Hal RothBesprekingen

Chapter 12 on Bali. "We Followed Odysseus is the story of two legendary sailors--one from the ancient world, the other from today. Set against the backdrop of Homer's great tale, Hal Roth tells the fascinating story of sailing a small boat in the wake of Odysseus. Crossing oceans and seas in pursuit of his goal, Roth, with the help of his wife, Margaret, retraces the voyages of Odysseus along the Turkish coast and the storybook isles of Greece. Then he sails to a desert island in Tunisia, visits Sicily and Corsica, and finally goes to Italy and Malta before returning to Greece. While writing this book back in the U.S., Roth talked to hundreds of people and discovered that though most have heard about Odysseus and the Trojan horse, they have never read The Iliad or The Odyssey."

Two people sail down the western coast of South America and around Cape Horn. Great adventure story.

Hal and Margaret Roth had an epic mission to sail around the world. Good thing they had the kind of relationship that could withstand being trapped together on a boat for nearly two years (46 months)! Their boat, Whisper, was a 10.7 meters long, black hulled fiberglass vessel that weighed 7.2 tons.
Their journey took them from the coast of Maine to Bermuda and the Virgin Islands, though the Panama Canal, across the South Pacific, winding through Tahiti and Fiji, crossing the Coral Sea and Australia, Bali, Africa, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and finally back through the Atlantic and the Caribbean, ending in Somes Sound, Maine. The amazing thing is, Roth did not come from a sailing background. Luckily, he was a gifted writer and this is his account of that epic journey (with excerpts from Margaret's journal thrown in). Weather, fishing, the mechanics of boats and sailing, the culture and customs of each community and port, getting to know and establishing relationships with other sailors, even being shipwrecked on coral reef and observing drug runners. Everything Roth writes about is fascinating. He loves the word "squally."

Mr. Roth has collected stories told on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a country place where blacks and whites have lived and farmed alongside each other for a very long time.

Mr. Roth's collection of stories is broad and interesting but the way he has presented them detracts from their value.

Mr. Roth says clearly at the outset that he has deliberately obscured the origins of the stories and rightly so because there is no way now for storytellers to consent to their tales being included in this collection.

But I think Mr. Roth takes hiding his sources too far. Some of the stories clearly originate in the 1920s while others are more modern. Some take place at the top of the Eastern Shore, some farther south. Some take place on the riverbank and seashore. Mr. Roth does nothing to help us place these stories in either time or place. Each vignette is written as a paragraph or two that is completely divorced from its neighbors. There is nothing here of Mr. Roth or of the storytellers or their communities. I am reminded of a book of limericks.

I received a review copy of "Conversations in a Country Store" by Hal Roth (Secant Publishing) through LibraryThing.com.½

Four stars because I'd recommend it if, like me, you finished the Odyssey and immediately started fantasizing about retracing his voyage yourself. Otherwise, you can safely skip it.

A more philosophical writer might have connected his voyage with Odysseus's in a more personal or insightful way. And a more flowery writer might have evoked the scenes of Odysseus's trip, both then and now, more vividly. Roth is a sailing geek first, literature geek second, so an awful lot of this book is given over to describing how many sails he used on a given day or which anchor he put down.

But he gets the basic job done, and that's the important part. He successfully retraces anyone's best guess at Odysseus's route. His scholarship seems sound; he makes a worthy point of making it clear that this is all guesswork, and when his guess at a location differs from other valid guesses, he makes that clear as well.

And it's not like it's a huge time commitment anyway. At barely 200 pages of large type with loads of pictures, it's a day's reading. (And also: loads of pictures! Big bonus.)

I've recreated his map for the internet. Hope you don't mind, Hal. I totally gave you props for it.

Three good solid chunks of armchair sailing.

Two on a big ocean and Two against Cape Horn may sound like Enid Blyton titles, but they're actually first-hand accounts of long cruises Hal Roth and his wife made on their 35-foot sloop Whisper — around the South and North Pacific in 1967-68; through the islands of southern Chile and around Cape Horn a few years later. Roth provides a very well-balanced mixture of sailing stuff and more general travel writing about the people they meet and the places they visit. Neither aspect displays sensationally good writing, but equally there's nothing really disagreeable or dull. It will keep you entertained, and might inspire you with a desire to see the places for yourself. However, what he tells us about the islands and straits around Cape Horn won't do anything to change the idea you already had that these are bad places to be in a big, powerful motor ship, and absolutely crazy places to take a small sailing boat.

The third book in this collection is The longest race, an account of the notorious 1968-69 non-stop singlehanded round-the-world race sponsored by the Sunday Times. The race had plenty of drama, but, perhaps inevitably as nothing like this had ever been run before, was an organisational disaster. Nine solo yachtsmen started: six of them had to withdraw at various stages due to ill-health, storm damage or mechanical failure; another, who should never have been allowed to start, went mad and killed himself; the amazingly hairy and delightfully eccentric Bernard Moitessier enjoyed himself so much finding inner harmony on the Southern Ocean that he didn't want to return to Europe (and his wife and kids...), so he left the race shortly before the finish, did an additional half-circuit of the globe and ended up in Tahiti; the reassuringly English (but still pretty hairy) Robin Knox-Johnston was thus the only one who actually got back to Plymouth and took the prize. This race was big news when I was a child, and I remember reading Knox-Johnston's book at the time, although the details now escape me. Roth's book was written more than thirty years after the event (probably more-or-less at the same time as the excellent Channel 4 film Deep Water was being made). It draws very heavily on the first-hand accounts of the participants, which he quotes and paraphrases extensively. As an experienced yachtsman who took part in later, better-organised solo races, and knew quite a few of the sailors involved (including Knox-Johnston and Moitessier) he is able to add a bit of perspective and explanation here and there, and the story he has to tell is a gripping one, but really the book is a bit of a journalistic pot-boiler.½

This book inspired the voyage I'm now actively planning. Hal Roth's voice is great--grounded, friendly, straightforward, encouraging. I appreciate his sympathy with dreamers on a shoestring budget. Full of valuable information, I only wish there were a more recent edition than 2003.½

The fourth book I read this year was The Monster's Handsome Face: Patty Cannon in Fact and Fiction by Hal Roth. I grabbed it in Delaware on the way back from the holiday trip-to-the-pseudo-inlaws' place, because there are two things that I like to come away with whenever I visit someplace new; a new bird observation and a new book on the local history or folklore.

This book wasn't particularly well-written, in places it was downright disorganized, and it only would have been a chapbook if the author hadn't taken the measure of quoting multi-page passages of a number of other, out-of-copyright works on the same subject; but it told a fascinating story. Patty Cannon enjoyed a brief stir of nationwide fame just after the civil war, when a well-regarded novel and several allegedly non-fiction books were written on her leadership of the Cannon-Johnson gang, her many murders, and her suicide by poison when the law finally caught up to her. These accounts generally make much of some things she may well not have done - killed her first husband and one of her children, for instance. The petty treason. They also play up the ways in which she subverted femininity. According to the stories she wore men's clothes when committing highway robbery, and could wrestle and shoot with skill.

What she actually, undeniably did, and did well, was organize the kidnapping of free black people from as far north as Philadelphia and sell them back into slavery. She would do this by offering them jobs, rooms, or merely companionship and a drink, luring them to an out-of-the-way place, and simply tying them up. Once they were kidnapped and sold, the newly enslaved (or re-enslaved) people would have no recourse unless they could find, without money or their own time, and in an era before resources like telephones or the internet, a white person who would testify to their identity and free status in court. As 'chattel', they themselves could not testify on their own behalf.

Naturally, she became something of a folk bogey among the local free black population; who needs to make up the devil when you've got one? But she was far from the only person with this business model. The law tended to overlook these matters, and in least one case a local sheriff ran the kidnapping gang. Quaker abolitionists from Philadelphia funded a crusade against her, but in the end, she was arrested after human remains turned up that were said to be those of a slave dealer who had come to do business with her and instead been killed for the money he carried.

This is some crazy shit you don't hear about in school.

http://teratologist.livejournal.com/206602.html

(Dr. Anne Riches Bequest)