Seaworthy: Adrift with William Willis in the Golden Age of Rafting - Softcover

Pearson, T. R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 030733595X ISBN 13: 9780307335951

Verlag: Broadway Books, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Welcome to the daring, thrilling, and downright strange adventures of William Willis, one of the world’s original extreme sportsmen. Driven by an unfettered appetite for personal challenge and a yen for the path of most resistance, Willis mounted a single-handed and wholly unlikely rescue in the jungles of French Guiana and then twice crossed the broad Pacific on rafts of his own design, with only housecats and a parrot for companionship. His first voyage, atop a ten-ton balsa monstrosity, was undertaken in 1954 when Willis was sixty. His second raft, having crossed eleven thousand miles from Peru, found the north shore of Australia shortly after Willis’s seventieth birthday. A marvel of vigor and fitness, William Willis was a connoisseur of ordeal, all but orchestrating short rations, ship-wreck conditions, and crushing solitude on his trans-Pacific voyages.

He’d been inspired by Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl’s bid to prove that a primitive raft could negotiate the open ocean. Willis’s trips confirmed that a primitive man could as well. Willis survived on rye flour and seawater, sang to keep his spirits up, communicated with his wife via telepathy, suffered from bouts of temporary blindness, and eased the intermittent pain of a double hernia by looping a halyard around his ankles and dangling upside-down from his mast.

Rich with vivid detail and wry humor, Seaworthy is the story of a sailor you’ve probably never heard of but need to know. In an age when countless rafts were adrift on the waters of the world, their crews out to shore up one theory of ethno-migration or tear down another, Willis’s challenges remained refreshingly personal. His methods were eccentric, his accomplishments little short of remarkable. Don’t miss the chance to meet this singular monk of the sea.


From the Hardcover edition.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

T. R. Pearson is the author of ten novels, including Glad News of the Natural World, A Short History of a Small Place, and Blue Ridge. This is his first nonfiction book.


From the Hardcover edition.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1: Little One

He carried by way of provisions only olive oil and flour, honey and lemon juice, garlic and evaporated milk. Since he intended to drink from the sea, a personal practice of long standing, he’d dispensed with the bother of stowing so much as the first ounce of fresh water. His radar reflector was a scrap of planking wrapped in aluminum foil, his chronometer a balky pocketwatch, his distress flag a scarlet sweater. He’d shipped no proper radio, had but a sextant for his bearings, sailing directions to guide him into the English Channel past Bishop Rock. Among his papers was a letter of introduction to the mayor of Plymouth, England, from the Honorable John V. Lindsay, the mayor of New York City. It read, in part, “If the bearer delivers this letter to you in person, he will have completed a trans-Atlantic voyage of great merit.”

This was his third attempt in as many years at a single-handed crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, all in a craft he’d christened Little One in honor of his wife. Hardly more than a glorified dinghy, that boat lived decidedly down to her name. She was eleven and a half feet stem to stern and five feet at the beam. She was sloop-rigged and lone-masted, weighed just over one thousand pounds, had three feet of draft, and was, even in sheltered, benign waters, ungainly.

He’d departed on his maiden voyage directly out of New York Harbor. A tug had taken his boat in tow at the foot of Twenty-third Street and had hauled him down the East River and along the Brooklyn shoreline in a bid to avoid both shipping traffic and bothersome harbor chop. He’d cast himself loose just a couple of miles past the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and had passed his first evening at sea watching the sun set over New Jersey while enjoying for dinner two teaspoons of whole wheat flour moistened with spit.

His first week out, the winds were southerly and the sea fog was persistent. He fell overboard one morning while attempting to set his jib, fairly swamped the boat in the process, and doused everything he’d carried. (He was never entirely dry for the remainder of the trip.) On the open ocean, Little One rolled more violently than he’d expected. She bucked and wallowed and generally handled in the manner of a cork, which, when combined with the gloomy weather, rendered his sextant all but useless. He either couldn’t see the sun or was too sea-tossed to shoot a useful sight and so had, as a rule, no reliable sense of just where he might be.

Ordinarily, he could have expected to need three months on the water to reach the English Channel from the narrows of Lower New York Bay, but he was plagued by unfavorable weather—a string of gales, and a hurricane—and after five weeks at sea, he found himself off the coast of Nova Scotia, within sight of Sable Island and in some danger from the surf. He was nearly two hundred miles farther north than he’d intended and well west of where he’d reasonably hoped to be.

Steering south, he met with the Black Swan, a freighter bound for Antwerp, and was given a carton of fresh fruit that he welcomed aboard for ballast. He took to riding out storms by

nailing himself in under his canvas decking, which salt and sun had conspired to spoil the fit of early on. He’d lie with a knife in hand in case he met cause to slash his way out. He slept little, was awake for days at a time, and compensated with meditation, along with a form of rhythmic breathing he’d freely adapted from Eastern religion. He could be, on occasion, so strict in its practice and parsimonious with air that he would rhythmically breathe himself into a faint. He was once unconscious for two days running, and, having survived somehow adrift, he awoke to find his chronometer stopped because he’d failed to wind it.

He suffered from heavy nosebleeds and decided, essentially on a hunch, that they were simply nature’s way of staving off cerebral hemorrhage. He had a bout with a hernia he’d allowed to go untreated for years and sought to ease his discomfort by looping the mizzen halyard around his ankles and hoisting himself upside down to the masthead, where he rearranged his guts. He noted in his log the “pernicious” effects of drinking Atlantic seawater (he allowed himself a quarter of a cup a day), and he concluded that the practice “might well lead to madness and suicide,” which, as potential calamities go, proved wholly insufficient to curb him.

His voyage was beset in turn by squalls and windless, fogbound lulls. He met scores of ships and refused all offers to take him off the water. He sang sea chanteys to lift his spirits. He measured and recorded his blood pressure daily and performed each afternoon a simple urinalysis. In testing the transmitter he had carried in the event of emergency, he discovered that the contraption didn’t work. He drifted east and south in the Gulf Stream and was convinced he’d make the Azores if the weather cooperated and his hernia gave him some peace. But the wind dropped, and he suffered a series of strangulation attacks, each of which could have led to the rapid, fatal onset of gangrene. He liked to think that his diet of flour, seawater, and condensed milk worked to forestall fever and served (though he couldn’t begin to say how) to spare him.

He wasn’t persuaded, however, that his luck and health would last, and he settled on the prudent option of cutting short his voyage and attempting another when he was properly mended. But just then sea traffic evaporated, and he saw no ships for a couple of weeks. When he finally spied the stacks of a Boston-bound steamer on the horizon, he inadvertently set his mainsail alight with the flare he’d struck to hail it and managed to go unnoticed nonetheless.

After two months at sea to the day, he crossed paths with the Sapphire Gladys, a New York freighter bound for Rotterdam. Again he declined to be taken off, since the Sapphire Gladys was eastbound, and instead requested that the captain radio the Coast Guard. The cutter Ingham was dispatched and managed to find him the following morning at a point, essentially, due east of Amagansett, Long Island, and due south of St. Lawrence, Newfoundland—a good two thousand nautical miles away from Plymouth, England.

* * *

His second attempt, the following summer, was only modestly more successful. In the intervening year, he’d fitted Little One with a wooden deck and a cabin that measured all of fifty-two by thirty inches, hardly room enough to sit with any comfort, much less stand. He’d been at sea for three full months when the Polish trawler Belona came across him; a crewman saw the scarlet sweater flying from his mast. He was entirely out of food and was in a “cataleptic trance.” He came to on the deck of the ship and asked to be put back onto the water, insisting he was capable of finishing the voyage, but the trawler captain sensibly refused.

Overall, Little One had traveled thirty-five hundred nautical miles, but only about two thousand of it was easting. Gales and squalls were largely to blame, though in a statement to a reporter, the skipper confessed that he’d known “some trouble navigating.”

Refitted and freshly resolved, he set out again the following spring. He’d arranged for a tow to the sea buoy twelve miles off Montauk Point, where he dropped his line and set his sails and struck out again for Plymouth. It was Wednesday, May 1, 1968. His name was William...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Broadway Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 030733595X
• ISBN 13: 9780307335951
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar