The British have a love of eccentric hobbies, a love that is ratified through organizations that indulge their unusual avocations. When I lived in the U.K, I was invited to join a group that collected matchbooks, one that studied the type of cobbles used in ancient walkways, and another that was dedicated to proving that the Earth was indeed flat. There is even a group dedicated to “drainspotting”; that is, taking photos of unusual manhole covers and posting them on the Internet. Disturbingly, the favored candidate for election as Britain’s prime minister is a member of that latter group.
Save for a rather standard interest in the poker club that met in the glorified closet that was the ski club room at Edinburgh’s Royal High School [my cousin was the team captain and had the key], I resisted these baubles.
However, there was rowing, a sport to which I account my rather broad shoulders and their upper-middle-aged tendency to snap, crackle, and pop when I first get up in the morning. I enjoyed those early mornings in a scull along the Water of Leith, but only to the point of mild eccentricity. When I met members of The Ocean Rowing Society at an ancient competition, I discovered the nexus between eccentricity and demented devotion. Not only did they promote, and continue to do so, the sport of casual rowing, but they also encourage the madness of crossing the oceans in rowboats.
There is eccentricity, but that has a certain splendor to it.
The “patron saints” of this pursuit are a couple of characters who are among the final members of that body of adventurous Brits whom I recall admiring during my formative years. These were people, now difficult to find, who desired not to recognize limits for human endeavor, but to strive in all things to discover what may be outside the margins of common existence.
John Fairfax was born in 1937 to an English father and a Bulgarian mother. Because of Fairfax elder’s work, they lived in Italy. It is here that I should warn the reader that, personally, I suspect much of Fairfax’s accounts of his youth require the ingestion of a rather large amount of sodium. Without comment as to their veracity, he would tell people that he was kicked out of the Italian Boy Scouts for firing a pistol at members of another troop, that he would move to Argentina with his mother and live off the land like a jungle boy, that he would join a band of smugglers and pirates, etc. I really haven’t the energy to log all of this bosh.
Two bits of information that I don’t doubt are 1.) He was inspired by the account of two Norwegians who, in 1896, managed to row across the Atlantic Ocean and 2.) Was equally inspired by the rowboat crossing of John Ridgway and Chay Blyth in 1966. [If the reader follows the link, he or she may see what those two got up to a couple of years later.]
Ridgway and Blyth were very much in the news during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. They were, along with Sir Francis Chichester, considered to be the eminent watermen of the period, especially as they both rowed across the Atlantic and participated among the few competitors in the first sailboat race of solo circumnavigators. While Fairfax gave many vague reasons for his interest in crossing the Atlantic, I can’t help but think that attention and publicity had something to do with it. This is not a criticism, by the way, as I find that much of human achievement, especially in the broad realm of “adventure”, is encouraged by these twin desires.
So, in London by his early thirties, and not having very much money or any sort of career to speak of, Fairfax trusted his luck and managed to find housing, a small income through legal gambling, and enough leisure to begin training to satisfy what was then a rather singular desire to be the first person to row solo across the Atlantic. Whereas these days there would be all sorts of high technical training devices and strategies, Fairfax made do with daily outings in a rented rowboat on The Serpentine, the lake in Hyde Park that is mostly used by couples floating about with picnic baskets and children sailing small, model ships. The days he favored for training were those when the weather was so bad that he’d be the only one in the water.
Also, through the circumstance of a bold introduction, he made the acquaintance of Uffa Fox, the sailing buddy of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the designer of many of the sailing craft familiar even in our day. Fox was intrigued by Fairfax’s passion and plans, even if they did seem a tad naive, and was willing to design a rowboat of singular qualities for the journey. He was not, however, impressed by Fairfax's budget, which was nil, so considerable negotiation was necessary, especially in the solicitation of sponsors for the journey. Eventually, enough were found that Fox presented him with the 22-foot, mahogany, self-righting, self-bailing, technological marvel that would be christened “Britannia”.
However, it wasn’t just donations that were gained through Fairfax’s series of classified newspaper inquiries. An avocational rower, with a dull job, no money, and a fresh divorce, found the ads intriguing and responded. Sylvia Cook would become an indispensable addition to the team and, eventually, to a subsequent adventure.
Other negotiations were necessary as Cook, who, while enamored of the romance of the odyssey, was also a bit alarmed at the off-handedness of the planning and nudged Fairfax into studying celestial navigation, soliciting the donation of a proper radio, and finding ways to store enough food to keep a man healthy enough to do nothing but row a boat for several months. He also consulted with a company that provided food for mountaineers that, while virtually taste-free, would provide enough daily calories to keep rowing. Still, compared with the equipment and supplies that contemporary ocean rowers use, Fairfax was practically paleolithic.
Since Fairfax was British by birth, he did carry with him an impressive supply of brandy on the rowboat, too.
Fairfax, along with Cook, traveled to Spain’s Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa, and launched Britannia on January 20, 1969 to no fanfare whatsoever. It’s just as well, since Fairfax discovered quickly that rowing in the Atlantic was different than rowing The Serpentine. His departure was not so much of an epic poem by Byron than a short comedy by The Three Stooges. Still, for better or worse, he was off.
Fairfax made it from the harbor and out into the open ocean where he would live by his physical ability and wits on brandy, food bars, sharks and other fish that he caught, and whatever donations that he could encourage from passing ships. From time to time, he would even go aboard freighters to enjoy a shower.
One hundred and eighty days later, much thinner and having laced the edges of madness born from loneliness and fatigue, Fairfax encountered some American good old boys, out bombing around the coast of Florida ostensibly looking for fish to catch, who had sighted the Britannia and gave Fairfax the good news that he was almost at his journey’s end. Refusing a tow, determined by row to the beach under his own power, Fairfax crunched the sand in Hollywood, Florida on July 19th. Waiting there for him was Sylvia Cook. Oh, and some members of the press and a pleasant note from the crew of Apollo 11 who had, just the day before, been the first humans to walk on the Moon.
I would mention that, had he been just eight days slower, the record for the first solo rowboat crossing of the Atlantic would have fallen to Tom McClean, also of Britain, who had left Newfoundland in April and, because he was actually a life-long rower who had planned a smarter route, made it to Ireland in just two months.
Naturally, Fairfax had made his point and was determined not to do anything so “bloody stupid” ever again. Just as naturally, two years later, he would begin to row across the Pacific, this time with the companionship of Sylvia Cook.
A note for younger readers: It was considered a bit scandalous for these two to have been cohabiting without benefit of marriage. While common today, in the late sixties and early seventies it was an outré notion. In those days, marriage licenses often had to be presented by younger couples when checking into a motel or hotel to prove their status. Apartments expected the same and in certain municipalities it was illegal for a man and woman to live together without the imprimatur of court or church.
This lent an exotic quality to the Fairfax/Cook adventures, which intoxicated the media, but also placed them in an awkward position. In order not to be accused of supporting a questionable lifestyle, they were forced by convention to present Fairfax and Cook as a pair of platonic adventurers, however with subtle innuendo about what the two might be doing during idle hours in the Pacific.
On April 26, 1971, Fairfax and Cook left San Francisco in the next version of Uffa Fox’s product, the Britannia II, to be the first people to row across the Pacific Ocean. The entire journey would take them almost a year.
Having driven for ten hours in heavy traffic and bad weather in a car with my wife, I can only imagine the stresses on their relationship that would have been caused by such an ordeal. Also, having myself sailed from Seattle to Sydney, the Pacific is larger than one can imagine and, during my three and one-half week voyage, when not near a port, I think we ever only saw one other ship. As impressive as was Fairfax’s solo crossing of the Atlantic, the tandem crossing with Cook is Herculean.
Cook recalled some of the daunting moments in an interview of some years ago:
The lowest point of the trip came, she recalls, towards the end when a shark bit a chunk out of Fairfax’s arm as he was fishing for food. She produces a graphic picture of the open wound. “It was too big to stitch, so I just bound it up. There was this triangle of flesh dangling down and I couldn’t decide whether to leave it or cut it off. Johnny was ashen and I did begin to think – what if he dies? What will I do with the body? If I threw it overboard, everyone would think I’d bumped him off.”
With Fairfax still ailing, they were caught up for five days in Cyclone Emily: “It was like being on the South Downs, but they were all moving.” When it finally passed, they were still 700 miles off the coast of Australia and Fairfax could no longer do his share of the rowing. I have to deduce this: Cook wasn’t going to draw it to my attention. “I did what I could,” she says and shrugs. “I didn’t do it all in a day.” Without her, though, the adventure would have ended in failure.Landing on Hayman Island off of the coast of Queensland, Australia, Fairfax and Cook became the first people to row across the Pacific. I should say, too, the first people to row across the Pacific and still have a relationship once they hit the beach.
The lives of the two voyagers would eventually un-wind, though, with Fairfax moving to the United States, eventually to the Las Vegas area, to live the rest of his life as a professional gambler. He would even go so far as to list “adventurer” as his occupation on his passport. He would live the life of his choosing until his death in 2012 at the age of 74.
Sylvia Cook, the much more British of the two, would return to England, have a child [although, again, without benefit of sacrament] and work at a variety of jobs as a teacher, clerk, and, these days at nearly eighty years of age, an upholstery tutor at the English version of a Home Depot. Most of those with whom she’s worked have not known of her earlier adventurous and independent life.
Their achievements, however, still serve to inspire ocean rowers well into this century. In 2014, a collection of ocean rowers, thinking of Fairfax and Cook, participated in The Great Pacific Race from Monterey to Honolulu. Despite more modern and technologically advanced craft, despite contemporary training methods, and despite the fact that California to Hawaii isn’t even half the journey as is California to Queensland, only seven of the thirteen crews made it to the race’s end, with several having to be rescued and number of the boats proving unworthy of the effort.
When one of the finishers was asked about how it must have been for Fairfax and Cook, forty years earlier in a comparatively crude boat stocked with, among other things, cigarettes and brandy, to complete a crossing of the entire Pacific Ocean, he confessed that it was, and is, a staggering mystery.
Such is the power of a transient desire, I suppose, as it has powered more human achievement than any amount of planning or training. Or, as Cook noted when reminiscing about her days with Fairfax, “I never knew if I was in love with him or his life. Or if there was a difference. He was a bit of a dreamer, but if you don’t dream you don’t achieve.”
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| The Britannia, now on display at the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall |