SEAWORTHY(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Welcome to the daring, thrilling, and downright strange
adventures of William Willis, one of the world’s original extreme
sportsmen. Driven by an unfettered appetite for personal challenge
and a yen for the path of most resistance, Willis mounted a
single-handed and wholly unlikely rescue in the jungles of French
Guiana and then twice crossed the broad Pacific on rafts of his own
design, with only housecats and a parrot for companionship. His
first voyage, atop a ten-ton balsa monstrosity, was undertaken in
1954 when Willis was sixty. His second raft, having crossed eleven
thousand miles from Peru, found the north shore of Australia
shortly after Willis’s seventieth birthday. A marvel of vigor and
fitness, William Willis was a connoisseur of ordeal, all but
orchestrating short rations, ship-wreck conditions, and crushing
solitude on his trans-Pacific voyages.
　　He’d been inspired by Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl’s bid to prove
that a primitive raft could negotiate the open ocean. Willis’s
trips confirmed that a primitive man could as well. Willis survived
on rye flour and seawater, sang to keep his spirits up,
communicated with his wife via telepathy, suffered from bouts of
temporary blindness, and eased the intermittent pain of a double
hernia by looping a halyard around his ankles and dangling
upside-down from his mast.
　　Rich with vivid detail and wry humor, Seaworthy is the story of a
sailor you’ve probably never heard of but need to know. In an age
when countless rafts were adrift on the waters of the world, their
crews out to shore up one theory of ethno-migration or tear down
another, Willis’s challenges remained refreshingly personal. His
methods were eccentric, his accomplishments little short of
remarkable. Don’t miss the chance to meet this singular monk of the
sea.
　　From the Hardcover edition.

　　T. R. Pearson is the author of ten novels, including Glad News
of the Natural World, A Short History of a Small Place, and Blue
Ridge. This is his first nonfiction book.
　　From the Hardcover edition.

　　“Seaworthy is an impressive achievement, powerful in drama and
rich in detail in describing the rafting career of William Willis,
a solitary sailor on the vast Pacific committed to proving himself
under the most forbidding circumstances possible. His exploits were
sometimes heartrending, sometimes ludicrous, and sometimes absurd,
but Pearson’s narrative, like his prose, never overreaches, never
abandons a cool objectivity in relating incidents of heroism no
less than those of a vainglorious eccentricity or appalling
stupidity. Unfailingly wise, often funny, and always penetrating,
Seaworthy is no less entertaining and always enjoyable.” —W. T.
Tyler, author of The Man Who Lost the War and The Consul’s
Wife
　　From the Hardcover edition.