Into the Screaming 50s (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine August 2002

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Into the Screaming 50s (Cont.)

IT WAS A REMARKABLE PIECE of seamanship, and it was easy to see why Edmund Rice, upon delivering the River Boyne and its remaining cargo to Valpara'so, had been handsomely rewarded by the ship's owners and underwriters. I could also understand why the story had been passed down through the Rice family from generation to generation, as a testament to the Ulyssean resourcefulness of the clan's patriarch. Still, there was something that seemed unusual—or maybe just uncharacteristically sentimental—about his great-grandson's need to "pay a little pilgrimage," as he put it.

Calling the Horn "the sailor's Everest" may be overstating it, but rounding this small island has become an important lifelist experience.

When I ask him about this later, John Rice, who lives in Southampton, on the English coast, can't quite explain it. "It was the culture in my family not to make too much of it," he tells me. "Especially because my grandfather failed to go to sea, and went into the flour-milling business instead. He always downplayed the story, and so did my father."

"Was your father a sailor?"

"No, he was a milling engineer."

It was Rice's mother, Catherine, an avid dinghy sailor, who taught young John the basics of the sport, during summer vacations on the Isle of Wight. After a failed attempt at gaining entry to Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point, Rice earned an engineering degree and wound up spending his entire career at a giant Caltex crude-oil refinery in the Emirate of Bahrain. While raising four sons, he raced in the cruiser fleet at the Bahrain Yacht Club. He also met Richard Fernie, now 59, a South African chemical engineer for Caltex, and over the years the families of the two men often vacationed together, sometimes on chartered yachts. Later, Rice went on to earn his yacht master's certificate from a sailing school in Devon.

One day in class, Rice told his instructor about the River Boyne, and the instructor introduced him to John Chancellor, a well-known British marine artist. In 1979 Chancellor contacted Rice and told him he wanted to depict the saga in a painting.

Rice runs his finger down the chart on the galley table and points out a bay about five miles south of where we are now—Bahía Rice. "The Admiralty named it many years ago," he says, "and we always assumed it was the bay in which the River Boyne was scuttled." Chancellor, Rice continues, was meticulous about getting correct detail in his paintings, and so he asked the captain of a research vessel that was doing some work in the Peninsula Hardy area to take pictures for him. But the pictures didn't match Captain Rice's sketches at all. Chancellor's conclusion was that the scuttling had taken place in the next bay to the north—Schapenham.

Soon another nautical authority would weigh in. Gilles Fortineau, professor of naval history at Nantes University in France and an expert on indigenous watercraft, had originally been interested in some sketches that Captain Rice had made of Fuegian bark canoes used by the now-extinct Yahgan Indians. Subsequently, he became fascinated with the River Boyne story. Earlier that night Rice gave me a copy of one of Fortineau's letters. It contained a closely reasoned argument about the likely site of the scuttling—the southern arm of the bay we were in, Bahía Orange—and concluded on a wildly self-congratulatory note.

"I wonder," Fortineau wrote, "how such a meticulous man as John Chancellor could have made such a mistake...after the Admiralty! (Two mistakes! What a story!). I am a bit proud (as unknown Frenchman!) to have contributed to rectify the wrong assertions of such a famous authority and...of an admirable painter!" He signed it, "Gilles (the Sherlock Holmes of the French Navy)" and added a postscript: "It would be so nice to make a film entitled 'River Boyne.' You should absolutely contact Cameron, realisator of 'Titanic'!!!!!"

Upon his retirement, in 1999, John Rice began to seriously explore the idea of an expedition to Peninsula Hardy. Many years ago he had considered retracing his great-grandfather's voyage in its entirety, all the way from Liverpool. But chastened by a heart attack at 62, he narrowed his ambitions, got on the Internet, and found Novak, who urged him to begin the yearlong process of procuring the special zarpe, or permission, that he would need from the Chilean navy in order to visit the normally restricted Peninsula Hardy.

It's clear that Novak has become absorbed by Rice's quest. On the other side of the table, he's rereading a letter that Edmund Rice sent to the River Boyne's owners, describing the bay as "about two miles north west of Cape Lort." That can only be Bah'a Rice. And yet the logbook describes a bay that is "well sheltered from the E by a small island in the mouth of the bay."

"Which would seem to count out both Schapenham and Rice Bays," Rice says, peering at a chart.

"Except that the island might not be charted," Novak replies. "A lot of the smaller bays haven't been updated since Fitzroy."

"It's a strange thing. A mystery."

Novak nods. "Well, that's why we're here."

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