Customer Reviews

The Saga of Cimba: A Journey from Nova Scotia to the South Seas

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The Saga of Cimba is a masterwork. I find this book as compelling, captivating, and yes even mesmerizing, now as when I first read it many years ago. It is one of very, very few which I can always re-read with unwavering pleasure and delight. Richard Maury has crafted a volume as close to perfect in terms of making the essential -nesses of cruising in small sail boats clear to the reader as any I have ever found. It's facinating to me that right through to the last page he never tells of himself, and only word sketches his alternating sailing companions very briefly. Cimba herself is the main character and Maury never loses sight of that fact. The Saga of Cimba is a book filled with the unpretentious magic of greatness.

Having sailed for 40 years, I came across an old edition of this gem written in the 30's and was astounded by the economy of prose, yet the depth of feeling created by its author.

It is a deceptively simple story, but packed with thoughts and observations which are thoroughly relevant today. And it is written in a style which came BEFORE the present supermediatic hyperbolic overstatement that characterizes most of what we read and hear today.

It is an excellent gift, and an inspirational work, even if you are never planning to cross an ocean. It is in a word, a classic. (And it is wonderful to think about how these places actually were in the thirties, and to listen to proper nautical language and vocabulary which has been washed away by the advent of the jet plane and skidoo.. Bon voyage!

This is a book for sailors who love words, and readers who sail. Not an instructor, Maury spends his tale with the spareness of bare poles. Seamen will love the action - and the calms, mostly for the lovely lyric writing and the gift Maury has with print. Kin to the Maury who invented organized navagation charts for seaways, tides, winds, currents; this tale of the smallest fishing schooner to make 1937 ocean history reflects talent aboard and with the pen for Richard Maury. Best book I've read, sadly I couldn't enjoy it from land.

I suspect this is THE book that inspired otherwise sane and sensible people to abandon their career, family and fortune in order to sail off to the South Pacific.

I read a lot of cruising narratives, many of which I plan to review here in time. I find many of these books both entertaining and informative, even if the writer has a different style of travel than I'm interested in or sails a type of vessel I'll probably never own. Most of the books of this type that I read were written in recent years, as cruising has become much more popular due to the availability of fiberglass boats, both new and used, and new equipment such as GPS receivers to take the hard work out of navigation.

Before this new wave of modern cruisers appeared, the pioneers of modern singlehanded or family-style voyaging under sail had to either build their boats themselves or convert existing vessels, mostly built of wood, to their needs. Most sailors these days would stay ashore if this was still the case, but thanks to those who did it the hard way and wrote about it, the way has been made much easier for those of us with an abundance of boat choices at our disposal. Their successes and failures, described in the great books many of them wrote, have saved many of us from coming to grief through lack of knowledge. Most people who sail today and even think just a little about long-distance voyaging and cruising are familiar with the works of at least some of these writers like: Joshua Slocum, Hal Roth, Bernard Moitessier, the Smeetens, and John Guzzwell. But there are other, lesser known sailors from this era as well, and some of the best writings are easy to overlook.

The Saga of Cimba: A Journey from Nova Scotia to the South Seas
by Richard Maury is one such sailing classic that I myself passed up for years, even though I had noticed it from time to time among the more contempary narratives in the sailing section of various bookstores. It was only a few months ago, when I was lacking something inspiring to read, that I decided to pick up this book that was first published in 1939 and remains in print. Upon reading the first chapter, I found myself immediately hooked. This is one of those rare narratives that not only recounts a fascinating adventure, but does so with a captivating writing style that takes you right along and makes you want to find an old fishing schooner and follow in the author's footsteps.


Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the voyage recounted in this book is the time period in which it took place - in the 1930s - before World War II brought the remote South Pacific islands into mainstream consciousness and when practically no one set out to voyage half way around the world for pleasure on a small, short-handed sailing vessel. This was a time of almost limitless freedom for those few who could pull off such a voyage. The world was wide open to them and the rules and regulations and fees that we have to pay for docking and even anchoring in many places were unheard of then.

One of the most difficult hurdles in the 1930s was simply finding an affordable vessel of suitable size and adequate seaworthieness for such a voyage. Maury and his partner in the adventure at last found their ship among a fishing fleet on the Nova Scotia coast. "We first saw her from the top of the cliff. She turned at her chains to every attack of wind, swaying, airy, buoyant, as though cut of fragile porcelain on the sea below. She was a two-masted schooner, almost as small as they go, almost as stalwart...."


The schooner, which they subsequently purchased and christened Cimba, was 35-feet overall with a 26-foot waterline and 9 1/2-foot beam. She carried a fisherman's working rig - gaff mainsail and foresail, and one jib. Maury and Carrol Huddleston sailed her down the coast to Stamford Harbor where they planned to fit out and equip the vessel for the voyage ahead.

From this point on, two ocean passages lay ahead: New York to Bermuda, and Bermuda to the Caribbean Islands. To prepare they made some modifications to the schooner, such as adding a deck hatch to ventilate the cabin, painting the hull and cabin and rebuilding the engine. The also took on the necessary stores and supplies, including everything needed to maintain the hull, rigging and sails. In light of the time period and the remoteness of their ultimate destination, it's not surprising that ship's equipment included a 30.30 Winchester rifle with 1,000 rounds of ammunition, and a .38 revolver and 12-gauge shotgun. Despite the preparations and large equipment list, the schooner "retained an air of almost puritanical simplicity on deck and down below" according to Maury.

Maury's first setback occured when his friend Carrol was swept overboard and lost his life in the harbor while tending the schooner in a storm. This event is mentioned only in a short paragraph. Maury sailed for Bermuda shortly after with a new crew - "Dombey" Dickinson. The schooner proved her seaworthieness in a winter storm enroute that caused a rollover and set fire to the cabin with coals scattered throughout the interior. From Bermuda, the pair sailed Cimba on to Grand Turk and then through the Windward Passage past Haiti to Kingston, Jamaica. From Jamaica they ran down to Panama's San Blas Archipelago and explored some of the jungle rivers of the coast. On the Pacific side of the Canal, they explored the Perlas Islands and then set sail for the Galapagos.

Among the remote Galapagos, so little visited at the time, they came upon a wrecked boat on a deserted beach, with two skeletonsin the sand nearby. They also found fresh footprints and heard a rifle shot from somewhere in the interior. Maury's account of the unraveling of these mysteries again illustrates how different the world was back in 1935 for a couple of adventurers willing to sail to such far-flung islands.

Onward into the Pacific, on the 3,000-mile downhill run to the South Seas, Cimba, working west and south averaged 6.4 knots or 150 miles per day. Maury writes: "The testing of a craft goes on forever - but a point is reached where finally the spirits of ship and men to some degree reflect each other, where often the weakness of one becomes the weakness of the other, the strength of one the other's strength."

Cimba made landfall off Ua Hiva in the Marquesas 19 days out from the Galapagos. Beginning in the Marquesas, Maury and his partner found the South Pacific they were looking for, and their adventures continued through the French territories and then westward to Fiji, where the voyage sadly ended on a reef. Although the schooner was with great difficulty salvaged and rebuilt on the beach, Maury never managed to sail on to New Guinea as planned due to various complications, and ended up leaving her in Fiji.

If you've every dreamed of sailing to the South Seas, or if you simply like good adventure narratives, you will love The Saga of Cimba. If you have an ounce of interest in boats or sailing this book will make you long for a sturdy old fishing schooner that you can fix up and point south. Richard Maury may have written only one book, but the The Saga of Simba deserves to be an enduring classic in the literature of the sea. It's definately worth checking out, but watch out, or you may find it inflicts a bad case of sea fever.

I have no idea why this book is so highly rated, it was a terrible disappointment to me after reading about a dozen books in the genre. There are adventurers, and then there are adventurers who can write, and the fact that I had to go back several times to believe what was so casually mentioned in a paragraph--the death of two of the original three crew members--should have been a sign that I could have put the book down without missing out on anything. Unless you are getting way down on your reading list or find this at a garage sale, don't bother. There are too many great books such as Bernard Moitessier's The Long Way to get to first.

The story of The Saga of Cimba has been part of my family history all of my life, and it just occurs to me, as I sit to write this review, that I actually owe my existence to that voyage of the little vessel, Cimba. Therefore, at the grand age of 72, I claim the title, Child of The Cimba! How so? Well, my father was Russell "Dombey" Dickinson, who was recruited to fill the navigator role after Dick's first partner, Carrol Huddleston, fell overboard. Father sailed on the Cimba until Pago-Pago, Samoa, where he decided to sail home and marry the sweetheart he'd found in Bermuda, while Cimba was being outfitted for the Pacific. That sweetheart was my mother, Kathleen Caffee, an American of Bermudian ancestry. I was born nine months after Russ returned to New York.

That's not really the end of the story, though it is the end of the Cimba portion. I'll just throw in this unknown information to round it out for you. Someday, I may find a way to publish The Saga of The Seth Parker, using Father's manuscript about his arduous voyage home from the South Pacific. It's a wild tale alright.

In Samoa, he signed on as Second Mate for a lumbering, four-masted schooner on its last legs, which had earlier been outfitted for an around the world broadcast venture for Phillips Lord, a popular radio character of the 1930's, who went by the stage name of Seth Parker. That venture ended with a hurricane, scaring the land-lubbers and severely damaging the ship. Russ set sail to deliver this derelict to new owners in Hawaii and kept a well-written account of events which seemed orchestrated to guarantee a watery grave for the Samoan crew and officers; as well as a nice, fat check from Lloyd's of London for the Hawaiian ship buyers. Mutiny against a drug-addicted, unqualified captain was finally necessary in order to call for a Coast Guard tow, so that this bedraggled prize could be laid at the feet of the angry owners. This is one of those "truth is so much stranger than fiction" stories, which I hope will one day be told. And, since Hollywood is not likely to notice the script I've written about it; I shall probably soon publish the work myself.

In the meantime, this Daughter of Cimba, has fulfilled Dombey's original intent by traveling around the world herself and living to tell about it; though I didn't take the same route, nor means of transport, that my father attempted. I recommend my book, Hey Boomers, Dust Off Your Backpacks