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However many times it has been done, the act of casting off the
warps and letting go one's last hold of the shore at the start of a
voyage has about it something solemn and irrevocable, like
marriage, for better or for worse. Mostly Mischief's ordinary title
belies four more extraordinary voyages made by H.W. 'Bill' Tilman
covering almost 25,000 miles in both Arctic and Antarctic waters.
The first sees the pilot cutter Mischief retracing the steps of
Elizabethan explorer John Davis to the eastern entrance to the
Northwest Passage. Tilman and a companion land on the north coast
and make the hazardous crossing of Bylot Island while the remainder
of the crew make the eventful passage to the southern shore to
recover the climbing party. Back in England, Tilman refuses to
accept the condemnation of Mischief's surveyor, undertaking costly
repairs before heading back to sea for a first encounter with the
East Greenland ice. Between June 1964 and September 1965, Tilman is
at sea almost without a break. Two eventful voyages to East
Greenland in Mischief provide the entertaining bookends to his
account of the five-month voyage in the Southern Ocean as skipper
of the schooner Patanela. Tilman had been hand-picked by the
expedition leader as the navigator best able to land a team of
Australian and New Zealand climbers and scientists on Heard Island,
a tiny volcanic speck in the Furious Fifties devoid of safe
anchorages and capped by an unclimbed glaciated peak. In a separate
account of this successful voyage, Colin Putt describes the
expedition as unique - the first ascent of a mountain to start
below sea level.
Far to the north of Russia, across the cold waters of the Barents
Sea, lies the desolate archipelago known as Franz Josef Land.
Hidden away still further to the north and west of those islands is
one of the most inaccessible and least known seas on this planet -
the Queen Victoria Sea. In his fifth book of voyages, Roger Taylor
describes his successful attempt to sail singlehanded into those
lonely and usually icebound waters in his largely self-built and
engineless yacht Mingming II. On the way he weathers the most
northerly point of the Svalbard islands before sailing due east
along 81 DegreesNorth to the north-west coast of Franz Josef Land.
Pack-ice would normally render such a route impossible. This
voyage, which linked the endpoints of Taylor's two previous Arctic
voyages to the north-west and north-east of Svalbard, marks the
culmination of nearly fifty years of small-boat ocean sailing.
In his third book singlehanded sailor Roger Taylor ventures to even
more remote seas aboard his tiny junk-rigged yacht Mingming. The
first voyage, across the North Atlantic to Baffin Island, is
curtailed when Taylor is injured in a storm in the Davis Strait.
Unwilling to sail on into the ice with a broken rib, he turns round
and re-crosses the Atlantic to Plymouth, completing a non-stop
voyage of over 4000 miles. The second voyage takes the reader to
Jan Mayen, Spitsbergen and on to 80 DegreesNorth, virtually as
close as it is possible to sail to the North Pole. During these two
voyages Taylor spends well over four months at sea, observing and
reflecting on the sea itself, its wildlife, its attraction, and
man's uneasy relationship with it.
Sailing his newly-created yacht Mingming II, Roger ventures into
the Baring Sea and explores the islands of north-eastern Svalbard.
During the 55-day voyage to waters seldom sailed in, he encounters
everything from walruses to inquisitive humpback whales to massive
ice cliffs, and nearly rescues a beautiful Russian girl from Bear
Island. On his way back he makes his third visit to the island of
Jan Mayen, deep in the Norwegian Sea, and there fulfils a long-held
ambition. Acutely observational and well-laced with Taylor's wry
humour, the book is as much an exploration of what is possible with
one man, one simple boat and one home-made sail, as a journey to
some of the planet's bleakest and most beautiful islands.
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