Roger D. Taylor - Mingming II & the Impossible Voyage

BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

Voyages of a Simple Sailor

Mingming & the Art of Minimal Ocean Sailing

Mingming & the Tonic of Wildness

Mingming II & the Islands of the Ice

Published by The FitzRoy Press 2020.

F

The FitzRoy Press

5 Regent Gate

Waltham Cross

Herts EN8 7AF

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part (other than for purposes of review), nor may any part of this book be stored in an information retrieval system without written permission from the publisher.

Copyright 2020 Roger D Taylor.

ISBN 978 0955803 598

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Publishing management by Troubador Publishing Ltd, Leicestershire, UK

An thog thu rithist an sel mr a ghlacas aghaoth shiabach?

Somhairle MacGill-Eain, An Saothach

Will you raise again the big sail that will catch the sweeping wind?

Sorley MacLean, The Ship

Mingming IIs 2018 Voyage

The Seven Islands

The islands of north-west Franz Josef Land

From White Island and Victoria Island to the east end of Kong Karls Land

From Kong Karls Land to Hopen

I do not believe in gods or afterlives; there is mystery, without doubt, but no magic. Once I am dead the decomposing constituents of my body, my only self, will be reabsorbed into the fabric of the worldly matter from which they came; no more, no less. This is a pleasing thought: to give something back after taking so much; to be reallocated randomly across the animate and the inanimate; to merge into the tail feather of a siskin, the leaf of a mountain ash, the eye, perhaps, of a blue whale; to wash down into the deep sea and reanimate the maternal fluid. All is possible.

To go to the wild places is to come nearer to that redistribution which is the cycle of life. To taste the solitude of a distant sea is to embrace the collectivity of all things. It is a negation of the ego, an underscoring of a pure and beautiful insignificance. It is a kind of rebirth, a cleansing of the warped, the cynical and the confused.

That is why, from time to time, I must go; and why, each time, I must push a little harder, a little further. Perhaps one day I will reach the very core of what I seek, although I doubt it; a perfect and certain understanding is too elusive to grasp. There have been moments when I have felt the tips of my fingers close gently around it, only to find it gone. All that remains is a faint and indeterminate scent, the memory of a gossamer touch, a distant reverberation as of placid waves on a far shore.

Such a delicate enlightenment cannot be coaxed out of the teeming conurbations. I have searched for it on high and distant mountains given only to the sough of the wind and the ravens croak, but even there a proximate mankind weighs too heavily on the mind and the senses. Only the far seas and the icy islands clothed in an unwavering inhospitality seem able to provide the pure and magnificent indifference against which a man can measure his existence.

Time and distance are the great cleansers. They scour the mind to a crystal clarity as thoroughly as the relentless wash of wind and wave leave a tiny yachts decks unblemished and sparkling. That is why a voyage must be long and unbroken. Forty days alone in the wilderness is a minimum; sixty or seventy the ideal. Longer than that would require a vessel surpassing the minimal, to the detriment of the enterprise: to achieve true absorption into them, the wild places should be approached by insinuation rather than by assault. They will cede, sometimes, to humility, but will close ranks against the brash, the aggressive, the pretentious and the unseeing.

The lonelier the target, the less known, the less frequented, the more difficult of access, the better. The aim is not simply to reach and taste the back of beyond, but to penetrate the fastnesses so far beyond the back of beyond that any sense of normal sublunary existence is dissolved clean away. Only there can the mind be recalibrated and reinvented. Only there can a reality be confronted without the distortive overlay of anthropogenic dross. Here lies a kind of contradictory but creative misanthropy: only by shedding the trappings of mankind can a mans true nature be discerned. It is an ancient modus operandi in new clothes: reclusion as the road to enlightenment.

Yet it is so much more than that, for there is the sailing too. This withdrawal is a dynamic exercise, as physical as it is philosophical. It is a kind of automotive monasticism, somewhat more than filling a knapsack with bread and cheese and retiring to a distant cell. A yacht must be built, prepared and managed; long tracts of ocean must be navigated; every risk and eventuality must be assessed and provided for. Two interdependent journeys are to be made simultaneously, one of the body, one of the mind. The aim is to bring them both to the allotted point at the right pitch of readiness and receptiveness. Thus, in diverse ways, a long and solitudinous sea voyage is the reductio ad absurdum of the practice of pilgrimage.

The sailing and its demands are vital to the mix. The requisite harmonisation with wind and wave, the ceaseless concentration on every nuance of the physical environment, help free the mind and bring it into alignment with a world beyond itself. The physics and mechanics of it a ton and a half of mass propelled so far, and with such grace, by no more than the movement of air and a few panels of simply-cut cloth invite an aesthetic pleasure, along with a certain wonder and gratitude that energy and matter have arranged themselves thus. The endless rise and fall of the sea mimics the wave motions that underlie the fabric of the universe and the restlessness of all matter. Denied the false solidity of the terrestrial, one is more receptive to the truth that all is motion; that nothing is ever still, nor ever can be.

And there, perhaps, lies the conundrum: the goal is to find the key to an untrammelled peace

a sphere rejoicing in its perfect stillness

but that stillness is, a priori, unattainable.

Nonetheless, the quest must continue; the voyage must be made, for every voyage brings its own reward, its own particular insight. To reject the voyage is to cede to a comforting urbanity; to accept the moribund and the uncritical. The time has not yet come for a living death.

Wester Ross

15 th September 2017

This is what I wanted to do: I wanted to sail my little yacht Mingming II into the heart of the Queen Victoria Sea. This sea lies to the north of Franz Josef Land. Franz Josef Land is an archipelago of 191 islands, or thereabouts, packed tightly in the Barents Sea well to the north of the Russian mainland. The islands belong to Russia, although the most westerly component of the group, Victoria Island, separated from the main group of islands by an eighty-mile-wide passage, was once Norwegian. The Norwegians ceded the island, which is much closer to the Svalbard group than Franz Josef Land, to the Russians during the 1930s, in a moment of political weakness. Victoria Island was first sighted in 1898 by the crew of the steam yacht Victoria, owned by the English adventurer Arnold Pike and skippered by a Captain Nielsen.