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

Gordon Turner is the author of Empress of Britain: Canadian Pacific’s
Greatest Ship and the editor of SeaFare, a quarterly newsletter on sea
travel.

Running away to sea is a long-cherished dream of armchair travellers, but George Fetherling turned reverie into reality. In 1998, as one of 11 passengers, he boarded a freighter in London and returned 114 days later. He actually travelled in several freighters but has used the literary device of combining them into one voyage in one ship, which he calls Pride of Great Yarmouth, a vessel that was prone to mechanical breakdowns. While Pride’s name has been invented, the journey was real. It took the author across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, and on to Tahiti, Fiji, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea, the last having its share of danger-ridden ports.

The author has a perceptive eye for details and an inquiring mind regarding the history, politics, and social conditions of the places he visited. He writes with knowledge, skill, and humour, occasionally opinionated and always worth reading.

Most passengers were British or American; each group developed an intense dislike for the other, perhaps the result of strangers being thrown together in close quarters for weeks on end. Fetherling avoided being closely identified with either faction, but he noted their foibles and flaws and committed them entertainingly to paper. The alcoholic, the fitness buff, Mrs. Malaprop, and the two sensible Scottish ladies are all there. Less is said about the largely Russian officers and crew.

Occasionally the writer makes factual errors regarding ships, but it must be remembered that Running Away to Sea is not a passenger handbook or travel guide. It is something better than either. Although the book was first published in 1998, anyone contemplating a voyage, long or short, in a passenger-carrying freighter today would benefit from reading Fetherling’s story. And for armchair adventurers who dream wistfully of the South Seas in the era of Somerset Maugham, exotic tales of the past must yield to the harsher reality of the present.