Idle Hour

One beckoning September day four years ago, sandy-haired, 21-year-old Dwight Long, restless son of a Seattle builder, chucked his junior studies at the University of Washington and pointed his snug, white, 32-foot ketch Idle Hour out of Puget Sound. Before him lay the glamorous uncertainty of the western horizon; behind, Foulweather Bluff and the fouler prospects of graduating into a depression. One afternoon last week, with 35,000 miles in her wake and her bows scoured with the spray of more than seven seas. Idle Hour breezed in from the blue Atlantic and hove to off Manhattan's Battery wall. At her helm was no pessimistic college senior, but a persuasive, soft-spoken yarn spinner who had ridden out a depression, tasted the tang of the world, and had a tale to sell.*

Like old Captain Joshua Slocum almost 40 years before him, like salty Harry Pidgeon, who followed Herman Melville's Typee course, like seagoing Soldier-Tennist Alain Gerbault--cockle-shell Magellans all--Dwight Long had set his sails to go round the world. He had $200 cash, a guarantee of $25 a month for dispatches to the Seattle Star, and a companion who had studied spherical trigonometry and could qualify as a navigator. At Honolulu they parted. There Veteran Harry Pidgeon took Long out on the sea one Sunday afternoon, taught him how to plot his own course. In Hawaii, Long picked up as messmate 69-year-old William Loy, a retired one-eyed mail carrier from Minneapolis. The 3,300 miles to Tahiti were enough for Loy, but there Long shipped on a 15-year-old Tahitian, Timi, who had worked in the film Mutiny on the Bounty.

Out of Samoa, a hurricane sideswiped the Idle Hour, snapped her sticks, and for 25 days the boys, sailed the 1,200 miles to New Zealand under a jury mast, with a blanket for sail. After repairs, the Idle Hour touched at Sydney, New Guinea, Bali, Singapore, carrying an occasional venturesome paying passenger. At Colombo, Ceylon, Timi caught malaria, died in Long's arms. Long saw to Timi's burial, then sailed on to London, stayed a year, wrote his 120,000-word book. In June he left Falmouth with Wilbur Thomas, 25, an American acquaintance who had come from California to sail the last lap with him. Prime experience on a 75-day Atlantic crossing was getting overhauled in the Bay of Biscay by a Spanish Rightist patrol and being jailed overnight as would-be assassins of General Franco.

In Manhattan last week, Dwight Long bustled about in a worn blue jacket and battered white yachting cap seeking a U. S. publisher for his book. Back in the job-hunting mill he had fled four years before, he had recommendations few job seekers could offer--from U. S. Admiral Harry Yarnell of the Asiatic Fleet, the Governor-General of Australia, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, the First Lord of the British Admiralty, the Lord Provost of Glasgow, even from the Lord Mayor of London himself, on Mansion House stationery. But most highly prized was one on the chaste paper of Lambeth Palace, a character from the Archbishop of York himself, a dignitary, says Long, who draws quite a lot of water in England.

--SAILING ALL SEAS--Hodder & Stoughtoun, London; 9/6 ($2.37).

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