" ... and the top thing was getting the right wife at the right time." only reflected their lives which many envy. Indeed, with Irving 's proposal came ten transatlantic voyages, seven circumnavigations of the world, once around the Cape of Good Hope and trips as far as Sudan and up the Nile, and cross-continent exp lorations, as well as wartime duty at Pearl Harbor monitoring Tokyo Rose broadcasts for the OSS. That perhaps was the only time she worried for her Captain out there on those dangerous secret Pacific missions. As for the Yankee voyages, each an epic, suffice it to let the seventh and final 40,000-mile 'round-the-worlder speak for all. A year and one-half long, its itinerary might defeat a travel agent's computer today. Departing Gloucester's Rocky Point on 5November1956-where every Yankee voyage began and ended-it included stops at Bermuda (to pick up three women disallowed by US law to sail as paying passengers from a US port), Haiti , through the Panama Canal to the Galapagos, thence to Pitcairn 's Island (historic refuge of the Bounty's mutineers), the Marquesas, Tahiti, across the South Seas to Siam, Singapore, Bali, West Africa, Capetown, West Indies, and then back to Bermuda and Gloucester by 1 May 1958. And except for one voyage when he was ten minutes late, it was Captain Johnson's custom to return 18 months to the minute from his time of departure. There's hardly an islet or cove in the Pacific and Southern Atlantic that the Johnsons ' schooner and their later brigantine Yankee failed to visit in 25 years of roving. In fact, the Captain may be the last true explorer, in the tradition of Captain Cook, to have actually di scovered five unknown islands, one of them uninhabited, north of New G uinea. It was 1934, his first voyage. They were du ly named Yankee, Arthur Cook, Robert and Search Island-"that one was after Exy's father's name. " And of course he found one for Exy. "They were all small islands, and Exy was not very big, but wow," the old mariner chuckled. "So we named the smallest one for her. " Exy can speak of the exotic with ease. This daring and devoted lady had seen her son, Arthur, at the age of ten months become the youngest known toddler to sail around the world on the deck of a schooner. She knows the recipes of the West Indies, Panama, Pitcairn Island, the Solomons, the Hebrides ,
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Madang, New Guinea, many strange places. She can tell of learning to ram a boat into a coconut tree and then dodging its falling fruit; of climbing volcanoes; of singing at native si ngsongs where a hundred pigs were ki lled with less upheaval than ki lling one on a New England farm; of stepping on a floating river island and hearing snakes slither away at each step; of watching elephants log teakwood; of living with rajahs in Bali, "where we had the best time we ever had. " And she was among the first whites to witness the long forgotten land-diving on Pentecost Island, watching 28 native men plunging headlong for six hours from man made 100-foot towers with vines tied to their ankles to break the fall just inches from the earth. Indeed , she recalls that some needed to have their heads pulled from the soft earth, and those who chickened out were beaten with nettles. The episodes are endless. There was Captain Johnson, a Navy Reserve lieutenant commander ("I had no idea who to salute") in command of the hydrographic vessel USS Sumner all during the war, "turning out charts ' til they came out their ears"- fifty of them from Bora Bora to the Philippines to Iwo Jima. And, there he was at bloody Iwo Jima, again ahead of the landing fleet, towing a pair of dead ships across the expected Japanese line of fire, and at famed Iron Bottom Sound, named for the hundreds of American and Japanese ships sunk there between Guadalcanal and Florida Island. Daily, he and his crew dove to the bottom to jimmy compartments, files and cabinets to recover secret codes, charts and documents, sorely needed by intelligence, from sunken enemy vessels. But war, for all his heroi sm, would not be foremost among hi s memorabilia. Instead in the barn next to that house with the barkentine silhouette on the porch is the collected lore of Irving and Exy Johnson, South Seas Explorers-native canoes, masks, paddles, spears and the like. It is a first-ra te Pacific Island Museum. So the Captain and Electa have come back bringing their story with them, to where it all began-still indomitable, ready to respond to the call "Turn out the watch! " .i,
Mr. Coughlin, veteran reporter for the Boston Globe, is a lifelong aficionado of things maritime.
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