An inspiration to the aspirational sailor

High Endeavours: The Extraordinary Life and Adventures of Miles and Beryl Smeeton

By Miles Clark

Prairie Books

$26.95, 447 pp. (likely less as a second-hand book)

ISBN: 0-88833-313-7

Trolling back through my shelves, I thought I'd see what books really impressed me and inspired me to think outside of my sailing comfort zone.. This biography of Miles and Beryl Smeeton, epic cruisers of the ‘50s and ‘60s, was skillfully done by Miles Clark, their godson and a yachting writer in his own right. It's a real find.

The Smeetons, thanks to husband Miles’s many and popular books, were already well-known some 50 years ago as pioneering world cruisers of amazing persistence and grit. The epitome of the “can-do” couple, the Smeetons were risk-takers in the post-war years when equipment was minimal and rescue by others was out of the question. You had to have the resources to save your own life and your own boat, which, given that the Smeetons actually did this, makes them expert cruisers. As Clark’s tale shows, however, as a couple and as individuals, they were so much more. Both were insatiably curious explorers and adventurers, and theirs is one of the most interesting biographies—and most memorable love stories—I have ever read.

Both Miles and Beryl came from military families, and perhaps it was the intimate experience of violent loss combined with the qualities of self-reliance and openness to adventure that made them such a good match. Arguably, it was Beryl and not Miles who was the greater adventurer, lighting off as she did in the 1930s alone, linguistically unprepared and determinedly “on-the-cheap” on cross-Asian tours and a memorably grueling tour of Patagonia. It is difficult today in an era of helicopter skiing, Goretex, EPIRBs and GPSes to imagine how or even why a middle-class Englishwoman would travel the least-charted parts of the globe, but Beryl’s taste for exoticism knew few limits.

Miles, an accomplished and extraordinarily tall (over six and a half feet) officer in the Indian army, had somewhat more bourgeois comfort levels,  but nonetheless had an equal urge to push his physical and mental limits. An accomplished horseman, rock-climber and hiker, and—during World War II—warrior and leader, Miles did bring to Beryl’s almost manic adventuring a leaven of experience and common sense. Still, by war’s end, and with a young child in tow, the Smeetons entered their 40s not with the desire to settle down, but to buy a wooden ketch they barely knew how to sail (the famous Tzu Hang), and then to sell up and homestead in British Columbia. As with all their seemingly circuitous schemes, the B.C. farm led to more sailing—the Smeetons, typically, soon became expert—and eight years of world cruising.

As related in the bestseller Once Is Enough, the Smeetons endured not one, but two horrific dismastings on the approach to Cape Horn. Characteristically, despite nearly getting killed, the Smeetons eventually completed a circumnavigation, including high-latitude, quasi-“research” trips that garnered them fame and awards. The only criticism I would have of their jam-packed lives is that their only daughter Clio seemed to endure long absences in boarding schools--and perhaps the anxiety of wondering whether her parents would die falling off a mountain or drowning beneath the sea—while Beryl and Miles burnt away their smoldering wanderlust.

Again, it is difficult to think of a couple in their mid-fifties (both Beryl and Miles were born around 1905), armed only with sextant, charts and a first-generation transistor radio, undertaking world cruising before virtually any facilities, rescue or weather services were in existence for "little boats", and, tackling the sort of conditions that put off Volvo 60 racers today. Along with the Hiscocks, Francis Chicester and a  few other pioneering cruisers and racers, the Smeetons showed the way.

Less well-known, if equally fascinating, is how the Smeetons (who eventually became Canadian citizens), started a wildlife sanctuary in Cochrane, Alberta in the late ‘60s that eventually led to the re-introduction of the Swift Fox, a small canid that had been hunted to extinction on the Prairies. Whether it was the sea, the mountains or death itself, the Smeetons were up to the challenge, it seems, and this is one of the greatest sailor stories you’ll ever read, even if 75% of it takes place on dry land. It's the best introduction I can imagine to the more specific sailing works the Smeetons wrote themselves.