Jeff’s Reviews > Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat > Status Update

That after disgracing myself years ago in a Bristol Channels gale, I could go back to sea alone and acquit myself well...Through my shame and grief I find I'm proud of our fine voyage. The ending was simply how it finished, not the voyage itself.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;

Years before, he had hit a reefer in the South Pacific that holed his wooden boat...While building it, Bardiaux had filled every spare cubic spot inside his boat with sealed empty cans of air, enough to provide the boat with flotation. He sailed it, virtually sunk, with only the rig and sails sticking up out of the water, for four days until he reached a port, where he hauled out and repaired the hole.

The ability to navigate by sextant and one's instincts, and to manage the boat according to the dicatates of the sea and sky, he feels, is passing, and I agree with him.

I take the Hiscocks, all nine of them; Eric's complete oeuvre,
hardbacked, blue cloth, Oxford University Press. They are saltstained, half-ruined, broken-spined, dust jackets long disintegrated,
the foundation of my library and of who I am, for they describe
all I want to do and the world in which I want to do it and upon
them I will build once more from scratch. The rest I hope I can find
again.

Now I know that the leak will not get better but worse, that I can't keep ahead of it, that I must get off, save my life, and let Toad sink.

Trim my mustache to an RAF shape and marry the daughter of a missionary, Celia, with whom I would have brittle fights on the veranda after dinner. Go quietly mad.

Or perhaps go native "poor chap, bad
business" and meet a Burmese woman and raise a bunch of beautiful Eurasian children.

"Where are you going?" I ask.
"We are going to Burma!"
"Burma?"
"Yes, Burma! You know, next door to India!"
What a thought! What might be waiting for me in Burma?
Perhaps I could turn into a Somerset Maugham character, become
an old Burma "hand." Manage a rubber plantation, wear baggy
shorts and a pith helmet, and start drinking a lot of gin.

Or if we had stayed together and rebuilt
our relationship as we had rebuilt Toad, cutting out the rot back to
what was clean and sound, and building on the good stuff. But I
didn't see how we could do that any more than meet each other
again for the first time.
I started running.... It seemed the only thing in the world I could do that did
something in return for me. The longer I ran, the better I felt.

I have thought, since leaving her, that we might have been perfect together if we could have met for the first time as the people
we were when we split up or perhaps quite a bit later. People
who had acquired some knowledge of marital relations and could
use it to make one work.