Thursday, April 24, 2008

Near Death On The High Seas

Reviewed by El Bicho

“…that sense of the full awfulness of the sea,” a line taken from Melville’s Moby Dick, is on full display in this anthology from Vintage Books. Contained within is a group of excerpts from sailing-disaster stories throughout the years, presenting a greatest hits collection of dangerous ocean tales complied by Cecil Kuhne, former whitewater rafting guide and author of nine books.

Near Death on the High Seas opens with Steven Callahan’s Adrift, a record of his being lost at sea for 76 days. It boggles the mind of a landlubber like myself on how to handle an ordeal like that. I can’t even fathom going to sleep alone on a boat as it continues sailing let alone waking up as Callahan did to “a deafening explosion” that leads to his being “thrown into the path of a rampaging river.”

Not that having someone by your side is a guarantee of safety. In Gordon Chaplin’s Dark Wind he and his girlfriend Susan sailed to the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Their journey was romantic in the beginning as they found paradise together. Unfortunately, they decided to stay in their boat rather than go ashore as a typhoon hit. They both ended up floating in the ocean, holding onto each other as large waves crashed down on them. One minute they seemed fine. Then, they were underwater and Susan drifted away into the darkness. Chaplin describes his helplessness to do anything about it: “...the next wave curled around me, wrapped me up, and did what they wanted with me.” It’s not clear what happened and likely he wasn’t fully aware himself even though his survivor’s guilt caused him to replay the events repeatedly.

The most famous sailing story in the collection is Kon-Tiki. Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl who, along with a small crew, attempted to take a raft from South America to Polynesia in an effort to explain archaeological evidence that linked the two locations. A documentary of their trip won an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1951.

Some sailors created their own adventures like Sir Francis Chichester who in 1966 at the age of 65 tried to be the first man to circumnavigate the globe west to east in Gipsy Moth Circles The World. Others took part in organized races, like Pete Goss who in 1996 was competing in a nonstop, single-handed round the world race when he risked his life and headed into a hurricane to rescue fellow competitor Raphael Dinelli, which he details in Close to the Wind.

Most of the excerpts read more like newspaper accounts as the writing is very matter of fact and economical. That’s not to say the stories aren’t compelling because they are, but there’s almost no insight into these men’s minds for those of us who don’t understand what drives them. For non-nautical types the boating jargon might be a little tough to understand but it gives an authenticity to the writers’ voices.  A glossary would have been ideal, but they are easy to look up. While not as many, there are women who participate in sailing; however, none are heard from in this book for some reason.

The most amazing part of the book is that none of the writers exhibit bitterness towards God or fate or nature at what has befallen. They readily accept the circumstances as par for the course. Steven Callahan might best explain their logical acceptance in his perfect description of the ocean: “...she is merely there, immense, powerful, and indifferent.”

…High Seas offers a great series of adventures for readers who sail and those who sit in the comfort of their armchair.

Posted by nbennett at 05:52 PM

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