Long Way Home: The Circumnavigations of Henk De Velde

When I first wrote the Dutchman, ten years ago, he was sailing around the world alone for the sixth and final time. His plan, he said, was to keep on sailing, continuing this last circumnavigation until the day he died, or until he found some unknown place "behind the horizon." At the time, Henk De Velde was somewhere in the Atlantic, slightly closer to South America than any other continent, but not very close to anywhere at all. I was on the nineteenth floor of an office building in midtown Manhattan, working at an adventure travel magazine, looking for stories. De Velde's journey had a nice hook, a neat beginning, but no real end, which was kind of the point. Several years into our correspondence, I told an editor about it. His response was that De Velde probably needed to die for the story to have a proper arc. In the meantime, De Velde kept sailing, and I kept following him—less and less as the years piled on but well after the magazine shut down and I'd left New York. I still wanted to know what shape De Velde's story would take, if he would ever find what he was looking for, and if he did ever get behind the horizon, where that might be.

I first reached him through a message board frequented by various adventurers, particularly seafarers. I asked him basic questions about his voyage, which he answered with a few details: His ship was named Juniper, a fifty-two-foot trimaran cut from Alaskan white cedar; he drank ten cups of coffee a day, plus a spoonful of water scooped out of the ocean for his health; he slept next to his satellite phone, in a bunk that didn't quite fit his six-foot-three-inch frame; he said the thing that kept him up at night were the sounds of his ship, to which he was constantly attuned, cataloging the creaks and shudders he might have to address in the light of day—unless something was too loud or too extraordinary to wait until dawn, in which case he put on a headlamp and harness and investigated. Most of his waking hours were filled with fixing countless minor catastrophes. When he had a spare moment, he wrote. He was working on several books, some about this journey, some not.

Eventually, we arranged a time to talk by satellite phone—me in my cubicle, De Velde making for the coast of Argentina. When the call finally came through, his voice was low and small and garbled by a crackling line. In the background I could hear a constant roar—from the wind or the sea or a bad connection, I wasn't quite sure. I asked him what it was like to be alone in the middle of the ocean for so long. "It never bothered me, being alone," he said. "At the moment I have these big feelings, but it is actually better that I cannot share. There are no words for the closeness I feel." To what? I asked. As way of explanation, he described a voyage he'd undertaken years ago, when he spent a winter with his boat locked in ice.

De Velde had been trying to sail around the world through the Northwest Passage, but had arrived too late in the year, and ended up surrounded by sea ice off the coast of Siberia. He got stuck near the village of Tiksi, at the mouth of the Lena River, which sounds like somewhere but is close to nowhere, which is exactly where he wanted to be. He stayed nine months, battling the ice as it expanded and hardened and closed in on his ship, threatening to tear it apart.

The climate there, he said, was not like any other he'd known before or since. It was dry—surreally so, the frost like a different type...