"Seaworthy": The old man, his raft and the sea: remembering a singular adventurer

"Seaworthy: Adrift with William Willis in the Golden Age of Rafting"
by T.R. Pearson
Crown, 280 pp., $24.95

Here's a surprise. In his latest book, Southern novelist T.R. Pearson ("Gospel Hour," "A Short History of a Small Place") has abandoned his usual Carolina/Virginia stomping ground and penned instead a true-life tale about ... trans-oceanic rafting?

Well, it may be a surprise, but it's also cause for celebration.

"Seaworthy: Adrift with William Willis in the Golden Age of Rafting" has all the hallmarks of Pearson's finest fiction. It boasts a wildly eccentric and venturesome protagonist. It's narrated by Pearson with a raconteurial verve that is both deprecatory of his hero's folly and admiring of his tenacity. And it includes lively background — some would call it digression — on other trans-oceanic rafters of the mid-20th century, a few of them obviously delusional, while others, such as Thor Heyerdahl and the crew of the Kon-Tiki, remain maritime legends to this day.

Best of all, "Seaworthy" is rich with Pearson's inimitable turns of phrase, whether he's describing his hero as "afflicted with an abiding affection for forbidding enterprises," or later seeing him as "either out of his proper mind or obliquely suicidal."

The book's opening lines offer a lure difficult to resist: "He carried by way of provisions only olive oil and flour, honey and lemon juice, garlic and evaporated milk. Since he intended to drink from the sea, a personal practice of long standing, he'd dispensed with the bother of stowing so much as the first ounce of fresh water. His radar reflector was a scrap of planking wrapped in aluminum foil, his chronometer a balky pocketwatch, his distress flag a scarlet sweater ... "

"He" is William Willis, age 74, in the mid-Atlantic in May 1968, en route from Montauk Point, Long Island, to Plymouth, England, aboard a barely floating raft that measured 5 feet by 11 ½ feet.

The question naturally occurs: Why didn't someone stop him? The ensuing pages make clear that no one — not even his devoted wife, Teddy — could ever talk Willis out of doing anything he wanted to do.

Those things included helping a prisoner escape from the Devil's Island penal colony of French Guiana (as a favor to his New York landlady, the prisoner's mother); crossing the South Pacific Ocean from east to west, alone, by raft — twice — when he was in his 60s; and making three attempts to cross the Atlantic from west to east when he was in his 70s.

So who was Willis?

He was born in 1893 in Hamburg, Germany, and first went to sea at age 15. He jumped ship in Texas at age 17 and wandered the entire U.S., taking what work he could find — as stevedore, migrant farm worker, riveter, salmon-trap builder — before settling in New York in 1926, where he went through 50 jobs in just a few years. He was a prolific aspiring writer, but got nowhere with it. In 1938, he went on his rescue mission to French Guiana, where he came down with "a devastating dose of malaria" that he survived only with the help of "primate consommé" and parrot poultices (instructions: split bird open and apply to soles of feet).

In 1954, he got the adventure urge again and sailed solo from Peru to Samoa on a balsa-log raft. Once wasn't enough apparently, and in 1963, on the eve of his 70th birthday, he made the trans-Pacific voyage again — this time all the way to Australia on a "space age" raft resting on hollow steel pontoons. He lived (just barely) to enjoy some celebrity and some belated writing success.

Pearson calls Willis "a connoisseur of solitude and a student of isolation" whose trips across the Pacific, unlike the Kon-Tiki's, had no scientific purpose except as an exercise in nutritional rigor and communion with oceanic nature.

In his eloquent closing pages, Pearson also calls Willis "a curiosity in his day, a wholesale obscurity in ours" — which begs the question of how Pearson came to hear of him in the first place. It would be nice to know, but his reticence on the matter doesn't get in the way of the pleasures of a book that is alternately zany, suspenseful and sublime.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com. He has been the Seattle Times book critic since 1998, and has also published four novels.