For the rest of the day I was very unpopular with the female members of my crew, and that night Jessica cried herself to sleep with our last remaining cat, three-month-old Hobby, in her arms.
By the next morning, however, Barbara was able to record:
Feb. 9. Everyone in better spirits now that we have left S.A. and its creeping poisons behind.... The Japanese seem very friendly and willing again and I have a hunch that Cape Town was the low point as far as group morale was concerned. Brazil should be far better.
Our track lay close to the great-circle route between South Africa and New York, so that we were not in an empty part of the world as we had been in the North Pacific and the Indian Ocean. On this trip we saw several ships.
For the first week we worked our way through light variables, with generally fair weather, until we picked up the trades at about 25° South. For the rest of the trip the wind for the most part was almost dead aft, and we sailed with the main on one side and the foresail or genoa swung out on the other, wing and wing.
On the morning of February 23 we rounded the north end of St. Helena and dropped down to St. James Bay. As we approached, the wind became strong and gusty. Several mild squalls made maneuvering difficult, so we anchored well out, and moved in later after the wind had dropped.
By 1400 we had been cleared and were free to go ashore to look over our first Atlantic island. St. Helena is rugged and beautiful—not at all the “barren fortress rock” we had imagined. Perhaps our views had been shaped by our awareness of St. Helena’s chief claim to world fame, as the place of Napoleon’s last exile. Certainly it is remote enough, and we could understand how, to Napoleon and later prisoners, it might well seem like the end of the world.
On our first expedition to shore we had a few bad moments. A native boy in a largish dory came alongside and offered to row us in. Since we had not yet launched Dodo (our new ship’s boat from Mauritius) and the seas in the roadstead were too high for our Flatty to carry more than two, Barbara, Jessica and I accepted the offer. We had only gone a few hundred yards when our oarsman somehow lost one oar, and we began drifting rapidly out to sea. He attempted to scull with the other oar, but with little success. Fortunately Ted was on deck and, seeing our predicament, rowed out in Flatty, rescued the oar, and overtook us. If he hadn’t acted quickly, we would have had the alternatives of jumping out and swimming for it or of continuing our seaward drift, with no help to be expected from shore. The nearest leeward land was South America, 2,000 miles to the west, which would have been quite a trip without food, water, compass, or sail.
Jamestown, the only settlement on the island, is a clean and fascinating village huddled in the deep cleft between two rugged mountains. The streets are narrow, winding into the valley, with dignified houses of fieldstone painted a yellowish cream and fronting directly on the pavement. Loaded burros, with or without masters, wander through the village and sometimes (as we found out) stop to poke their noses into a conversation. The people—a mixture of European, East Indian, and African—are friendly, dignified, and self-confident. There is undoubtedly, as elsewhere, a certain degree of stratification and snobbishness, but it is refreshingly minor.
Sir James Harford, Governor of St. Helena, invited us to the Residency for tea, and later Lady Harford, learning that Barbara was planning to move into the local hotel for a few days in order to finish a book, invited both her and Jessica to Plantation House, where they could work in a “breakfast-in-bed” atmosphere—an invitation which the girls wasted no time in accepting. They returned with a completed book manuscript and countless anecdotes about the island.