Small Boat to Freedom

Small Boat to Freedom is the moving and inspiring story of one man's decision to leave the country he loved because of a political situation he abhorred. John Vigor had it all, a loving family, a secure and well-deserved reputation as a syndicated South African newspaper columnist, and a lovely home in one of South Africa's most beautiful cities, Durban. But an apartheid-regime clampdown on freedom of expression forced Vigor to the wrenching decision to leave his idyllic life-and financial security-and leave South Africa on a 31-foot sloop with his wife and seventeen-year-old son for a precarious voyage to a new but uncertain life in America. At age fifty, Vigor had been a journalist for eighteen years, working for antiapartheid newspapers, raising a family of three sons with his wife, June, also a journalist. But in 1987 the South African government and its once-untouchable apartheid policy was crumbling. In an attempt to clamp down on dissident opinion, the government began restricting writers. The Vigors knew it was time to leave, but to do so meant losing most of their savings, the scant remainder of which they used to purchase a boat for the dangerous voyage from Durban around