Although he died in 1994, Bernard Moitessier keeps popping up in my life.
For those who care about such things, Moitessier is famous for participating in, and then withdrawing from, the 1968-69 Golden Globe Race, the first solo sailing race around the world. The rules were simple: Leave from England, sail south and then east around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, Australia’s Cape Leeuwin, South America’s Cape Horn, and back up the Atlantic to England – without stopping and without assistance.
Moitessier did not simply withdraw. He rounded Cape Horn with an excellent chance of winning. But instead of aiming his boat toward England, he kept going, detouring long enough to slingshot a message onto a boat in Cape Town harbor that he was abandoning the race “because I am happy at sea and perhaps to save my soul.” He finally dropped anchor at Tahiti, after sailing alone nonstop one and a half times around the world, a total distance of more than 37,000 miles.
I first encountered Moitessier in a book about the race by Peter Nichols titled A Voyage for Madmen, published in 2001. Earlier this year, while browsing at the Bangor Public Library for something to read, I picked up a novel about a fictional sailing family: Before the Wind, by Jim Lynch. The family’s two sons are named Bernard and Joshua, after Moitessier and Joshua Slocum. But it is the daughter, Ruby, who is the preternaturally gifted sailor, and who breaks her father’s heart by pulling a Moitessier in a local race, purposely failing to finish. It’s a good novel, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in boats and the sea.
The April 2017 edition of Cruising World magazine, which I picked up in a waiting room this summer, mentions Moitessier in an article on Cape Horn. I had never read The Long Way, Moitessier’s book about the Golden Globe Race, until I spotted a copy at the Rockland Yacht Club a few weeks later, lying in wait for me to borrow.
Moitessier was born in Hanoi in 1925 to French parents, and spent much of his youth crewing on Chinese junks all over Southeast Asia. He was something of a mystic, and he lived life on his own terms. During his months alone at sea, he often fabricated conversations between himself and some unnamed devil’s advocate presence, perhaps another part of his consciousness. Some of these conversations appear in the pages of his book, including this one:
“Yet it is thanks to the modern world that you have a good boat with winches, Tergal sails, and a solid metal hull that doesn’t give you any worries.”
However, these effects last for a short time only levitra discounts and get recovered in a few days only. As an example, an online pharmacy is easier than you assume for tadalafil overnight buying. Both of these drugs contain sildenafil citrate, which is an FDA-approved ingredient for curing impotence in men. viagra shop online The real man doesn’t expect a woman online cialis sale or anyone else to validate him; he validates himself.
“That’s true, but it is because of the modern world, because of its so-called ‘civilization’ and its so-called ‘progress’ that I take off with my beautiful boat.”
“If we listened to people like you, more or less vagabonds and barefoot tramps, we would not have got beyond the bicycle.”
“That’s just it; we would ride bikes in the cities, there wouldn’t be these thousands of cars with hard, closed people all alone in them, we would see youngsters arm in arm, hear laughter and singing, see nice things in people’s faces; joy and love would be reborn everywhere, birds would return to the few trees left in our streets and we would replant the trees the Monster killed. Then we would feel real shadows and real colors and real sounds; our cities would get their souls back, and people too.”
Moitessier wrote these words in 1969 – before the first Earth Day, before the Arab Oil Embargo, before drive-through ATMs and drive-by shootings. How prophetic they seem now. As Houston flooded and bumper-to-bumper traffic crept northward out of Florida, one could not help but wonder if things could have been different. Had we not been busy for the past five decades paving over wetlands and building freeways and burning fossil fuels without a thought to the impact on the ecosystem, perhaps Harvey and Irma would have been smaller and less devastating.
And perhaps if a significant number of us bicycled in our cities and lived closer to our workplaces, we would be less frazzled and fractious in our dealings with one another, less inclined to assume the worst about those with whom we disagree, and more appreciative of the daily wonders our planet provides for us, despite our abuses.
It makes one wonder: Who are the real madmen?
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