I have never been quite clear about what happened to the rest of the gang during the trip ashore, but twenty-two pages in Jessica’s Journal gave me some idea and Barbara tried to fill me in on the rest. The “bus to Belém,” which I had thought was standard transportation, had turned out to be a private car, for which the driver expected to be paid 40,000 cruzeiros (about $90), in advance. Barbara tells me she had no difficulty in making her emphatic “No!” understood, but after the car had been driven sadly away, she found her phrase book quite inadequate to ask the bewildered but eager-to-help villagers who crowded around, “How do you travel when you want to go to Belém?” The only interpretation she could make from their baffled shrugs was that no one ever wanted to go there. There certainly was no regular bus service, and the railroad, mentioned in the pilot book and shown neatly on the map, had never been developed beyond the ten miles of track laid in a flush of enthusiasm ten years earlier.
By some intricate process I never fully understood, Barbara got her entire gang to Belém, and back. They traveled by truck, by local bus, by passing jeep, and by a number of other unnamed means. In Belém they managed to pick up the mail and supplies and, in the case of the men, to get a smattering of the information for which we had come so far out of our way.
We now set a course for Barbados, 1,100 miles to the northwest. Our route led us across the Great Amazon Bight, a region of dirty brown water and uncertain weather. For the first two days it rained almost continuously, with mean rip tides and cross swells. Our progress alternated between a drift and a fast run, depending on the squalls. Each burst of wind and rain carried us along a few miles and then passed on, leaving us wallowing behind to wait for the next boost. They were not too violent, so we kept up our four lowers throughout.
On the afternoon of the second day, however, we could see a squall approaching which obviously meant business, and we thought it prudent to reduce sail a bit. My log tells what happened:
Biggest squall we’ve ever had, hit suddenly just as we were downing foresail. Ripped main and jib to pieces. Rain torrential and flat out, stung like hail. Continued under foresail and mizzen until things quieted.
The main was a total loss but the canvas scraps, as Slocum philosophically observed under similar circumstances, made good material for pot rags. The foresail was saved, with only minor tears, but the jib was badly damaged and required a complete overhaul. It was an amazing sensation to see a full, billowing mainsail disappear in an instant, and Ted, who was at the tiller, confessed that his first instinct was one of helplessness because bits of canvas were carried out of reach so fast there was no chance to grab and save them!
We bent on our spare mainsail and carried on, working our way across the bight under the three lowers. Frequently we passed boiling patches of confused waters, bubbling in turbulent rips. The water was dirty brown in color and brackish in taste, although closer to shore it may well have been completely fresh, as the stories of travelers claim. Sometime during all this—we could not take sights because of overcast skies—we passed the equator and entered the Northern Hemisphere, but we didn’t feel in the mood to make a celebration of it.
At last, toward evening of the third day, we saw blue water ahead. The line of demarcation was surprisingly abrupt, and as we passed out of the discolored area of the Amazon current the weather, too, settled into an ideal trade-wind pattern. We had left behind one more region of unpredictable conditions which had been considerably on my mind. That night we saw the North Star for the first time in two years.
We made the rest of the trip in good time and even better spirits, reaching Barbados early in the morning of April 23. We stayed a week at this very British isle, not so much because we fell in love with its charms as from the necessity for awaiting the arrival of funds. The authorities in Salinas had managed to extract from Barbara every cent she had, as fees for the trips made by the pilot boat. When she had turned out her purse and pocketbook, and showed that was all the money she had in her possession, the total charges proved to be, by an amazing coincidence, exactly the amount she had.
On our first evening at anchor, while we were eating on deck, we heard a splash alongside and a voice hailed us from the water. “Ahoy, Phoenix! May I come aboard?”