In 1904, Capt. John Voss completed a three-year voyage half-way around the world, from Vancouver to England via the Cape of Good Hope, in a modified dug-out sailing canoe, the Tilikum.
His 1913 book, The Venturesome Voyages Of Captain Voss, can be read here: https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/voss-venturesomevoyages/voss-venturesomevoyages-00-h-dir/voss-venturesomevoyages-00-h.html
Pussy Riot: cutting works by Russian artists (as a sort of cultural punishment for the invasion) is "just stupid".
I agree - it is weak of heart and mind. The Russian people are not attacking Ukraine. Putin and Imperialism are. A dangerous and slippery slope to mistake a people for their government https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/21/cutting-works-by-russian-artists-is-stupid-says-pussy-riot-member
"How was it?"
"The world? Oh, very nice."
"Any trouble?"
"No trouble, no accidents, no sickness, a few gales."
– French-American Jean Gau, chef, artist and one of the first men to sail alone around the world, aboard his 30-foot wooden Tahiti ketch, Atom, designed by John Hanna.
[via the New York Times, 1957]
From my piece, Sealand:
"...the very notion of territory is born of settlement. It is necessarily somewhere defined not just by boundaries but by claims of ownership."
[first published by @GriffithReview, 2006]
https://ccohanlon.tumblr.com/post/676075941
There are named winds all over the world but in the Mediterranean, every wind has a name. The names are similar (with some linguistic differences) in every Mediterranean country and are used more commonly than compass points. They don't just indicate direction but also express, poetically, characteristics.
‘Several people have looked at me with mild desperation and disbelief in their eyes, at the mere thought of not knowing when to expect delivery, and although it sounds like a logistical nightmare to have a fluid ETA, allow me to make the argument that it is the opposite. When we can’t participate in the ever faster moving treadmill of capitalistic supply and demand, when everything is not just a ‘click’ on a computer away, we are set free.’
https://fairtransport.eu/fair-transportation-is-freedom-by-ditte/
Another extraordinary voyage in a very small boat:
In 1972, Englishman Shane Acton, aged 25, bought Shrimpy, a tiny, 5.5 metre plywood yacht designed by Robert Tucker, for £400 and set off around the world. A Swiss woman, Iris Derungs, joined him.
They got back to England 8 years later. Shane wrote a book, then sailed to Central America.
"There were no clear skies, fair winds or landfalls on palm-fringed cays in the voyages I made in my imagination; instead, the coasts were tree-less, steep and rock-strewn, beset by fast-running tidal streams and angry seas..."
[from Northing, 2005]
https://ccohanlon.tumblr.com/post/679137182165958656/northing
Below: a 1914 French chart of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.
At the end of 2019, my wife and I ran out of money and luck. An Irishman I'd never met offered us shelter for the winter. We borrowed the money to fly to Ireland but arrived with nothing but our bags. It was the nadir of our wandering years.
Over the next three months, this man looked after us — bought us staples, gave us money, kept us sheltered. I won’t embarrass him by giving his name but our debt and gratitude to him are profound. We won’t ever forget his kindness.
Great short read from Emily M Bender, Prof. Linguistics, Washington Uni on the real danger of Google's LaMDA - a mass ontological capture of our relationship to knowledge, deepening Google's self-framing as the all seeing and 'computationally-neutral' source for information https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/14/human-like-programs-abuse-our-empathy-even-google-engineers-arent-immune
Jaded wanderer. Diarist. Wreck.
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
– Anne Carson, from Decreation