Tristan Jones

Tristan Jones (May 8, 1929 - June 21, 1995) was an author and mariner who wrote numerous books and articles, many in the first person, about sailing. His stories tended to be a combination of both fact and fiction in the tradition of Welsh story tellers and it has often been difficult to tell these apart.

Life

Tristan Jones, real name Arthur Jones, was born in 1929 in Liverpool, the illegitimate son of a working class girl, and was brought up mainly in orphanages, with little real education. He joined the Royal Navy in 1946, after the end of the Second World War, and served for 14 year. Then he bought a sailboat, tried whiskey smuggling, and scraped a living sailing the Mediterranean.

According to Anthony Dalton's account, [cite book|author=Anthony Dalton|title=Wayward Sailor: In Search of the Real Tristan Jones|date=2002|publisher=McGraw-Hill Professional] "Then came a midlife sea change. Arthur Jones looked into his future, imagined greatness, and began to claw his way to it. Having taught himself to sail, he taught himself to write. He was a natural at both. As Tristan Jones, in his mid-forties, he sailed out of Brazil's Mato Grosso and into a Greenwich Village apartment to write six books in three years and reinvent his past."

This past included being born on his father's tramp ship off Tristan da Cunha in 1924, leaving school at 14 to work on sailing barges and active service in the Navy [ [http://www.tristanjones.org/meet_tristan.htm Meet Tristan Jones] ] .

His books recount numerous feats, of which the most famous (The Incredible Voyage) is how he transported and sailed his boat from the lowest water on earth (the Dead Sea) to the highest lake (Lake Titicaca. After his left leg was amputated in 1982 he sailed more than halfway round the world and across the centre of Europe. He lost his right leg in 1991 and with that his incredible spirit began to die too, although he returned briefly to sea.

Bibliography

*"The Incredible Voyage"
*"Ice!"
*"Encounters of a Wayward Sailor"
*"Seaguls in my Soup"
*"The Improbable Voyage"
*"The Psychology of Adventure"
*"One Hand for Yourself One Hand for the Ship"
*"Outward Leg"
*"Saga of a Wayward Sailor"
*"Somewheres East of Suez"
*"Heart of Oak"
*"Adrift"
*"A Steady Trade"
*"Dutch Treat"
*"To Venture Further"
*"Yarns"

ee also

External links

* [http://www.tristanjones.org The Tristan Jones Web Site]