Ice bird by David Lewis

[NickiCrutchfield]

I've just re-visited the scariest seafaring book I know.
Davis Lewis sailed his small, 32', steel boat, single-handed from Australia to Palmer in Antarctica. The following year he continued from Palmer to South Africa. He spends many weeks at 60 south and and higher, as low after low sweep past him. However often I read the book, the feeling of sheer terror never leaves me. The tension lies in the fact that he is alone, with badly frost bitten fingers, thousands of miles from anyone.He is dismasted (twice) and faces staggeringly awful conditions every day. The list of ingredients is almost as if drawn from the deepest recesses of a frantically paranoid and fearful mind, but it is all real. The guy just gets on with it, he has no choice, but the resilience and calmness of the writing is almost Tilmanesque in its quiet understatement. The brooding nature and remoteness of the location creates a morbid sense of foreboding in the reader. I cannot recommend this book enough, it is one of the masterpieces of modern, single-handed seafaring adventure.

 

[sarabande]

I met him at a RGS lecture. A woolly sort of guy on the outside, but stainless steel inside. very difficult to get to know, but the sort of person who always manages to find personal support at the last minute.

What would he have made of todays highly sponsored RTW boats ?

 

[NickiCrutchfield]

Lucky you. I would love to have met him. Not even to talk to particularly, just being close would be a boost. Does that make sense? That knack for finding what you need in life by being offered it is a way of living which always has my respect.
I think he would have quietly shuddered at the level of sponsorship and the accompanying sycophancy and carried on his own path.
Another inspiring person. It is amazing how many such people are drawn to the sea isn't it?

 

[LittleSister]

David Lewis also wrote (among about a dozen other books) 'We the Navigators - The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific', a fascinating and very readable book which explores how the Pacific islanders navigated. David Lewis tracked down the few surviving traditional navigators, and not just spoke to but went on voyages with them to understand their methods. They showed astonishing feats of navigation, amazing Lewis who was by that point a very experienced sailor.

Its a while since I read it (must do so again), but what sticks in my mind are methods including being able to sense the combinations of up to three or more different swells to judge direction, weather, wind shifts and the proximity of land. This was considered a strictly male skill, as they said they could feel these through their testicles (they knelt down when they really needed to concentrate on this). They also had detailed knowledge of distances and directions which were not written down, but passed orally through generations of navigator families.

Like many other cultures different to our own they had a completely different conception of geography and the disposition of places in relation to one another. Their 'mental map' of directions was related to where particular stars would rise from the horizon, but they could identify directions in cloudy weather, and knew about the positions of stars which were invisible from their location and apparently known only from voyages, undertaken several generations before, to distant other island groups.

However, if it's understated writing and endurance in icy climes you're after you are unlikely to do better than 'The Worst Journey in the World' by Cherry Apsley-Gerrard. Not a sailing book, but an absorbing, thrilling, thoughtful and deeply moving account of Antarctic exploration by someone who was in Antarctic with Scott (who's fatal attempt at the South Pole was but one part of a bigger 2 year expedition). The 'Worst Journey' of the title is not the pole expedition (though that features in the book), but an earlier, near fatal, three man trek (without Scott) in the Antarctic winter - permanent dark, unimaginable temperatures - across uncharted territory, purely for scientific curiosity! Typically, he loves Scott (though in a strictly manly, Edwardian sort of way, you understand!), and reckons him all the greater because he fights and (in Apsley-Gerrard's eyes) rises above his weaknesses (uncharismatic, not particularly strong, poor judge of men, prone to depression, etc.) to become a true leader. An amazing book, one of my favourites of all time.