"A Sail to Gallipoli" (used book)

A Sail to Gallipoli

by Douglas Dixon

About the book

Used book. Hardcover. Dust jacket included. Fair condition.

This is the story of a family pilgrimage in a sailing yacht through the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to the Black Sea. It was, as the author explains, a four-stranded rope. First, to give his 15-yearold daughter a chance to qualify for membership of the Royal Ocean Racing Club, second to give her an extended tour of Southern Europe and show her the sources of Western Civilization, thirdly, to open new cruising grounds in the Adriatic and Aegean to the school boys and girls of the Mannö expeditions and finally, to achieve a long-cherished and secret ambition to return in peace to the battlefields of blood-soaked Gallipoli. Dusmarie sailed with the Ocean Racing fleet to La Rochelle, then explored the coasts of Spain and Portugal to winter in the Balearics. The next year saw her round the Coast Brava and Cote d’Azur to Corsica, Messina and Yugoslavia. She wintered in Malta and the following summer made the complete round of the Adriatic; she was wrecked in the Corinth Canal but was restored to sail under the snows of Olympus to Mudros and eventually through the narrows of Dardanelles to Istanbul and the Black Sea. This is a tale of weather and a sailing boat, but the author take you ashore and shows you something of the places where Dusmarie finds harbour, something of the inhabitants and their customs and something of the difficulties to be met with when coping with foreign tongues and foreign ways. Above all, History, whether of the long-gone days of Ulysses and Troy, or British sea power in the Mediterranean, or the magnificent failure of the Gallipoli campaign, is never far from his mind.