Implausibly, the Campés' dream of a life at sea is coming true. Four months ago Joachim, 39, a German-born architect, sold his house in Bavaria and shipped out of La Rochelle, France with Marie, their four children and a tutor for a journey that will last until 1981 and stretch 10,000 miles. (In previous summers the Campés have sailed as far as Turkey.) Joachim is filming the voyage for German television, which, on the strength of an earlier documentary of his on volcanoes, is underwriting 11 50-minute segments. It will not be a travelogue, Joachim explains, "but a psychological study of how seven people can live closely together under stress over four years."
The voyage almost ended after a single night. The steel-hulled St. Michel was caught in a gale that splintered the boom, ripped apart a staysail and shut down the rudder motor. The Campés steered manually until they could put into the Azores to repair the damage.
Then 34-year-old Marie, a member of the Cartier jewelry family and a granddaughter of French poet-diplomat Paul Claudel, came down with her own mal de mer. "She was seasick and miserable," Joachim says. "She was convinced the trip was a mistake. She told me she wished she'd never come. She knew it was going to be hard, but not this hard."
Marie, Joachim and Dagmar, who left her job as principal of the school the Campé children attended, rotate exhausting three-hour watches. The women (Joachim stays out of the galley except to bake bread) prepare four meals a day—three hot, one cold—usually made from dried foods since there is no refrigeration. The dried meat and fruit, onions and lentils are also good nutrition. For foul weather, Joachim has designed interior steering and the boat can be sealed tight. Crossing the North Atlantic their greatest danger was icebergs, especially "growlings" too small to pick up on shipboard radar. Sylvester, the oldest, became expert at spotting them.
"When we arrived in Labrador," Joachim asserts, "Marie was convinced it was all worthwhile." She agrees: "We found what we'd been sailing for. We were in unison with nature and entirely self-sufficient. We fished and bathed in waterfalls. It was like being on another planet, in Eden before the apple. You cannot know the same sensation unless you are this far away from civilization and have gone through the extremes we have." The shipboard motto, from Macbeth, is "The worst enemy of human beings is their security."
The Campés appreciate the rugged life as only those born to wealth can. Though Marie is French (German is the shipboard language), she grew up in the affluent New York City suburb of Bedford. Her mother, Marion, is descended from Louis Cartier, who founded the jewelry firm in Paris in 1847. Marie's father, Pierre Claudel, ran Cartier's New York store until the firm was sold in 1962 and he moved to Paris to produce his father Paul's plays.
Marie was midway through her first year at the Université Catholique in Paris when she met Joachim, the son of a retired German stockbroker, on a ski lift in St. Moritz. "He didn't speak French, and I didn't speak German," Marie recalls. But they overcame the language barrier as well as the initial opposition of her parents. (During World War II Marie's father was captured at the Maginot Line and held in a German prison camp for seven months.) Joachim set up a successful business designing Plexiglas furniture in their home in Bavaria.
But Marie, a writer who is now working on a series about their trip for the French magazine L 'Express, was frustrated. "I was always having to divide myself between Joachim and the children," she explains. "The result was that Joachim usually had the advantage." As for Joachim, he felt "there was too much business and too little creativity."
Now, at sea, the family's creativity extends even to the children's education. Dagmar teaches math, Latin, literature and grammar daily, using flash cards when the sea is too rough for writing. In the Azores the children dissected a Portuguese man-of-war under the microscope, looking for its poison cells. In Labrador they explored the tundra, mailing rocks and leaves back to their former classmates in Bavaria.
After making port along the Eastern U.S. seaboard, the Campés will sail for the Caribbean, the Panama Canal and the Galapagos Islands. "I'm interested in people whose minds and lives are entirely different from ours," Joachim explains. "My idea is to see fewer places but to stay long enough to get a real impression. If you try to see too much you see nothing."
Both Joachim and Marie are experienced enough to cope with the dangers of the sea and do not worry excessively even while watching their children scramble like monkeys in the schooner's rigging. "The risk to their lives is no higher than driving on the highway," he argues, adding that he's more concerned about navigational errors or Caribbean yacht hijackers. "The children have learned to tolerate such hardships as thirst and cold," Marie says. The only casualty has been Calixte's Teddy bear, which has fallen overboard twice (and been retrieved both times). As his big sister, Letitia, philosophizes, "You have to put up with these things if you want to go around the world."
BETSY VON FURSTENBERG
(Countess von Furstenberg is a former stage and movie actress who now lives in New York.)
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