Moitessier

Imagine yourself in the forest of the Amazon, looking for something new, because you wanted to feel the earth, trees, nature. You suddenly come across a small temple of an ancient, lost civilization. You are not simply going to come back and say: "Well I found a temple, a civilization nobody knows." You would stay there, try to understand it, try to decipher it ... And then you discover that 100 kilometers further on is another temple, only the main temple this time. Would you return?

– round-the-world solo sailor Bernard Moitessier, attempting to explain why he U-turned a few hundred miles from winning the Golden Globe Race for fastest circling of the globe to begin a second circumnavigation (quoted in The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, ch. 14.)


What a strange and appealing man, this Moitessier, adventurer, monk, poet, philosopher, explorer of the inner essence of what it means to exist. Typically French, atypically French. If I may be permitted a conceit, I know a bit what he feels. Though, of course, as a man who sailed, both solo and with a long-suffering wife, over nearly 100,000 miles of the unforgiving fury of the sea, he has explored existence in a way completely alien to some of the ways I’ve considered.

Rhetoric: How do you define your existence? Tough question, for a variety of reasons, so – why are you here? What are you supposed to do? Are you doing it? When are you going to? A neat way of answering these questions is to imagine yourself financially independent. You’re a billionaire. You can buy anything you want. All your needs can be taken care of. What would you do?

In my attempts at answering that question I think I’d mirror what young John Milton did before he became old John Milton. But that, too, might be self-conceit. Maybe I’d be dead of alcohol poisoning after six months. Wish I had the Hopper equivalent Bernard Moitessier’s self-imposed solo ten-month exile on the cusp of death. With a little bit less of that “cusp of death” thing ...