High Endeavours: The Extraordinary Life and Adventures of Miles and Beryl Smeeton

Lisa Arsenault is a public-school teacher in Ajax, Ontario.

Readers who relish biographies about unique and eccentric people will
love this book. Miles and Beryl, British subjects, met in India in the
1930s, married after her divorce from his commanding officer, and
embarked on a married life during which they pursued a variety of
dangerous activities, both separately and together.

Miles was a career soldier with “an exceptional ability for getting
out of trouble he should never have got into in the first place” and a
daring mountaineer, sailor, and sportsman. Beryl was a tireless and
fearless traveller who crossed four continents by a variety of
means—usually uncomfortable. She often journeyed alone despite bad
weather and dangerous political situations. A mountain-climber, she
achieved the highest altitude reached by a woman at the time of her
ascent.

The couple purchased, sight-unseen, a derelict farm in British
Columbia, and farmed it virtually as pioneers. On reaching their
fifties, they bought a yacht and, with no previous sailing experience,
travelled over 130,000 miles. They broke several records during their
days as ocean-going gypsies. In their “golden years” they built
(literally by hand) a chalet-style home in Alberta and bred (again with
no previous experience) endangered wild animals.

Some of their adventures hardly seem credible they are so fantastic.
The facts, however, are substantiated by eyewitness accounts, documented
direct speech, diaries, letters, ship’s logs, the author’s
interviews, and the published works of Miles Smeeton. The book is
exhaustively researched and includes maps tracing the various journeys
on sea and land, family trees, photographs, footnotes, and an appendix
and bibliography.

While obviously a fan of these two people (he is Miles Smeeton’s
godson), Clark does adopt a “warts and all” approach to describing
their characters, and their foibles and poor judgments are not
neglected, though they may be somewhat downplayed. In pursuit of
adventure they took what most people would consider foolhardy
chances—not only with themselves but also with their daughter—but
survived for their tale to be told. Certainly their lives were not dull,
and this well-written, action-packed biography is absorbing reading.