56 Books Like Two Against Cape Horn

This is a hero’s journey, right out of Joseph Campbell: a young man goes to sea, circumnavigates the globe, and experiences marvel after marvel of nature. What he learns on his journey matures into a kind of wisdom that transforms the world.

Darwin’s adventures keep me on the edge of my seat; his descriptions seduce me; his ideas inspire me. I want to be there with him as he recoils from the horrors of slavery in Brazil or observes the aftermath of a Chilean earthquake. And I feel I truly am with him, collecting birds and lizards on the islands of the Galapagos, as he begins to divine the answer to one of the greatest mysteries of the world.

As a young teacher in Buenos Aires, two of my students were the Goodall sisters, direct descendants of Anglican missionary and pioneer Thomas Bridges, who settled on the north shore of the Beagle Channel in 1886. Thomas’s second son Lucas’s account of life at Harberton Estancia – which truly was at the edge of the world at that time – is a luminous but saddening account of the last days of the Ona, Selknam, and Yahgan peoples. It’s full of sailing adventures too. As we threaded our way through snow-lined Acwalisnan Channel – between the Beagle and the Straits of Magellan – we leafed to page 113 of our sepia-illustrated 1949 edition of the book. We read how Lucas became the first European to pass this way, with his Yahgan friend Acwalisnan as pilot. I’m hoping to catch up with Abigail Goodall, whom I last saw in 1981, this (southern)… show more.

Bill Tilman was a war hero and an accomplished Himalayan climber – reaching 27,000 feet on Everest without oxygen in 1938 – who turned in later life to sailing as a means of accessing obscure mountain ranges. In 1956 he sailed his Bristol Channel pilot cutter (Mischief) from England to the Chilean channels and made the first successful crossing of the Patagonian ice cap. Tilman was likely not easy to get on with – he tolerates no women on board, and on this particular cruise we never learn the first name of his deputy – but his writing is erudite and amusingly self-deprecating. This narrative concludes with the dry comment: “Ships are all right – it's the men in them.” Tilman sailed to the very end. He disappeared at sea in 1977, in his eightieth year, en route to climb a remote island peak in Antarctica. Would that… show more.

In 1986, New Zealander Gerry Clark set off on what would turn out to be a three-year circumnavigation of Antarctica aboard his home-built plywood yacht Totorore. The ostensible objective was a study of seabirds – notably albatrosses – but this is no ornithological treatise. In the Chilean channels and the intricate waterways around Tierra del Fuego, Totorore and her crew lurch from one near disaster to another, each recounted Tilman-like in an understated style. Later, he is dismasted twice and the voyage becomes a desperate struggle for survival. We were lucky enough to meet Gerry – and have him sign a copy of this book – in 1990; it’s rightly described as “one of the most remarkable small boat adventures of all time.” Tototore and crew disappeared one night in 1999, en route to retrieve satellite transmitters from albatrosses on Antipodes Island, off New Zealand. 

We know Sterling Hayden mostly as a Hollywood movie actor – at least 40 film roles. Hollywood was his income, sailing was his love. At 6 ‘4” he was bigger than most in his life’s accomplishments. I think of him first as a maverick adventurer and a proponent of personal freedom, then second as an actor, and finally as a terrific author, that being his true legacy and one I would be glad to emulate. He lived a more than a full life and in his final days settled in Sausalito, CA and in 1976 wrote Voyage. He lived much of his life on ships and sailed around the world twice and more, so he knew about what he wrote in Voyage.

The paperback version that I treasure in my library is 700 pages of fine print and each page a detailed education about a ship, her crew,… show more.

I loved this book because it fictionalized a “real” sailboat race around the world: what was then called The Whitbread, rebranded as the Volvo Ocean Race and now known as The Ocean Race.

The characters are true to life and the sailing details are both right and thrilling. I would not want to race around the world (or even across my local waters) with any of them, but their quirks and willingness to push the boundaries make for a rollicking story. 

I like this book because it was the first book I read as a child about sailing around the world. It filled me with a sense of adventure that ignited in me a desire to do the same while also filling me with a sense of dread.

Unfortunately, I focused more on the romance of the story than on the reality. 

You do not have to be a lover of seafaring novels to enjoy Dana’s memoir and his vivid descriptions of people and places. Two Years Before the Mast is a masterpiece of writing. As an Englishman, I have always enjoyed reading American prose; Steinbeck, Hemingway, Melville, they seem to write clearly and to the point without the long-windedness of some authors. 

How times have changed since the days when Dana was a seaman, (even when I was at sea in the 1950s 60s, and 70s) to today’s conditions for seafarers. My nephew who is a chief engineer with BP has the same amount of leave as the time he spends at sea, (4 months max) with the internet, skyping, and Netflix. He is highly paid and flown home first class. My contract was for 12 months, no leisure facilities on the ship, a letter now and then, and a train… show more.

Patrick O’Brian is the master of nautical fiction. I enjoyed every one of his Aubrey—Maturin series but this one shines out.

I believe that, in maritime fiction, the sea should be its own character, and this book brings to life every face of it. His intricate prose captures the daily life onboard Napoleonic-era ships in painstaking detail and throws the reader into a totally immersive world.

But mostly, I love how this book embodies the friendship between Jack and Stephen. Although they are such different characters, they have such a beautiful connection and when they are separated from their ship, they rely on each other to survive.

I love exploring the various relationships of men and women, in platonic, familial, and romantic senses. 

Neither novel nor travel book, this classic journey defies category.

Purportedly a quest for a scrap of giant slothskin, which the author finds in a cave in southern Chile, it zig-zags through time and space, alighting on travellers from Magellan to Butch Cassidy, while trampling down conventional boundaries.

“Everyone says: ‘Are you writing a novel?’ No, I’m writing a story and I do rather insist that things must be called stories. That seems to me to be what they are. I don’t quite know the meaning of the word novel.”