Seaworthy
Adrift with William Willis in the Golden Age of Rafting
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- USD 7.99
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- USD 7.99
Descripción editorial
Welcome to the daring, thrilling, and downright strange adventures of William Willis, one of the world’s original extreme sportsmen. Driven by an unfettered appetite for personal challenge and a yen for the path of most resistance, Willis mounted a single-handed and wholly unlikely rescue in the jungles of French Guiana and then twice crossed the broad Pacific on rafts of his own design, with only housecats and a parrot for companionship. His first voyage, atop a ten-ton balsa monstrosity, was undertaken in 1954 when Willis was sixty. His second raft, having crossed eleven thousand miles from Peru, found the north shore of Australia shortly after Willis’s seventieth birthday. A marvel of vigor and fitness, William Willis was a connoisseur of ordeal, all but orchestrating short rations, ship-wreck conditions, and crushing solitude on his trans-Pacific voyages.
He’d been inspired by Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl’s bid to prove that a primitive raft could negotiate the open ocean. Willis’s trips confirmed that a primitive man could as well. Willis survived on rye flour and seawater, sang to keep his spirits up, communicated with his wife via telepathy, suffered from bouts of temporary blindness, and eased the intermittent pain of a double hernia by looping a halyard around his ankles and dangling upside-down from his mast.
Rich with vivid detail and wry humor, Seaworthy is the story of a sailor you’ve probably never heard of but need to know. In an age when countless rafts were adrift on the waters of the world, their crews out to shore up one theory of ethno-migration or tear down another, Willis’s challenges remained refreshingly personal. His methods were eccentric, his accomplishments little short of remarkable. Don’t miss the chance to meet this singular monk of the sea.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1953, the 60-year-old Willis sailed a homemade balsa-wood raft over 4,000 miles across the Pacific from Peru to American Samoa, accompanied only by a cat and a foul-mouthed parrot. Novelist Pearson (Glad News of the Natural World) gives a rousing retelling of how, along the way, Willis endured a hernia and a perforated ulcer, sewed up an artery ruptured by a shark's tooth and survived on seawater after running out of fresh. He details Willis's eccentric diets, yogic breathing exercises and mystic spirituality, his half-baked, spur-of-the-moment planning, and the uncanny luck and superhuman hardiness that saw him through the rafting crises. Pearson places Willis in the context of others who have embarked upon Kon-Tiki like epic raft excursions: Willis's was probably the most daring and quixotic of the bunch, undertaken not to advance a crackpot archeological theory (one Mormon-led expedition set out to prove that ancient Israelites had reached Hawaii from California), but simply to deny his own mortality. Pearson tells this incredible adventure tale in a breezy but gripping style, steeped in the lore of the sea and the perverse wisdom of a real-life ancient mariner. Photos.