So who else likes these kinds of stories?
Here a list of one's I've read;
Tristan Jones is an old sea salt and has written
The Incredible Voyage and
Outward Leg. The last is him one-legged in a tri-maran.
117 days adrift is a fantastic story of shipwreck and survival.
Fastnet Force 10 The most incredible adventure story ever. Bad weather made the '79 Fastnet race in the North Atlantic into a disaster. Marvelous reading.
Atlantic Circle A lady accompanies her husband across the Atlantic ocean in a small sailing boat. The part where she's buying Tupperware. Lots and lots of Tupperware is hysterical.
River-Horse This guy took a boat through the Huson up the Erie canal. I don't know how he managed to make such an exciting trip sound boring but he managed.
Watersteps through France Simply wonderful. A couple takes a boat through the canals in France. The food descriptions are particularly compelling.
Dove Can you imagine sailing alone around the world when you're 16?
Fiction;
Life of Pi Rather fantastic story of shipwreck...with a tiger.
Robinson Caruso I was surprised and pleased with the religious overtones in this book.
Message edited by its author, Jun 5, 2008, 11:50am.
Atlantic Circle is going on my wish list right away!
Dove - he was a WEIRD guy though, wasn't he
If you look at my genre - travel section I have quite a lot of boaty ones... I do love them even though I really don't like to sail myself!
Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls is a good anthology of true shipwreck stories, from Alexander Selkirk to World War II. Not all stories pertain specifically to shipwrecks, but it is still an interesting read.
4: Definately Lorax, 'Sailing Alone Around the World' is a fantastic book.
Another book I'm a couple of chapters into is '
In the Heart of the Sea' by Nathaniel Philbrick about the wreck of the whaleship essex, a little slow but promising.
Though it's slightly off target for this thread I can heartily recommend '
Stargazing' by Peter Hill, which is a memoir of a young Scottish Lighthouse keeper in the 1970's.
Rich
For fiction, the grand-daddy of them all is Gulliver's Travels.
For something true and contempory, I've enjoyed reading the blog of the German adventurer and writer Holger Jackobsen. You can follow him here:
http://www.wownet.net/~holger/blog/voyag...Gabriel García Márquez's
Relato de un náufrago (Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor) is a factual account of one man's ordeal as he drifts for 10 days on a raft in the Caribbean, having fallen off a Colombian destroyer with a cargo of contraband. I read the story a good 15 years ago, but it is still quite vivid in my mind. I say the account is based on fact, but García Márquez's writing really makes the tale come alive.
Further fiction:
Robinson Crusoe is the obvious one.
Kidnapped includes a gripping account of shipwreck off western Scotland. Then there are
Joseph Conrad's novels, most of which are steeped in the sea:
Lord Jim and the short
The Secret Sharer are two favourites of mine.
The non-fiction shipwreck story that most impressed me was
Endurance, about Shackleton's exploits in the southern oceans.
#2. I've heard that solo around the world sailors are frequently so asocial that being alone for extended periods of time is the only place they feel comfortable.
I feel the same way about mountain climbing. Love to read about it. Would never consider doing it.
#4. Oh no! It's just that the modern stuff is what I've read.
#6. I loved
Mayflower so
In the Heart of the Sea is going on my wish list.
#7. Thanks for the link. That looks really interesting.
#8. I'm on an antarctic kick at the moment so I'll have to read the Shackleton book as soon as I whittle down my TBR read pile a bit.
Thanks everybody. I feel like it's Christmas!
others;
The Terror Dan Simmons is a gifted writer who labors over his craft. Not alot of sailing here though because they spend years frozen in the artic ice.
Castaway Neither shipwrecked nor marooned but still fits in this catagory I think. There's something about
Lucy Irvine's writing I find incredibly compelling. She agrees to accompany a man to a desert island for a year for 'fun.' Sounds like a dream come true, right? I suppose, as long as you don't forget the antibiotics.
Black Wave is a recent book from the Early Reviewer program. It's the story of a Californian family on an extended sea voyage whose catamaran wrecks on a reef in the Pacific. If you're interested, there's a bunch of reviews with very mixed opinions posted on LT.
Minerva Reef by Olaf Ruhen is the true story of a group of Tongans shipwrecked on Minerva Reef near Fiji in 1962.
How about
The Ice Master? Another shipwreck in the Arctic.
By the way, I asked in Name That Book if anybody remembered a book describing short inland canoe or other small boat trips on rivers and lakes in New England and one or two in southeastern Virginia. I read it in the 1970s or perhaps the 1980s. Can't remember the title, but it was a very pleasant read.
17 I bet that's a Paul Theroux - he comes from New England and likes going around in his canoe...
>19 Sorry you lose your bet its by Peter Marshall from Wales. His name showed up in the Touchstone so I didn't put it in the message and I should have.
The modern day, non-fiction super-adventure of
(Kon Tiki) by ((Thor Heyerdahl))...
Balsa raft construction and sailing across the Pacific to prove an archeological migration theory. Even has a climax of how-to-survive wrecking on a reef.
Try, try again...
since it let me post before I was a member, guess I am stuck with unable to edit #21.
So #22
The Kon-Tiki Expeditionone of my fav all-time adventure stories...
Logbook for Grace: Whaling brig Daisy, 1912-1913 . Young naturalist Robert Cushman Murphy writes to his new bride from a whaling ship in the Antarctic region. (Time-Life republished this oldie but touchstones doesn't seem to recognize...)
Delilah by Marcus Goodrich. A gritty (fictional) account of life on a coal-burning (decrepit) ship in WW II Asia.
Message edited by its author, Sep 22, 2009, 8:09pm.
I recently read/reviewed
Caliban's Shore, about the shipwreck of a British East Indiaman on the southeastern coast of Africa in 1782. Pretty interesting, but, as some tend to be, also somewhat padded out.
I also recall a book about the wreck of the
Medusa called
Death Raft, which, after the initially compelling story and human drama, also descends into repetition.
Message edited by its author, Sep 22, 2009, 2:44pm.
>25 I haven't read
Caliban's Shore yet, although it's on my TBR list, but although you were luke warm about this one, I reckon Stephen Taylor's other book
Storm and Conquest to be a super read - thoroughly recommend it: about the clash between France and England in the Indian Ocean in and around 1809, including the Mauritius campaign which was used by Patrick O'Brian as the basis of his Aubrey/Maturin novel
The Mauritius Command.
One of my favourite books in this genre is Peter Nichols's
A Voyage for Madmen, the story of the first non-stop round the world solo yacht race. Gripping stuff, even when knowing the result!
I suggest Capsize: A Story of Survival in the North Atlantic by
Alain BombardThe author asked to be left in the middle of the Atlantic on a rubber dinghy with poorly sea gear and no food, to prove that most of the time shipwrecked people die because they panicked.
I like to read sailing stories too, I think so I don't have to do the work but can get the thrill (which is why I like to read travel books). I don't remember the names of all of the best books, but there was one about the race around the world when they all went down to the roaring forties close to Antarctica that was fascinating. At least one boat disappeared completely, another overturned and the fellow managed to brace himself standing up on his hull for days until he was found. (Maybe that was Peter Nichols's book, I don't remember.)
And then there was Tristan Jones who moored himself to an iceberg and woke up to find it had turned over.
There's an American writer who wrote some good fiction about a man who lived on his boat and frequently got into trouble with nasty people. A lot of good sailing in those stories. The writer's first name is Tony and I think his last name started with an H or some letter near that (I picture myself going to that section at the Kitchener library to look for him).
There is actually a charming and well crafted series of British children's fiction that heavily features saling
Swallows and Amazons is the first in the series. They are by Arthur Ransome. I remember them making me want to learn to sale as a child.
I also recently read a work of fiction
The Riddle of the Sands that bills itself as the first spy novel but there is a lot of sailing and accurate geographical detail as well as political intrigue.
Batavia's Graveyard by
Mike Dash is a good history of a wreck on scattered reefs and islands off the west coast of Australia in the 17th century before longitude was exactly measurable; and the desperate efforts to survive by the castaways, preyed upon by a gang of others. (I know, soundss a bit like a certain TV series.)
I've read
The Wreck of the Batavia by
Simon Leys, which I don't recommend, although Leys does suggest his readers find Dash's book as it's so much better than his own!
You're right, the story of the Batavia is so violent and weird that it reads like fiction.
30
The Riddle of the Sands is excellent, even if I usually fail to properly attribute it to Childers; for some reason I always assume it is by John Buchan, author of another great tale of espionage,
The 39 Steps.
Message edited by its author, Nov 7, 2009, 12:02pm.
This message has been deleted by its author.
>33
Rather different fates! Childers was shot for treason, Buchan became Governor-General of Canada.
>30
I'd agree - these are both great classics of their type. I have a particular fondness for Ransome, having been brought up on all his S&A books as a child (the first I ever collected with my own money), and then as a student in Leeds lived in the house he was born in.
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