Sailor’s Voyage Home Is a Long One

By Leonard Wibberley

First Published in on July 5, 1979

12/1/2016

Leonard and his family on the Lady Hazel

Once upon a time, I had a friend who had no country at all—but he was a very good sailor and that was the saving of him.

His name was Valint and he was a Hungarian. But I met him in the island of Trinidad in the West Indies.

He was a great man at turning a phrase and I remember one evening in the dregs of the day we drifted into Port of Spain Harbor, put down a mud anchor—it’s all mud there—and crawled into our bunks to dream of being warm and dry.

The next morning, I got up early. I stumbled out of the sopping-wet cabin and looked about. The sky was gray and the sea was gray and the air was gray. And there was a soft, gray rain falling as if weeping for the sorrows of all mankind. It was the right time for suicide, as any man of sense would agree.

Valint came up on deck with me, took a look around and smiled with delight.

“God,” he said. “What a beautiful gray day.”

That was the kind of man Valint was.

He was a veteran of the first World War and that’s how he lost his country. He was a soldier in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and when he was demobilized, he got back to his village and his village wasn’t there. There wasn’t a house left or a street to walk about in or a person he knew. So he walked clean out of Hungary and finally got to Marseilles where he got a job on a merchant ship.

He wound up in the island, of St. Vincent, which is also in the West Indies, and he jumped ship, though he had no passport, no birth certificate; not a piece of official paper to show who he was or that he was alive at all.

Still, he liked the West Indies but, finding no work in St. Vincent, he stole a sloop and sailed it to Trinidad where there was work to be had on the oilfields.

“Didn’t your conscience bother you, stealing a boat?” I asked.

“Why should it?” replied Valint. “Someone stole my village and someone stole my country. What’s a 30-foot boat compared with that?”

He got a job on the oilfields and that is where we met, for I was working as a refinery operator—a job which was a very great mystery to me. But I got paid every month and, so, didn’t worry.

We both loved sailing and soon we were racing a Star-class boat together and we got so good that we were invited to the international Star-class races in San Diego. But we couldn’t raise the needed money and didn’t go.

Then one day Valint told me that he’d gotten a job skippering a cruising yawl around the world for an Englishman and his wife, and off he went. He was back several months later. He’d left the boat in Tahiti and got a job ashore winding armatures.

He said he was the only really experienced armature winder in Papeete but the French deported him because he had no papers.

They had deported him to Hungary—but he jumped ship going through the Panama Canal and made his way back to Trinidad, where he got his old job back in the oilfields. Everybody knew he had no papers and everybody knew he was illegally on the island, but nobody cared.

Then came World War II and Valint was picked up as an enemy alien, illegally living on the island. He was imprisoned and tried on that charge and all his friends came to court to do what they could for him.

Luckily, the judge also raced Star-class boats and he knew Valint, who had beaten him in racing many times.

When the prosecution had presented its case, charging that Valint was an enemy agent in Trinidad illegally and without papers, the judge thought about the thing for a good five minutes. Then he pronounced judgment.

“The prosecution asserts that the defendant has no papers and that he is an enemy alien,” he said. “But British law demands that a charge be proved and, since the defendant has no papers of any kind, whatever suspicions there are concerning him, it cannot be proved that he comes from Timbuktu. Therefore, the case is dismissed for lack of evidence. I might add that we will have won nothing in the present war if we are to condemn a man on suspicion or on hearsay.”

Then one day when I was putting the battens in the mainsail before a race, Valint said to me, “I got some papers at last.”

“You have?’“ I cried.

“Yes,” and he produced a marriage certificate. “She’s a sensible girl. And she has a nice house and a small cocoa plantation in the center of the island.”

I got the mainsail and Valint sweated the downhaul tight.

“You know something,” he said. “Every sailor’s headed for home. Sometimes it’s a real long voyage.”

The 7th book in the Father Bredder Mystery Series—A Touch of Jonah—is now available on Kindle!

Description: This time, Father Bredder finds himself embroiled in a mystery reminiscent of Murder on the Orient Express set on a boat during the Transpac Yacht Race to Honolulu. Father Bredder joins the crew of the Fair Maid to determine if the captain of the boat is cursed or if someone is trying to kill him. “A Touch of Jonah gives us landlubbers the next best thing to being part of that exhilarating, grueling and wonder-filled obstacle course that is the Transpac ocean race without our having to run its dangers. This is a superior piece of craft—the transference of the actual sensate quality of race sailing to words on paper. And Holton has done it, surprisingly enough, in the form of a mystery book, one of his Father Bredder series.” — The Los Angeles Times