Sailing Alone: A History by Richard King

Sailing Alone: A History
by Richard J. King
Penguin Books 2023

Singlehanded sailors are the focus and the motivation for this book. Sailing Alone: A History tells the storyline of historical ocean crossings and unprecedented circumnavigations while exploring the motivations of these strange people who decide to spend months, or even years, alone in some of the most inhospitable places on Earth. Similar popular books are not easy to come by. The most recent examples were written at the beginning of the 21st century, such as the case of Nic Compton’s Sailing Solo: The Legendary Sailor and Great Races (2003) or Lone Sailors and Spiritual Insights: Cases of Sport and Peril at Sea by Richard Hutch (2005).

King, himself a solo ocean crosser, or, as he calls the sailors who also write, sailor-writer explains at the beginning of this book that:

Sailing Alone [: A History] is the exploration, firstly, of why go. I wanted to find out why other people have committed, exiled themselves into small boats alone on the surface of the open ocean. (...). Secondly, ‘Sailing Alone [: A History]’ is the story of what they saw. (...). Thirdly, this study, (...) is about my own relatively minor voyage…

These motivations seem to be the beginning of an entertaining and effective book. The human factor in solo sailing is obviously relevant, and its analysis can be a fascinating reading. Also, having some first-hand narration of what is to be in a small sailing boat can add texture and bring the reader close to the subject. As the chapters are read this potentially good combination fades away.

The third aim of King for Sailing Alone: A History is the dominant feature of the book. Most of the chapters begin and end with King’s travel, even though the sailor-writers before King left a healthy amount of first-hand beautifully written testimonials that could be used instead. In the “Storms and Waves” chapter, the author quotes David Lewis's writing: “The remains of the already-shredded canvas dodger streamed out horizontally, flogging with so intense a vibration that the outlines blurred. Then the two stainless steel wires supporting the dodger parted and in a flash it was gone. The whole sea was white now. Sheets of foam, acres in extent, were continually being churned anew by fresh cataracts. These are not seas, I thought: they are Snowy Mountains of Australia—and they are rolling right over me.” If the book leaned more on these sailor-writer records, it would make these important sailing personalities more vivid and give to the book an anthology component of solo sailing writing.

The sentence opening the book is “My own solo crossing was not an exceptional feat of seamanship,” and yet, this unexceptional feat takes up a considerable portion of the pages that intend to tell the history of sailing alone. It is difficult to see King’s latest book as this kind of history. The selection of people highlighted does not follow a coherent criterion, and its presentation to the reader is not in a chronological or thematic way. In one of the last chapters addressing the feats of young solo sailors, Robin Lee Graham, the first teenager to conclude singlehanded circumnavigation in 1970, is only mentioned quickly with no biographical notes, except that he “cruised with his family in their boat in the South Pacific, and had read his Slocum”. At the same time, the rest of the chapter is dedicated to three other teenagers who concluded or only attempted their circumnavigation forty years after Graham. The lack of objectivity and erratic decisions make it difficult to agree that this is a work of history. However, the research to make this book seems to be exhaustive. The solo sailors mentioned make a practically complete list of sailor-writers of anglophone expression.

King's approach to the first and second aims of the book is done more successfully. The writer cites the “why go” and “what they saw” of several important and relevant solo sailors, allowing direct contact with those who made such incomprehensible trips, and mainly with those sailors who did them for the first time. However, King does not make a big effort to analyze the answers to these questions, to relate their motivation to world events or to track how or why they change from Josiah Shackford to Jessica Watson. The final impression is that these sailors did it for the same reason that people climb Mount Everest or hike the Pacific Crest Trail.

Sailing Alone: A History is a book that uses a good idea and a great motivation to disenchant in every chapter. The overflow of the author's non-relevant contribution to the subject and the erratic choice of topics and protagonists in the book, make it claim as a work of history feel unauthorized. From its pages remains a complete list of some good reads to do on this topic and a vague sense of the reason why people sail alone. Lastly, it is impossible to not suspect that to make this book two good ones were discarded: an objective history of singlehanded sailors and an honest personal account of a north-Atlantic solo crossing.

Marcelo Silva is a PhD candidate in computational electromagnetics currently living in Uppsala, Sweden.