifting six inches from its rope binding at every wave. A strong gust might topple it.

"The wind just changed again," shouted Phil, straining vainly on a rope pulled tight as a crowbar. "We need to haul the sails round the mast or pull them down completely before it gets any worse."

Peering out into the darkness I could make out only the glittering curtains of falling rain, the outer circumference of the pool of light around our hurricane lamp. The wind had swung round to a northeasterly, the waves fractious, confused, jostling up against one another, occasionally spraying upwards over the plump gunwales. Even with the wind on our side and all eight of us pulling, we had never yet managed to change the complex sails in less than half an hour. Now we had to pull against the full force of the wind, in a storm, in the middle of the night.

"Are you sure it wouldn't be safer to wait till morning?" I asked Phil, trying to sound thoughtful rather than terrified.

"Maybe. But if the wind strengthens any more it'll be too late to do anything. Except maybe cut the sails off to save the mast." He looked haggard. "It's a tough call."

Another fear gnawed, unspoken. Somewhere ahead of us lay a rocky island with a submerged reef. In our 2,500-mile voyage from northern Chile to Easter Island, the uninhabited territory of Sala y Gómez was to have been our first and last Pacific landing before our destination. Now we needed to avoid it at all costs.

I wiped my rain-mottled spectacles and looked around at my crewmates. Lined up in differently colored raingear, Marco, Jorge, and Greg looked like damp garden gnomes. Marco grinned nervously and began drumming on the lid of a water vat, steeling us for a decision. As Phil's Chilean brother-in-law, he often assumed the role of right-hand man, though his only prior maritime experience was a summer spent towing tourists round a beach resort on a kind of inflatable banana. Carlos, on his own atop the rickety bamboo steering platform at the back of the boat, was yelling something that sounded like "What course?" as he struggled to control rudder shafts the size of telegraph poles. Phil appeared not to hear him, as he craned his neck up into the torrent, scrutinizing the reversed sails as if looking for operating instructions.

I clambered sodden and squelching astern in search of Erik, our Bolivian Aymara boat builder and the man to whom I often turned when I was having difficulty remembering what the hell I was doing on a bundle of reeds in the middle of the Pacific.

I found him hanging off the windward side of the boat, up to his waist in the boiling seas, struggling to pull a broken leeboard up before we lost it altogether. As I edged along the side of the boat to help him, sheet lightning flashed soundlessly around us, briefly illuminating a wilderness of angry, rain-pocked water.

"No es bueno ? not good," murmured Erik, with characteristic understatement. He threw a sodden rope up to me and together we pulled out the leeboard. The upper layers of totora reeds were for the first time beginning to feel spongy underfoot. "The boat's already sunk a foot lower than it was when we left Arica," he said gravely, plastering his black hair across his forehead. "But now the rain will soak the reeds from above as well as below. If it buckets down like this for much longer we may be too low in the water to continue."

Meaning what exactly? We would sink? I looked at the waterline, now barely two feet from the deck, and decided not to enquire any further.

Through the flimsy woven bamboo of the cabin walls, Marco's voice was clearly audible, radioing urgently for a weather report on the VHF. "Viracocha calling all shipping. Do you copy?" Nobody did. We had had no radio contact for days.

The only other source of weather information, a Trimble navigation system with satellite link, had never actually worked in the first place. Its egg-shaped aerial hung pointlessly upside down from the crossbar of the steering platform, a monument to our technical ineptitude. Whatever weather lay ahead of us, we weren't going to know about it until we sailed into it.

As we edged our way back along the side planking towards the foredeck, I clipped my harness onto the safety line. Ever since we had left Chile's northernmost port of Arica a month earlier, a single nightmare had haunted me. I knew it like an old enemy, could reach into my mind for it and feel its familiar shape like a cold pebble in a coat pocket. It was always the same:

Alone on night watch, I lose my footing and tumble into dark waters. I surface coughing and mute with shock to find the rounded stern of the boat already ten meters away, out of reach and retreating by the second, my shipmates asleep. I scramble to locate the safety buoy, trailing on thirty meters of nylon rope. Too late I see its tiny wake, rippling past, moving quickly. I thrash out for it, catch it momentarily in my palm like a rugby ball, and then a surge tugs it from my grasp. I swim in abject panic to catch up, gasping and swallowing water, but my clothes hold me back and it retreats into the darkness before me. And then, after my yelling, my cracked and feeble cries, the silence in response, comes a strange icy calm, a terrible, rational weighing up of my situation as the ocean gently tugs at my boots.

Even if someone saw me fall, the ship will be a mile away by the time they get the sails down. And if nobody saw me, it could be dawn ? thirty miles of sailing ? before anyone notices my absence. I am alone on this black ocean, a thousand miles...