25. The Environmental Epiphany of Ellen MacArthur
You can be nearly certain as you read this right now that a person is on a boat out there trying to cross an ocean alone. Beginning perhaps in the 1980s, for the first time in human history, as far as we know, at any given point on any day of the year there is assuredly at least someone, if not several someones, out on the global ocean voluntarily by themselves in a small boat, cruising on their own or racing against others. In 1988 the late historian and single-handed sailor Richard Henderson compiled a blue-water “honor roll” of solo sailors. He totaled 421 people, presumably all of whom had crossed at least one ocean alone. Of these 421, 94 had sailed alone around the world. In 2021 the International Association of Cape Horners created a revised list that totaled 330 people who had sailed alone around the world, including 180, beginning with Robin Knox-Johnston and Bernard Moitessier, who had done so without stopping. Many of the sailors on this list have circumnavigated alone more than once. There are certainly more people who have not been recorded in any published list, and then there are several hundred people by now, maybe even thousands, who crossed at least one ocean alone or did significant solo passages, but never went around the world by themselves.
Among the circumnavigating cruisers who did so more than once is an Australian by the name of Jon Sanders. He has sailed around the world eleven times. That is not a typo. He grew up in Perth, interested in boats since he was a boy. He read his Slocum and his Knox-Johnston and got involved in ocean sailing, funding his voyages mostly by his sheep-shearing business. Quiet and self-deprecating, Sanders bettered David Lewis by completing a single-handed circumnavigation of Antarctica. Between 1981 and 1982 he did this twice without stopping. A few years later he sailed around the world three times without stopping, a total of 70,000 miles. He has written just one book, Lone Sailor (1984), which is long out of print. This sort of art or messaging seems never to have been of much interest to him. Sanders finished his most recent circumnavigation in January of 2021 at the age of eighty-one. As the Covid-19 pandemic ripped around the globe, he was out at sea. He had been sponsored to raise awareness about microplastics. His mainsail carried an enormous logo that read “NoPlasticWaste.Org,” and he had a specially drilled intake to filter ocean water for one hour every day. When he returned home to Australia, scientists found tiny bits of plastic in nearly every single sample.
The single-hander racers have continued to push almost inconceivable boundaries. The French sailor François Gabart, for example, won the Vendée Globe in 2013. Then in 2017 he set the record, which is still held at the time of writing, for the fastest full solo circumnavigation of the world. In charge of a stunningly high-tech foiling trimaran, he averaged a speed of twenty-seven knots over his 27,000-mile voyage. Gabart surfed and pounded and hydro-foiled across the oceans of the Earth in forty-two days, sixteen hours, forty minutes, and thirty-five seconds. To put that into perspective, in 1969 Knox-Johnston did so in 312 days.
The difference between modern single-handed racing and small-boat solo cruising, comparing the passages of, say, François Gabart to that of Jon Sanders, is like juxtaposing a Formula 1 Grand Prix car race to a camping trip in a 1960s Volkswagen bus. The cost of Gabart’s mainsail could fund five of Jon Sanders’ boats and all of the equipment and stores for each of them to last around the world.
The Vendée Globe, the Velux 5 Ocean Race, the Route de Rhum, the Mini-Transat and Mini-Transpac (ocean-crossings in small racing boats), even the modern evolution of the OSTAR, which has now been split into a more professional race and one that is more for amateurs, are all big businesses and high-tech endeavors. In the wake of Alain Gerbault, Bernard Moitessier, Eric Tabarly, and Alain Colas, France has entirely dominated the sport. French solo sailors comprise the majority of winners, record-holders, and entrants of all the major solo races. In 2018, for example, organizers staged a fiftieth-anniversary re-enactment of the 1968–9 race—the one with Moitessier, Knox-Johnston, and Crowhurst. The 2018–19 sailors aimed to circle the world non-stop in boats that were similar to the 1960s-era size and designs, and they navigated without computers or GPS and other modern equipment. No one died, but only five of the eighteen entrants finished the race. Jean-Luc Van Den Heede, an experienced champion single-hander from France, won this retro-Golden Globe. Van Den Heede has now sailed alone around Cape Horn a full twelve times.
Although still dominated by the French sailors in the high-speed races, solo sailing has continued to expand around the world. For example, in the 2022–23 version of the Golden Globe circumnavigation race, sixteen entrants flew flags from countries such as Ireland and Canada. The winner was Kristen Neuschäfer of South Africa, the only woman entrant, finishing in 233 days. She finished ahead of the only two others who managed to complete the voyage nonstop, Abhilash Tomy from India and Michael Guggenberger from Austria. Ian Herbert-Jones from England was rescued after being rolled and dismasted after rounding Cape Horn. Neuschäfer herself rescued fellow competitor Tapio Lehtinen, from Finland, who was floating in a life raft in the southern Indian Ocean after his boat sank under his feet in about five minutes.
Meanwhile, among the solo cruisers and even among some of the racers, a sense of environmentalism has grown, influencing their why-go and their what-they-saw. The French solo circumnavigator and racer Isabelle Autissier in 2009 became the head of the French branch of the World Wildlife Fund. She writes and advocates for climate-change action and has proposed that racing boats post their carbon footprint on their hulls before departing on an ocean crossing. For the 2024 Vendée Globe, the Swiss single-hander Oliver Heer (#RaceforChange) aims to run a climate-neutral race and will be sampling seawater for levels of carbon dioxide, temperature, and salinity, sending out the data in real time to the Swiss Polar Institute. Gabart himself told the press after setting the world record that the most likely restraint to the next person breaking his time will not be anything related to boat design, but the fact that the melting of Antarctica’s edges due to global warming has made sailing in the furious winds of the Southern Ocean increasingly more hazardous.
Solo sailors have rarely led the way of blue environmentalist movements, however. Of any sailor, Moitessier lived and wrote the most earnestly about his spiritual relationship with ocean life and the sea itself, but even he never really waved a flag to preserve, protect, or diminish our impact on the ocean specifically. Even in his later writings, Moitessier was more focused on people on land, both in cities and on South Pacific islands. The next generation of published solo mariners, often going when quite young and having grown up with public concern about ocean plastics, oil spills, and overfishing, such as Robin Lee Graham, Nicolette Milnes Walker, and Tania Aebi, began to lean in a little to marine conservation. These sailor-authors wrote of pollution, beautifully diverse marine settings, and anthropomorphized sea turtles. None of them afterwards, however, did anything professionally in terms of ocean advocacy. Nor have Watson, Sunderland, or Dekker in the 2010s been active in marine conservation after their voyages. As eighty-three-year-old Kenichi Horie explained to me beside San Francisco Bay in 2022, the why-go for him, which I think goes for most single-handers, especially at first, is more often about the personal mission.
For example, in May of 2022 the Australian sailor Lisa Blair became the first woman to circumnavigate Antarctica non-stop aboard her vessel Climate Action Now. She completed this goal on a second attempt, setting a new speed record. Her boat was covered with a design that depicts hundreds of sticky notes about how individual people can make changes. “I run a paperless office. Donna, Gold Coast,” says one. “I embrace plastic free July, Cleo W., NSW,” says another. Blair’s first book was called Facing Fear (2021). Addressing climate change was an opportunity for sponsorship and almost certainly a far distant second to Blair’s mission to solo sail around Antarctica. This does not diminish her genuine care and desire to make a broader impact. It’s like people running a marathon for a cause.
All of this in mind, then, renders the story of Ellen MacArthur, our final character to sail onto this watery stage, all the more exceptional.
“I loved the sea, I was drawn by the sea, and my job and motivation were to race on the sea,” declared Ellen MacArthur in her first book, Taking on the World (2003). In this she tells the story of her life up to her second-place finish in the 2000–1 Vendée Globe, a feat that she accomplished as the youngest (aged twenty-four) and only female entrant. The Vendée Globe is an event that transcends analogy or parallel: roughly three months of relentless high-speed sailing alone in the harshest conditions in the world as sole navigator, engineer, software technician, tactician, rigger, meteorologist, cook, and sailmaker on racing boats sixty feet long—propelling oneself by the powers of the wind while thousands of miles away from any physical assistance and constantly trying to balance simple survival with the desire to go ever faster. When Ellen MacArthur sailed in the Vendée Globe in 2000–1, one person had died in each of the previous two races.
As with nearly all of the world’s single-handers, the path to this sort of life and her motivation to go could hardly have been predicted—but MacArthur’s passion and talent for this seemed like a rare, recessive gene emerged in this special individual. She was born in 1976, the oldest daughter of three children, in the farming village of Whatstandwell, Derbyshire. At age four she went on her first sailboat with her aunt, who owned a little pocket cruiser by the coast. Like a young Mozart finding a keyboard for the first time, a prodigy discovering her talent and passion, Ellen was immediately enthralled and devoted.
“The most amazing feeling was the feeling of freedom, the feeling that I felt when we hoisted her sails,” she said later about that first day. “It was the greatest sense of freedom that I could ever imagine. I made my mind up there and then after that first sail, somehow, I was going to sail around the world.”
As MacArthur saved her lunch money to buy her own boat she read every book on sailing she could borrow. She remembers in particular reading Gipsy Moth Circles the World. Her school library still has the lending card showing that she checked it out multiple times. Meanwhile, she passionately looked forward to the small annual trips with her aunt. When she at last bought her little dinghy, she sat in the boat on the grass in her backyard. Soon she was taking lessons. By the age of seventeen, after learning she had not passed her examinations to become a veterinarian, mostly due to a poorly timed illness, MacArthur decided she would skip university, earn her boat captain’s license, and begin teaching sailing. She bought herself her own pocket cruiser. In 1995, because of her devoted teaching and excellence and speed in achieving her certifications, MacArthur was awarded the BT/YJA Young Sailor of the Year Award in Britain, sharing the stage with none other than Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, who was receiving his second Yachtsman of the Year Award. No one at the time, not even MacArthur, had any idea what she would go on to achieve—and that these two would be sharing the stage again ten years later.
MacArthur decided that she wanted to sail her boat alone around Britain. The round-Britain solo voyage had been first popularized a century and a half earlier by previous M-surnamed British yachtsmen—Middleton, McMullen, and MacGregor—and was later spun into literature by Jonathan Raban, who after his own solo trip around his home island wrote Coasting (1986). At eighteen, MacArthur found a sponsor and accomplished the trip without incident, navigating all the tides and currents and coastal rocks and rips that make a solo trip like this so difficult.
MacArthur next earned a position helping to prepare boats for ocean races, which led to her assisting in the delivery of a racing boat back across the Atlantic from the Canadian Maritimes. As she approached the coast of France and saw the chimneys of Les Sables-d’Olonne, sitting at the helm alone with her shipmate down below, MacArthur found herself wanting to put the tiller over to go back out to sea. Her why-go was now forged in carbon, kevlar, and stainless steel: “Although we had been out there for two weeks and sailed through testing conditions, I had absolutely loved it. We really had sailed across the Atlantic, and I knew I was doing what I’d been born to do.”
MacArthur worked relentlessly on ocean racing with her eyes set on competing in the Vendée Globe, teaming up with the single-handed sailor and marketing manager Mark Turner. She worked to prepare others’ racing boats and hustled for sponsorship to race herself. She began to work on her French so she could communicate with the major players. In 1996, as the only female competitor among the fifty-two entrants, she sailed in her first ocean-crossing race, the Mini-Transat, which is a single-handed event in boats that are by rule only twenty-one feet long. The Mini-Transat had proved nearly as dangerous as the Vendée Globe; before MacArthur’s year, one person had died on average every time the event was held. MacArthur finished first in her class and seventeenth overall.
From here she, Mark Turner, and a growing support team found a major sponsor to finance Ellen’s entrance in the Route de Rhum, another trans-Atlantic race. When MacArthur won first-in-class and fifth monohull overall in this high-profile event, the racing world really began to sit up and take notice. Her sponsor committed to fully financing a new custom racing boat, Kingfisher, built to compete in the Vendée Globe. As she continued to train and prepare, she raced with other sailors, including with a Vendée Globe veteran from France. She raced on high-performance dinghies and enormous trimarans to practice technique and to understand how to harness the power of these ocean rockets. With her new boat completed in Auckland, MacArthur sailed with part of her team to Cape Horn, then by herself with Kingfisher up to France. As a further test, she raced her new boat across the North Atlantic in the 2000 OSTAR (now called the Europe 1 New Star). She won this race, too, earning first among the monohulls and setting a new OSTAR monohull record, crossing in fourteen days—the youngest ever to win. To exemplify how boat design and other factors have evolved, consider that Sir Francis Chichester first won that race in 1960 by finishing in forty days.
Later that year, in the northern hemisphere winter of 2000, MacArthur lined up to compete in the Vendée Globe. Modern racing boats, whether mono- or multi-hulls, as with Abby Sutherland’s Wild Eyes, cannot be steered by wind vanes. All of MacArthur’s self-steering aboard Kingfisher was electronic, dependent on a diesel generator and auxiliary solar power. On her boat there was no shower, no toilet, no laundry, no insulation, no comforts whatsoever. Her food was freeze-dried and heated with a little stove. Her water was desalinated from seawater. All of her systems had backups and backups of backups, and via a large satellite dome at the stern of Kingfisher, MacArthur could call or email her team for technical advice and regular check-ins. She could hear her position in relation to the other racers, and she could look at Internet-posted weather, but she was not allowed weather-routing advice from anyone ashore nor could she receive suggestions on when and where to tack. In other words, in addition to the brutally exhausting physical conditions, MacArthur and her Vendée Globe competitors at the time had to constantly make all their own decisions.
After coming from behind, MacArthur held the lead for a couple of days in the final stretch in the Atlantic, but she eventually finished in second place, only a day behind the winner, Michel Desjoyeaux of France, who set a new Vendée Globe speed record. Of the twenty-four entrants that year only fifteen finished. Over the course of the race, MacArthur had to replace fiberglass shelving, repair large patches of sail, flip and reset a battered daggerboard that was nearly twice her body weight (only a couple days from the finish this board had been struck underwater, perhaps by a floating shipping container), and on several occasions MacArthur had to climb to the top of her ninety-foot mast in the most extreme conditions to do electrical work, drill holes, and repair battens. Coming down from one of these trials she told her camera that this had been the closest to death she had ever felt: she had been pinned at the top of the mast on the leeward side as the boat gybed itself, since she had no way to alter the self-steering while up aloft. If the boat had heeled all the way over, she would have drowned—if not been killed immediately by the impact. In the final days of the Vendée Globe, she sailed with only one of her two forestays, a crucial part of the rigging that keeps the mast upright.
MacArthur had already been popular in France before the race, but with this second-place finish in the Vendée Globe her celebrity went to the moon. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the docks to welcome her home. “À donf! Ellen! À donf!” they shouted, which translates as “Go for it,” or “Full-on”—which started after a French interviewer asked MacArthur what her favorite French phrase was.
After the Vendée Globe, MacArthur wrote her first book, Taking on the World. Despite the pressure from her publisher, she took a full extra year to do so, because she felt she was too rushed and pulled in too many different directions. She wanted to carefully write the best book she could. Taking on the World even includes her own line-drawing illustrations. Meanwhile, MacArthur continued to sail and plan intensely, racing on her own, with others, and as captain of a fully crewed trimaran attempting to set a new world speed record. They lost their mast in the Southern Ocean, but they were all fine, and the endeavor gave MacArthur confidence that she could take a powerful trimaran by herself around the world to try to set the single-handed record. By December 2004 she was taking a new custom-built trimaran, an enormous seventy-foot-long boat named B&Q Castorama, which she nicknamed “Mobi” after the white whale, on a trial race across the Atlantic. She took this boat, built just for her in Australia, from New York City to Cornwall in just over seven days, arriving seventy-five minutes shy of the world record.
Later that year, MacArthur sailed her new trimaran solo around the world in an attempt to beat the fastest time for a circumnavigator. Among the most high-tech sailing vessels ever built, with the most advanced materials and technology, this vessel was also stunningly dangerous. A trimaran, like a raft with a pole in the middle, is more stable upside down, so if the boat pitchpoles or is flipped over sideways, which is more likely at great speed, it’s nearly impossible to right the vessel, even for a team of sailors. The mast of her B&Q Castorama, “Mobi,” reached one hundred feet high.
Ellen MacArthur aboard B&Q Castorama, approaching the finish line, about to set the world record for the fastest non-stop circumnavigation at the time (2005).
Arriving back in February 2005, standing once again on a stage with Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, Ellen MacArthur had achieved what she set out to do, rocking the sporting world by setting a new circumnavigation record, making it around the Earth—from a pre-set line off France and back—in seventy-one days, fourteen hours, eighteen minutes, and thirty-three seconds. Since this wasn’t within any racing rules, she received regular weather-routing advice and constant assistance from her shore-based team, but the weather routers were occasionally off or even incorrect—the reality of weather forecasting. As she neared the finish, over 30,000 emails from around the world came in each day, encouraging her on, dozens of which Ellen would scroll through and read on board for inspiration as she was sailing. Over the course of the ten weeks, the most she ever slept at a single stretch was three hours—which she did only once—and she averaged over the whole circumnavigation no more than four and a half hours of total sleep during each twenty-four-hour period. MacArthur said she found this trip twice as hard as the Vendée Globe race, admitting that her mind visited some very dark places due to physical and mental exhaustion. Although she was sailing alone, she wrote that this truly felt like a team effort, even more than any other previous race, a culmination of years of collective work from dozens of people. This feeling of doing it for others helped pull her through. Her devotion and partnership with her “Mobi,” too, was as cherished and emotional as her relationship with Kingfisher.
Ellen MacArthur and “Mobi” were accompanied back to England by a Royal Navy escort and a private fleet of hundreds of vessels. Queen Elizabeth II named her, at twenty-eight, the youngest woman in modern times to be Dame Commander of the British Empire. The President of France awarded her the Légion d’Honneur. Although her world record would only stand for a couple of years and then would be slashed by François Gabart a few years after that, the other awards and opportunities continued to flow in, and she continued to race at the highest level, alone, as skipper, and as part of a crew.
Yet five years after her solo circumnavigation record, she quit competitive sailing entirely.
To explain why MacArthur left the racing life at the top of her game, it is important to delve into her what-they-saw, the evolution of her perception of the ocean and marine life. As presented in her writing, her blue-water world was at first more Chichester than Moitessier. She sailed with her eyes constantly on boat speed and weather, often sailing her boat white-knuckled at more than twenty knots across the surface. Periods of calm seas and low winds were moments of anguish and times to repair the boat frantically before the next blow. As MacArthur spent more and more time at sea, however, in her storytelling she began to increase her observations and extend her sympathies to the nonhuman world at sea.
MacArthur, for example, never had the time to fish at sea, but she wrote that she preferred not to eat flying fish that landed on deck, to throw them back, because she felt sorry for them. She loved her dolphins, felt welcomed and accompanied by them, and she had been particularly struck early on in her career at the prolific marine life in the Gulf of St Lawrence as she began her first trans-Atlantic crossing. Here they sailed past belugas and pilot whales, over fifty dolphins approaching from all directions, and sharks “silently slipping along.” She was, as she wrote in Taking on the World, “hypnotized by the wildlife . . . amazed at how many species were around us.”
Early in her career and in Taking on the World, MacArthur wrote little of seabirds. But as she spent more time in the Southern Ocean, she became mesmerized by the albatrosses and other birds of this desolate region, recognizing that their sightings often signal land and icebergs nearby. Describing the albatrosses during her first Southern Ocean crossing alone, this bird is a “friend,” but she admitted to not having time or energy to think more about them. By her later trips she was able to spend time differentiating their species, and they came to symbolize these stormy seas and were her regular companions. In her second book, Race Against Time (2005), about her record-breaking solo circumnavigation on B&Q Castorama, MacArthur wrote the following one day after clearing the Cape of Good Hope:
Sunrise, though, was amazing—the light fantastic, and the seabirds, as ever, around us all the time. Wandering albatrosses, sooty albatrosses, black-bellied storm-petrels, and little shearwaters—dancing not just in the wind but with the immense waves. I guess for them it’s just another day in the Southern Ocean. As for me, sometimes I find it hard to come to terms with the idea that this is in fact my job.
Race Against Time includes several photographs of albatrosses, including ones taken from stills or video by MacArthur herself from her cockpit. On the bulkhead of “Mobi,” amidst small motivational sayings for herself, she drew cartoons of albatrosses, both comic and dramatic. After rounding Cape Horn, wrung-out tired and having to work aloft, she watched a single albatross seem to say goodbye to her as she left the Southern Ocean, bound north, still pushing to break the record.
In Race Against Time, MacArthur’s interest in seabirds continued up into the Atlantic on the way home. She wrote specifically about what she believed to be a masked booby (Sula dactylatra) near the equator, mentioning how she looked it up in her bird book. By Full Circle: My Life and Journey (2010), her third book, which was a memoir of her years after the Vendée Globe and beyond the world-record circumnavigation, MacArthur now began writing of the cape petrels in the Southern Ocean, and she described her stop in the Falkland Islands on her trial sail with B&Q Castorama, during which she had her brief meeting with the albatross conservationist Sally Poncet. “Little did I realize then,” MacArthur wrote, “the significance of the conversation.”
Beyond the seabirds, she described her experiences in the Southern Ocean as that sublime mixture of terrifically threatening yet mesmerizingly beautiful. At one point during the Vendée Globe race in 2000, MacArthur was napping far southeast of the Cape of Good Hope when she looked out of a portal and saw her boat sailing closely past an iceberg, within twenty feet. She ran into the cockpit in her socks. MacArthur told her camera immediately afterwards that she did not even want to think about what could have happened, wondered out loud how in all this vast ocean she could get so close to something like this. Sailing at over twenty knots and surfing down massive waves, she said: “It is a very subtle mixture of exhilaration and terror. And yes it’s amazing to be going so quickly, but you’re on your own and if something goes wrong there is no one there.” In all her trips to the Southern Ocean alone she had to be afraid of icebergs, however beautiful they were, because the radar alarms were unreliable, and she occasionally had to slalom past the smaller growlers at high speed in rough weather, even when it was dark and moonless.
MacArthur’s description of the enormous Southern Ocean sea states are harrowing, evocative of Kay Cottee’s descriptions of aquamarine wave faces backlit by the sun as the seas towered threateningly overhead. MacArthur wrote in Race Against Time, for example: “It’s about to go dark down here, and the waves are no smaller . . . I’m completely in awe of this place. The beauty of those immense rolling waves is endless, and there is a kind of eternal feeling about their majestic rolling that will live on for ever. Watching them roll along—with nothing to stop them—makes me and B&Q feel completely insignificant.” MacArthur, as if in a nod to Moitessier, continued on to explain how sensory it all was, how tiny she felt before the indifference of these seas, and how she was both afraid and feeling gorgeously alive—even in winds gusting to over fifty knots. MacArthur was isolated but felt free as she coped with the boat’s high speed in a storm, in the dark, when she couldn’t even see the waves coming. In Race Against Time she ended this onboard entry with a surprising shift in tone, as she tilted her hand toward what she was thinking about as her future calling after her sailing career: “I’m glad we’ve come down here and seen this storm. It’s a reminder of how small and insignificant we are on this planet—but at the same time what a responsibility we have towards its protection.”
After setting the world record, even as she continued to race for a couple of years, MacArthur had really moved on to her next mission: human sustainability on Earth. As she explains in Full Circle, she began to learn about the crash of the cod fishery in the North Atlantic by a chance tour of a mothballed French factory trawler and then a friend giving her a copy of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod (1997). She reconnected with Sally Poncet and visited the island of South Georgia and a couple of the other sub-Antarctic islands, where she learned about the impact of nineteenth-century sealing, twentieth-century industrial whaling, and the decreasing populations today of wandering albatrosses. Here she learned that seabirds are the most threatened of all groups of birds on Earth. Of monitored global populations, seabird colonies have declined by nearly seventy percent over the last seventy years. Their plummeting numbers are due in part to human development on their island habitats, introduced species like rats and pigs that eat their eggs, and because of plastic and chemical pollution at sea. Although this problem is lessening due to new regulations on the type of gear, in part due to the work of Poncet and her colleagues, tens of thousands of seabirds are also still killed each year due to industrial fishing practices, such as long-lining, which streams miles of lines with baited hooks near the surface, attracting and killing birds that mistake the bait for prey. As MacArthur helped to collect samples, count nests, and record advocacy videos, she found herself mesmerized by the albatrosses, their peaceful nature away from any people. She could now slow down, sleep through the night, watch the enormous animals up close and waddling around on the cliffs; before, she had only seen them out at sea on the wing in heavy winds, thousands of miles from land. With time to think, sitting on the islands that she had previously only screeched past, MacArthur began to reconsider her life, re-evaluating it thus far as even a bit selfish and self-centered.
“It was a bit like seeing something you weren’t expecting under a stone, and having two choices,” she said at one public talk. “I either put that stone to one side and learn more about it, or I put that stone back, and I carry on with my dream job of sailing around the world. I chose the first. I put it to one side and I began a new journey of learning.”
As MacArthur told it, what she saw under the stone, what she began to realize from her time alone in the Southern Ocean, was how her carefully measured supplies and materials on her boat so closely parallel the finite materials on Earth, materials such as coal and liquid petroleum, but also copper, tin, zinc, and silver—all projected by some research to be exhausted within this century. Sustainability of resources was a bigger issue than saving the whales or stopping coastal pollution. This was everything. MacArthur committed to leaving ocean racing altogether for this greater challenge: “the future of our global economy.” MacArthur’s growing sense of existential crisis about the human impact on the Earth crystallized during her “journey of learning,” over the four or so years after her 2005 record-setting circumnavigation. The emergency around climate change and the rapidly rising alarms about carbon emissions were getting louder.
“If we want a world that works,” wrote the conservationist writer and activist Bill McKibben in 2010, responding to a lack of action in the US Congress, “we’re going to have to raise our voices.”
So today one of the greatest single-handed sailors ever to have lived now uses her star power and logistical talents and experience to propel two initiatives. The first is the Ellen MacArthur Cancer Trust, which she started after the Vendée Globe. This program gets together on a sailboat young people who have had or are still fighting cancer, bringing them aboard as a crew to haul lines and steer the boat and just be with other kids in the same situation, including survivors, who really understand each other. The second, started in 2010, is the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which raises money, funds research, and conducts outreach to achieve a more circular global economy, not only recycling materials and products, but designing them, building them to be reused and repurposed from the start, to get closer to zero waste. MacArthur explains that she has found it is not enough simply to lower our impact and use less, travel less, buy less—the mission at hand is to realign the entire operating system of capitalism, shifting from a linear economy to a truly circular system. She explains that being on a boat alone, with all her supplies while several thousands of miles away from human contact, had inspired this perspective. When she stepped off “Mobi,” after setting the world record by traversing the Southern Ocean alone in 2005, running for her life before hurricane conditions off Cape Horn, MacArthur had her epiphany, connecting her sailing life to the world as a whole.
“No experience in my life could have given me a better understanding of the definition of the word finite,” she says in her public speeches, which have reached millions. “What we have out there is all we have. There is no more.”
Toward the end of Full Circle, MacArthur explained that she bristles at any perception of her as an “eco-warrior.” She is focused on inspiring innovation and positive change. Her beloved sailboat had become a symbol of Earth and her experience alone at sea had stood for all human life. Like the first solo circumnavigator Joshua Slocum who had returned home a century earlier, Ellen MacArthur also tied up at the dock and burned to be of greater use.
As the solo sailors have changed over a century, so have the stories created about them. In 2016, for example, a half dozen years after the establishment of the Ellen MacArthur Trust and the voyages of the three teenaged-girl single-handers, Disney released the animated film Moana. This was nearly 150 years after that heroic description of Josiah Shackford, seventy-five years after Call It Courage, and over fifty years after Where the Wild Things Are.
Moana slots neatly into the hero’s journey structure, with more than a brief nod to Call It Courage. In the animated film, the hero, Moana, the daughter of the chief, has been chosen as the special person favored by a personified ocean. However, unlike Mafatu in Call It Courage, Moana is not afraid of the ocean. She is instead blessed, chosen by the sea. Moana’s home island is in trouble, so she sets out alone, beyond the reef with her pet chicken, teaching herself to sail as she goes. After a storm leaves Moana and her small waka shipwrecked on an island, she solicits the help of the demi-god Maui, allowing her to voyage back out to sea, where she scrapes through several trials until she passes her final test by using her recently learned dynamic sailing skills to restore the ecological balance of the region. She saves her home island and the health of the food and her people, to whom she returns to be the next-generation chief. A major thread throughout the movie is that the main character learns of her people’s history, that they were once great voyagers across the oceans. The final scene of the film is Moana as a young captain-chief, a figure evoking master navigators like Mau Piailug who rejuvenated their Pacific Island communities in the 1970s. Moana’s fellow islanders sail gloriously over tropical swells in a fleet of traditional vessels while a stingray, the spirit of her grandmother, swims alongside the boat and a sea eagle, the spirit of Maui, soars by the masthead.
In other words, in Disney’s Moana, the new version of the solo-sailor story, the young mariner hero returns as an environmental and community savior, a reviver of traditional seafaring culture, and with the crown as new chief of her island, swarmed by hugs and cheering, beloved by her family and her community, whom she now serves.
Ellen MacArthur’s radical life-shift to focus on the betterment of humanity is mostly terrestrial, focused on humans on land, on the things we make and the preservation of materials, but it arose out of her study of seabirds and other twenty-first-century marine issues. She followed in the wake of solo-sailor environmentalists such as the Australian Ian Kiernan, one of Jessica Watson’s heroes, and other sailors turned activists, such as Sir Peter Blake of Aotearoa New Zealand and Isabelle Autessier of France.
Looking ahead toward the future of solo sailing, cruising or racing, regardless of what type of boat people choose to go on and at whatever speed and however connected to shore, the single-hander will always return home with a deeper appreciation for a single human’s smallness in time and on Earth. Sailing a small boat at sea is, especially for the cruisers, a commitment to a low-impact lifestyle that teaches one to adapt and pay careful attention to the natural world.
Robin Lee Graham put it well after his five years on Dove in the late 1960s: “One learns from the sea how little one needs, not how much.”
Solo sailors will continue to try to bring back to us how truly large our ocean is, how for weeks across the surface you can see no one else, nothing created by human hands. Although today they know intellectually that this is no longer the case, on the surface of the ocean the mariner still feels and looks on what appears to be an untouched, unspoiled, elemental and wild and immortal sea. Small-boat sailors in particular will continue to perceive the ocean this way and will write about it in kind. Yet sitting on the quiet deck alone with only the sound of the hull gurgling along over the royal blue surface, the solo sailor, regardless of their artistic aspirations, will always feel limited, by pen or now film, in what they can genuinely retrieve for those of us on shore as to the true experience of what they saw.
During one of Ellen MacArthur’s first ocean passages across the North Sea as a teenager, she tried to bottle up some bioluminescence to bring home. “I began to realize that the beauty of the water can’t be taken away or captured,” she wrote, “It can only properly be appreciated first hand . . . I was desperate to understand much more.”