"It's Joseph Conrad meets Elmore Leonard."
—Vancouver Sun

A spellbinding tale of the sea: love, murder, and mysticism: At the turn of the century, a Kwakiutl warrior from British Columbia's wild northern islands raids an artifact collector's yacht to reclaim stolen sacred masks. He takes the collector's wife, Kate, as hostage on his 200-mile canoe voyage home. The collector hires Dugger, a coastal trader living on the edges of the law, to give chase in his ketch with the collector as passenger, but Dugger's financial salvation comes at a terrible price, for he is Kate's secret lover. Day and night Dugger sails the uncharted islands, through raging currents and ship-swallowing whirlpools, and the account of his pursuit is interwoven with Kate's harrowing and erotically charged journey.

Based on a true story, this novel reaches its thrilling climax at the last secret, hallucinatory potlatch of the ancient Kwakiutl culture, where the history of a doomed people is melded with the fury of three hearts.

The Vancouver Sun, Saturday June 17, 2006

“[Ferenc Mate] demonstrates that the West Coast can be as exotic and wild as anywhere.”

“Joseph Conrad meets Elmore Leonard”

“Who would ever have thought a sail up Discovery Passage could be so danger-packed? This trip makes the voyage of Odysseus seem like a pleasure jaunt.”

“[A] thrilling, evocative, tightly written melodrama.”

Ferenc Máté Interview - May 12, 2006

What initially fascinated you so much about boats and sailing?
I was born in Transylvania, which is about as far as you can get from the sea, so it can’t be in the blood. When I started university in Vancouver, I didn’t have enough money to rent a place to stay, so I bought an old scow and built a little house on it—$800 total, including the curtains. I moored it in False Creek in a rickety marina full of all sorts of sailboats. Their owners would invite me sailing. After the first couple of outings, I was hooked for life.

Does your wife sail with you?
It’s more like I sail with her. She was the veteran sailor when we met. When she was nineteen, she went down to the docks in Hawaii and hitched a ride on a sailboat to San Francisco—twenty-seven days, with six men.

The day we met she had been sailing. She was riding her bike—a spring day, she was all tanned and freckled. I had this beat-up old Porche convertible that I bought with money from working on tugboats, and I stopped and gawked, and she stopped and laughed—the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, truly. And she said, “You want to give me a ride?” We packed the bike into the back and have been together ever since. Built a sailboat in California together and sailed in the Pacific for years. She does everything, but especially navigates. I sailed without her in Polynesia, sailed solo, and almost took a shortcut over the reef, trying to find the entrance to the lagoon at Bora Bora.

Could you briefly describe the Kwakiutl people and culture for those who haven’t yet read your book?
The Kwakiutl live in one of the most dramatically beautiful places on earth—the wild, central B.C. coast. There are nearly vertical mountains—some 13,000 feet—plunging into the sea, hundreds of islands, inlets, glaciers, mist, killer currents, rain. These people have been there for 8,000 years in villages around tiny coves protected by barely submerged rocks. There is no access through the mountains; they travelled by sea only. They fished and gathered in the summer—salmon, halibut, eulichon, shellfish, berries, kelp—and they dried and smoked everything to last the winter. All winter long they feasted and danced. They had the most beautiful art and architecture of any ancient peoples. And theatre—they had these giant, windowless houses where they had the most complicated theatre pieces full of gory and terrifying special effects that would make Steven Spielberg jealous.

Have you seen the Kwakiutl people or witnessed their rituals firsthand? Do you have any interesting anecdotes about this?
Well, we sailed by their abandoned villages for years. We spent three entire summers there. My very first encounter with their culture was on a small deserted island. I sat on an old log on the beach to rest and fell right into an overturned, half-rotten dugout canoe. I was so shocked, I backed away and almost stepped onto a skull. It was a burial island across from an old village.

Around that village, mostly reclaimed by brambles and the woods, we found great fallen house posts and burial poles, all beautifully carved, all rotting. I felt like bloody Indiana Jones, and this was five years before Indiana Jones.

Later that summer, we sailed up to a still-inhabited village—a dozen people—and there I met an old carver who still carved poles and masks, and was working on a dugout canoe, the most gentle, soft-spoken man. He had a big, jolly wife. Loved her madly. He was crushed two years later when she died. Talked about joining his “angel.” He took me to see his sister, who wove delicate baskets out of cedar bark. She was out in the woods peeling the soft inner bark off a tree, talking quietly. By herself. He told me it was a prayer to the cedar that translates something like, “Forgive me, friend. I come to take your dress. I beg you for it to make a basket. Take care of me, friend, that I may be kept from sickness.” I tell you, next to her, I felt like I was from some barbarian race.

Are the cannibalistic rumours actually true, or were the Kwakiutl a more docile group of people?
Cannibalism—roasted heads, hands being gnawed—has been documented since Captain Cook’s time. The last mention of it was in the early 1900s when a couple of cannibal dancers died from eating a recently dead corpse. In 1921, a well-known half-white, half-Kwakiutl man who had worked with Boas was charged with eating a corpse. He denied it. Boas was fairly sure the cannibalism he witnessed was a sleight of hand. I leaned toward that until I went to the Marquesas and heard—from the natives talking openly—about how rampant ritual cannibalism had been there. “But we only ate enemies.” So…

After publishing a number of highly successful travel and non-fiction sailing books, why did you decide to switch to fiction and write Ghost Sea?
It actually started as non-fiction, combining Kwakiutl history with a renegade sea captain and a mysterious woman from the east coast who disappeared. But her family changed their minds and decided against giving me her letters and photos. So I switched to fiction.

But I’ve loved writing fiction from way back. Have two unfinished novels from decades ago. Why the love? Well, remember the last time you were really swept away by a novel—the emotions, the intensity? Multiply that feeling a few dozen times; that’s what it felt like writing Ghost Sea. Beats any drug, any wine. Of course, the best is when I drink the wine (we have our own vineyards) then go up into my old guard’s tower to write. What a rush. Especially a historical, adventure love story. I do solo sailing and climb solo in the Dolomites, so I’m used to big emotions, but I tell you, writing some of the passages is right up there with scrambling up a peak or coming through a storm.

You just came back from sailing in Tahiti-Marquesas, preparing for your next novel. How exactly do you go about researching in this way?
Don’t mention Tahiti-Marquesas, or I’ll have a stroke. I spent two months there, and I tell you, I was never so sad to leave a place. Thank God I’m going right back. As for this mode of research, perhaps I’m limited as a writer, but I can only write wholeheartedly about things I have known, touched, felt—physically and emotionally. And it has to be a prolonged, intense emersion. I mean, how can anyone write about how a sailboat handles in the trade winds in a tropical cross swell, or what sails and sheets do in a dark rain squall—the colours, the smells—or about hacking through the jungle in the pouring rain to find a ritual stone platform where they performed human sacrifice and initiated virgins? How can you write about the shapes of the stones they lie on, how the rain gushed out of the banana leaves, if you haven’t lived it? How do you write about searching for a break in the reef when coming from a distant island? I have to have felt the thrill, the fear. To me there is a universe of difference, say, between Conrad and O’Brian: both write about faraway places and the sea, but one writes from experience, his guts and soul, the other from the library.

I’m not knocking research. I read everything about my subject, and scour museums and photo archives. But the live thing brings things to life. And of course, the people. I can’t write about a people unless I know at least their descendants: how they move, how they talk, what kind of words they use, what makes them smile, the sound of their voices, their laughter. How can you write about the Polynesians unless you see them sing, see them dance, see them sit motionless for hours in the shadows or see their eyes when they talk about love or death or how to fish for mahi mahi? I’m sure I go overboard with this first-hand stuff, but for me it works.

Did you use any of your personal sailing experiences as part of the fiction in Ghost Sea?
All the sailing scenes come from real experiences—the whirlpools, the running aground (my specialty). Condensed, embellished, sure, but real, even the scene in Devil’s Hole (a real place). We were up north. Candace had to leave in a float plane because her mom got sick, so it was just my son (we call him Buster) and me to bring the boat back down a couple of hundred miles. He was twelve. Well, as I said, Candace always navigates, and sure enough, one day coming through Devil’s Hole, I misread the current tables, misread the slack by over an hour. So off we went in the pouring rain. We had no dodger or awning; we just steered in foul-weather gear, and I thought it kind of strange that there wasn’t a single other boat. It’s the only way north, and you can usually only go through once a day. Anyway, it was raining so hard we could hardly see, and we joked around and got the giggles when I noticed the shore rushing by. But it was too late to turn back; the current had us. So we hung on and slammed into the first whirlpool, and it spun us around. We fought and spun and bucked for a half-hour, and we were almost out when Buster yelled, “Dad, you’ll hit the cliff!” Well, it was no cliff—blocking the pass was a six-foot wall of water. Big choice: SLAM. Right into it; right through it. And we were kind of proud of ourselves and looked back to kiss it goodbye, and right there behind the stern was the wall of water following us, catching us. And it fell onboard, buried the stern, filled the cockpit. And we were only an hour and something late; almost two more hours to go to full flood. That place had swallowed barges, never mind sailboats.

Ghost Sea is based on a true story. How much is actually factual and how much is fiction?
Boy, that’s tough. All the Kwakiutl stuff is straight out of Boas’s field studies, which spanned thirty years. Believe it or not, I actually softened some of the horror. The arrest of the Kwakiutl is real, the turning back of the Orientals (but not the rescue) is real. The secondary characters are based on real people, though not from the period, and certainly every inch of the coast that’s described is real. As for Dugger and Kate, well, that’s a long and very personal story.

What’s in store for Dugger in the next book, Sea of Lost Dreams?
Poor Dugger. He does get to fulfill his dream of sailing to the South Seas (1922), but at what cost? He has to pick up two passengers in Mexico to survive: a French spy who is being sent to find a white man who is organizing the natives to rebel and an Irish nun (witty as hell) without her habit, heading to Tahiti to look for her gone-native brother, a painter who has disappeared. Then there is Heiura, this ravishing Polynesian-French girl—a tomboy—who becomes their pilot through the islands. So we have an idealist colonizer, an idealist missionary, her idealist artist brother, and Dugger, the dreamer. Drop them into paradise and see what comes out. Honest to God, I can hardly wait to see what happens.