One Perfect Storm After Another

In a pithy foreword to “Near Death on the High Seas” (Vintage, 430 pages, $14.95), the late William F. Buckley Jr. writes, “It is man’s capacity to expose himself to the certainty that he will be lonely and afraid that makes possible great adventures of the human spirit.”Not everyone in this collection of wrenching true-life accounts of boating disasters and near disasters knew what loneliness and dread they were in for. But in each we are witness to what men and women will do under conditions of the most extreme duress, and the best stories engagingly tap into “human emotion … because they rouse that most basic of fears — death by drowning,” as Cecil Kuhne writes in the preface. The mixture of pleasure and empathetic pain will be familiar to viewers of the television show “Lost” or readers of Sebastian Junger’s “The Perfect Storm,” though here the terror is often worse for being endured alone.The book’s best writer, Derek Lundy, provides a wide-angle view of the perilous 1996–97 Vendée Globe race, a solo, nonstop, round-the-world competition. Mr. Lundy conveys the bravery and desolation of crossing single-handedly the Southern Ocean, which contains the point on Earth most distant from land: “Only a few astronauts have ever been farther from land than a person on a vessel at that position.” Mr. Lundy also illustrates in the most stark terms the experience of several solo sailors (one of whom did not survive) trapped among the waves during “apocalyptic sailing”: “nonsailors might try to visualize a never-ending series of five- or six-story buildings, with sloping sides of various angles and with occasional buildings half as high again, moving toward them at about forty miles an hour.” One racer capsized in two or three seconds when the keel of his boat snapped off while he was drinking tea in the cabin. Soon after, the boom smashed a cabin window, sending the sea rushing in till it nearly filled the overturned vessel. Miraculously, he was saved, though regrettably that rescue is not chronicled here.“Near Death” is not merely a collection of tales of derring-do; at its strongest it delivers a full-blooded sense of lives lived far beyond the comfort zone most of us have so meticulously constructed. “For every sailor the sea is the enemy,” Buckley writes, and what gives this book some depth is seeing people light out into enemy territory knowing that whatever precautions are taken, man is likely to lose any fierce battle with nature.Mr. Kuhne, the editor of the anthology, chose his narratives well for the most part, although they are unwisely arranged alphabetically by author. In many cases they are written by firsthand participants, which often lends a captivating immediacy, but some of the authors are more sailors than writers. Sprinkled throughout the book are an array of technical terms that will scare off some laymen and casual boatmen, and readers are liable to become impatient to get to the moments of highest drama. But when the havoc breaks loose, as it invariably does, this is gripping material.In one fine chapter, “Dark Wind,” Gordon Chaplin recounts how he and his lover Susan Atkinson tried to ride out a typhoon while anchored just off an idyllic islet in the Marshall Islands. “The idea of abandoning ship — our home, our career, our life — was unthinkable” as the storm built, as it is to many a captain, but the decision to stay aboard brought not only the loss of the boat but the drowning death of Atkinson, and Mr. Chaplin’s account, which evinces a flair for the dramatic, relates a poignant series of second-guesses.Peter Nichols’s “Sea Change” might seem out of place since it devotes a good portion of its pages to a marriage’s dissolution, which occurred prior to a nearly deadly voyage. But its depiction of the failed marriage and Mr. Nichols’s relationship with his boat in the face of solitude is touching. Toad was a wooden craft he had spent countless days sailing and fixing up. Headed for America from England but still many miles away, Toad took on water through the seams in the hull and “turned into a colander.” Mr. Nichols had to abandon it and nearly all his possessions when he was rescued by a container ship that heard his distress call on its way to Galveston, Texas. When the ship’s crewmen pulled him aboard, all Mr. Nichols had for money was about $60 and a Visa card with a limit of 100 British pounds. But at least he was no longer alone.Mr. Hughes has written for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times, among other publications.

One Perfect Storm After Another

One Perfect Storm After Another

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