bout de papier, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1999) — Summer 1999 // Été 1999, p. 41
HIGH ENDEAVOURS by Miles Clark,
Greystone Books (Douglas & McIntyre)
1991. $24.95
Reviewed by Nicholas Coghlan
Nevil Shute, in his introduction to one of Miles Smeeton’s sailing books, wrote thus about Miles and his wife Beryl: “These people are quite unusual, and anyone reading this had better realise that.”
The Smeetons were in fact the greatest Canadian adventurers of this century. They are known in sailing circles for a series of hair-raising exploits, recounted in an amusing and understated fashion in Miles’ various books. The most famous of these (described in Once is Enough) was a double attempt in 1957-58 to round Cape Horn in their 46 ft ketch Tzu Hang, undertaken when both Beryl and Miles were already in their fifties: the first voyage was marked, and nearly ended, by a disastrous pitchpole (head-over-heels capsize) and dismasting in the Roaring Forties, 1500 hundred miles off the Chilean coast, the second by another dismasting a year later in Force 10 winds rather closer to the Cape. The book was a best-seller, and not just in the international sailing fraternity: readers also enjoyed Miles’ accounts of Beryl’s cooking (tinned cat food was served on more than one occasion when supplies ran low, and Miles describes eating what he thought was a cold rice dish on a late-night watch, only to find he had consumed a bowl full of maggots…) and of the adventures of their intrepid cat Pwe, who once fell overboard in the Southern Ocean and had to be rescued by Beryl diving in.
Miles Clark’s High Endeavours, a life of Miles and Beryl Smeeton, wisely attempts neither to re-tell these stories nor Tzu Hang’s subsequent 1959-67 circumnavigation of the globe (this time with a successful rounding of the Horn). Instead Clark, who is the Smeetons’ godson, concentrates on Miles’ and Beryl’s youth in England, their early lives travelling the world and their sunset years spent in their adopted Canada, first on Saltspring Island B.C. then running a wildlife trust at Cochrane, Alberta.
Beryl’s early life alone would merit a book, but sadly she was not endowed with any great literary talent and kept only a few rough notes on her journeys. These included an ascent with the then-unknown Sherpa Tensing to 23,000 ft in the Hindu Kush (the highest altitude then reached by a woman), an overland journey from Delhi to Europe in 1935, another overland journey from Hong Kong to Burma in 1937 and a 1000-mile solo horseback ride through Southern Patagonia in 1937-38. Miles meanwhile earned himself a reputation as a dashing but somewhat eccentric young cavalry officer with Probyn’s Horse in the last days of the Raj and then as a war hero at the Battle of Imphal. Following their sailing exploits in the fifties and sixties, the Smeetons took up pioneer-style farming (with often hilarious results) at Musgrave’s Landing on Saltspring Island and, finally, in company with their daughter Clio, the running of an ill-conceived but well-intentioned wildlife trust, catering to orphaned moose and foxes inter alia, at Cochrane. Beryl died in 1979, Miles in 1988.
Clark, as well as being Miles and Beryl’s godson, was their friend and this closeness to his subjects occasionally detracts from this account of their lives. The tone is sometimes hagiographic, and the author is particularly coy about Miles’ supposed extra-marital wanderings. The reader infers, too, that both Miles and Beryl could at times be unbearably snobbish and that their alternate spoiling and utter neglect of daughter Clio was by no means in the latter’s best interests: Clark is too respectful to make anything but the most oblique reference to this.
But Miles and Beryl Smeeton, for all their imperfections, were towering figures. An awed Dorothy Innes, wife of the novelist and sailor Hammond Innes, once described Miles as “an Odysseus”, but High Endeavours rightly puts Beryl at his side, not in his shadow. As such, this is an inspiring read and calculated to make even the most casual reader shuck off their office job and take to the sea or to the hills.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1999) — Summer 1999 // Été 1999, p. 41. Read the rest of this issue →
