I would like to thank the Cruising Association for their kind co-operation in allowing me to browse through and quote extensively from their archive of Erskine Childers’ logbooks. Their straightforward approach to granting me permission was a breath of fresh air. You can find out more about their work by going to: www.cruising.org.uk. Beyond that, I am indebted to my girlfriend, Ivory, and also my mother, for their help both with listening back to drafted chapters and ruthlessly hunting out grammatical errors. James Cox also deserves mention for his help with sourcing images and thank you to both Liz and Clara at Bloomsbury for invaluable work in putting the book together with great efficiency.
Ultimately, however, the biggest acknowledgement has to go to the authors who, in addition to providing me with much of my favourite literature, seem to have gone out of their way and often put themselves through extreme discomfort to provide me with billions of amusing and hair-raising incidents and anecdotes to narrate. I never realised that writers were quite so willing to suffer for their art until I started researching this book.
I would like to thank the following for allowing me to reproduce text from authors whose works are still in copyright. I am therefore indebted to: Penguin Random House for the use of quotes from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (see here and here) and The Green Hills of Africa (see here). The Society of Authors, who administer the John Masefield estate and granted permission to quote from Sea Fever (see here), New Chum (see here, here and here), Autobiography (see from here to here and here), On Growing Old (see from here to here and here), Cape Horn Calm (see from here to here), Dauber (see here) and Big Jim (see here). Picador for allowing me to use quotes from Eric Newby’s The last Grain Race (see here and here). The Arthur Ransome Trust for granting permission for me to use quotes from Racundra’s First Cruise (see here, from here to here, from here to here and here) and Autobiography (see from here to here).