According to villagers, John Long's boat sailed itself all night before crashing onto the beach, a ghost ship with all its lights on. They were afraid to approach because of the giant waves rolling in off the Pacific, but in the morning, when the tide went out, they found gold rings and bracelets in the sand and American dollars everywhere, the beach littered with riches. They said they found keys made of pure gold ancient sailors' keys for opening chests.
Everyone gathered, until eventually there were nearly 100 people standing on the beach, worried that a family might still be trapped inside the hull. Perhaps it was not a ghost ship at all but a ship of death.
Local fishermen said they found the body near the mouth of the Río Cahoacán a white corpse as large as two men, with no clothes and a light beard, mouth open as if it might speak. Villagers went to find the judge, because he was the only one with a phone, and he called officials from larger towns to come take the body away. This village was only a few palapas made of sticks and bamboo, with palm-frond roofs.
It was like a story from Gabriel García Márquez: the carnivalesque scene on the beach. The sea that brings gifts of the First World, conquistadors, and death. This body floating naked and larger than life John Long, literally a big man, now become legend. But this tale is real. It happened in February in the village of La Cigüeña, on the west coast of Chiapas, seven miles from Mexico's border with Guatemala. Long, a 78-year-old Irishman who'd spent his adult life in California, had dreamed of this voyage for 16 years. He'd left San Francisco three months earlier on his 48-foot ketch, Cúlin, heading south to the Panama Canal and then home to his native Ireland.
Long's , or emergency position-indicating radio beacon, went off at 12:49 a.m. on February 2. And contrary to all the colorful stories from the villagers, with their invention of gold and claims of finding the body, the Mexican navy actually discovered Long's corpse around 11 a.m. the next morning, floating two miles offshore near the town of Puerto Madero, seven miles north of La Cigüeña. His body was naked and bruised, with cerebral hemorrhaging, broken ribs, and a broken neck.
Long's story was disappearing even as it was happening, and soon legend would be all that was left. I know this because his story is a version of what could have been my own. Ten years ago, I ran into trouble in these same waters.
My sailboat was a 48-foot ketch, just like Long's, and in the late fall of 1997 I hired another captain to deliver it from San Francisco to Panama while I finished a semester of teaching at Stanford. My plan was to pick up the boat in Panama and continue to the British Virgin Islands, where I would run winter charters. This boat, Grendel, was my business and my home.
But the captain I'd hired, an accomplished sailor in her thirties, took on some bad diesel in Acapulco, diesel with water in it, and limped into the town of Puerto Madero on a bit of wind. For some reason, she waited a week before calling me. Then the cook took off on another boat for la pura vida in Costa Rica, and took my $2,000 in emergency cash with him.
None of this made any sense, of course, and it was the beginning of the most outrageous four months of my life. I arrived in Puerto Madero figuring I'd be on my way in about a week. But soon enough, I was the center of attention in the town's backwater shrimp port, a tiny village of its own, without a name. I'd fallen down the rabbit hole, into a place where, everywhere I turned, I heard newer and less believable stories, and they were all about me.
My sailboat was large and broken, tied to the one crumbled chunk of concrete on the shoreline, visited by rats, snakes, begging children, prostitutes, the police, the navy, drunken fishermen, and the crooked port captain's men. At first I tried to have the engine fixed, but a mechanic with a disco shirt, gold chains, and a group of thugs at his shop held the high-pressure injection pump for ransom, demanding $900 instead of $100 for the repair. So I tried a new tack, spending $3,500 to buy a used engine and have it trucked down from California. This engine was stolen before it ever arrived, only to reappear mysteriously months later, a 500-pound hunk of metal dumped on the beach in the middle of the night.
The outboard engine for my dinghy was also stolen, a theft I came to believe was arranged by my one friend in port, a young Guatemalan named Santiago who was also my interpreter. When I alerted the port captain, a formal and evasive man in his sixties, he told me I could report my stolen engine officially or unofficially. Officially meant he'd have six agencies come strip-search me. Unofficially meant he'd do nothing, even though I could tell him who'd stolen the engine and where it was being kept.
As a week turned into a month, I started paying protection money to Gordo, a Buddha-like crime boss, but even then I was threatened by his own toughs, who beat a prostitute nearly to death right in front of me. I was harassed constantly by a Nicaraguan guy who had an imagined rivalry with me over a waitress at the port's only restaurant, a misunderstanding based on one nervous smile. Almost every day at dawn, a Mexican navy captain came aboard to search my boat and give me advice on how to do my hair, which was already so short it was almost military. One morning, his men bound my hands and beat me as he looked for drugs.
Ultimately I spent four months in Puerto Madero, out of options and out of money. I was referred to locally as “the ATM machine,” bleeding cash, on the edge of ruin. Even when I'd take a taxi from Tapachula, the larger city 15 miles inland, the drivers knew who I was and every detail of my story. They knew the mechanic and his men. They knew what I paid Gordo. They knew who had my outboard. They knew I had tried to escape once, putt-putting away at one knot on a broken diesel engine belching black grime into the water, and that pirates in pangas had rammed my boat and threatened to board it for drugs. They knew I had sailed straight to sea that night like a coward with my lights off, then limped back into port to go through it all again.In other words, I became familiar with Puerto Madero. By the time I finally left, I was enraged and terrified. Ten years later, when I heard about Long, I knew I had to go back, as much to resolve my own story as to find answers to his.
John Long was three months into the biggest adventure of his life. He'd loved boats and the sea since his childhood, on the coast of Ireland, and now he was on his way home, planning to finish his voyage at the oldest sailing club in the world, the , in Crosshaven, a few miles upriver from his native Myrtleville. “If you sail into Crosshaven, you'll die a happy man for having made it,” his brother, Michael, told him when he left San Francisco. “And if you die along the way, you'll die a happy man for having tried.”
Long and his wife, Julia, had come to America in 1965 on their honeymoon. They didn't intend to stay, but Long saw that he could make good money as a carpenter, so they decided to stick around long enough to earn the cash to buy a Volkswagen van back in Ireland.The momentum of a life is something few of us can control, however. The Longs ended up raising their three sons Aaron, Philip, and Jason in California, and John never missed a single day of work. His was a good life, a rich life, but in his retirement, the dream of this yacht, Cúlin, and the dream of this voyage took over.
“It became an obsession, almost an obligation,” says his youngest son, Jason, a 35-year-old English professor in Merced, California. In 1992, Long bought a bare hull made of Cor-Ten steel and used his skills as a master carpenter to finish out the interior in teak and other hardwoods. He and Julia were separating, though the family would still spend holidays together, and Cúlin was a labor of love after all those years of steaming and bending, carving and fitting.
Then there were his half-dozen attempts to make the voyage. Long was delayed over the years by family events, such as the birth of a granddaughter, but also by having to turn back many times. Though he'd served in the merchant marine as a young man, sailing around the world delivering bananas and coffee, he didn't know navigation or his boat's equipment very well. On his first attempt, he sailed north instead of south after he left San Francisco Bay. The next trip was the same; he ended up near Tomales Bay, more than 40 miles up the coast. The next time Long tried, he found himself out in the Farallon Islands, almost due west.
Each time, he'd say he was done. “I'm sick, I'm tired, my hand is hurt,” he said after the Farallones. “I'm done with this. This is it.”
Then, the next day, there would be another voice mail, saying he knew now what had gone wrong and how to fix it. “I think I can do this.”
When Long left on his final voyage, on October 14, 2007, there was no party. No one sawhim off. Sailors at the dock had ridiculed him for years, and his family had lost faith. For the early attempts, they gave going-away parties. After a while, though, they stopped believing he would ever really go more than a few miles outside the Golden Gate. Jason hoped he might just sell the Cúlin and get a condo and season tickets to the Oakland A's. “We felt OK,” he told me, “because we thought he would never go.”
But this voyage had become, to some extent, a grudge match against the naysayers. This time, Long had taken classes. He knew navigation and his equipment, and he surprised everyone by making it down to Santa Barbara to visit his oldest son, Aaron, a business student. He was on his way. He was anxious to continue on, sailing for Mazatlán within a week.
“I've got my sea legs back,” he said. “I'm feeling good. I'm going.”
I never thought I'd set foot in Puerto Madero again, and arriving back in town is disorienting. The small port area, where I was stranded, has been renamed Puerto Chiapas, and the government has put in a cruise-ship dock, which Holland America is using for its Panama Canal trips. On the surface, Puerto Chiapas is an innocent place of coffee and fruit and friendly people, with a tremendous fake pyramidal marketplace and a pool. But the pangas are still here, and the fishermen, and I suspect things haven't changed all that much.
I've got a letter from Jason Long giving me full authority to try to salvage or sell the Cúlin. Armed with this, I take a taxi to the harbor, to the small port captain's compound, and go inside. The old port captain has passed away, the secretary tells me. The new one, Captain Andres Ordaz, a good-looking man in his forties, is a bit slicker but seemingly up to the same games. He claims Long was sailing north from Central America, had never been in Mexico (he says he confirmed this with officials in Manzanillo and Mazatlán), and was cooking some fish on deck when he tripped overboard. He even claims that parts of the dinner were found.
My sailboat was large and broken, tied to the one crumbled chunk of concrete on the shoreline, visited by rats, snakes, begging children, prostitutes, the police, the navy, drunken fishermen, and the crooked port captain's men.
I have only a few facts, provided by the Longs before I left: a photo of the Cúlin taken a few days after it hit the beach, showing all three sails up; the U.S. Coast Guard's report of when and where the EPIRB went off; directions to the spot where the Cúlin is beached; and a summary of the autopsy report provided to the Longs by the U.S. consulate in Mexico City.
Trying to match these facts with the port captain's account creates a fairly preposterous scene: It's 1 a.m. and Long is on deck, with his three sails up. The jib is back-winded, though, held out on the wrong side, which stops the boat dead in its tracks, like a giant air brake. Yet somehow the Cúlin has been able to defy the laws of physics, sailing hundreds or even thousands of miles north from Panama or Costa Rica or wherever Long teleported to after he left California. To celebrate this miracle, he is fixing a lovely fish dinner in the middle of the night, naked, but suddenly trips overboard, managing to hit his head so hard that his brain hemorrhages. Midair, the abrasions on his left cheek, described in the autopsy, have time to quickly scab. He breaks his neck and ribs and instantly stops breathing, so that when he hits the water none of it gets into his lungs.
I'm guessing the port captain's fable is a fair preview of what I'll find as I try to follow the local investigation, if there is one. So I decide to go directly to the boat.
The last few miles to La Cigüeña are down a narrow dirt road through low plantain trees, unspoiled and remote but also a little spooky, given what happened to Long. The village is beautiful, though, when it appears, a collection of bamboo-and-wood huts stretched along the slow Río Cahoacán. No garish paint, no abundance of concrete. The few attempts at that were wiped out in 2005 by Hurricane Stan. There are goats and pigs and dogs in the road, and when I get out of the car everyone stares. The first man to offer help is a drunken fisherman in a yellow shirt. His name is Israel, his eyes are marbled, and he's full of claims. He'll take me to the boat.
“Hay un problema?” he keeps asking. Do we have a problem? And then he answers himself in English, “No problem, my friend.”
We walk through the village to where the river turns north and divides the jungle from a long beach and the sea. Israel's two sons have a small wooden canoe they've built by hand. It's narrow and tippy, with yellowish bilge water and a blue crab huddled inside the bow. I board and squat low. The Cahoacán is known for its crocodiles, but one of the boys walks beside the boat in waist-deep water, pulling the bow.
It's late afternoon, the air warm and humid but not hot, not stifling. There's a light breeze coming from the ocean, and a few fishermen throw hand-nets into the water. Small, thin fish skip across the surface to escape us. There are trees overhanging to our right, driftwood like sculpture on the beach to our left. It's lovely here, like parts of Puerto Madero ten years ago, and it doesn't feel dangerous at all. We land on the beach side and walk 100 yards across sand to the Pacific, where slow rollers are coming in.
After a few minutes, I see the Cúlin ahead. The boat is only a hull, more than half buried, lying on its side. A group of men are standing on her cabin, bent over, perhaps removing something. They're several hundred yards away, and they remind me where I am, what this place is capable of. As we come closer, they see us and immediately leave, walking away fast. I can't tell whether they're carrying things or not.
Up close, the boat is heartbreaking. Waves washing over it, everything stripped and carted away. I had wanted to help Long's family salvage something, but there's nothing left.
From Acapulco south to the Guatemala border lie hundreds of miles of yellow-sand beaches, from the surf towns of Puerto Escondido and Puerto Ángel to the undeveloped coast of Chiapas, where you might see a few palm-frond-roofed palapas and then another 100 miles of nothing. Conventional sailing wisdom advises keeping close to land here as you pass through the enormous Gulf of Tehuantepec: They say the “Tehuantepeckers,” 60-knot winds that scream across the narrow, flat spit of land separating the Gulf of Mexico from the Pacific, can blow you 300 miles to sea. This is myth, in my experience, but the sailing world is full of myths, and this one puts every yacht in close to shore, where it becomes a target= for pirates.
The pirates of southern Mexico don't quite merit the name. Those off the coast of Somalia have .50-caliber machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. They operate out of a country that hasn't had a stable government in more than a decade, so they are in fact much like the 17th- and 18th-century pirates of the Caribbean, powerful enough to capture entire ports and operate out of them untouched. The pirates of most of the world, though, and certainly the Central American coast, would never think of themselves as pirates per se; they are merely opportunists, poor fishermen and petty thieves. A passing yacht can be worth a hundred times what a Mexican fisherman will make in his lifetime when I was here ten years ago, the average wage was $25 a month.
Add in the fact that this coast sits right on an active smuggling route. Acapulco lies between the Colombian port of Buenaventura and California, and with crackdowns in the Caribbean, smugglers have moved out into the Pacific, its vastness hiding merchant ships towing submarines full of cocaine, cigarette boats running fast and invisible to radar in the dark, semisubmersibles riding low, only their periscopes sticking up. In October 2007, Mexican law enforcement seized 23.6 metric tons of cocaine from a ship docked in Manzanillo, a record seizure on land or at sea. It was just outside Manzanillo that Long had his first brush with pirates. He'd made it all the way down the 1,100-mile coast of Baja California and stopped for a few repairs in Mazatlán. But just north of Manzanillo, at sea, at night, his electrical system died. His alternator was out. He also had a recurring mechanical problem: The prop shaft would slip back and jam against the rudder and make him go in circles.
It was just outside Manzanillo that Long had his first brush with pirates. He'd made it all the way down the 1,100-mile coast of Baja California and stopped for a few repairs in Mazatlán. But just north of Manzanillo, at sea, at night, his electrical system died.
Long set off his EPIRB, which alerts rescue agencies by satellite. This is a serious piece of equipment, an international cry for help that should not be set off unless the boat is sinking or there's some other life-threatening emergency. Problems with an electrical system don't usually qualify. But Jason says his father was worried that without power, he wouldn't have lights or radar and was in danger of collision.
The Mexican coast guard came out immediately. They'd been watching Long, because sitting there in one place with his lights off, he looked as if he were on a drug rendezvous. The officers boarded with machine guns and made him leave his boat. Then they sped away, leaving the Cúlin drifting, and stopped and waited. Pirates were tracking the boat, apparently. “It was kind of left as bait for a while,” Aaron says. The coast guard watched on radar, but the pirates had radar too, and they could see the coast guard waiting, so they turned back. The officials returned Long to his boat and gave him a free tow into Manzanillo, and there he began an ordeal of repairs and scams and paperwork that lasted more than a month.
When Long finally left Manzanillo, in January, he planned to sail straight to Panama. He continued to have mechanical and electrical problems, though, so Aaron thinks he may have been looking for a port to pull into for repairs. He was hugging the shore, sailing no more than a few miles out, avoiding the Tehuantepeckers. This put him right in the drug route, not only for big loads to Acapulco but also for local traffic making quick trips over the Guatemala border. He presented an opportunity to everyone.
The ironic thing is that Long had built the Cúlin specifically to withstand pirate attacks. He'd placed his helm inside and could lock himself behind a massive sliding steel door and windows of thick bulletproof glass. All his lines to control the sails ran inside as well. I've never seen or heard of another sailboat quite like this. Most sailors just hope they won't run into pirates, but Long was prepared.
The truth may be elusive in other places, but here in Puerto Madero and La Cigüeña, I believe it never actually exists. Even as events occur, they immediately become something else. An outsider can never know anything for certain, and this is partly because we are mythological creatures, born of conquistadors and sitting on our mountain of gold in El Norte. We aren't believable ourselves, even our existence, so we're told stories, and every story is about one thing: money. It made perfect sense for everyone to try to take my boat. And it makes perfect sense now that Long's story should be