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The Sailor's Classics library introduces a new generation of readers to the best books ever written about small boats under sail
In the autumn of 1968, Donald Crowhurst set sail from England to participate in the first single-handed nonstop around-the-world sailboat race. Eight months later, his boat was found in the mid-Atlantic, intact but with no one on board. In this gripping reconstruction, journalists Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall tell the story of Crowhurst's ill-fated voyage.
No one meets the ocean on quite such intimate terms as the sailor in a small boat. No one experiences a solitude more absolute than that encountered by long-distance single-handed sailors like Joshua Slocum or Bernard Moitessier. Since the early nineteenth century, when Byron and Shelley put to sea in their own boats in order to set themselves adrift in nature at its most turbulent and unruly, writing and sailing have gone hand in hand.
There have been writers who sailed—Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hilaire Belloc, Jack London, E.B. White, William Golding, John Barth, Thomas McGuane, Geoffrey Wolff—along with a multitude of sailors who wrote, from Slocum and John Voss to Tristan Jones and the father-son team of Daniel and David Hays. After nearly two hundred years, the literature of small-boat voyaging under sail is enormous, and every publishing season sees more additions to the list.
It is the function of The Sailor’s Classics to recognize and celebrate the relatively small number of truly important books in this library. Some have been chosen because the voyages they describe are themselves of unignorable merit; some because the sheer brilliance of their writing demands their inclusion. Most combine in equal parts serious nautical interest with literary excellence.
As general editor of the series, I am always trying to keep in mind the bookshelves on my own 35-foot ketch. A proper ship’s library isn’t restricted to books with boats in them, of course; I wouldn’t happily set sail for more than a day or two without novels by Dickens, Trollope, Evelyn Waugh, and Saul Bellow, and poetry by Pope, Keats, Tennyson, Hardy, Philip Larkin, and Robert Lowell. The big question is which small-boat voyages can stand up in such exalted literary company? Not very many is the honest answer, and half the function of an editor is to know what he must reject. The books that won’t figure in the series are as important as those that will.
We won’t be publishing quaint curiosities. Period charm does not make a classic, and though I have a soft spot for, say, Nathaniel Bishop’s Four Months in a Sneak Box (1879), and an even softer one for Maurice Griffiths’ The Magic of the Swatchways (1932), they won’t be found in The Sailor’s Classics. Nor will the many salty “yarns” full of the faded yo-ho-ho of generations past. Whimsical accounts of family vacations afloat (the obligatory adventure with the dog and the dinghy...) will be left to gather dust in peace. So will all those melancholy solo voyages in which the writers go to sea in order to discover themselves.
There remain the books whose vigor has not dimmed with the passage of time, whose voice is as alive and meaningful now as it was on their first publication—the books that should be essential reading for every literate sailor. No. 2 in the series is Richard Maury’s The Saga of Cimba, first published in 1939; No. 4 is The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, first published in 1971. They are perfect examples of what I mean: one a loving close-up portrait of the sea in all its moods, written by a master mariner with an astonishing literary gift; the other a study, by two journalists, of a man who lost touch with reality during the course of the first singlehanded round-the-world yacht race. Each—in its very different way—is an indispensable book. Each contributes an important thread to the larger pattern in the carpet, which is the great, various, and intricate design of the literature of small-boat sailing.
The Sailor’s Classics will surprise our readers with its richness and complexity. Since Homer’s Odyssey, the voyage has supplied one of the classic forms in literature—both as a grand metaphor for life itself in the long passage from birth to death, and as a sequence of tests and adventures. Equally, the boat (and especially the small boat) has long stood as a symbol of selfhood—a fragile ark bearing the journeying soul to its destination. Hilaire Belloc put the matter beautifully in The Cruise of the Nona:
The cruising of a boat here and there is very much what happens to the soul of a man in a larger way... We are granted great visions, we suffer intolerable tediums, we come to no end of the business, we are lonely out of sight of England, we make astonishing landfalls—and the whole rigmarole leads us along no whither, and yet is alive with discovery, emotion, adventure, peril and repose. Those five nouns should be emblazoned above The Sailor’s Classics: it is from the interweaving of discovery, emotion, adventure, peril, and repose that the pattern of sailing literature is made, and we shall do our best to honor each and every one in our selection of the best books ever written about life aboard small boats at sea. Jonathan Raban
Series Editor
March 2001
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
58 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Sea-Tinged Madness,
By J. H. Minde "Everything I need is right here" (Boca Raton, Florida and Brooklyn, New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
This review is from: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst (Paperback)
A true "Sailor's Classic." Reading this book it is impossible not to feel compassion for Donald Crowhurst who set out to win the Golden Globe challenge as the first man to nonstop circumnavigate the world alone in a sailboat. Crowhurst's early years are well-documented and give us a picture of a driven and compulsive man with some serious character flaws and an aversion to failure. Yet failure was a condition which dogged him throughout his life. Crowhurst's decision to undertake the circumnavigation was both dramatic and ill-considered. With relatively little sailing experience and a lot of bluff he convinced his sponsors to fund the building of a revolutionary trimaran, the "Teignmouth Electron" equipped with all manner of electronic wizardry (Crowhurst had invented a sort of early GPS, the Navicator, in the mid-60's). Unfortunately, the "Teignmouth Electron" was never properly completed, the race deadline having intervened, and Crowhurst sailed in a boat that was unfinished, poorly provisioned, and untested, having done miserably in what passed for sea trials. Setting out on the latest possible day, Crowhurst found himself limping along at a ridiculously slow pace three weeks later. Plagued by equipment failures, the "Teignmouth Electron" was taking water due to design flaws, and had no real chance of completing the race. Having staked all on a successful outcome, the tension and isolation of his predicament attacked Crowhurst's mind. In a fit of brilliant madness, Donald Crowhurst spent hours working out and logging false positions, sun sights, weather reports, and sailing notations to make it seem he was circling the earth while in fact he meandered pointlessly through the South Atlantic for months. He even secretly put in to port for repairs, a fact which was not discovered until after the race, when his "real" logs were reviewed by investigators. Crowhurst's position reports and daily runs were diligently reported onshore; he was (falsely) credited with a record run of 243 miles in one day, a record he actually matched in reality once he decided to begin sailing in earnest again. In the meantime, for all the world knew, Crowhurst was going to be the winner of the Golden Globe. As he turned toward home, the media hoopla grew wilder, and so did his delusions. His log entries degenerated into irrational philosophic and religious ramblings in which he began to believe himself God. In the end, tortured by his demons and consumed by guilt, Donald Crowhurst jumped into the sea, leaving his boat to sail on without him. Brilliantly and sensitively written, without tendering excuses the authors Tomalin and Hall never lose sight of the essential humanity and frailty of their subject, as well as his consuming but undirected brilliance. Relying heavily on Crowhurst's logs, it is devastating to watch the man's mind unravel in the face of his aloneness. Crowhurst's singlemindedness got him far, but it ultimately proved his undoing as he was unable to see any but the options he had limited himself to, the ultimate one being his own destruction. As Camus wrote, "In the end there is but one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide." Crowhurst's answer is his legacy.
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
GET IT WHILE YOU CAN,
By A Customer
This review is from: Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst (Paperback)
If you're interested in the complexities of the human heart and mind, this book is for you. It's superbly written, well paced and detailed without ever being tedious, and it gets extraordinarily close to Donald Crowhurst the man--an unusual and intelligent person who took a few wrong turns and kept going. There was so much at stake in his journey, and thinking it all through sensibly and accepting the consequences of poor preparation proved to be too difficult for him. In the end he became so distressed and confused that he lost sight of himself... He was never able to see that the truth about human life can't be computed or worked out like an equation--it is not susceptible to logical proofs, because the variables are manifold and not easily understood, and people are both more and less than logical... His need, clearly, was to go home and start again, but the penalty for doing so seemed too high to him. So, in refusing to accept a lesser defeat he suffered a far greater one. You can't help rooting for Donald, and you can't help feeling sorry for him.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Man and His Ship,
This review is from: Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst (Paperback)
Donald Crowhurst left England on October 31, 1968 to participate in a around-the-world, non-stop, solo sailing race. He was the next to last competitor to leave, just before the deadline. His boat, the Teignmouth Electron, was a trimaran. He sailed at a disappointingly slow speed for a while and then reported a few amazingly fast days. Radio communications halted as he approached the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, and nothing was heard from him for 111 days. Then radio communications resumed as he re-entered the South Atlantic, around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America. He was leading the race, and seemed assured of the trophy and the cash prize of £5,000. Then, on July 10, 1969, his boat was found drifting in the Atlantic, with no sign of Crowhurst on board. This book is the sad detective story of this voyage. Crowhurst never left the Atlantic Ocean, let alone sail around the world. He left massive documentation which showed that he had cheated. Presumably, rather than complete his fraudulent voyage, he stepped into the ocean and left the evidence for people to examine. Although these facts are known prior to even picking up the book, the author still comes to a very surprising conclusion. This is a book about what was going on in the mind of this sad man who seems to have gone mad. It is a fascinating and worthwhile read.
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