Incident in a Nowhere Place (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine May 2002

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Incident in a Nowhere Place (Cont.)


	"The Shackleton Method": Sir Peter Blake in command, in the wheelhouse of the Seamaster during the Amazon expedition (Blakexpeditions/Franck Socha)

Fazendinha is a long brown river beach nine miles southwest of the Brazilian town of Macapá. Here, close to where the muddy Amazon meets the Atlantic, its waters are tidal. When the tide is high and the sun is out, Fazendinha can look almost resortlike: Bars and cheap restaurants line the beach road. At night local people fill tables on the sand and eat grilled shrimp, drink Antarctica beer, and listen to live samba bands.

When the tide is low, there's a different look: Children who live in nearby shacks play soccer on the flat, sticky mud-wrack that stretches a long way out to the tumbling river. It's fun for a kid. You run and slide and roll in the mud, and get so covered with it that the mosquitoes don't bite, and the only thing on your mind is scoring another goal before the incoming tide drowns the playing field. But when you get too old to spend your afternoons playing soccer, there's nothing left but mud.

On the afternoon of December 5, 2001, three local men—Ricardo Tavares, 22, Reney Macedo, also 22, and José Irandir Cardoso, 25—sat drinking beer on the beach and staring across the muddy shallows at a yacht that had anchored a few hundred yards offshore that morning. By any measure, it was a dazzler: 118 feet long, with two towering aluminum masts and rigging filled with radar sweeps, satellite navigation transponders, and radio aerials. Awnings were rigged over the boat's decks; in their cool shadows were the silhouettes of outboard engines, dinghies, anchors, thickets of marine hardware. The men on deck looked like tourists in shorts, but the boat didn't look like a tourist boat. It was ugly, bulbous, purposeful. Along the bow of its discolored, bare aluminum hull, the boat's name, Seamaster, was painted in electric blue; amidships, in lowercase, was a single enigmatic word: "blakexpeditions."

Yachts rarely appear off this coast. Tourists don't come here either. There's nothing for them in Macapá. The town is the capital of Amapá, the least populated state in Brazil after the remote mountain fastness of Roraima. It is inhabited mainly by public servants who facilitate the government's lumber and mining interests in the region. Tourists enter Amazonia through Belém, on the Rio Pará, at the southern edge of the great Amazon delta. The few yachts venturing into the river also go by way of Belém, where they can find supplies, hardware, and better communications. Nobody sails to Macapá.

The three young men could not have been more astonished by this apparition. They watched the yacht's crew come ashore to drink and make phone calls at the Bar du Bizerra, a hole-in-the-wall like the others along the beach, with tables and chairs spreading over the road and onto the sand. Just before dark, the crew returned to the yacht. They came and went in a black inflatable propelled to high speeds by a large outboard motor.

Tavares, Macedo, and Cardoso went and found three other men in the nearby village of Santana: Isael da Costa, whose 27th birthday was the next day; Isael's brother Josué da Costa, 29; and Rubens Souza, 20. A criminal indictment would later list their occupations as bricklayer's assistant, general laborer, electrician's assistant, laborer, sailor, and fisherman, but all were unemployed, with little education and fewer economic prospects. Several had records as part-time petty thieves. "Sandal thieves," the local police call young men who rob in their T-shirts and flip-flops; or "water rats," when they take to the water in small boats and rob fishermen.

In Macapá, there is almost no twilight. Night falls fast. Since the yacht looked like it was staying put for the evening, they decided to head out to it in a catraia, a small fishing boat with an outboard, and stick up the crew. They disbanded and went to their homes to eat dinner and to collect what they needed.

When they rendezvoused at the river's edge just before 9 p.m., four of them pulled on motorcycle helmets and the other two donned balaclava-like hoods. Tavares, Cardoso, and Isael da Costa carried handguns. They got into the catraiaand motored out into the river, then paddled noiselessly as they neared the boat. They later said music was coming from it.

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