A selection of interesting and unusual books for boat or bach.

A shipmate of mine calls the chandlery his ‘church.’ Right now, he’s no doubt making repeat reverential visits to prepare his boat for their summer cruise.

Reminder to Gordon: you need to drop by a boating books shop as well, to stock up on those other essentials for a great summer cruise – good books aplenty.

Here are some suggestions, mate:

AN ATLAS OF EXTINCT COUNTRIES
BY GIDEON DEFOE (4TH ESTATE 2020)

AN ATLAS OF IMAGINED ISLANDS
EDITED BY HUW LEWIS-JONES
(THAMES & HUDSON 2019)

Every saloon table needs a few dip-in-dip-out books that provide nuggets of conversational value during the evening meal. These two books will do the trick. For among the extinct countries, who would know of Poyais (today a part of Honduras and Nicaragua), or Maryland in Africa, or Khwarenzia (comprising of today’s Iran, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, roughly. And cause of death? ‘A total lack of manners!’), or New Caledonia (not the one you’re thinking of). As for the imagined islands, you’ll enjoy the fanciful maps and descriptions of Primera-Edición, El Dodorado, Sömnö, Between-Tides and others. They all sound like places worth visiting – if you could.

PLUNGE – ONE WOMAN’S PURSUIT OF A LIFE LESS ORDINARY
BY LIESBET COLLAERT

(ROAMING ABOUT PRESS, 2020)

A worthwhile recounting of a life where moorings are cast adrift, and told from the perspective of an independent woman, who didn’t really know about sailing before. And who gets seasick. As the blurb says, “The author and her husband [sort of] sail to incredible places, but the real journey is a personal one.” With dogs as shipmates.

The book is interesting too in its coverage of starting a manufacturing business while on board the boat, and a pre- and later-life as nomads on the road. I found myself compelled to keep reading to find out what happened next with Liesbet et al.

NAVIGATION, KUPE & COOK – AN OCEAN IN A MIND AND A MIND ON AN OCEAN
BY KINGSLEY SMITH

(MARY EGAN PUBLISHING 2022)

An intriguing premise for a book: to compare the heritages of navigation from societies without writing (that of Polynesian ocean voyager Kupe) and those with (the European traditions of Captain James Cook). Dense, well researched and well-referenced, a book to be savoured slowly. Essential reading for all contemporary New Zealand navigators.

THE ENDERBY SETTLEMENT – BRITAIN’S WHALING VENTURE ON THE SUB-ANTARCTIC AUCKLAND ISLANDS 1849-52
BY CONON FRASER

(OTAGO UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014)

For bleak and barely inhabited spaces, the SubAntarctic Islands have generated a rich trove of tales and epic storytelling. This terrific book adds to this rich library: the barely believable story of Britain’s most optimistic, most misguided and shortest-lived colony, which struggled on for only three years. It’s a unique record of a doomed colonial enterprise that has left the Auckland Islands pretty much as they were before – uninhabited, isolated, wild and beautiful. But at least now with World Heritage status.

FIGUREHEADS ON THE BOW OF THE SHIP
BY SUE PRITCHARD AND JEREMY MITCHELL

(NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM LONDON 2020).

A book of unsettling images (though beautifully photographed). For, as the text says, “When ashore, removed from the ship and divorced from their original function, an air of uncanny surrounds figureheads.” Brief descriptions of each add to the intrigue, such as for ‘Personification of a Naval Battle’ (a woman in a blue-green dress), or ‘Alecto, a Greek Fury’, or ‘Lallah Rookh’ (no, I hadn’t heard of him before, either) or ‘Rose of Torrige.’ Another great in-and-out book for the saloon table.

MISCHIEF AMONG THE PENGUINS
BY H W TILMAN

(GRAFTON BOOK, THE MARINER’S LIBRARY, 1961)

‘Hands wanted for long voyage in a small boat. No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure.’ So ran the ad in The Times of London in 1959. A reminder of what sailboat cruising was really like back in the days before chart-plotters, SSB radios, Iridium Go or watermakers – or any of the host of specialist accessories we rely on now. This surprisingly poetic narrative of an epic voyage from the UK to the Crozet and Kerguelen Islands in the remote and icy southern Indian Ocean is also a story of epic and trail-blazing mountaineering. Of Tilman’s writing, Sir Francis Chichester said, “His books are accounts of real adventure. They satisfy me as fiction never could.” In 1977, aged 80, Tilman was lost at sea on board the expedition vessel En Avant, near the Falkland Islands.