Evanston: the Northwest Passage
Evanston: the Northwest Passage
Usually when I find myself starting to skim a book, I put it aside and read something else. However, I wanted to learn details of Willy de Roos’s 1977 passage through the Northwest Passage and so I did skim his book. Sailing and writing are skills not necessarily found in one person; and the Northwest Passage isn’t about sailing anyway, but, as Rear Admiral G. S. Ritchie points out in his introduction, about the art of pilotage: steering a vessel past obstacles near land. Willy de Roos deserves respect for his preparation and determination; but the book is dull.
It does not start well, with Mr. de Roos discussing on the first page his other “hobbies” before he took up sailing. Motorcycles. Painting. Toy trains. The book is translated from the French, so perhaps it reads differently in the original; but, as I expect you know, I don’t consider sailing a hobby.
So what did I learn?
Willy de Roos was born and lived in Belgium, but for unexplained ‘administrative reasons’ is a Dutch citizen and his 45’ steel ketch, WILLIWAW, flew the Dutch flag.
For more than half the passage, he had a crew, a young man, Jean-Louis, who left at the first opportunity, flying out from Gjøa, named after Amundsen’s ship.
Even in 1977 there were more people in the Canadian far north than I expected.
The nature of the passage is revealed in a chapter title: “Water in the Fuel!”
There are no open horizons, no space, only a lot of things to be avoided and which you bump into or which bump into you.
I’m very glad I didn’t ever go up there.
The edition of NORTH-WEST PASSAGE I read dates from 1980 and includes a blurb on the dust jacket of “Another Great Story of Arctic Exploration”, ICE, by Tristan Jones. Amusingly it quotes a gush of hyperbole from Lloyd’s List, “The book really is a poetic saga, ranking with such writing as the Odyssey in its sprit, with the great Icelandic sagas in literature and with Slocum and Conrad for sheer literary vigour. It is a book far above the ordinary run of solo voyage literature and one to inspire the spirit of man.”
Except that it is now known that Tristan Jones was a fraud and ICE a complete fabrication.
I knew a man back then who named his son Tristan after Mr. Jones, whose real first name was Arthur and who was born in Liverpool, not romantically aboard a ship at sea near Tristan de Cunha as he claimed. Tristan is actually a rather nice name; but I’ve since wondered if that man ever regretted his choice.
A while ago someone sent me a link to a story about Tristan Jones and Webb Chiles.
The self-named Tristan was sitting in a bar with drinking companions, one of whom told him that I had written disparagingly of Bernard Moitissier, which I don’t believe I did. The relevant excerpt from THE OPEN BOAT can be found below.
Tristan Jones, who was drunk, bellowed, “Bring me the head of Webb Chiles. Bring me the head of Webb Chiles.” And toppled over backwards from his bar stool.
From THE OPEN BOAT:
I saw Moitessier more frequently, both in Papeete and on Moorea, where I had dinner with him and his family in their shack at the head of Cook's Bay. I admire Moitessier for dropping out of the nonstop-around-the-world race and making the long voyage. But meeting him was a sad experience. He caused me to recall Housman's poem "To an Athlete Dying Young," which suggests that it is more fortunate to die immediately after a grand achievement than to live long years with only remembered glory.
In early 1979 Bernard Moitessier was a very unhappy man. Of moderate height, lean, apparently fit, he had not done much real sailing for a decade, not since the long voyage ended in Papeete in 1969. His ulcer was bothering him again. On the shelf above his mattress stood a carton of Gelusil. And I do not believe it is a betrayal of any confidence to state that he is married to a woman who hates boats and who prefers to live in squalor ashore, rather than aboard the thirty-nine-foot steel ketch Joshua at her mooring in the bay.
Bernard was unhappy in that resigned way of a man who knows he has lived beyond his time and can see no way out of his unhappiness, not because there is no way, but because he has no will to take it. That was his judgment of himself. "I have no will anymore," he said to me several times. And once, almost enviously, "But you, you are still young and strong." I was thirty-seven.
Neither he nor Helene liked French Polynesia: not Moorea, which some consider to be the most beautiful of islands; certainly not Tahiti. And they loathed Papeete, which they visited only for medical treatment. They did not even speak well of the Tuamotus, where they had lived for years on the island of Ahe.
As a group of us sat on mats at Moitessier's, eating spaghetti he had cooked, one young Frenchman told me, "God must certainly look after you in that little boat at sea." To which I replied, "God does not bail." And then I turned to Bernard. "Did you expect God to take care of you during a voyage?" He thought for a moment before replying, "No. But sometimes a little god entered in and made everything go well for a while."
He also said that initially he had given to the pope the royalties to the book about the long voyage. He subscribes to the "Money is the root of all evil" oversimplification and did not want to taint the voyage. Although he is not a practicing Catholic, a decade ago the pope seemed to him to be the symbol of the last vestiges of the spiritual in the world. If I understood him correctly, he now keeps the royalties himself.
Every morning before the wind came up, the hills around Cook's Bay echoed the sound of Bernard chipping rust from Joshua. But his work was desultory, just something to fill time. There was the boat, still sound. There was the pass to the open sea. And there was the unhappy, burnt-out man.
On the morning I was to sail back to Papeete, Bernard rowed past Chidiock on his way to Joshua. We wished one another well. I looked at him and wondered whether if I were still alive at age fifty-four, I would be like him. Better that the flame has burned once than not at all. But better still, as Housman said, that one dies before it flickers out.
Saturday, June 8, 2013