Customer Reviews

Seamanship: A Voyage Along the Wild Coasts of the British Isles

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The text recounts a voyage that the author undertakes from the southwest of England, to the Atlantic coast of Ireland, northward to the Hebrides and the Orkneys, and finally to the Faroe Islands.
This is a genuinely annoying book. As others have noted, there is, with a few exceptions, very little description of the lands and coasts traveled to. Mostly the author waxes philosophical about this or that aspect of our relationship with nature, embodied here by the sea. But that's not the problem. The problem is that, ultimately, the author proves to be a very un-admirable individual - someone that you would NOT want to sail with, much less depend on, in challenging circumstances. The real hero of the voyage (in my opnion) is George Fairhurst, an experienced professional sailor whom the author employs to skipper his boat, the Auk. By the end you come to sympathize with Fairhurst's assessment that the author is merely a "plucker": the sort of individual who floats from experience to experience, depending entirely on others to keep the boat sailing (Fairhurst), or the home and family going (the author's wife Sarah), while assuming none of the risk. You may consider it brave of Nicolson to reveal enough about what happened on Auk to allow the reader to form such a negative judgment of him. Personally I find this simply a species of the same instinct that causes him to climb three miles barefoot over sharp rocks to a hilltop holy place, despite being an avowed agnostic. It's self-indulgence masquerading as self-revelation. It's solely about the personal experience, and not about the truth.

SEAMANSHIP is author Adam Nicolson's account of his 1,500-mile voyage along the outer fringes of the British Isles aboard the 42-foot ketch "Auk".

Perhaps I should have realized the thrust of Nicolson's narrative sooner. Indeed, as soon as I opened the front cover, seen the extent of the voyage as depicted on two end page maps, and then noted that this small hardcover is only 177 pages long with relatively large print. I mean, if one is sailing from Falmouth in Cornwall across the Celtic Sea to Ireland's southern tip, then back across to Cornwall, north to southwestern Wales, across the Celtic Sea again, up along Ireland's west coast, across to Scotland, up through the Inner and Outer Hebrides, east to the Orkney Islands, and finally ending far to the northwest in the Faeroes, how much description of so many places can be jammed into such a small space? Disappointingly little, if that's what you're looking for.

Rather than a travelogue in the traditional sense, SEAMANSHIP is more a ruminative consideration of Sailing Man's relationship to the Sea and his Ship, and, in this volume specifically, Adam's success (or not) in manly bonding with the Auk's skipper, George. Nicolson's philosophical bent is well represented by the following passage:

"The nature of the voyage is set before you cast off. A sea passage is shaped by the boat's time attached to the land. Every moment at sea is dependent on, and even twinned to, a moment in harbor. What a boat sails on and in is not only the ocean and the wind but the days, weeks, and months tied up alongside."

And, using a mixed metaphor:

"That is why death at sea is such a casual affair. Death has no need to approach ... It doesn't come rolling on like a swell, proceeding grandly towards you with its bosom before it and its intentions clear. Death is already there, a few feet away, resting beneath the table, its head on its paws and a smile in its eyes, happy to accept the scraps that fall."

I love the landscape of the British Isles more than any other place on Earth, especially its wild, wave and wind-ravished margins. Here, the author's description of the ancient monastic island off the Irish coast, Skellig Michael, almost brought tears of longing to my eyes. I wanted to visit the place myself - now. But, for me, there wasn't enough of such descriptive power between this book's covers to satisfy a raging wanderlust.

SEAMANSHIP is far from being a bad read. Whereas I'm only awarding 3.5 stars (translated to four by an inadequate rating system), one more in tune with Nicolson's lyrical prose will emphatically award five and excoriate me for my shallow obtuseness. This is a book you must read and decide upon for yourself.

This book is not, as you might expect from the title, a book on how to make the boat go where you want it. Instead it is a love story. It's about a love for the sea, for the boat, for life itself.

Nominally it's the story of a voyage along the Atlantic coasts of England, Ireland, Scotland, and the islands north of there. It's partly the story of the trip; it's partly a philosophy of life, of man putting himself and his wind propelled boat against the elements.

Mr. Nicolson has a way with the written word that makes his prose almost like poetry or music in the hands of another. I'm not a boating person, but it almost makes me want to go find a sailboat.

Delightful story.

Occasionally, a quick background of the reviewer is necessary to give weight to the review. I am the son of a hardscrabble Scottish coal miner and shoe-repairer. I am less than likely to approve of a book written by an English, upper-class, Eton-educated member of the landed gentry who happens to own a Scottish island. (Billy Connolly immediately comes to mind: "Oh, do ye really THINK so?")

And yet I loved this book. It is not perfect. The title is just plain inappropriate. It fails as a travel book because that is not its intent, and it fails in clarity because only towards the end is it revealed that he HIRED his friend George Fairhurst to skipper the boat, which only then makes understandable the early section where he describes himself gallivanting up the Skelligs for endless hours while his "friend" keeps the boat on station by running its engine and constantly steering.

But the man can write rings around the world. His description of the ridiculously-inaccessible Skelligs, or more accurately his thoughts about them, make a visit there simultaneously unnecessary AND mandatory.

Yes, he is a rich dilettante. Yes, he has an over-grand sense of his place in the world. Yes, his "mea culpa" description of his social mistakes (like hiring a good friend and then treating him like an employee) is suspect in sincerity.

But it comes down to this: the man can write rings around the world. This is a supremely enjoyable and educational book by a rather naked, somewhat-annoying person.

This son of British aristocrats and inheritor of the family castle has a fine command of the English language, and a prep school mastery of classical literature. Wordsworth, Blake, Auden, Homer...every last rock along the Irish and Scottish coast is adored as exceptional, extraordinary, and peered at through the lens of history, religion and literature. It's a bit as if we've compressed a year-long seafaring adventure around the British Isles into a Great Western Literature series.

Still, as the Brits are wont to do, Nicolson riffs brilliantly from time to time. Describing a skin-diving find of cave-dwelling crabs: "The crabs sat among them, alert and claws raised, hanging there poised, armed and Homeric, each one a toy Achilles with his spear and helmet set among the display cabinets in Cartier's or Tiffany's." At times, the story jumps off the pages...a daring rescue at sea...a brush with death. But just as quickly, we're back slogging through the stuffy, semi-pretentious introspection and forced metaphor.

Though Nicolson gives a half-hearted attempt at soul-searching and introspection, in the end we just don't like him very much. Rather, we fully agree with the sea captain he has hired to keep him alive and sail from Southern England to the northern reaches of the Hebrides and Orkneys. Captain George Fairhurst provides the seamanship, and ultimately decides his employer/chronicler is a mere "plucker", someone who takes life's pleasures as they come and decidedly avoids shouldering the risk. The short novel is replete with Nicolson bounding off the ship to go rock-climbing, scuba diving, strolling about the latest landing, while Fairhurst is deep in the bowels of the diesel engines trying to keep the boat afloat and the whole project alive.

Given the title, I am disappointed Fairhurst didn't essay his experience.

Sadly, the character of the author, as revealed by his prattling narrative, does little to educate the reader regarding seamanship. Or perhaps, it serves as a warning and a signpost for other would-be voyagers on the type of character to avoid when going to sea.

If this book had been written by George Fairhurst, perhaps real knowledge and wisdom of the sea might have found their way to warrant ink and paper.

This is one of the least-enjoyable books on sailing I have read.

Ughh... I found reading the other reviews far more enjoyable than reading this book. Unfortunately, my husband didn't read them before buying the book for me for Christmas. I am a sailor, and was hoping for a nice short read over a holiday break that would entice me to this foreign land. Instead I found myself drowning in what felt like forced prose.

To be fair, I am also an engineer, and never particularly enjoyed all those Honors English classes either. It reminds me of one of those droning books I was forced to read, not something I would choose to read.

Remember the scene in Saving Private Ryan where the literate but naive tech sargeant quotes Emerson to the Tom Hanks character about the romance of war? Well, here we have an amateur sailor showing his well-read background off while breaking every rule of the sea. George, the friend and hired hand, must have had his hands full with this sea pup, heading out into gales, riding dinghies into heavy surf. Really, why read this book? George has some interesting comments about managing anxiety, they meet some interesting characters, but what you learn is what not to do on a coastwise passage and never to sail with an English major with a great memory for quotes. Oh Boy!

The book starts off in a promising fashion: a desire to sail to some of the wildest coasts in the British Isles leads to finding someone who knows what will be needed (George) and then finding a suitable boat for the voyage (the Auk). The Auk requires considerable refitting and off they go. There's a very nice description of the Skelligs off the southwestern coast of Ireland--a magnificent rocky pinnacle. Photographs would have been a useful addition here, but you can always visit Google.

Unfortunately, what starts happening makes it seem as if the author started spending his time below deck (which was not the case). There's more about himself and how things are going with George. The culminating disappointment is the side trip to St Kilda. St Kilda and its stupendous sea stacs certainly rank very high among the most dramatic places in the world, yet they get just a scant couple of pages here. There are some fine books about this Hebridean Outlier. The remoteness, grandeur, and history should make it worth a more prominent place in the book that the Skelligs, but the feeling you get is rather like a tourist at, say, the Grand Canyon who stops, takes a hurried picture, jumps back in his car and speeds away. So, for me, after the Skelligs, the author seems to start losing his way.

There are some excellent books out there on sailing that combine drama and introspection and nature. Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World is one of the classic examples of this; Nansen's Arctic voyages in the Fram provides another classic. Both Slocum and Nansen designed their own craft. Those two books perhaps point to what Seamanship could have been.

an excellent book for anyone who is fascinated by the outer hebrides as i am.