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September 2026 issue

I could begin this, our Adventure Issue, with a quote by James Cook or Ernest Shackleton, but Captain Nemo has launched as many nautical escapades as real-life explorers, so let’s dive right in: “The sea is the only embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the ‘Living Infinite,’” he said in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

There’s truth in this fiction. As many adventurous seafarers know, once you cut the ties of everyday life and civilisation, the ocean can be magical. Aside from a sense of freedom, it offers true peace and contemplation – one owner told me that undertaking an Atlantic crossing had been life-altering. And then there’s the fuel it gives a hungry mind: the spectacle of a vivid South Pacific island, or a blindingly white Arctic landscape, where even sound behaves differently. There’s also the opportunity to get to know local people in a deeper way. That’s certainly true of Mike Crothers, owner of 34-metre Iceberg, who motored into a tropical cyclone in Papua New Guinea to rescue stranded islanders.

And so to the real explorers. My favourite quote by James Cook is from a letter to the Admiralty from his second voyage to the great white south, to discover a conjectured great (habitable) land mass. “If I have failed in discovering a continent, it is because it does not exist.” He was correct in context – no such habitable continent does exist – but he came within about 75 nautical miles of Antarctica, which was veiled in fog and bounded by impenetrable ice. Something about that vicinity is enormously tantalising. How close could you come to discovery? Today there are plenty of opportunities beneath the waves. And plenty more enriching encounters to enjoy along the way. Fair winds and following seas…

Caroline White
Editor

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