102 Days In Search of Land

Thirteen-year-old Johnny, a Marshall Islands native boy, was due back in school. So was his ten-year-old friend, Ajanse. They had spent the forepart of the summer, with five grownups, on a 24-ft. trade cutter, voyaging to Kwajalein Island. On the return in July, just 40 miles from home on Ailinglap atoll, the boat lay in an oppressive calm. The captain, wise in the ways of South Pacific weather, knew what that meant: a storm. It came and drove the cutter hundreds of miles out of her course, to the region of Bikini, famous atomic atoll. Near Bikini a wave drenched the compass box. The steersman saw the compass fluid turn black; the needle began to spin erratically.

Thereafter nothing went right. By guess and the stars, the captain set a course for the Philippines, but high winds blew his boat all through the islands of Micronesia without a landfall. Between storms, the equatorial sun turned the tiny shelter cabin into an oven. The water tanks went dry, and salt decks made brine of rain water. At night the boys and the crew of five set out clean planks and licked the dew off them in the morning. Their only food was a bag of trade sugar and the few fish they caught. The captain died, and they put his body overboard. Six weeks out, the crew had not enough strength to raise the mainsail. In mid-October a desperate crewman drank two bottles of shaving lotion, died two days later.

On Nov. 4, after 102 days at sea, the lookout sighted land. Staggering up the beach, the three men and the two boys were met by Plantation Owner Edmund Harbulot. "Is this the Philippines?" they asked. No, said Harbulot, this was the island of Epi in the New Hebrides, 3,000 miles from the Philippines and 1,800 miles from Ailinglap. Johnny and Ajanse, weak and exhausted, had one big worry: Would teacher be mad at them for getting back to school so late?

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