In 1954 William Willis built a Balsa wood raft and sailed from Peru to Samoa with a parrot and a cat. He did this seven years after Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition. Heyerdahl wanted to prove that Polynesia was settled by people from South America, and was accompanied by a full crew and constant radio contact. Willis just wanted to prove he could survive and sailed alone with a broken transmitter. Willis was an impossible kook.

I first came across Willis in October through a brief mention in Alice Payne's "Tale of the Clam Diggers," a book about City Island. Two small paragraphs mentioned he had visited City Island during one of his wacky adventures. It also mentioned the balsa raft, the parrot, the cat, and a second journey with two kittens. Oh and that he was 60 years old at the time of his first expedition. She called him a "wonderful old salt."

I imagined his raft to be one of those platforms lodged in the middle of a holiday lake -- flat and about five feet square. Upon further research I realized it was not all that much larger, maybe 15x8, though it did have a railing, sort of. It was called Seven Little Sisters named for the seven Balsa logs used as its base. I fell promptly and obsessively in love.

I scoured the internet. I didn't find much. How could that be? People on the internet love to put up pages about guys who wear green monkey socks and cats that pee in toilets. Surely there should be dozens of websites about William Willis. Not even an entry on Wikipedia... I suppose that will have to be my task.

However, lucky for me just last year a man, T.R. Pearson, published a book entirely about William Willis. It's called "Seaworthy: Adrift with William Willis in the Golden Age of Rafting." The Golden Age of Rafting! Nice. Actually he writes about a few other rafting and survivalist kooks, but his primary focus is on Willis. It's a great read.

Willis also wrote his own book, which I have on order, and which Pearson warns is tedious and frustrating. It did poorly in the United States but was a big hit in Russia as a children's story, where it sold over 100,000 copies! I have a copy in Finnish though I don't read Finnish.

Willis became a sailor when just a teenager, leaving his home in Hamburg to sail around Cape Horn. It didn't go so well. And I won't ruin your reading fun by telling you why. I'll just mention that he left sailing to hop freight trains (before most people did during the depression), met a yogic breathing guru in San Francisco in 1916, and became a strict -- nearly raw food - vegetarian. He worked on farms, in mines, and in general just drifted on the thin strings of resourcefulness.

Eventually he found his way to New York and lived for a time on the west side. It was here that during a broken conversation with his landlady (she only spoke French, and he barely, and the two of them rarely) that he learned she had a son that was wrongly accused of murder and held prisoner on Devils Island in French Guiana! Actually three islands made up "Devil's Island" but essentially it was a penal colony surrounded by sharks, divided by rivers brimming with Piranhas, and between jungles hosting pockets of aboriginal cannibals, swarms of malarial mosquitoes, millions of man-snacking army ants, and raging plagues, like leprosy! Not to mention the actual prisons and work camps which brought on early death via bone crushing labor and soul crushing silence. "For almost 100 years men periodically braved sharks, treacherous currents and days adrift under a broiling sun trying to escape from [these] three islands." (New York Times, 1983). A Crime Magazine writer adds this: "To escape by sea required a slender Indian dugout canoe, provisions, a comrade with naval experience and the direct intervention of God."

Anxious for the sea and missing the adventures of his youth -- cold, starving and usually near death -- William Willis (in his 50's) decided that he and he alone should somehow sail to Devils Island and save his landlady's son -- his landlady who he had scarcely known. He spent months in the New York public library researching his task and by golly if he didn't manage to sail south, sneak onto the island, find a man to help him (actually the man felt so sorry for him he demanded Willis accept his companionship and island know-how), and locate and secure the young man's freedom via a series of bribes and dodgy canoes. You can read yourself about all the times he almost died. And yes, there were piranhas, shamans, and leprosy.

On his way to rescue the landlady's son he met a woman on a freighter ship who just happened to be taking a vacation. She, her name was Teddy, preferred freighters to cruise ships for the obvious benefits of rusty sleeping quarters, dreary food, and swarthy sailors for companions. They were married upon his safe return from the Caribbean. And they eventually moved to The Bronx! Yes, it all comes back to the Bronx now doesn't it. I have not been able to determine where in The Bronx they lived just yet but I do know he had his sails made for both voyages on City Island, and most people around here knew him.

Of his two rafting journeys across the pacific I will mention only a few details. He was a sloppy architect and a poor planner. Most everything broke and he had to battle sharks to fix things. He fell overboard and hadn't left himself a safety line. He had to hand sew his sheets with a raging hernia in a three day storm which ultimately left him tied to the deck unconscious. He had no electronic equipment. His stove broke. His water became polluted. And the cat ate the parrot. Yet he survived.

He survived on sea water, sugar, flour, condensed milk, and flying fish. He survived because he knew he could. He practiced his breathing, remained as positive as one can given all the terrible circumstances he found himself in, and in general is a testament to the power of impossible optimism.

Love and trade winds,



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