The Voyage of the Cormorant Quotes

“Another admission: I am romantic, I dream-up radically impractical journeys just to try and feel or to intuit something from a past that may well have never existed – or not in the way I imagine it. Combined with this I have a tendency towards depressive states. My episodes have never been so bad that I couldn’t get out of bed and face the day, but after my time at the lighthouse and losing the woman whom I thought I loved so much, and drinking to bad effect every night, I felt a shift come on that scared me.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“told myself. Alone in nature, alone on the sea – that never felt awkward.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“how that can be, but there is nothing lonelier than being alone among other people. I would be better once underway again,”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“called me, checking-in to see that I wasn’t, on some level, trying to disappear at sea. I assured”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“embrace of the technocratic future leaves us bereft of the magic of the forest from whence we came. In his book, Nature Revealed, Edward O. Wilson writes, “Human nature today remains Paleolithic even in the midst of accelerating technological advance. Thus corporate CEOs impelled by stone-age emotions work international deals with cellular telephones at 30,000 feet.” Open wilderness formed us. We are wild in nature, made of the same stuff as the dolphins and whales, the island foxes, sea birds, and every other creature – bones and sinew, muscle and blood.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“since I was re-imagining the past, I could easily sidestep the unpleasant parts – slavery and social immobility to name but two. This “better time” went with my ideas of the life I wanted, but I could not solve the puzzle of where to go, or how to live within this particular vision, except with the thought of an expedition.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“she does not sail at the pace of contemporary life, and 10 days or two weeks is what it takes merely to settle into the rhythm of boat life.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“His essential book, Sea-boats, Oars and Sails, written in the early 20th century, defines a sea-boat as “a means of transport as well as something to go sailing in; one that will bring her owner to whatever place he wishes on any day when boats of the same size are out fishing.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“the small phalaropes with the clucking motion of their heads as they paddle; the sooty shearwaters in their hundreds like smoke-colored gulls coursing just inches above the surface; the terns, white like painted spirits, hovering then diving; and the black coots chopping away with stiff wing beats in asymmetrical formations.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“I had a beautiful, intoxicating sail on the steady wind, making unbelievable time surfing down the gentle swells with surges to seven knots.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“set a pot of water to boil on the camp stove and walked out to the farthest point under the cliffs. I dug a pit and thought of the latrine back at the San Carlos camp – flies in there, flies in the kitchen. I washed my hands, first in the sea, then rigorously with soap and fresh water back at my camp. This is what it takes, I thought, to get some solitude. You travel days and days down a desert coastline and sail off by yourself. I saw not a soul, nor evidence of anybody besides the weirdly placed panga on the cliff top. And for all this effort I felt not free exactly, but at least not put-upon. There was no conversation to make, just an enveloping silence with the crash and roll of small waves to break the feeling of looking at a giant photograph. I was finally outside of the day-to-day, and perhaps outside of myself for a moment as well.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“I imagined being on watch onboard a frigate, wearing a woolen pea coat and drinking coffee from a tin mug. I thought that it was something Hemingway would do, or that I was like Jack Kerouac in the merchant marine in Lonesome Traveler.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“A culmination of various impulses – for time alone, for wilderness surfing, and for something I thought of as “full nature immersion” – the expedition before me also represented a living experiment. I had the notion that traveling in an ancient mode, removed from the ceaseless roar and electronic thrum of contemporary life, I could connect to the most basic aspect of my nature. Not so much my nature as an individual, but my nature as a member of our species shaped by longstanding, elemental human practices and by the elements themselves. I”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“Cormorant was my way of trying to know the world as it was before – a wilder place, where magic showed itself in weather and animal encounters”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant