While many travel writers travelled alone all or some of the time, there is a group for whom their aloneness and isolation was the essence of the adventure. These include the two nineteenth-century women travellers, Mary Kingsley and Isabella Bird, the round-the-world sailor Joshua Slocum, and the ever-optimistic Dane Ejnar Mikkelsen, marooned with a colleague in the Arctic just before the First World War. The two more contemporary writers included here are Sylvain Tesson, who deliberately marooned himself on the shores of Lake Baikal for a winter, and Paul Heiney, who also deliberately isolated himself, but on a boat and for very different reasons.
‘the other one I would have given anything to avoid’
PAUL HEINEY
One Wild Song (2015)
An important aspect of the voyage for all these writers is what is left behind, as well as what is sought. None had a fiercer and less tractable catalyst for departure than Paul Heiney, as he explains here in his introduction. He left the English coast in Cornwall to sail alone in his small boat around Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of the Americas and possibly the most forbidding destination in any marine atlas.
Land slips from sight very slowly, often more slowly than you would wish. But eventually it goes and in that moment, when the coast finally disappears and you, your little ship and your crew are alone on the sea, lies the torment; for a bit of you wants rid of the sight of land and the real journey to begin, but if you are honest you secretly crave its comforting presence. This is the voyaging paradox and has been for all sailors who take to deep waters. On that fine July afternoon, as the green and secure Cornish landscape dwindled behind me and the blank, grey ocean lay ahead, I was torn over where my true ambition lay; wouldn’t life be simpler and safer at home, on land? Yet isn’t an ocean voyage the greatest of achievements, if an often dangerous and uncertain business? Which way do you turn your head? Forwards to the unknown or backwards to the safe? The only answer has to be ever forwards, towards the bow. Backward glances are not the ingredients of true adventures.
The start of a new voyage is a time of confused emotions, a tumult of thoughts and feelings every bit as wild as the tumbling of the waves around you. This must be accepted and relished, for if depth of feeling is lacking then there can be no sense of adventure. On the one hand it is also a time of urgency in which you are drawn with all haste to the horizon like a gull to a scrap of fish: you want to be on your way, devouring the journey, making progress, putting miles beneath the keel getting there. But a little bit of you wishes the land would stay with you, for it spells comfort and refuge while, increasingly, all around you is becoming less certain and you more isolated. On land you can walk with others, at sea you always stand alone.
It doesn’t do to look over your shoulder too often, watching for the once distinct outline of land to fade to a blur and then be lost in the haze: this leads to an unnerving feeling that a door has finally closed on the world behind you. This thought will make you swallow hard. Yet once it is admitted, that things have changed and that which was is now gone, and only what lies ahead matters, then you are relieved and rise to the challenge. This transition does not always come easily, but it is at the heart of the satisfaction of voyaging. People talk of ‘voyages of discovery’ and imagine only of arrivals in new, romantic worlds; but the beginnings and the ends in themselves are the least part of it, for true voyages are an unfolding process of self-discovery and the true drama lies not in the starting or the finishing, but is made along the way.
I have made two of my life’s toughest voyages in the past few years; one I had always wanted to make, and the other I would have given anything to avoid. Both involved letting go of one world, and finding the courage to live in the next. One is the long trek, under sail, to one of the most profoundly remote parts of the world; to an often bleak land of rock, ice and near overwhelming storms – these are the waters of the infamous Cape Horn. The other is the long, hard journey through the death of my son, Nicholas, who took his own life at the age of twenty-three; to travel this road is to suffer desolation that no earthly place can inflict upon you. The two journeys are not unconnected; they are both tales of high adventure and discovery through some of life’s most difficult landscapes, and both begin, as all voyages must, with finding the courage to face the future, reserving the past as a fond memory and not something you should cling to like a drowning soul. Your strength must come from what lies ahead. That is true voyaging.
‘A more successful ascent of the Peak was never made’
ISABELLA BIRD
A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1873)
Isabella Bird is one of the most admired of all the travel writers of any age. She freed herself from a male dominated society, overcame her own perennial ill health and ventured forth to Japan, Tibet, China, the Americas, Persia, Kurdistan and Korea. Dervla Murphy wrote to me of Isabella: ‘I think of long dead authors as my friends. Among the dearest is Isabella Bird, a clergyman’s daughter, born exactly a century before me in 1831. For decades, while travelling in far-flungery, she wrote to her sister in Edinburgh, who represented all the mid-Victorian virtues from which Isabella needed to escape.’ She visited the Sandwich Islands (now called Hawaii) in 1873, and on the way back led anything but a lady’s life in the Rocky Mountains of the USA, riding a horse more than 800 miles in three months over unpredictable terrain. Here she is at Estes Peak in Colorado.
Long’s Peak, the ‘American Matterhorn’ as some call it, was ascended five years ago for the first time. I thought I should like to attempt it, but up to Monday, when Evans (a hunter) left for Denver, cold water was thrown upon the project. It was too late in the season, the winds were likely to be strong, etc; but just before leaving, Evans said that the weather was looking more settled, and if I did not get farther than the timber line it would be worth going. Soon after he left, ‘Mountain Jim’ came in, and he would go up as a guide, and the two youths who rode here with me from Longmount and I caught at the proposal. Mrs Edwards at once baked bread for three days, steaks were cut from the steer which hangs up conveniently, and tea, sugar, and butter were benevolently added. Our picnic was not to be a luxurious or ‘well-found’ one, for, in order to avoid the expense of a pack mule, we limited our luggage to what our saddle horses could carry. Behind my saddle I carried three pairs of camping blankets and a quilt, which reached to my shoulders. My own boots were so worn that it was painful to walk, even around the park, in them, so Evans had lent me a pair of his hunting boots, which hung to the horn of my saddle. The horses of the two young men were equally loaded, for we had to prepare for many degrees of frost. ‘Jim’ was a shocking figure; he had an old pair of high boots, with a baggy pair of old trousers made of deer hide, held on by an old scarf tucked into them; a leather shirt, with three or four ragged unbuttoned waistcoats over it; an old smashed wide awake, from under which his tawny, neglected ringlets hung; and with his one eye, his one long spur, his knife in his belt, his revolver in his waistcoat pocket, his saddle covered with an old beaver skin, from which the paws hung down; his camping blankets behind him, his rifle laid across the saddle in front of him, and his axe, canteen, and other gear hanging to the horn, he was as awful-looking a ruffian as one could see. By way of contrast he rode a small Arab mare, of exquisite beauty, skittish, high spirited, gentle, but altogether too light for him, and he fretted her incessantly to make her display herself.
Heavily loaded as all our horses were, ‘Jim’ started over the half mile of level grass at a hard gallop, and then throwing his mare on her haunches, pulled up alongside of me, and with a grace of manner which soon made me forget his appearance, entered into a conversation which lasted for more than three hours, in spite of the manifold checks of fording streams, single file, abrupt ascents and descents, and other incidents of mountain travel. The ride was one series of glories and surprises, of ‘park’ and glade, of lake and stream, of mountains on mountains, culminating in the rent pinnacles of Long’s Peak, which looked yet grander and ghastlier as we crossed an attendant mountain 11,000 feet high. The slanting sun added fresh beauty every hour. There were dark pines against a lemon sky, grey peaks reddening, and etherealising, gorges of deep and infinite blue, floods of golden glory pouring through canyons of enormous depth, an atmosphere of absolute purity, an occasional foreground of cottonwood and aspen flaunting in red and gold to intensify the blue gloom of the pines, the trickle and murmur of streams fringed with icicles, the strange sough of gusts moving among the pine tops – sights and sounds not of the lower earth, but of the solitary, beast-haunted, frozen upper altitudes. From the dry, buff grass of Estes Park we turned off up a trail on the side of a pine-hung gorge, up a steep pine-clothed hill, down to a small valley, rich in fine, sun-cured hay about eighteen inches high, and enclosed by high mountains whose deepest hollow contains a lily-covered lake, fitly named ‘The Lake of the Lilies.’ Ah, how magical its beauty was, as it slept in silence, while there the dark pines were mirrored motionless in its pale gold, and here the great white lily cups and dark green leaves rested on amethyst-colored water!
…
Unsaddling and picketing the horses securely, making the beds of pine shoots, and dragging up logs for fuel, warmed us all. ‘Jim’ built up a great fire, and before long we were all sitting around it at supper. It didn’t matter much that we had to drink our tea out of the battered meat tins in which it was boiled, and eat strips of beef reeking with pine smoke without plates or forks.
‘Treat Jim as a gentleman and you’ll find him one,’ I had been told; and though his manner was certainly bolder and freer than that of gentlemen generally, no imaginary fault could be found. He was very agreeable as a man of culture as well as a child of nature; the desperado was altogether out of sight. He was very courteous and even kind to me, which was fortunate, as the young men had little idea of showing even ordinary civilities. That night I made the acquaintance of his dog, ‘Ring,’ said to be the best hunting dog in Colorado, with the body and legs of a collie, but a head approaching that of a mastiff, a noble face with a wistful human expression, and the most truthful eyes I ever saw in an animal. His master loves him if he loves anything, but in his savage moods ill-treats him. ‘Ring’s’ devotion never swerves, and his truthful eyes are rarely taken off his master’s face. He is almost human in his intelligence, and, unless he is told to do so, he never takes notice of anyone but ‘Jim.’ In a tone as if speaking to a human being, his master, pointing to me, said, ‘Ring, go to that lady, and don’t leave her again tonight.’ ‘Ring’ at once came to me, looked into my face, laid his head on my shoulder, and then lay down beside me with his head on my lap, but never taking his eyes from ‘Jim’s’ face.
…
We reached Estes Park at noon of the following day. A more successful ascent of the Peak was never made, and I would not now exchange my memories of its perfect beauty and extraordinary sublimity for any other experience of mountaineering in any part of the world. Yesterday snow fell on the summit, and it will be inaccessible for eight months to come.
‘Fortunately my terror is a special variety’
MARY KINGSLEY
Travels in West Africa (1897)
Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) came from a family with a literary and naturalist bent; she was the niece of Charles Kingsley (The Water Babies) and admired Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley and, most of all, Isabella Bird. She arrived in Sierra Leone in 1893 and initially followed a similar route to that taken by Mungo Park, a hundred years earlier, and Graham Greene forty years later. Travels in West Africa covers an eleven-month journey among the ‘inland tribes’. Kingsley roamed from Sierra Leone as far as Angola, explored almost unknown parts of Gabon and even pioneered a new route up the 14,000-foot Great Peak of the Cameroons. She is another of Dervla Murphy’s heroes: ‘Of my chosen octet, Mary Kingsley is the best writer and wittiest commentator.’ Kingsley was to die at only thirty-seven, having volunteered as a nurse during the Second Boer War. She developed typhoid in Cape Town and asked to die alone and be taken out to sea for burial.
I must say the African leopard is an audacious animal, although it is ungrateful of me to say a word against him, after the way he has let me off personally, and I will speak of his extreme beauty as compensation for my ingratitude. I really think, taken as a whole, he is the most lovely animal I have ever seen; only seeing him, in the one way you can gain a full idea of his beauty, namely in his native forest, is not an unmixed joy to a person, like myself, of a nervous disposition. I may remark that my nervousness regarding the big game of Africa is of a rather peculiar kind. I can confidently say I am not afraid of any wild animal – until I see it – and then – well I will yield to nobody in terror; fortunately as I say my terror is a special variety; fortunately because no one can manage their own terror. You can suppress alarm, excitement, fear, fright, and all those small-fry emotions, but the real terror is as dependent on the inner make of you as the colour of your eyes, or the shape of your nose; and when terror ascends its throne in my mind I become preternaturally artful, and intelligent to an extent utterly foreign to my true nature, and save, in the case of close quarters with bad big animals, a feeling of rage against some unknown person that such things as leopards, elephants, crocodiles, &c., should be allowed out loose in that disgracefully dangerous way, I do not think much about it at the time. Whenever I have come across an awful being in the forest and I know it has seen me I take Jerome’s advice, and instead of relying on the power of the human eye rely upon that of the human leg, and effect a masterly retreat in the face of the enemy. If I know it has not seen me I sink in my tracks and keep an eye on it, hoping that it will go away soon. Thus I once came upon a leopard. I had got caught in a tornado in a dense forest. The massive, mighty trees were waving like a wheat-field in an autumn gale in England, and I dare say a field mouse in a wheat-field in a gale would have heard much the same uproar. The tornado shrieked like ten thousand vengeful demons. The great trees creaked and groaned and strained against it and their bush-rope cables groaned and smacked like whips, and ever and anon a thundering crash with snaps like pistol shots told that they and their mighty tree had strained and struggled in vain. The fierce rain came in a roar, tearing to shreds the leaves and blossoms and deluging everything. I was making bad weather of it, and climbing up over a lot of rocks out of a gully bottom where I had been half drowned in a stream, and on getting my head to the level of a block of rock I observed right in front of my eyes, broadside on, maybe a yard off, certainly not more, a big leopard. He was crouching on the ground, with his magnificent head thrown back and his eyes shut. His fore-paws were spread out in front of him and he lashed the ground with his tail, and I grieve to say, in face of that awful danger – I don’t mean me, but the tornado – that depraved creature swore, softly, but repeatedly and profoundly. I did not get all these facts up in one glance, for no sooner did I see him than I ducked under the rocks, and remembered thankfully that leopards are said to have no power of smell. But I heard his observation on the weather, and the flip-flap of his tail on the ground. Every now and then I cautiously took a look at him with one eye round a rock-edge, and he remained in the same position. My feelings tell me he remained there twelve months, but my calmer judgment puts the time down at twenty minutes; and at last, on taking another cautious peep, I saw he was gone. At the time I wished I knew exactly where, but I do not care about that detail now, for I saw no more of him. He had moved off in one of those weird lulls which you get in a tornado, when for a few seconds the wild herd of hurrying winds seem to have lost themselves, and wander round crying and wailing like lost souls, until their common rage seizes them again and they rush back to their work of destruction. It was an immense pleasure to have seen the great creature like that. He was so evidently enraged and baffled by the uproar and dazzled by the floods of lightning that swept down into the deepest recesses of the forest, showing at one second every detail of twig, leaf, branch, and stone round you, and then leaving you in a sort of swirling dark until the next flash came; this, and the great conglomerate roar of the wind, rain and thunder, was enough to bewilder any living thing.
‘I’m glad we didn’t shoot those guillemots yesterday’
EJNAR MIKKELSEN
Lost in the Arctic: Being the Story of the Alabama Expedition, 1909–1912 (1913)
Ejnar Mikkelsen (1880–1971) was a Danish explorer who led an expedition to Greenland. Their wooden vessel, the Alabama, was trapped in the ice off Shannon Island. Mikkelsen and his engineer, Ivesen, were separated from the rest of the crew, who were rescued by a whaler. The two remained marooned on Shannon Island for 865 days … no one knew where they were. As compensation for his adventure he has had a mountain range in Greenland named for him.
And the days go on, one just like another, all wearily long, and always the same striving to occupy our thoughts with the present or the past, anything but the painful doubt of the future. The possibilities are too awful. And yet we cannot help following in our minds the ships that now may be on their way towards us – we see them entering the ice, striving to get through to land – they should soon be able to reach us now, if it is no worse out there than what we can see here close in to land. Or we follow the movements of a single ship – today it has reached the ice, and each day it comes nearer – we let it lie up when fogs or storm hinder its passage, until at last the day comes when it should have been here, if it had entered the ice on the day we fancied it there. A mad existence – another year of this would be too much for us.
Now all the snow has gone and the running water stopped. It is impossible to leave Bass Rock now, for the ice is full of cracks and pools of water. We are prisoners upon this little patch of rock, but still we climb up as before, spending the most of our time gazing out over the sea, and waiting. The land ice goes – breaking up and drifting away to southward, floe after floe goes floating away, and we wish for our boat, that we might follow – anything rather than this ceaseless waiting.
We sit out on the farthest point of rock, looking at the water lapping against its foot. It is a fine day, warm and bright, without a cloud in the sky, and all about looks fair and kindly. But the flowers are gone, the sun is declining and soon the autumn will be here with its boisterous gales. It is a lovely scene, but it is rarely that we care to talk now of the beauty of the scenery; we sit in silence, looking out over the sea.
A whirr of wings in the air wakes us from our dreams: it is a flock of guillemots that have their home on the cliffs, and are now making for the water. So happily they splash about down there – and how we envy them! The gun lies ready between us, the birds are good eating, and it is always something to do. Moreover, we need meat. The guillemots shall die. Cautiously we creep along the shore to get within range, but the little black birds disarm us after all, we cannot find it in our hearts to shoot them. It is cheering to have some few living things about us, we sit on a stone and look at them; their young ones are waiting for them up on the cliff, they will die of hunger if their parents do not return – and we know what hunger is; no, let them live! Besides, there may come a ship – and then it would be a pity. We can wait until tomorrow, all sorts of things may have happened by then.
We are well paid for having spared them by the feeling of quiet content which takes possession of us as we sit there watching the happy little creatures. At last they fly off, and we feel quite sorry they are gone. Well, it is getting near our bedtime too; we may as well go back to the house and turn in.
Half-an-hour later we are lying in our sleeping bags, and have said good-night to each other, repeating once more the old refrain, ‘Who knows – there may be a ship tomorrow!’ And as I lie there, my eyes wander over the wall of the cabin – there is the picture of the four generations, there the street scenes from Copenhagen, and then a little empty space, always the first and last I see. There was a picture there once, a little card with the woods of Frederiksdal, so green and splendid – but I had to take it down, it was too painful. I burnt the card, but I could not burn the place where it had hung, and the empty space grins at me now, as if to say, ‘Do you remember?’ And I remember all too well, it was a foolish thing to burn the card, for the empty place is worse. ‘Coward,’ it seems to say, ‘you dare not think of the future, you dare not hope ever to reach home again!’
Soon all is still in the house, and we sleep. Suddenly I am wakened by the noise of a case upset outside, and as I open my eyes, there is Iversen dashing across the room, bare-legged, with nothing on but a striped jersey, and with a wild look in his eyes. A bear! is my first thought, and in a moment I am out of my bunk, seize my gun, and am about to follow, but before I have got halfway, I stop, petrified with astonishment – Iversen has got the door open, and is crying ‘Morning – good-morning!’
God – a ship at last! In a moment I am standing beside my faithful comrade, staring at a host of men – an endless army of men – the whole shore is full of men.
What happened next I do not know. We put some clothes on, I suppose, but there is a blank spot in my memory, and the next thing I remember is that Iversen has disappeared, and going out to look for him, I find him standing on a rock, waving his cap and shouting, ‘A ship! a ship! a ship!’
With a bound I am at his side. True enough, out there where we have never seen anything but water and ice, a little steamer is lying. We look at each other with bright eyes, and do not know what to say. It is eight-and-twenty months since we last saw a human face. Then we go up behind the house, where nobody can see us, and shake hands – hard. We have been through a rough time together, and now it is over. A moment we stand holding each other’s hands, then Iversen bursts out suddenly – ‘I say – I’m glad we didn’t shoot those guillemots yesterday – jolly little things!’
‘Many a long talk since then have I had with the man in the moon’
JOSHUA SLOCUM
Sailing Alone Around the World (1899)
Joshua Slocum (1844–1901) became for a while the world’s most celebrated traveller, and his 36-foot gaff rigged sloop Spray the most famous boat, after his achievement of being the first man to sail alone around the world. He and Spray, which was no more than a converted oyster boat, left Boston in April 1895 and arrived back in Newport, Rhode Island in July 1898 after a 46,000-mile journey. He fended off pirates by spreading tin tacks about the deck at night; the squeals of the first barefooted boarders were enough to discourage any more. After this record-breaking voyage he continued to sail alone, usually to winter away from New England. On 14 November 1909 he set off on one of these voyages, having indicated an interest in exploring the Orinoco, Rio Negro and Amazon Rivers. He was never heard from again.
On the evening of July 5 the Spray, after having steered all day over a lumpy sea, took it into her head to go without the helmsman’s aid. I had been steering southeast by south, but the wind hauling forward a bit, she dropped into a smooth lane, heading southeast, and making about eight knots, her very best work. I crowded on sail to cross the track of the liners without loss of time, and to reach as soon as possible the friendly Gulf Stream. The fog lifting before night, I was afforded a look at the sun. Just as it was touching the sea, I watched it go down and out of sight. Then I turned my face eastward, and there, apparently at the very end of the bowsprit, was the smiling full moon rising out of the sea. Neptune himself coming over the bows could not have startled me more. ‘Good evening, Sir,’ I cried, ‘I am glad to see you.’ Many a long talk since then have I had with the man in the moon; he had confidence in my voyage.
About midnight the fog shut down again denser than ever before. One could almost ‘stand on it.’ It continued so for a number of days, the wind increasing to a gale. The waves rose high, but I had a good ship. Still, in the dismal fog I felt myself drifting into loneliness, an insect on a straw in the midst of the elements. I lashed the helm, and my vessel held her course, and while she sailed I slept.
During these days a feeling of awe crept over me. My memory worked with startling power. The ominous, the insignificant, the great, the small, the wonderful, the commonplace – all appeared before my mental vision in magical succession. Pages of my history were recalled which had been so long forgotten that they seemed to belong to a previous existence, I heard all the voices of the past laughing, crying, telling what I had heard them tell in many corners of the earth.
The loneliness of my state wore off when the gale was high and I found much work to do. When fine weather returned, then came the sense of solitude, which I could not shake off. I used my voice often, at first giving some order about the affairs of a ship, for I had been told that from disuse I should lose my speech. At the meridian altitude of the sun I called out aloud, ‘Eight bells,’ after the custom of a ship at sea. Again from my cabin I cried to an imaginary man at the helm, ‘How does she head, there?’ and again, ‘Is she on her course?’ But getting no reply, I was reminded the more palpably of my condition. My voice sounded hollow on the empty air, and I dropped the practice.
‘Something fairly close to the sheer happiness of being alive’
SYLVAIN TESSON
The Consolations of the Forest (Une Vie à Coucher Dehors) (2013, 2011)
Baikal is a rift created lake in the mountainous region of Siberia, north of the Mongolian border. It is more than 600 kilometres long and ten kilometres deep in places and contains over 20 per cent of all the fresh water in the world. It is surrounded by mountains and taiga forests. It is very cold in winter. Sylvain Tesson (b. 1972) spent six winter months in a cabin beside the lake. His enforced loneliness was mitigated by dogs, the occasional visits of fishermen and a supply of cigars and vodka, with which, as a sensible Frenchman, he had equipped himself.
26 July
‘I’m leaving now, but have barely passed the first of the elms that line the road …’ André Chenier, guillotined on 25 July 1794.
Sergei will come to get me the day after tomorrow. We’ll drop the dogs off at Elohin, where they’ll stay until they find a master in a different cabin in the reserve.
I came here without knowing whether I’d find the strength to stay; I leave knowing that I will return. I’ve discovered that living within silence is rejuvenating. I’ve learned two or three things that many people know without having to hole up somewhere. The virginity of time is a treasure. The parade of hours is busier than the ploughing-through of miles. The eye never tires of splendour. The more one knows things, the more beautiful they become. I met two dogs, I fed them and, one day, they saved me. I spoke to the cedars, begged forgiveness from the char, and thought about my dear ones. I was free because without the other, freedom knows no bounds. I contemplated the poem of the mountains and drank tea while the lake turned pink. I killed the longing for the future. I breathed the breath of the forest and followed the arc of the moon. I struggled through the snow and forgot the struggle on the mountaintops. I admired the great age of trees, tamed titmice, and perceived the vanity of all that is not reverence for beauty. I took a look at the other shore. I knew weeks of silent snow. I loved to be warm in my hut while the tempest raged. I greeted the return of the sun and the wild ducks. I tore into the flesh of smoked fish and felt the fat of char eggs refresh my throat. A woman bade me farewell but butterflies alighted on me. I lived the most beautiful hours of my life until I received a message and the saddest hours afterwards. I watered the earth with tears. I wondered if one could become a Russian not through blood but through tears. I blew my nose on mosses. I drank litres of poison at 104° F, and I enjoyed pissing with a wide-screen view of Buryatia. I learned to sit at a window. I melted into my realm, smelled the scent of lichen, ate wild garlic and shared trails with bears. I grew a beard, and time unfurled it. I left the cave of cities and lived for six months in the church of the taigas. Six months: a life.
It’s good to know that out there, in a forest in the world, there is a cabin where something is possible, something fairly close to the sheer happiness of being alive.