They also learned that Vagabond was not the only ship to have arrived since the town’s destruction. Six weeks before, an English sailboat had arrived, made some repairs, reprovisioned as best they could, and then sailed on. A damaged Dutch sloop had arrived three weeks earlier and was beached a mile to the east. A Romanian sailboat had arrived only three days before Vagabond. The small, wiry Chilean man in his thirties who had become their unofficial guide joked that Punta Arenas was becoming the “new French Riviera.”
They met the crews of both ships, and for Neil and the others, friendly people were unreal. The absence of threat was vaguely unnerving. The chance to live on land, perhaps in the shell of a house, seemed too good to be true. Food there was very scarce. Spring, although it officially began on September 21, the day they arrived, was still almost a month away. The friendly Chileans had no provisions to spare, but they did show the sailors where they could hunt small game—mostly rodents and wild dogs—and where they could gather shellfish.
It was unreal, too, to meet the three Dutchmen and one woman and her eight-year-old child who were making a winter home a mile east of Punta Arenas while they tried to repair their holed thirty-eight-foot Fiberglas sloop. Two of the Dutch spoke good English, as did one of the Romanians. They, along with six others, two of them women, had sailed a forty-eight-foot Fiberglas ketch all the way from the Black Sea. It was also anchored east of the wrecked town. Each of the crews was wary and suspicious of the other for a day or two. It wasn’t until they had shared the stories of their long voyages of survival that they all began not only to trust one another but to feel a bond of brotherhood. The Romanians, like those aboard Vagabond, were still in shock after being greeted with friendliness by fellow human beings.
The Dutch had fled Amsterdam on the first morning of the war, landing briefly in Portugal and again in the Canary Islands for supplies. They hadn’t encountered the resentment and violence that fleeing Americans had experienced; no one blamed the Dutch for the War. But conditions were harsh in the Canaries, the islands crowded with European refugees and food so scarce that aristocrats with millions of dollars in gold found it almost useless. The Dutch decided to sail across to Argentina, which, they thought, had plenty of food and would welcome them. When they landed in a small Argentinian fishing village, they learned they would lose their boat and be interned. They opted to try for the South Pacific.
The Romanians’ story was more harrowing. Vacationing on the Black Sea when the War began, they had all, including the three Communist Party members aboard, decided that the war was a meaningless disaster and chosen to run. By the time they got to the Bosphorus, a nuclear explosion had blocked the straits to all commercial and military traffic but they were able to sail through. They touched on North Africa only once, losing two of their shipmates in an attack by brigands, then escaped out through the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. They stopped in Cape Verde to reprovision but found food so scarce they could obtain almost nothing. Sailing on, they’d been dismasted in a storm off Brazil, spent three weeks in a jungle south of the Amazon fitting another mast, and then sailed on. They too had been attacked by a jet, an Argentine jet, but it had fired just once, missed literally by a mile, and then flown off.
Both the Dutch and the Romanians seemed surrealistically skinny and bony at first, until Neil realized that he must look even worse.
It took Neil and Jeanne and the others only two days to decide that their plan to sail on soon to the South Pacific was madness born of their desperation. They had no food and little prospect of getting much until the summer offered a chance to plant and harvest crops. Jeanne was pregnant, Lisa and Olly still very weak, although both were out of bed now. Sheila and Jeanne had pulled two of Olly’s rotting teeth a week earlier, and his debilitating low-grade fever was disappearing. He had recovered sufficiently to pinch Sheila’s behind and begin entertaining himself and others again with monologues.
On their third day they moved Vagabond east to beach her closer to the other sailboats. The terrain was desolate: the few trees were twisted like grotesque cripples by the fierce westerly winds. Aboard Vagabond as Philip and Sheila and Lisa began preparing to cook a wild dog Jim had caught and killed, Olly suggested a barbecue. Philip said that of course that was the easiest way to cook, the only way, but Olly shook his head.
“I mean a real barbecue,” he said. “With people, talk, laughter. You know, like they do on Smith Island.”
“You mean… invite other people?” asked Jeanne.
“Sure,” said Olly. “Shit, this poor critter’s so thin and bony, none of us gonna get fat anyhow, but we got to give him his self-respect, make him feel he’s worthy of dying for us.”
They all stared at him. Share their first meat in a month?
“Who’ll we invite?” asked Jeanne.
“Well, those fellas with the funny round hats for one,” said Olly.
“Everyone,” said Neil.
“What?” said Philip.
“We’ll invite everyone,” Neil repeated almost dreamily. “We’ll invite everyone…”
“By God, that’s a bloody good idea, Neil,” Philip said, grinning, “To share with friends again, even if it leaves us back with dried grasses and barnacles.”
“Don’t criticize barnacles, dear,” said Sheila. “Lisa and I are concocting a marvelous barnacle salad.”
“Save it for the barbecue,” said Neil. “Save everything good. Tomorrow we’ll share every bit of food we have so we can start from scratch.”
“Bit mad, I suppose,” said Philip, still smiling. “Still, it beats hoarding…”
Jim was the official messenger, and he spoke first to their little Chilean guide, who nodded and looked pleased and hurried away to tell his friends.
But the Dutch were confused and wary.
“You want to share your food with us?” the oldest Dutchman asked, frowning.
“Yes,” said Jim. “But… but we only have the dog. We… don’t have much else to eat or drink. It’s—”
“It’s what you call ’potluck’, no?” the Dutchman said, smiling.
“And ’Bring your own bottle,’ ” added another, also smiling.
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Jim. “But you don’t have to bring anything…”
“Well, we’ll come,” said the oldest Dutchman. “We’ll come with much thanks.”
The Romanians were even more dumbfounded. Jim could sense that they suspected some kind of trap. They had greeted him with their rifles at port arms. They whispered together in Romanian, glancing at him nervously.
“Why you do this?” the Romanian captain asked after he had finally understood Jim’s invitation. “You have much food?”