English mildness on display in Sir Francis Chichester's Gipsy Moth Circles the World:
That day I found out why the port side pole had jammed in the mast track. I noticed that the track had been twisted and pulled away from the mast for a foot or so. The cracks I had heard must have been the rivets popping . . . "If this track goes," I logged, "I shall be poorly placed, because I did not bring any metal repair tools or gear."
He is only two weeks into his many-month journey and already is wrestling at midnight with a sail pulled tight across the keel, after being caught in a gale. And 64 years old to boot.
This makes me think of a section from Henry Walter Bates' "The Naturalist on the River Amazons" which I was reading yesterday. Homeboy's talking about being at Ega, one of the remotest towns on the Amazon, for four years or so sometime in the 1850s.
I suffered most inconvenience from the difficulty of getting news from the civilised world down river, from the irregularity of receipt of letters, parcels of books and periodicals, and towards the latter part of my residence from ill health arising from bad and insufficient food. The want of intellectual society, and of the varied excitement of European life, was also felt most acutely, and this, instead of becoming deadened by time, increased until it became almost insupportable. I was obliged, at last, to come to the conclusion that the contemplation of Nature alone is not sufficient to fill the human heart and mind. I got on pretty well when I received a parcel from England by the steamer once in two or four months. I used to be very economical with my stock of reading, lest it should be finished before the next arrival, and leave me utterly destitute. I went over the periodicals, the "Athenæum," for instance, with great deliberation, going through every number three times; the first time devouring the more interesting articles; the second, the whole of the remainder; and the third, reading all the advertisements from beginning to end. If four months (two steamers) passed without a fresh parcel, I felt discouraged in the extreme. I was worst off in the first year, 1850, when twelve months elapsed without my letters or remittances. Towards the end of this time my clothes had worn to rags: I was barefoot, a great inconvenience in tropical forests, notwithstanding statements to the contrary that have been published by travellers; my servant ran away, and I was robbed of nearly all my copper money.
This long stay is several years into like the dieselest 11-year collecting expedition ever. The English know how to be dogged!
Aye, terrific! Doggedness is one thing, but coming out of it in good enough spirits to believe that writing in great detail is worthwhile—that's the cake.