View Full Version : Tristan Jones
Hi all.
I want to recomend HEART OF OAK, by TRISTAN JONES.
I have already advised Karen that to understand the breaking down of a civilian boy and the building of a matelot into something awsome this book is a must.
As I explained to Karen, read the foreword before you go further than the first page, It might not be for you.
However it is the nearest account of reality in the Andrew that I have found, ( warts and all ).
Everything from THIS OLD HAT OF MINE tO tHE LOBSTER SONG, and everything in between.
I hesitated before recomending it to Karen, but her signature is a St Vincent motto which is significant.
Also her dad, dear old departed Chalky sang the songs as loud as everyone else on the returning bus after sports day.
He, like me and thousands of others, used the ripe language of the lower deck to release lots of built up tension from our way of life, and it was, to a great extent was left behind when times got better in civy street
This book brings everything back with a bang.
God bless you Tristan, wherever you are.
Paddy
Hi Paddy
Thankyou so very much for that....much appreciated.....Book will be with me in about a week....so looking forward to reading it.
If dear Dad was still here he probably would not need reminding of any of it
Thanks again Paddy for remembering My Dear Dad.
Karen
Batstiger
30-11-2009, 22:45
It's a great book Karen, I have read it twice!
Bob.
It's a great book Karen, I have read it twice!
Bob.
A buzz is going round in the familly now that I am into tristan Jones books and they are all raking the internet for my aproaching birthday and xmas.
Of course it will be a terrific surprise when I unwrap.
Buzzes get out don't they.
Paddy
A buzz is going round in the familly now that I am into tristan Jones books and they are all raking the internet for my aproaching birthday and xmas.
Of course it will be a terrific surprise when I unwrap.
Buzzes get out don't they.
Paddy
By the way,,,
Tristan Jones died in 1995 in I belive Saigon, having lost both legs some years before, ( probably due to blue liners ).
I gather he did good work out there for limbless children up to shortly before his death.
Paddy.
Hi Paddy
Thankyou so very much for that....much appreciated.....Book will be with me in about a week....so looking forward to reading it.
If dear Dad was still here he probably would not need reminding of any of it
Thanks again Paddy for remembering My Dear Dad.
Karen
Hi Karen.
Have you read the book yet ? , if you have I apologise now for songs and naval vocabulary, not realy fit for a lady but just cover your ears when you sing the songs.
Although I suspect the female part of the modern navy have their own songs and sing them louder.
Paddy
Hi Paddy
Should be with me on 23rd Dec.....I will get myself some ear plugs....Perhaps when I start reading it I might forget I am a Lady...Not to worry..Looking forward very much to reading it.
Karen
Hi Paddy....
Book recieved.....Now have started to read it.....See what you mean...but it certainly makes you realize...
thanks...
Guz rating
28-12-2009, 14:22
Dear Karen and Paddy,
I have managed to get a copy of "Hearts Of Oak" one of the best books I
have read from the lower deck point of view. I joined up sixteen years after Tristan, unfortunately things had not improved perceptively since his time. It has always been a mystery to me the train of thought that the worst you treat people the better you make them.
To my knowledge I have never read a book twice, but this one I will. Thank you Paddy for the recommendation this one really hit the spot.
I hope you both have a great New Year.
Alan
Hi Paddy
Should be with me on 23rd Dec.....I will get myself some ear plugs....Perhaps when I start reading it I might forget I am a Lady...Not to worry..Looking forward very much to reading it.
Karen
Hi Karen.
The familly, having got wind of my interest in Tristan Jones, found it a good idea for xmas pressys. I now have 9 of his books. Unfortunatly I already have 3 thickish books on loan from the library. Should keep me busy doing nothing for some time.
I hope you had time to read yours.
Paddy.
Dear Karen and Paddy,
I have managed to get a copy of "Hearts Of Oak" one of the best books I
have read from the lower deck point of view. I joined up sixteen years after Tristan, unfortunately things had not improved perceptively since his time. It has always been a mystery to me the train of thought that the worst you treat people the better you make them.
To my knowledge I have never read a book twice, but this one I will. Thank you Paddy for the recommendation this one really hit the spot.
I hope you both have a great New Year.
Alan.
They used to say,,,
A dog, a woman and a walnut tree,
The more you beat them, the better they be.
Do we add 15 year old boys ?
I know it works with the tree but I shrink from the others.
Paddy.
Hi Paddy... well I see what you mean...but very interesting and realistic....trying to find time in between working....just up to half way now..but find it difficult to pull myself away from reading it...
thanks again for reccomending it to me....I can picture my dear dad singing away to the songs....
Karen
Hi Paddy... well I see what you mean...but very interesting and realistic....trying to find time in between working....just up to half way now..but find it difficult to pull myself away from reading it...
thanks again for reccomending it to me....I can picture my dear dad singing away to the songs....
Karen
Happy new year Karen.
Those songs could normally only be sung with the help of something like a drop of Bermudan Black Seal rum, 6 shillngs a brown half gallon jar,
This at a time when the likes of Captain Morgan, Lemon Heart etc sold at £1 a bottle.
It was the opinion of the singer, that it not only lubricated the vocal chords but also improved the tone and volume of said voice.
I drink hardly at all these days but the ocaisional drop of Nelsons blood serves to re-open the window of my memory and bring those great days back, in fact, just the smell is enough.
Paddy
Happy New Year also to you Paddy..
Yes I know what you are saying....Dad has always said it Lubricates the vocal chords...also a little drop now and then would also get the Grey Matter moveing.....To this day he still has a bottle of Capatain Morgans in the lounge...and as I don't drink..will have to use it up in the cooking....
I trust you had a good christmas and a happy new year with the Family...I had an excellent time...but missed my Dear dad so much....lots of tears..
C U L
Happy New Year also to you Paddy..
Yes I know what you are saying....Dad has always said it Lubricates the vocal chords...also a little drop now and then would also get the Grey Matter moveing.....To this day he still has a bottle of Capatain Morgans in the lounge...and as I don't drink..will have to use it up in the cooking....
I trust you had a good christmas and a happy new year with the Family...I had an excellent time...but missed my Dear dad so much....lots of tears..
C U L
I know the thoughts of lots of forum members were with you and your family over the festive season Karon.
The first xmas after such a loss is the worst time except for the actual death and I know that it is a long long time before you stop hearing their voice and expecting them to walk through the door.
Paddy
Thanks Paddy for the kind thoughts and words....I am back in the UK tomorrow evening...sorting dads things through not looking forward to it at all..but I will always cherish the memories I have of him...and I will always be very proud of him...
C U L
Batstiger
31-01-2010, 22:11
Obituary of Tristan Jones.
This is a book in itself!
Tristan Jones, sailor, author, adventurer: born off Tristan da Cunha 8 May 1924; died Phuket Island, Thailand 21 June 1995.
Tristan Jones's life was a series of adventures. Since he was a Welshman, a sailor, a romantic and a story-teller in the best seafaring tradition, the adventures were so plentiful that they filled eight books of autobiography and were sometimes so improbable that they defied belief.
It all began with a breach birth in a full storm, aboard a British tramp steamer, 150 miles north-east of Tristan da Cunha - hence the Christian name - in May 1924. Mrs Jones was the ship's cook and both she and Tristan's father came from a long line of Welsh master mariners. "By God, this one will always land on his feet!" the ship's mate was reported to have said, as he delivered the baby from the 10-hour ordeal. "He may be a candidate for hanging one day, but he'll never drown!"
Before he was 18, Tristan Jones had been rescued from the sea three times. He left school at the age of 13 and worked as a "nipper" aboard a coastal sailing ketch, but at the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the Royal Navy, serving on convoy duties to the Soviet Union from Iceland. After the war he transferred to the Royal Hydrographic Service, but in 1952 in Aden an inshore survey vessel he was on was blown up by guerrillas and his spinal injuries were so severe that he was told he would never walk again.
On his discharge from hospital, he bought and converted an old lifeboat and decided he would set a new record for taking a sailing boat further north than the 84 degrees N achieved by F. Nansen. His improbable, Baron Munchausen-like exploits in the Arctic, accompanied by his one-eyed, three- legged Labrador dog, Nelson, were to be the subject of his second book, Ice! (1979).
His next venture was the eccentric notion of conquering the "vertical sailing record of the world". Having sailed his boat on the earth's lowest stretch of water, the Dead Sea, at 1,250 feet below sea-level, Jones determined to sail the highest, Lake Titicaca, 12,580 feet up in the Andes. His account of this six-year journey was published in The Incredible Voyage (1978), which became a best-seller in Britain and the United States.
As a writer, Tristan Jones's work varied greatly. He could reel off rip- roaring yarns, such as Saga of a Wayward Sailor (1980), but he could also produce reflective and highly literate work such as the account of his boyhood in his best book, A Steady Trade (1982). As his British editor, I often pleaded with him to settle down and devote himself to serious, unhurried writing, but a few weeks in New York or London, where his advances on royalties could disappear with liquid celerity, were more than his seafaring soul could stand.
Up until 1985, one could never be quite sure where Jones was living at any given moment. His boats were his home. Letters or faxes might arrive from the uttermost parts of the earth: a request for money to be cabled to Bahia Concha in Columbia, say, or an urgent request for some vital part of an outboard engine to be obtained from a trusting chandler and despatched with all haste to Constanta on the Black Sea.
Occasionally, if his publisher paid his fare, he would turn up for publication of a new book, as he did for the launch of A Steady Trade in 1982. Such visits could be hazardous, however, and on this occasion Jones held his own among such distinguished television chat-show guests as Sir Laurens van der Post and Patrick Leigh Fermor, only to finish the evening draining the BBC's hospitality room of its entire stock of liquor.
Although he was proud to receive a Welsh Arts Council Literature Award for The Incredible Voyage and to have an entry in The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales, the success of his books and the tributes he received from fellow writers and explorers meant little to him. He wrote in order to go on sailing, and, when his leg was amputated and he could no longer sail solo, he set out to show the world that disability need not preclude a life of adventure. He acquired a trimaran, mischievously named it Outward Leg, and set off with a crew of two to make his 20th Atlantic crossing in a small boat.
He arrived on the south coast of England in the summer of 1984 and when he reached Brighton Marina (how he sneered at words like "marina": "That's a name for smart Kensington ladies walking their poodles in the park"), I travelled down to take him some money and buy him lunch. He persuaded me to "come for a sail" and I spent a sleepless night bumping along the Channel, but it gave me an inkling of how this courageous seadog had survived his many lives.
No sooner was the anchor hauled up than the jokes and drinking stopped and Tristan was transformed into a strict disciplinarian, barking orders at his crew, charting courses and ceaselessly surveying the horizon. I was deposited in the dawn light at the foot of a dock-side in Folkestone, and as the sea surged Tristan issued orders to jump, cling to a metal hand-rail and climb the 57 vertical steps to the top. Terrified, but relieved to be on steady ground, I looked down to see him waving and giving a thumbs- up sign. It was almost the last time I saw him.
From Britain, he sailed his trimaran the lengths of the Rhine and the Danube to the Black Sea and eventually across the Indian Ocean. For the last 10 years, he lived on Phuket Island off the coast of Thailand, still writing and, even after the loss of his other leg last year, teaching disabled young people to sail. He was a true original and an immensely brave man. He had no known relatives, but he had friends and drinking companions in ports all over the world.
Regards, Bob.
Guz rating
31-01-2010, 23:57
Thank you Bob for posting that article on Tristan Jones, I read "Hearts Of Oak" and I was surprised the article did not mention that he was a Ganges boy.
Guz
Thank you Bob for posting that article on Tristan Jones, I read "Hearts Of Oak" and I was surprised the article did not mention that he was a Ganges boy.
Guz
I am a bit out of sync in that I have 9 of his books but am reading now ( The improbable voyage ) because I am unsure of the order they came in, just thought,,, try this one and if it's out of order put it down and read another first.
It does not work like that,,, a book of his started is a book that has to be finished.
Like all ex matelots, there is I know a fair proportion of bull***t in his stories but if halfe of it is true " and from my own experience of river cruising, I know it is ", although the Ice I forged my way through " in a steel boat " was only 5 inches thick max.
Yet the displaced sheets of ice either side of the boat were at times ten foot across and made a noise like Davy jones trying to come through the hull and put the fear of xxxxx up my wife, If she could have got off she would have, she even threatened to walk across the ice, broken as it was.
That trip was only about six miles and probalbly took ten years life out of the hull, his was several hundred and at times the ice was much thicker, and that was the safe part of the journey, also bearing in mind, he had already lost one leg by this time.
Knowing what I know about fast rivers ( and I am only talking 6 - 7 knots ) I have no doubt in saying that he and his crew were lucky to live through it.
Paddy
Guz rating
08-02-2010, 17:09
Great post Paddy I really enjoyed reading it, I think if I had been on that boat in the ice I would been considering abandoning ship. Anyway Paddy I down loaded this link I thought you would like it.
Regards
Alan
http://www.tristanjones.org/link_page.htm
Great post Paddy I really enjoyed reading it, I think if I had been on that boat in the ice I would been considering abandoning ship. Anyway Paddy I down loaded this link I thought you would like it.
Regards
Alan
http://www.tristanjones.org/link_page.htm
Thanks Alan,
I have just spent the last two hours or so going through the site and I will return.
Brilliant.
Paddy
Guz rating
10-02-2010, 19:46
Thanks Alan,
I have just spent the last two hours or so going through the site and I will return.
Brilliant.
Paddy
Paddy I found this article on the web I thought you might like to read it, written by a guy who knew him and did some sailing with him. A right character and like most matelots a bit of a bullshitter, read it and you will see what I mean.
Take care mate
Alan
http://www.peterkinsley.com/storyteller/p1_storyteller.html
Paddy I found this article on the web I thought you might like to read it, written by a guy who knew him and did some sailing with him. A right character and like most matelots a bit of a bullshitter, read it and you will see what I mean.
Take care mate
Alan
http://www.peterkinsley.com/storyteller/p1_storyteller.html
He pops up all over the place Alan and brings to mind many that I knew, and I should think if you were corporal of the gangway he would have been the one you had to call out the duty watch to get him on board and safely down to the cells after a few bevvys in Wonchai. one or two in my minds eye even looked like him including a pair I had under me when I ran the boatswains party once, absolute pissheads but either one could splice a two inch wire in halfe the time it took me, even with a hangover.
Paddy
Guz rating
11-02-2010, 12:59
He pops up all over the place Alan and brings to mind many that I knew, and I should think if you were corporal of the gangway he would have been the one you had to call out the duty watch to get him on board and safely down to the cells after a few bevvys in Wonchai. one or two in my minds eye even looked like him including a pair I had under me when I ran the boatswains party once, absolute pissheads but either one could splice a two inch wire in halfe the time it took me, even with a hangover.
Paddy
Like you Paddy I have met his like many times through my life, with an amazing capacity for drink but would always turn in for work the next day. I remember two in Vietnam always in trouble, but if you got into a scrape they were the ones you wanted with you. Tristan Jones nothing seemed to stop him, even when he lost both legs he was still planning a sea trip.
Regards
Alan
Great post Paddy I really enjoyed reading it, I think if I had been on that boat in the ice I would been considering abandoning ship. Anyway Paddy I down loaded this link I thought you would like it.
Regards
Alan
http://www.tristanjones.org/link_page.htm
Hi Guzz and all,
I've just been looking at this thread....and I definitely recall my late Dad talking about Tristan Jones' books. Dad was an avid reader and loved reading about a great variety of topics...but his one favourite area...was tales about the sea and the navy. For the fortunate people he used to entertain with his stories...he'd have them fascinated for hours.
Which brings me to your Tristan Jones' link, Guz. How great to have him recorded on tape. The ease with which he tells his stories reminds me so much of my own father....also he mentions about writing a book about his time around Castelorisso. I wonder if anyone knows...which book that was??
There are two reviews of Tristan's video and both give him a 5 star rating. (One of the reviewers is from W.A. even.)
Anyway, it looks like I too will be heading off to the library to find a Tristan Jones book or 10. The video looks great too. I think we'll have to be adding another room for everything naval. :)
Cheers,
Bee
p.s. My Dad knew his fair share of bawdy songs too....but he always changed (or conveniently forgot) the words when there was a female audience. (Bless him.)
INVINCIBLE
11-02-2010, 17:41
Paddy,
I cannot seem to find "Hearts of Oak" on Amazon. How long ago was it written?
Paddy,
I cannot seem to find "Hearts of Oak" on Amazon. How long ago was it written?
First edition in 1984 and you can't find it because it is HEART OF OAK, in fact one of his later books, gave him time for the bullshit to mature, but we still recognise the ships and places as they were then.
That's why I never go abroad to places I visited in the good old days, I know I would be dissappointed.
You don't drop anchor in the Sechelles these days to be greeted by canoe loads of girls, bedecked in garlands of flowers who had not seen an englishman for years and the main currency were dishes of Mr Pussers best butter nicked from the mess. ( butter melts quick in the Sechelles and is the rarest comodity) , the rest of the world will never be as we knew it.
Paddy
INVINCIBLE
11-02-2010, 21:49
Paddy,
Many thanks I have now found it - looks good. There is also "Heart of Oak" by Alexander Kent (I met him once a long time ago) but the reviews of his book are not that good.
Obituary of Tristan Jones.
This is a book in itself!
Tristan Jones, sailor, author, adventurer: born off Tristan da Cunha 8 May 1924; died Phuket Island, Thailand 21 June 1995.
Tristan Jones's life was a series of adventures. Since he was a Welshman, a sailor, a romantic and a story-teller in the best seafaring tradition, the adventures were so plentiful that they filled eight books of autobiography and were sometimes so improbable that they defied belief.
It all began with a breach birth in a full storm, aboard a British tramp steamer, 150 miles north-east of Tristan da Cunha - hence the Christian name - in May 1924. Mrs Jones was the ship's cook and both she and Tristan's father came from a long line of Welsh master mariners. "By God, this one will always land on his feet!" the ship's mate was reported to have said, as he delivered the baby from the 10-hour ordeal. "He may be a candidate for hanging one day, but he'll never drown!"
Before he was 18, Tristan Jones had been rescued from the sea three times. He left school at the age of 13 and worked as a "nipper" aboard a coastal sailing ketch, but at the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the Royal Navy, serving on convoy duties to the Soviet Union from Iceland. After the war he transferred to the Royal Hydrographic Service, but in 1952 in Aden an inshore survey vessel he was on was blown up by guerrillas and his spinal injuries were so severe that he was told he would never walk again.
On his discharge from hospital, he bought and converted an old lifeboat and decided he would set a new record for taking a sailing boat further north than the 84 degrees N achieved by F. Nansen. His improbable, Baron Munchausen-like exploits in the Arctic, accompanied by his one-eyed, three- legged Labrador dog, Nelson, were to be the subject of his second book, Ice! (1979).
His next venture was the eccentric notion of conquering the "vertical sailing record of the world". Having sailed his boat on the earth's lowest stretch of water, the Dead Sea, at 1,250 feet below sea-level, Jones determined to sail the highest, Lake Titicaca, 12,580 feet up in the Andes. His account of this six-year journey was published in The Incredible Voyage (1978), which became a best-seller in Britain and the United States.
As a writer, Tristan Jones's work varied greatly. He could reel off rip- roaring yarns, such as Saga of a Wayward Sailor (1980), but he could also produce reflective and highly literate work such as the account of his boyhood in his best book, A Steady Trade (1982). As his British editor, I often pleaded with him to settle down and devote himself to serious, unhurried writing, but a few weeks in New York or London, where his advances on royalties could disappear with liquid celerity, were more than his seafaring soul could stand.
Up until 1985, one could never be quite sure where Jones was living at any given moment. His boats were his home. Letters or faxes might arrive from the uttermost parts of the earth: a request for money to be cabled to Bahia Concha in Columbia, say, or an urgent request for some vital part of an outboard engine to be obtained from a trusting chandler and despatched with all haste to Constanta on the Black Sea.
Occasionally, if his publisher paid his fare, he would turn up for publication of a new book, as he did for the launch of A Steady Trade in 1982. Such visits could be hazardous, however, and on this occasion Jones held his own among such distinguished television chat-show guests as Sir Laurens van der Post and Patrick Leigh Fermor, only to finish the evening draining the BBC's hospitality room of its entire stock of liquor.
Although he was proud to receive a Welsh Arts Council Literature Award for The Incredible Voyage and to have an entry in The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales, the success of his books and the tributes he received from fellow writers and explorers meant little to him. He wrote in order to go on sailing, and, when his leg was amputated and he could no longer sail solo, he set out to show the world that disability need not preclude a life of adventure. He acquired a trimaran, mischievously named it Outward Leg, and set off with a crew of two to make his 20th Atlantic crossing in a small boat.
He arrived on the south coast of England in the summer of 1984 and when he reached Brighton Marina (how he sneered at words like "marina": "That's a name for smart Kensington ladies walking their poodles in the park"), I travelled down to take him some money and buy him lunch. He persuaded me to "come for a sail" and I spent a sleepless night bumping along the Channel, but it gave me an inkling of how this courageous seadog had survived his many lives.
No sooner was the anchor hauled up than the jokes and drinking stopped and Tristan was transformed into a strict disciplinarian, barking orders at his crew, charting courses and ceaselessly surveying the horizon. I was deposited in the dawn light at the foot of a dock-side in Folkestone, and as the sea surged Tristan issued orders to jump, cling to a metal hand-rail and climb the 57 vertical steps to the top. Terrified, but relieved to be on steady ground, I looked down to see him waving and giving a thumbs- up sign. It was almost the last time I saw him.
From Britain, he sailed his trimaran the lengths of the Rhine and the Danube to the Black Sea and eventually across the Indian Ocean. For the last 10 years, he lived on Phuket Island off the coast of Thailand, still writing and, even after the loss of his other leg last year, teaching disabled young people to sail. He was a true original and an immensely brave man. He had no known relatives, but he had friends and drinking companions in ports all over the world.
Regards, Bob.
Bob,
I would like to put a poem on to "poems for the naval man " from one of Tristan Jones books.
I know we had a post from one of his publishers recently but I can't find it, I think it must have entered through a different post.
I would like to ask his blessing, although I think I remember the poem a long time ago from another source.
Hopefully he will see this and respond.
Paddy.
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