Books: Pretty Good Ocean

MONSOON SEAS (337 pp.)—Alan Villiers—McGraw-Hill ($4.75).

An albatross glided to a landing in West Australia 20 years ago, with a message round its neck. On a metal band someone had painfully punched out with a nail, in French: “Thirteen men cast away on the Crozet Islands. Send help for the love of God.” When help arrived, barely a sign of the castaways remained. Putting small faith in their S.O.S. by albatross, the unlucky 13 had apparently put to sea on rafts. The wild waters of the southern Indian Ocean did the rest.

The Indian Ocean has its implacable moods and its share of human tragedies, but Author Alan Villiers, who tells the story of the Crozet castaways in Monsoon Seas, is not out to give the ocean a bad name so much as to salvage its lore and legends. An ardent old salt, Villiers has played Boswell to the briny deep before. His personal reminiscences, e.g., Grain Race, Cruise of the Conrad, Falmouth for Orders, made even the laziest landlubber feel he had missed something in never having rounded the Horn under sail or followed the wake of Captain Cook in a square-rigger. Coaxing the Indian Ocean to lie still for its historical portrait is another matter. But Author Villiers does well by his chosen sea, and might have done even better if he had crowded on less statistical cargo, more anecdotal sail.

Unhappy Hooligan. Villiers trots back & forth from the timid “dawn of sailing” to the smudgy triumph of the modern oil tanker, but lingers longest and most lovingly in the ages of exploration and trade. As late as the 19th century, a shrewd captain could pocket a clear $100,000 on a single trip. Though scurvy often mowed down two-thirds of a crew, the lure of whales and slaves, pearls and spices kept the survivors coming back for more, and made piracy “the oldest profession” in the Indian Ocean.

The slickest of the buccaneers was 17th-century Captain Henry (“Cutthroat”) Avery, born plain Ben Bridgman. Avery’s special prey was the rich pilgrim trade of Moslems heading for Mecca. One such ship, carrying the daughter of the Grand Mogul, was looted of bales of silk, sacks of diamonds, and a ruby-encrusted saddle. Persuading his pirate confederates to transfer the booty from their leaky craft to his sturdier one, Avery changed course in the middle of the night and gave them the slip. At St. Thomas he divvied up the swag with his crew and headed alone for England, only to find that the Admiralty and the East India Company had tacked a £1,000 reward on his head.

Hiding his treasure chests, not daring to spend a penny of his £100,000 haul for fear of being nabbed, Avery finally found some Bristol merchants who agreed to act as fences. The pirate turned over his hoard and never saw it again. When he called at their offices, they threatened to expose him. Such sharp dealings broke the old cutthroat’s heart. He shortly died, “not worth so much as would buy him a coffin.”

Slumping Harem. The ocean bred its gay as well as its devil dogs. One of the gayest, Alexander Hare, a rich English trader, settled on one of the beautiful atolls of the Cocos-Keeling Islands in 1827 with a slave harem of 117 beauties from Malaya, Java, Bali and points east. A former partner and prior claimant, John Clunies-Ross, a Scot, soon showed up with his family and a crew of predatory bachelors. To keep them out of what he called his “flower garden,” the latter-day Solomon ladled out rum to Ross’s men, penned his women in a stockade on another island, and kept them busy husking coconuts from dawn to dusk.

Nonetheless, the harem population soon slumped to 40, in eight years was wheedled away entirely. The redoubtably lecherous Hare left to round up another harem, but new laws against slavery stymied him. Ross stayed on to become King of the Islands, a title held today by 23-year-old John Clunies-Ross V (TIME, Sept. 3), thanks to the 999-year charter that Queen Victoria granted Ross I.

One thing saddens Windjammer Villiers about today’s Indian Ocean. Across its 4,600-mile face from Cape Town to Bombay, no bona fide sailing ship scuds before the trade winds. Without “the creak of well-seasoned timbers, the slow gurgle of water at the bows, the gentle hum of the warm wind in the taut rigging,” the “flying-fish ocean” is still a pretty good place, he feels, but not as good as it used to be.