1. Ann Davison and the Meaning of Life
Ann Davison had been a pilot of small airplanes, lived on a small island on a lake, and then with her husband Frank bought an old boat to cruise the world. Aboard this vessel, after two years of devoted but incomplete restoration, they hurried outbound from England in May of 1949 to escape creditors. What followed was a nightmare of two weeks of sleepless days, engine trouble, relentlessly foul winds, and inexperienced navigation. They wrecked on the rocks of Portland Bill, an outcrop into a whirlpool of the English Channel. Abandoning the boat in the middle of the night, they tried to get ashore, shouting to each other to be heard over the gusts and steep seas as the tidal race sucked them away from the coast. Their life raft—an open Carley float rigged with canvas and rope—capsized several times. They endured through the night, through the morning, and then the waves grew still taller and took them farther from land. Frank succumbed to the cold and a particularly violent wave and drowned. After Ann watched this, she numbly drifted in the raft until a shift in the tide and wind enabled her with a makeshift oar to paddle close enough to swim and scrabble ashore. She scaled up the rocks and found help. Inexplicably, despite that horror and fatigue, she knew even then that she would have to go back out to sea. She wrote that her relationship with the ocean could not end there.
A couple of years later, Davison bought a wooden sailboat named previously, by coincidence or fate, the Felicity Ann. She wanted to be the first known woman to attempt to sail across a major ocean alone. Frank had sailed by himself across the Gulf of St Lawrence before they’d met, but Davison’s trip was not to better his, nor was it a stunt, an intentional feminist statement, or a bucket-list adventure. Davison’s attempt was nothing less than a search for a new meaning in life.
She must have had a certain magnetism, because Ann Davison received enthusiastic help finding and fitting out Felicity Ann. Her project remained on the straight rails of activity for a few months until there she was, thirty-eight years old, her brown hair snipped straight across her forehead as if quickly done herself, and now sailing out of Plymouth on the morning of 18 May 1952, three years and a day after she had sailed outbound with Frank.
In the hubbub of this departure day, she nearly crashed into one of her escort boats, but then the press corps and those vessels filled with friends peeled away. The sun went down. She attempted to relax. She watched for ships. She tried to find a more comfortable way to sit in the cockpit with her hand on the tiller. Now she was westbound again near the same waters that she had floated on that life raft, alone this time in a boat of her own, with the intention to sail directly to the island of Madeira, a passage of some 1,500 nautical miles. (I’ll be using nautical miles for distances at sea: 10 nautical miles = 11.5 statute miles = 18.5 kilometers; so 1,500 nautical miles is the equivalent to 1,725 statute or land miles.)
Davison was the first to admit that her knowledge of her engine was minimal, her sailing experience still less. She had only taken a brief course in celestial navigation, which she said she found befuddling, but in her self-deprecation she surely undersold this a bit, because from her experience as a pilot of small planes she knew how to read a chart (a map used for navigating at sea), and she understood compass bearings and navigation by dead reckoning (using your speed over the water and the compass course to estimate where you are). She had a radio receiver, so she could often hear the BBC and check her clock on their time signals, but she could not broadcast out to anyone, even to a passing vessel. Local and long-distance radios for two-way conversations, radar for detecting ships and coastlines, and sonar for detecting depth underneath the boat were all instruments in their infancy, technologies beyond the reach of most small boat sailors at the time. More significantly, Davison had no electrical and barely any mechanical means for Felicity Ann to steer itself. She wearily sat at the tiller hour after hour, day after day. Sometimes as the voyage went on and conditions were favorable, she was able to tie the tiller in place temporarily or adjust the sails and tie the tiller to guy-lines so the boat could steer itself. More often, though, when she needed to eat or sleep, she resorted to “heaving-to” or “lying-to,” meaning she adjusted her sails to stay as stable and stationary in the water as possible. Or she just took down the sails. When lying-to she was forced to content herself with making little progress toward her destination—or even sometimes going backwards.
Ann Davison departs from Plymouth, England, on her boat Felicity Ann (1952).
As Felicity Ann was a wooden boat, it would often let in at least a little water at the start of a voyage, even if the planks had already swelled, since the wood was adjusting to open-ocean movement. So by the fifth day, Davison’s bilge pumps were clogged with sawdust and other muck from the shipyard work. She was too emotionally exhausted to clear these pumps, “too stupid with fatigue,” as she described it. As her boat began to slump in the water, she got herself towed into Douarnenez on the western tip of Brittany by a group of over-eager French fishermen. From here she did what she had not planned, hop-scotching down the coast, sailing south to Vigo, then to Gibraltar, and then south to Casablanca. This unplanned route turned out to be prudent, becoming a shakedown cruise in which Davison was able to gain experience, learn what supplies she did and did not need, and make her mistakes with the boat on shorter passages.
Along the coasts of Spain and Portugal, because of the busy ports and the strong southbound Canary Current, she and Felicity Ann regularly had to be mindful of the shipping lanes. In a thick fog off Finisterre, Davison resorted to banging on her frying pan because she had forgotten a horn or any other means of making noise. One night on the way to Gibraltar, she was nearly run down by a merchant ship.
“The seas were fierce and we were lying to without any canvas,” she explained, “when suddenly a steamer appeared on the crest of a wave, a triangle of lights, port, starboard and masthead, coming straight for us.”
Davison did not have enough time or enough wind to raise a sail to move out of the way, so she hurried down to her engine. Inboard engines had been installed in small boats for a few decades by the time Davison set out, but her little five-horsepower diesel still had to be started by hand cranking. She squeezed her body down below and heaved around the starting handle—“with strength borrowed from fear”—until the pistons began to thump. She leaped back into the cockpit and shifted the engine to forward. The propeller began to spin. Just barely, she scooted her boat out of the way of the freighter, which likely never even saw her.
“After that,” she wrote, “there was no more sleep.”
Ann Davison’s account of her trans-Atlantic passage, titled My Ship Is So Small (1956), is in my opinion one of the most artistic and most thoughtful, funny, and surreptitiously poetic narratives ever penned by a solo sailor after their return home.
Sea stories published in English for public entertainment go back at least to the likes of pirate-explorer William Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World, published in 1697. First-person sea narratives seem to have always been and continue today to be an unapologetic mish-mash of sailing logistics and navigation, of drive-by anthropology, marine biology, and maritime history, with easy blending between fact and fiction. Authors spinning sea stories for publication have usually been eager to tell readers about the creative chores that went into the making of their books, even as they proudly declare that they don’t have the authorial gifts to describe the scenes as they sit down later writing with calloused fingers, their foul-weather jackets seemingly still dripping seawater from a hook behind them.
Sailing a boat, historically and today, is in large portion a literary endeavor. Sailors tend to do a lot of reading, turning to reference books for information and to stories to pass the time. They nearly all keep a daily, sometimes hourly, logbook for weather and navigation. And they often keep a personal journal, as well as writing and receiving letters (now emails and texts). When sailor-authors return ashore to write their stories, following the tradition, they often quote directly from their own logbooks, journals, blogs, letters, and from what they were reading on board, sometimes going as far as Sir Francis Chichester in the 1960s, who treated himself sailing alone at sea as a sort of separate on-the-scene reporter, inserting within his books long quotations from his daily log to expound on a given adventure. He transitioned from his past-tense prose to his at-sea writings with phrases such as “My log takes up the tale.” Chichester’s final words to conclude his Gipsy Moth Circles the World (1967) detailed his written output during the voyage: “with eight log books filled up, I had also written more than 200,000 words.”
In short, the study of human life on recreational boats, especially those of single-handers, is as much literary analysis as it is history and sociology.
Sailor-writers have consistently been inspired and informed by their predecessors who were able to publish their stories, and sailors who went out alone are particularly blessed when it comes to storytelling on the return because they have no witnesses to hinder the tale. Yet it was not until the mid-twentieth century that solo-sailing authors, all of whom had been men, began to feel open enough to describe their journeys in more personal, emotional terms. In Sailing Alone Around the World (1900), Joshua Slocum—the dean of single-handed sailing and the author of what is still the most popular and influential story of them all—is self-effacing at times and shares moments of emotion, but he barely reveals his inner self. Ann Davison, a half-century later, is one of the earliest if not the first single-handed sailor to admit candidly and describe in detail her genuine fear, loneliness, and self-doubt.
Sea narratives, single-handed or otherwise, used to spend little time ashore before casting off the dock lines. Before the 1960s or so, sailor-authors usually gave only a slight background as to their internal motivation for the voyage, resting on tough tropes along the lines of “Why not?,” “Because I wanted to,” and “I ran out of other things to do.” Davison, however, delved deeply and mindfully into her reasoning, including her thinking after the drowning of her husband. In setting the stage for her trans-Atlantic attempt in My Ship Is So Small, she wrote something that is worth quoting in full:
The only way to live is to have a dream green and growing in your life, anything else is just existing and a waste of breath . . . Adventure, some people call it, or romance, or when they are really frustrated, escapism. If anyone asked me and I was unguarded enough to reply, I would call it the pursuit of beauty, or truth, and if I was honest I would admit it was largely curiosity, the urge to find out the why, the what and the how at first hand, without simply taking someone else’s word for it . . . I know by now that the glitter of romance as seen from afar often turns out to be pretty shoddy at close quarters, and what appears to be a romantic life is invariably an uncomfortable one, but I know, too, that the values in such living are usually sound. They have to be, or you don’t survive. And occasionally you are rewarded by an insight into living so splendid, so wholly magnificent, you can be satisfied with nothing less ever after, so that you go on hoping and searching for another glimpse for the rest of your life. The dream-boat business came up three years before I actually set out because I had a life going spare and wanted to use it, and the notion of sailing a small boat about the world appealed because it offered freedom, independence, travel and a home into the bargain.
Davison laid out here much of what has driven people to go to sea for the last two centuries. Certain individuals, by some mixture of nature and nurture, usually spurred by social factors or personal trauma or spiritual ennui or too much reading, have throughout human history rejected the materialism of their day and sought simpler lives as they desired physical adventure and challenge, even if that might put their life in danger. These traits and reasons, however, do not speak precisely to the desire to go by oneself. Davison’s single-handed trip for “freedom, independence, travel” was, in many ways, an anti-social, self-centered, and seriously selfish act. But then again, if Davison wanted to go to sea alone again, perhaps the potential of losing someone else might have been too traumatic to imagine.
Single-handed sailor-authors rarely admit that they embark on a trip like this for something to write about, yet Davison explained that “it would surely provide unlimited copy with which to feed the typewriter and incidentally me, for I had degenerated into a writer of sorts through the years.” The fact is, a solo voyage across an ocean alone for anyone has a significant, even primary aspect of social and artistic performance. Most sailors, reading others, have envisioned writing about their voyage even before they cast off. Once out at sea, they’re reading others’ accounts, sending out articles and long letters and writing journal entries, and then after they have survived and returned to shore, they have almost always wanted to write and publish about it, rendering the reader, author, and mariner experience inextricably entwined. Although by today there have been surely hundreds of single-handed sailors who have been truly hermits, shunned all publicity, and written nothing and never had any desire to do so, the solo sailor without literary aspirations seems to be more the exception than the rule. Many, due to lack of writing skills or racism or misogyny in the book business, have been unable to publish their narratives. This often left their voyage feeling incomplete. Decades after her own circumnavigation, single-hander Tania Aebi wrote that the writing of her story directly after her trip, “performing the expected duties—compiling a book,” was a necessity for her to provide full closure before she could move on with her life. Sailor-writer John Rousmaniere put it this way: “Equally respected is the tradition of returned solo sailors telling as many people as possible how they did it. This marriage of monastic retreat and public confession may seem contrary, but there it is.” Ann Davison laid this all out there in My Ship Is So Small.
Davison’s why-go paragraphs present, most importantly, the genuine, unabashedly aspirational belief that a sail across an ocean is a passage of greater significance, a vision quest, a morality tale for how we each should spend our time on Earth. Voyages alone out to sea, taken so intensely and seriously by their sailor-authors, represent one of the nearest and clearest of metaphors of any single human life spent on Earth. A copy-editor for a newspaper in Ohio named Robert Manry, who sailed a 13.5-foot boat across the Atlantic in 1965, wrote that he tried to craft his voyage “into something nearer to a work of art than my life on land had been.” This is perhaps why the single-handed voyage story is so compelling to so many of us—in its madness, pluck, pride, and in its “do not go gentle” journey of solitude before existential unknowns. No one on the planet is more often reminded of one’s meaninglessness in time than the solo sailor in a little boat bobbing about on the eternal indifferent deep.
One of the few aspects that Davison did not explore in her explanation of her why-go in My Ship Is So Small, although she alludes to this with her admission of “escapism,” was the state of the world in which she lived in the early 1950s. Davison had written in her previous book, Last Voyage (1951), that “thousands of people, blasted out of their calm by war, found it difficult to settle in their peacetime niches.” These people were called escapists, she said, who “turned their eyes to distant lands across the sea, and a broader vista of living.”
Both of the world wars had reminded us of our collective human capacity for hatred and violence toward one another, cruelties enabled by our tribalisms, racisms, and our clever inventions such as aircraft, machine guns, lethal gases, and then the development of the atomic bomb. In response to the wars, Western cultures—an imperfect broad grouping that I’ll use for lack of a better one—turned toward the ocean for visions of peace and escape. The New Zealand historian Harold Kidd described the rise of a “sea gypsy culture” that began in the 1920s in response to the madness of World War I: “People from England and other places began this move to get the Great War behind them and get the hell out of the place. They sailed all over the world.”
After the two world wars, with the atrocities fully revealed and the dead tallied, the floodgates of the world’s ports seemed to empty out again to sea dreamers. Frank and Ann Davison, for example, began their search for their own boat immediately after peace was declared in 1945. The sea had emerged as a respite from humanity, finding thousands of survivors seeking new lives, a “Ulysses generation” as Rousmaniere put it: people who perceived the ocean as the last place on Earth that remained wild and untouched by war, still seemingly clean and free without national borders and government authorities.
In 1949, two years before Davison’s trip, fellow Englishman Edward Allcard also crossed the Atlantic alone in a wooden boat. He published Single-Handed Passage (1950), which is full of small moments of boastful joy, his naked self monkeying around dangerously over the side, and his explanations of nautical strategies in rigging and engine work. Allcard provides a window into the period as he rants regularly about capitalism, paperwork in ports, petty burglary on the docks, lack of respect for the yachtsmen who helped during the war, and most of all how the ocean provides respite from all this. As he approached New York, and the fame for which he declared disinterest, he wrote in Single-Handed Passage: “What was there to celebrate? Getting near to the artificialities and impurities of civilization, where money was god? Giving up the glorious freedom of the sea? . . . How many have said to me ‘You are doing just what I have always dreamed of doing.’ ”
Sailors and writers, like Davison and Allcard, as well as marine biologists, oceanographers, anthropologists, artists, and filmmakers, developed and mirrored this cultural interest in the sea in the decades around the world wars. They influenced a flood of Western public interest in the ocean as a representation of a simpler life, a saltwater horizon full of meaning and purpose, a place as yet undiscovered and unspoiled and beyond the influence of people. Scholars refer to this as post-war primitivism. For example, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which would win him the Pulitzer Prize, had just been published when Davison set out to cross the Atlantic. In the novel an aging poor Cuban fisherman rows out into the Florida Straits alone, then sets his sails and uses a handline, shunning the new motorized technologies of the younger fishermen in the harbor. Hemingway’s old man feels a romanticized brotherhood with the animals of the sea, even the ones he kills and eats. By the time of Davison’s voyage, Thor Heyerdahl and his war buddies had completed their passage on a raft from Peru to French Polynesia. The expedition, their best-selling book, Kon-Tiki (1950), and their Oscar-winning documentary of the same name continued to send escapist, ocean-centric, tiki-themed waves throughout Europe and across North America. Frenchman Jacques Cousteau and his colleague Émile Gagnan had invented the aqualung and were beginning to make their underwater films. American ichthyologist Eugenie Clark had published the international bestseller Lady with a Spear (1951), the first mainstream memoir by a woman marine biologist. And Rachel Carson had an unprecedented two books, Under the Sea-Wind (1941) and The Sea Around Us (1951), both measured, scientifically researched natural histories of the ocean, sitting comfortably at the same time in the top ten of the New York Times bestseller list. In the 1953 issue of Life magazine in which Davison first told the story of her ocean-crossing, her feature is sandwiched between horrific black and white photographs from the Korean War—soldiers walking past dead bodies and pointing guns at seemingly groveling North Korean “Red” soldiers—and a full-color advertisement for the Hollywood film Return to Paradise (1953), featuring scantily clad women in Hibiscus-print dresses, smooching sailors, and being rescued on the beach by Gary Cooper as a turquoise ocean horizon plays placidly in the background.
So it was within this rising tide of public interest in the ocean that on 20 November 1952, Ann Davison aboard Felicity Ann nosed her way out alone beyond the island of Gran Canaria to attempt to sail across the Atlantic. Only a few days after she left, the world learned that the United States had weeks earlier detonated the world’s first thermonuclear bomb in the Marshall Islands. This weapon exploded a radioactive mushroom cloud over the North Pacific ten miles high.
Davison faced a 2,600-mile passage. Starting off with black clouds and rain, but a mostly auspicious breeze, she knew that already out there was a French physician named Alain Bombard who had set out a month before in a fifteen-foot rubber raft. Bombard had a single sail, a sextant, a fine-mesh net, and two cameras supplied by Life magazine. He carried barely any food, which was part of his declared mission. Young Dr. Bombard stowed only sealed emergency rations so he might prove that the ocean could offer a person enough water and enough food in the form of fish, to be supplemented by, as Life explained, “the nutritive qualities of plankton.” Bombard made it to Barbados in a little over two months. Having proved his point, he published his book Histoire du Naufragé Volontaire (Story of a Voluntary Castaway) the following year.
Davison, for her part, had packed her Felicity Ann with water and food such as eggs, fruit, potatoes, pre-cooked corn flour, and bread rusks, enough for a possible sixty days, which she believed to be “an excess of caution,” because she reasonably anticipated an actual passage of some thirty to forty days. The steady, favorable trade winds are legendary for smooth westbound passages across to the Caribbean. In early November 1952 a new friend in the Canary Islands had given her a canned Christmas pudding, saying, “Not that I don’t think you’ll make it across before then, but you never know.” Even though she got a late start, Davison assumed that by Christmas she would be comfortably drinking cocktails in English Harbour, Antigua—or at least quite close. She did not even pack a nautical almanac for the following year, an essential book for celestial navigation.
On Christmas morning, Ann Davison floated, crazed, in the latitudes of where all had told her to expect the trade winds. She had not found them. For the entirety of the passage so far she had experienced only occasional days of favorable wind. She saw only teasing glimpses, hours here, a day there, of the characteristic trade-wind clouds, those long low lines of puffy cumulus that have propelled sailors from Europe to the Caribbean for centuries. On this December 25th, however, Davison calculated that she was still only about halfway across the ocean. She could not be entirely sure, because she was not confident about her celestial calculations and sextant work.
The cabin of her boat was like a sauna, the sea like molten lead. Each day of calm she ran the engine for two hours, just to move and feel the breeze on her face. She worried about the barnacles and algae growing along the hull of Felicity Ann, making her progress still slower. When there were not calms, there had been winds from the west. Small traditionally rigged boats can at best make fifty or sixty degrees toward the direction of the wind. This meant to go westbound with a west wind she had to aim more toward the north-northwest and then tack, alter course, and sail back toward the south-southwest. On the open ocean, with no long-range weather forecasts, it’s terribly hard to calculate when it’s best to make these tacks, these long zig-zags, and when to expect wind shifts, how to consider currents, and how to maximize miles and angles toward an eventual direction, especially when you’re new at long passages. And if this were not enough to obsess about, Davison worried about hurricanes. She was statistically safe from hurricane season, but this unsettled weather made her doubt if a massive storm was not on the way. Sometimes she suffered aggressive squalls coming out of nowhere. She had no one to consult. She was even having difficulty getting any of the BBC broadcasts on her radio receiver. On the subject of ocean weather in the Atlantic, she read every book that she had aboard, over and over again, yet she could make no sense of her predicament. It’s difficult for most of us to imagine the emotional strain and doubt, exacerbated by lack of sleep, that spun a perpetual gauze around Davison’s thinking as she endured life aboard her tiny boat, just twenty-three foot long, surrounded by a water horizon for day after day after day.
Davison decided to open her friend’s Christmas pudding. When she bit into the sweet dense cake, the dried fruit did not go down well. Another insult. She surely hurled that pudding and its can as far over the side as she could, only to have to watch it bobbing there on the flat sea in sight for the rest of the day. Unless, mercifully, it sank.
Perhaps the only silver lining to traveling so maddeningly slowly is that Davison, like the fanatical Dr. Bombard, had an unprecedented amount of quiet, close-to-the-surface time to observe the open-ocean environment of the temperate Atlantic. Although a rainbow one day lifted her spirits mightily, Davison was not exactly smitten with the blue environmentalism that was beginning to permeate Western cultural perceptions of the sea in the 1950s. She did not see her voyage in those terms. She did not include in her explanation of why-go, or surprisingly anywhere in My Ship Is So Small, what it is about the ocean itself, about saltwater, this call to the sea, that magnetizes so many Ishmaels to the foot of the harbor or to exile themselves out alone across oceans. Why, for example, did Davison not set off for a long hike in the Alps or the Rockies? She did not wax poetic about the ocean as boundless and free and healing or a space that we need to protect. She did not carefully write down what she saw in terms of species, abundance, or behavior. Davison’s ocean was a purgatory with stagnant calms or foul winds. Her ocean was also the environment in which she had watched her husband drown. She flicked her cigarette butts over the side and dumped her daily garbage in the sea. When she came upon a couple of cans floating on the surface, Davison was not disgusted by the litter so far from land. She saw floating trash as a comfort, helping to ease her loneliness, reassuring her that other people were out there.
Ocean-going field guides were in their publishing infancy at the time, and, as far as I can tell, these were not the sort of books Davison brought along anyway. Beyond perhaps one illustrated “fish book,” she seemed to prefer volumes on navigation or collections of English verse. She did not look over the rail and envision squeaky dolphins as her personal friends. Even with some mental distance after the trip, when Davison sat down to write My Ship Is So Small, she did not relay any spiritual connection to marine mammals or really any open-ocean life.
At most, Davison mentioned some companionship derived from the fish that schooled in the shade of Felicity Ann, such as the smaller ones that nibbled at the invertebrate growth on the boat’s bottom. Although she never put out a line to catch fish—she said she would have felt badly about killing them—she did eat the occasional flying fish that ended up dead on deck. This started when she had felt “honor bound” to eat one, since she’d read about this so often. After she fried a flying fish in butter and found she liked it, she did so several times more. One day she also recorded “baby cuttlefish” on deck, which were likely unfortunates from a school of flying squid.
Davison’s imagery of fish and squid seem mere moments, like curious clouds or, if she had been traveling on land, a mention of an attractive perennial on a front yard in a foreign country. The marine life gave some local flavor to her story, but it carried no moral for humans or messages about ocean health.
More emblematic of Davison’s relationship with the sea was an encounter later, in mid-January. As she continued her grueling passage westbound, three large sharks arranged themselves in formation around Felicity Ann, one on each side and one astern. “Unspeakably sinister,” the sharks swam so close that she could have reached over the rail and touched them. They served only to emphasize the menace of the ocean: what Davison described as the “ceaseless, tireless, lonely, loveless sea.”
In other words, Ann Davison felt that people cannot love the ocean any more than anyone can love the sky or outer space. Her sea of the 1950s was a wilderness in which to prove oneself, in the wake of Joseph Conrad, far from the forming eddies of Rachel Carson and Jacques Cousteau. Love of the ocean for Davison was the love of seafaring, the “illusion of mastery.”
Eventually, after an anxious slog of sixty-five days alone at sea, which included a troubling stye in one of her eyes and “sea boils,” Ann Davison dropped anchor in a small harbor of Dominica in the late afternoon of 24 January 1953, becoming indeed the first woman documented to have crossed an ocean alone. Davison’s final words of My Ship Is So Small are about courage, which she defined as resilience, going forward, and openly learning from mistakes.
My own personal copy of the book is by chance a used first edition in which the only markings anywhere from a previous reader are on the last page. They are timid, precise lines penciled carefully with a straight edge under the very last words of the book: “I had to sail across thousands of miles of ocean to find out that courage is the key to living.”