Review: “Small Boat to Freedom”
Published 7:00 am Saturday, May 22, 2004
If it’s true that life is a journey, not a destination, then “Small Boat to Freedom” is a microcosm of life.
It’s a first-person recounting of a family’s wrenching decision in the late 1980s to leave the life and people they loved in South Africa because its apartheid system seemed to be pushing the country toward an unavoidable bloodbath.
Written by former Whidbey Islander John Vigor, the book is an open and frank look at one family’s choice to risk everything — from financial stability to death at sea — to start a new life in the United States, the homeland of his wife, June.
Locals will remember June as former Island Living editor at the Whidbey News-Times. We discover in this book that in the 1980s she was editor-in-chief of the largest family magazine in South Africa, where her work included such things as flying to the U.S. to interview Dr. Benjamin Spock. Sailors will recognize her husband’s name from numerous books and magazine articles about open water sailing.
From Jan. 8, 1987, when they left Durban, South Africa, until June 11 of that year when they arrived in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the couple and their teenage son sailed 7,000 miles across the Atlantic — into another hemisphere and an uncertain future.
Those who expect the book to be primarily about battling storms and boredom at sea in a 31-foot boat will find the undercurrent of this trip in the subtitle: “A Journey of Conscience to a New Life in America.”
The book is a sailing odyssey, to be sure, a five-month, wind-powered trip through some extreme conditions. But the reasons that led this gentle couple and their youngest child to take this extraordinary step are explained as well. The heart-wrenching decisions they had to make are told in a restrained yet personal style that you might expect to hear over a couple beers in a waterfront bar from a 50-something yachtsman.
Early in the book Vigor recalls a conversation with his wife one evening about the apparent inevitability of rioting and indiscriminate killing. He talked about buying a gun to defend their family, and whether a rifle or shotgun would be preferable. It was then they realized that if they weren’t going to kill, they had to leave.
At that point, Vigor had been a syndicated humor columnist in South Africa for nearly 20 years and his wife was doing well in her profession. Their two adult sons were working in the U.S. and the youngest would graduate from high school in 18 months. That became the timeline — they would leave in 18 months.
The book has extensive detail about how the family set about to surreptitiously leave South Africa, including how they tried to get around the government’s limit on how much money could be taken out of the country. Reading about white, middle-class people fleeing a place that they simultaneously love and fear gives a new perspective to the concept of a refugee.
As Vigor explains, whites who left then “were treated almost as traitors. All able-bodied whites were supposed to stay and fight the blacks when the big revolution came.” So, to avoid 18 months of insults and harassment, they told no one. The pain of that silence is clear. He writes, “I told nobody that I was planning to leave South Africa, not even my widowed mother or my sister, Sandra.” His subsequent goodbye to his mother at a retirement home is one of the many places readers might pause to consider how, or if, they could have uprooted themselves.
As the departure date came closer they told a few close friends. While June and their son were U.S. citizens, John retained his British passport, although he had lived in South Africa since he was 13. Because he was married to an American, he was able to obtain a U.S. visa. As he mentions several times, they were among the lucky ones who had the option to leave.
While the author is a world-class sailor, readers don’t need to be to understand the voyage. Sailors will appreciate the specifics, such as his description when the yacht was running before a strong wind under a double-reefed mainsail and a working jib. Those who don’t know nautical jargon won’t have trouble following the action. For example, early in the voyage when they’re still near the South African coast, Vigor notes, “I navigated by dead reckoning, that fine-sounding nautical term for informed guesswork.”
The book also includes three pages of data and one page of drawings of the boat, named Freelance.
This is real life, with awful moments such as standing on a Durban street watching their uninsured furniture destroyed in an auction house fire just before it was to be sold for needed cash. But the book is not all tension. There is a laugh-out-loud section about the author trying to buy eggs on an island off Brazil.
The geographic distance the Vigors covered is shown on a map inside the front and back covers. Readers who traverse the pages between will begin to understand the personal voyage they made.
