Book Review with Excerpts

by
Bill Haskell
My articles My booksMy videos
Follow on:

Sailing Alone

by Richard J. King

Reviewed by one-handed economist David Zetland

I read this 2023 book by Richard J. King on the recommendation of LS. It’s all about those sailors who take to the sea alone, with only wind (or muscle power). It’s about the mental and physical challenges, and how technology and society have added or (mostly) subtracted from them.

I thought the book was insightful. It definitely convinced me that sailing alone is for other people!

Here are some excerpts I marked:

1. Davison’s why-go paragraphs present, most importantly, the genuine, unabashedly aspirational belief that a sail across an ocean is a passage of greater significance, a vision quest, a morality tale for how we each should spend our time on Earth. Voyages alone out to sea, taken so intensely and seriously by their sailor-authors, represent one of the nearest and clearest of metaphors of any single human life spent on Earth. A copy-editor for a newspaper in Ohio named Robert Manry, who sailed a 13.5-foot boat across the Atlantic in 1965, wrote that he tried to craft his voyage “into something nearer to a work of art than my life on land had been.” This is perhaps why the single-handed voyage story is so compelling to so many of us—in its madness, pluck, pride, and in its “do not go gentle” journey of solitude before existential unknowns. No one on the planet is more often reminded of one’s meaninglessness in time than the solo sailor in a little boat bobbing about on the eternal indifferent deep.
2. The sea had emerged as a respite from humanity, finding thousands of survivors seeking new lives, a “Ulysses generation” as Rousmaniere put it: people who perceived the ocean as the last place on Earth that remained wild and untouched by war [after WWII, when solo sailing took off], still seemingly clean and free without national borders and government authorities.
3. In Sailing Alone Around the World (my review) Slocum regularly quipped about the satisfaction of his own company, “There was never a ship’s crew so well agreed.” Aboard Spray at last, Slocum enjoyed a voyage free from mutiny, domestic life, and living under the roof of another family member. At sea he could avoid any interpersonal conflict at all.
4. Don Quixote lives in his imagination and yearns to serve a world that has long since moved on. Go to nearly any marina today anywhere in the world and you’ll find a Don Quixote, half-mystic and half-fool, applying another coat of varnish to the rail of his old, beloved Rocinante.
5. Jones explained to me that they had stuck the famous sailor out to anchor in the current because he did not dress like the yachtsmen at the club, his boat “looked exactly like she had been doing what she had been doing,” and they wordlessly resented this easy-going solo circumnavigator who threatened their self-esteem and view of themselves as sailors.
6. Maybe, though, there is something deeper here, crudely summarized, in terms of social values in modern Pacific Island cultures: an emphasis on family, serving the community, and decentering the individual? … The social-science researcher Peter Belmi, a Filipino immigrant and professor in the business program at the University of Virginia, has found that people from wealthier backgrounds end up focusing more on themselves, whereas people from communities with fewer resources seek power or success to benefit others, since they have been raised relying on their communities to survive. “We don’t need others as much in order to survive,” said Belmi, referring to the thinking of those in power, “and so what it means to be a good person is to pursue your own identity, to figure out how you are unique, compared to others.
7. Since the 1960s, even as portions of the general public throughout the world began to really consider anthropogenic threats to the open-ocean environment, this has proven more the exception than the rule among single-handed mariners and the narratives they created: the sailing and adventure came first and then—often, but definitely not always—the environmental advocacy follows.
8. Adams said that despite what the world sees today as a powerful feminist act of being the first woman to sail the Pacific alone, she did not identify as a feminist then or now. Her why-go was not to prove anything about women. Adams feels as she always had, that this trip was simply something she wanted to do—and could. Her friend and fellow single-handed sailor Carol Baker, who herself in her late seventies still sails alone along the coast of the Pacific Northwest, told me that Adams has never had any axe to grind and “never had any patience at all with the feminist movement.”
9. An important point: Do I think that Peter Nichols was reflecting on how metaphorically appropriate this was, how sadly perfect his sinking boat was for his future book, even as he was stepping up the ladder onto the merchant ship that had answered his mayday? I do. I do not think, however, there is anything unethical or false in this. Aren’t we all doing this at some level all the time, always imagining an audience? It is part of that fair, old question: can you be a storyteller and be pure of endeavor at the same time? Is an adventurer, athlete, activist, politician, or even a social worker or teacher to be considered compromised, less “true,” if they know from the start that they are going to create something from it, craft some form of art or research project or any other form of creative or scholarly expression? Solo sailors present an exceptionally compelling case study in this fluidity of experience and art and story, because there is so long a tradition of the ancient mariner’s sea stories. There is no one to confirm the tale. For single-handers the stakes are often life and death, and the remains and the reality of a death are almost always unrecoverable and unknown. We will never know if Slocum’s Spray really did steer itself so well, if he did in fact escape pirates, or even how or when he died.
10. Put another way, it’s often quoted that the novelist Gabriel García Márquez once said: “Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.”
11. His voice is one of long experience, but also humility. In an appendix, Moitessier makes clear that the ocean’s weather and sea states are too variable and complex for full human knowledge. “The sea will always remain the great unknown,” he says. “It is sometimes enormous without being too vicious; not as high a week or a month later, it can become very dangerous because of either cross-swells, or an unexpected or completely new factor. The person who can write a really good book on the sea is probably not yet born, or else is already senile, because one would have to sail a hundred years to know it well enough.”
12. Since the 1990s, the technologies of GPS and satellite communications have enabled far more single-handers to go to sea and do so more safely, but the technologies have also encouraged a larger portion of mariners to avoid learning or practicing celestial navigation and wayfinding, which surely reduces their spiritual connections and their deeper awareness of the sea, the clouds, and the movement of the solar system. I used a paper chart, kept track of my dead reckoning, but I relied on that little electronic box far more than I would have liked. Bernard Moitessier would have been disappointed in me.
13. The satellite phone and now the internet, both still exceptionally expensive out at sea, provide emotional comfort, safety, weather, anchorage information, and gear assistance. But they also reduce the sailor’s focus on the sea and their self-reliant endeavor, which was supposedly why so many went out there in the first place.
14. I like having this ocean crossing in my pocket. [King sailed solo across the Atlantic.] It’s like when you touch your wallet or phone now and again just to make sure it’s there. I did not plan for this to be the impact of the passage, but it has remained an ego crutch for me, even though I almost never bring it out. I just put my fingers on it when I’m speaking with someone who I think is a condescending jerk. My “pocket reminder” is my five years of (kinda solo) travel.
15. Many single-handed writers use “we” when talking in their narratives about their progress, referring to themselves and their boat. This makes sense, because it shows humility and the recognition that this couldn’t be done without a good boat. It was certainly true for me that Fox tolerated its new owner, caring for me far more patiently than I deserved.
16. Slocum, Pidgeon, and other well-known single-handers were relatively poor. They did nearly all the work themselves on shoe-string budgets. In the countries they lived in and the ports they visited, though, as white men, even without much money, they had a path to achieve what they wanted if they had the talent and gumption. Any individual and cultural discouragement they felt before departing was but a scratch on the barricades that had been constructed in front of, say, an African American man trying to build a boat and sail around the world in the 1890s, or 1920s, or 1950s—and still today.
17. The footage from the news cameras at the time Laura Dekker looks calm, partly confused, very young, but also maturely, mildly amused by the absurdity of the attention. She wrote in her personal notes at the time that she felt terribly depressed and exhausted by the trials, writing “It’s a good thing I’m a fine actress.” The Dutch Council for Child Protection saw Dekker’s idea primarily in terms of child neglect and seemingly a fear that this might break the compulsory education system in the country. (So apt!)
18. I took solace from wisdom more useful than the texts of the weather service: the words of the lobster captain that I had worked for part-time just before I left on the trip. While we were out hauling pots one morning, I asked him if it was going to stop raining. He said, “Always does.”
19. Conrad wrote vivid, accurate, and extravagant descriptions of waves and storms—perhaps more passionately than any other writer before or since writing in English (his third language after Polish and French). Here are a few sentences from Typhoon: It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one’s kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally, as it were—without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him.
20. It is foremost the storm that is the proving ground for the individual, not the doldrums or the sharks or the logistics or the ship avoidance or even the loneliness. The solo sailor might interpret their safe emergence out of a storm as a success born of experience, toughness, personal philosophy, technological expertise, the good boat, the aid of one’s ancestors, the mercy of their god, or just merely dumb luck. Or a mixture of all these things.
21. Looking ahead toward the future of solo sailing, cruising or racing, regardless of what type of boat people choose to go on and at whatever speed and however connected to shore, the single-hander will always return home with a deeper appreciation for a single human’s smallness in time and on Earth. Sailing a small boat at sea is, especially for the cruisers, a commitment to a low-impact lifestyle that teaches one to adapt and pay careful attention to the natural world. Robin Lee Graham put it well after his five years on Dove in the late 1960s: “One learns from the sea how little one needs, not how much.
22. During one of Ellen MacArthur’s first ocean passages across the North Sea as a teenager, she tried to bottle up some bioluminescence to bring home. “I began to realize that the beauty of the water can’t be taken away or captured,” she wrote, “It can only properly be appreciated first hand.
23. I too was almost killed by not only a steamship, but more significantly by a containership, arguably the twenty-first century’s greatest symbol of capitalism, over-consumption, and the linear economy. Could we extrapolate, as literary types are wont to do, that I was a wee symbol of Western culture and so far it has been a near miss, to be killed by our own products, our own emissions, but we have been granted a bit more time to do something with the life we’ve been left?
24. Then what is courage?” she wrote. “An understanding and acceptance; but an acceptance without resignation, mark you, for courage is a fighting quality. It is the ability to make mistakes and profit by them, to fail and start again, to take heartaches, setbacks and disappointments in your stride, to face every day of your life and every humdrum, trivial little detail of it and realize you don’t amount to much, and accept the fact with equanimity, and not let it deter your efforts.

I recommend this book to sailor. For everyone else, maybe not? FOUR STARS.