I meet David Lewis and a young man at Spit Bridge Marina I worked Antifouling boats I remember asking him what he ate in the storms and he said" usually at cheese and biscuits in normal weather and just biscuits in the rough"
David Lewis
12:03AM GMT 26 Nov 2002
David Lewis, who has died aged 85, was a renowned amateur sailor whose most remarkable voyage saw him capsized three times and dismasted twice by hurricane-force Antarctic storms, and beyond any chance of rescue - which, in any case, he would not have sought.
Lewis left Sydney in the 32 ft steel cutter Ice Bird on October 19 1972. No one was known to have sailed alone to Antarctica; Lewis's purpose was to circumnavigate the Antarctic continent. He was 55, a GP, and thought of himself as timid though venturesome.
He planned a voyage of 6,000 nautical miles, via New Zealand, to reach the Antarctic Peninsula, but the timing and his chosen course proved unfortunate. Six weeks later, he was running down the 60th parallel - the "screaming sixties" - under a tiny storm jib. Wet snow filled the cockpit and festooned the rigging. He was dog-tired, tossed about and dispirited by repeated gales. He tells in his memoirs, Shapes on the Wind, of observing himself then with clinical detachment, sometimes drifting into hallucination, twice hearing voices, and making mistakes.
The pointer moved right off the barometer's scale; the wind rose to hurricane strength, the waves climbed above 15 metres high. A roaring wave seized Ice Bird, hurtling her forward and slewing her to starboard. It exploded overhead and crashed the yacht down on her port side. It wrecked the galley, destroyed the self-steering gear, carried away the life raft and tore the heavy storm jib across.
From inside the cabin, Lewis hauled on the tiller lines to try to get the boat running without sail, but mostly she wallowed in the valleys between the waves. His stomach, he wrote, was hollow with fear; the wind now gave off the high scream of a hurricane of more than 80 knots, as the sea grew white.
In an instant all went black for Lewis, and he found himself upside down and spinning, with the cabin table coming down on his head. Ice Bird had been picked up, cast on to her lee side, then rolled through 360 degrees to be righted by her heavy keel. The mast had gone, but banged alongside until he could secure the remains. The cabin was wrecked and full of water; it spurted with every roll from a crack in the steel between two portholes. The radio was destroyed, the pump out of action. The strong steel cabin trunk was stove in. It was 3,600 miles to Sydney, 2,500 miles to the Antarctic Peninsula. Hands numb, frost-bitten and gashed, Lewis bailed automatically for 10 hours.
The storm abated, and eventually he managed with much pain to raise a jury mast and rig a storm jib. Two weeks later, a second hurricane turned him over again. This time he was prepared, and the damage was less, but he cried in near despair.
Six weeks later he made landfall where originally planned, and soon afterwards reached the American Antarctic base of Palmer, tying up alongside Jacques Cousteau's oceanographic ship Calypso. The voyage had taken 14 and a half weeks, the last 2,500 miles under jury rig.
David Henry Lewis, an only child, was born on September 16 1917 at Plymouth. His father was a Welsh mining engineer, his mother an Irish doctor. The family moved to New Zealand when David was a boy, and he spent a year at a Maori village school on Rarotonga, on the Cook Islands, where he heard wonderful sagas of ancient Polynesian heroes, navigators of the Pacific who "dared the clouds of heaven".
At 17 he built a kayak, and ended his days at Wanganui Collegiate School by travelling home to Auckland alone, 430 miles by river, lake, sea and portage, in 50 days. At medical school at Dunedin, he ascended 19 unclimbed peaks.
He completed his medical training in England at Leeds University, graduating in 1942 as the fifth doctor in a direct family line that had begun with his Irish great-great-grandfather. He joined the Army in time to serve after D-day as medical officer in the 9th Parachute Battalion in France. Posted to Egypt, he dabbled secretly with the outlawed Arab League of National Liberation in Cairo and with Left-wing Zionists in Palestine. Characteristically, he sympathised with both sides.
Just after the war, in Jamaica with his Lithuanian first wife, Perle Michaelson, and their daughter Anna, Lewis became involved in the independence movement led by Norman Manley, during 18 months as medical officer at Port Royal.
Back in London, driven by social conscience, he set up a general practice at East Ham and angered conservative colleagues by supporting the nascent National Health Service. He represented the Medical Practitioners' Union with the London Trades Council, sat on the executive, and in the early 1950s led the council's May Day march from Stepney to Trafalgar Square.
When his first marriage ended in divorce, Lewis turned increasingly to the sea and the mountains and thoughts of a different life. In 1960 he entered the first Observer single-handed transatlantic race, and came third in a fleet of five, after shattering his mast with England still in sight and losing two days in repairs. The winner was Francis Chichester.
The race produced the first of Lewis's dozen books, The Ship Would Not Sail Due West. Now he planned the first circumnavigation of the world by a catamaran, and spent all his savings on her design and construction. First, he sailed this craft, Rehu Moana (Maori for Ocean Spray), in the 1964 transatlantic race, finishing seventh.
At Newport, Rhode Island, his second wife, Fiona, joined him with their two small girls for the world voyage. They had sold their London home and the practice. They sailed, with some rudder troubles, down to Magellan Strait and out into the Pacific. There Lewis, eschewing compass, chronometer and sextant, intended to test his theories about the navigational methods of the ancient Polynesian voyagers.
At first he strayed, but then took Rehu Moana 1,600 nautical miles from Rarotonga to New Zealand by observing the sun and stars and other natural phenomena, fetching up just 25 miles off his intended landfall.
He was to learn much more about Polynesian path-finding by sailing with great Polynesian navigators whose knowledge had very largely been thought lost. A four-year fellowship with the Australian National University supported his studies, and the Institute of Aboriginal Affairs financed research into Aboriginal desert journeyings.
It was after this that he embarked on the personal challenge of the Antarctic. When the smashed Ice Bird reached Palmer station, the Americans worked on repairing boat and sailor. Invited by National Geographic magazine to postpone the rest of the circumnavigation and revisit the Pacific to write about the navigators, Lewis accepted, and returned to Palmer in the southern hemisphere spring of 1973. It was a hard thing to do.
This time ice smashed his self-steering gear and a gale capsized him and again dismasted him. He had to abandon the circumnavigation and make for Cape Town, 800 nautical miles north, under jury rig.
His voyage inspired the establishment of a non-profit organisation, the Oceanic Research Foundation, which he led at the outset. It marshalled finance and expertise for expeditions - he led those, too, at first - to fill small gaps in south polar knowledge. Later, his interests turned to the north Pacific and Arctic regions and peoples, and he helped unite some Eskimo families split for 40 years, some in Alaska, some in the Chukotka region of Russia's Far East - divided by the Bering Sea and the Cold War.
Aged 75, with a short third marriage behind him, Lewis concluded that he was certainly not too old to pick up the pieces and start again. He continued to sail small craft on long voyages, sometimes alone, to win over good-looking and clever women, and to lecture and practise medicine when he needed money.
It was his version of what Masefield in Sea Fever called "the vagrant gypsy life". He was 80, a naturalised Australian, when Australian Geographic magazine named him their 1998 Adventurer of the Year. His other awards included the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of Navigation and the Bernard Fergusson Trophy as New Zealand's Yachtsman of the Year 1965. Leeds University gave him an honorary MSc for his research into exposure and reactions to fatigue and solitude.
His eyesight failed off the Queensland coast, but with help he continued to cruise until his death.
Apart from his former wives, David Lewis leaves a son and three daughters.
