The Reef at Rakahanga

In the dark of a windy evening last week a waterlogged raft drifted with the waves of the South Pacific, as it had for four months past. The deck was awash in 3 ft. of water; to the roof of the deckhouse there clung five sick and starving men, Eric de Bisschop and his four-man crew. Ahead of them lay the foam-edged sickle of the reef of Rakahanga in the northern Cook Islands. They had already missed landfalls at the Tuamotus, at Starbuck and Penrhyn Islands. There was no option but to shoot the reef at Rakahanga in the hope of reaching the calm lagoon and the fresh water and food that lay beyond it.

Cannibals & Curry. For 66-year-old Eric de Bisschop, skipper of the raft Tahiti Nui II, it was a familiar gamble. All his days he had given odds to death and won. Born near the French seaport of Calais, the son of a wealthy and aristocratic family, De Bisschop at 14 ran away from a Jesuit seminary, signed 'on as cabin boy on a sailing ship that beat its way around Cape Horn.

After World War I, during which he served as one of the first pilots in the French naval air force, De Bisschop chartered a merchant ship and set out again on 'his wanderings. When his vessel foundered in a storm off the Azores, he went to China, became chief of the security guards in the French concession at Hankow in the 19205. There he teamed up with another French adventurer, Jean Tatibouet. Together De Bisschop and Tatibouet built a Chinese junk and for two years cruised the Pacific and Indian Oceans. They lived eight months among Papuan cannibals, were briefly jailed as suspected spies in the Japanese-held Marshall Islands. It was only days after they put to sea again that they discovered the Japanese had punctured all their cans of food in a search for contraband. Heaving the rotting" food overboard, they lived for a month on a few fish and a soup made of axle grease, curry powder and water. When they finally staggered ashore at Molokai, their delirium and ravaged appearance sent the lepers of Father Damien's colony fleeing in terror.

Down the Garonne. As soon as they were out of the hospital, the two men built an outrigger canoe, sailed it from Honolulu to the French Riviera in 250 days. In France De Bisschop drifted down the Garonne River on a Polynesian raft and out into the Atlantic, where, off the Canary Islands, his unwieldy craft was rammed and sunk by a Spanish fishing boat.

For a while De Bisschop settled down to the quiet life as French consul in Honolulu. But Thor Heyerdahl's exploit in sailing Kon-Tiki from Peru to Tahiti set him off again. Determined to reverse Heyerdahl's course, De Bisschop pushed off from Tahiti on a similar raft, traveled 5,000 miles, only to have the raft break up under him in a tremendous gale 840 miles from the coast of Chile. Besides the adventure of it, De Bisschop hoped to prove that Polynesian seafarers had colonized all the Pacific from Indonesia to South America. Last April he left Peru aboard a new raft bound for Tahiti, but wind, wave and current carried him far north until last week he and his crew faced the reef at Rakahanga.

The raft came in on the long, swelling rollers, struck heavily on the razor-sharp coral, broke up in a jumble of logs and loose gear. The four others were flung free, but De Bisschop, trapped in the wreckage, was hammered again and again on the brutal reef. When the survivors struggled ashore and got help from the natives, it was too late: Eric de Bisschop, dead of his injuries, had gambled once too often.

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