Books: Alone Before the Mast

GIPSY MOTH CIRCLES THE WORLD by Sir Francis Chichester. 269 pages. Coward-McCann. $6.95.

While it was still under way, Sir Francis Chichester’s 226-day single-handed circumnavigation of the globe in the 53-ft. ketch Gipsy Moth IV received more popular acclaim than an armada of Magellans, Drakes and Joshua Slocums. Fleet Street printed reams on his every tack; BBC cameras traced his tortuous rounding of Cape Horn; the Queen knighted him in midpassage. Sailors and landlubbers alike marveled at the ability of a 65-year-old man, who had won a bout with lung cancer eight years earlier, to survive everything from chronic leaks to a capsizing in the Tasman Sea. But any temptation to romanticize Chichester’s feat will be quenched by a reading of this distillation from his 200,000-word log.

Sir Francis quickly gives himself away as a cranky, querulous old man. To hear him tell it, Gipsy Moth’s designer and builders created a rolling, roundheeled bitch, and girdling the globe alone is as bum a trip as anything this side of LSD. Still, the curt, seamanlike account should be required study for any weekend sailor inclined to emulate Sir Francis’ accomplishment. As Sir Francis notes at one point: “I had no feeling of romance about the voyage yet but, of course, seasickness is very anti-romantic.” By the end of Chapter 10, most readers will be willing to give up singlehanded sailing for a safer sport—say, skydiving.