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Welcome to the daring, thrilling, and downright strange adventures of William Willis, one of the world's original extreme sportsmen. Driven by an unfettered appetite for personal challenge and a yen for the path of most resistance, Willis mounted a single-handed and wholly unlikely rescue in the jungles of French Guiana and then twice crossed the broad Pacific on rafts of his own design, with only housecats and a parrot for companionship. His first voyage, atop a ten-ton balsa monstrosity, was undertaken in 1954 when Willis was sixty. His second raft, having crossed eleven thousand miles from Peru, found the north shore of Australia shortly after Willis's seventieth birthday. A marvel of vigor and fitness, William Willis was a connoisseur of ordeal, all but orchestrating short rations, ship-wreck conditions, and crushing solitude on his trans-Pacific voyages. He'd been inspired by Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl's bid to prove that a primitive raft could negotiate the open ocean. Willis's trips confirmed that a primitive man could as well. Willis survived on rye flour and seawater, sang to keep his spirits up, communicated with his wife via telepathy, suffered from bouts of temporary blindness, and eased the intermittent pain of a double hernia by looping a halyard around his ankles and dangling upside-down from his mast. Rich with vivid detail and wry humor, Seaworthy is the story of a sailor you've probably never heard of but need to know. In an age when countless rafts were adrift on the waters of the world, their crews out to shore up one theory of ethno-migration or tear down another, Willis's challenges remained refreshingly personal. His methods were eccentric, his accomplishments little short of remarkable. Don't miss the chance to meet this singular monk of the sea.… (mais)
It's hard to image now, but when Thor Heyerdahl's set out "Kon-Tiki" in 1948, most people said he was crazy and was sure to die - so when he lived to tell about it, becoming a world-wide celebrity, it set off a raft of imitators in the 1950s and 60s, which Pearson calls the "Golden Age" of rafting.
The subject of the book, William Willis (b. 1897) was a working-class German immigrant blessed with physical stamina and mechanical know-how from a lifetime of working odd-jobs at sea and land, he was a man of extreme habits and strong personality - for example he lived on a bizarre diet (for the 1950s) of home-grown organic raw vegetables and grains. A greybeard in his 60s, he decided to test himself and follow Heyerdahl's example in a balsa raft, setting adrift from Peru westward, he went entirely alone. His successful expedition, global press attention and books which followed made him a household name for a brief time, but today he is largely forgotten and unknown.
The book discusses not only Willis' five separate raft trips over a 15 year period or so - Willis was well into his 70s by the end - it is a survey of other rafting expeditions from the "Golden Era" including Kon-Tiki, Tahiti Nui (I,II and III), Lehi (I,II,III,IV), and Alain Bombard. Each is a fascinating mini-account told by an accomplished novelist.
Pearson's portrayal of Willis is often unsympathetic - perhaps rightly so and for the same reasons critics in the 1950s and 60s were. Unlike Heyerdahl who set out for a scientific reason and greater purpose, Willis did it for no reason other than to see if he could personally do it. Willis often made major mistakes such as taking contaminated water, not taking a spare set of sails, not correcting a dangerous medical condition - Willis knew better and understood his risk but seemed to undermine himself for the thrill of the adventure. ( )
From Publishers Weekly In 1953, the 60-year-old Willis sailed a homemade balsa-wood raft over 4,000 miles across the Pacific from Peru to American Samoa, accompanied only by a cat and a foul-mouthed parrot. Novelist Pearson (Glad News of the Natural World) gives a rousing retelling of how, along the way, Willis endured a hernia and a perforated ulcer, sewed up an artery ruptured by a shark's tooth and survived on seawater after running out of fresh. He details Willis's eccentric diets, yogic breathing exercises and mystic spirituality, his half-baked, spur-of-the-moment planning, and the uncanny luck and superhuman hardiness that saw him through the rafting crises. Pearson places Willis in the context of others who have embarked upon Kon-Tiki–like epic raft excursions: Willis's was probably the most daring and quixotic of the bunch, undertaken not to advance a crackpot archeological theory (one Mormon-led expedition set out to prove that ancient Israelites had reached Hawaii from California), but simply to deny his own mortality. Pearson tells this incredible adventure tale in a breezy but gripping style, steeped in the lore of the sea and the perverse wisdom of a real-life ancient mariner. ( )
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Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
This book is dedicated to Mayor Andy Baxter and to the memory of his beloved wife, Carley Cunniff, in modest token of my gratitude for their support, encouragement, and invaluable friendship
Primeiras palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
He carried by way of provisions only olive oil and flour, honey and lemon juice, garlic and evaporated milk.
Citações
Últimas palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
We can only be sure that William Willis slipped beneath the swell and so in death, as in life, was committed to the sea.
Welcome to the daring, thrilling, and downright strange adventures of William Willis, one of the world's original extreme sportsmen. Driven by an unfettered appetite for personal challenge and a yen for the path of most resistance, Willis mounted a single-handed and wholly unlikely rescue in the jungles of French Guiana and then twice crossed the broad Pacific on rafts of his own design, with only housecats and a parrot for companionship. His first voyage, atop a ten-ton balsa monstrosity, was undertaken in 1954 when Willis was sixty. His second raft, having crossed eleven thousand miles from Peru, found the north shore of Australia shortly after Willis's seventieth birthday. A marvel of vigor and fitness, William Willis was a connoisseur of ordeal, all but orchestrating short rations, ship-wreck conditions, and crushing solitude on his trans-Pacific voyages. He'd been inspired by Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl's bid to prove that a primitive raft could negotiate the open ocean. Willis's trips confirmed that a primitive man could as well. Willis survived on rye flour and seawater, sang to keep his spirits up, communicated with his wife via telepathy, suffered from bouts of temporary blindness, and eased the intermittent pain of a double hernia by looping a halyard around his ankles and dangling upside-down from his mast. Rich with vivid detail and wry humor, Seaworthy is the story of a sailor you've probably never heard of but need to know. In an age when countless rafts were adrift on the waters of the world, their crews out to shore up one theory of ethno-migration or tear down another, Willis's challenges remained refreshingly personal. His methods were eccentric, his accomplishments little short of remarkable. Don't miss the chance to meet this singular monk of the sea.
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The subject of the book, William Willis (b. 1897) was a working-class German immigrant blessed with physical stamina and mechanical know-how from a lifetime of working odd-jobs at sea and land, he was a man of extreme habits and strong personality - for example he lived on a bizarre diet (for the 1950s) of home-grown organic raw vegetables and grains. A greybeard in his 60s, he decided to test himself and follow Heyerdahl's example in a balsa raft, setting adrift from Peru westward, he went entirely alone. His successful expedition, global press attention and books which followed made him a household name for a brief time, but today he is largely forgotten and unknown.
The book discusses not only Willis' five separate raft trips over a 15 year period or so - Willis was well into his 70s by the end - it is a survey of other rafting expeditions from the "Golden Era" including Kon-Tiki, Tahiti Nui (I,II and III), Lehi (I,II,III,IV), and Alain Bombard. Each is a fascinating mini-account told by an accomplished novelist.
Pearson's portrayal of Willis is often unsympathetic - perhaps rightly so and for the same reasons critics in the 1950s and 60s were. Unlike Heyerdahl who set out for a scientific reason and greater purpose, Willis did it for no reason other than to see if he could personally do it. Willis often made major mistakes such as taking contaminated water, not taking a spare set of sails, not correcting a dangerous medical condition - Willis knew better and understood his risk but seemed to undermine himself for the thrill of the adventure. (