Seafaring tales

There's much more to say about our early married lives when I was the most junior partner in an 11-doctor group practice. We soon had two children and increasing family responsibilities. There's a rather lengthy piece about the first two years of our married lives, years of doubt and uncertainty not only about our marriage and whether it was likely to flourish or fail, but also and equally important, what I would do professionally. I'll return to this theme soon, and post my version of those events; but first a digression and a change of pace.

Now that my traveling days are over, one way I can relive the exhilaration of experiencing new places and faces is through the ineffable pleasure of reading about travels. I've just reread three favourite classics of travels and adventures at sea: Thor Heyerdal's Kon Tiki Expedition, Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World, and Eric Newby's The Last Grain Race. I can't find adequate words of praise for these three remarkable books, but I can urge everyone who  reads this blog to read all three of them. 

In the 1930s, Thor Heyerdal, a Norwegian scientist, was studying the cultivated plants of Polynesians in the Pacific Islands, got interested in how they came to settle on these scattered islands in the first place, wanted to test the hypothesis of their possible origin in the Inca civilization of South America. After the end of the world war of 1939-45, he recruited some friends to sail with him on a balsa wood raft from Ecuador across the Pacific to the Marquesa Islands, which proved that it was feasible to sail one way by raft from South America to at least some of the Pacific Islands - but didn't prove the flimsy hypothesis that Polynesians originated in South America. There is overwhelming evidence that they came from the opposite direction, from Asia. This, however, doesn't detract from the fact that The Kon Tiki Expedition is one of the all time great tales of nautical travel and adventure.

Sailing Alone Around the World is another all time great tale of adventure at sea. Joshua Slocum was a Canadian from Nova Scotia, captain of a clipper ship who got laid off in Boston during an economic recession at the end of the 19th century. He bought a dilapidated old sloop, the Spray, refurbished and refitted her to make her seaworthy and set off originally to sail alone across the Atlantic. Having successfully completed that voyage alone, he kept going until he had circumnavigated the world. His narrative of this epic voyage is written in a simple, homespun style that is readable, very enjoyable, and leaves the strong impression that every word of it is true. 

Eric Newby is identified as a travel writer. Like his modern counterpart Bill Bryson, he could be very funny as well as perceptive and informative. As a youngster barely out of his teens Eric Newby sailed on a Swedish clipper ship, the Moshulu, from Port Lincoln, South Australia, across the South Pacific around Cape Horn into the Atlantic Ocean to Gotenburg, Sweden, in 1938-39. He described his experiences of that voyage in the first of his travel books, The Last Grain Race. This is another nautical classic.  Three sailing ships took part in that race. One of them disappeared off Cape Horn during a severe storm with sleet and snow. It's likely that the sails and rigging got coated with ice, making her top-heavy so she suddenly capsized, too rapidly for a radio distress signal to be sent. We had our Christmas holiday at Port Lincoln in the summer of 1938-39 and one day sailed out in a launch to see two of the three clipper ships in that grain race anchored off Boston Island, outside the entrance to Port Lincoln. One was the Moshulu, on which Eric Newby was an apprentice; the other was the Viking which was lost off Cape Horn.  Passat was the third ship in that grain race and she was torpedoed by a German U-boat, possibly before the official start of the 1939-45 world war.