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. The prolific Southern author of Glad News of the Natural World (1985), among other books, T. R. Pearson turns to the free-spirited Willis for his material in Seaworthy , the author's first nonfiction effort. An accomplished storyteller, Pearson captures the joie de vivre of the German-born explorer, skillfully describing both Willis and the great era of exploration that spawned such interest in Thor Heyerdahl's efforts to disprove earlier theories of sea travel. Despite Pearson's talent, Willis remains a bit elusive, and the mariner's motivation and some of his more eccentric ideas—his belief in telepathy, for instance—remain matters, perhaps, for other studies. All in all, Pearson admirably brings the forgotten Willis to life. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. In 1954, when William Willis was age 60, he left his wife in New York and sailed from Peru across the Pacific Ocean on a balsa-wood raft he had constructed. On board were a cat named Meekie, a parrot named Eekie, and some fresh water and food. After nearly four months, he landed in American Samoa, more than 4,000 miles west of Peru, a 115-day journey. His radar reflector was a scrap of planking wrapped in aluminum foil, his chronometer was a balky pocket watch, and his distress flag was a scarlet sweater. Willis was menaced by storms, sang sea chanteys, was followed by a brown shark, and suffered from eyestrain and a hernia. He rode out severe weather by nailing himself under a canvas tarp. Pearson chronicles Willis' early life as well as this wondrous voyage, and he discusses other rafting trips, including Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition. For anyone interested in sea adventures. George Cohen Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “ 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 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. By the age of 74, when he was officially declared lost at sea, William Willis had undertaken no fewer than five trans-oceanic voyages on rafts and dinghies of his own design, living on a diet of seawater, olive oil and flour, alone and on the open ocean for months on end. Unlike Thor Heyerdahl of Kon-Tiki fame, Willis had no particular rationale for his efforts, no ideology to validate, no theory to prove. As a yogic breathing instructor of his once put it, "The impossible attracts you." Willis's was a classic dreamer's life, a s