Suzanne Heywood · 2023 · sea

Suzanne Heywood was seven when her father sailed the family out of Plymouth in 1976 to retrace Captain Cook's voyages. It was meant to take three years and took ten - fifty thousand miles, a fractured skull in the Indian Ocean, almost no schooling, and a childhood nobody ashore was checking on. She got herself to Oxford at eighteen.

1. 1
   Plymouth

   July 1976, and a Midlands hotelier who has decided to retrace Captain Cook's voyages sails a seventy-foot schooner out of Plymouth with his wife and two children - Suzanne is seven, Jon is four, and it is meant to take three years.

2. 2
   Las Palmas

   South to the Canaries and the trade winds, the standard first hop of any circumnavigation - and the last point at which the trip still looks like the adventure that was advertised to everybody.

3. 3
   Cape Town

   Down the Atlantic past Tristan da Cunha to South Africa - and then east into the Southern Ocean, which is where a family yacht stops being a family yacht and becomes something more serious.

4. 4
   Ile Amsterdam

   The remotest inhabited place on earth, and the wave: a knockdown in the Indian Ocean that stoves in the deck and fractures Suzanne's skull - the incident her father later wrote up as I'm not afraid to die if we are all together.

5. 5
   Mooloolaba

   Queensland, and the pattern that will run for a decade - repairs, paying guests, and a girl teaching herself from correspondence courses on a chart table because no state anywhere takes an interest in whether she is at school.

6. 6
   Tauranga

   New Zealand, where they keep coming back - the Bay of Plenty, kiwifruit country, and a country Suzanne begins to think of as the closest thing she has to somewhere she is from.

7. 7
   Suva

   Fiji, and the years of zig-zagging the Pacific: Tonga, New Caledonia, Vanuatu and the John Frum cargo cult, with nobody ashore knowing where the boat is most of the time.

8. 8
   Honiara

   The Solomons, and the far edge of it - reefs the boat is repeatedly put onto, and the growing understanding that the voyage has no end date because her father does not want one.

9. 9
   Lake Rotoiti

   1986: at sixteen she is driven to a cold bach on the lake and left there to mind her brother while her parents take paying guests sailing - and stays almost a year, studying alone and picking kiwifruit to eat.

10. 10
    Oxford

    At eighteen she gets herself a place at Oxford and comes home - fifty thousand miles and ten years after Plymouth, having spent her entire childhood on a boat and taught herself almost everything she knows.