Running Away to Sea: Round the World on a Tramp Freighter

by Douglas Fetherling

At a low point in his life, the prolific Canadian writer Douglas Fetherling sought to clear his head by taking the kind of trip that many of us dream about – going round the world on one of the last of the tramp freighters. The four-month voyage carried him (and a handful of other travellers) some thirty thousand nautical miles, from Europe via the Panama Canal to the South Pacific, a region with a future as fragile as its past is romantic. There the ship, a converted Russian ice-breaker renamed The Pride of Great Yarmouth, traded at some of the most fabled – and some of the most disreputable – ports in the southern hemisphere. The return voyage, by way of Singapore, Indonesia, the Indian Ocean, and Suez, was just as memorable.

Written with dash, colour, and droll humour, Fetherling’s narrative is peopled by a rich cast of characters, from the Foreign Legionnaires of French Polynesia to the raskol gangs of Papua New Guinea. Most memorable perhaps are the men and women who continue to follow the millennia-old life of the sea. This is the world of Ordinaries and Able-Bodied Seamen, but also of hopeful young officer cadets – to say nothing of, in this particular instance, a temperamental cook, a computer genius with a nose-ring, and a young Russian woman who believes herself the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.

Fetherling captures the reality of life aboard a working cargo ship – the boredom, the seclusion, the differences of nationality and culture that isolation and cramped quarters seem to exaggerate. But he also describes how the routine of loneliness or tranquillity is punctuated by moments of near-panic – shipboard fires, furniture-smashing storms, even a brush with pirates in the Strait of Malacca.

Running Away to Sea is literary travel-writing in the grand old tradition.

245 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Joanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this account of the author's trip around the world on a freighter. The book is well-written, and the narrative contains a mixture of stories about the places visited, the people encountered, both on the ship and ashore, and quite a bit of interesting history about each port visited. I recommend it for anyone who likes travel stories. Note it is not really about seafaring as much as it a personal account of the people and places visited.

[Albert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Running away to sea--something many of us dream about--seems less compelling after reading this marginally interesting travelogue. Unfortunately, the book suffers from a commonplace ailment of much travel literature. When the author does not have enough adventure and misadventure to fill a volume with observations taken straight from his journeys, he often pads the pages with historical, sociological and economic filler. Thus, as in this effort, the reader's armchair adventure becomes mired in the writer's attempt to flesh out the bones of a trip on a tramp steamer where little of interest transpires. There are better travel books about.