Saga of a Wayward Sailor

By Tristan Jones

Excerpted from Motorboat & Yachting (UK), December 1995:

“Tristan Jones wrote over a dozen collections of cruising tales. Saga of a Wayward Sailor recounts a few years of his cruising life in the early 1960s. Most of the time he is aboard CRESWELL, a 36ft wooden ex-lifeboat from 1908. In 1961, after two years in the Arctic Circle, he is suffering from ‘Arcticitis, a kind of lassitude that slows you down’, and it’s time to move on. So he quits Iceland for Norway, Sweden and a number of points to Gib.

“Curious adventures are never far away: it takes him a couple of weeks to convince the authorities in Soviet Estonia that he is an eccentric Welshman, rather than an English spy pretending to be an eccentric Welshman. He is accompanied by the three-legged dog Nelson, and the cruising is usually single-handed, but the cast of walk-on characters is constantly entertaining – the fussy English nanny who appoints herself crew is unforgettable.

“Jones’ prose – a unique and arresting blend of the earthy, the philosophical and the picaresque – and the sheer scale and tangential offshoots of his adventures, made him a wonderful tonic in the age of irredeemably dull books documenting yet another round-the-world race. He is sorely missed.”

Excerpted from Lloyd’s List, August 1995:

“…this is the last batch of yarns from a born storyteller.

“It describes his voyages and adventures in the wooden lifeboat CRESWELL which he converted long ago, always accompanied by his three-legged dog Nelson, sometimes by occasional crews like the Australian smuggler Pete, the Englishwoman Sissie and others.

“The scrapes and dangers overcome could not have been survived by anyone but Tristan. The kaleidoscopic spins from smuggling Dutch Edam cheeses and Barbary apes, arrest by the Soviet Navy to dismastings and narrow escapes from death – his dog Nelson once saved his life. He spent his whole life at sea, even contriving to be born in a ship off Tristan de Cunha.

• For more information, see Saga of a Wayward Sailor in our catalog.