Atlantic High by William F. Buckley Jr

Author:William F. Buckley, Jr. [Buckley, William F. Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7953-1140-6
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 1982-09-11T04:00:00+00:00

I had a friend called Carl, who used to sail with us regularly. He was a shipmate of exact, entirely unfocused, intelligence. If you gave him a line and told him on no account to release it, he would hold on to it even if his old aunt fell overboard and he alone—at the cost of temporarily releasing the line—could toss her a life preserver: boy-stood-on-the-burning-deck stuff. Once, coming down Buzzards Bay after an entire night on the helm, I gave him a course of 260 degrees and asked him to hold it while I snatched a couple of hours’ sleep. It was midafternoon, bright as Hollywood Bowl, when I was awakened by the unmistakable shock of yacht-running-smack-into-rocks. I bounded up to the cockpit and found us aground. The rocks we had hit were not submerged. They rose six feet above the water. I had made a terrible mistake. My instructions to Carl should have been: “Follow a course of 260 degrees until you see a rock. When you see that rock, go 240 degrees until you have passed the rock. Then go back to 260 degrees.”

Well (Teddy with great amusement reminisced), this here Russian navigator was using plotting sheets, sailing from the Baltic to the Gulf of Mexico. Plotting sheets are squares of paper marked with horizontal lines, each one representing one degree of latitude. You draw in the vertical lines, representing the meridians of longitude, spacing them apart to correspond to the distance between meridians at those particular latitudes—as simple as applying your divider to the little graph printed at the bottom right-hand corner of every plotting sheet. What this does is save you thousands of charts of empty stretches of ocean, which after all you don’t need.

Provided there isn’t an obstruction in the area.

Bermuda is an obstruction. It is, in fact, one enormity of an obstruction—as thousands of vessels, beginning in 1515 when Juan de Bermúdez first ran into the magic island and its surrounding coral bed, have discovered: incidentally providing, centuries down the line, for the financial security of Teddy Tucker. But the Russian navigator, laying out his plotting sheets from the British Channel to the Straits of Florida, clean forgot about Bermuda, so that one night in March this great big boat was coasting on down toward Florida, with a couple of million dollars’ worth of cargo—I forget just what: gold, copper, spies—when suddenly the boat hit—Bermuda. Well, not exactly; but they hit the reefs off Bermuda, and were most thoroughly grounded. (As I live and breathe, the sentence I just finished typing was interrupted by a shudder, followed by a thud. I ran out of my cabin, to learn that we had been rammed. I am writing this book while cruising around South America, Rio to Valparaiso. A freighter, Panamanian registry, at the last minute decided to pass us port to port, cutting across our bow. I deduce from the shudder that our boat, the Delta Line’s Santa Marta, either veered to starboard to expedite clearance and ran aground, or went into reverse.

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