Ann Davison A Sailor’s Life Journey of Courage and Persistence By Susan Gateley
Davison, shortly before departing England, says goodbye to Atlantic “veteran” Edward Allcard, 36, and Californian Norman Fowler, 25, before they leave Plymouth for their ocean voyage in their 12-ton, 40-foot yacht Catania.
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arly in my sailing career, I found a book in our town library by a woman named Ann Davison. She was the first woman to sail the Atlantic alone, which she did in 1952—the year after I was born. She sailed a 23-foot sloop, leaving England in May of that year and reaching the United States the following year. I, an aspiring teen-aged female single-hander myself, was fascinated by both her writing and her sailing accomplishments. Of her famous voyage, she wrote, “It wasn’t courage that sent me scurrying across the ocean. It was a little curiosity and a lot of desperation that went into the making of that particular dream.” I subsequently learned that between 1950 and 1964, she wrote five books based on her life experiences, much of them being related to boating in one form or another. She had plenty of material to work with, too. She lived an adventurous life and once wrote of her various expeditions and excursions: “Does anyone ever really know exactly why they do anything? I start out with one reason and very often finish with another...” But motives notwithstanding, a consistent reason running through her various adventures was a zest for active, adventurous living and personal freedom. She must have had an interesting upbringing. Art was everywhere in her home, she wrote, and she tried her hand at it with sketching and painting. But horses were her passion, and that sent her off to veterinary school where she met a young man. She fell in love and then backed out of the marriage at the last moment. “Marriage, when you looked at it closely, seemed to have all the earmarks of a trap,” she wrote. “It was full of grim-faced people talking about ‘duty’.” Before long, Davison was fed up with vet school and sick and dying horses, so she tried to make a go of it as a professional artist, drawing and painting horse portraits. Fortunately, when her art career was foundering, she discovered flying. She was given a trip to Argentina to visit friends for her 21st birthday, and while there, got her first
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SOUTHWINDS
flying lesson. She was instantly hooked—having an affinity for going fast, as she explained. She wrote of her first time at the controls of an airplane: “Afterwards, I felt a great inward glow.” Back in England, with financial help from her father, she obtained her license and began to eke out a living freelancing as a self-described hard-working, dedicated, unspectacular pilot. This was just a few years after Amelia Earhart founded the 99s, an international organization of women pilots, and there were perhaps no more than a dozen licensed women flying in England. This was also when she first began writing about her various adventures to supplement her income. She married another aviator in 1939, describing the partnership as being “two misfits who found their forte in the rackety flying of the thirties,” but then World War II came along and grounded both of them. They went off to Scotland and began a decade of hardscrabble farming. It was challenging, their last farm being on an island, but there came a day, Davison wrote, when she and her husband Frank felt “we had to some extent mastered island life.” It was no longer a challenge. Meanwhile, out in the wider world of England, socialism ruled, and security was the order of the day. This did not suit them and they talked of emigrating. Before long, the idea of traveling the world by boat took form, which brought about the fateful purchase of a 70-foot fishing smack, Reliance, and her fatal voyage in 1949. Ann survived the wreck of the boat, but her husband did not. She wrote Last Voyage, a fascinating account of the purchase, the extensive fitting-out, and the tragic last days afloat to pay off the debts from that particular adventure. The book, the best of the three of her works I’ve read, was enough of a success to leave her with leftover funds to buy Felicity Ann, the boat she sailed the Atlantic with. Her solo voyage was in part a continuation of the dream she and her husband had nur-
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