Seaworthy

April 17, 2006
In 1953, the 60-year-old Willis sailed a homemade balsa-wood raft over 4,000 miles across the Pacific from Peru to American Samoa, accompanied only by a cat and a foul-mouthed parrot. Novelist Pearson (Glad News of the Natural World
) gives a rousing retelling of how, along the way, Willis endured a hernia and a perforated ulcer, sewed up an artery ruptured by a shark's tooth and survived on seawater after running out of fresh. He details Willis's eccentric diets, yogic breathing exercises and mystic spirituality, his half-baked, spur-of-the-moment planning, and the uncanny luck and superhuman hardiness that saw him through the rafting crises. Pearson places Willis in the context of others who have embarked upon Kon-Tiki
–like epic raft excursions: Willis's was probably the most daring and quixotic of the bunch, undertaken not to advance a crackpot archeological theory (one Mormon-led expedition set out to prove that ancient Israelites had reached Hawaii from California), but simply to deny his own mortality. Pearson tells this incredible adventure tale in a breezy but gripping style, steeped in the lore of the sea and the perverse wisdom of a real-life ancient mariner. Photos.