Contributing Source - Brian Mooney

Source: Brian Mooney
Submitted: 08/05/04

Tristan Jones revisited

He was anti-establishment and had a pathological hatred of authority; 
he liked cocking a snook at governments, and anyone in authority, 
and almost on principle he rejected all social norms. 

In the end this is precisely what he did on a large, but quite harmless, 
scale by embellishing many of his tales and – in some cases marvellously 
brought to light by Dalton – inventing whole chapters of his life.

He arrived in the Argentine capital raw and emaciated. (I have some 
great photographs of Tristan and Edwin with Sea Dart on the hard at
the Club Nautico Argentino in Buenos Aires before he stormed out
from there in a huff over the treatment, he said, of Edwin). In Buenos
Aires, Tristan became the toast of a small circle of friends and admirers;
he told stories and sang for his supper, and he smoked and drank.
This was the height of the ‘dirty war’ in Argentina in which unmarked
police cars roamed the cities picking up, torturing and often wantonly
killing suspected and known left-wing guerrillas. These were nasty times,
and Tristan had the odd brush with the law, usually after some heavy
drinking, but he was never, as far as I could tell, in any real danger.
He lived for a while with an English teacher in Olivos and broke her heart
when he slipped his moorings for Montevideo. He also bounced some cheques.

On reading Dalton’s book I now realise quite how cleverly Tristan confabulated.

A story I wrote about him for Reuters (copied below) displays a cavalier 
regard for the truth, and a willingness to weave and stretch the facts just 
a little here and there. I now recall that during a radio interview for 
Reuters audio service he said his primary aim was to entertain. At our 
initial meeting to interview him and write his ‘arrival’ story, he gave me 
Liverpool as his place of birth, although my diary later records drunken 
evenings with him when he claimed that he was he was either conceived 
on or born close to the Island of Tristan da Cunha. Later he would become 
a Welshman. But in the interview he was already changing official dates; 
he said he had left the British navy in 1959 rather than the officially 
recorded date of 1960, and somewhat bizarrely he gave his age then in 
1975 as 52. This would have given him a date of birth of 1923 – while the 
birth certificate of Arthur Jones (his presumed real name) was 1929, and 
that of his forged passport 1927. Being born earlier, however, reinforced 
the stories of his time fighting the Germans in World War II.

Significantly he never talked about sailing in the Arctic – icebound 
adventures which he immortalised in Ice and which, as Dalton convincingly 
demonstrates, were almost certainly all or mostly fictional.

He was already claiming to have logged heroic and implausible distances 
at sea, even a staggering 58,000 miles in Sea Dart which maybe in his mind, 
or from a mis-reading of my notes, included the passages in Barbara, the 
yacht he skippered for Arthur Cohen and sailed up to Manaus. His claim 
then of seven solo Trans-Atlantics was also, with hindsight, extremely 
suspect.

One little incident – uncovered by Dalton – reveals Tristan’s craft. I had 
recently been overtaken by a violent pampero blanco (the name given to 
the sudden storms that can rip over the River Plate from the Pampas) on 
my boat, Milena, while sailing to Uruguay, and I had regaled Jones and others 
about surviving it at a dinner party. We were driven aground, but came 
through unscathed. My storm ends up in The Incredible Voyage, Tristan’s 
first book and the account of his odyssey across the continent, as his 
dramatic landfall in Uruguay. Sea Dart’s arrival was in fact, as Dalton 
describes from Tristan’s own logbook, preceded by fog and accompanied 
by merely a ‘lively sea’.

I am disappointed – though not surprised - that the Tristan da Cunha 
birthright and Welsh upbringing, the early days under sail, the great sea 
battles of World War II and most if not all of the Arctic adventures are pure 
invention, but in the end it doesn’t really matter. Tristan was one of those 
people who managed to conjure truth out of fiction. He transcended his own 
invention, and he wrote at his best when he was telling a tall story – Ice, 
Heart of Oak and A steady Trade – and at his most limp when he was more 
or less tied to the facts – The Improbable Voyage.

All I can say is: Well done Tristan. You told some great stories, you wrote 
beautifully and you entertained; and you did undertake some remarkable 
voyages. You were a loveable rogue.

The Reuters story (1975):

Buenos Aires, Jan 5, Reuters – British yachtsman Tristan Jones has just 
sailed down river to the Argentine capital on the first ocean-going yacht 
ever to cross South America from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic east 
coast. Only hours after docking at the old port here on Christmas Eve 
virtually at the end of his 3,040 mile trans-continental trip, the 52-year-old 
adventurer was already talking about future ‘impossible voyages’.

“One day I am going to circumnavigate the world north to south flying a 
specially built light yacht over the polar icecaps with helium balloons,” the 
Liverpool-born adventurer told Reuters.

His voyage across South America began late in 1973 when he sailed 
Sea Dart – a 21-foot bilge keel cutter – down the Pacific to the Peruvian 
port of Callao.

“It really all got under way in a bar in Callao when I was wondering how 
the hell I was going to get Sea Dart up to Lake Titicaca,” Jones said.

“I got talking to this guy in a bar and he turned out to be a lorry driver … 
within days we were hauling Sea Dart over perilous mountain passes in 
the Andes to Lake Titicaca,” Jones continued. He spent eight months 
sailing on the landlocked lake – at 13,000 feet (4,000 metres) above sea 
level.

Sea Dart was the first ocean-going yacht ever to sail on the Lake and 
also the first boat to fly the British ensign in Bolivian waters since Bolivia 
lost its Pacific coast provinces in the last century in a war against Chile.

He then hauled Sea Dart by road and rail up to the Bolivian capital, 
La Paz, and some 650 miles across the desolate Chaco region to the 
riverhead of Corumba in Brazil. From there he sailed down the Paraguay 
and Paraná Rivers with a Bolivian companion to Buenos Aires.

“If you don’t count the heat, problems with uncharted Rivers, and winds 
that change directions like the swirl of a skirt it was plain sailing,” said Jones.

Jones began his adventures at sea shortly after he was invalided out of 
the British navy in 1959.

“They fixed me with a two pound pension and said I was not fit for sea 
any more, so I thought: damn that, I’ll sail in my own navy.” Sixteen years 
later Jones has logged some 120,000 miles – 58,000 in Sea Dart – under 
sail.

He claims an impressive series of records, which include:

Other sea-going exploits include seven solo Atlantic crossings, and a 
complete capsize in the Indian Ocean during a typhoon.

Asked if he ever got tired of his adventuring, Jones replied: “Sometimes, 
but then I just have another cup of tea.”

Jones says he believes in adventure for adventure’s sake. “I wanted to 
do real sailing – without any commercial backing – for the sheer pleasure,” 
he says. His adventures prove that it is still possible to sail large distances 
at low cost without commercial backing.

He bought Sea Dart for £1,000 two years ago in the West Indies on money 
he had saved from writing articles for yachting magazines. “Basically I just 
keep myself going on fresh air and sandwiches,” he says.

Sea Dart is 14-years-old. Built in Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire, 
England, she was originally designed for weekend sailing in the English 
Channel.

Jones fixed a bowsprit to convert her from sloop rig to cutter right and 
made a few more modifications. “She’s bloody uncomfortable, but she 
will go anywhere,” he says. 


Extract from my re-written diary:

Tristan Jones took shape slowly, the form emerging gradually
across the continent in a series of disjointed sightings and
unclear signals. At first there were rumours from the
Altiplano that a bearded white man was sailing a boat on Lake
Titicaca, then followed reports of the boat decked in British
and Bolivian colours making a triumphal procession through
the streets of La Paz. Silence ensued until a few weeks later
messages starting filtering down from the upper reaches of
the Paraná -- Jones was safely out of the Chaco, heading
south and east. By the time he had got to Asuncion, Graham
Greene country, Jones was writing his own script, long,
amusing despatches to Reuters in Buenos Aires describing his
descent towards the Atlantic Ocean. Jones was engaged on one
of his first crazy epics -- sailing a boat across the South
American continent, West to East. He had already tried the
reverse direction the previous year, hauling his way up the
Amazon until he could go no further. Now, he had turned logic
on its head and decided to use wheels and guile to get
himself and his boat across the Andes. He had his boat
trucked up from Lima and deposited in Lake Titicaca where he
did four things: he picked up an Indian boy as a deck hand,
introduced cricket, became a local deity, and sailed into
Bolivian history. Bolivia, starved of its access to the
Pacific Ocean since it was embroiled in war with Chile and
Peru in the 19th century, embraced Jones as if he were the
reincarnation of one of the Irish adventurers who took part
in the great liberation struggles against Spain. He had flown
the Red Ensign in Bolivian waters for the first time since
Bolivia became landlocked. The Bolivian navy organised a
triumphal reception for Jones and boat in La Paz which was
marred only by the truck which carried the vessel breaking
down. The voyage proceeded by road and rail -- the period of
enforced silence -- until Jones emerged at the source of the
great river system that carried him down to Buenos Aires.

Tristan was rich feature material and I wrote about him with
gusto. He was also an extraordinarily gifted raconteur, a
facility we used to turn out some good radio interviews and
that he exploited to live free in Buenos Aires for several
months. Gaunt, greying but hardy, Tristan became the
obligatory exotic guest at social gatherings and rarely
disappointed those who expected him to get outrageously
drunk, sing dirty shanties and abuse most if not all the
guests. When drunk, he would often claim that he was named after
the island of Tristan da Cunha, near where he was either born or 
conceived. True to the adage that sailors and ships rot in port,
he slipped his moorings one day and sailed across the River
Plate to Montevideo from where he shipped himself and his
boat back to England. Questions were asked about some
bounced cheques and a heart was broken.