Alone through the roaring forties - Vito Dumas

Alone Through the Roaring Forties is the story of Vito Dumas's wartime voyage from Argentina eastward around the globe in the 31-foot canoe-sterned ketch Lehg II. By any measure, it was a remarkable, unprecedented voyage over what Dumas justly called "the impossible route" - south of the Cape of Good Hope, south of Australia, south of Cape Horn. Leaving Buenos Aires in June 1942, he made the 20,000-mile voyage singlehanded, becoming the first to do so. He was also the first solo sailor to round Cape Horn and survive, and the first to sail around the world with only three landfalls. Dumas completed his high-latitude voyage through the great Southern Ocean, where prevailing westerly gales push huge seas unimpeded around and around the bottom of the globe. His gear and provisions were makeshift - he suffered inordinately because his tattered clothing provided no protection from the cold wind and water - but his boat, though very small, was tough and well mannered. He was awarded the Slocum Prize in 1957 "to honour the extraordinary voyages made by the greatest solitary navigator in the world.";Alone Through the Roaring Forties was first published in Spanish, then in French, and finally, in 1960, in English. Somehow through its translations it retained the qualities not just of a great voyage, but of a great book. It reflects the force of Dumas's personality, the ups and downs of elation and depression, hardship and relaxation, and above all, his unrelenting determination in the face of adversities. It is a story of skilled navigation and seamanship and of great adventure, and it is the godfather of all later stories about daring the vast, forbidding Southern Ocean in frail sailboats - including, most recently, Derek Lundy's Godforsaken Sea. Any sailor in the Roaring Forties must reach an accommodation with the sea at its most challenging and inhospitable. Dumas was the first to do so alone in a small boat, and it is that struggle which informs every page of his book, placing it among The Sailor's Classics. Jonathan Raban's introduction places this great book, out of print for many years, in its deserved place of eminence in the literature of the sea.;Rich with details of Dumas's life and motivations, the introduction will help readers appreciate the magnitude of Dumas's trail-blazing accomplishment, his reasons for undertaking it, and its significance for the generations of adventurers that have followed.