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Robin Knox-Johnston

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Guest Choice

Sir Robin Knox-Johnston chooses Sea-Fever by John Masefield

Robin Knox-Johnston was the first person to sail nonstop round the world, back in 1969, when he was 30. He was determined to go to sea, “from the age of 8”, and Sea-Fever, he says, was part of this hunger for the sea. He took 313 days for his voyage round the world. In a boat from a different era of sailing, Ellen MacArthur has just done it in 71 days! And thanks to satellites, she was never out of touch with friends, family and fans for more than a few hours at a time. Back in 1968, Knox-Johnston was effectively out of contact with anyone else for almost a whole year.

To keep himself sane, he took quite a library with him – including a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Verse. In his account of the solo voyage, A World of My Own, he relates how poetry became more and more important to him as his supply of unread novels dwindled. Out in the middle of the Southern Ocean, he learnt by heart Gray’s Elegy, Burns, Scott, and Shakespeare – and many others. “To give my voice practice [after over 200 days alone at sea, with virtually no radio contact the whole time], I would usually recite out loud, my Golden Treasury in hand, to a wondering audience of albatross and petrels”. And, as he told Magma, that included Sea-Fever.

John Masefield (1878-1967) was English Poet Laureate from 1930-1967 and published Sea-Fever in 1902. Masefield published it originally with the title hyphenated, and the opening line of each stanza beginning, “I must down to the seas again…”. Not “go down”. And that’s how it appears once again in Carcanet’s new edition of Masefield’s Collected Poems. But in between, generations of British schoolchildren have learnt it as, “I must go down to the seas again…” Which is exactly how Knox-Johnston learnt it, and still recites it!

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