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West of Wisdom: A Tale of Lust and Love in the South Pacific

by Edwin P. Cutler

220 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #05-0984; ISBN 1-4120-6083-4; US$19.95, C$22.94, EUR16.39, £11.47

Ghosts of greed and passions past threaten when a sailor saves a young woman from pirates and they flee through the South Pacific searching for the treasure promised in the riddle West of Wisdom.

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About the Book      About the Author      Excerpts      Catalogue Information

About the Book

    Many years ago Blake Bernard married Ethyl, the daughter of a missionary couple, on a South Pacific island. On their honeymoon cruise they were captured by pirates and the pirate captain attempted to ravish the bride. In the fight, Blake was shot and the pirate's boat caught fire and sank. Ethyl and the pirate escaped, but his treasure chest was lost. Ethyl was a grandmother when she received a mysterious riddle, West of Wisdom, found in a floating bottle.
    Astarte, her granddaughter, takes an inter-island freighter to find the island where her grandmother was married. When she recites the riddle to the ship's captain, who happens to be the same now much older pirate, he decides she knows the whereabouts of his long lost treasure. She is kidnaped bound and gagged and stuffed in a sail bag.
    The story starts when a man with a glass eye puts the sack on the deck of Timothy Tyler's sailboat and threatens to take over. Tim refuses to let the man come aboard and sails out into the boundless South Pacific Ocean. When the bag falls into the sea, he looks back and sees a small white hand reaching from the sinking sack.
    And then...

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About the Author

Edwin Paul Cutler grew up with a dream to sail out of sight of land and steer by the stars. After a career as a mathematician, he went sailing with his wife, Wendy, on Romarin, a wooden boat built in 1938. They spent 10 years sailing in the Caribbean Islands and several years in Bermuda teaching college math and computers.

They made ocean passages navigating with a sextant. When their wooden mast broke, they scarfed in a splice and sailed away. They rode out hurricanes in the Caribbean Islands and repaired broken thru-hull fittings at sea.

They traveled to French Polynesia to study the islands in the story. On the Aranui, similar to the Wanderlust, they traveled to all of the Marquesas, several of the Tuamotus, and on to Tahiti. They flew over Huahine and Raiatea, spent a week on Bora Bora, and took the ferry from Tahiti to Moorea to stay in a grass hut.

The islands of the South Pacific were studied in Seven Seas Cruising Association newsletters, Alan Villiers, "Captain John Cook", 1967, Sven Wahlroos, "Mutiny and Romance in the South Seas", and Commander Victor Clark, "On the Wind of a Dream", 1960 and in various chart books.

Edwin has published numerous poems and several short stories in nautical publications, including sailing adventures and experiences in Cruising World. Some are available on "epic99.tripod.com". For NASA he published scientific papers on pulsars and artificial intelligence.

Another adventure-mystery-romance novel, Caribbean Kiss, is ready for publication.

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Excerpts

CHAPTER 1

    The Cithara's anchor shattered the mirrored surface of Anaho Bay, and Tim Tyler lifted his eyes to the mountains that had guided him in from the sea. A gentle breeze pressed the sails and his tired boat backed away to set her hook in the sandy bottom.
    Legends of piracy, salacious whale boat crews, and beautiful native vahines teased Tim's mind as shadows filled the valleys of Nuku Hiva, the Marquesa Island where Herman Melville lived with the cannibals long ago. He watched the shoreline become a work of art in deepening shades of gray but tensed when a shadow separated itself from shore and slowly came his way.
    "Who?" he wondered as the shadow came closer.
    While he watched,the tropic jungle exhaled a pleasant breath, laced with the sweet scent of hibiscus and frangipani, its whispers lazily slatted the Cithara's sails. After a thirty day passage from San Francisco to Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, he wanted company, yes, but the welcoming committee came a darkness, looming larger with each subdued stroke of muffled oar. In the tropic twilight, terror walked its chilling fingers up his spine.
    When no friendly hail came from the growing menace, Tim crouched low to minimize his silhouette and moved back from the bow. In the cockpit, he wished he had a weapon, but felt foolish for his fears when the skiff came alongside manned by a single sailor.
    The solitary figure lifted his seabag to the toerail and demanded, "Lend a hand, lad!"
    When Tim did not move, the demand became a threat. "Damn it man, take my bag aboard, or wait for me in hell."
    At this, Tim grabbed the sack and pulled while the man pushed until they managed the bag safely onto the Cithara's wooden deck. The man cursed again and growled, "Who are you and where's my bloody crew?"
    Tim's fears returned, for never had subdued sounds from one man's mouth seemed so vile, and when a nickel plated pistol sparkled in the starlight, the hair at the nape of his neck stood in hackles.
    Looking down at the man the tropic shadows had produced, Tim saw that he was middle aged, and aging, yet seemed quick and spry. His wizened face had the leathered look of men who spend their lives at sea. From the shadows of his coal black beard and bushy eyebrows, a glass eye stared up, returning the light from every star that glittered in the sky above. Out the hollow of that incandescent sphere, the dull red fire of hell burned bright, his aspect was more of monster than of man.
    "I'll take command now," the shadow bellowed and, waving the gun toward the bow, demanded, "Get the anchor up, step to it, lad!"
    Tim's hand, resting on the cabin top, touched the gaff pole, and he thought how like a hockey stick it felt.
    "Stop!" He spoke his first word in this new land.
    To his amazement, Glasseye, his hands gripping the lifeline ready to haul himself aboard, stopped. Momentarily he seemed suspended then dropped back into the skiff and swung the gleaming gun.
    With the roar and flame of burning powder, Tim's rage exploded and using muscles tuned by weeks of rolling on a pitching ship at sea, he swung the pole and struck the man close behind his ear. The glass-eyed head popped like a melon, and the man, who had tried to murder him but missed, slumped a pile of lumpy arms and legs down into his little boat.
    Tim saw the smoking gun drop into the water and watched it lead a trail of bubbles to the starlit sand below. "If shifting sand hides the gun how can I ever prove self defense?"
    He saw his grandfather sitting on a piling back in Powell River, across the Straights of Georgia from Vancouver Island, and heard him say, "In some lands, you are guilty until proven innocent." He had said to run from trouble in a foreign land, and this South Pacific island was foreign land to Tim. With fumbling fingers he untied the painter and cast the fellow's dinghy off then ran to the Cithara's bow to raise the anchor and get away.
    Lugging the big hook up into the bow chock, he looked aft expecting Grandpa to ease the mizzen sail, which would let the ship fall off the wind so that she might retrace the course she made coming in. But he was alone and hurried back to trim the sails himself.
    The breeze that had greeted him with a song of the islands now became a dismal moan filled with the pain of tragedies these lands had suffered long ago. It slithered down the ancient mountainside and whispered across the water invading the peace he thought that he had found. What had been a pleasant song now shook his soul to its deepest core and he recalled the sorrow explorers had laid on the native populations by slaughter, whiskey, and disease.
    His sails filled with the jungle's breath, a breath laced with the bouquet of funeral flowers, and the Cithara, forty feet on deck and weighing twelve tons, gathered way. Looking back, Tim saw the little dinghy, now a spot of darkness at the far end of the Cithara's phosphorescent wake -- Glasseye's funeral pyre.
    But then, a new sound wedged its way into his world, and all fears of retribution for the death that he had wrought were lost in the threat of rumbling breakers on rocks that guard the entrance to the bay. The surf thundered where a rogue wave broke. Roiling and seething it tripped across the entrance rocks spreading white foam that glowed like snow beneath a sky now full of stars.
    A dark path in the swirling spindrift marked the passage he must take. Gripping the helm, he urged his boat to leap through death's door in search of open water. With vision clouded by swirling sea spray they cleared the maelstrom and, once again, the Cithara stepped her forefoot into the long swells of the boundless South Pacific Ocean. While trimming the sails, Tim heard again the horrid, hollow sound of Glasseye's cracking skull and saw him slump into his little boat, not much larger than a coffin.
    "I murdered him," he gasped and with the nausea that comes when one has taken someone's life, he sprawled across the cockpit coaming to vomit in the sea. Shuddering, hating the sensation, but unable to dispel the vision of the fire and brimstone glowing from the man's glass eye, he lurched his guts into a darkness that drew a curtain on this dreadful day.
    Sea creatures flashed their luminescent lights in protest as the Cithara roiled the waters in her rush to get away. In the glow he saw again the hollow eye and watched in wonder as the pirate's seabag rolled to the rail where it balanced, taunting him, then dropped into the water with a splash that rinsed his troubled face.
    He felt a sense of sweet relief; all trace of that cruel moment when a pirate tried to take his ship was sinking into the depths taking secrets he didn't wish to know.
    The Cithara lifted on a crest and he saw the sack settling in the sea. When his boat dropped into the following trough, the bag was lost from view.
    Casting his eyes ahead, Tim wondered where to go and what to do. When he felt his craft rise on yet another swell, he stole a last look into the Cithara's foaming wake.
    A small white hand was reaching from the sinking sack.

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Catalogue Information

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