longest voyage at sea

Reid Stowe’s Unparalleled Voyage

Gregory de la Haba

• Features Interviews
• January 17, 2020 3:52 am

“The sea is full of life, but it is death for humans. It is good having this reminder of death always around because it reminds me of the impermanence of life on earth and it impresses on me that the world of God is real.” —Reid Stowe

Imagine sustaining yourself on mung bean sprouts and fish while at sea for over three years on a 70’ sailboat hewn with your own hands. You take it upon yourself to simulate a mission to Mars in order to better comprehend the physiological effects of not touching land for such a great extent of time. Imagine meditating to the Green Goddess for protection because while at sea, with no land in sight, solo, headed on a fast path to enlightenment because out there there’s no room for mistakes. You prove to yourself over-and-over again how Tantric Buddhism’s mantras and spiritual practices that you’ve trained and disciplined in for years are now not only serving and protecting your body, speech, and mind heroically well during storms in pitch-black darkness but is purposefully keeping you alive and steady. At the same time, elevating your consciousness for when the sky does finally break and you’re reminded undoubtedly there is nothing but ‘water, water everywhere’ surrounding you for days on end and you know full well that without this deep belief in a higher deity and the ritual of meditation you’d be sailing into the abyss of insanity. Imagine having your portrait painted by Basquiat in St. Bart’s in 1985. That’s where you both first met and he loved your island studio and wanted to paint you and he—in his ‘radiant’ gratitude for sharing your paints and studio—gives you the portrait in return. Imagine during this same time when St. Bart’s was home and loading-up your sailboat with tons (literally) of marijuana headed for America was as casual and ordinary as surf sessions with Julian Schnabel; because drug-running, like surfing, is what you did when not painting or sailing. The downside of this balancing act was getting caught with bushels of fresh Colombian herb packed to the gills in your ship’s hull in the mid 90’s and then having to sell your Basquiat painting to Tony Shafrazzi’s cousin to pay your lawyer who happened to be strolling down a NYC street with your friend Anthony Haden-Guest when you called him for help from jail. Imagine spending 20 or 30 years on a single painting done on sails that were stitched together by hand, yours, and where the vibrations of the sea still hum in the very weathered stitching, sails, cleats, and ropes—all props in which to make art—from your epic journey around the world and back and because as a mystic—yes, you are one—there is no other way to paint “the universe and everything in it.” Imagine for a moment being on a truly epic adventure, over one-thousand days at sea, the longest sea voyage in history, and painting to live about it.

Whale Course Diptych

Welcome to the fantastical world of American artist and sailor extraordinaire, Reid Stowe (b. January 6, 1952), an ingenious gentleman for whom the sea is his Absinthe. ‘A life at sea’, says Reid, ‘invites absorption and meditation lending unlimited scope to the imagination.’ Mr. Reid views sailing, especially his many long-days-alone-at-sea as high-performance art vis-à-vis spiritual and physical enlightenment. For him, the physical act of being and making art is as sacred and as profound as the depths of the sea itself. The global journeys aboard his ship Anne where much of the art-making process begins and is sorted out becomes, therefore, not just a means to an end but a conduit to a means. A way to achieve higher consciousness in an environment burdened with constant fear (being capsized, getting sick or hurt which can lead to death) in order to allow those situations—coupled with absolute isolation—to foster the imagination to run wild and open up like a Lambo on a deserted highway. Think tribal rituals before sacrificial offerings. It is indeed the ultimate opportunity to delve into the subconscious and, perhaps, into an even deeper place where God is revealed. With an average of thirty-one thousand waves a day (yes, he counted) rocking Mr. Reid’s boat back and forth, up and down, and at times, over and under, a little touch of divinity can go a long way. Sailing for Reid isn’t about traveling from point A to point B. It’s about shining a light on man’s maximum capabilities, unraveling and testing his almighty potential—a means to achieve sublime heights of enlightenment, spirituality, and clarity which can then be channeled into the process of creation and, hopefully, as the ultimate end result, revealed so that others are illuminated to the sanctity of life and the divine. For Mr. Stowe, art is an elixir meant to alleviate earthly pains and elevate spiritual awareness.

Mars Ocean Odyssey

William Reid Stowe grew up sailing along the Eastern seaboard from his home in Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina. He enjoyed building his own boats and by his mid 20’s sailed both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. He sailed to Antarctic in 1986 and in1999 completed a 194-day journey without touching land on an expedition called “The Odyssey of the Sea Turtle”. Here, Reid would take conceptual art to new heights and be the first to use GPS as a drawing tool after charting a 5,500 mile circumference in the South Atlantic sea in the shape of an enormous sea turtle, a gesture to Aesop’s fable, “The Tortoise and the Hare” and Reid’s reminder to take it slowly but surely in this short life instead of rashly and quickly. “Possibly the largest artwork ever created”, says the now 67-years-young artist. But all of this was mere practice and planning for a quixotic journey he began concocting as a young man back on his small, 26-foot catamaran: to venture on what would be billed as the longest continuous sea voyage in the history of mankind without resupply or stepping on land. By 1997, Reid was promoting this insanely epic idea as 1000 Days at Sea: The Mars Ocean Odyssey. He had postulated in a paper titled One Thousand Days Non-Stop at Sea—Lessons for a Mission to Mars, co-authored with writer Albert A. Harrison, that the conditions of confinement and isolation experienced during extended sea voyages would mimic to some degree those any astronaut would experience for a Mars voyage. In essence, Reid was trying to alert the Science community that he was the ideal type of specimen (in body, mind and ,spirit) that would make for the perfect astronaut to endure such a harrowing and long trip to a planet 140 million miles away and that would require at a minimum 150-300 days to complete. Many thought Mr. Stowe nuts. Even the famed Naval Officer and deep-sea explorer, Robert Ballard, who discovered the Titanic thought Reid’s ocean journey an impossible dream.

Sail Painting

But on April 21, 2007, from the 12th St. Pier in Hoboken, New Jersey, Reid Stowe, with a hull now packed with sprouts, water, dried goods and even pasta, tomato sauce and olive oils provided by his friends at Cipriani’s, embarked on his quest that would last a resounding 1,152 days and take him thousands of nautical miles around the globe before returning safely, and sanely, to the Hudson River on June 17th, 2010. A small and fascinating antidote to this story is that Reid’s Dulcinea, Soanya Ahmad, accompanied him on the first 306 days of the journey but had to disembark due to—what was later discovered to be—morning sickness. Members of the Royal Perth Yacht Club, including yachtsman, Jon Sanders, a previous record holder for longest time solo at sea, assisted in bringing Ms. Ahmad back to terra firma while Reid continued on his mission, alone. In July 2008, with Reid still out at sea, Soanya gave birth to their son, Darshen whom Reid would see for the first time as a two-year-old on his eventual and triumphant return. Many in the sailing community who had followed his progress online thought Mr. Reid selfish and lambasted his decision to carry on while his wife was carrying child. In truth, Reid’s life as an artist in search his destiny is reminiscent of Siddhārtha Gautama’s epic trials and tribulations away from his wife and son for six years before awakening and returning home to them with full Buddha status. Or when soldiers deploy into the enemy fire for eighteen months as their little ones are learning to walk and talk without them. Reid’s journey was tantamount to the landing on the moon. And his determination to follow through regardless of setbacks and or unforeseen circumstances (rogue waves turning over the boat, torn sails in need of emergency stitching, de-salinization machine breaking down, running out of fresh water, getting sideswiped by a cargo ship, losing the ability to navigate against the wind, or when the First Mate abandons ship to give birth), begs anyone searching on their own path to ask: How bad do we really want the thing we set our sights on? How much are we willing to endure to turn a crazy idea into reality?

Two spiritual Self Portraits

At the Paul Calendrillo Gallery in Chelsea, New York, where Mr. Stowe’s large-scale paintings were on display this past October, it was apparent to this writer that there was something special going on within the framework of the draped sails hanging about the gallery’s walls. Maybe it was the different dirt, soils, and woodchips he utilized in his work, earthly elements that he brought along on his journey and collected during all his previous years traveling (like orange dirt from Morocco) so he could smell them, touch them, and pour over his feet to keep his physiology in tune with the earth during the constant motions of the sea and that gave the paintings an alchemic element that—during opening night—drew the visitors near and, gasp, compelled many to touch the art. Maybe it’s Reid’s subtle use of black and white Op art meandering through colorful compositions that lend them an air of a long-lost blueprint, or a treasure map, to some magical destination than mere, unnavigable abstractions. Reid had stated that he’s “empowered by past sailors, visions of Odysseus” and he sees himself as “the most ancient man” constantly aware of “attracting the positive vibes and spirits of the sea” because “the sea is death for humans.” With Whale Tooth Sailor, a nine by eleven foot painting on an antique sail from the famed, hundred year old, four-masted barque Peking (salvaged from the dustbins of history), Reid Stowe captures the prowess of his vision and the gravitas of his beliefs.

Reid explaining “Whale Tooth Sailor” to Gregory de la Haba

Impressive and awe-inspiring like the giant Moai stone sculptures found on Easter Island, Whale Tooth Sailor consists of a massive totemic and alien-looking structure planted firmly at center on the hand-woven, cotton cloth sail. Around it the artist glued painted imagery of whale teeth, each approximately six inches in length, that lead the eye around and through the picture plane. A bright life-vest-orange sailing vessel, more makeshift raft than custom sailboat, is juxtaposed at its base and at a fraction of its size. As if to highlight the great odds against man and the universe, like the Starship Enterprise zooming light-years into the infinite galaxy—To boldly go where no man has gone before—Reid’s small ship is a metaphor, perhaps, for a journey set to begin for anyone willing to go the distance into the unknown. There is nothing foreboding about this journey, oddly, it appears familiar in its primitiveness, its primordial aspect comforts us and the weathered, hand-stiched weaves, again, make us want to feel the work as much as we’re obliged to look at it. Reid’s paintings are masterfully tactile and that human element allows for us a moment to ponder the origins of man, our common ancestry, and from whence we all came, the sea. This is a work symbolic of man’s place in the world, small yet with infinite potential. Get close to the work and you might hear wind hitting off the sail or reggae legend Peter Tosh singing:

“Man of the past And I’m livin’ the present And I’m walking in the future I’m just a mystic man Got to be a mystic man”

Whale Tooth Sailor is where you’ll feel hundreds of years of picture-making journeying across the globe on the high seas and coming into a new modern port where Reid’s words, “the paintings are empowered with the magic of the voyage”, should be taken for face value. He’s a mystic man. —Gregory de la Haba

Three of Reids Works on Display in NYC

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International Editor, Gregory de la Haba is a painter and sculptor with a penchant for writing and curating.

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A Record-Smashing Sea Journey, and Not for Its Speed

By John Tierney

• June 16, 2010

ABOARD THE ANNE, off New Jersey — After 1,152 days meandering the world’s oceans on a 70-foot schooner he built himself, Reid Stowe plans to sail into New York on Thursday afternoon and claim the record for the longest sea voyage in history — eclipsing a century-old record by almost three months. But it is not ending exactly as planned.

When the journey of the Anne began in April 2007, there were two travelers intent on staying out of sight of land for a thousand days. Mr. Stowe, 55, a veteran sailor, was with Soanya Ahmad, 23, a recent City College graduate who had never been at sea. She did fine at first, but was forced to leave after 10 months when she felt overcome by seasickness — which turned out not to be seasickness.

Ms. Ahmad transferred to a local yacht near the Australian coast and returned home to Jamaica, Queens, to deliver their son, Darshen, now 23 months. Mr. Stowe went on sailing alone. When he pulled into New York Habor and moored off Sandy Hook on Wednesday afternoon, he said it was his first glimpse of land in more than two years.

“The first people I’ve seen in years!” he shouted happily, as a boat carrying a United States Customs officer and half a dozen other people approached his schooner. It looked much the worse for wear; he did not.

“I was never lonely once in the whole voyage,” he said, once he had welcomed aboard his first visitors. “Being alone in the wildness and beauty of nature is an enlightening experience.”

He viewed his trip in the tradition of religious hermits who go off by themselves: “You not only enlighten yourself, but you nourish the spirit of your culture.”

To the uninitiated, those might sound like the words of a man who has been too long at sea by himself, but not to the friends and sponsors of Mr. Stowe’s expedition. During his years living at a pier in Chelsea aboard the Anne, he became known as a singular blend of mariner, mystic, carpenter, painter, sculptor and New Age philosopher.

During the voyage, he spent much of his time sewing torn sails and performing other maintenance, like repairing the the bowsprit after a collision with a freighter. He sustained himself with regular yoga and mediation, subsisting on rainwater, fish and sprouts grown on the boat, along with beans, cheese, oatmeal, pasta and rice.

“I’ve still got enough food left for another year,” he said, inviting his guests to a meal of dried dates, nuts and Parmesan cheese that tasted remarkably good after three years at sea.

He said he had not been sick or injured the entire trip, and he credited his health to his diet, especially the sprouts, which he ate twice a day. “Sprouts can save the world,” he said.

The hardest part of the journey, he said, was saying goodbye to Ms. Ahmad, but he felt compelled to finish the voyage.

In an interview on Tuesday, Ms. Ahmad said she understood. “There was really no question of him abandoning the journey,” she said. “Before we left, we had an agreement that if I wanted to leave, he would go on by himself. It was for the best. If he had come back, he would still be planning on doing the whole 1,000-day trip again. It had been an obsession with him since the 1980s.”

It took Mr. Stowe two decades to find sponsors for the trip, which was billed as the Mars Ocean Odyssey: a voyage to study the stresses on an isolated, self-sustained crew over the length of a Mars mission. During his search for sponsors, he had assured Jeff Blumenfeld , the editor of Expedition News , a monthly newsletter about explorers, that he would be prepared for all contingencies of a long voyage by taking the proper supplies, including contraceptives.

Reminded on Wednesday of that promise, Mr. Stowe grinned and said: “People make mistakes. Things happen. We sure didn’t want it to happen. But now that it has, I see it as a positive.”

After Ms. Ahmad went home, he began calling it the Love Voyage. With his supporters in New York tracking his route by satellite, he set a course in the South Atlantic that traced a gigantic heart in her honor.

Another of the goals was to break the record for the longest sea voyage: the 1,067 days that the crew of a Norwegian ship, the Fram , was away from land in the 1890s, when it became frozen in Arctic ice during the explorer Fridtjof Nansen’s attempt to reach the North Pole.

Mr. Stowe is to be greeted at a pier on West 42nd Street by Ms. Ahmad and the son he has never seen. During the journey, in the blog, 1000days.net, that Mr. Stowe wrote on a computer (until it broke last year) and dispatched by satellite phone, he mused on his responsibilities to Ms. Ahmad and Darshen.

“They are not the first woman and child to wait for their man to come home from the sea,” he wrote. “It is the most ancient of stories.”

Well, yes, it is an old story. Penelope waited during Odysseus’ 10-year voyage home, and they were not able to hold weekly conversations by satellite phone, as this couple did. Then again, Penelope did not have to welcome back a sailor who had been all by himself for two years. Might readjustment to family life be a little difficult for everyone?

“I’m not apprehensive,” Ms. Ahmad said. “I doubt he is. Before, he’s gone out for 100 days, 200 days, and he’s been his usual old self.”

For his part, Mr. Stowe looked anything but apprehensive. He showed a berth on board that he had converted for his son, and said he looked forward to the family living together on the boat on the New York waterfront.

And what, besides seeing his family, was the first thing he wanted to do once he set foot on land? “I have no wants at all,” he said. “I want to make everyone happy. I want to share the story.”

The Man Who Fell to Shore

Free on the right, free on the left, free everywhere. —Bernard Moitessier, The Long Way, his 1971 account of circumnavigating the globe in a sailboat alone

For two years, three months, and 26 days, while the world economy crashed, and Barack Obama ran for and won the U.S. presidency, and Sarah Palin debuted, and Spitzer resigned, and Sully landed, and Jon and Kate split, and Haiti crumbled, and Avatar opened, and Apple unveiled the iPad to the waiting world, Reid Stowe floated alone.

He didn’t know what was happening elsewhere. He didn’t care to know. He wasn’t lost or stranded. He was alone at sea by choice, piloting a 70-foot schooner, the Anne, which he’d built himself, undertaking a mission he’d been dreaming of and planning for most of his adult life: to sail on the ocean nonstop for 1,000 days.

He had a routine. At night, he’d wake every hour or so to check the horizon for ships. He’d sleep until nine in the morning, then get up and put his coffee and oatmeal on to boil. He’d check the GPS and mark his location on the map with an X . He’d update his log, recording his position and conditions. Then he’d retire to a small wooden desk below deck and eat his breakfast and write. Thoughts. Impressions. Dreams. He’d spend the rest of the morning attending to an unending list of repairs: hand-stitching his wind-shredded sails, or jury-rigging a bent bowsprit, or fiddling with a broken electric winch.

At noon, he’d make lunch, drawing from a hold full of six tons of imperishable food—rice and pasta and lentils and peanut butter and Parmesan cheese—maybe adding a handful of fresh sprouts or some salted fish he’d caught and dried on the deck. He’d check his laptop, which received e-mail through a satellite-phone connection, his one tether to the land-bound world. He’d answer his messages, then send back a daily report to be posted on a website, 1000Days.net , being maintained by friends onshore.

“There are a myriad of life support systems to keep me alive and each one needs tending,” he wrote on Day 361. On Day 461: “The food is holding out great. I eat well. The electrical and mechanical systems need maintenance. Pulleys, shackles, turnbuckles and fittings are wearing down like I have never seen before. I had to push so hard to get this mission going that I have been through the aches, the anguish, the barriers, the doubts and fears and they go on. I go on too, it’s worth it.” On Day 842: “You are getting the unedited, live story from me as it happens, right off the cuff, wet off the wavetops and I don’t look back.”

Then he’d close the laptop and get back to the repairs. At 4 p.m., he’d take a coffee break. He’d meditate. He’d paint until dark, his favorite part of the day. At dusk, he’d venture out to the deck and watch the sunset blossom, like red ink dropped in clear water, over the endless horizon of the sea.

He stuck to this routine, perfected in every detail, for the next two years. He went months without seeing another boat, let alone another human being. In the evening he practiced yoga on a small wooden platform in the salty air. He’d stand on deck and shout, “I love you!” as loud as he could at the waves as they crashed against the hull. He carried a shaman’s mask, a dragon’s head, with him on the voyage, and some nights he’d strip off his clothes, put the mask on, go outside, and dance naked, alone under the vast stars that seemed to belong only to him.

Now it’s August, nearly two months after Reid’s return to the city, and he’s on the phone with Sears. He’s trying to track down a new gas stove for the boat. He’s talking to an automated voice-prompt recording.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes. Large appliances. Large. Appliances. ” He finally gets a person on the line. He’s put on hold. He waits. The person returns to tell him that the stove he’s looking for is only available to order online. “Okay, good. Can I order it with a credit card?” he asks. Yes, he can—which is great news, since his partner, Soanya Ahmad, has a credit card. Reid, who’s 58, has never had a credit card in his life.

He hangs up and says, without sarcasm or a trace of impatience, “Well, she seemed real nice.”

Day One: On April 21, 2007, Reid Stowe, then 55 years old, career mariner, adventurer, deep in debt and near dead broke, set sail from a pier outside Hoboken, on a mission to break the record for the longest continuous voyage at sea. He called this trip the “Mars Ocean Odyssey” because, at 1,000 days, it would last roughly as long as a round-trip mission to Mars. Reid had undertaken this kind of adventure before. When he was 19, he went to Hawaii to surf and wound up joining a bohemian sailor on a trip through the South Pacific. Later he built a 27-foot catamaran, christened it Tantra, and sailed it with another man across the Atlantic to Portugal. Then he sailed it alone to Morocco. Then he decided he needed to build a bigger boat.

Reid finished the Anne in 1978, and in 1987, he took her on a six-month voyage to Antarctica with a crew of seven artists, only one of whom had ever been to sea before. When he wasn’t sailing, he was living on the boat, at anchor somewhere, usually for free. He wears hand-me-down clothes from his 16-year-old nephew, and his last apartment was a loft in Soho, in 1988. He’s never lived anywhere as an adult that’s had a refrigerator.

When he set sail that day from Hoboken, he was not alone. He had one other crew member, Soanya, a 23-year-old City College graduate from Queens. She’d never sailed beyond the mouth of the Hudson River.

They’d been friends for four years and, not long after she’d decided to accompany him on his voyage, they became a couple. She lasted at sea for nearly a year, breaking the record for the longest nonstop sea voyage by a woman. But she was suffering from crippling seasickness, and she decided she couldn’t continue. So Reid e-mailed an Australian yacht club and arranged to be met by a friendly vessel. Reid would then venture on, by himself, still two years from his 1,000-day goal.

Day 307: “I sat in the cockpit alone as they powered back towards the land and caught my breath. I reset my sails and turned back to the south. The Mars Ocean Odyssey continues …” Day 457: “I just found out that Soanya gave birth to our baby boy!”

Soanya had not been seasick; she’d been pregnant. She’d had her suspicions on the boat, but kept them to herself initially. When the news was confirmed, she e-mailed Reid daily with updates and, soon, with photos of their newborn son. She named him Darshen, after the Sanskrit word for “vision.” Reid wasn’t troubled to miss the birth of his son; Reid’s father, an Air Force officer, left for Korea shortly after Reid was born. Besides, it had taken Reid roughly twenty years, with many delayed departures, fractured friendships, and recalibrated dreams, to raise the money and gather the sponsorships to make his trip possible. So there was never a question that he would sail on, no matter what, right to the end.

Day 1,152: On June 17, 2010, under an oceanically blue New York sky, Reid, looking gaunt but exultant, steered the Anne, her sails now patched and yellowed to the color of tobacco stains, up the Hudson, with a barge full of international press trailing behind. The previous record for the longest nonstop sea voyage in history was, depending on how you count it, either 658 days, set by Australian Jon Sanders in 1988 during a triple circumnavigation of the globe (Sanders, incidentally, was the one who picked up Soanya from the Anne ), or 1,067 days, which is a rough guess as to how long the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen spent with his ship stuck in ice as he attempted a trip to the North Pole in 1893. By either count, Reid had broken the record. He’d completed not only the longest sea voyage in history but the longest continuous voyage of any kind ever undertaken by a human being.

A crowd of 300 cheered him as Reid slowly docked at Pier 81 in Manhattan. An organizer urged a small herd of press photographers to step back, saying, “Come on—he hasn’t seen more than six people in three years.” As the photographers elbowed for position, shutters snapping, Reid waved from the deck and shouted, “I see a lot of people here that I love!” then started to cry.

Soanya stood nearby. She’s a petite woman, maybe five feet tall, and she was nearly lost in the crush of the crowd. She waited patiently with the near-2-year-old Darshen asleep in her arms. And then, for the first time in three years and 56 days, Reid Stowe set foot on land.

“Is that my little baby?” he said of Darshen, still sleeping. He kissed Soanya, then turned to the press. “I wrote some stuff down,” he said. He cleared his throat and read his speech. “This is a new human experience. No one really understands what I did—physically, mentally, spiritually. This was all accomplished through the power of love.” Reporters called out for a statement from Soanya, who said, “We have a really bright and amazing future ahead of us.” Darshen, meanwhile, had woken up and been whisked off by a friend, away from the turbulent scrum.

“What’s next? Where are you going to stay?” asked a reporter. “I’m going to stay on the boat. I love the boat,” Reid said.

You do not ask a tame seagull why it needs to disappear from time to time toward the open sea. It goes, that’s all, and it is as simple as a ray of sunshine, as normal as the blue of the sky. —Moitessier, The Long Way

The ‘Anne’ bobs lightly in the green water of the Hudson off Hoboken. “You’re looking at the boat that completed the longest sea voyage in history!” Reid often shouts to visitors who wander by, to which one visitor responded drily, “It looks it.” “I know, and I wouldn’t change a thing!” Reid answered brightly.

The Anne’ s not seaworthy at the moment. Ropes need replacing, masts need repairing, and winches have seized with salt and rust. Reid has months of repairs ahead of him, but he’s not discouraged. “Sometimes I look around New York and think I may be the only person in the city living in a home I built with my own hands,” he says proudly. Soanya and Darshen, who’d been staying with her family, are also now living on the Anne . Darshen is a bubbly and curious toddler, and he finds the schooner to be a fascinating playground. He rambles fearlessly over wooden steps and ledges, exploring the enticing corners and nooks, his legs dotted with red bites where mosquitoes snuck through the netting under which they all sleep. On hot days, of which there were plenty this summer, Darshen plays under a blue plastic tarp that Reid’s strung over the cockpit, splashing in a large, translucent plastic bin half-full of water, which serves as a makeshift kiddie pool.

Reid’s driver’s license expired while he was at sea, so when he needs to run errands, he rides his bike to the nearby path station to go to the dentist, or the bank, or to photocopy the hundreds of pages of journals he kept, a job that takes two hours and leaves him so antsy, standing next to that rattling machine, that he starts doing yoga squats in the copy shop.

One day, the family needed to get off the boat for a few hours, while one of Reid’s friends worked on sanding and revarnishing the deck. When they returned, Soanya was worried about all the fiberglass dust. “Fiberglass dust is toxic!” she said.

Darshen lunged toward his wading pool, reaching to splash in the water. “Darshen, don’t put that water in your mouth!” she called out. “There’s no dust in there. Do you see any dust in there?” Reid said. “I don’t need to see it! If it got in, it got in.” “Do you want me to pour it out?” “Yes, I think you should.” And over the water went into the river.

Reid is gradually adjusting to being a father. Darshen is gradually warming up to Reid. Reid has a full-grown daughter, Viva, from a previous relationship, who also had a baby while Reid was away, his first grandchild; his daughter and granddaughter greeted him on the pier when he returned. Previously, though, Reid’s life was sailing and everything else was secondary. The only thing you could count on was that, one day, he’d sail away again. Now he’s ready to be a family man. One of his recent chores was to cut and hang a perimeter of black netting all around the deck, to make sure that Darshen wouldn’t wander away and accidentally fall overboard.

While Reid was at sea, and Soanya was raising Darshen alone, the two of them would talk by satellite phone, their voices seeming scratchy and faraway. Sometimes she would put Darshen on. But Darshen had only an abstract idea of where his father was, or even what “father” meant at all. If someone showed him a picture of a sailboat in a book, he’d point to it and say “Daddy.”

During his thousand days at sea, Reid survived one collision (Day 15: with a freighter, which grazed the Anne ) and one really bad storm (Day 659: a monster wave upended the Anne and knocked Reid unconscious in the galley; he suspected the boat had rolled completely over because, when he came to, rice was stuck to the ceiling). But the worst day, he thinks now, was the day when Soanya decided she had to quit.

After she left, Reid started to despair that the voyage was hopeless. The Anne was damaged. The work was endless. The sails were shredding. He’d sew them by hand and they’d shred again. Eventually Reid pulled down all but one of his sails. He stopped setting courses and let the wind take him where it might. The pain in his arms from the constant work got so bad it started to wake him up at night. He prayed for God to send Jesus and the Buddha to heal him. Then he had a vision: Jesus came and laid his hand on Reid’s left arm and the Buddha appeared and laid hands on his right arm. And God appeared to Reid and he was 60 years old with a long white beard, just like in old Italian paintings. At one point, the vision changed and Reid saw floating there in front of him an enormous platter of barbecued spare ribs. But he refocused and the ribs vanished and Jesus and Buddha reappeared and the ship lurched and God and Jesus and Buddha all bumped heads. Then the Buddha turned to Reid and winked at him.

One day, as Reid drifted, a friend e-mailed him with a curious message: “Reid, look at your chart. You’ve drawn a whale.” Reid checked the chart—it was true. His ship had inadvertently traced the rough outline of a whale in the sea. He took this as a sign. This was the spirit of the sea, speaking to him. From that moment on, he knew he would make it. He could go two more, five more, ten more years if he needed to.

When astronauts are on space voyages, they sometimes experience a phenomenon called “the overview effect”: an overwhelming, euphoric sense of connection to the universe. Sailors on long voyages have reported similar experiences. The mystic, transcendent possibilities of solitude have long attracted shamans and holy men, and the lure of solo sea travel has transfixed adventurers throughout history. Now Reid had sailed alone for longer than them all.

Back on land, Reid’s progress was being monitored closely by three distinct groups. There was Reid’s loyal band of supporters, who maintained 1000Days.net. There was Soanya and their new baby. And there was a third group, whose interest was entirely malevolent: a group of commenters posting on a website called Sailing Anarchy.

The website caters to racers, the kind of hard-core weekend sailors who compete in regattas and fetishize sleek, expensive modern craft. On the site, they’d scoffed at Reid’s mission, posting on a message board that eventually reached nearly 30,000 comments. At the beginning, one commenter wrote, “100 days would be a stretch.” Later, one wrote, “He dead yet?” They ridiculed his voyage as not sailing but floating, a kind of “nautical pole-sitting.”

One commenter, who called himself Regatta Dog, became particularly, disturbingly obsessed. He dug up old court papers and posted them online, including a report that Reid once owed over $11,000 in child support to Viva’s mother, as well as Reid’s federal conviction for pot smuggling in 1993, for which Reid spent nine months in jail. Regatta Dog even tried to find out Soanya’s return flight to JFK and meet her at the airport for an ambush interview on video. But he got the wrong info, so he simply walked around the terminal asking other befuddled passengers about the lunacy of a 1,000-day sailing voyage, then posted that clip on YouTube.

These commenters consistently portrayed Soanya as a flaky acolyte or a hypnotized groupie, but she is neither. She’s a strong-willed, well-spoken, thoughtful young woman, who was taken with the idea of living free of the consumer obsessions and expectations of the modern world. She met Reid back in 2003, when he was living on the boat, docked off Manhattan, and she was a photography student at City College, drawn to the waterfront as a romantic escape from the cold geometric canyons of the city. Reid was out working on the boat. She said hello and asked if she could take some pictures. He said sure, then asked, Why don’t you come aboard?

She returned to the waterfront a week later to give him prints of the photos, and Reid had a boatload of people ready to sail for the day. He invited her along. She spent most of the ride chatting with other passengers, while Reid, the busy captain, at home in his element, piloted the boat and entertained his guests. He didn’t pay much attention to her. Later, he sat down, put his arm around her, and said, “So—do you have a boyfriend?”

People were always coming and going, artists and sailors, and Soanya became a semi-regular member of Reid’s informal crew. She liked to listen to him talk about meditation and yoga and sustainable living, or his theories on spirituality and connecting to the universe. These were all things she also thought about, but she had never found anyone among her young friends who could talk about them with any authority, if they even cared at all. She was still in school and working as an office intern, and she came to hate the idea that this might be the whole of her life. Dressing up in office clothes, hewing to a schedule, spending every day penned in a cubicle.

Eventually Reid told her about his dream to sail uninterrupted for 1,000 days, because eventually he told everyone about this dream. It had become a running joke among his friends. Oh, has he invited you yet to sail for 1,000 days? But she considered it. And one clear day, while the two of them sat on the boat on the Hudson, Reid was expounding on the voyage and Soanya blurted out, “I’ll go.”

Early on in their voyage, the two of them both posted lists on the 1000Days website titled, “Ten quick reasons why I like it here.” Reid’s included: “I like being with Soanya on a grand adventure. I like being king of an insecure kingdom. I feel like something good could happen.” Her list was slightly different. It included: “It’s good to be away from commercialism, noise and stress. I found the wonderful partner to show me the magic of the sea. I’m not stuck doing something I don’t want to do. No one is telling me how to be.”

How can I tell them…? Tell them and not frighten them, without their thinking I have lost my mind. —Moitessier, The Long Way

When the English yachtsman Francis Chichester completed the first solo navigation of the globe with only one stop, in 1967, he was knighted by the queen. When Moitessier, a sailor from French Indochina, completed a trip around the globe, in 1969, he was hailed in France as a philosopher-poet of the sea. His boat, the Joshua, is still on display in a French museum. When Reid Stowe returned from his journey, he hoped the mayor might be there to greet him. Actually, he hoped the president might greet him, though he knew that was unlikely. But it didn’t seem entirely inappropriate.

Instead, he did some newspaper and radio interviews and got booked on CBS’ The Early Show (it was later canceled) and found out he’d only be allowed to moor his boat for one night in Manhattan. So he scrambled to find a friend with a space in Hoboken. Reid is still optimistic, still full of love for the world, but he’s also confused and slightly frustrated that, for example, not a single sailor has come to visit him to ask how he completed this record-setting voyage. It’s almost as if no one understands what he’s accomplished. When he first returned, he’d been surrounded by reporters asking questions like, “What did you miss most—a hot shower or ice cream?” And Reid, fresh from three years alone communing with the ocean and having nightly revelations on the nature of love, thought, When you’re in the presence of an illuminating gift from the heavens, you don’t think, Gee, I miss ice cream. I didn’t miss a thing out there.

Moitessier would understand. Moitessier, a great inspiration to Reid as a young man, was competing in a race around the world called the Golden Globe in 1968, and he was well in the lead when he decided to change course and simply keep sailing. He explained this in a note, which he flung by slingshot onto the deck of a passing ship, that read in part: “I am continuing non-stop because I am happy at sea, and perhaps because I want to save my soul.” He later wrote that, looking back on his decision, he only regretted the inclusion in the note of the word “perhaps.”

“We’re going to have a good life now,” Reid says on the boat. “We don’t know what it’s going to be. We may not have much money, but we’ll be people who know we did something good for humanity, and everyone will know it, too. And we’ll be respected for that, and loved for that, and my son will grow up coming into that. What’s worth more than that?”

The three of them plan to live on the boat through the winter. They have a wood-burning stove, and there’s still plenty of food in the hold, another year’s worth at least, by Reid’s estimate. And at the end of that year, who knows? Reid is planning another voyage, maybe a slow tour of the sacred sites of the Atlantic Ocean, or a voyage down the East Coast that Reid wants to call “Keeping the Spirit of Adventure Alive in America.”

He’s also hooked up with a literary agent, who’s paired him with a successful co-author, so that’s good. The writer has several Times best sellers on his résumé, and co-wrote autobiographies of William Shatner and Johnnie Cochran. Reid also hopes to mount an art show in Manhattan of the 100 or so paintings he completed on his voyage. One day, he unpacked these paintings to show them to his friend, a curly-blonde French-Canadian art collector named Anne-Brigitte Sirois. Most incorporate collages of sea maps and cosmic swirls and photos of Reid at the wheel of the Anne . One of the collages includes a photo of him and Soanya embracing. When he shows that painting, Darshen wanders over, runs his hand over the photo, and says, “Mommy and Daddy.”

Later, Soanya sits alone on the deck and thinks about the ocean. Her parents were not happy when she announced she was leaving on a boat for three years with a man more than twice her age, but they took her in when she returned, a year later, pregnant, and helped her raise her son. As for life on the ocean, she both misses it and doesn’t. She’s not a sailor, she’s decided, not like Reid. She remembers how he would sit out happily on the deck and do yoga with the salt-wind licking at his face, and she’d retreat down below to do her yoga on the bed. Reid gets tremendous pleasure from pulling ropes and setting sails, but to her it’s just work; she doesn’t enjoy it at all. The one part of sea life she does miss, though, is how simple and direct it all was. Out there, you relied on yourself and no one else. If you were hungry, you’d fish. If rain was falling, and you were thirsty, you’d go out and catch the rain.

She’s done most of the parenting because, as she sees it, she has a two-year head start on Reid. He’s a patient father, sometimes too patient, letting Darshen toddle off toward unseen perils. But he’s getting better. And she’s started to see Reid in some of Darshen’s expressions. She’s noticed they’ve got the same mouth. And Darshen has really taken to the water. He welcomes visitors cheerily to the boat by name if he knows them, and if he doesn’t, he greets them by shouting, “Hi, person!”

On one recent afternoon the three of them sat together on the yoga platform, cross-legged under a bright and placid sky. Reid and Soanya closed their eyes and chanted Om . Unexpectedly, Darshen, sitting at their feet, joined in. They sat like that, eyes closed, chanting in unison, for a long, edifying moment.

Reid opened his eyes and shouted out joyfully—Hey!—and gave Darshen a big hug, and Darshen laughed. And Soanya thought, When you’re all together like that, it really doesn’t get any better. For that moment, the three of them, alone yet together, may as well have been a million miles from the rest of the world.

Day 23: Soanya growing sprouts. All photographs courtesy of Reid Stowe

Day 15: Repairing a bent bowsprit after a collision with a freighter. All photographs courtesy of Reid Stowe

Day 640: Facing down a fierce Cape Horn gale. All photographs courtesy of Reid Stowe

Day 876: A whale-shark sighting. All photographs courtesy of Reid Stowe

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Longest distance sailed non-stop by any vessel

The longest distance sailed non-stop by any vessel is 71,023 nautical miles (131,535 km; 81,732 miles), a feat achieved by Australian Jon Sanders between 25 May 1986 and 13 March 1988. Starting and finishing in Fremantle, Western Australia, Jon made a record three consecutive non-stop solo circumnavigations of the globe – one west and two east – and was at sea for a total of 657 days on his 13.9-m (44-ft) sloop Parry Endeavour .

The leading publication for discoveries & rediscoveries

Jimmy Buffet wrote lyrics with him in mind. Basquiat painted his portrait. He built a 70-foot schooner and left the touch of solid earth for a record 1,152 days without touching shore, without resupply of food or water, and without fuel. This shaman created a large body of extraordinary abstract paintings, often using worn-out sails that could no longer be repaired. Here is an invitation to view fragments from an unconscious realm into which few artists have ventured.

Thematic Exhibitions

Reid stowe, psychonaut on the high seas.

“Tibetan lamas could be called psychonauts, since they journey across the frontiers of death into the in-between realm.”

           — buddhist scholar robert thurman, reid stowe has literally voyaged “across the frontiers of death into the in-between realm” since he was a teenager. it was not until 2018 that he decided to fully reveal that he has always led a double life. that parallel life has meant constantly creating art and sailing the world’s oceans. the result of this unique dynamic is a vision that is far apart from that of any other painter. when his last epic voyage ended in 2010 he had set a new oceanic endurance record of 1,152 days as the first person to sail for the longest period around the earth, in solitary, without touching shore, without resupply of food or water, and without fuel. it was so jaw-dropping that even the elite community of experienced ocean sailors was left incredulous that he survived. it even found stowe ensconced in ripley’s believe it or not.  at the same time an artistic zenith was also achieved. stowe’s large series of paintings defies being pigeon-holed with a particular style or tied to a specific movement..

The first reaction to these paintings is that they exude an integrity and authenticity. Then we discover they are the cumulative effect of spiritual experiences — from harrowing to sublime — upon the oceans. At the core of our understanding we come to discover an artist intuitively embracing an inner dialogue between his unconscious-spiritual-psychological life inseparable from his life on the oceans. For decades, Donald Kuspit, dean of American art historians and author of many notable books on modern and post-modern art (including his influential The End of Art ) has challenged the validity of certain popular artists whose marketplace-crafted personas camouflage the truth of their roles as faux-revolutionary descendants of a tired Pop Art movement, effortlessly regurgitating a narcissistic conceptualism. He has been as surprised as anyone by Stowe’s paintings:

“Stowe is a serious discovery. He is a natural-born mystic whose long voyage seems to have been an extended religious transcendental experience — and what came out of it were paintings that are quite intriguing.  They are not classifiable in any certain way. They seem to live in a borderline, exploring between the psychotic and the transcendental, spiritual experience. These works definitely come out of what the psychoanalyst Romain Rolland referred to in 1927 as, coincidentally, the ‘Oceanic Feeling.’ They are densely layered and as a body overlap with so many modern concepts in painting.”2

Sometimes Stowe’s imagery reveals itself as a subtle lure and at others as an explosion of visual effects; in both cases it is an invitation to view fragments from an unconscious realm into which few artists have ventured. Sometimes it takes a fiercely independent outsider and introspective artist like Stowe to remind us how the unconscious serves not only as a powerful source of inspiration but the only source that results in truly compelling art. Throughout history, those artists who have become recognized as “masters” have achieved such exalted status owing to their extraordinary abilities in expressing truly unique visions. For centuries, those visions have been realized through styles and techniques that are so innovative that they evoke from viewers an emotional reaction quite unlike any other. One hundred years ago, Clive Bell, the British art critic and champion of abstract art, put a name to its cause as “significant form” and to our response as “aesthetic ecstasy.”3 Without even knowing Stowe’s extraordinary back-story, his paintings can elicit this emotional reaction. Knowing his back-story reinforces the impact of the “ah-ha” moment.

Bell’s observations about our psychological and spiritual reactions to art gained renewed resonance in art criticism during the height of Abstract Expressionism in New York. Yet, art historians continue to struggle with a paradox inherent in contemporary art criticism. Some champion conceptualism — the opposite of Bell’s perception — sometimes encouraging a jaunty art market too often driven by commercialism.  At that glittery end of the spectrum one finds artists anointed as “masters” by the marketplace despite their unawareness of (or delight in) producing works that are slavishly derivative, frolicking in the purely decorative, or confessing to a vapid imagination. Other critics deride the permission freely granted by Marcel Duchamp — that seminal conceptualist master of the early 20th century — to pursue what are seen as comfortably nihilistic subversions of “art” where both the unconscious and art history are denied.  By the 1980s art historians had reawakened a vigor in the dialogue about the difference between a very conscious construction of art — as taught, for example, at the Bauhaus and by Josef Albers, later flowering in Geometric Abstraction and Minimalism — versus the unconscious expression inherent to movements such as Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.  In 1987, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted an influential exhibition (with an eponymous book) called The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985.  That exhibition, whose title was drawn from Kandinsky’s seminal treatise of 1912, re-examined the history of abstract painting, revealing that the unconscious has always been a vital source of inspiration shared by masters.

Most recently, the artist-critic Ann McCoy wrote, “Artists who do draw from the unconscious are dismissed as throwbacks to an outdated Romanticism. Dreams, synchronicity, and visions are thought of as byproducts of bourgeois society and the irrational is to be avoided. Critical theory stresses art that is motivated by politics and society rather than subjectivity.  Artists drawing from mythology, antiquity, alchemy, etc. are dismissed under the heading of ‘historicism.’  This abandonment of the unconscious seems to be more prevalent in the visual arts than in poetry, film, and theater.”4

The Psychonaut

In 1970 a new term — psychonaut — was coined for those who explored the unconscious and its altered states. The word means “a sailor of the soul” and aptly describes Stowe. Viewers standing before his large paintings — some actually 16-foot sails — realize they are oceans apart from marine panting. They experience brilliant Day-Glo colors as movements breaking free from geometric structural grids. They sometimes become so absorbed by their hallucinatory effects that they wonder if mind-altering drugs induced their creation. For Kandinsky color was psychic vibration. For Stowe color is more than a control over chromatic exuberance. He agrees with Mark Rothko’s statement that if a viewer was moved only by the color relationships in his paintings, then they missed the point.

Stowe the psychonaut is not a follower of his controversial contemporary Timothy Leary (psychologist and author of The Psychedelic Experience ), who urged Stowe’s generation to use LSD to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Stowe the oceanic shaman has used psychoactive plants and other entheogenic substances but only to gain deeper insights and spiritual experiences, which were later translated into paintings. “The healing power of altered states of consciousness is no longer relegated to the counterculture of Timothy Leary” writes Michael Pollan, author of the recent book, How to Change Your Mind .  “It’s entering the mainstream. There are now FDA-approved psychedelic therapists.”5 And while Stowe hopes that with pot’s legalization and its farming having become a multi-billion-dollar enterprise it may also be more acceptable to reveal that he was also one of the largest pot smugglers in American history. But that story comes later, as it pales before the significance of his artistic accomplishments.

The chapter that is truly extraordinary is one that enriches the history of abstract painting. It’s a chapter where phenomenal endurance is inextricably intertwined with artistic innovation. Stowe’s artistic path — from origin to evolution to maturity — is genuinely unique. Like other masters, he may be cast as the prototypical hero passionately pursuing a noble quest. Tracing these artists’ paths to fulfillment, we discover their persistence, their quirks, and their obsessions. We learn that their own personal voyages were often fraught with great difficulty and even tragedy (in America alone, think Gorky, Pollock, Rothko, Haring, and Stowe’s friend, Jean-Michel Basquiat). Quite unlike other masters, Stowe may be called art history’s first adventure hero — a hero who discovered a mystical source, and still taps it. If his paintings were not as compelling as his backstory he would have been politely dismissed. Instead, he would had to have settled for being ensconced in just one pantheon, that reserved for heroes of mythic endurance and courage, along with other fearless ocean explorers — but they always sailed with large crews. In the early 15 th century Zeng He commanded an impressive Chinese royal fleet, becoming the first to circumnavigate the globe. In the mid 18 th century Captain James Cook charted the Pacific Ocean. In the mid 19 th century Charles Darwin sailed around the world proving his theories on evolution. Now, consider sailing solo around the world. In the late 19 th century Joshua Slocum was the first to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe, albeit making landfalls.  In 1967, Sir Francis Chichester made a solo circumnavigation of the world (with just one stop, in Australia) in 226 days. Two years later, Bernard Motissier sailed in the first non-stop, singlehanded Golden Globe Race sponsored by the Sunday Times in London, and was on target to win but for philosophical reasons instead decided to continue sailing back to Tahiti. In 1986, the greatest Australian sailor, Jon Sanders, logged 658 days. Finally, in 2010, Stowe broke all records with his 1,152 days at sea — more than three years.  His extraordinary accomplishment became known as “1,000 Days — The Longest Sea Voyage in History.” When he finally docked in Manhattan neither the press nor anyone in the crowd on shore knew that more than one hundred paintings on tattered sails were stowed below decks. Few even knew that with the help of his father and brothers he had built his 70-foot, 60-ton Schooner Anne . Fewer still ever saw her bulkheads, into which Stowe had installed tropical woods he had hand-carved in haute-relief. Also aboard were carved wooden statues. It was an environment in which Gauguin would have delighted.

How then, does one come to understand Stowe’s art? Art historians are charged with the responsibility of immediately detecting whether an artist’s works are fearlessly innovative or slavishly derivative. Truly unique works are challenging, triggering an instinct to examine a broader spectrum of a life’s works with the hope of unraveling the mystery behind their creativity. Standing before Reid Stowe’s large paintings it becomes clear that he has broken from the mainstream art world. He is neither an insider nor an outsider. If anything he is inside-out, having absorbed and transmuted elements from nearly every movement from the 1950s to today, including Abstract Expressionism, Collage, Assemblage, Pop, Art Brut, Hard Edge, Op Art, Shaped Canvas, Abstract Illusionism, Arte Povera, Dada, Narrative, Outsider, Surrealism, Graffiti, Neo-Expressionism, Performance Art, and Neo-Geo.  As a result, one encounters a dense layering of styles and imagery including graffiti figures, painted words, flat circles of color, mandalas, linear geometries, strips casting shadows, careful pouring and dripping, and carefully placed jolts of Day-Glo. 6 Equally disarming is his use multiple techniques and mediums often combining house paint, spraypaint, acrylics, gold leaf, fragments of photographs, pieces of worn sails from his voyages, beach sand, sawdust, driftwood, sailing rope, and sail repair twine. Most of the pictures he cut from magazines and inserted as collage elements were storage diagrams, work lists, press coverage, and promotional materials — all related to his voyages were play a role of enlightening viewers but were more important because they empowered his vision. He often painted black & white checkerboard strips that appear to play the role of safety tape marking of a hazardous area. The final works sometimes break out of the expected rectangular canvas on stretcher bars and are instead irregular in shape because the chosen support material is an assemblage of large pieces of found driftwood. The result is a complex imagery drawing us in while begging to be decoded.  A compelling multimedia painting by Stowe is the result of more than just this hybrid vigor. Digging deeper throughout six decades of paintings, one seeks answers to the evolution and maturity of his path. After long contemplative viewings, we art historians would never have imagined naming other-worldly oceanic experiences as the wellspring of this creativity.

In order to unravel the mystery behind Stowe’s works and why they represent a significant departure from mainstream contemporary art, one must first examine the dynamics of an unconscious source traced back to his childhood. By so doing we understand how he became the only painter in history whose artistic life force originated in and on the oceans in command of his own self-constructed sailboats on profoundly dangerous voyages. We also come to grasp why his spiritual and artistic evolution is so distinctive. “There is a big difference between being a guest on the sea and the captain of your own boat, having to make your own decisions to survive,” he says. “I took all that I had learned and experienced on the oceans and went into the psycho-spiritual realm to succeed in this voyage.” This is a crucial distinction that puts a light year between Stowe and any other artist.

At eighteen he painted Flying Above the Birds and Swimming Below the Porpoises Simultaneously . “Though I had started to break up the point of view as early as 13 years old, those paintings were more influenced by Picasso and Klee. This painting is the first showing the maturing of my mystical visions. Next, I painted a mural of that painting 10 feet square on the wall of my family’s beach house and it is still there. The success of this image allowed me to clearly hold those visions in my head for a lifetime.”

Born in 1952, the first of six children, Stowe grew up spending the summers on the North Carolina coast. With his father’s help and encouragement he learned how to build a boat. It soon became clear that he was one of those rare kids who loved spending more time on the water than the land. It was also clear that he was artistically talented. By age thirteen he was experimenting with Cubism. By seventeen his art began to take on new forms as he was drawn to discover how the paths to mysticism could be expressed as visual phenomenon. A photograph of him at 17 shows him seated beneath a large painting employing the psychedelic portraits of the Beatles created as posters by photographer Richard Avedon in 1967. He continued to stretch large canvases and experimented with multimedia, mixing oils, collage, and sometimes worn out rope from his sailboat.

The First Spiritual Voyage

In 1971, when he was nineteen, his family was not surprised when he announced that he needed to drop out of after one year in college and sail from Maui through Gaugin’s South Pacific. His trip found a turning point in Fiji after he befriended Ivo von Laake, a young Dutchman with a 19-foot plywood sloop (and no motor). While living with von Laake in New Zealand, he first learned about the most famous of French sailors, Bernard Moitessier. Von Laake had just spent a year in Tahiti helping Moitessier with his book, The Long Way (published a few years later), so von Laake regaled Stowe firsthand with the sailor’s exploits and philosophy. Stowe was particularly struck by the fact that, despite being in the lead of the historic first solo ocean race around the world, Moitessier eschewed the cash prize awaiting him at the finish line in England in favor of continuing on to Tahiti.  Moitessier later explained to The London Times that he extended his voyage “because I am happy at sea and perhaps to save my soul.” Before the publication of the great sailor’s book, Stowe was struck by quotes such as, “You can take your mind off of the land and just be at sea and keep going.” Stowe clearly understood Moitessier’s meaning when he said, “You do not ask a tame seagull why it needs to disappear from time to time toward the open sea. It goes, that’s all.” This philosophical acceptance would continue to resonate as true with Stowe because he, like Moitessier, was imbued with Far Eastern religions and had discovered yoga at sea as a means of enhancing his experience as well as his art.7

The South Pacific thus became the first breakthrough spiritual voyage for Stowe, one where he increasingly felt at one with the ocean. He captured his experiences swimming with dolphins, painting them swimming above him in the sunlight while he was simultaneously looking down at the seabirds flying below him. In another painting he expressed being awestruck by double rainbows. Stowe attributes this voyage as being “how the seeds were planted” in reinforcing the confidence needed for his own record-breaking voyage from 2007 to 2010. “Many people said I had my head in the clouds, but my life was based upon a lifetime of boat building, navigation, athletic and seamanship skills I developed. Then I was free to meditate on the sea and use my insights to go further than the men before me. In my case, I also used my lifetime of art creation to help me.” In his Flying Above the Sea Birds Looking Down on Catamaran Tantra , he states that “This painting goes with the first manuscript, begun when I started building the catamaran. It was intended to be an illustrated children’s book about the adventures I was going to go on in my little catamaran. I was two characters, the sailor and the artist. I went on many of adventures at sea creating art and meditating. We went into a space of unfamiliar shapes, and then into a rainbow void where it was revealed that we would return home and build a bigger boat to take our family and friends on a voyage to paradise. Then we returned home to build the boat. The amazing thing was that most of my fantasies came true. That book is another example of how my art programmed my future and helped me realize my dreams.”

Peter Nichols’ insightful (and often chilling) A Voyage for Madmen (2001) is the exemplar book on the physical and psychological demands of ocean solo sailing for very long periods. “Normal people aren’t driven to try to sail around the world without stopping,” he wrote. “They don’t stop their lives midstream and embrace, with single-minded effort and every resource available to them, a hair-raising stunt never before attempted and which has every chance of killing them.”8

It’s important to point out that Stowe is neither an egomaniac nor junkie of adrenalin rushes. He never had a guru or spiritual guide. He never sought a life on the ocean for personal salvation. Rather, he has always returned to the ocean for enlightenment, and this act is inseparable from his approach to making art. On his first trip through the South Pacific he brought with him books by Carl Jung such as Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963) and Man and His Symbols (1964). Also influential on his path to self-realization was The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927) by Walter Evans-Wentz, a Theosophist.  Equally alluring was Carlos Castaneda’s very popular The Teachings of Don Juan (1968) about shamanism and mysticism. “Even more important,” says Stowe, “is Tibetan Yoga and secret doctrines because the techniques are powerful and bring on ecstasy for me more than ideas or teachings.” Today, the numerous art books on Stowe’s bookshelves are joined by titles on Far Eastern Buddhism, Zen, astral projection, metaphysics, magic, esoteric psychology, yoga, and the universe — all pointing to his holistic exploration of creativity and the unconscious. In Imagined Catamaran he uses ‘imagined’ in the title “because I had not yet built the catamaran. I even put a Chinese Junk type sail, which I never ended up using. This painting also goes with the children’s book.”

First Crossing of the Atlantic

As a result of his year in the South Pacific, Stowe became increasingly drawn to emulate Moitessier in both philosophy and spiritual approach. He soon planned his next adventure on the high seas. After hitch-hiking from Arizona to his grandfather’s beach house on the Intracoastal Waterway near Shallotte Point, North Carolina, he passionately explained his need to build a boat that could cross the Atlantic Ocean. Once again his family supported his dream, and for the next eight months he focused on building a 27-foot catamaran with red sails he named Tantra. In the summer of 1973 von Laake rejoined Stowe (now 21) and the two young men launched into the North Atlantic. The media was captivated by the daring adventure, reporting that there was no motor and only a sextant for navigation.

After arriving in Portugal, von Laake returned to Holland and Stowe continued to sail solo to the Moroccan coast. He described this solo ocean voyage as, “a young man’s life or death rite of passage into a modern sea shaman.” Settling in Mogador (now called Essaouira), he met a spiritual healer in a tea shop who told him stories about his practice of laying on hands. Using the tea shop as his base, Stowe was inspired to paint many colorful scenes of life in the coastal town.

Von Laake rejoined Stowe after three months and they crossed back over the Atlantic, this time arriving in Bahia, Brazil. Because both young sailors went into deep meditation while they created art at sea, Reid titled this voyage, “Two Together as One into the Void.” From Bahia they continued north and then up the Amazon River where they set anchor and went ashore.  Stowe collected abandoned canoes and carved them into mermaids and yoga goddesses and ceremoniously sacrificed them to the sea.

He also painted on sails and charts his proposed routes with self-portraits on the other side cheering, “Hooray, I made it!” These paintings not only translated his experiences of the Atlantic crossings, but he considered them to be “programming paintings” that would help him succeed at sea in the future. Stowe recalled painting Amigo Da Verdade : “It rained hard throughout the morning. We meditated, did yoga, and gazed down through our slatted deck at the fish congregating under the catamaran. When the rain stopped the animals and the people came out and began their activities. I made this painting at that moment.”

The pair parted again when the opportunity arose for Stowe to help a Frenchman sail his boat to Martinique in the Caribbean. However, while sailing out of the broad Amazon River delta at night they were captured by pirates and robbed of all their valuables. The pirates asked about the little catamaran that was anchored nearby on the river but Stowe said he knew nothing about it. The pirates argued about whether to kill them, but eventually decided to leave them hog-tied on the sailboat. After being prisoners for three nights and two days, they managed to untie themselves and during a storm at night tacked out of the mouth of the Amazon.  That morning a mahi-mahi jumped into the air, rang the ship’s bell, and fell into cockpit. They realized it was Thanksgiving Day, and the sea gods had confirmed their good fortune. The region remains dangerous. In 2001, a group of pirates shot and killed New Zealand’s most famous sailor, Sir Peter Blake, in the same area.

Carnaval in Salvador is part of a group that Stowe painted during the voyage and were meant to illustrate his manuscript, The Voyage of the Lightship Tantra (written 1973–75). He describes the book as “The story and loves of a young man who sails the smallest boat to four continents doing yoga, painting, and becoming the shaman of the sea. The highlights are losing the boat to pirates and returning to the Amazon, rescuing the catamaran, and later sailing a boatload of pot back home with plans to build the magical Tantra Schooner (later renamed the Schooner Anne ).”

Stowe in the Amazon

In 1974 luck smiled upon Stowe again when an adventurer on the Amazon sent a letter saying that Tantra was spotted still anchored in the delta. Stowe returned, stealthily slipped aboard at night, and quietly sailed his catamaran out of the Amazon. In the Caribbean, he arrived at the then sleepy Port Elizabeth on the island of Bequia. To his delight he discovered the island was a haven for sailors and he settled in painting many canvases, usually on worn sailcloth. He also discovered that many of the sailors were earning significant amounts of cash to support their wanderlust by smuggling boatloads of marijuana to the American shore. And then the big idea hit him. He was the most experienced ocean sailor of the lot. If he worked hard and saved all that money he would have enough to fulfill his dream of building a large schooner to make the longest voyage at sea. Stowe soon became known to the Colombians. He accepted the challenge and quickly made a reputation as a reliable captain in the Caribbean.

The woodblock at right illustrates one of Stowe’s encounters with pyschotropic mushrooms. The wood he used was “purpleheart,” which is a very hard, durable, and water-resistant tropical wood. It has always been one of Stowe’s favorites, and he used it to carve the rail all the way around the Schooner Anne as well as the sea serpent figurehead off his bowsprit and in the interior flooring. After the long voyage, Stowe and Soanya returned to Guyana to repair the schooner and it took them months to acquire it. “Painting is my true love,” he says, “but I have had so many mystical experiences with tropical woods absorbing, carrying, and resonating spirits.” We surfer sailors knew that after a big rain for a few days the magic mushrooms would grow in cow pies. We also figured the surf would be up in the calm after stormy weather. So, we carried our surfboards over the hill to our favorite beach where no one lived and passed through a big cow pasture. There were mushrooms everywhere. The locals called them Jumbi Umbrellas and were afraid to eat them. A Jumbi is a mischievous forest spirit in the Carib-African Voodoo culture. I found a place where the farmer had raked the manure into a giant pile and it was covered with mushrooms. I climbed on top, squatted down, and started picking and eating them. Then we went surfing. It was an enlightening experience. We saved a lot for our friends, but they do not taste good later because they quickly wilt and turn brown.”

Pot Smugglers of the Caribbean

I’ve done a bit of smuggling, I’ve run my share of grass, I made enough money to buy Miami, but I pissed it away so fast Never meant to last, never meant to last.

— Jimmy Buffet, 1974, “A Pirate Looks at Forty”

For Stowe, pot smuggling became a way to earn a living, just as pot farming today has become a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. By the end of 1977, he had the money he needed to build his schooner, and a year later he completed the construction. He even got married — to an artist, Iris Groskoph.

Moitessier would have been intrigued if he had known that Stowe carefully studied the construction of 19th-century American schooners and concluded that the Gloucester fisherman was the quickest and the most seaworthy sailboat. He even went to Mystic Seaport and studied the complicated ropes and pulley plans for its famous schooner, the L.A. Dunton . From time to time Stowe would climb atop his neighbor’s roof to get a better perspective on how the schooner was taking shape, and then slightly bend the steel rods used in its construction until it was just right. Stowe describes his schooner as being “round like a bottle, with a deep keel, so it floats like a duck in rough seas, and cuts through the water like a submarine.” With family pitching in, by the end of the summer Schooner Anne was launched from the same North Carolina shore where Stowe had built Tantra just six years earlier. A year later his daughter, Viva, was born. For the next two years the young family explored the Caribbean in their 70-foot, 50-ton ocean home. The island of Dominica was a favored port of call because this is where Stowe collected most of the tropical hardwoods from which he carved sculpture and made furniture.

The 1980s was a fruitful decade for Stowe in painting but after the couple separated the island of St. Barts held particular attraction for him. There he became friendly with Basquiat and soon thereafter rented a loft in SoHo and the two often got together. “I liked Basquiat a lot. He even painted life-size portrait of me, inscribed my name above my head, and gave it to me,” recalled Stowe, “but he was always trying to score heavy drugs and that was not my scene.” Stowe was more focused on scoring art materials discarded by frustrated painters. As a “beachcomber in SoHo” he found a steady supply on the sidewalks. This explains why his paintings sometimes bear the signatures of other artists on their versos.

Another artist with whom Stowe became friendly in St. Barts was singer Jimmy Buffet. “I met Buffet in St. Barts in the early 1980s when everybody was partying together. We got to know each other well enough that he said he wanted to write a song about me. But recently I heard he was distancing himself from his old smuggling buddies. Maybe now as pot is being legalized he might reidentify himself with the St Barts sailing smugglers, because it was all colorful good vibes.”

I used to rule my world from a pay phone, And ships out on the sea, But now times are rough, And I got too much stuff, Can’t explain the likes of me.

— jimmy buffet, lyrics from “one particular harbour” (1983), envisioning art through living the disciplines of buddhism, yoga, and the tantras.

It’s important to clarify that Stowe saw pot-smuggling as the means to raise the money necessary to build his schooner. His own use of pot or psychedelic drugs was not out of a desire to become lost in space. Rather, he learned that the proper use of mushrooms and marijuana were a means to attain knowledge of the sacred, which was as a path to enlightenment. “Throughout the long story of man, marijuana and other mind-altering drugs were used sacredly as a sacrament for various purposes,” he says, “It is the phrase ‘recreational’ that sets the future of pot up for unenlightening experiences that lead to problems.” When Stowe did smoke pot it was always in the Buddha pose meditating or practicing yoga. Consistent with this philosophy of connecting to higher powers was his adoption of the Tantric traditions for transmuting and lifting his sexual drives into spiritual energy.

About The Nirvanic Symphony :

“This painting, like all the others from 1970–75, is an illustration of my mystical experience of listening to the music in my head. When Ivo and I sailed south of Morocco in heavy winds we were nearly flipped over as we surfed down one wave, plunged into the back of another wave, and water sprayed in our air vents. Days of stormy winds, waves, and wetness are quite hectic and stressful. I relaxed in my narrow bunk with the waves pressing the thin plywood hull against my shoulders on both sides and put my hands over my ears. As the painting shows, there I am sitting in the lotus posture in my third eye with big ears, implying I am listening. The sound of the waves is most dominant. I also hear the music of my friend Ivo who plays the silver flute. I hear Moroccan music, birds, and bells, and Carlos Santana’s guitar — it all blends together into beautiful music.”

About Meditating with the Green Goddess in My Chakras :

“These paintings are very important for me because they were painted to protect and enlighten me in dangerous conditions. I have many more of them as big as 12 x 15 feet. This painting is a graphic example of one of my practices. At 23 years of age I was preparing to go back into the pirate’s territory and rescue my catamaran, Tantra, so I made this painting and others to give me the courage and the spiritual power to succeed. The premise of my Yoga Adventures at Sea manuscript is that painting and sculpture has been an important part of many of the Yoga disciplines in Buddhist and Hindu cultures since ancient times as well as the Japanese Shinto. Of course, this goes back to man’s most ancient art in caves. So, when I speak of yoga, this includes my art practice. My depictions of real experiences at sea carry the utmost validity because of my success of achieving what no other man may be capable of surpassing — physical acts in a life-and-death environment where by I departed the touch of the earth far longer than any human. After Soanya had to depart I spent 846 days without seeing land or another human.

About Catamaran Tantra Smashed by Giant Wave :

About The Green Goddess Looks Over Me as I Sail Back Home to North Carolina :

The Pilot House

“The pilot house is the most important and most used room on the schooner. For cold, stormy, or even hot wet spray conditions, the pilot house is the most comfortable place to be and still see 360-degrees and keep an eye on the sails through the skylight. Knowing that the schooner would spend its days in the void of the sea, I wanted the interior to have an inspiring wonderland of rich tropical carved woods that would contribute to the well-being of the crew. Feeling that I sail on the cathedral of the sea, I wanted the interior to have a spiritual uplifting theme that would actually help us through long days. Practically, the pilot house is right above the motor room and serves as a work shop/art studio, with navigation table, tool trunks, work stations — and there is a bunk and places for eight people to sit together for meals. There has always been a wood/coal stove in the back of the pilot house. I only used the motor coming on and off the dock. I never have used the motor at sea, but it is very important to be able to maneuver into tight spaces. In 1979 we sailed to the Caribbean with a full cargo, but with nothing built in the interior because I always intended to use tropical woods. We were in Bequia when Hurricane David, one of the deadliest hurricanes of the century, made a direct hit on Dominica, about 150 miles north of us. Afterwards, we sailed up to Dominica, which is a mountainous island. Huge trees had been toppled and there had been many landslides. Natives with chain saws salvaged these rare woods and we bought from them and traded food and goods.  They loaded us up with teak, mahogany, and at least ten other beautiful woods, which we only knew by their Creole names, such as Bois Lézard, Maho La Mer, and Kowosol. I used these for the whole interior, including the pilot house with my twenty carvings of spiritual, nautical, and nature themes. All have all contributed to the magic and rich history of the (Tantra) Schooner Anne.”

The First Arts and Cultural Expedition to the Seventh Continent

Moitessier’s epic achievement of the longest non-stop sea voyage in history never left Stowe’s mind. In 1986, while in New Zealand, he revisited the concept of challenging that record. Just how long should he sail?  In his mind’s eye he saw a slot machine spinning until it stopped on 1,000. Soon after, this number was reinforced when he read that it would take about 1,000 days for astronauts to travel to Mars and back. From the beginning, he conceived of recruiting a crew of eight because he was acutely aware of the extreme difficulties of handling a big schooner on his own. He also wondered how isolation in a dangerous environment would affect the crew’s coping with physiological and psychological deprivations. He knew that on the ocean any mistake could mean death. Moreover, he wondered how such an environment would affect his own creative drive. NASA had been wondering the same thing. Stowe then named his mission “1,000 Days at Sea: The Mars Ocean Odyssey.” To begin, he conceived of a five-month test voyage that would further prove his abilities and reinforce his presentation to prospective sponsors. He chose Antarctica for its notoriously dangerous passage near Cape Horn. Knowing that isolation would come into play, he recruited a mixed bag of artists, musicians, writers and comedians. “I wanted to bring a creative group,” he said, calling the voyage “The First Arts and Cultural Expedition to the Seventh Continent.” He also called it “The Antarctic Jokers Expedition” because the group of seven were inexperienced sailors who saw themselves a entertainers.

Early in 1987, the difficult task of securing corporate sponsors met with mixed success. He started by joining the prestigious Explorers Club in New York, discovering that most of its members were not really explorers. The club proved to be the first of many prospective funders whose initial enthusiasm eventually revealed an aversion for risk.

“The club’s expeditionary committee gave Stowe $2,000 in seed money, a high form of sanction, and NASA has shown interest in his voyage. But most club members, the president among them, thought his plan a prescription for disaster. “I half expect to see a headline a year after he leaves that says, ‘Two Found Murdered’” said president Nicholas Sullivan, who supported Stowe’s flag award. “But if he makes it, he’ll be one of the greatest explorers ever.” Most members were fond of Stowe, Sullivan said, and it was easy to see why. He had pluck. ‘Before I bring the boat back to port,’ Stowe vowed, ‘I’ll have to go crazy.’ It was rare to encounter such impetuosity and unbridled passion around headquarters.” 9

After negotiating ice packs in hurricane force winds, the Schooner Anne made stops along the Antarctic Peninsula and presented art and entertainment to the groups living on scientific research bases. Eventually, their disruption would cause the base directors to ask them to move on.  When they set anchor in Whaler’s Bay at Deception Island they were actually in a caldera, the center of

an active volcano. After it had erupted in 1967 and again in 1969, heavily damaging the local scientific stations and causing the British abandon the island. All that remained was a row of rusted abandoned whale oil tanks standing along the shore, remnants of the island’s old role as a whaling station. Whale bones still littered the beach, sad reminders of an inhumane industry. Stowe became inspired to affix paint rollers to long bamboo poles and painted 20-foot-tall graffiti faces on five of the tanks. The huge primitive faces stood as sentinels, tribal warriors with eyes wide and glaring, and mouths aghast at man’s brutal intrusion on this remote part of the earth. A few years later, travel writers for Islands Magazine wrote about the mysterious graffiti faces they encountered, unaware of the identity of their maker.

Scientific illustrators and topographic artists had visited Deception Island since the early 19th century, but Stowe’s fiercely expressive graffiti faces unite animism and environmental issues and are the first artworks on Antarctica. As such, they represent the birth of a new art and myth on the

Southern Continent. “These are the biggest paintings that stand alone and the farthest from any others in the world,” says Stowe. He may also be the first to carve sculptures in this inhospitable environment, including his six-foot tall mahogany The Penguin King .10

Changing Tides

Son of a son, son of a son, son of a son of a sailor, son of a gun; load the last ton one step ahead of the jailer,   — jimmy buffet, lyrics from “son of a son of a sailor” (1978).

Upon his release in 1994 Stowe spent the next two years rebuilding the Schooner Anne in St. Maarten where she had been moored since 1987.  It’s important to point out that even during his smuggling days Stowe had constantly produced art. After his release some of his big paintings on sails contained messages aimed at helping him to overcome the bust and to succeed on his next voyages. One read “It’s OK Dream Smuggler” in letters tapering into the distance. Still planning ahead for the “1000-day Voyage,” when the repairs were finished in 1995 he returned to the ocean, this time to practice with newly-built self-steering gear. He assembled a crew of seven to that included his new French wife, Anne-France Peidfer, and teenage daughter, Viva. When the arrived at La Rochelle, France, Stowe docked next to Bernard Moitessier’s famous sloop at the Musée Maritime de La Rochelle, located, of course, at Place Bernard Moitessier. Again, the spirit of Moitessier reminded him of the ultimate challenge. However, raising money for either an epic voyage or even repairs proved fruitless for one branded as an ex-convict. Anne-France pressured him to be realistic and sell the boat and instead buy a farm in France. That’s when the marriage ended. Rebounding in 1997, he met another adventurous French woman, Laurence Guillem, who would become his third wife. Together, they embarked from France to the South Atlantic, far off the coast of Brazil on a winding voyage to New York he named “100 Days Non-Stop at Sea.” Stowe had rigged pulleys on the deck, passing lines through winches that lead to the cockpit. In tandem with the self-steering gear, this rigging enabled him to sail the schooner by himself for the first time. In the summer of 1998 they sailed up the Hudson River and docked at Pier 63 at 23rd Street.

The 1,000 Day Voyage

As the years passed, the task of assembling a crew for “1,000 Days at Sea: The Mars Ocean Odyssey” continued to prove as daunting as raising funds. Laurence urged him to sell the schooner and move to the country. Equally predictable, they divorced. Undaunted, in 2003 Stowe launched a recruiting trip he aptly called “The Search for the Argonauts.” But the qualifications were quite high. After all, he was not necessarily seeking people with sailing experience who loved the ocean as he did. He sought people who wanted to sail into the void, into eternity, into the place everyone must face in the end. He was testing to discover others who held a fearless affinity with mythical beings. Each of his most experienced sailing buddies perceived the trip as far too dangerous. Predictably, his less experienced sailor-friends, who were at first naively enthusiastic for the adventure, backed away when they, too, were warned of the magnitude of the risk. To make matters worse, every expert his prospective investors had consulted concluded that the probability of failure was exceedingly high.

Ultimately, Stowe found himself alone — except for Soanya Ahmad. She was a recent graduate of the City University New York who was conducting a photo-documentation of the New York City waterfront and first met Stowe tending to his schooner at Pier 63. Until this point many readers may have misperceived Stowe’s mission as that of a madman artist-survivalist sailor seeking to set an endurance record.  Like Moitessier, Stowe distained records and saw the themes of survival and endurance as contrived. Instead, he saw that in the natural course his own evolution had arrived at the place where he could succeed in carrying out his aspirations. His life picture was much larger now, and he said, “I was looking at how I could help humanity evolve.”  Coincidentally, this story turned into a love story between an artist and his muse. Stowe found in Soanya an indefatigable champion and soulmate who was the catalyst whose faith in the seemingly impossible mission ensured its success. Together, they were at once alchemists and realists who refused to let the deadly risks obscure their quest of discovering the magic and mystery of the oceans. They saw themselves as a joined human consciousness heading into the unknown, shifting away from the earth, and evolving to higher realizations on what would become the longest sea voyage in history.

During the next three years the couple secured donations from food suppliers and restaurants. Every spare space in the hull of the Schooner Anne was packed with donated foods, including rice, beans, tomato sauce, pasta, and fine pesto, olives, and chocolate, all carefully double-wrapped in vacuum-sealed plastic and placed in waterproof containers. Ahmad also brought along some of her favorite Indian spices, such as cumin, curry, and masala. Other provisions included coal and firewood for the iron heating stove. The big mahi-mahi or tuna he caught were then salted and dried and became meals until it became time to catch another. A system for collecting rainwater used tarps and sails, and an emergency desalinator was brought to make seawater potable. The deck was outfitted with solar panels for powering the electronics onboard, which included a laptop and a satellite phone.

The “now or never” day arrived on April 27, 2007, and the couple launched from a dock at Hoboken, New Jersey. Just fourteen days out, while crossing the major shipping lane, the voyage nearly ended when a freighter struck a glancing blow that sheared off the bowsprit. The bowsprit protruded fifteen feet off the bow and its forward fourth sail had played a crucial role in controlling direction. Knowing he would be unable to sail without the bowsprit against the wind, Stowe struggled to create a jury-rigged system. He wrapped two heavy chains around the bow and attached them to the giant forward turnbuckle, holding the whole rig forward. He wound up sailing the entire voyage in this disabled condition.

Soanya quickly went from being a completely inexperienced landlubber to one who soon overcame seasickness and absorbed all of Stowe’s coaching. However, after ten months she became increasingly ill. As the Schooner Anne approached Australia, Stowe emailed the one man he knew would help: Jon Sanders of Perth — the very man who had broken Moitessier’s solo record.  Sanders now happily obliged by sailing out of Perth and picking up Soanya at sea. In this love story it turned out that she was not seasick but pregnant. Moreover, she had just logged 306 days at sea, setting the longest non-stop record at sea for any woman and the longest sea voyage in history for a couple.  Despite her insistence that Stowe continue his quest, the media painted Stowe as a narcissistic kook and major pot smuggler who abandoned his pregnant lover. Weekend yacht club sailors used the blogosphere to try to scuttle his credibility, doubting the voyage was even happening. Fortunately, NASA’s satellites had been signed on with a tracking company that monitored the next three years of sailing. “I suddenly became the Hated Man,’ he says. “The National Geographic told me, ‘We can’t cover your story because we’ll have a public backlash.’”

During the voyage Stowe wrote several hundred essays, and his more esoteric thoughts appear in the unpublished manuscripts — Yoga Adventure at Sea and Illuminations from the Longest Sea Voyage in History.   In one near-death experience, a crushing rogue wave capsized his schooner in the infamous “Roaring Forties” near Cap Horn. That experience contrasted with being serenaded by a pod of whales. Stowe lived in a dichotomy where he remained acutely aware that any mistake on the ocean could mean death yet he fully embraced each day’s experiences as transcendental. When the seas calmed he painted and sculpted, never feeling like a prisoner in solitary confinement, but appreciating and making the most of what he saw as eternal moments. Both psychologists and physicians have long asserted that long periods of isolation deprived of meaningful human contact often leads to anxiety, high blood pressure, lack of sleep, paranoia, a break-down of the immune system, and even dementia.  Stowe was having none of it. He never exhibited signs of profound irrationality — nor did he underestimate the power that was driving his spirit to both survive and be creative. With practical calm he asserted, “I was always captain on my own magical boats that I built with my shamanistic powers. I was a not a passenger or crew being taken care of by someone else.”

In Stowe’s paintings aboard ship and later in his studio his natural approach was to dissect the many “isms” in painting history, a practice he had engaged since his teenage years when he admired the planar shapes of Stuart Davis, Charles Sheeler, and the early work of Ad Reinhardt. Some of Stowe’s paintings possess the vocabulary of a surrealism. He creates stage-like settings with foregrounds upon which pointed obelisk-like spires rise up, casting shadows deep into the painting. The spires are appear as actors on stage, playing the role of optical devices that shift the viewer’s consciousness to explore a complex maze of shapes, lines, and colors. Sometimes we are invited by a beach in the foreground (with real sand) and a blue horizon in the distance — think Dalí — but passing between them can prove convoluted with linear geometric structures lurking among the layers. Shadows in spraypaint often appear, adding illusory depth to long brushstrokes. While André Mason reinforced Stowe’s use of sand it was Antoni Tàpies and Anselm Kieffer who gave him the freedom to make larger earth-filled areas in his works. The spirit of Arte Povera gave him the freedom to paint or construct on any ground support and leave it rough. Throughout, he was influenced by Tantric and Buddhist art, and sometimes mandalas are incorporated as graphic elements. Equally important to Stowe the shaman, his lifetime of yoga practice enhanced a sense of clairvoyance and gave him the confidence that his art was helping him to accomplish his dream-like mission on the oceans.

Far Beyond Performance Art

Stowe’s ocean odyssey provided more than just a wellspring of inspiration. He saw the art he created while at sea — paintings, carved wooden sculpture, and performance art — as necessary for his survival. As a ritual in pleading for protection to whatever spirits commanded the tides and the winds, he hoisted carved wooden anthropomorphised totems up his masts. On calmer seas he wore masks that he created, painted his body, and performed shamanistic dances naked on the deck. He also painted on torn sails that could no longer bear another round of his repeated sewing and mending.

This brings up his Performance Art. During the last quarter of the 20th century its practitioners were often perceived as free-wheeling cousins in the fine arts who were alternately eccentric, entertaining, or even amusing. Art critics lauded these performances as explorations of human identity — and those that pushed the limits of physical and mental stamina were soon called Endurance Art. For days or even months, and often before large audiences, these artists endured various forms self-imposed pain, solitude, hunger, or tedious rituals. Stowe was well-aware of the danger associated with Performance art on the ocean. In 1975, Bas Jan Ader, a well-regarded conceptual artist and sailor, launched his 13-foot sailboat from Cape Cod, bound for Europe. This was his most ambitious Performance piece, and he called it “In Search of the Miraculous.” His body was never recovered.

Stowe’s considers his ritual of “Dragon Dancing” crucial to his survival at sea. “When I wear a dragon mask and dance, I go into a trance and then receive illuminations like no captain or man before me,” he said. “When sailing to Antarctica or alone on the 1000 Day Voyage I am always in a life-or-death high-performance situation. I must do what I can to empower myself, receive illumination, and become one with my environment. It’s not about having a great idea about acting or performing. I still trance dance in my studio while I paint.”

A Lifetime of Dragon Dancing

“willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classical implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. it drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost continents of infantile and archetypal images. the result may be disintegration of consciousness…but on the other hand, if the personality is able to absorb and integrate the new forces, there will be experienced an almost super-human degree of self-consciousness and masterful control. this is a basic principle of indian yoga. it has been the way, also, of many creative spirits in the west.”, — joseph campbell, the hero with a thousand faces , p.53, stowe on dragon dancing:.

“If I said I’d been dragon dancing for most of my life, I wouldn’t be exaggerating. Nor would I be unique among the people of the world. Have a look at the history of man. From the very beginning people have been dancing even before we became what is now called human. Perhaps our deep archaic memories surface as we remember the elaborate mating dances we did when our ancient spirit resided in the reptiles, birds, insects, and sea creatures before we crawled out of the eternal abyss. These are the feelings that come to me as I dance.  Even as children we danced like animals, roared and made noises. I dance like all these creatures and in my imagination colors flicker phosphorescent in kaleidoscope patterns as my cosmic opposite and I trade moves. I think anybody who has danced into a heat can relate to what I’m saying. Mysterious things happen to our psyche even on a sawdust cowboy dance floor. But imagine what it is like to wear a dragon mask and dance naked on the wide-open eternal seas far from all of civilization after not having seen another person for years. This is real dragon dancing in a shamanistic, ritualistic, ecstatic sense very similar to dance that still goes on today. I think people the world over dancing in a night club for hours to loud amplified music are experiencing a form of transcendence that all people long for deep in their psyches.

Stowe’s time for painting was conditioned by the weather. For long stretches through severe weather and high seas his time was consumed by maintenance and survival. Even fair days would begin with the never-ending tasks of cleaning, fixing equipment, adjusting rigging, and patching shredded sails. “One leak left unattended or too many torn sails,” he said, “and you could suddenly be in serious trouble.” Art time was reserved for after a lunch of nuts he roasted or sprouts he grew. “The absolute key to my diet, the real secret to what has kept me going all these years, is sprouts. They give you way more fresh food and grow much faster than regular gardening.” After many hours painting or sculpting, he would practice yoga and meditation for a few hours. This was followed by a dinner, often of the big fish he had caught. He purposely kept very well-hydrated before bunk time so that he would have a natural alarm clock to remind him to run his safety checks on all systems throughout the night. He adhered exactly to this routine every day.

Today, the best-known practitioner of Performance Art is Marina Abramovic, who in 2010 compiled a total of 736 hours of silence while sitting still, opposite individual spectators, in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art. After enduring eight hours a day between March 14th and May 31st critics hailed what was the biggest exhibition of performance art in the museum’s history. By comparison, at the same time Stowe was completing his Heart of the Ocean while racking up 27,648 hours on a voyage that was one massive performance piece.

The Masterpiece of Man on the Sea

“As I sailed up the southeast Trade Winds I was rocked by 31,000 waves a day. I knew I had already been rocked and set in violent motion far longer than any human body and I needed a break. With my unique knowledge of the ways of the seas, I needed to find a place of respite. That is how I found the exact place in the sea where I could abandon all sense of direction and surrender my will to control the sea and myself and let nature do with me what she would. I was swept here and there, but I refused to look at the compass or direction. This may be my greatest accomplishment, what no man has conceived or been able to do. In my mind’s eye while I viewed from high, I saw my track create a spontaneous abstract squiggle that I called, The Masterpiece of Man on the Sea. The reason this drawing is greater than my Turtle, Whale or Heart is because I had to abandon myself to the sea to make it. The sea actually made it. For the other drawings I had to impress my will upon the sea. That is what man had to do since the first men ventured onto the sea. Over the years as I prepared for the voyage and while I was at sea, I was in an expanded state of consciousness and I knew I was overcoming the fears of Man through the ages. Abandoning myself to the sea took it to another level, because the foundation of the drawing was the physical triumph of my seamanship skills of the success of the “1,000 Day Voyage.” Then I was able to surrender and abandon myself to the sea and let the sea create The Masterpiece of Man on the Sea.”At this point one may summarize Stowe’s spiritual evolution in the following passage:

The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-moment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity. The Law lives in him with his unreserved consent.

— joseph campbell, the hero with a thousand faces , p.204, return of the hero, the two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured as distinct from each other — different as life and death, as day and night. the hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone., — joseph campbell, the hero with a thousand faces , p.188.

The 1,000-day mark arrived in January 2010, but Stowe decided to remain at sea longer. It was winter in the Northern Hemisphere, a season when he was well-aware that storms in the North Atlantic would make his approach home very difficult. On June 17th, after 152 more days at sea he finally guided Schooner Anne past the Statue of Liberty underneath arches of water sprayed from the FDNY’s fireboats. Just two weeks earlier Abramovic had completed her endurance event at MoMA. He continued up the Hudson River and finally docked before a large awaiting crowd. Upon reuniting with Soanya and for the first time held his two-year-old son, Darshen, he announced to the press that he re-named his voyage “The Love Voyage” in honor of Soanya and his supportive family. From CNN to The New York Times , the media lauded the longest ocean journey, and he was featured in Ripley’s Believe it Or Not . Curiously, but perhaps fittingly, the Ripley’s illustrator featured a meteor next to Stowe’s portrait, not a schooner on high seas. After all, Stowe also broke the record for the longest solo voyage in space — doubling the 437 days set by the Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov aboard the Mir space station. “I did what no man had ever done,” he declared. “I’m certain that nobody could do what I did. When they are capable of going 200 or 300 days non-stop without resupply, then I’ll say they might have a chance to aspire to my 1,152 days.”

The Schooner Anne’s last major ocean voyage was a repair trip to Guiana in 2011 with Soanya and Darshen aboard. The ocean will inevitably call again. In the meantime, we can appreciate in Stowe’s body of work an extraordinary approach that pushes our concepts about the genesis of creativity. His paintings are testament to how art may be generated from the unconscious dimensions of the psyche while at the same time their creator’s three-year passage required immersion and the fullest alertness in an environment both unforgiving and sublime.

— Peter Hastings Falk, 2018

The Sacred and the Oceanic

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Long sea voyages were once a way of discovering new lands. You can probably name a few explorers but how much do you really know about them and their voyages at sea? Who has travelled the furthest out on the open oceans of our world?

On 21 April 2007 Stowe departed the New York harbour, setting sail and, eventually setting the new record for the longest solo voyage. He proposed spending 1000 days at sea in order to beat the record held by John Sanders.

John Sanders

Sanders is commonly believed to have held the record for the longest solo voyage (before Reid Stowe broke it, of course). He had spent 658 days at sea, completing three solo non-stop circumnavigations between 1986 and 1988.

Fridtjof Nansen

Critics of Reid Stowe actually believe that the record for the longest voyage was held, not by Sanders, but by Fridtjof Nansen whose voyage to the North Pole in 1893 saw him spend around 1067 days at sea. His goal was to be the first to reach the North Pole. However, during his journey, he realised that his ship would never make it to the North Pole and abandoned it, setting off on foot with Hjalmar Johansen. They made it furthest north than anyone had ever been at that time.

Christopher Columbus

Everyone knows Christopher Columbus as the famous explorer who discovered America, so it’s hardly surprising that he has made this list. Little is known about the ships he used to sail over 4000 miles. We do know however that he made 4 voyages with a crew of just 87 men.

We know even less of Chinese explorer Zeng He who used a boat of 200 feet in length and 28,000 men to complete 7000 miles worth of sea voyages. His crew contained around 28,000 men. There were more doctors on his ships than there were men in Columbus’ crew.

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REID STOWE: Longest Voyage in History (Undisputed!)

The record might be broken as of today (according to his harshest detractors), or it may actually be broken less than two weeks from now on Saturday March 27 (according to my own calculations), but either way Reid Stowe is now (or soon will be) the unequivocal record-holder for longest non-stop voyage of any type ever undertaken by a human being.

You may recall I mentioned Reid last December , when he broke Jon Sanders ‘ record for longest solo voyage. This target at least was always clearcut and well defined, though it wasn’t originally one of Reid’s goals when he set out from New York Harbor aboard his 70-foot schooner Anne on April 21, 2007. Back then Reid had crew (a young photographer from Queens, Soanya Ahmed, who later left the boat after becoming pregnant) and he believed he would capture the title for longest voyage (solo or otherwise) if he beat Sanders’ mark of 658 days non-stop at sea. To do this he proposed to stay at sea for 1,000 days.

Much water (pardon the obvious metaphor) has passed beneath Reid’s keel since then. One thing that happened early on is that Reid’s voyage provoked relentless ridicule from a small band of anonymous critics who, among other things, asserted that the real record for longest voyage was set not by Jon Sanders, but by the crew of Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram back in 1896. Though Sanders, who sailed three solo non-stop circumnavigations in 1986-88, is commonly believed to have been the prior record-holder, Reid’s critics sort of have a point. Of course, the record Nansen was shooting for when he set forth from Norway in July 1893 was not for longest voyage, but for first to reach the North Pole. His plan was to sail as far east as he could along the northern Siberian coast, then head north, freeze his ship into the Arctic pack ice, and drift very slowly with the ice across the pole.

In many ways Nansen’s journey was obviously not a proper sea voyage. During most of its transit his ship Fram , which was specifically designed by Colin Archer with very round hull sections so that it would pop upwards and resist being crushed as pack ice gripped it, wasn’t even afloat, but hard aground (or hard a-ice, as the case may be). The crew actually spent much time off the ship, hunting polar bears, making scientific observations, and practicing their skiing and dog-sledding in case they had to abandon ship.

Indeed, once Nansen realized the ship would never make it to the pole, he and one companion, Hjalmar Johansen, actually did abandon ship and set off for the pole on foot. They made it as far as 86 degrees, 13.6 minutes north before having to turn back, which was the closest to the pole anyone had ever been up to that time. In the end, because they were so much more mobile, Nansen and Johansen made it back to shore a full year before Fram , in August 1895, when they reached the Franz Josef Land archipelago, where they were forced to winter over before proceeding further south. Fram and her crew meanwhile reached Spitsbergen in August 1896, and by the end of that month both the ship and Nansen were safely back in Norway.

Because of the unusual nature of Fram ‘s “voyage,” I originally resisted the notion this was the benchmark Reid had to beat in his quest to claim a record for longest voyage. I said as much to Verena Dobnik of the Associated Press last spring, and she cited me as sole authority (primarily because she herself was intimidated by the ferocity of Reid’s critics) for the proposition that Reid had broken the record when he reached day 659 of his voyage. As far as I knew (and still know now) no member of Fram ‘s crew ever claimed they set a record for longest voyage, and prior to the emergence of Reid’s detractors, no one else ever did either. But since then I’ve adjusted my thinking a bit. After Reid went into what he calls his “sacred sideslip” and started drifting in the Atlantic doldrums off West Africa last summer, just killing time and making art, an analogy to Fram ‘s drift across the Arctic, whether she was floating or not, began to seem more apt.

Which raises the question: exactly how long was Fram afloat or aground on ice without her crew touching dry land? According to Reid’s detractors, per a blog they have created entitled Reid Stowe and 1,000 Days at Sea – Reality Check , the answer is 1,056 days. The only authority they cite for this figure is a link to a map posted by the Fram Museum in Norway, which notes the date Fram was first frozen into the ice (September 22, 1893) and the date she broke free of the ice near Spitsbergen (August 13, 1896), which interval does indeed add up to 1,056 days. (According to the site, day 1,056 of Reid’s voyage fell on March 12, but according to my math it actually was yesterday.)

Unlike Reid’s detractors (apparently), I have actually read Nansen’s account of his voyage, Farthest North (it’s a great book, which I heartily recommend) and on revisiting its text I’d say the last day any member of  Fram ‘s crew set foot on land prior to their drift across the Arctic Ocean was September 10, 1893. It may actually have been later than this, but I find no other references to anyone going ashore subsequent to that date, until August 14, 1896, when the crew landed at Spitsbergen, the day after they broke free from the ice. Lacking immediate access to Fram ‘s log for better data, I would thus put the record at 1,067 days, which, as noted, Reid should exceed by the end of this month.

One irony here is that Reid’s critics, while taunting him with the precedent of Fram ‘s voyage, have also abused him unmercifully for not covering more distance during his voyage. They fail to note that Reid on Anne , having made one leisurely circuit of the globe, has in fact covered much more distance than Fram .

The other irony is that this picayune counting of days spent aboard Fram matters little, because Reid in the end will blow the old record away, whatever it was, by a large margin. He decided some time ago not to end his voyage at 1,000 days, because he didn’t fancy returning to New York in January. Instead he has set his return date for June 17, which means (barring the unforeseen) the new record for longest voyage ever made will be 1,150 days.

In the run-up to Reid’s homecoming I’ll be reprising and discussing various other aspects of his voyage and achievements in future posts here on WaveTrain. So stay tuned.

PS: If you like this post and think I should get paid something for writing this blog, please click here . The link will take you to the same post at BoaterMouth, where you will find lots of other blogs about boats.

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Perhaps Mr. Stowe is being criticized not against the distance the Fram traveled, but because Mr. Stowe only completed a single of his own promised 4-5 circumnavs. Between that and his complete failure to achieve any of his other goals, it would be nice if some future article might delve into his success rate measured by his own pre-voyage claims and objectives. Are accolades really due to Reid for nautical pole sitting? After all, one of his latest posts claims he just put up his mainsail for the first time in 6 months! Adventurer? Please.

Thanks for the comment, Akbar (or might this be Regatta Dog?)… I am well aware of all the things Reid has been criticized for and look forward to discussing some of them in future posts. Stay tuned! cheers…

well done reid, a record is a record. As I made a single handed voyage from rhode island to bermuda that took 5 days and found myself talking to my baked beans and happy to take on a crew. The critics I guess have little or no nautical experience and have only been sea sick on the ferry.

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10 Remarkable Sea Voyagers

By mark mancini | may 9, 2022.

Today, most governments and geographers acknowledge five named oceans . You’ve got the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Arctic, and the Southern. Like five fingers on the same hand, they’re all part of the unified World Ocean , covering 71 percent of the Earth’s surface. And since ancient times, people have made a name for themselves by exploring it . These are the chronicles of 10 memorable sea voyagers, from globetrotting travel writers to a modern-day wayfinder.

1. Pytheas // 4th Century BCE

A Greek adventurer born in what’s now Marseille, France, Pytheas is a much-debated figure. He claimed to have sailed around the British Isles in the year 325 BCE or so. He may have also visited Iceland and traveled above the Arctic Circle, which, if true, might have made him the first European adventurer to write about witnessing the sun shine at midnight during the polar summer.

Pytheas recorded his experiences in a book called On the Ocean that, as far as we know, doesn’t exist anymore . No copies have survived; all we have to go on are the writings of ancient authors who referenced the original text. Some of them had their doubts about Pytheas’s claims, and the actual route he took is a mystery. 

2. Leif Erikson // 10th Century

There’s a good chance the Norse explorer Leif Erikson was the first European who ever set foot in North America. His exploits are retold in two of the Icelandic Sagas, a set of historical volumes written a couple centuries later and thought to be based on oral tradition. Erikson was the son of Greenland’s original settler, Erik the Red, and he either landed in eastern Canada by mistake or went there on purpose after hearing the testimony of a sailor who’d seen it in passing.

Erikson didn’t stay in North America for long, but he likely left his mark. Archaeologists in Newfoundland, Canada, found the remains of a Nordic settlement , dated between 930 and 1030 CE, that match descriptions in the sagas. 

3. Ibn Battuta // 14th Century

Beginning in 1325, Muslim scholar Ibn Battuta began his epic wanderings across Dar al-Islam (the Muslim world). Over several expeditions by land and sea, he traveled in modern-day Mali in west Africa, Egypt, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, present-day Russia, India, Southeast Asia, and China. He once sailed down the coast of East Africa on a type of ship called a dhow and traversed the Indian Ocean from Arabia to present-day Myanmar to Indonesia. He also had a nauseating jaunt across the Red Sea. 

In 1354, the sultan of Morocco ordered Ibn Battuta to dictate a book about his experiences. Popularly called the Rihla (which means “voyage” in Arabic), it retells his lifetime of adventure through 44 modern-day countries.

4. Zheng He // 15th Century

Leading a fleet of 300 ships, packed with a combined 28,000 people, would be an amazing feat in any era. The Muslim mariner Zheng He did it more than 50 years before Christopher Columbus made it across the Atlantic. Zheng He (born Ma He circa 1371) was captured at age 10 by Ming Dynasty soldiers and rose through the ranks as a member of the emperor Yongle’s court. After securing the ruler’s trust, Zheng He was asked to preside over seven great diplomatic voyages to assert China’s maritime power.

The first of those trips, each lasting about three years, began in 1405 and the last wrapped up in 1433. During his expeditions, Zheng He established key trade routes across the Indian Ocean, from east Africa to India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia, and collected many tributes for China. All the while, he commanded tens of thousands of people. Exotic animals like elephants and giraffes were sometimes brought along for the ride.   

5. Ferdinand Magellan // 16th Century

Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan orchestrated the first successful circumnavigation of the globe . Yet he personally didn’t live to see it through.

The voyage launched from Spain in 1519, tasked with scouting a western route (across the Atlantic) to the Spice Islands in modern-day eastern Indonesia. Under Magellan’s leadership, the crew sailed below the southernmost tip of the Americas, through a turbulent , ice-choked waterway now called the Strait of Magellan.

Upon exiting the strait, the group entered another ocean where the waters seemed nice and calm. So Magellan named it the Pacific, a synonym for “ peaceful .” Partway through the journey, Magellan lost his life during a skirmish in what’s now the Philippines. But the surviving crew successfully completed its long, hard voyage around the world.

6. Jeanne Baret // 18th Century

Jeanne Baret succeeded where Magellan failed, becoming the first known woman to sail all the way around the world. Her circumnavigation of the planet started in 1766, when she boarded the French naval ship Étoile disguised as a man . Her plan was to accompany naturalist Philibert Commerson (who was also her boyfriend) and serve as a botanist on Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s voyage to Asia.

A royal ordinance at the time barred women from French naval vessels, but Commerson sidestepped the rule by passing her off as a young male assistant. The two scientists used this once-in-a-lifetime chance to gather exotic plant samples. At some point, Baret’s secret was revealed; she and Commerson later left the expedition early to begin a new life on the island of Mauritius. After his death in 1773, Baret married and returned to France within the next two years. By doing so, Baret completed her journey across the full length of the earth. 

7. James Cook // 18th Century

A farmhand’s son turned British naval captain, James Cook is best remembered for leading three lengthy voyages of discovery through the Pacific Ocean. The last one claimed his life. Following his service in the Seven Years’ War, Cook charted New Zealand, logged the first recorded crossing of the Antarctic Circle, visited the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, and braved Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. (Cook is often credited as the first European to visit Australia, but that’s not true .)

It was during the third of these signature voyages that Cook met his demise. A series of tense meetings with Hawaiians on the western coast of the Big Island turned deadly. We’ll probably never know the full context of that incident, but we do know a group of Hawaiians killed Cook on February 14, 1779 near Kealakekua Bay.

8. Ida Pfeiffer // 19th Century

Widowed in 1838 , this Austrian mother of two was 41 years old when she embarked on the first of many international adventures. By the time she died in 1858, her traveler’s resume included a voyage around Africa’s Cape Horn and a transpacific visit to Tahiti, where Pfeiffer was introduced to its queen.

Pfeiffer watched the geysers of Iceland, joined an Indian tiger hunt, tried to cross the Andes before a Peruvian revolution changed her plans, and discovered an insect new to science. Oh, and lest we forget, she circumnavigated the globe—twice. Somehow, she also found the time to write multiple books about her travels.

9. Michael Healy // 19th Century

Michael “Hell Roaring Mike” Healy , the son of an Irish plantation owner and an enslaved Black or biracial woman, is recognized as the first person of African descent to command a U.S. federal ship.

Born in Georgia in 1839, Healy grew up in Massachusetts and served as a merchant mariner. He was admitted to the U.S. Treasury’s Revenue Cutter Service, which enforced customs laws at sea, by President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. The commission brought him from the east coast around Cape Horn to San Francisco. Between 1868 and 1896, Healy patrolled the coastal waters of Alaska, often in cold, foggy, windy conditions; he also commanded the annual Bering Sea Patrol , covering 15,000 to 20,000 miles at sea each time. The trusty Coast Guard cutter Healy , a state-of-the-art polar icebreaker, is named after the famous mariner.

10. Nainoa Thompson // 21st Century

About 1500 years ago, Hawaii’s original settlers navigated the Pacific by using the stars, winds, waves, and other natural phenomena. The long-distance wayfinding methods that took them from the South Pacific to the Hawaiian islands fell into disuse over time, which makes the career of the Native Hawaiian navigator Nainoa Thompson all the more remarkable.

Thompson used these ancient navigation techniques—and nothing else—to lead a double-hulled voyaging canoe named Hōkūle’a all the way from Hawaii to Tahiti and back in 1980, under the mentorship of traditional navigator Mau Piailug. The expedition was part of an effort to rescue this cultural heritage and pass on the traditions to the next generation.

Before the decade’s end, he directed the Hōkūle’a on an even more ambitious, two-way journey between his Hawaii and New Zealand, a round-trip distance of over 16,000 nautical miles . Thompson continues to lead Hōkūle’a ’s worldwide voyages.

This Is the Longest Straight-Line Ocean Path Around the Earth

But don’t go hauling your boats out just yet

Julissa Trevino

In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set sail on a greuling and dangerous quest: the first-ever voyage around the world. But since that first daring adventure, advances in sailing technology and navigation have made the trip much more common. Today, even families— children and all —have accomplished the lengthy venture.

But there is at least one ocean path that's likely never been traveled: the longest straight-line sailable path on Earth. This 19,940-mile trip runs from the Pakistan coast through the passage between Madagascar and Africa and around to northeastern Russia—and is the longest straight-line someone could (theoretically) sail without touching land.

As David Schultz reports for Science , this straight-line path has just been scientifically verified for the first time thanks to work by Rohan Chabukswar, a physicist at United Technologies Research Center Ireland, and Kushal Mukherjee, an engineer at IBM Research India in New Delhi.

The path was first mapped five years ago by Reddit user Patrick Anderson, who goes by the screenname kepleronlyknows. To create the map, Anderson used a set of coordinates that appeared in a Wikipedia entry titled “Extreme points of Earth.” This was supposedly the longest straight line on Earth that can be sailed without hitting land.

Interested in testing the route, Chabukswar and Mukherjee used data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ETOPO1 Global Relief model of Earth, which can map features down to about a mile in size. As Schultz reports, this gave the scientists relative certainty that the points of the map were all within the ocean.

To calculate the possibilities, they first found the number of great circles on Earth. Great circles are the paths around a sphere whose distance is equal to the circumference of that sphere. Following one of these paths across the Earth is the shortest distance between two locations, but because our planet is circular, the path does not appear as a straight line on a 2-D map. They are used for many types of navigation, such as helping pilots find the shortest distance between two cities.

But there’s hundreds of millions of different possible great circles, each with tens of thousands of points to verify. In total, that would require examining more than 5 trillion possible points, Schultz writes . So instead, they turned to the “branch-and-bound” algorithm, a computer program that tests only a few possibilities of the longest path before tweaking the search again for the best possible line.

In just 10 minutes of using this program, the researchers had support that the Wikipedia entry and Anderson’s map were correct. They detail their work in a study that they uploaded to the preprint server arXiv .

As the scientists write in the paper, the original map sparked lots of debate about whether Anderson was right. It also led to some attempts at finding the longest distance on land without hitting a major body of water.

Chabukswar and Mukherjee also tested to find the longest drivable straight-line path. This time, it took the computer 45 minutes, but it found a 6,985-mile path that started in eastern China and ended in western Portugal.

Unfortunately, Gabart probably won’t be sailing the newly verified path anytime soon. In fact, the researchers don’t recommend that anyone sail or drive these paths since the algorithm analysis does not ensure safe conditions along these tracks.

As they write in their paper: “The problem was approached as a purely mathematical exercise.”

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Julissa Trevino | | READ MORE

Julissa Treviño is a writer and journalist based in Texas. She has written for Columbia Journalism Review, BBC Future, The Dallas Morning News, Racked, CityLab and Pacific Standard.

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The Longest Voyage: Lehi’s Journey to the Promised Land

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The Book of Mormon tells of three ocean voyages from the Old World – the Middle East – to the New – the Americas. First were the Jaredites, who left their homeland after the scattering at the Tower of Babel. Then, after a huge leap forward in time, two migrations took place that were almost contemporaneous. We are told very little about the Mulekites, whose journey may have been an Atlantic crossing using a Phoenician ship. Because the Book of Mormon is ultimately a lineage history of the third group, led by the prophet Lehi, we are most familiar with their story.

As discussed in recent Meridian articles, the Lehite land route from Jerusalem to Bountiful is now largely settled. The key location in Nephi’s record that indicates directions, Nahom, is now archaeologically attested by dated inscriptions; his “Bountiful” is the most comprehensively-described location in the entire Book of Mormon. Significant fieldwork is now under way in southern Oman at the most plausible site for it.

The reason that the Lehite land journey, roughly 2100 miles/3300 km in length, is now largely in place on the modern map stems mainly from two facts:

Firstly, it is the account that the Book of Mormon gives us the most information about . As we would expect, Nephi’s account remains largely focused on the spiritual significance of the events, but he still incorporates a high level of descriptive detail, including directions, just as he said he would (see his introduction to 1 Nephi). These details allow us to accurately visualize the physical setting where everything unfolds.

Secondly, modern scholarship knows significantly more about ancient Arabia, its history, its civilizations and cultures, than it does about ancient America . That is true no matter where in the Americas we may think the remainder of the Book of Mormon unfolds. So while the Old World setting is quite clear, the New World’s is not as settled; a factor allowing competing theories about where most of the Book of Mormon took place. 1

Both these factors, however, become largely irrelevant when the Lehite ship pushed out into the Indian Ocean. Nephi’s account is suddenly terse and vague. Unlike the land journey, Nephi gives us no directions, no time scale, no names along the way, no lessons learned, no examples of divine blessings received and no descriptions beyond the terrible storm that soon arose. Based on my experience aboard a 600 BC-design ship in the same waters, I have speculated that at least one reason for his silence is that the realities of life aboard a pre-modern vessel simply left little time and energy for record-keeping. 2

But also, while scholarship tells us much about ancient sea voyaging generally, including a fact that surprises many: the extensive maritime history of Oman, our knowledge of seafaring in Lehi’s era and in that region remains spotty. In particular, we have no comparable ocean voyage to learn from. The Lehite voyage was, quite possibly, the longest sea journey made in history by anyone.

By taking just Nephi’s account and a touch of common-sense, here’s what we can be sure of:

• Just as revelation allowed Noah to build a very large and complex ark for a specific mission, Nephi tells us that he too was guided by the Lord (1 Nephi 18:1-3) in building a ship to accomplish his mission of sailing thousands of miles to another hemisphere.
• In any case, his ship was not built after the manner of men (three times in 18:2). Any ships that Nephi might have seen in his life were suited only for relatively short coastal voyages. No-one then alive had the expertise or experience needed for such a long voyage.
• Nephi relied on his brothers for ship-building labor and expresses his appreciation for them (17:49, 18:1,4). No others are mentioned. Had Bountiful been an inhabited place, Nephi could have hired others. That fits nicely with what we now know about the most plausible Bountiful candidate, Khor Kharfot: despite its unique abundance, it was almost certainly uninhabited when the Lehites were there. 3  
• Nephi would also not have needed specific revelation to know where he could locate ore to make basic tools, then the considerable effort involved in smelting the ore and making them.
• The Lord provided all the resources necessary at Bountiful, including timber. It was “prepared of the Lord” (17:5) and thus not deficient in any way. Khor Kharfot contains the last remnants of the ancient forest found in parts of early Arabia, including several species of hardwood suitable for building a ship. Nothing needed to be imported from outside of this special place.
• The group did not necessarily have to re-supply during the journey to supplement the food items taken aboard. They may have, but while many landlubbers imagine calling into exotic islands for fresh coconuts and fruit, in fact, many long voyages have demonstrated that this is not necessary. Abundant fish and rain allow non-stop sailing.
• Whatever direction they traveled the Lehite voyage was almost surely the longest voyage across the oceans in recorded history, perhaps as long as 17,000 miles/27,000 km.

What we don’t know:

• Nephi does not tell us the type of ship he made. We know only that it had at least one sail (18:9, 22), it could be steered (18:13) and it had decking where people could dance (18:5-9). Obviously it was robustly built, surviving not only the four day tempest (18:9-22) but a trans-continental voyage. A number of design options remain possible – a hulled vessel, a raft of some sort or a hybrid design, perhaps like a catamaran. The timbers could have been lashed/sewn together, overlapping planks nailed or pegged together or the mortise and tenon method (joined using interlocking timbers with sealing).
• We do not know the direction of sailing from Bountiful. Once out in the Indian Ocean, two options awaited. Winds and currents allow for both possibilities under the guidance of the Liahona. The first was that they could have traveled southwards and then westwards , passing beneath both Africa and South America before turning northwards into the Pacific;                                                                                                                  or                                                                                                                             they could have maintained an easterly heading across the Indian Ocean into the Pacific. ENSO weather events ( El Nino ) 4 then allow periodic sailing eastwards across the central Pacific. A northerly crossing of the Pacific is another possibility. These are longer routes, but would normally offer much easier and safer sailing conditions than passing beneath Africa and South America.
• From this stems the obvious fact that we cannot be sure how long the voyage took . Regardless of the details, it was surely a minimum of 9-12 months.
• While we do not know yet exactly where they arrived in the New World, Alma 22.28 clearly indicates that the initial arrival was on the west , Pacific, coast of the Promised Land.

The more we learn from history about seafaring and the role of oceans in facilitating contact between pre-modern cultures, rather than isolating them, the more plausible Nephi’s account becomes. This does not in any way diminish the awe that the Lehite journey generates, or its value as a testament to unrivalled faith and determination.

As our energies continue to be applied to the Book of Mormon’s story and its message, the circumstantial evidences that Joseph Smith predicted would ultimately validate his prophetic calling will continue to emerge. 5

• Indeed, at least two proposals made by Latter-day Saints are not even situated in the Americas!
• “ Sailing with Nephi ” in Meridian Magazine (2010): www.latterdaysaintmag.com/index.php?option=com_zine&view=article&ac=1&id =
• See the recent accounts in Meridian Magazine of archaeological work at Khor Kharfot last month, February 2016.
• “ Is this the wind that blew Nephi to the Americas? ” in Meridian Magazine (2011): www.latterdaysaintmag.com/component/zine/article/7969?ac=1
• Times & Seasons , Vol. 3 (Nauvoo, IL: September 15, 1842): 921-922.

This article is condensed from the author’s 2015 book, Lehi & Sariah in Arabia: The Old World Setting of the Book of Mormon.

The book is available from the publisher in hard-cover, soft-cover and e-book formats at:  https://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-001023307/LEHI-and-SARIAH-in-ARABIA.aspx

Leslie Rees April 13, 2016

Joe, in 1834, Oliver Cowdery wrote a series of letters about the history of the Church. He said of them: "That our narrative may be correct, and particularly the introduction, it is proper to inform our patrons, that our brother J. SMITH Jr. has offered to assist us. Indeed, there are many items connected with the fore part of this subject that render his labor indispensable. With his labor and with authentic documents now in our possession, we hope to render this a pleasing and agreeable narrative, well worth the examination and perusal of the Saints.-... assuring [our readers] that it shall be founded upon facts." In 1835 Joseph had his scribes copy Oliver's letters into his journal as part of "a history of my life." In Letter 7, Oliver wrote: “You are acquainted with the mail road from Palmyra, Wayne Co. to Canandaigua, Ontario Co. N. Y. and also, as you pass from the former to the latter place, before arriving at the little village of Manchester, say from three to four, or about four miles from Palmyra, you pass a large hill on the east side of the road. . . .I think I am justified in saying that this is the highest hill for some distance round. . .At about one mile west rises another ridge of less height, running parallel with the former, leaving a beautiful vale between. The soil is of the first quality for the country, and under a state of cultivation, which gives a prospect at once imposing, when one reflects on the fact, that here, between these hills, the entire power and national strength of both the Jaredites and Nephites were destroyed. By turning to the 529th and 530th pages of the Book of Mormon, you will read Mormon's account of the last great struggle of his people, as they were encamped round this hill Camorah (sic). In this valley fell the remaining strength and pride of a once powerful people, the Nephites... From the top of this hill, Mormon, with a few others, after the battle, gazed with horror upon the mangled remains of those who, the day before, were filled with anxiety, hope, or doubt. . . . “This hill, by the Jaredites, was called Ramah: by it, or around it, pitched the famous army of Coriantumr their tent. Coriantumr was the last king of the Jaredites. The opposing army were to the west, and in this same valley, and near by. From day to day, did that mighty race spill their blood, in wrath, contending as it were, brother against brother, and father against son. In this same spot, in full view from the top of this same hill, one may gaze with astonishment upon the ground which was twice covered with the dead and dying of our fellowmen.”

J. Larson April 12, 2016

I don't know why it is so set in cement that Lehi, Mulekites, and Jaredites had to have traveled to Mesoamerica by way of the Pacific. Warren Aston even says that the route is not conclusive. Maybe Lehi sailed down and around the tip of Africa and crossed the Atlantic landing somewhere on the east coast. We have no idea of where the Mulekites and Jaredites may have begun their journeys or where they may have landed. Current scholarship as well as clues from the Book of Mormon are pretty compelling to show that all of these civilizations existed in the Great Lakes area of North Amerca. I have visited some of the great mounds in Ohio and New York including the huge serpent mound. I have also visited the museum of Holy Stones in Newark, Ohio, and seen engravings of the ten comandments and other artifacts. I have lived in western New York where there are hundreds of fortifications built in the manner described in the Book of Mormon with trenches all around, bone pits and mounds of ancient bones. Metal helmets and breast plates were found in quantities by early farmers and were sold for scrap metal. DNA studies now show a match between the Algonquins and related tribes that match the people in the Middle East. No such match exists in Mesoamerica. Smelting of metals such as copper, iron, even steel have been found as have metal plates with curious writing. Language similarities between Egyptian and some North American tribes such as the Micmacks indicate some sort of connection with Egyptian writing which is puzzling to the archaeologists. It's time we stepped back from what is assumed to be the the lands of the Book of Mormon and reassess the ethnic and archeological evidences around the Great Lakes. Zion's Camp came upon a skeleton on their way to Missouri which Joseph Smith stated it was a Nephite named Zelph. It's time we took a second look.

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US Navy Ships Set Record for Longest Stretch at Sea

MarineLink June 25, 2020

The aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) transits the Arabian Sea, June 12, 2020. (U.S. Navy photo by Aaron Bewkes)

Two warships kept away from shore to minimize crew exposure to COVID-19 have set a new U.S. Navy record for most consecutive days at sea. 

As of Thursday, aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) (Ike) and its escort ship, guided-missile cruiser USS San Jacinto (CG 56) have been at sea for 161 days, besting the previous mark of 160 days set by aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) in February 2002.

Ike and San Jacinto departed their homeport of Norfolk, Va., in mid-January for the strike group’s Composite Training Unit Exercise (COMPTUEX) and follow-on deployment to the U.S. 6th and 5th Fleet areas of operation. At the time, the coronavirus was only just starting to emerge.

But by the time the ships crossed the Atlantic, the coronavirus had spread on land, and the U.S. Navy, grappling with COVID-19 outbreaks of its own aboard the Theodore Roosevelt and a number of other vessels, had begun curtailing port visits to limit the risk of crew exposure to the virus.

“In March, I suspended liberty port visits to reduce the chance of spreading and contracting the virus across the fleet,” said Vice Adm. Jim Malloy, commander U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, U.S. 5th Fleet, and Combined Maritime. “Throughout this pandemic, maintaining the fleet’s warfighting readiness while ensuring the safety and well-being of our sailors has been my top priority.”

Both Ike and San Jacinto’s crews have had to maintain mission readiness and effectiveness despite restrictions related to COVID-19.

“San Jacinto and Eisenhower have proven their ability to remain a flexible, adaptable and persistent force while staying on station in the Arabian Sea,” said Capt. Edward Crossman, commanding officer of San Jacinto. “Both crews have been resupplying and refueling, performing repairs and upkeep, and maintaining overall readiness while continuously at sea. The two ships have spent the last five months conducting operations and exercises with foreign partners, other U.S. service branches, and U.S Navy ships in the region.”

The ships also participated in a "rest and reset" period at sea, coming off-station for a short period of time to allow the crew to relax and reenergize with morale events such as swim calls and steel beach picnics.

But with every passing day at sea, the two warships will only continue to grow their record. Not due to return to the U.S. until later this year, Ike and San Jacinto’s remain deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operation in support of naval operations to ensure maritime stability and security in the Central Region, connecting the Mediterranean and Pacific through the Western Indian Ocean and three critical chokepoints for the free flow of global commerce.

“The fact of the matter is our work isn’t done,” Crossman said. “We aren’t headed home yet, and we’re on path to blow the previous record out of the water.”

Although Naval History and Heritage Command does not specifically track continuous days underway for naval vessels, it has two modern documented days-at-sea records, both of which are now broken.  

In February 2002, USS Theodore Roosevelt operated for 160 days straight in support of post-9/11 response. And it was again, Ike, who held the record of 152 days consecutively underway during the Iran hostage crisis in 1980.

Interestingly, the first USS San Jacinto was also underway during a yellow fever epidemic during the Civil War. In May 1862, under the orders of President Lincoln, San Jacinto and other union warships bombarded Sewell’s Point, Va. In August 1862, it was reported that yellow fever had broken out on the ship, so San Jacinto sailed north, laid anchor and quarantined for four months.

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The Longest Voyage: The Dream

1434 - 1517 | discover how the first voyage around the world took place., acción cultural española, ac/e.

Antonio Fernández Torres, Guillermo Morán Dauchez (General Archive of the Indies) and Braulio Vázquez Campos (General Archive of the Indies).

The Dream by Lola Bermúdez (Tannhauser Estudio) Acción Cultural Española, AC/E

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, French writer.

Europa and Asia by Lola Bermúdez (Tannhauser Estudio) Acción Cultural Española, AC/E

Some 500 years ago in Seville, Europe's long-awaited dream of reaching the unexplored, mythical lands of the Orient and the Maluku (Moluccas or Spice) Islands became a reality. Ferdinand Magellan set off on his voyage in 1519, and three years later it became the longest voyage of the era: the first circumnavigation of the world was completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano, captain of the Victoria , and his crew in 1522.

To celebrate the 500th anniversary of this amazing feat, Cultural Action Spain (Acción Cultural Española) and the General Archive of the Indies (Archivo General de Indias) have come together to organize the exhibition of The Longest Voyage . This fantastic exhibition showcases testimonies from some of the sailors and navigators who went on this exceptional journey. Their stories speak to the human aspect of the voyage: these men dreamed of sailing an impossible route into the unknown and managed to return home, changing history forever.

Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Coasts of Europe and Africa (1520) by Giovanni Vespucci Acción Cultural Española, AC/E

Setting the Stage: Europe, the Orient, and the Oceans

Europe and Asia | Mid-15th century–Early 16th century

The Longest Journey: The First Circumnavigation of the Globe by Braulio Vázquez Acción Cultural Española, AC/E

Europe had always dreamed about Asia. For the old continent of Europe, the Orient was a distant fantasy, an obsession. By the mid-15th century, the spread of the Ottoman empire meant that overland trade routes were cut off, and Renaissance Europe resolved to overcome its fear of the sea. Iberian navigators, who had turned their art into a science, surveyed the oceans and considered the possibility of new trade routes. Until this time, people thought the oceans were an unbreachable abyss. > Take a virtual tour of the exhibition in the General Archive of the Indies.

Portulan Chart of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Coasts of Europe and Africa (1520) by Giovanni Vespucci Original Source: Archivo General de Indias

During the 14th century, Europe was centered around the east of the Mediterranean Sea, where Italian factories in Genoa, Florence, and Venice served as intermediaries that traded luxury goods with the Far East, which specialized in silk and spices. With increasing pressure from the Turks in the 15th century, the trade route moved west towards the Atlantic, and the focus shifted to Portugal and Spain.

This portolan chart was not designed for navigating the Mediterranean Sea, but for voyaging toward the Orient. Its creator, Juan Vespucci, worked as a navigator for the Spanish House of Trade (Casa de la Contratación) in Seville from 1512. He was the only one authorized to make copies of the Padrón Real (the Royal Register), which was the secret master map used on all Spanish ships during the 16th century.

Miller Atlas (1522) by Lopo Homem Original Source: Biblioteca Nacional de Francia

The Exploration Race: In Search of Spices

Iberian Peninsula | 1488–1517

Map of the Voyage of Discovery by Tannhauser Estudio Acción Cultural Española, AC/E

In the late 15th century, Portugal and Spain (then known as Castile) charged into the oceans in an unprecedented exploration race. Both countries had the same goal: find a sea route to reach the Far East and the fabled Moluccas islands, the home of lucrative spices.

Treaty of Tordesillas Treaty of Tordesillas / Page 03 Archivos Estatales

The Treaty of Tordesillas was signed on June 7, 1494 by  the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, and King John II of Portugal. It established a new meridian 370 leagues (1,277 miles) west of the Cape Verde islands. Each party promised not to undertake explorations in the other's side: the west of the meridian was Spain's, while the east belonged to Portugal. An unforeseen consequence of the Treaty was the question of who owned the Maluku Islands, as the Tordesillas meridian naturally formed an anti-meridian which divided the waters and land in the East.

Planisphere (ca. 1519) by Jorge Reinel Original Source: Biblioteca Nacional de Francia

The Project: Dream Meets Possibility

Seville - Valladolid | October 20, 1517–March 22, 1518

Magellan Engraving (19th century) by Fernando Selma Original Source: Archivo General de Indias

By 1517, the Portuguese had been present in India for nine years and trading with the Moluccas islands for five. Meanwhile, Castile was held up in the Americas, still searching for a passage to the East and the Mar del Sur. The Mar del Sur (South Sea), later known as the Pacific Ocean, was discovered by the Spanish explorer Balboa. That year, a young king who dreamed of becoming emperor arrived in Castile and assumed the joint throne of Castile and Aragon. He was Charles I of Spain, later known as Emperor Charles V. A few days after his ascension to the throne, the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan crossed the border into Castile and offered the king the key to reaching the Spice Islands by heading west. As soon as the two met, their dreams came to fruition.

The Capitulations of Valladolid

The king, who “loved the maritime letters and poems” that Magellan showed him, soon took up the gauntlet to discover the Maluku Islands. He granted Magellan the title of governor and gave him advance ownership of any lands he discovered. He also named him Captain-General of the first Armada and granted him other trading favors and privileges. Magellan was also promoted to the rank of Commander of the Order of Santiago and became a citizen of the Kingdom of Castile.

Settlement of King Charles I with Ferdinand Magellan and Rui Faleiro Settlement of King Charles I with Ferdinand Magellan and Rui Faleiro / Page 04 Archivos Estatales

According to this charter issued by Royal Decree in Valladolid on March 22, 1518, and signed on the same day by Joanna I and Charles V, Ferdinand Magellan and a learned man named Rui Faleiro were both named Captain-General of the Spice Island Fleet (Armada de la Especiería).

What drives us to explore?

The scientists and explorers Pedro Duque, Tomás Mazón, Tomás Echegoyen, Kitín Múñoz, Íñigo Múñoz, Matthias Mauer, and Ignacio Orcada, among others, speak about their experiences as they embarked on a voyage into the unknown.

General History of the Indies (16th century) by Bartolomé de las Casas Original Source: Archivo General de Indias

History of the Indies

The chronicles of a New World discovered at the end of the 15th century saw the dawn of a new period in which all sorts of testimonies were recorded by various authors. They wanted to record first-hand accounts of everything people saw and experienced in lands that were as yet unknown to all Europeans. These chronicles were indispensable to historians who analyzed the magnitude and impact of this historic event from every angle. One of the greatest works is History of the Indies (Historia General de las Indias) by Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566).

Las Casas described and fiercely denounced the conditions that native Indians were subjected to, as well as the behavior of the conquistadors following their arrival in Española Island, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. As for any references to the first circumnavigation of the world, Brother Bartolomé's account tells us a lot about Magellan's arrival to the Spanish Court and the negotiations that took place to organize the Armada for the Spice Islands.

Justified Account by Cristóbal de Haro Justified Account by Cristóbal de Haro / Page 01 Archivos Estatales

This document is a record of an inventory that was managed by Christopher de Haro up until 1526 for the Armadas of Magellan, Caboto and de Loaísa. Though there is an abundance of these kinds of accounting summaries in the General Archive of the Indies (Archivo General de Indias), this one is of particular interest as it provides information about the destination of the cloves that were brought back from the Maluku Islands by Captain Elcano, aboard the Victoria .

Justified Account by Cristóbal de Haro Justified Account by Cristóbal de Haro / Page 10 Archivos Estatales

A sponsor in the shadows?

Some authors argue strongly that Cristóbal de Haro played a pivotal role in the original design and plan for Magellan's Armada and that he may even have been working in the shadows as the main architect and sponsor of the project.

The Longest Voyage. Sea Acción Cultural Española, AC/E

Continue to the next stage of the adventure. The Longest Voyage: Setting Sail .

Adaptation of the exhibition " The Longest Journey: The First Around the World ". Organizers:   Spanish Cultural Action , Ministry of Culture. General Archive of the Indies Curated by:  Antonio Fernández Torres, Guillermo Morán Dauchez, Braulio Vázquez Campos Program:  Raquel Mesa Images: Archivo General de Indias, Tannhauser Estudio > See the digital catalog > Download the digital catalog > See brochure This exhibition is part of the First Voyage Around the World project.

Cervantes, times of childhood and youth

Archivos estatales, the longest journey: setting sail, cervantes: a life in the golden age, the longest journey: the exploration, cervantes, the brilliant author, the longest voyage: the destination, la casa lonja de mercaderes in seville, the longest voyage: the return, paper restoration processes, the longest voyage: transformation, the road to a new era.

U.S. missile destroyer ship breaks Navy record for longest stint at sea

A U.S. guided missile destroyer ship has broken the record for the longest consecutive number of days at sea for a military surface vessel, the Navy said Tuesday, underscoring the effects of restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic .

The USS Stout reached 208 days at sea Sept. 26, spending nearly seven months in the Middle East and the North Africa area, known as the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations. The previous record of 207 days, held by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the USS San Jacinto, was also set this year.

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced the Navy to cancel port visits to prevent sailors from being exposed while ashore.

Earlier this year, more than 1,000 sailors were infected with Covid-19 on board the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt. One sailor died and the aircraft carrier was sidelined in Guam for weeks.

In an exclusive interview last month, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday said the Navy has learned from the Roosevelt incident and has been successfully preventing transmission on ships, but he acknowledged changes, like fewer port visits and longer time at sea, have put more stress on the sailors and hurt their quality of life during deployment.

“We have to have ships stay at sea another month or so longer as they do their training and instead of taking leave right after training before deployment, they roll right into deployment,” he said.

“We're not pulling to port as frequently as we had before,” in order to avoid sailors being exposed to Covid-19, Gilday said. Instead, the ships do “stand-down days,” in which as many sailors as possible are given a day off.

“Everybody needs a break every once in a while and I do think that the toughest challenge, I believe in a situation like this, is trying to understand what that threshold is and not pushing it too far,” he said. “You kind of know when people are tired, people are frazzled."

The USS Stout deployed as part of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier strike group, but while the rest of the strike group returned home earlier this summer, the Stout stayed at sea. The Stout supported maritime security operations such as patrolling the Bab el-Mandeb strait and the Strait of Hormuz during the deployment.

“We are extremely proud of Stout’s accomplishments in theater as they’ve been operating to ensure freedom of navigation,” Vice Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, U.S. 5th Fleet, Combined Maritime Forces, said.

“Under the challenges of Covid-19 and the uncertainty of regional tensions, Stout embodied their motto and prevailed with ‘Courage, Valor and Integrity.’”

Courtney Kube is a correspondent covering national security and the military for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

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Semester at Sea Voyages

Semester at Sea study abroad programs offer a truly global experience each fall and spring. All of our Semester at Sea voyages on the MV World Odyssey are 100+ days, explore at least 10 countries, and allow students to earn 12-15 academic credits from Colorado State University. Explore the transformative upcoming fall and spring programs below!

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[On] Semester at Sea, I got to see 14 different countries in a period of three months. That just added a lot of richness and color and depth to my understanding of my place in the world, and what else was out there.

I’m just thankful that I’ve lived long enough to, climb to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa—marvel at the Taj Mahal in India—climb the Great Wall of China—almost slide down the inside of the Great Pyramid in Egypt—watch the penguins in Antarctic and swing on a vine in the Amazon with a group of Semester at Sea students…I will travel and marvel at beautiful places and people around the world, look for new friends, send cards to my family and five great grandchildren, hoping it will instill in them the desire to meet and mingle with the rest of the world.

I have always loved to travel and Semester at Sea introduced me to places and people that changed my life forever.

Stepping off the ship in Morocco, I really had no expectation of what my experience would be like. We stuffed our backpacks to the brim, mounted our own camels, and set off to trek to a nomad camp across the Sahara. Arriving far past sunset, we stood at the top of the immense sand dunes looking down at our desert camp. We had the privilege of eating the most delicious Moroccan food and celebrating the experience with traditional musicians all night long. It was one of those “how crazy is my life” moments. Unbothered by the absence of cell service, my heart has never been so full as when I was dancing away under the full moon in the middle of the desert with the best of friends.

A lot of my personal travels and the path toward the creation of Pencils of Promise started as a student on Semester at Sea. It was not only the best, but most important thing that I’ve ever done because it set me on the path to becoming a global citizen.

Semester at Sea was so much more than one can imagine. I set sail expecting one thing and came back a different person. The people that I met along the way impacted my life and became my friend for life. If you enter this semester with an open mind the world will take you in its hands and allow you to see it in a whole different light.

Semester at Sea gave me an experience that I will forever cherish. I have become a better person because of the cultural experiences that I have had. I made lifelong friends that I know will be my forever travel buddies. During my four months abroad with Semester at Sea it helped me develop as a person and become a better version of myself.

A Voyage for All

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Yemen's Houthis say their missiles hit Andromeda Star oil ship in Red Sea

• Medium Text

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Reporting by Ahmed Tolba in Cairo and Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Editing by Leslie Adler, Chris Reese and Muralikumar Anantharaman

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Lisa Baertlein covers the movement of goods around the world, with emphasis on ocean transport and last-mile delivery. In her free time, you'll find her sailing, painting or exploring state and national parks.

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Blinken, Saudi crown prince discuss achieving peace, security in Gaza, US says

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Monday in Riyadh, where they discussed the urgent need to reduce tensions in the region, the U.S. Department of State said in a statement.

Security breach at Sea-Tac airport causes long lines at checkpoints

A security breach Sunday night at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport caused long lines for passengers waiting to clear security and get to their gates.

Screenings resumed around 9 p.m. but people were asked to allow for additional time to get through the lines, according to a post from the airport’s X account.

The nature of the breach wasn’t disclosed and an airport spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment.

SEA Travelers, be aware a security breach this evening has impacted lines at security checkpoints. After following standard security protocols, screening has resumed. Please allow extra time for longer lines. pic.twitter.com/iE2DAmWRMs — Seattle-Tacoma Intl. Airport (@flySEA) April 22, 2024

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This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

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Shoreline model predicts long-term future of storm protection and sea-level rise

by Duke University

Researchers in North Carolina have created a simulation model to analyze how coastal management activities meant to protect barrier islands from sea-level rise can disrupt the natural processes that are keeping barrier islands above water.

"Coastal management strategies intended to protect people, property and infrastructure from storm impacts can, over decades, increase vulnerability, even leading to the loss of barrier islands, especially as sea-level rise rates increase," said A. Brad Murray, professor of geomorphology and coastal processes at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment.

He and other researchers in North Carolina created a computer model that simulates dynamics of barrier island systems over the next two centuries, showing how natural processes that create and maintain these systems affect communities and infrastructure, and how human efforts to protect communities and infrastructure, in turn, affect those natural processes. They published a pair of studies on the work April 9, 2024 in Earth's Future.

Barrier islands are narrow offshore landforms that run parallel to the mainland coastline. These are dynamic features, naturally gaining elevation and migrating landward as sea level rises or sediment supply dwindles. Barrier islands absorb wave energy before waves hit the mainland, which can lessen coastal storm surge and flooding. The United States has the greatest extent of barriers worldwide, stretching across much of the Southeast and Gulf of Mexico.

Coastal communities on barrier islands , which have long grappled with eroding shorelines and coastal storms, now face substantial sea-level rise due to climate change. They are already encountering increased risks of coastal flooding and threats to critical infrastructure .

Many of these coastal communities rely on federally subsidized "beach nourishment"—the artificial widening of beaches with sand—or engineered solutions, such as the construction of artificially high dunes, to adapt to changing climate threats.

Some of these solutions, however, interrupt natural processes that have kept barriers above sea level.

Sand deposited on these islands when storm waves knock down dunes is essential to maintain barriers' width and elevation. But on developed barriers, storm fallout—including overwashed sand on roads—are hazards.

"Counterintuitively, the more successful humans are in preventing storm impacts, the less resilient the barrier system becomes in the long term," said co-author, Laura Moore, professor of coastal geomorphology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Difficult tradeoffs are going to be inevitable when it comes to managing the coast with the hope of preserving coastal living as we know it."

The researchers' modeling demonstrates that how long a barrier remains habitable varies with different coastal management strategies and climate scenarios.

For example, the model showed that shifting away from the practices of protecting roads with tall dunes and bulldozing overwashed sand off paved surfaces may allow barriers that would have become uninhabitable to rebound and keep up with sea level rise longer.

Adopting management strategies that allow one segment of the shoreline to evolve naturally—such as building a long bridge to replace part of a highway—can increase the barrier system's resilience in that area. However, management strategies in one area affect erosion rates in adjacent areas.

Increasing long-term resilience in one area can come at the cost of higher shoreline stabilization costs for neighboring communities. Given these connections along the shore, stakeholders in neighboring coastal areas may benefit from collaborating, the authors noted.

"There's no perfect solution," said the study's lead author, Katherine Anarde, assistant professor of coastal engineering at North Carolina State University. "Understanding an entire barrier system and how it responds to different coastal management decisions is critical to assessing the sustainability of coastal development over the coming decades. The model helps us consider several factors in managing coastal areas to ensure we're not unintentionally making things worse in the long run, and to weigh the tradeoffs."

K. A. Anarde et al, The Future of Developed Barrier Systems: 2. Alongshore Complexities and Emergent Climate Change Dynamics, Earth's Future (2024). DOI: 10.1029/2023EF004200

Journal information: Earth's Future

Provided by Duke University

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