Alone Through the Roaring Forties (Sailor's Classics S.) - Tapa blanda

Alone Through the Roaring Forties is the story of Vito Dumas's wartime voyage from Argentina eastward around the globe in the 31-foot canoe-sterned ketch Lehg II. By any measure, it was a remarkable, unprecedented voyage over what Dumas justly called "the impossible route" - south of the Cape of Good Hope, south of Australia, south of Cape Horn. Leaving Buenos Aires in June 1942, he made the 20,000-mile voyage singlehanded, becoming the first to do so. He was also the first solo sailor to round Cape Horn and survive, and the first to sail around the world with only three landfalls. Dumas completed his high-latitude voyage through the great Southern Ocean, where prevailing westerly gales push huge seas unimpeded around and around the bottom of the globe. His gear and provisions were makeshift - he suffered inordinately because his tattered clothing provided no protection from the cold wind and water - but his boat, though very small, was tough and well mannered. He was awarded the Slocum Prize in 1957 "to honour the extraordinary voyages made by the greatest solitary navigator in the world." Alone Through the Roaring Forties was first published in Spanish, then in French, and finally, in 1960, in English. Somehow through its translations it retained the qualities not just of a great voyage, but of a great book. It reflects the force of Dumas's personality, the ups and downs of elation and depression, hardship and relaxation, and above all, his unrelenting determination in the face of adversities. It is a story of skilled navigation and seamanship and of great adventure, and it is the godfather of all later stories about daring the vast, forbidding Southern Ocean in frail sailboats - including, most recently, Derek Lundy's Godforsaken Sea. Any sailor in the Roaring Forties must reach an accommodation with the sea at its most challenging and inhospitable. Dumas was the first to do so alone in a small boat, and it is that struggle which informs every page of his book, placing it among The Sailor's Classics. Jonathan Raban's introduction places this great book, out of print for many years, in its deserved place of eminence in the literature of the sea. Rich with details of Dumas's life and motivations, the introduction will help readers appreciate the magnitude of Dumas's trail-blazing accomplishment, his reasons for undertaking it, and its significance for the generations of adventurers that have followed.

Vito Dumas was born in Argentina in 1900. He was an avid swimmer in his youth, reportedly making a 42-kilometer, 25-hour swim across the Rio Plate estuary from Uruguay to Argentina at the age of twenty-three. At the same time he developed a love of sailing, at least in part, his translator hints, as an escape from difficult family circumstances. Dumas's several ocean voyages began in 1931 with a 74-day solo trip from France to Argentina. Subsequent to his around-the-world voyage, he circumnavigated the Atlantic in 1945-46 and sailed from Buenos Aires to New York in 1955 in a tiny, 2-1/2 ton boat. When not at sea he was a farmer and rancher by livelihood, painter and musician by avocation. He was awarded the Slocum Prize, the most coveted award for ocean voyagers, in 1957. Like many lone voyagers he had definite ideas and idiosyncrasies, refusing to carry a sea anchor, a bilge pump, or more than one screw driver on board. Dumas died in Argentina. Born in England in 1942, Jonathan Raban taught English literature before becoming a full-time writer in 1969. He first lived in America as a visiting professor at Smith College in 1972. A full-time writer since 1969, his books include Soft City (1973), Arabia Through the Looking Glass (1979), Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi (1981 - winner of the W.H. Heinemann Award for Literature and the Thomas Cook Award), Foreign Land (1985), Coasting: A Private Voyage (1986), For Love and Money (1987), Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America (1990 - winner of the Thomas Cook Award), and Bad Land: An American Romance (1996 - a New York Times Editors' Choice for Book of the Year; winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; winner of the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award; winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award). Paul Theroux called Bad Land "a masterpiece," and a recent Kirkus review of Raban's newest book, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings (November 1999), calls him "one of the English-speaking world's great travelers and travel writers." Raban began sailing in the early 1980s. He has sailed alone around Britain and has spent much time afloat on the coastal seas of Europe. Since moving to Seattle in 1990, he sails a twenty-year-old Swedish ketch on the rim of the North Pacific. He edited The Oxford Book of the Sea in 1992. The Guardian has called him "the finest writer afloat since Conrad."