Hardship, Survival, and Adventure Theme Analysis

Everyone warned us against it. Grandma came visiting and stayed onboard. It was all quite ridiculous, she said, reckless, irresponsible. […] Icebergs, hurricanes, pirates, whales, supertankers, freak waves — she heaped up horror upon horror, thinking to frighten me and so frighten off my mother and father. She succeeded in terrifying me, all right, but I never showed it. What she didn’t understand was that we three were already bound together now by a common lunacy. We were going, and nothing and no one could stop us. We were doing what people do in fairy tales. We were going off to seek adventure.

Stella Artois barked her farewells at them, and at every boat we passed in The Solent. But as we were sailing out past the Isle of Wight, she fell strangely quiet. Maybe she sensed, as we did, that there was no turning back now. This was not a dream. We were off around the world. It was real, really real.

Mom gets quite snappy with us sometimes when we don’t do things right. Dad doesn’t seem to mind, not out here, not at sea. He just winks at me and we forget about it. They play a lot of chess together, when it’s calm enough. Dad's winning so far, five games to three. Mom says it doesn't bother her, but it does. I can tell.

We only spent a couple of days in La Coruña. Mom slept a lot. She was really tired. Dad did some work on the rudder cable while we were there. He’s still not happy with it, though. We set off for the Azores two days ago.

We passed south of an island called St. Helena a few days ago. No need to stop. Nothing much there, except it's the place where Napoléon was exiled. He died there. Lonely place to die. So, of course, I had to do a history project on Napoléon. […]

I saw a sail today, another yacht. We shouted Merry Christmas and waved, and Stella barked her head off, but they were too far away. When the sail disappeared, the sea felt suddenly very empty.

Off Perth, Australia. Until today it has been nothing but empty ocean all the way from Africa. I love it more and more when it’s just us and Peggy Sue and the sea. We all do, I think. But then, when we sight land, we always get so excited. When we saw Australia for the first time, we hugged one another and jumped up and down. It’s like we’re the first sailors ever to discover it.

But I was happy to get back to the Peggy Sue. I missed her while I was gone, like I miss Eddie.

I’ve been sending him cards, funny animal cards, if I can find them. I sent him one of a wombat. I saw a wombat too, and hundreds of possums and tons of kangaroos. And they’ve got white cockatoos in Australia like we’ve got sparrows at home — millions of them.

But out here it’s gulls again. Wherever we’ve been in the world there’s always gulls.

The sun was blazing down. I had not really felt the burning heat of it until then. I scanned the horizon. If there was a sail somewhere out there in the haze, I could not see it. And then it came to me that even if I were to see a sail, what could I do? I couldn’t light a fire. I had no matches. I knew about cavemen rubbing sticks together, but I had never tried it. I looked all round me now. Sea. Sea. Sea.

Nothing but sea on all sides. I was on an island. I was alone.

Until now, except for occasional gut-wrenching pangs of homesickness and loneliness, I had by and large managed to keep my spirits up. But not any-more. […] I felt more and more isolated, more and more wretched. In the end I decided not to go onto Watch Hill anymore, that it just was not worth it. Instead I stayed in my cave and curled up on my sleeping mat for long hours during the day. I lay there drowning in my misery, thinking of nothing but the hopelessness of it all, how I would never get off this island, how I would die here, and my mother and father would never even know what had happened to me. No one would, except the old man, the madman, my captor, my persecutor.