Seul, à travers l’Atlantique
One of the first 15 copies on Japanese paper (no. 10).
Accompanied by a set of original prints: the Firecrest departing from Cannes in 1923; the Firecrest arriving at Le Havre in 1929, docked at Cherbourg before its dramatic transport in 1930; the launch of the Alain Gerbault in 1932; together with various views of Gerbault at Cannes, or sailing along the coasts and rivers of France.
In 1907, Jack London, his wife Charmian and a crew of amateurs set sail from San Francisco aboard the Snark, a 17-meter sailboat built for the voyage, bound for Sydney. A sailor at heart, London reached Hawaii, visited Polynesia, then set course for the most remote islands of Melanesia before reaching Australia. This Pacific crossing gave rise to L’Aventureuse ou Les Contes des mers du Sud and, above all, Martin Eden.
These accounts fascinated and haunted Alain Gerbault, who, after the First World War, could think of nothing but a solo sailing adventure. A distinguished fighter pilot during the war, he received two citations for gallantry, including one praising his “remarkable audacity” after single-handedly attacking an enemy patrol of three aircraft deep behind enemy lines, downing one and returning with his plane pierced by more than twenty bullets. Assigned to the École nationale des ponts et chaussées from March 1919, he found little enthusiasm for a career as an engineer. He devoted himself instead to tennis, a sport he had played since childhood: French schoolboy tennis champion in 1913, he won the Dinard tournament three times, reached the doubles final at Roland-Garros and the World Championships in 1921 with Pierre Albarran — his partner at bridge as well as tennis — and was a finalist at the Monte-Carlo tournament in 1922.
But the dream of adventure prevailed. In 1921 he resolved to change his life and set out to acquire a racing yacht, traveling to Cowes in England, where he found the Firecrest (named after a small bird, the firecrest), built for racing in 1892. A 12-meter yacht entirely unsuited to solo sailing, it mattered little to Gerbault. He brought it back to Cannes, where he met the young sailor Ella Maillart, and spent all of 1922 training in the Mediterranean before setting off alone, anonymously and without publicity, from Cannes on 25 April 1923. Three weeks later he reached Gibraltar. Departing again on 6 June, he completed the first solo west-to-east crossing of the Atlantic under sail, reaching New York in 101 days, on 14 September 1923 — a remarkable feat given the sailing conditions of the time.
He continued his voyage, reaching the Pacific on 11 June 1925, and returned triumphantly to the port of Le Havre on 27 July 1929. He thus became the first sailor to cross the Atlantic solo under sail, an account he gives in this Seul, à travers l’Atlantique, and the first Frenchman to complete a solo circumnavigation of the globe under sail, which he recounted in L’Évangile du soleil (Fasquelle, 1932), a vehement denunciation of the harm inflicted by Western civilization on indigenous peoples. He summed up his view bluntly: “There is a race that fucks and a race that gets fucked, but what I really think is too crude, and only a Céline could write it!”