George and Barbara Perkins

AROUND THE WORLD ON THE QE2: THE LAST OF THE GREAT OCEAN LINERS

The QE2 is now retired. The book is a personal account of her last world cruise. Highlights include the Taj Mahal at sunrise, Mount Parnassus, Delphi, Cape Horn, Pitcairn Island, the Strait of Magellan, the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, the moai statues of Easter Island, the Great Wall and the Shaolin Monastery in China, the Hunter Valley Vineyards and Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Excerpts follow:

“If you’ve never been to Hong Kong, Tahiti, or Valparaiso—or any number of famous places around the world—this book will give you an idea of what you’re missing. . . . This print-on-demand paperback is beautifully done, well-edited and attractively packaged by Shires Press, headquartered in the Northshire Bookstore, an independent store in Manchester Center, VT. The big publishing houses are struggling, but POD looks like one kind of publication that’s here to stay.”
-- Carter Jefferson, INTERNET REVIEW OF BOOKS

EXTRACTS:

PERILS OF THE SEA

We returned to the ship, moved on toward Gibraltar, and discovered that even in the great scheme of things a drowning at sea is no small matter for those who stand nearby. We were on our way to Lisbon when just such a situation grabbed our attention.

In most ways the day had been normal. People lounged on the decks, swam in the pool, played shuffleboard, ping pong, tennis, or basketball, whacked golf balls into a net, read books in the library, gambled in the casino, attended lectures and performances, watched movies, did their laundry, considered their futures, talked about their most recent shore excursions, wondered about the folks at home, went to breakfast, lunch, and afternoon tea, napped in their cabins, worked on picture puzzles, listened to piano or harp music in the ship’s bars, drank, played cards, watched the waves and the shoreline glide by, and in short passed the day pleasantly in the manifold ways possible while cruising in the Mediterranean Sea. We had left the rough waters off Sardinia and Corsica two days and many leagues behind and were now approaching Gibraltar.

When the Rock hove into sight in early afternoon, passengers gathered on the decks to watch the approach, admire the mountain-like height, and then witness the fabled narrowness of the strait leading into the Atlantic Ocean, where Africa becomes a near presence on the horizon, at times only 8½ miles from the Spanish shore.

This excitement over, the distressing news of the day began at about 3:30 in the afternoon. We were among those gathered in the theater when an announcement was made that named one of the women on board and asked her to contact the Purser’s Office. The same announcement was repeated again, shortly after. The third time, the message was broadened to include anyone who was with the woman or had seen her in the last couple of hours. She was described briefly as 68 years old, grey-haired, wearing a red jacket and blue pants. Clearly, there was something wrong.

It is not easy to lose a person on a cruise ship, not even one that is the length of three football fields. With 1,500 or more passengers on board, not everyone knows everyone else, but after weeks together, it is amazing how many people know one another, or know someone who knows someone, or know someone by sight. Rumors began to fly. It was a long way down to the water.

Grey-hair, a red jacket that might stand out against the waves, blue pants that might not.

After 6:00 p.m., as we were dressing for the scheduled dinner and formal ball, the Captain announced that having failed to find the woman aboard, he was turning the ship around. We would head back to the place where she had last been seen. He asked everyone to keep an eye out on all sides of the ship, from whatever deck or window was available to us. We did, but with the sinking feeling that none of us would see a grey head bobbing above a red jacket in the white foam of the waves. Even if by some miracle we did, we thought it would certainly be too late. Ships in the area had also been alerted.

Shortly afterward, we had just sat down to our plates, crystal, and silverware, and the waiters had just spread our napkins on our laps, when the Captain came on the speakers again to ask all passengers to return to their cabins and search for the missing woman under their beds and behind their shower curtains, and in all their closets and cupboards. We did that, and in another twenty minutes, without any further news, we were told to resume “normal” activities, which for us meant that we returned to the Queens Grill and ordered our meals. At this point none of us had much appetite. Then the loudspeakers blared yet again as the Captain asked all crew members to suspend their duties as soon as they could and return to their cabins to make the same searches. The result was the same. The woman appeared to have disappeared, while we steamed on, backward tracing our route and feeling more and more hopeless.

Grey-hair, a red jacket that might stand out against the waves, blue pants that might not.

Perhaps twenty minutes later, the Captain spoke again, with his voice relieved and confident. The woman had been found asleep in a bathroom in the crew’s area on the number six deck. No passenger should have been in that hallway. Apparently, not long after her husband had left their cabin to join the throng on the decks who were watching the passing of the Rock of Gibraltar, she had left her cabin and got lost. When he returned, he found her missing. It seemed possible that she had begun to feel ill, had descended to the Six Deck in search of the ship’s doctor, had turned the wrong way, ignored signs, and wound up in the bathroom.

We were due in Lisbon in the morning and we got there. The QE 2 being the QE 2, the Captain turned her around, and with all four engines revved up to full steam ahead we quickly made up the hours we had lost and returned to our schedule.

EASTER ISLAND

Easter Island has no docking for a ship as big as the QE2. In the best of circumstances, it is necessary to anchor a couple miles offshore and go in by tenders. The surrounding seas are notoriously rough, and the best we could get as a forecast was that we would have a fifty/​fifty chance of getting ashore. As it turned out, the weather was beautiful and the seas calm, with only mild swells. The tenders took about 15 minutes each way for the trip, and, although some were late returning, everybody who wanted to visit the island got to shore.

At the dock, when we settled in our seats on our tour bus, we were greeted by an unusually entertaining guide who introduced himself by saying that he was a native Chilean who had immigrated to Easter Island. Before he began his duties he explained his deficiencies as a tour guide:

Do not believe a thing I tell you, for I warn you that I am twice a liar. In the first place, I am a lawyer, which makes me a liar by profession. In the second place, although I will tell you many things about the history of Easter Island and its famous statues, there is so little known about these matters that I must make things up. Some may be true, but some may be lies. Either way, you don’t need to believe me, though you may if you choose.

The evidence before our eyes told us that the island has many splendidly beautiful features even discounting its famous Moai, the giant statues carved from volcanic rock. Although it belongs to Chile, we had to sail 2,500 miles from Valparaiso to get to it, and from there to Pitcairn Island would be another 1,200 miles. This isolation has left its mark. The native islanders are not Chilean, but Polynesian. Our guide told us that even today only Polynesians are allowed to own property on it. As a Chilean married to a Polynesian woman, he could not own property, but his wife could and so could his children. The curse of the foreigner would not be passed down to his children’s generation. We chose to believe this, for it seemed to have the ring of truth. At one point we made a rest stop at a souvenir shop owned, he said, by his wife, a shop, he said, where there were great bargains to be had. We chose to believe the first part, and when we browsed goods on display, the second seemed more or less true as well.

Easter Island occupies an area of less than 70 square miles, or little more than eight miles in length and another eight in breadth. A century ago the population had dwindled to a few hundred natives, but when we visited it had grown to perhaps 4,000 people. Much of it is a national park.

When Captain Cook visited it in the 18th century, he considered the island a desert. Today, what you see either from shore or through the windows of a tour bus is a rolling landscape of brown and green hills, with very few trees and little agriculture. Nevertheless, contrary to Cook’s assessment, it seemed to us a two-toned jewel in an ocean of blue. Because of the volcanic soil there is not a lot of agriculture. Cows are pastured in fields, and are of obvious economic value to the people, but horses seem to wander freely, apparently finding enough fodder in the low vegetation, but seeming to plough no fields or fulfill any other practical use. We saw little evidence of crops growing on a scale larger than kitchen gardens. Among the few trees, perhaps none were native. Of those that we judged to be imported, a good many were eucalypts, brought there presumably because they will grow almost anywhere. Planting them on a treeless island sounds like a good idea at first, but eucalypts have the habit of regularly fueling wildfires, most famously in their native Australia, and they carry that trait elsewhere as well—in California, for example. As we toured, we passed trees on fire by the roadside. Nobody seemed to care, there seemed to be no effort to put the fires out, and when we returned to the ship we saw with more educated eyes something we hadn’t noticed before we landed: from several places on the island there rose into the blue skies wisps of gray smoke that now seemed a perennial part of the landscape. The impression of permanence was only an impression, of course. We found no occasion to ask about rainy spells or yearly weather cycles.

For our first tour stop we drove through a pasture at Ahu Akivi to view a stand of seven giant Moai, erected in a line positioned to face the sea. This placement is unusual, for, of the over 800 monoliths believed to have been erected between 1000 and 1690 A.D., most were arranged to face inland. Nobody seems to know what they stand for. One theory suggests that they are representations of early royalty, put in place to keep vigilant watch over their subjects, but that seems puzzling because they have little or no individuality. A bunch lined up to look outward toward the sea may have been placed to keep watchful eyes alert for potential intruders. But if that were so, it remains a puzzle that they watch from one perspective, not from many. Whatever they represented, some were in ancient times thrown to the ground so that they landed on their faces and were broken, with the result that they could watch nothing at all. Because some of the figures are as tall as eighteen feet and weigh several tons, the making and the moving from quarries that are miles from their standing places invites a lot of speculation. In sum, however, why they were built and what happened to the people who built them remains a mystery.

After our first stop we went to Ahu Vinapu, where we left the bus and passed through a cattle gate to see figures deliberately toppled, broken, and lying face down, the “why” as much of a mystery at the site as it had seemed in the abstract, before we arrived and viewed them. At most of the sites, the figures seem to represent men, but at Ahu Vinapu we saw one woman, though the indications of gender were so faint that we wondered whether they would show up well in the photos we took. If this was the female statue that Captain Cook reported seeing, she apparently had two heads at the time of his visit, for that is how he sketched her. The one we saw didn’t look as if it had lost a head.

At this place there was a wall of stones, massive blocks square-cut and joined with almost incredible precision, very much like those at the Inca temples at Cuzco and Machu Picchu in Peru. Probing with a finger that can find no space between them, it is hard to imagine how they were shaped and placed together with such accuracy. Thor Heyerdahl speculated that early Peruvian settlers got to Easter Island before the later arrival of Polynesians. Recoverable dates don’t seem to provide convincing support for this theory, however. Some of the plants on the island seem to have sprung from seeds carried from Peru, which may be taken for supporting evidence of the Peruvian settler theory, but we wondered if birds or ocean currents could have accomplished the same thing.

One of the privileges of touring by ship is the impetus to challenge authority and turn fleeting impressions into historical records. Like Captain Cook, we possessed the incontrovertible evidence of our own eyes. Unlike him, we traveled in the wake of more than two hundreds years of earlier visitors, explorers, and scientists who had left voluminous records that we had neither the time nor the inclination to master.

We didn’t get to the quarry where most of the stone used to carve the Moai came from, but did visit Rano Kau, a water-filled pit of a giant volcano that, with others, spewed forth the rock that formed the island. Nearby we found the Bird-Men, rock carvings of men with bird-like heads and phallic noses, or perhaps a man who carried a bird on his shoulders, a man who, according to legend, created the first humans in his image.

At the coastal edge near Rano Kau, we walked a long path by the side of a high cliff to visit Orongo, a weird and extensive city of perhaps fifty mounded stone houses that each holds a door so low that it would be necessary for the inhabitants to crawl into them and barely room within for sleeping. They were shaped somewhat like igloos, but there had never been any igloos for inspiration here. The complex has a defensive look, much as though it was inspired by the thought of a circle of giant turtles sitting side by side, protected by their shells, with their claws withdrawn and ready to pull in their heads if danger should threaten. Certainly it would be hard for an intruder to penetrate these shelters if they were defended by one or more kneeling inhabitants holding outthrust spears. We guessed that most of the daily living of these people was carried on outdoors, and that they retreated inside primarily in bad weather or for defense.

The turtle city inhabitants may have been a later people than the people who carved the Moai. Near their settlement, not far into the sea, stood a very high outcropping of rock where terns were said to nest. According to our guide, legends spoke of a time when six tribes lived on this part of the island. Each spring each tribe selected a champion to climb down the nine hundred foot cliff that stood at ocean’s edge, wait for the laying of the first tern egg, swim to the rock outcropping, climb the nine hundred feet to its top and steal the egg, descend the outcropping, swim back, and carry the unbroken egg up the shore-side cliff. The first to complete the challenge claimed his reward of a kingship and six virgins to mate with until the following spring, when it was time for the annual ritual to begin again. Nearby were petroglyphs said to represent some of the successful claimants over the two hundred year cycle of the competition.
Here, in essence, our tour ended. According to our guide, the story of the first tern egg challenge completed what he had heard of the pre-history of the island and its mysterious origins. This legend, and also, of course, the Aliens from Outer Space theories, which he mentioned but didn’t bother to explain.

If Aliens from Outer Space came today, they would find a convenient landing place. The small Easter Island airport was extended in 1986 by NASA for space shuttle landing, should that ever be necessary. It has a long runway and can and does accommodate Chilean Air jet planes. In some ways it is easier to fly to the island than it is to get there by a ship. In Valparaiso the QE2 had offered such a flight to its passengers.
After our tour we returned to the dock to wait in long lines with passengers from other buses for our turn to be shuttled back to the ship. This, too, the QE2 did well. To provide shade against a very hot midday sun, a huge canopy had been erected where crew members dispensed cold water and lemonade while we waited.

That evening at dinner, we decided to celebrate our Easter Island visit by ordering Chateaubriand for six for the next evening at sea. That included our table, which we shared with a Canadian couple, Jim and Rachael Boles, and Greg and Mary Liz Scharf, from North Carolina, who were seated at a table next to us. Chateaubriand, because it was cooked on a rolling grill that was placed next to the table, was one of the few meals on the menu that required advance notice. Greg had agreed to buy the champagne, and because we would be attending a wine tasting in the afternoon, we agreed to use our newly acquired knowledge to furnish the wine. Oliver Lau, the very personable young assistant Maitre d’, was called in on an emergency basis, because David Chambers was hobbling about on a broken ankle and his regular assistant was helping to fill in for him.

Fine. But when dinner time arrived, Mary Liz was either seasick or suffering from food-poisoning as a result of eating raw pineapple on the pier at Easter Island, so was unable to eat any of it. Oliver prepared it excellently, however, and Mary Liz gamely sat and watched, and then posed, looking very chipper, for the group picture that Kim, our waitress, volunteered to take. The rest of us had no difficulty disposing of her share. We decided that we would have to plan the same meal again later in the trip.