The "People of the Sea" (published by Lodestar books) is the story of an extraordinary and emblematic life in post-war Britain. The best (auto)biographies work on three levels – personal, historical, and mythical – and this one ties all three into a gripping knot. The headiness of liberation in 1945; early experimentation with alternative lifestyles, free love, and an astonishing appetite for adventure on the high-seas; intellectual obsession, ecological awareness and the founding of a tribe – the People of the Sea.
James Wharram was 17 in 1945 and will be 93 next year. His autobiography, co-authored with one of his long-term partners and associates, Hanneke Boon, begins in Manchester. The only son of a working class builder father who is rising in the world and a feminist mother, he gets the most important parts of his early education from the public library. Wharram discovers William Morris, the Fabians, Keynes, Marx, and, most importantly, perhaps, an obscure French sailor-adventurer, Eric de Bischopp (more later on him). He travels to liberated Europe, where he talks – and walks – Freud, Jung and sexual liberation with young demobilised groups all wondering what to do with the great gift of a future before them. Within a few years, he performs the first Atlantic crossing in a catamaran (he prefers the term "double canoe") as a self-styled "marine archeologist". He returns to found a William Morris-like boat-building commune/cooperative on various estuaries of the Irish Sea where free love, boat-building and the early seeds of The People of the Sea are sown.
Floating dreams
By the 1990s, he had launched a huge ocean-going double-canoe, The Spirit of Gaia, aimed at studying natural ocean environments as well as fulfilling a childhood dream of bringing ocean-going canoes back to Polynesia. This is one of the two most poignant moments of the book – the Polynesia of his imagination was on an imaginary journey of its own that excluded him. Throughout, he and his partners create and nurture the "People of the Sea" – a ragtag group of ocean sailors, boat-builders and alternative livers. Like him, they are people who have heard the call of the ocean, and, lacking financial means, they self-built to his expert designs simple, tough and – at least in the world of yacht-clubs and marinas – eyebrow-raising double canoes. Thousands of these boats have been built and criss-cross seas and oceans, each a floating dream for a different and better world.
