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COMMENTARY
June 16, 2010
Dear Abby
As media events go, news of Abigail Sunderland's misadventure aboard Wild Eyes in the Indian Ocean is fairly frivolous. I need a frivolous topic at the moment, so let me glom onto it.There is nothing quite like maternal advice from a childless woman, to a born-again mother who has been homeschooling seven kids, with an eighth on the way. I was thinking this while reading more than one self-righteous column about how irresponsible Abigail's mother was, in letting her 16-year-old daughter loose on the high seas -- to repeat or perhaps even improve upon the feat of her brother Zac (who completed his own solo circumnavigation at age 17). The Sunderlands present themselves as a modern-day Swiss Family Robinson. And let me be so irresponsible as to recommend that book to other people's children. For while I can't say much for it as prose, looking back over the English translation I read as a kid; nor as an authoritative work of natural history; I can say the Swiss pastor wrote a first-rate adventure story, two centuries ago. From its beginnings in the lore of the Wyss family, it was designed to inculcate "family values" -- of a distinctly Protestant and Christian kind. Embedded within is a spirit of adventure and self-reliance that stands in total opposition to our contemporary "Obamacare" values. The Christian hero takes risks. He is not fatalistic; there is nothing ambiguous in his embrace of free will. The Christian God expects our best masculine efforts. And I have used that word "masculine" in a sense that pertains alike to men and women. Grace Darling, Florence Nightingale, Mary Kingsley -- these were among the "Christian heroines" presented to me as a child in a wonderfully backward boy's school. (Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Palin ... the tradition continues.) I mention this to preclude cheap shots from the usual feminist quarters. As an armchair yachtsman, I had to fight the impulse to sneer at the high-tech, radar-equipped boat that Abby Sunderland set sail in. My idea of yachting south of Cape Town was formed by Joshua Slocum in Spray, Vito Dumas in Lehg II, Conor O'Brien in Saoirse, Miles and Beryl Smeeton in Tzu Hang, H.W. Tilman in Mischief, Bernard Moitessier in Joshua and, definitively, David Lewis in Ice Bird. These were grown-up people who sailed into the world's loneliest and most dangerous seas in tiny vessels quite free of modern gizmos, knowingly beyond radio contact and without hope of rescue. The Smeetons were pitch-poled (turned back over front by a wave) twice, and survived to tell both tales. The New Zealander Lewis, a magnificent and only half-crazed medical doctor, took his little steel sloop -- about half the size of Abby's Wild Eyes -- from Sydney to Palmer Base in Antarctica, then back to civilization, dented from three roll-overs and dismastings. He lived only because he found a way to jury-rig a new mast each time, from pieces of the old, and limp onward. Whereas Abby, already delayed by equipment failures, faced the South Indian Ocean in the gathering Antarctic winter, with one of these high-tech composite masts that remains perfectly intact -- even after it breaks off about two inches above deck level. The boat was designed to become a survival capsule in such a case (Abby's father is a shipwright, he had seen to that), and she could reasonably expect a response when she sent her distress signals. So: not comparable to the older yachting achievements, except, the sailor is a 16-year-old girl. She had been delivering yachts solo from age 13. Her parents dissuaded her from attempting the circumnavigation until they felt sure she was ready. And she was ready enough. The French fishing vessels that came to her rescue may have lost some catch, but gained by the publicity; other rescue services were kept in practice. Really, no one's nose needs to be out of joint on this. And I, for one, look forward to seeing what the other six Sunderland kids will do. When I left home myself, at age 16, to travel off to Asia, my mama was a little nonplussed, but my papa insisted I knew what I was doing. I had spent years rehearsing for life on the road; my father and his father had also left home at that age. Today, we have people still living off student loans in their 30s, and not yet able to face adult responsibilities by the time they retire. So it is truly shocking to be reminded that a young teenager is not a baby. I gather Abby is embarrassed by her setback, but still cracking jokes, including self-deprecating ones that people much older fail to get the hang of. She is a little blaze of nobility in our cringing, septic, nanny-state world, and now that her first adventure is over, it is time to repeat: "You go, girl!" David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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