Incident in a Nowhere Place (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine May 2002

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Incident in a Nowhere Place (Cont.)

MOST OF THE MEN on Seamaster when Blake was killed have chosen to remain silent, pending the verdict in the Brazilians' judicial case. But crew members Don Robertson and Leon Sefton both spoke with me in detail about what happened that night.

"They came from nowhere and suddenly were all around us," Robertson, Blake's oldest and closest friend aboard the yacht—they had shared tens of thousands of sea miles and countless games of Scrabble—told me when I reached him by phone in New Zealand in mid-January.

Robertson recalled that it was after 10 p.m. Blake, Robertson, and most of the crew were standing around on deck,

"They were waving guns, shouting in Portuguese," said Don Robertson. "We didn't know what they were saying, but we didn't need a dictionary. Very quickly they isolated us from each other, pinned our guys down."

having a drink. With Seamaster's deck lit up by lights in the wheelhouse and in the rigging, stereo speakers playing music, the generator running, and large fans circulating air through the boat, no one heard or saw anything until the Brazilians appeared on deck.

"They were waving guns, shouting in Portuguese," said Robertson. "We didn't know what they were saying, but we didn't need a dictionary. Very quickly they isolated us from each other, pinned our guys down to the deck. It appeared professional, almost military." In their helmets and balaclavas, he said, the Brazilians looked "done up for a raid."

Robertson and Rodger Moore, another longtime friend of Blake's on the crew, initially tried to push the gunmen away. Moore splashed them with beer, Robertson said, but Tavares smashed Moore in the face with his gun butt, and Moore dropped to the deck, unconscious. Journalist Mark Scott and Geoff Bullock pulled Robertson down to the deck with them, urging him not to resist. Robertson remembers Scott screaming at him to stop for the sake of Scott's wife and two daughters. The suddenness of the Brazilians' appearance, the shouting, the quick felling of Moore, forestalled any attempt to repel the boarders. The crew was quickly subdued.

Except for Blake. Almost immediately, he ran down the companionway stairs and headed belowdecks. He was followed closely by Isael da Costa.

Leon Sefton, the cameraman, told me he had been in bed in his cabin, almost asleep, when he heard "a ruckus" on deck at about 10:20 p.m. Through the noise of the fans, generator, and music, he couldn't make out what the shouting was about, so he got out of bed to complain about the noise.

Sefton's cabin was directly across from Blake's, forward of Seamaster's main saloon. He noticed Blake's door was ajar, and that Blake was inside. Sefton began tying on his surf shorts, looking down; when he looked up a man in a balaclava was standing in front of him holding an automatic pistol.

When he was a child, Sefton told me, he had been in a bank with his mother when a man carrying a shotgun and wearing a hood came in to rob it. When the robber appeared, eight-year-old Leon had thought it was a joke because he looked so funny, so out of place. Now, as the Brazilian came toward him, Sefton didn't laugh. He dropped to one knee, raised his hands, and said, "It's cool, it's cool," over and over. Da Costa stopped two feet from Sefton and aimed his pistol at the young man's head.

At that moment, Blake came out of his cabin carrying the .308 rifle they'd brought aboard for the Arctic cruise. Holding the large-bore gun at his hip, he shouted at da Costa, "Right! Get the fuck off my boat!"

It was too much for da Costa. He retreated, still facing Blake, as the boat's captain chased him aft through the saloon. Da Costa began climbing backward up the steps and disappeared out of Sefton's line of sight. Then Blake suddenly tensed, and there was a loud exchange of fire. Four shots, Sefton believes, two from each man. One or both of the bullets from Blake's rifle hit the Brazilian, who was holding his gun outstretched in both hands, and smashed into the pistol, knocking it out of da Costa's grip, taking with it the tops of two fingers, and grazing his forearm. Da Costa's bullets went wide, and he scrambled, bleeding, up to the deck.

Blake might have fired more shots, but his rifle jammed. He started banging its stock on the saloon floor. Sefton asked him if he needed more bullets—he'd gathered them up from Blake's bunk—but Blake said no and told him to go clear a ventilator fan out of the forward hatch in case they needed to get up on deck by that route. Sefton ran forward out of the saloon, past the crew cabins, but before he got to the bow he heard more gunfire. He turned and ran back toward the saloon.

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