Swimmers met John Fairfax and his 22-foot rowboat, the Britannia, in Hollywood, Fla., in 1969.

Published: February 18, 2012

From the New York Times

He crossed the Atlantic because it was there, and the Pacific because it was also there.

He made both crossings in a rowboat because it, too, was there, and because the lure of sea, spray and sinew, and the history-making chance to traverse two oceans without steam or sail, proved irresistible.

In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean.

In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost. (The couple survived the voyage, and so, for quite some time, did their romance.)

Both journeys were the subject of fevered coverage by the news media. They inspired two memoirs by Mr. Fairfax, “Britannia: Rowing Alone Across the Atlantic” and, with Ms. Cook, “Oars Across the Pacific,” both published in the early 1970s.

Mr. Fairfax died on Feb. 8 at his home in Henderson, Nev., near Las Vegas. The apparent cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Tiffany. A professional astrologer, she is his only immediate survivor. Ms. Cook, who became an upholsterer and spent the rest of her life quietly on dry land (though she remained a close friend of Mr. Fairfax), lives outside London.

For all its bravura, Mr. Fairfax’s seafaring almost pales beside his earlier ventures. Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Greene, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in.

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.

Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself. His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of adventure-based reality television.

The only child of an English father and a Bulgarian mother, John Fairfax was born on May 21, 1937, in Rome, where his mother had family; he scarcely knew his father, who worked in London for the BBC.

Seeking to give her son structure, his mother enrolled him at 6 in the Italian Boy Scouts. It was there, Mr. Fairfax said, that he acquired his love of nature — and his determination to bend it to his will.

On a camping trip when he was 9, John concluded a fight with another boy by filching the scoutmaster’s pistol and shooting up the campsite. No one was injured, but his scouting career was over.

His parents’ marriage dissolved soon afterward, and he moved with his mother to Buenos Aires. A bright, impassioned dreamer, he devoured tales of adventure, including an account of the voyage of Frank Samuelsen and George Harbo, Norwegians who in 1896 were the first to row across the Atlantic. John vowed that he would one day make the crossing alone.

At 13, in thrall to Tarzan, he ran away from home to live in the jungle. He survived there as a trapper with the aid of local peasants, returning to town periodically to sell the jaguar and ocelot skins he had collected.

He later studied literature and philosophy at a university in Buenos Aires and at 20, despondent over a failed love affair, resolved to kill himself by letting a jaguar attack him. When the planned confrontation ensued, however, reason prevailed — as did the gun he had with him.

In Panama, he met a pirate, applied for a job as a pirate’s apprentice and was taken on. He spent three years smuggling guns, liquor and cigarettes around the world, becoming captain of one of his boss’s boats, work that gave him superb navigational skills.

When piracy lost its luster, he gave his boss the slip and fetched up in 1960s London, at loose ends. He revived his boyhood dream of crossing the ocean and, since his pirate duties had entailed no rowing, he began to train.

He rowed daily on the Serpentine, the lake in Hyde Park. Barely more than half a mile long, it was about one eight-thousandth the width of the Atlantic, but it would do.

On Jan. 20, 1969, Mr. Fairfax pushed off from the Canary Islands, bound for Florida. His 22-foot craft, the Britannia, was the Rolls-Royce of rowboats: made of mahogany, it had been created for the voyage by the eminent English boat designer Uffa Fox. It was self-righting, self-bailing and partly covered.

Aboard were provisions (Spam, oatmeal, brandy); water; and a temperamental radio. There was no support boat and no chase plane — only Mr. Fairfax and the sea. He caught fish and sometimes boarded passing ships to cadge food, water and showers.

The long, empty days spawned a temporary madness. Desperate for female company, he talked ardently to the planet Venus.

On July 19, 1969 — Day 180 — Mr. Fairfax, tanned, tired and about 20 pounds lighter, made landfall at Hollywood, Fla. “This is bloody stupid,” he said as he came ashore. Two years later, he was at it again.

This time Ms. Cook, a secretary and competitive rower he had met in London, was aboard. Their new boat, the Britannia II, also a Fox design, was about 36 feet long, large enough for two though still little more than a toy on the Pacific.

“He’s always been a gambler,” Ms. Cook, 73, recalled by telephone on Wednesday. “He was going to the casino every night when I met him — it was craps in those days. And at the end of the day, adventures are a kind of gamble, aren’t they?”

Their crossing, from San Francisco to Hayman Island, Australia, took 361 days — from April 26, 1971, to April 22, 1972 — and was an 8,000-mile cornucopia of disaster.

“It was very, very rough, and our rudder got snapped clean off,” Ms. Cook said. “We were frequently swamped, and at night you didn’t know if the boat was the right way up or the wrong way up.”

Mr. Fairfax was bitten on the arm by a shark, and he and Ms. Cook became trapped in a cyclone, lashing themselves to the boat until it subsided. Unreachable by radio for a time, they were presumed lost.

For all that, Ms. Cook said, there were abundant pleasures. “The nights not too hot, sunny days when you could just row,” she recalled. “You just hear the clunking of the rowlocks, and you stop rowing and hear little splashings of the sea.”

Mr. Fairfax was often asked why he chose a rowboat to beard two roiling oceans. “Almost anybody with a little bit of know-how can sail,” he said in a profile on the Web site of the Ocean Rowing Society International, which adjudicates ocean rowing records. “I’m after a battle with nature, primitive and raw.”

Such battles are a young man’s game. With Ms. Cook, Mr. Fairfax went back to the Pacific in the mid-’70s to try to salvage a cache of lead ingots from a downed ship they had spied on their crossing. But the plan proved unworkable, and he never returned to sea.

In recent years, Mr. Fairfax made his living playing baccarat, the card game also favored by James Bond.

Baccarat is equal parts skill and chance. It lets the player wield consummate mastery while consigning him simultaneously to the caprices of fate.

Richard Holbrooke, diplomat and troubleshooter, died on December 13th, aged 69

HIS favourite book was Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick”, and it was pretty clear why. He cited Ishmael’s confession near the beginning of his memoir of the 1995 Bosnian peace talks, “To End a War”: “as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” For Richard Holbrooke the remote, the forbidden and the barbarous were as likely to be found at negotiating tables, in cold hotel rooms, or in windowless government offices where men and women struggled to sort out the world, while he banged heads.

He liked Matthew Arnold, too, and again recognised that “thirst to spend our fire and restless force/In tracking out our true, original course”. He tracked his own course through history, more than 40 years at the sharp edge of American foreign policy, working for every Democratic president since John Kennedy: a big, burly actor in his own play, glaring through wire-rimmed glasses or barking into his phone. A crowd of “close friends” eddied round him, all of whom could be nudged, flattered, tricked, and in the end—when the blue eyes hardened and the cheeks puffed out—pushed into doing what he wanted. A bastard, a bully, a bulldozer, an egoist, but also a charmer, full of heart and fun, a great guy to have dinner with, even when—as at Pamela Harriman’s in Paris in August 1995—he would get up eight or nine times from the table to take telephone calls, radiating happy self-importance.

Those calls were to organise NATO air strikes on the Bosnian Serb positions round Sarajevo. NATO was meant to operate as a collective; but in the face of the West’s craven failure to end the Bosnian war, Mr Holbrooke had more or less singlehandedly decided to play hardball with the Serbs. If they would not make concessions at the table, they would have to be beaten on the ground. He made dramatic appeals to Washington to give him “bombs for peace”. The pleas succeeded.

The Dayton peace accords, signed that December, sealed Mr Holbrooke’s fame as a diplomat. Signs of his balance and realism were everywhere, for example his insistence that the new Bosnia, despite including a Serbian republic, should be a properly multi-ethnic state. Recalling first-hand the 1968 Vietnam peace talks in Paris, held up for two months over how to seat the Vietcong, he demanded a table that would seat nine people only, not including the Bosnian Serbs. The only Serb he would deal with was Slobodan Milosevic, a “thug” he tolerated because he could be a thug himself. It was surely not immoral to talk, walk in the woods, down a pear brandy or two together, if it saved lives. As it turned out, he saved many thousands.

In Dayton and everywhere else he was a hard taskmaster, but this was no more than he demanded of himself: shuttling to and fro between continents, staying up sleepless to read a book or to watch “There’s Something About Mary” for the fifth time. When he was given a job he did it fast, on his own terms (he was not Mr Obama’s “envoy” to Afghanistan and Pakistan, too elegant a word, but his “special representative”, a much wider-ranging brief). And he expected short, direct lines of communication. As early as 1970, in a piece for the first issue of Foreign Policy (a magazine he edited from 1972 to 1977, during a Republican lull), he lamented the mushroom growth of the State Department, where internal communications were becoming “ever more time-consuming, less intelligible and less controllable”. He thus predicted four decades early the age of Wikileaks, though Wikileaks might well have doomed his tactics in Bosnia.

The impossible pursuit

Kennedy’s “ask what you can do for your country” had first got him into the foreign service, in the Mekong Delta in 1963, where he handed out cooking oil and thatching straw in a fruitless attempt to win the Vietnamese to America’s side. Like the journalist he had meant to be, before the New York Times turned him down, he always tried to talk to locals. In Pakistan he would squeeze his big frame into refugees’ tents in Swat, as relaxed as if he were cruising a Washington cocktail party, to listen to the misery of ordinary, frightened folk.

To himself and to others he seemed a natural for secretary of state, but never made it; presidents’ minds were set elsewhere. In the Obama foreign-policy cabal he sat awkwardly, a New Yorker rather than a Chicagoan, and a weary-seeming holdover from ancient Democratic regimes. His bluntness played badly in Kabul, where Hamid Karzai sometimes refused to talk or eat with him.

He always insisted that Vietnam no longer haunted him, though the similarities with Afghanistan were inescapable, not least a crushing sense of the limits of American power. Mr Holbrooke, however, still believed that America was the world’s problem-solver, and that with “all its will and all its strength” it could put the most benighted spots to rights. Even the Afghan war, perhaps, could be turned round. And so, like Ishmael, he charged boldly on:

and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

from PRINT EDITION | Obituary