Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 28, 1993 TAG: 9302280270
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DONALD P. MYERS NEWSDAY
DATELINE: BROOKHAVEN, N.Y. LENGTH: Long
HE'S SEEN JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING BUT, AT 87, STILL HAS SPIRIT TO EXPLORE
"Oh sure, I'm an odd old bone now, but don't you fellas think the spirit's gone." - Walter Huston "The Treasure of Sierra Madre"
Writer Dennis Puleston has dined with the cannibals. He sailed the South Seas 60 years ago with a snake named Egbert wrapped around him. He got tattooed with a shark's tooth one night by the natives. He's been clobbered by a couple of hurricanes and had his back broken in a war. He's been around and around the world, top to bottom, and along the way he's been charmed by the devil and cursed by the gods.
"The local virgins," he said the other day, grinning back toward his salty nights in Samoa. "Remind me to tell you about the local virgins."
The full moon cooked up over the Carmans River, just east of Puleston's little cottage in Brookhaven. A three-legged dog dozed in the study at his feet.
Oh sure, the old man's 87 now, with white hair and a white beard, but don't you think the spirit's gone.
The day before, he had gotten out of bed at midnight and gone out into the cold night air to check out Mars high in the winter sky. He just got back from a job up the Amazon as a lecturer and naturalist on a nature cruise. Next month he's off again, down to Central America and the Caribbean, then across the Atlantic to Lisbon.
"Here's a man in his eighties who's always the first one to jump ashore, the first one to head off into unknown territory," said Kevin Schafer, director of field operations for the New York cruise company that employs Puleston. "Once we were on some island in the high Arctic, and he disappeared off into the tundra. He came back an hour later, all covered with blood. He said he was just trying to get close to a really good bird. Dennis pays no attention to the nonsense of injury or age."
Puleston had the equivalent of $120 in his pocket in 1931 when he left his native England and set out to sail around the world in a 29-foot yawl. The boat had no engine. The trip took six years - he wasn't in a hurry - and before it was over, he might have bitten off a little more than he could chew.
On the island of Ndeni in the South Seas, the native chief welcomed Puleston and a friend with a feast one night around a blazing fire. "By the side of the fire were these piles of grisly looking meat," he said. "You just picked out the least repulsive piece and threw it into the fire until it went black. Then you fished it out with a pointed stick. I'd eaten one of these pieces of meat - it was kind of chewy - and I asked the chief in my best pidgin English what the meat was."
And now, Dennis Puleston was sipping a cup of coffee inside a fine old gardener's cottage down a dead-end road. An Amazon parrot named Cinderella whistled at another parrot named Michael in the other room.
"The chief said the meat was `long pig.' That meant that what I'd been eating was an insurance salesman or a missionary or something. It was human flesh."
A human skull, a gift from a man in New Guinea, grinned down from a shelf in the study. Puleston had given the man a T-shirt, and the man was so pleased that he went into his hut and came out with the skull. "It was his grandmother," Puleston said. "Grandma's eye-sockets were filled in with clay and decorated with white seeds so she can see in the after-life."
Seeing wasn't always easy while sailing around the world 60 years ago. Things got a little fuzzy one hot night in Samoa when the natives initiated Puleston and his friend into their clan. They had to drink a lot of kava, the potent local drink made from the root of a pepper bush.
"It's not really intoxicating, but from the waist on down, you're just paralyzed. You're staggering all over the place." Puleston had finished his coffee now, and the caffeine was beginning to kick in. "Remember the local virgins? Well, these beautiful Polynesian maidens with the undulating arms kept serving that kava. We had to drink it down, of course, or otherwise it would have been an insult."
Puleston took off his red sweater and began to roll up the right sleeve of his shirt. "Let me show you what happened next," he said, unveiling a large black shark's-tooth tattoo on his bicep. "We thought that was going to be the end of the evening, but it wasn't. As honored guests, we were given these beautifully woven pine mats to sleep on - and then they gave each of us one of the local virgins to sleep beside us."
Michael, the parrot, whistled across the cottage toward Cinderella.
"Unfortunately," Puleston said, "the kava had done its work, and the next morning the local virgins were still the local virgins."
Puleston picked up pets, three rare cockatoos, on the island of Tenimbar in the Arafura Sea. That was four years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. When Puleston arrived in the Philippines, he encountered a friendly Japanese ship that was collecting birds and animals for Emperor Hirohito's private zoo. Puleston donated the cockatoos.
"In those days, Hirohito was a god, so it was like giving a present to god himself," Puleston said. In return, the Japanese gave him a formal document of thanks from the emperor. "Little did I realize that it might save my life later."
Near the end of his around-the-world trip, Puleston reached China just as the Sino-Japanese war was heating up. U.S. authorities were evacuating American citizens, but because Puleston was a British subject, he was held under house arrest by the Japanese in Beijing.
"Then I suddenly remembered the gift of the cockatoos to the emperor. I showed the document to the Japanese officers, and they practically fell on their knees. It got me a military pass out on a troop train."
Puleston returned to England via the Trans-Siberian Railway, sleeping on straw. He got home to Leigh-on-Sea in 1937, broke and hungry and 30 pounds lighter than when he started six years earlier.
Early in the long voyage, Puleston had been forced ashore by a hurricane in North Carolina - little knowing that this country would become his future home. He got a summer job later teaching sailing at Rye, N.Y., and during the women's sailing championships in 1934, he jumped into the Long Island Sound and helped to rescue a woman who had fallen overboard.
"That was the first time I met my wife," Dennis Puleston said. "I met her in the middle of the Long Island Sound."
When he finished his trip, Puleston married Betty Wellington of Brookhaven, and became an American citizen. Working for the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development as a naval architect, he helped develop the DUKW, the World War II amphibious truck that landed Marines at Normandy on D-Day and also at Iwo Jima. Puleston's back was broken by Japanese shellfire in Burma.
After the war, President Truman presented him with the Medal of Freedom. And, from 1948 until he retired in 1970, Puleston was director of technical information at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.