- Foreword -

Sir Robin Knox-Johnston

Major Harold William 'Bill' Tilman CBE, DSO, MC and Bar, is without doubt one of the twentieth century's greatest adventurers. War hero, coffee planter in Kenya, mountaineer and eventually a sailor, he led a full life anyone with an adventurous spirit can only envy.

He was born in 1898, and as for so many of his generation, life after school was an immediate posting to the trenches in France where the Great War was raging. Despite winning two Military Crosses for gallantry by the time he was twenty years old, he survived the slaughter that killed so many of his young, teenaged contemporaries, and such awards are a clear indication of a courageous person who is willing to take risks.

The war eventually ground to an end leaving a young man, barely twenty years old, who had already lived a lifetime of experience, with the question of what to do with a future he had not fully expected to have. In his first book Snow on the Equator Tilman wrote:

To those who went to war straight from school and survived it, the problem of what to do afterwards was peculiarly difficult. A loss of three or four years upset preconceived plans, and while the war was in progress little thought was devoted to such questions. Not that there was no opportunity for such thinking, for there was ample time for that through solitary night watches at observation post or gun line; during periods of what was euphemistically called resting behind the lines; or, where most of us went sooner or later, in hospital. No, the reason was because making plans seemed rather a waste of time. Either the war would go on interminably, in which case one was already arranged for, or, in the other alternative, consolation might be found in the philosophy of Feeble, that 'He who dies this year is quit for the next.'

Fate made the decision for him, as he won a square mile of British East Africa, now Kenya, in a lottery for ex-servicemen. He settled down to coffee growing for the next twelve years, and might have continued if he had not met Eric Shipton, another coffee grower in that country, and was introduced to mountaineering. Over the next eight years the two made some of the greatest climbs of the decade, and in 1936 he achieved the first ascent of Nanda Devi, without oxygen, at 7816 metres the highest mountain yet climbed.

Tilman volunteered in the Second World War, spending time with Albanian and Italian partisans behind enemy lines, and earning a DSO for his services, but was back climbing with Shipton in Tibet by 1947. But by now the Himalaya were becoming crowded with expeditions of younger men who could reach greater heights than was possible for him as a fifty-year-old. However one suspects the real reason he looked for pastures new was that the Himalaya no longer appealed to a man who enjoyed the challenges of the wilderness, and exploring areas off the beaten track away from the crowds. He was a natural pathfinder and had always sought the excitement of seeing and climbing something for the first time. He decided to look further afield.

It was a conversation with a friend that led him towards the ­Patagonian Ice Cap at the foot of South America. Areas marked Inesplorado would have been irresistible to a man of Tilman's temperament-and he did not resist. His first problem was how to get there. He investigated taking a ship to Buenos Aires and crossing Argentina but discovered that was not possible for two or three years. And so he discovered the sea:

There is something in common between the arts of sailing and climbing. Each is intimately concerned with elemental things, which from time to time demand from men who practise those arts whatever self-reliance, prudence, and endurance they may have. The sea and the hills offer challenges to those who venture upon them, and in the acceptance of these and in meeting them as best he can lies the sailor's or mountaineer's reward. An essential difference is, perhaps, that the mountaineer usually accepts the challenge on his own terms, whereas once at sea the sailor has no say in the matter and in consequence may suffer more often the salutary and humbling emotion of fear.

Tilman decided to marry the two sports to achieve his objective. He bought a dinghy, sailed in it and on friends' boats to build up experience, and then bought a 1906 Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter called Mischief. These sturdy boats, built for racing to ships to provide pilots, are not the most manoeuvrable, but they were strong and cheap compared with the cost of a new yacht at that time. He refitted her in Palma, and arranged that the previous owner would sail her with him to South America, although he insisted on bringing along his wife. Tilman, who never married, gives the strong impression of being a misogynist, and an insult to the wife's cooking led to husband and wife leaving in Gibraltar, along with two other crew members. Now dangerously short of crew he realised that by the time he had found replacements it would be too late to sail to South America, and so resolved to sail to England and await the next sailing season. A wise decision as you don't go near Cape Horn in the southern winter in a small boat. He found a scratch crew who mutinied off Oporto and then with one or two friends who came out to join him he made a safe passage to Lymington. It was not the best introduction to voyaging and we will never know what caused crew to abandon the boat in such numbers, but crew can be difficult unless they are willing to give and take, and picking up bodies just to make up numbers is far from an ideal way to gather in a good crew, unless they are outnumbered by competent sailors to support the routine and discipline that is essential to the safe and happy running of a boat.

His voyage the next year to South America to cross the ice cap is one of the great sailing and exploration adventures. He describes the passage through the Magellan Strait in straightforward terms but, as those of us who have sailed in those channels know, it is a dangerous route with almost constant, cold adverse winds for the west-going vessel, of Force 7 or more. Despite this he achieved his objective and returned via the Panama Canal, a voyage of some 20,000 miles. In his amusing style of writing he describes the vicissitudes in a casual way that belies what he really achieved.

I have never been sure whether Tilman was particularly hard on his crews or he just chose them badly. Such comments about a crew member as 'felt that a man with the unseamanlike habit of wearing gloves at night in summer in the Atlantic would not prosper on a voyage of this kind' indicate a rather unsympathetic attitude toward his crew's comfort, even if one might share his surprise.

The bars of the waterfront and the yacht clubs are full of people talking about their experience and planned adventures, but all too often these appear to be imagined more than achieved or achievable. There is a harsh difference between the imagined demands of a voyage to high latitudes and the reality of working a boat in cold and clammy or gale conditions in the days before satellites, when navigation and the boat's exact position were never easy or precise. Sailing in old boats does make greater demands on the willingness to accept discomfort, or deal with recurring equipment failures that sap sleep and stamina, and many of Tilman's crews appear to have found this reality more than they could accept.

The loss of Mischief off Jan Mayen Island in 1968 has often been put down to Tilman's poor seamanship and in a way it is hard to put it down to anything else. A proper lookout, although appointed, was not kept, and he should have hove to further away from the coast, but it is easy to be wise after the event. The Arctic is an unforgiving place to sail and this was a bad year for ice. Once the boat had been put ashore, where the necessary repairs could be made, she was at the mercy of the weather conditions, and strong winds and ice floating into the bay eventually caused further damage that made the planned tow to Norway a forlorn hope. The strenuous effort for more than two weeks after beaching the boat, to patch her up, get her afloat again and sail to Iceland where repairs could be made would discourage most people. It is in his efforts to repair and re-float his boat that Tilman is at his best.

Sea Breeze's wreck off Angmagssalik on the east coast of Greenland is one of those nightmares every skipper wishes to avoid. In ice, engine failed, no wind, and the currents that push along the coast drifting the boat inexorably towards the rocky coast with no hope of rowing off: the conclusion was inevitable. Anchoring in that area is almost impossible. I tried it within the same fjord on one occasion but the drifting ice soon pushed our yacht so the anchor became trapped beneath an ice flow, from which we extricated ourselves, using the motor, with great difficulty.

Baroque, yet another Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter, nearly suffered the same fate close to Angmagssalik in 1975. She survived but all but one of the crew abandoned the vessel at Reyjavik. Tilman got her back to Lymington the following year and sold her and that was his last voyage north.

It is a part of his restless character that Tilman actively sought the unfrequented areas of the world. He relished the opportunity to explore, and the dangers that are inevitable to the pathfinder just brought added spice to his life. That Tilman completed so many of his voyages successfully is a credit to his determination and his seamanship.

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