The Circumnavigators
 Derek Wilson
 (Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
 2003 Carroll & Graf
 ISBN: 0786711507

The Pioneer Voyagers Who Set Off Around the Globe.

Coming up in an island nation, sea travels & adventures are a part of my psyche, & the stories of those first circumnavigators have always stirred my blood & mind -- imagine what our world must have looked like centuries ago when first we set eyes upon lands & people, flora & fauna we hadn't known were there.

So let Derek Wilson be your guide for he has a fine eye for detail & brings to life those long-ago adventurers & their astonishing exploits. These people were brave, fierce, daring & sometimes foolhardy. They were women as well as men who came from many young nations, looking for profits, enemies, novelties & a new way home.

If you didn't know, it all began on April 27, 1521 when Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan met an untimely death on a speck of a Pacific Ocean island, & his second-in-command, Juan Sebastian Elcano, (who no one remembers!) made the fateful decision to continue sailing West (toward Africa & hopefully, home) instead of turning around & going back they way they'd come around South America.

& so the narrative of nearly five hundred years unfolds in dramatic detail, pictures, charts, & diagrams, telling of the voyages of Drake, Byron, Carteret, Wallis, Cook, Dampier, Anson, et al. Of how the world was between the Portuguese, Spaniards, English, French & Dutch as they sought riches & dominance in new lands, sponsoring explorations of uncharted territories & discovering wonders & mysteries.

What I like about the way Derek Wilson writes is that he brings to the foreground the “little people” -- the forgotten pilots, pages, surgeons, cartographers, botanists, et al, without whom those on whom we have since conferred fame would not have succeeded.

For hundreds of years & voyages the two scourges of these global journeys were:
• the lethal disease exacted on crews after four weeks without landfall -- the lack of vitamins in fresh food which resulted in the dreaded scurvy.
• the lack of longtitudinal calculations. So much of an impediment was this to safe & exact circumnavigation that the British government, in 1713, offered a £20,000 (an astronimcal sum of money in those days) for the first reliable solution (within 30 nautical miles). Who solved it & how? Read the book!

It was during the circumnavigation in the 1760s of the great Frenchman Bourgainville, that a certain Mlle Bare, disguised as a male servant on the Etoile, made the first round-trip by a woman.

The Circumnavigators is an exhilarating glimpse into how our world was in those days of yore -- what made us tick -- why we went down to the sea in ships & left for parts unknown -- how the Reformation changed a heretofore united Catholic Europe, & bred the subsequent hatred & wars between nations; how deeply our sea adventures affected us back at home &, sometimes, changed our societies in profound ways.

On, on to The Clipper Ships of the 19th century in Profit and Pleasure -- what a thrilling chapter!

& The Ancient Mariner, Joshua Slocum, the first solo-circumnavigator in the 1890s, who set off east & upon making it to Gibraltar, decided, to do an about-face, & head west back across the Southern Atlantic, sailing the currents of those who had gone before.

In his concluding chapter The Ocean Within, Derek Wilson writes of our modern world & the circumnavigators, especially Chichester, who wrote of their journeys both upon the sea & in the air.

With no disrespect I call The Circumnavigators a “loverly read” -- containing all my favorite ingredients: sea journeys into the unknown with a host of offbeat, flawed heroes, & a storyteller who vividly recreates true tales out of dry, old facts, adding dashes of humor & insight.

I also think this is a history book that will greatly benefit school students, because it is a pleasing way to learn, & because it explains how our world was explored, why & how it changed us.

Derek Wilson has a large body of historical works most of which are, sadly, out of print in the USA:
The People and the Book
Hans Holbein: Portrait of an Unknown Man
The Astors: Landscape with Millionaires
Africa, A Modern History
Dark and Light: The story of the Guiness Family
Rothschild: A Story of Wealth & Power
East Africa Through A Thousand Years
A Tudor Tapestry
Sail and Steam & many more!
(08/03/03)

Rebecca