In the Wake of da Gama

I have a few books like this on my shelf, old hardbacks which have long lost their dust covers, which are thumbed and stained and eaten by silverfish, and which are almost indistinguishable on their spines to my fading eyesight.

They are books which have wandered the world with me, books which I treasure, books which, given a few more years, I will read yet again.

About this particular book I feel a little bad, as it is one of the most formative books of my life yet....

....it doesn't belong to me and I'm not sure how it has ended up in my possession. It's my brother's, and it was given to him by our parents at what was probably a bad time in his life, 1956, the year he followed me to boarding school in England. Hence the 'Haylett mi' - the 'mi' meaning 'minor', indicating he had an elder brother in the school - and his school number 62 - I was 52.

'In the Wake of da Gama' is, of course, the story of an almost insanely dangerous and daring expedition, in which four small ships - da Gama's flagship was a mere 120 tons - set off from Portugal to sail down the west coast of Africa, around the Cape of Storms (now the Cape of Good Hope), up the uncharted and Arab-dominated east coast, and then across the Indian Ocean to India, and back again, an unimaginable feat of seamanship.

The book is simply written, absolutely perfect for a small boy of about eleven. The exciting story it tells was set in an environment I knew and understood - for example, few English boys of my age would ever have seen a dhow. It was one of the books which encouraged me to read non-fiction in preference to fiction - so many true stories are far more fabulous than fiction - something I have done ever since.

I don't know how many times I have read this book, perhaps half a dozen in over sixty years, but it has now been superseded by....

....a magnificent retelling of much the same tale, a book so good that, after avidly reading it from cover to cover, I then re-read its 540 pages. This was the book for the adult who, as a child, had loved Genesta Hamilton's 'In the Wake of da Gama'.