Voyaging the Pacific: In Search of the South

In 1997, Miles Hordern sailed alone in a 28-foot sloop across the Southern Ocean from New Zealand to Patagonia and back - a voyage of 13,000 nautical miles across the largest uninterrupted stretch of water on earth, a region of icebergs, gales and high seas. Six weeks after setting out from New Zealand he made landfall on the coast of Chile and, after a chance meeting, embarked on a 1000-mile cruise southwards to survey the channels and fjords of Patagonia, one of the last unchartered areas in the world. From Chile he sailed north on the Peru current, then west through the tropics on the return passage to New Zealand.;In this book he conjures up the experience of the 18-month journey, so that the reader can feel the motion of the boat on the vast ocean and enter into the lone sailor's state of mind. Voyaging the Pacific is also a journey into the past.As Hordern charts his course he recalls other mariners who have over the centuries sailed south in search of unknown lands and mythical treasure: the Ancient Greeks believed the southern hemisphere was filled by the largest continent of all, Terra Australis; in the imagination of the Dark Ages this land was peopled by a race not born of Adam, the six-fingered Antipodeans who danced on their hands; and in the Age of Discovery, Spanish navigators crossed the Southern Ocean four times in search of Ophir, the biblical land of Solomon's gold. And as Hordern voyages through the calms and squalls of the South Seas, the ghosts of castaway sailors, real and imaginary, follow in his wake.