Book review…

Small boat, big seas — the Voyage of the Cormorant

The nomadic life. If you already suffer from the psychological infection of nomadism, this book will only worsen your condition.

6 min readApr 24, 2019

The traditional sailing/row boat of the Shetland Islands, the Yoel, on which the Cormorant was modelled. Photo: Source unknown via CC search.

THERE IS AN EXHILERATION to be found on the sea and a different sort of exhilaration to be found in reading about it. It is the second type of exhilaration I experienced as I finished Christian Beamish’s Voyage of the Cormorant.

One of the things about reading of other people’s adventures is that you start to think how unadventurous your own life is. I read Christian’s book when I was feeling that way about my own life. Sure, I knew my life was good but I also knew it lacked that sense of adventure I read about in his book, a sense of adventure I experienced in the past when solo walking or being out with friends in Tasmania’s mountainous interior or in the Snowy Mountains of southern NSW.

In the garden

This was made apparent to me when, wandering through the nearby Permaculture Interpretive Garden, a park-come-edible-landscape that the local council uses for teaching its community courses, I stopped to talk with Emma, a gardener I know who helps maintain the place. We exchanged pleasantries about the mild late-autumn day. I asked about her children. Then when she asked what I had been doing I told her I was reading Voyage of the Cormorant and proceeded to describe Beamish’s lone journey. We got on to other, similar topics and then she said: “You know what? I think you need a holiday”.

It wasn’t a holiday I needed. It was a voyage of my own, even a little voyage. Even a couple days walking in the dissected plateau of the Blue Mountains would do. I didn’t want to make a long, open boat voyage as Christian did in his Cormorant, part of the way down the desert coast of Baja California. I’m not a sailor and my adventures are usually in the mountains or on the coasts.

I should say that Christian is also a surfer and he took a couple boards with him on that voyage, stopping off to camp in his boat in sheltered bays and to surf where the swells ran consistent and strong.

Realisation

It — what I seek — came to me as I neared the end of his book. It is the exhilaration found in some adventurous activity, that high point that leaves you with a sense of perspective, of being-in-the-world, a peak moment, if that makes sense. It’s a feeling that blasts your brain with happiness… no… contentedness might be more what it leaves you with, a contentedness about being there, then, wherever it strikes you.

Nor do you have to go on some arduous adventure like Christian did to experience this strange quality. You find it on even short, one-day adventures. It hits you when you reach some peak, some ridgeline, the edge of some sea cliff and you look out and you feel immersed, part of that grand sweep of oceanic horizon or those serried ridges that fade to the horizon as tints of misty blue. A calmness comes as a quiet excitement rises in you and whether you realise it or not, a smile spreads across your face. That is the exhilaration I speak of.

Lone voyage

Christian’s was a lone voyage in an open boat he built to a traditional Shetlands design. He writes of being able to see the line of the old Norsemen’s longships in its curved hull and pointed bow and stern. His boat had no motor, relying on a mizzen and a square main sail and on rowing his way through the not-infrequent calms he encountered on the open sea.

Sometimes, becalmed, he would put up his canvas tarp shelter and spend his is time reading until a breeze brought his sail back to life. At night he read by candle lantern. What he read were the Nineteenth Century American writers of the wild places — Thoreau, Emerson and the like.

Humble people

His book is not only about sea voyaging in a little boat, surfing the Baja swells and the desert coast. It is very much about the people he met. These were mostly fishermen living temporarily in coastal fishing camps from which they would go out in their open boats to catch whatever was running.

The people, those Baja Mexicans, gave him shelter and food and provided the human company that helped keep him sane on what was a trying, arduous journey during which he was constantly exposed to sun and salt spray. He gave what he could in return. His writing about them and his time with those humble, simple-living people reminds me of that saying about the kindness of strangers.

Christian writes of only one stopover that gave him pause for thought. That was with an American living with a younger Mexican woman and their young son. He had been in Baja a long time and he treated his partner more as a chattel. She spent a good deal of her time with a tequila bottle. Christian likens the man to some early Californian surfers he met when he was young. Tough and rough characters they were, different to their present day contemporaries. Perhaps this man was one of them who found his way down the Baja peninsula, and stayed.

Voyage of the Cormorant is a book about nomadic living of the maritime kind. We’ve probably met people living in their vans, many having chosen to live this way, some having been forced into it by loss of job, relationship or home. Maritime nomadism as lived by Christian seems the more trying, the more challenging version of the nomadic lifestyle.

Completion not necessary

From Christian’s book I got that you don’t have to complete a journey for it to be successful. Plans made on a full belly in the warmth of your living room can change rapidly when faced with the uncertain conditions of the mountains or, for Christian, the sea.

So it was that Christian did not sail the southern portion of the Baja peninsula as he planned to. A lack of safe anchorages and long stretches on board the Cormorant covering long distances of desert coast would have been too challenging for someone running out of energy. When energy goes so does motivation. It was the result of continual exposure to the elements, the draining of his physical energy and mental exhaustion that left him with a lassitude he could not shake. He was tired, very tired.

The book ends with Christian back in his native California. Here, he spends time recovering. He starts again what he did before the voyage, which is shaping surfboards, and makes a few short voyages in Cormorant. One of these was something of a flop, her writes, and ended up with Cormorant being holed and he and his travelling companion having to repair the vessel at a lighthouse.

These shorter voyages were made in company and he writes of how long distance voyaging would best be done in the good company of fellow surfers. That, he says, would make sailing easier and would make for more convivial shore camps that lone voyaging. He discovers, too, that towing Cormorant to a location then making the shorter sea voyage is another way to blend sailing and surfing.

Do not imagine you need to be a sailor or a surfer to enjoy Voyage of the Cormorant. If you already suffer the pull of nomadism the book will only worsen your condition. If you do not, then you too might feel that urge, that dissatisfaction, that sense that there is something more to life, an urge that all too often leads to your own adventures and to experiencing the exhilaration that comes with attaining some peak, some ridgeline or the passage of some vast stretch of ocean, as did Christian in the Cormorant.

2012. Beamish, Christian; Voyage of the Cormorant; Patagonia Books, USA.

Available as print and digital editions.
Print ISBN 978–0–9801227–6–3
eBook ISBN 978–1–938340–11–6