DESPERATE VOYAGE

A sea thriller of the first water and salt at that- incredible but good yarning and eminently readable. A youth- in May 1946, when shipping across the Pacific was down to zero, was determined to rejoin his bride in Australia, and set out from Panama, in a sailing cutter, to go the 5,500 mile alone, with his crew of two kittens. A well-written, exciting tale, with sustained suspense, which even those to whom sailing terminology is Greek will enjoy. Caldwell was a greenhorn; he records the slow learning of his craft, his brief training, his mistakes, his final departure. What he didn't learn then, he learned in the school of experience,- battles with the elements, with sharks, with turtles. He gave away his kittens to a South Sea island child. The pace quickens with September, and the beginning of disaster, becalming, starvation, illness, and at last shipwreck. He was cast up on a rocky coast in the Fiji Islands, was found by some children, and eventually saved by adults in an unspoiled Eden. And of course, he eventually reached Sydney- seven months after he started. A whopping yarn- truth stranger than fiction.