| Subject: Re: Mischief in memory |
Author:
Boyd Percy
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Date Posted: 17:26:55 01/09/15 Fri
In reply to:
Wes
's message, "Mischief in memory" on 12:35:28 01/09/15 Fri
>Another column picked up from the paper.
>
>Thanks to the lousy weather and the holiday letdown, I
>would have had a really severe case of cabin fever
>over the weekend if the mailman hadn’t showed up with
>a book I’ve been wanting to read for years. Actually,
>it was a compilation of eight books by an Englishman
>named H.W. Tilman, and even with all the time I had
>free I’m still only a third of the way or so through
>the fascinating series of tales he tells.
>
>Tilman was an original, or the last of his breed, or
>something. For centuries, explorers have headed out to
>see what’s over the next hill, in search of El Dorado
>or Cibola, or just to see what’s out there that no one
>has seen before -- even by air. But by the
>nineteen-twenties and thirties, the world was running
>out of such places, and mostly those places were
>pretty remote and inhospitable, like Antarctica or the
>more desolate reaches of the Himalayas.
>
>Now, Tilman was a mountaineer and was on several
>attempts to climb Mt. Everest. In between Everest
>attempts, he spent an awful lot of time poking around
>in hitherto unknown places in the Himalayas. But by
>the nineteen-fifties even those places were becoming
>known and at times even crowded.
>
>Even though Tilman was now in his fifties -- he was
>born in 1898 -- his call to adventure was no less
>strong. He wound up buying a sailboat with the idea of
>sailing it to otherwise hard-to-reach mountains to
>climb. Places like Patagonia, Greenland, the Antarctic
>Peninsula and several desolate sub-Antarctic islands.
>
>The boat he bought, a 45-foot Bristol Pilot Cutter
>built in 1906 named Mischief took him a good
>many such places over the next twenty-five years.
>These were no short voyages, either; his first such
>expedition, exploring a glacier in Patagonia at the
>far end of South America, took him a little over a
>year, with only about six weeks of it actually spent
>in climbing. Other voyages were as long.
>
>He didn’t always head for the southern ocean; in later
>years he led crews of a handful of men on voyages to
>places like Greenland and the Canadian arctic. He
>wrote about his adventures with a dry wit and a real
>talent for understatement. What they represent is a
>last look at the way some things used to be done.
>
>The advent of GPS technology and the ready
>availability of satellite mapping and imaging has
>closed forever the ‘heroic’ era of expedition travel
>in which Tilman achieved many notable objectives.
>Tilman’s famous comment on the early Everest
>expeditions, that “any worthwhile expedition can be
>planned on the back of an envelope.” applied equally
>to his high latitude voyages. Apart from sextant,
>compass and a short wave radio receiver for time
>signals and shipping forecasts, his boats carried no
>technology, no liferaft and only very basic rations
>for the crew.
>
>To find a crew, Tilman would either rely on
>recommendations from personal networks or would resort
>to the insertion of a brief notice in the Times,
>typically ‘Hands wanted for long voyage in small boat:
>no pay, no prospects, not much pleasure’. That the
>crew were not asked to contribute financially towards
>the voyages led Tilman to expect that they would
>accept his leadership and judgement without question.
>
>At the age of 80, Tilman was on his way to the
>Antarctic again, this time on a boat owned and
>captained by a younger man. The boat disappeared
>between Rio de Janerio and the Falkland Islands; no
>trace was ever found. Somehow it’s easy to think
>Tilman would have been satisfied with that.
>
>I’d like to say that the world is a poorer place
>without Tilman in it, but that wouldn’t be exactly
>right. The world doesn’t have much room or need for
>someone like Tilman any more, and that’s what makes it
>a poorer place.
I guess he died at sea like your character, Matt Caldwell. A most fitting burial site for an adventurer. It's good to have books to read on a cold winter's day. It's also better to be at home than to be on I-94 near Kalamazoo. I just read that 150 cars were involved massive pile up near that area. That included two trucks carrying formic acid and fireworks. A big mess on an icy highway.
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