Bookvica

[AMERICAN RAFT VOYAGE] Na plotu cherez okean [i.e. On a Raft Across the Ocean]

Willis, W.

Item #2874

Moscow: Detgiz, 1959. 206 pp. With eight leaves of illustrations and maps. 22x14,5 cm. Original publisher’s cardboard binding, designed by Fedor Lemkul. Edges of the front board slightly rubbed; otherwise a very good copy.

Translated from the English by L. Vasilevsky and S. Semenov. Preface by V. Zakharchenko.

First Russian edition of William Willis’s account of his celebrated 1954 solo voyage across the Pacific Ocean, originally published in English as The Gods Were Kind: An Epic 6,700-Mile Voyage Alone Across the Pacific (1955).

In 1954, at the age of sixty, Willis (1893-1968) sailed alone from Peru to American Samoa on the Seven Little Sisters, a raft constructed from seven balsa logs. Accompanied only by a cat and a parrot, he covered approximately 6,700 miles—considerably farther than Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki expedition—before reaching Pago Pago after nearly four months at sea. Willis’s narrative combines an account of the construction and navigation of the raft with descriptions of storms, marine life, isolation, physical hardship,
and the practical problems of survival during a prolonged ocean crossing.

The Soviet publication followed the considerable popularity of translated accounts of experimental and solitary voyages, particularly Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki and Alain Bombard’s Naufragé volontaire [Alone at Sea]. In his preface, V. Zakharchenko explicitly places Willis beside Heyerdahl and Bombard as an author whose endurance to overcome nature is remarkable. At the same time, the preface carefully separates Willis’s personal philosophy from the approved Soviet interpretation: some of his views are described as “alien to us, Soviet people,” while his courage, perseverance, seamanship, and devotion to his wife are said to be qualities that “cannot fail to attract us.”

The edition was designed by Fedor Viktorovich Lemkul (1914–1995), a noted Soviet illustrator of children’s books and a distinguished collector. Together with his wife, Ekaterina Petrovna Lemkul, he spent approximately thirty years assembling an important collection of Russian and European artistic glass, ranging from antiquity to the late nineteenth century. The collection, which included numerous rare and unique objects, was transferred to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in the early 1990s and became part of its Department of Private Collections.

Status: On Hold