And that was the way it was for a good number of months. Willie Singer was on the case in Australia, and we all had our fingers crossed that he was going to get lucky and come through with the lens if Cleopatra didn’t find another one first.
I spent my time between the solitude of Cayo Loco and the deck of the Lucretia. On the island, I watched the pieces of our giant puzzle start to take shape as first the light keeper’s quarters, then the dock, and then the marine railway were rebuilt. Finally, the tower itself began to resemble its original stature.
Cleopatra came and went from Cayo Loco as she continued her search with no results. She never got discouraged. We always knew that the light would one day come our way. She reminded me countless times of others who had faced what seemed to be overwhelming odds. She told me stories of treasure hunters she had known. They had a blind resolve that I couldn’t fathom at the time. It didn’t matter whether they dug two days or twenty years for a ship they hoped they would find. We never doubted that Cleopatra would succeed. We just kept on working.
Then one morning, it hit me. I looked up at the lighthouse and realized that we were almost done. The thought rekindled a memory that brought the whole thing into perspective. I was aboard the Lucretia, halfway up the Amazon River at an outpost called Macapá, where the equator crossed the river. Just out of town on a bluff above the road, there was a monument that marked the equator—a piece of granite with the words MARCO DE CERO etched across its face. I stood next to the monument while Cleopatra snapped my picture. It was my birthday.
They call photos still shots, but Cleopatra reminded me I wasn’t still at all. She pointed out that in fact we were both doing at least a thousand miles an hour as the earth rotated on its axis.
As we drove back to Macapá to board the boat, she looked out the window at the green blur of jungle and said, “I think the reason the years seem to fly by is because they really do.”
It had been months since we had gotten Willie Singer’s letter telling us of the news about the lens in Australia. I had taught Cleopatra how to use a satellite phone, and she strapped it to her waist wherever she went. She never tried to call Australia; she just waited for the news to come to her.
In the meantime, we now sailed to Havana, where Cleopatra took me for a shave and a haircut. Our destination was a barbershop in the middle of Old Havana, near the Plaza de Armas on Avenida Obispo. Cleopatra said it was the oldest one in the New World, and the condition of the building seemed to confirm that. I have to admit I was a little nervous, lying in a chair with a towel over my eyes while a communist barber with rum on his breath held a straight razor blade to my neck.
Cleopatra sat and chatted with the idle barbers and shared a glass of rum. Then she dropped the bombshell that she had actually been born in the chair in which I was now lying with a hot towel on my face.
“Look up,” she said.
I opened my eyes to see a faded mural that I had failed to notice earlier on the wall of the shop. It was a painting of pyramids and ancient boats carrying what appeared to be Egyptian royalty.
“I guess I better start at the beginning,” she said. It was then that she told me the story of the Lucretia, her family, and her birth in the barbershop.
Like Cleopatra, the Lucretia wore her age well. The ship had been built originally as a pilot schooner in the Netherlands in 1887, and she was christened the Neptunia by her builder and owner. She ran the trade routes from Europe to the Cape Verde Islands, and later she was put into service moving illegal immigrants from Africa to the rubber plantations up the Amazon River near Manaus. Eventually the Neptunia settled into a routine of hauling bananas from Martinique to San Juan and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
While the Neptunia plied her predictable routes between the islands, not far away, the world stage was about to be graced with a new historical eruption. In the spring of 1895, Captain Anderson Meador stepped onto the embarcadero in Havana. He was there to assume the job of naval attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Havana. He had brought his young wife with him. It was a hot time in Havana. Just two months later, the revolutionary leader José Martí was killed in his first battle at Dos Ríos. His death ignited the revolutionary cause, and a year later, there was fighting in the streets of Havana, which gave the U.S. government the excuse to send in the battleship USS Maine to protect American citizens there.
On the evening of February 15, 1898, Captain Meador kissed his eight-months-pregnant wife good-bye and headed off to dinner with the commander of the USS Maine, which sat at anchor in Havana Harbor.
As fate would have it, that evening, the Neptunia was berthed near the embarcadero no more than half a mile away from the battleship. While the whole city danced through the streets in celebration of Mardi Gras, revolutionaries in the hold of the Neptunia were secretly off-loading crates of weapons that had been smuggled from France.
In the early-morning hours, the USS Maine was rocked by a horrific explosion and sank in Havana Harbor. Hearing that the Maine had exploded, Lucretia Cannon Meador immediately rushed out of the house and into the embassy carriage in an attempt to find her husband. The trip was cut short, for the shock of the explosion sent her into labor.
Between the Mardi Gras crowd and the panic of the explosion, the streets were packed. There was no possibility of getting her to a hospital. The driver carried Lucretia into the barbershop on Avenida Obispo, where the owner of the shop delivered the baby. Amid the chaos, when the little girl was handed to her mother in the barber chair, they asked what her name was to be. Lucretia looked up at the Egyptian mural on the wall of the shop. “Cleopatra,” Lucretia answered. “Call her Cleopatra. She already looks like she is in charge.”
When Lucretia and her baby daughter were loaded back into the carriage, the owner of the shop gave the driver a wooden chest the size of a beer case. It was decorated with carved scenes of palm trees, shells, and fishing boats. He said it was a toy box for the baby.
Cleopatra had come into the world the day her father, Captain Anderson Meador, died. Sometime around dawn, Spanish authorities seized the Neptunia as she tried to make her way out of the harbor on the morning tide. The boat and the baby would meet again.
After the tragedy, Lucretia Cannon Meador shocked her family back in Annapolis by not fleeing Havana at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Instead she boarded a ferryboat for Key West. Lucretia had fallen in love with the tropics and saw no reason to return to the chilly shores of Chesapeake Bay. Her plan was to wait out the war in Key West.
Lucretia attended the dedication of the memorial to the men of the Maine in Key West Cemetery and was informed by the Navy that she was entitled to housing on the Navy base. She gracefully declined. Instead, she found a small conch house off Fleming Street on a little alley called Nassau Lane. It was here she would begin the task, like many Navy widows before her, of raising her infant daughter—and hopefully finding a new husband.
Meanwhile, a local sailor and cavalry officer named Patrick Highbourne had left his family shipping business in Key West at the outbreak of hostilities and had charged up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt. His actions in the battle had earned him the Silver Star for bravery. When Patrick returned home, he was honored with a parade on Duval Street, where admirers threw confetti from the windows and blew conch-shell salutes to their native son.
Patrick Highbourne humbly accepted the gratitude, but his attention was suddenly diverted to the beautiful young widow who was introduced to him by the commanding officer of the Key West naval station. By the end of the ball, the embers of mutual attraction had already turned to hot sparks. The next morning, Captain Patrick Highbourne called on Mrs. Meador, where he met Cleopatra for the first time. They took advantage of the picture-perfect day and sailed out to the Marquesas Keys, where they picnicked under the palms. Tiny Cleopatra chased minnows and made a sailboat out of coconut husks and palm branches.
It wasn’t long after that first meeting that Cleopatra’s life changed forever. The new
century had brought a new father.
The Highbournes of Key West were descended from a clan of loyalists who had wanted no part of the American Revolution, and after the British defeat at Yorktown, they had decided to get out of Dodge. In the late summer of 1783, they had sailed for the island of Abaco in the Bahamas.
Life in the islands was directly connected to the elements, and times of prosperity and despair rose and fell like the ever-present tides. In 1821, a late-season hurricane roared up through the lower latitudes and swept across Abaco. As it approached, young Augustus Highbourne, a boat builder, made preparations. He had moved his small schooner, the Queen Conch, up into the protection of a deep tidal creek surrounded by mangroves. Then he emptied the cistern below his house and climbed down into the cool dark pit with a lantern, food, and water to ride out the storm.
After hours of screeching winds and driving rain, he was suddenly staring up into a blue sky. Not to be deceived, Augustus assumed it was only the eye of the storm. But what finally filtered through his weather-beaten brain was this: he was suddenly seeing the sky above because the house he had built upon the rock foundation of the cistern was no longer there.
When he came out and looked around, he saw his house sitting perfectly intact, but it was a hundred feet away from where he had built it.
Augustus took this as a sign from heaven. Several days later, he hoisted his house onto the deck of the Queen Conch, said good-bye to friends and family, and set a course for Key West.
Augustus had decided it was time to change latitudes. Like his ancestors before him, he went chasing the dream of a better, safer life. But for Augustus, the dream came true. Key West had risen from the mysterious beginnings of an Indian village covered with so many skeletons that it had been named Cayo Hueso (Bone Key) by the Spanish. Seven miles offshore along the edge of the Gulf Stream lay one of the most treacherous reef systems in the world, which since the days of Columbus and the conquistadores had laid claim to hundreds of ships, mixing the bones of sailors and passengers with those of the original Indians.
No sooner had Augustus Highbourne dropped his house onto the island than a ship hit the reef, and he raced ahead of the other boats in the speedy Queen Conch and laid claim to the first of many a wreck. He immediately used his shipbuilding talents and went right to work designing faster boats that would beat out the competition. But he was also building freight-carrying schooners that connected Key West to Havana.
The Highbourne shipyard blossomed, and a cargo company was added, moving people and provisions from their home base at Key West to Havana and the islands to the south.
Augustus passed on at the age of seventy-six, and he left a legacy and a fortune to his eleven children. It was his youngest son, Patrick, who would eventually wind up running the family shipping business with the style and flair of his father.
Patrick had protected and enlarged the family business and answered the call of his country, and now, in the spring of 1900, he had a family. That required a home.
It didn’t take Lucretia long to find what she wanted. By the first Christmas of the new century, the Highbournes celebrated the holidays in their new house at the end of Spoonbill Lane, one of the highest pieces of land on the island—six feet above sea level. They named it Highbourne Hill.
Though the house and the tropical garden that surrounded it were meant to be an anchor for the family, Cleopatra, like her stepfather, was in love with the sea. It was soon discovered that Lucretia was unable to bear any more children, so Cleopatra became the center of attention and the pride and joy of her parents. Though her mother attempted every possible enticement to stay ashore at Highbourne Hill, Cleopatra saw the house as the place where she ate and slept when she wasn’t on the Queen Conch.
By the time she was five, Cleopatra was traveling—whenever allowed—with her stepfather on his schooner, picking up the knowledge that would serve her well for nearly a century. She learned Spanish from the housekeepers at Highbourne Hill and French patois from the stevedores on the docks of distant ports such as Fort-de-France and Port of Spain. Patrick Highbourne taught his daughter to bait a hook, plot a course, read a map, and steer by the stars—to the chagrin of her mother, who constantly battled to keep Cleopatra ashore and interested in school and the social world of Key West.
Cleopatra’s life changed course radically in the summer of her seventeenth year, when her mother became ill. Despite Patrick’s heroic attempts to find a cure, Lucretia Cannon Meador Highbourne succumbed to the rigors of tuberculosis. She was laid to rest in the Key West Cemetery in the family plot adjacent to the Maine memorial.
Patrick Highbourne kept his word to his dying wife despite his daughter’s cries of opposition, and Cleopatra was forced to go to boarding school in France. As her luck would have it, she returned to Key West only six months later, fleeing the conflict in Europe that led to World War I.
Cleopatra took up her old life where she had left it, and she went back to sea. For several years, she worked as first mate to her father on the Queen Conch. It was an odd sight in the ports of the Caribbean to see a beautiful young girl handling the duties of running a ship, but Cleopatra Highbourne quickly gained the respect of the sailors who reported to her.
The morning of Cleopatra’s eighteenth birthday, the Queen Conch rested gently at anchor in the little harbor of Les Trois-Îlets across the bay from Fort-de-France. When Cleopatra leaped out of the bunk in her tiny cabin and went topside to have her coffee, she was greeted by the sight of her father sitting on the rail of a beautiful old schooner moored next to them. Cleopatra stared in amazement at the lovely ship, which smelled of fresh varnish, paint, and pine. She jumped from the deck of the Queen Conch and strode across the small finger pier to where her father sat.
“She was called Neptunia, but I haven’t nailed her name boards on,” Cleopatra’s father said. “That’s the job of the captain. It is an old tradition that when a boat changes hands, the captain can keep the original name or change it. Happy birthday.”
Then he told her the story of how the Neptunia had been in Havana Harbor on the night of her birth. “What do you want to call her?” her father asked.
Tears streamed down Cleopatra’s face as she ran into her father’s arms. “Lucretia, Daddy. I want to name her for Mama.”
The next morning, they were saluted by a cannon as both the Lucretia and the Queen Conch sailed out of Fort-de-France, racing to America, fifteen hundred miles to the north. They made the run in an astonishing eight days, and when they sighted the Cape Florida lighthouse at the south end of Key Biscayne, only thirty seconds separated them at the finish line.
“I won, but I am sure Daddy let me. And that’s the story of how I got the boat,” Cleopatra told me. “After that, the years just seemed to roll by like so many waves and so many storms. Somewhere along the line, I realized that I had forgotten to settle down, marry, and have a family—but by then it was too late. Besides, I was married to the sea. Though I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I had stayed ashore in Key West, that was not my destiny, and I wouldn’t trade my experiences for the world. I may be an old woman, but I still feel like a young girl on a long voyage.”
There was silence in the barbershop; then the wet towel was unwrapped from my face, and the chair was suddenly cranked to a sitting position. A cloud of white powder enshrouded my head as the barber brushed me off with a broom.
Cleopatra was standing next to me, smiling. “Mind if I take a ride in that chair now that you are finished?”
“Of course,” I answered and helped her up.
She sat there and stared at the faded mural for a few moments. “It is fading with time, just like me.”
She looked around the shop one more time and then back at the painting. “I’m just glad it wasn’t Helen of Troy on that wall. I couldn’t think of being named Helen. Now let’s go do the town, Tully.”
At sunset, we had mojitos and tapas at the bar at the Angleterre Hotel, then headed
out to the ballpark and the real reason we had come—the ultimate battle without bullets in postrevolutionary Cuba.
El Cohete, the man Cleopatra lived to see pitch, was taking the mound for the Havana Industriales. The opponents were not Columbus and the Spanish conquistadores like in my dream, but the much-hated Santiago de Cuba. Millions of Yankee dollars called El Cohete from the other side of the Gulf Stream, hoping he would defect and play what the Cuban press called pelota esclava (slave baseball). But El Cohete stayed home. Thousands of newspaper articles had been written about his decision, but nobody in the press really knew why he stayed in Cuba.
“He doesn’t need to go” is all Cleopatra said about it when I asked her. We inched along through the throng of fans pouring into the stadium. “Besides, El Cohete can’t swim.”
The game was a classic battle. Sixty thousand fans were in the stands two hours before the first pitch was thrown. The screaming, air horns, drums, and timbals never stopped. In fact, they only got louder; El Cohete had his magic working.
After each strikeout, the crowd would collectively count all of them off. That night, they were hoarse by the end of the game as El Cohete fanned sixteen batters and shut out Santiago.
The Industriales were up two games to none, and the series would now go to Santiago. As much as Cleopatra wanted to follow the team, the overland trip by car or train was too much for her. We were heading back to Cayo Loco.
After the game, Cleopatra and I caught up with El Cohete. He invited us to an open-air block party not far from the stadium, where he hung out in the neighborhood. Nobody asked for an autograph, and there were no agents, managers, lawyers, sponsors, or groupies screaming behind police barricades. El Cohete visited with people on their porch stoops and in their cocina, and then he and Cleopatra sat and talked family together. When the streets emptied and the party was put to bed, he walked with us in his uniform, and his cleats hung over the high handlebars of his bicycle.