Harold William 'Bill' Tilman (1898-1977) was among the greatest adventurers of his time, a pioneering mountaineer and navigator who held exploration above all else.
The son of a Liverpool sugar importer, Tilman joined the army at seventeen and was twice awarded the Military Cross for bravery during WWI. After the war Tilman left for Africa, establishing himself as a coffee grower. He met Eric Shipton and they began their famed mountaineering partnership, traversing Mount Kenya and climbing Kilimanjaro.
He was the first European to climb in the remote Assam Himalaya, delved into Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor and explored extensively in Nepal, all the while developing a mountaineering style characterised by its simplicity and emphasis on exploration.
It was perhaps logical that Tilman would eventually buy the pilot cutter Mischief, not with the intention of retiring from travelling, but to access remote mountains. For twenty-two years he sailed Mischief and her successors in search of them- to Patagonia, where he made the first easterly crossing of the ice cap, to Baffin Island to make the first ascent of Mount Raleigh, to Greenland, Spitsbergen, and islands in the far Southern Ocean, before disappearing in the South Atlantic in 1977.

J.R.L.Anderson's High Mountains and Cold Seas draws on a wealth of personal correspondence between Tilman-a compulsive letter writer-and his immediate family and close friends, crafting the first detailed account of the extraordinary life of this remarkable, but very private individual.

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One of the great sailing and exploration adventures.

Tilman, well in to his fifties, progressed from sailing a 14-foot dinghy to his own 45-foot pilot cutter Mischief, readied for her deep-sea voyaging, and recruited a crew for his most ambitious of private expeditions. Well past her prime, Mischief carried Tilman, along with an ex-dairy farmer, two army officers and a retired civil servant, safely the length of the North and South Atlantic oceans, and through the notoriously difficult Magellan Strait, against strong prevailing winds, to their icy landfall in the far south of Chile.

The shore party spent six weeks crossing the Patagonian ice cap, in both directions, returning to find that their vessel had suffered a broken propeller. Edging north under sail only, Mischief put into Valparaiso for repairs, and finally made it home to Lymington via the Panama Canal, for a total of 20,000 nautical miles sailed.

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With unclimbed ice-capped peaks and anchorages that could at best be described as challenging, the Southern Ocean island groups of Crozet and Kerguelen provided obvious destinations for Tilman and his fifty-year-old wooden pilot cutter Mischief. His previous attempt to land in the Crozet Islands had been abandoned when their only means of landing was carried away by a severe storm in the Southern Ocean.

Tilman’s account of landfalls on these tiny remote volcanic islands, bears testament to the development of his ocean navigation skills and seamanship. The accounts of the island anchorages, their snow-covered heights, geology and in particular the flora and fauna pay tribute to the varied interests and ingenuity of Mischief’s crew, not least after several months at sea when food supplies needed to be eked out.....

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First published fifty years before political correctness became an accepted rule, Mischief in Greenland is a treasure trove of Tilman’s observational wit.
In this account of his first two West Greenland voyages, he pulls no punches with regard to the occasional failings, leaving the reader to seek out and discover the numerous achievements of these voyages. The highlight of the second voyage was the identification, surveying and successful first ascent of Mount Raleigh, first observed on the eastern coast of Baffin Island.

For the many sailors and climbers who have since followed his lead and ventured north into those waters, Tilman provides much practical advice.
Tilman’s typical gift of understatement belies his position as one of the greatest explorers and adventurers of the twentieth century.

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Mostly Mischief’s ordinary title belies four more extraordinary voyages made by H.W. ‘Bill’ Tilman covering almost 25,000 miles in both Arctic and Antarctic waters.

The first sees the pilot cutter Mischief retracing the steps of Elizabethan explorer John Davis to the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage. Tilman and a companion land on the north coast and make the hazardous crossing of Bylot Island while the remainder of the crew make the eventful passage to the southern shore to recover the climbing party. Back in England, Tilman refuses to accept the condemnation of Mischief’s surveyor, undertaking costly repairs before heading back to sea for a first encounter with the East Greenland ice.

Between June 1964 and September 1965, Tilman is at sea almost without a break. Two eventful voyages to East Greenland in Mischief provide the entertaining bookends to his account of the five-month voyage in the Southern Ocean as skipper of the schooner Patanela.
Tilman had been hand-picked by the expedition leader as the navigator best able to land a team of Australian and New Zealand climbers and scientists on Heard Island, a tiny volcanic speck in the Furious Fifties devoid of safe anchorages and capped by an unclimbed glaciated peak.

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MISCHIEF GOES SOUTH
'Every Herring should Hang by its own tail'. (1968)
By H W Tilman. Paperback, 158mm x 215mm, 194 pages. This Edition Published 2015. 0.33 kg

In 1966, after a succession of eventful and successful voyages in the high latitudes of the Arctic, Tilman and his pilot cutter Mischief head south again, this time with the Antarctic Peninsula, Smith Island and the unclimbed Mount Foster in their sights.
Mischief goes South is an account of a voyage marred by tragedy and dogged by crew trouble from the start.
Tilman gives ample insight into the difficulties associated with his selection of shipmates and his supervision of a crew, as he wryly notes, ‘to have four misfits in a crew of five is too many’.

The second part of this volume contains the account of a gruelling voyage south, an account left unwritten for ten years for lack of time and energy. Originally intended as an expedition to the remote Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, this 1957 voyage evolved into a circumnavigation of Africa, the unplanned consequence of a momentary lapse in attention by an inexperienced helmsman.

The two voyages described in Mischief goes South covered 43,000 miles over twenty-five months spent at sea.

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IN MISCHIEF"S WAKE
'In the Joy of the Actors Lies the Sense of Any Action. That Is the Explanation, That the Excuse. ' (1971)
By H W Tilman. Paperback, 158mm x 215mm, 171 pages. This Edition Published 2015. 0.30 kg

The first of the three voyages described in In Mischief’s Wake gives H.W. ‘Bill’ Tilman’s account of the final voyage and loss of Mischief, the Bristol Channel pilot cutter in which he had sailed over 100,000 miles to high latitudes in both Arctic and Antarctic waters.

Back home, refusing to accept defeat and going against the advice of his surveyor, he takes ownership of Sea Breeze, built in 1899; ‘a bit long in the tooth, but no more so, in fact a year less, than her prospective owner’.
After extensive remedial work, his first attempt at departure had to be cut short when the crew ‘enjoyed a view of the Isle of Wight between two of the waterline planks’.

After yet more expense, Sea Breeze made landfall in Iceland before heading north toward the East Greenland coast in good shape and well stocked with supplies. A mere forty miles from the entrance to Scoresby Sound, Tilman’s long-sought-after objective, ‘a polite mutiny’ forced him to abandon the voyage and head home.

The following year, with a crew game for all challenges, a series of adventures on the west coast of Greenland gave Tilman a voyage he considered ‘certainly the happiest’, in a boat which was proving to be a worthy successor to his beloved Mischief.

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Three more voyages, ‘the first comparatively humdrum, the second totally disastrous, and the third exceedingly troublesome’.
The first voyage describes Tilman’s 1971 attempt to reach East Greenland’s remote and mountainous Scoresby Sound. The largest fjord system in the world was named after the Whitby whaling captain, William Scoresby, who first charted the coastline in 1822. Scoresby’s two volume Account of the Arctic Regions provided much of the historical inspiration for Tilman’s northern voyages and fuelled his fascination with Scoresby Sound.

With a good crew aboard in 1971, it was particularly frustrating for Tilman to find the boat blocked by impenetrable ice off the entrance to the fjord. He refused to give up; his obsession with Scoresby Sound continued in 1972 and after a series of unfortunate events Sea Breeze ended up between a rock and an ice floe with a failed engine and a disastrous outcome.

Safely back home in Wales, the inevitable search for a new boat began. ‘One cannot buy a biggish boat as if buying a piece of soap. The act is almost as irrevocable as marriage and should be given as much thought’. The 1902 Pilot Cutter Baroque, after not inconsiderable expense, proved equal to the challenge after Tilman’s first troublesome voyage in her to West Greenland in 1973....

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A younger, less experienced crew join Tilman in 1975, this time heading north along Greenland’s west coast until a break in the boom necessitates the abandonment of the objective and an early return. ‘ The following year proves to be Tilman’s last voyage in his own boat.

Tilman never expected crews to pay, covering all the costs of his voyages personally. He therefore held the quite reasonable view that his crew would pull their weight, show loyalty to the ship and take the rough with the smooth. Sadly, the crew in 1976 fell far short of that expectation, forcing several changes of plan and eventually obliging Tilman to leave Baroque in Iceland. Not for the first time in Tilman’s remarkable 140,000 miles of voyaging is he moved to quote Conrad: ‘Ships are all right, it's the men in them.’

Tilman set a high standard and led by example; where his companions rose to the challenge, as they did in the majority of his expeditions, the results were often remarkable.

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Sailing Alone around the World is the extraordinary story of one man's courage and resourcefulness, and has an enduring and universal appeal as a landmark of world adventure. Stanfords Travel Classics feature some of the finest historical travel writing in the English language, with authors hailing from both sides of the Atlantic

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Perhaps the title of this book, (Bernard Moitessier's first), should have been "Sailing on the Reefs'--for that is exactly what he did, almost unbelievably, twice.
After finding his beloved Marie-Therese, a beautiful junk in the Gulf of Siam, he set off across the Indian Ocean for Africa and eventually the Caribbean. Eighty days or so into the trip, Moitessier and Marie-Therese found themselves on the reef at Diego Garcia.

It took Moitessier just nine months to build Marie-Therese II from scratch in Mauritius with no boat plans or power tools. From her launch he sailed her down to South Africa. His observations during a stay of almost two years are as interesting as the people he met and the innovative boat improvements he came up with. Unfortunately, he and Marie-Therese II managed to end up on the rocks near St. Vincent in the Caribbean.
In between these two heartbreaking disasters is a tale of courage, resourcefulness, and creativity. It is told with refreshing honesty, in which Moitessier, still really an apprentice sailor, admits his blunders. And it is told with marvelous humor.

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YARNS, NARRATIVES AND BIOGRAPHIES. Page Eight. TRISTAN JONES, JOSHUA SLOCUM, BERNARD MOITESSIER, BILL TILMAN See also Shipwrecks and Maritime Disasters See also Other Nautical Tales Return to Top of Page