Airborne: A Sentimental Journey (1976)
Atlantic High: A Celebration (1982)
Racing Through Paradise: A Pacific Passage (1987)
WindFall: The End of the Affair (1992)
Reviewed by Bill Meehan.
William F. Buckley Jr., a friend of Russell Kirk, circulated The University Bookman to National Review subscribers for a number of years. On the centenary year of Buckley’s birth, the Bookman is running reviews, old and new, of Buckley’s books in memory of the great man of letters.
A few years ago, when The University Bookman editor Gerald Russello asked some of the journal’s contributors what they’d be reading over the summer of 2019, my answer was that I’d be rereading William F. Buckley’s four books about his ocean crossings: Airborne: A Sentimental Journey (1976); Atlantic High: A Celebration (1982); Racing Through Paradise: A Pacific Passage (1987); and WindFall: The End of the Affair (1992). I had recently socialized at sunset on a Morgan 34 in the Delaware Bay and thought revisiting the sailing books fun and worthwhile; after all, they are essential to fully appreciating the National Review founder and his body of work. Moreover, as Buckley’s personal bibliographer, I knew for sure that he produced more words about his life on a sailboat than about any other topic. So, how could I run aground following the advice of one of my English professors at Hampden-Sydney College: “It’s not how much you read, gentlemen, it’s how much you reread.”
There’s really nothing “conservative” about sailing, except perhaps from the perspective that it represents the individual confronting natural elements often beyond his control, i.e., squalls and such. Buckley might not appear to be the picture of rugged individualism, but sailing requires self-reliance, determination, ingenuity—and stamina. Indeed, Buckley explains in Airborne that the challenge of putting together a crew for the first of his four ocean cruises included determining each person’s “tolerable measure of physical discomfort during a substantial part of the journey.”
Buckley remarked in an article for Yachting magazine that owing a sailboat was like “taking a shower with $100 bills,” but the “mystique of the sea” summoned a Wordsworthian nod to nature not seen in any of his other work:
You are moving at racing speed, parting the buttery sea as with a scalpel, and the waters roar by, themselves exuberantly subdued by your powers to command your way through them. Triumphalism … and the stars also seem to be singing together for joy.… The ocean and the sky and the night are suddenly alive … It is most surely another world, and a world worth knowing.
Ultimately, sailing—or “cruising” as Buckley liked to call time at the helm—is about friendship, especially at the end of the day:
When you are in a harbor, there may be four congenial people around the table, eating and drinking and conversing, listening to music and smoking cigars, the wind and the hail and the temperature outside faced up to and faced down. Here, in your secure little anchorage, is a compound of life’s social pleasures in the womb of nature.
Rereading Buckley’s books about “the mysteries [that] abound at sea” was a splendid way to occupy leisure time that summer in Lewes Beach.
So, when the National Review Institute asked me in the fall of 2024, in its preparation for the 100th anniversary of Buckley’s birth in 2025, to compile some facts and figures about the ocean crossings, I thought it a good time to, yes, reread the books a fourth time. Which was fortunate, since they’d just been rereleased by Lyons Press, with three new forewords by Christopher Buckley, the author’s son, and one by Lance Morrow, Buckley’s sailing companion for twenty-five years. My notes evolved into the following summaries of each crossing.
Dates: May 30, 1975 to June 29, 1975
Buckley wrote in the “Notes & Aside” section of National Review about his “imminent departure for thirty days,” when he would be sailing his 60-foot schooner Cyrano from Miami to Bermuda to San Miguel in the Azores and finally to the Spanish resort Marbella. “I have been hoping,” he explained, “to make such a trip for a very long time.” Fifteen years, in fact, had passed since he mentioned to a sailing companion in Maine’s York Harbor that they one day would have to cross the Atlantic. So, on May 30, and insured for $1M by Lloyd’s, the crew shoved off. A broken propeller had delayed departure nine hours, while most of the electronic instruments, including the Buckley Home Entertainment Service (i.e., TV), failed at sea. Reggie Stoops, a key member of the crew, had to leave after the first leg in Bermuda, while his college-aged replacement proved inexperienced in ocean sailing and Van Galbraith was smacked by an out-of-control winch. The crew, which included Danny Merritt and Kathleen “Bill” Taylor Finucane—Pat Buckley’s sister—endured a squall with 50-mph winds at midpoint and arrived, after 4,400 miles afloat, on June 29. The cruise was called “the Big One” or just “the BO” and took place in the same year National Review celebrated its twentieth anniversary and Buckley turned fifty. It became the subject of Airborne: A Sentimental Journey and published in 1976, the same year Saving the Queen, the first of the Blackford Oakes spy novels, became a best-seller.
Dates: May 30, 1980 to June 28, 1980
The lede to an article about to run in the July 28, 1980, issue of People magazine went in part like this: “. . . Last month he set out from the Caribbean island of St. Thomas to sail the Atlantic with four [sic] friends, four paid crew and one intrepid photographer, Christopher Little, aboard the 71-foot ketch Celestial. It was Buckley’s second such crossing . . . Why would he do it again?” The weekly’s editors wanted a one-line answer and contacted Little, who called Buckley with their request. Tell them, “The wedding night is never enough.” Five years to the day of the B.O. Buckley and crew on May 30 headed to Marbella, covering 3,800 miles of ocean in twenty-nine days. The passage was, Buckley explained, “an experience about which many people dream . . . a venture in companionship at sea.” The cruise was beset with mechanical breakdowns from the radio to the weather-mapping printer to the navigational Plath computer to an innovative speedometer, along with the “truly grave” situation of running out of ice on the 500-mile first leg to Bermuda. On top of those malfunctions, the crew faced seven-foot swells and heavy winds on day two and later, over four days, “the damnedest, steadiest, hardest most sustained wind” Buckley could recall. As with the first crossing, the crew—Van Galbraith (St. Thomas to the Azores), Reggie Stoops, Danny Merritt, Tony Leggett, Dick Clurman (St. Thomas to Bermuda), and Tom Wendel (Azores to Marbella)—were required to keep “a loquacious journal” from which Buckley drew for the book, Atlantic High: A Celebration, published by Doubleday.
Dates: June 2, 1985 to June 30, 1985
It was on an overnight Friday sail aboard Patito, the 36-foot sloop he acquired after selling Cyrano, that Buckley made the decision. They were anchored at Eatons Neck on Long Island and, when the conversation turned to ocean cruising, Danny Merritt said he had no interest in sailing across the Atlantic a third time. “How about the Pacific?” Buckley asked. “That’s different,” Merritt answered. This time, however, Buckley wanted not a cruise but a passage. So he and the crew—Christopher Buckley, Dick Clurman, Van Galbraith, Merritt, Reggie Stoops, and photographer Christopher Little—would depart Honolulu on June 2, at 4:00 p.m. BWT (Buckley Watch Time, when clocks are moved ahead one hour, resulting in cocktails at sunset and dinner under the stars), and sail 4,400 miles to New Guinea. Among the provisions were twenty-eight cases of wine, fifty cases of beer, one case of champagne, and at Buckley’s request one-hundred packs of “divine” Swedish crackers. Enroute, the U.S. military staff at Johnston Atoll refused the boat a slip; the anchor became wedged in a chunk of coral; several squalls with 25 to 50 mph winds damaged the mainsail and genoa; the boat crashed into a dead whale; and Buckley encountered “navigational anomalies” with WhatStar and a GPS system. After crossing the equator twenty-eight days later, Sealestial arrived on June 30 at Kavieng. The title for Buckley’s Pacific passage came from Christopher’s journal: a complaint that his father’s tempo made it seem like they were racing through paradise.
Dates: November 5, 1990 to December 5, 1990
It was National Review’s thirty-fifth anniversary gala and Buckley had just surprised the audience by announcing his retirement from the journal he founded. He neatly segued into more personal remarks in characteristic style: “Since you were so kind to ask after my personal plans.” In one month, on November 5, he would set sail on the route of Christopher Columbus, 4,400 miles from Lisbon to Barbados. The passage held “a special allure” for Buckley: in the Age of Sail it was “the great superhighway at sea” connecting the Old World and the New. Called “Ocean4,” its crew consisted of Leg One: Danny Merritt, Dick Clurman, Van Galbraith, Tony Leggett, and photographer Christopher Little; and Leg Two: Christopher Buckley, Bill Draper, and Douglas Brendan joined Merritt and Galbraith. At 1:00 a.m. on Day 3 and for the next thirty-six hours a violent squall exposed defective rigging on Sealestial. The crew, thrown about and smacked by flailing lines, was in apparent danger. Buckley called it “a bloody nightmare” and took responsibility for “a tactical mistake” that allowed such bruising instability on the boat. More than half way into the 30-day cruise, Buckley was sharing the midnight to 4:00 watch with son Christo, who turned and said, “Happy birthday, Pup.” It was a special sixty-fifth, for the Pacific crossing marked the deepening of a father-son relationship after a short estrangement. Sealestial docked on December 5, and a month later in Switzerland Buckley started writing: “It is what the sea does to my friends and me that incurs in me this felt obligation to let others in on it all, hoping that they might feel some of the balm my friends and I came home with.” Buckley’s tribute to the crossing was published by Random House in 1992 and titled WindFall, with the apt subtitle The End of the Affair.
Before setting sail from Bermuda in 1980, Buckley submitted a column he titled “See You Later.” He explained that he would be taking a two-week vacation from the syndication and be incommunicado for eleven days: “During that period President Carter, Senator Kennedy, the airlines, the people who spend their days profaning the English of King James, may perform their abominations safe in the knowledge that there will be no reproach from me.” He closed the piece with a friendly warning: “The chances, then, are overwhelming that, like MacArthur, I shall return. In the meantime, the Republic is on probation.” In other words, Buckley would be “standing athwart” but not “yelling Stop” for a few days.
To withstand the languor of hot and breezeless hours at sea when he wasn’t in the cockpit, the man who feared boredom and had never sailed for more than seven days maintained a vigorous schedule. Buckley organized his professional life around deadlines, and sailing across an ocean for a month was no reason to slack off. Buckley kept busy at sea by whittling away at the “awesome volume” of mail he received or by reading manuscripts and books. All the while listening to classical music (Bach, mostly) or Dick Wellstood’s jazz piano recordings.
He answered “the growing mound of letters” next to the large armchair in the owner’s stateroom on Sealestial partly “because I desire to do so, in part because, as editor of a journal of opinion of ambitious political-intellectual reach, I feel I should do so; in part because my journal, and to a degree my ideology, are mendicant in their posture toward the various tribunals that judge us and the readers that sustain us.” Buckley’s replies, ashore and afloat, were neatly expressed. “The key,” he pointed out, “is brevity.” A selection of his concise correspondence usually appeared every two weeks in the Notes & Asides section of National Review, a collection eventually anthologized in Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.
On the first crossing, Buckley also made it through Moby-Dick and polished the final draft of Saving the Queen. On the third, he read Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October; some of Revolution in Time by David Landes; the galleys for a novel by Louis Auchincloss; and the manuscripts for Van Galbraith’s memoir as ambassador to France and Richard Clurman’s analysis of the national news media. And, on the fourth ocean sail, Buckley proofed the galleys for Tucker’s Last Stand, his ninth spy novel, and reviewed the manuscript for son Christopher’s Wet Work.
Moreover, buried in “the hunk of mail” on the fourth crossing was a lengthy letter from author Sam Tanenhaus, whose prolific research on a Whittaker Chambers biography Buckley had endorsed. Wrote Buckley, “I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am for your extraordinary kindness in writing to me in such detail. Not only because I find what you say engrossing, but because I read it with enhanced appreciation, knowing how it must drain you to bring it all together. . . . I write from a boat . . . three thousand miles to go.” Notably, shortly after the Chambers book was published in 1997, Buckley named Tanenhaus his official biographer, and mirabile dictu the long-awaited Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America is expected to hit the bookstores in June.
An elegant jet-setter with a flair for literary journalism, Buckley had few rivals in the art of travel writing, especially when it came to sailing. A master storyteller, he adeptly wove devices of fiction together with reportage to craft entertaining narratives full of exuberance and authority. Buckley wrote candidly about misadventures at sea, such as when a malfunctioning compass landed his boat on a rocky shoal off Rhode Island, and the Coast Guard said, “Sorry, we can’t help you.” Still, he writes in Airborne, “it is singularly gratifying to steer a boat, whether out at sea in troubled waters, or gliding into a dock, preferably stopping before you hit it.”
After racing for about ten years, Buckley became disenchanted with that aspect of the yachting world and decided to spend his time “cruising” on BWT. Sailing was integral to Buckley’s life and, starting when he was thirteen, spanned nearly seven decades. Buckley’s sailing literature—which attracted an audience far beyond the followers of his magazine National Review, his syndicated column “On the Right,” and his television show “Firing Line”—is a significant component of his œuvre.
Bill Meehan is editor of William F. Buckley Jr.: A Bibliography, Conversations with William F. Buckley Jr., and Getting About: Travel Writings of William F. Buckley Jr.
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