Blue Water Vagabond

Few sailors have had a more varied and adventurous six years at sea than Dennis Puleston did from 1931-1937. Working as a teller in a London bank, he thirsted for adventure. After pooling his savings with a friend, he quit his job and went to sea on a 31 foot yawl. After a brief sail down the Portuguese coast they crossed the Atlantic and spent a pleasant season among the Caribbean islands until their money gave out. At that point they found work on a coconut plantation. When a hurricane destroyed their labors, they went back to sea once more. Puleston's subsequent adventures included a shipwreck off Cape Hatteras, a grim voyage down from Newfoundland on the schooner 'Marit', knocking ice off her decks to keep her from sinking, and an excursion diving for a treasure galleon on Silver Shoals. Puleston was then asked to join the Fahnstock brothers on 'Director' and sailed her through the Panama Canal to the strange Galapagos and the enchanted isles of the Marquesas and Tahiti. Meandering though the Western Pacific, taken captive by cannibals in the New Hebrides and suffering malarial fevers from the jungles of New Guinea, this bluewater vagabond experienced one adventure after another. He finally landed in Peking just as it was falling to the Japanese in the Sino-Japanese War. "Travel abroad was far more of an adventure," Puleston writes of that time in his foreword. "Conrad Hilton was probably still in diapers, the Kentucky chicken colonel had not yet reached that exalted rank, and Pan American had yet to span the oceans." Blue Water Vagabond draws the reader into this now-vanished world.