Description
‘No one had sailed alone to Antarctica; I had long been obsessed with the fascination of the frozen southern continent;-to reach it, relying entirely upon my own resources, was to accept the ultimate challenge of the sea.’
The ultimate challenge of the sea. Here is the incredible story of how David Lewis responded to it, and won.
First there was the dream. Then came David Lewis’s search for a suitable boat which would not only withstand the journey, but which he could afford. Then came the preparation and supplies, the thousand and one items of equipment, stores and fuel necessary for that long voyage into danger.
David Lewis set sail from Sydney on 19 October 1972. Through the ‘Roaring Forties’, through the ‘Furious Fifties’ he sailed on. Mountainous sea, constant gales, snow storms, freezing temperatures accompanied him until the sixth week when, on 19 November, 3600 miles out from Sydney, and 2500 miles from the Antarctic peninsula, Ice Bird capsized and was dismasted. The proud yacht of a moment before had become a wreck: high adventure gave way to an apparently foredoomed struggle to survive. Yet, incredibly, after capsizing a second time, and in an astounding feat of navigation, Ice Bird made landfall at the U.S. Palmer Antarctic station, fourteen weeks after having left Sydney. There, the shattered boat was repaired.
In December 1973 David Lewis set sail on the second leg of his perilous journey through pack-ice and towering bergs, only to capsize yet again. Ten weeks later, exhausted and battered as Ice Bird, he reached Cape Town.
Ice Bird is not only the account of one of the greatest small-boat journeys of all time. It is also a story of human endurance, a testimony of man’s will to overcome almost anything and everything – physical and psychological – to stay alive.
In 1964, at the age of forty-five, David Lewis, a New Zealand-of Welsh and Irish descent, gave up his eighteen-year medical practice in London and took to the sea to realize his secret dream of sailing around the world. He had planned this carefully. Placed third in the first single-handed Transatlantic race in 1960 (which was won by Francis Chichester) he then built the catamaran, Rehu Moana in which he planned to sail round the world. The voyage took three years and Lewis described this journey with his wife and two small daughters in two superb books entitled Daughters of the Wind and Children of Three Oceans.
David Lewis became the first navigator in modern times to cross the Pacific – a journey of some 2500 miles from Tahiti to Huahine and Rarotonga to New Zealand – without instruments, following a legendary Maori course, and using only the sun and stars to steer by. His landfall was only some twenty-six miles in error.
In 1968-9, under a research fellowship of the Australian National University, he spent nine months in Isbjorn, a 39-ft auxiliary gaff ketch, investigating and learning from the few surviving practising navigators indigenous navigation methods in the Western Pacific.
David Lewis is the recipient of numerous awards and citations: The Gold Medal of The Royal Institute of Navigation in 1974; The American Institute of Navigation’s Superior Achievement Award for Outstanding Performance as a Practising Navigator; The Royal Yacht Squadron’s 1974 Chichester Award for a single-handed cruise.
Hard cover, 223 pages. In very good preloved condition with the exception of a name inside front cover and a worn dust cover with several tears.