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Outside Magazine May 2002
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Incident in a Nowhere Place (Cont.)

ON DECK, EVERYONE had heard the first exchange of fire between da Costa and Blake. According to the crew, Rob Warring and Geoff Bullock saw da Costa come up from below, wounded and holding his bloody hand. Tavares moved into the wheelhouse, and Warring and Bullock saw him fire two shots down the stairs, step aside, then fire twice more. From below, Blake, who by now had cleared his rifle's action, returned fire, but the rifle jammed again. He turned from the stairs and once more began banging the rifle butt down on the floor. Tavares, perhaps seeing that the rifle was jammed, quickly stepped to the companionway and went halfway down the steps. Blake was turned away from him, banging the rifle down on the floor. Tavares shot him twice in the back from a distance of several feet.

Blake fell at the foot of the companionway steps, hitting his head on the sill of the saloon doorway. Tavares continued down the steps, picked up Blake's rifle, and climbed back up to the deck.

Sefton believes that no more than 40 seconds passed from the time Blake told him to go forward until he came back and found him lying at the foot of the companionway steps. Blake's eyes were open but appeared lifeless. Sefton began trying to revive him.

On deck, Josué da Costa was untying Seamaster's rubber dinghy; others were still frantically removing the crew's watches. Robertson pulled his arm away as one of the Brazilians made a grab for his watch, and it stayed on his wrist. Three of the thieves were now scrambling over the rail into their own boat, while Tavares and the da Costa brothers jumped into the inflatable, but they couldn't figure out the Zodiac's engine and so they motored away in the catraia towing the rubber boat. As they went, Tavares fired what seemed to Robertson like "a hail of bullets." One grazed Bullock's back as he dropped to the deck for protection, inflicting a flesh wound. Nobody else was hit.

Warring, a trained medic, was the first to go below, where he found Sefton bent over Blake. They shifted Blake, getting him flat on his back, and spent the next 15 minutes attempting to resuscitate him with mouth-to-mouth and CPR. With each forced exhalation, blood poured from Blake's mouth. "I kept talking to Pete the whole time," Sefton told me, "but he was white and it was pretty clear he was dead. I think one of the most heartbreaking things for us all was to see Don when he came below. It was terrible. They were such close friends, best mates.

"I remember watching Pete earlier that last night, while he was looking at Rabbit [Robertson's nickname], who was making us all laugh with some story, and Pete was just laughing at him and you could see how much he loved him. Pete had a wonderful last night."

When it became clear that Blake was beyond help, Robertson put out distress calls on the boat's VHF radio. The only response came in Portuguese, and it was some time before word of what happened was communicated to the police.

"Then there was this horrible long time while we were waiting for the police," Robertson said, "with Peter lying dead on the floor."


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