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Just one package of cookies a week.
Though memories of the first voyage are shadowy for me, our second trip is etched in Technicolor. It was a family affair in which we had all planned and participated for years. Tim and I had already been on boats all our lives. Our friends had accept that we were sailing away one day. I was involved teaching simple sailing skills on busy days and both Tim and I did our daily share of swabbing down the rental boats as well as the thousand other chores the enterprise generated. Ground horsemeat and powdered milk was our economical fare. We were allowed just one package of cookies a week. Once underway the budget was just US$50 per month.
Pounding our sheets on the rocks.
At last the day came when we set off on the adventure it seemed that we had spent our entire lives preparing for. In every village laughing local children assailed us. Overcoming our natural shyness Tim and I soon learned simple Spanish and made friends who took us into their homes, meager as they might be. In the markets I got the job of bargaining for the vegetables because the vendors charged me only half what they would my rico parents. In Puerto Vallarta Mom and I hauled the laundry ashore to the river. We pounded our sheets on the rocks, local fashion, having a hilarious time until the incredulous Indian women took the job away from us.
A struggle to stay awake.
At sea evening watches came to be special. Mom or Dad, depending on who was on duty, would answer our curious questions about their childhoods and tell us stories. The intimacy of those moments is my most treasured memory; a time lost to most of my generation through the intrusions of radio or TV. Tim and I took turns at the wheel all night sharing the watches with Mom or Dad, generally steering one hour out of three. It was a struggle to stay awake and to keep a good course while the compass-rose spun dizzily one way and then the other in the dimly lit binnacle. The hour-long stint felt like forever.
I was my father's assistant in the mornings and afternoons operating the stopwatch for his sun sights. After getting the fix I peered curiously over his shoulder as he worked out the calculations. "Don't worry about navigation Teré," he reassured me. "It's nothing but adding and subtraction." Mom also knew how to navigate and I couldn't wait to learn.
When Tim and I weren't out swimming, doing our schoolwork, or exploring in our canoes, we read a lot. Two six-foot long bookshelves were packed with a double row of carefully accumulated hardbacks. Many were biographies about navigators and bloodthirsty conquistadors like Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Cortez and Francisco Pizarro. Mom or Dad would read to us aloud from the Coastal Pilot as we sailed along the coast, and we looked up information about the Indians we were meeting, so we were generally well informed. Of course, being kids, we had horded piles of dog-eared comic books in both English and Spanish.
Blue faces and painted breasts.
In Panama, aboard the coastal trader Peralta we slept like the natives on the wooden deck, sharing the crew's diet of rice and plantain. Dad had arranged this expedition to take us into the untamed Darien. We steamed across the Gulf of San Miguel and up the Sambu River deep in the jungle to a trading post. I was awed when the skipper remarked that this tiny settlement was the furthest into the interior that white men (and little girls) could go and be sure of coming back alive. Amerindians came crowding aboard. The nearly naked men, wearing only a cloth looped through their loins, stood no taller than I. Their visage was startling for their faces were painted with a bold dark blue beard. The women wore beards too, as well as having painted breasts and torsos. Ashore I discovered that the Indians lived in thatched platform-houses with no walls. Everyone could see in. A proud Indian man strode out of the jungle followed by his nine submissive wives! The Indians even had slaves, conspicuously unpainted, to do their domestic chores. Indians from further in the interior hauled their heavy loads of bananas down river in 60-foot long canoes laden to the gunnels but made buoyant with outriggers of balsa. One Indian man enquired gravely of my father about my state of health, assuming my physical immaturity to be pathological. The Indian women were, at 10-years old fully developed, at 12-years old already mothers. With their bare-breasts, long glossy hair and necklaces of antique Spanish coins the girls seemed wonderfully pagan, so primitive and different from the covered up Catholic influenced cultures of the Latin America I had so far seen.
I wanted to trade for a carved paddle shaped like a leaf, but the Indian man misunderstood my Spanish. He thought that I wanted his beautiful canoe, almost twice as long as Shellback! Though almost prepared to trade it for three of my mother's old lipsticks he was hesitant, unsure how to get his family back up the river. But the paddle alone…..no ay problema. That was no problem.
Abducted in a San Blas village.
On the other side of the Panamanian Isthmus, in a large San Blas island village, I lagged behind my
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