A. J. Mackinnon - The Well at the Worlds End: One Mans Epic Cross-Continental Quest for the Fountain of Youth

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The Well at the Worlds End

A funny and dangerous journey that highlights Mackinnons knack for finding adventure a delight. The Herald Sun

Mackinnon is essentially a solitary traveller. Like many of literatures solitary travellers, he makes great company. Australian Book Review

[A] funny and spirited book [Mackinnons] magnificent foolhardiness has given him some of his best stories. The Age

A charming and beautifully written chronicle of life on the road. The Advertiser

This is a wonderful book its the sort of story you want to share. The writing is warm, humorous and entertaining. Bookseller & Publisher

There is an illicit and vicarious pleasure in reading the details of another travellers follies, mistakes and near death experiences A fascinating story. Good Reading Magazine

Travel literature either makes your feet itch or settles you down in a comfy chair with a Scotch handy. A.J. Mackinnons book belongs to the latter variety his narrative should please the vicarious traveller. The Sunday Age

Charming The Sunday Mail

An amazing story Richard Aedy, The Book Show blog, ABC Radio National

Copyright 2011 by A. J. Mackinnon

This paperback edition 2016

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the Publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mackinnon, A. J. (Alexander James), 1963

Title: The well at the worlds end : one mans epic cross-continental quest for the fountain of youth / A.J. Mackinnon.

Description: Paperback edition. | New York, NY : Skyhorse Publishing, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015042240 (print) | LCCN 2015046222 (ebook) | ISBN 9781634502825 (paperback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781510702134 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mackinnon, A. J. (Alexander James), 1963---Travel. | Voyages and travels. | Fountain of youth (Legendary place) | Iona (Scotland)--Description and travel. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Adventurers & Explorers.

Classification: LCC G465 .M327 2016 (print) | LCC G465 (ebook) | DDC 914.14/2--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042240

Illustrations and maps by A. J. Mackinnon

Book design by Thomas Deverall

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

This book is dedicated to my father, whose map of life and love
has guided me from the very start
and to Chris, who is there on every adventure.

Prologue

And whatten wull ye leave to your own bairns and wife,

Edouard, Edouard?

The Warldes room! Let them beg through life!

Alas and wae is me, O!

Scottish ballad

I am eight years old and have just been sent by my older brother Richard to go and find as many rolls of toilet paper as I can. Youre the youngest, he has explained, and cant get into as much trouble as I can. Off you go.

I wind my way through the white labyrinth of the ships interior, dodging passengers and a narrow-eyed ships steward while I visit every bathroom I can find. I return to the upper deck with ten rolls of loo paper and find that it is almost too late. There is now a gap of oily green water between the cliff of the liners side and the Sydney quay and there is a strong smell of diesel. Between us and the crowds on the quay is a festoon of coloured streamers, red and green and blue and yellow, thousands of them fluttering in the breeze and stretching tighter and tighter across the widening gap until they begin to break and curl up.

Richard, unwilling to fork out for the streamers from the ships shop but ever ingenious, now has what he needs. He grabs the loo rolls from me and tells me to hold all the dangling ends of tissue paper. Then he lobs each roll one by one in a true cricketers throw right across the gap in ten soaring arcs of fluttering paper. Three rolls hit home among the crowd and I am almost sure that one elderly woman collapses from a blow to the head. I turn to grin nervously at Richard but he is not there. His figure can be seen ducking away through the crowds along the railings. I wonder briefly why. Two seconds later I turn the other way to find that the ships steward is bearing down on me, more narrow-eyed than ever. Richard is usually right, but in one matter I now suspect he might be mistaken. Sweet-faced and cherubic I might be, but, from the expression on the stewards face as he pushes his way along the crowded deck, I doubt that I am immune to the wrath of the authorities after all. Abandoning the loo rolls, I flee. I am not happy

*

I was pretty unhappy to be there in the first place, to tell the truth. A few months earlier our parents had broken the news: the whole family would be uprooted from our settled existence in Wollongong, New South Wales, and put on a ship bound for England. When first told the news, all four of us Richard and my two sisters and I had burst into tears and protestations at the unfairness of it all. We had cried for the two months leading up to the departure, we had howled in the back of the car as we drove to Sydney for the farewell, and we had stormed and sulked as we were pushed up the gangplank to the glacial bulk of the Arcadia.

But not long after hurling the illicit streamers, the protestations died on my lips. Even when I found Richard on one of the upper decks just as we were passing beneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge and he managed to convince me that the soaring funnels above us would be knocked off by the bridges too-low-seeming span, thus killing us all, I didnt care as much as I ought to have. I had caught the romance, the danger, the fizzing uncertainty of being a traveller it seemed a good way as any to die.

From that moment the magic of seafaring, of proper old-fashioned voyaging, has never left me. Tin trunks. Luggage labels. Ships railings. Deck quoits. Crossing the line. Albatrosses. But the element that really soaked into my young mind was the slow turning of the great globe beneath our bow, day and night, mile by mile, week after week, latitude by latitude, port by port. Table Mountain. The Canary Islands. The fabulous bazaars of Casablanca, where I purchased with my pocket money the chief treasure of the whole trip, namely a plastic pen which, when tilted, sent a tiny camel gliding across a background of date palms and desert dunes. Back onboard there was a large map of the world on the wall of the pursers deck where our progress was marked daily by a little blue and white pin. Each day, Richard and my sisters and I would note our minute but steady progress.