Incident in a Nowhere Place (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine May 2002

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Incident in a Nowhere Place (Cont.)

RUN THROUGH BY THE EQUATOR, Macapá lies at the northern mouth of the Amazon delta, on the true Rio Amazonas. Here it is always hot and humid, except immediately after it rains or when the wind blows in from the east off the Atlantic. When it's not raining it's getting ready to rain, with towering castles of gray thunderclouds building against pale pink skies over the brown water of the delta.

The town has that look of fast-developing Third World river towns at the edge of nowhere, although the center of Macapá looks prosperous for a backwater, with a university, a small concrete multiplex movie theater, and a growing middle class driving late-model Volkswagens. Only at its edge does Macapá grow visibly poorer, with ramshackle wooden houses, garbage-filled streams, and uninviting brothels, an inter-woven and self-perpetuating matrix straggling down the coast toward Santana and the beach at Fazendinha.

When Blake dropped anchor here last December, he was still in the early days of a new career as an environmental crusader and educator. In 1997, after the death of Jacques Cousteau, Blake had been invited to become the Cousteau Society's new figurehead and roaming explorer. After six circumnavigations and 30 years at sea, he had seen the decline of ocean ecosystems firsthand, and his decades of navigation through the riptides of politics, business, and promotion made Blake seem the logical choice to rescue the dissent-ridden Cousteau Society and restore its legacy.

But his nose for a well-run organization led him to split with the Cousteaus, and in 2000 Blake decided to strike out on his own. With his new yacht Seamaster and sponsorship from Omega watches, he formed blakexpeditions and resolved "to undertake voyages to the areas of the world which are key to the planet's ecosystem." The United Nations made Blake a special envoy for its Environmental Program, and Seamaster flew the UNEP flag. In late 2000 Seamaster sailed to Antarctica—the first leg of an extended world voyage—to film a three-month exploration of the effects of global warming on the polar waters, ice cap, and life-forms.

From Antarctica, Seamaster headed north to Brazil for a further three months of filming and environmental study on the Amazon. Part of the crew left the yacht upriver, at the mouth of the Rio Negro, to proceed down the Orinoco to the Venezuelan coast, where they planned to rendezvous with the boat. By early December, Blake and his crew had completed filming and were ready to head out to sea and steer north to Baffin Island and the Northwest Passage.

Seamaster was a happy boat. The crew, which varied as people came and went, had a steady core of four or five paid hands to handle the ship and five or six of Blake's longtime sailing mates as additional crewmembers and filmmakers. The number aboard on the Amazon ranged between 10 and 20 people, including Australian Rob Warring, 48, Blake's second in command; old friend Don Robertson, 62, an Australian who'd settled in New Zealand and was Seamaster's communications specialist; Kiwis Geoff Bullock, 58, and Rodger Moore, 55; Charlie Dymock and Robin Allen, 18-year-old sons of friends of Blake's in England; and Leon Sefton, 32, a TV director and cameraman and the son of Blake's longtime New Zealand business partner, Alan Sefton. Blake ran things with a no-pretense Kiwi style: They were all friends, and all enjoyed Blake's irrepressible humor. The only outsiders were Paolo Matos, a Brazilian cook, and Mark Scott, a New Zealand journalist who had joined the boat for a couple of weeks to write an article for New Zealand Geographic magazine. With the Orinoco group upriver, there were ten men aboard Seamaster on December 5.

That morning, they anchored Seamaster off the Porto de Santana, about 13 miles southwest of Macapá, to await immigration clearance. The local port authority radioed that there was danger of robbery at their present position, and advised them to anchor instead off the praticagem, the pilot station at Fazendinha. They did so, and cleared customs. The crew was set to sail early the next morning for Venezuela. They'd certainly thought about crime, maintaining a 24-hour watch throughout the trip up the Amazon, and had never felt in any particular danger. They spent the evening celebrating the completion of a difficult voyage.

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