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.