Date: August 16 2014

Margalit Fox

Anthony Smith
Explorer
30-3-1926  ¢â‚¬”  7-7-2014

”Fancy rafting across the Atlantic? Famous traveller requires 3 crew. Must be OAP. Serious adventurers only.” So read a help-wanted ad in  The Daily Telegraphin London on January 28, 2005.

The ad was no joke. The man who placed it, Anthony Smith, then 78, was an English explorer and author who had crossed the Alps by balloon and traversed Africa by motorcycle, among other things. For his new adventure, he was seeking OAPs – old-age pensioners – to cross the Atlantic with him on little more than a pile of logs. Smith, who has died at 88, made that voyage. By the time he and his crew finished their journey in 2011 – a 66-day odyssey in which they were blown far off course and endured significant damage to their raft – Smith was 85.

They called their raft Antiki, partly in homage to Kon-Tiki, the raft on which Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl sailed the Pacific in 1947, partly in tribute to their own antiquity. The combined age of the Antiki’s crew was 259.

The crossing was not Smith’s last ocean adventure, nor even his most arduous. But it was undoubtedly his best known, chronicled in the news media and through blog posts written mid-ocean (theirs was an internet-ready pile of logs). It was also a crowning achievement of a career so bold that in the 1960s Smith, feared lost on a balloon voyage over Africa, had the privilege of reading his own obituary.

”Am I supposed to potter about, pruning roses and admiring pretty girls, or should I do something to justify my existence?” Smith asked in a newspaper interview in 2011.

Anthony John Francis Smith was born in Buckinghamshire and grew up there at Cliveden – Lord and Lady Astor’s estate – where his father was employed as manager.

After serving as a pilot with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in the 1940s, Smith earned a degree in zoology from Oxford.

His adventures began in his student days in 1950, when he and several friends travelled to Iran in search of a fabled eyeless white fish, said to inhabit the qanats, ancient irrigation tunnels there. They did not find it, but the trip gave Smith his first book,  Blind White Fish in Persia, published in 1953.

His later books include  High Street Africa  (1961), which chronicles his five-month journey, much of it by motorcycle, from Cape Town to England;  Throw Out Two Hands  (1966), about crossing East Africa in a hydrogen balloon in 1962; and  A Persian Quarter Century  (1979), in which Smith returned to Iran and discovered his fish – the blind cave loach, later named  Nemacheilus smithi  in his honor.

But the Atlantic always loomed. He had hungered to cross it under sail since he was a youth, when he read  Two Survived, a 1941 history of men who had made the journey and barely lived to the tell the tale. The book, by Guy Pearce Jones, recounts the fate of the British merchant ship Anglo Saxon, sunk by an armed German ship in 1940.

Seven seamen survived, escaping into the Atlantic in an six-metre wooden craft. During their 70 days at sea, five died. Finally, after almost 3000 miles, the two survivors – Roy Widdicombe, 21, and Robert Tapscott, 19, both near death – made landfall at Eleuthera, in the Bahamas.

Smith had long wanted to reprise the voyage in tribute to his countrymen, but he was waylaid by his professional life: He was a science correspondent for  The Telegraph  and later presented science programs on radio and television.

He chose to go by raft for a practical reason: a raft, he said, was more stable than a boat.

On January 30, 2011, the Antiki, made of lashed-together plastic pipes, set sail from the Canary Islands. The raft had no motor; its single sail flew from a telephone pole. On April 6, 2011, it made land at St Maarten, in the Leeward Islands. Smith had hoped to land at Eleuthera as the sailors he honored had done, but the winds dictated otherwise.

In 2012, Smith completed the St Maarten-to-Eleuthera leg aboard the Antiki with a new crew, a 700-mile journey that entailed high winds and savage seas.

Smith’s memoir of the Antiki’s voyage is scheduled to be issued in February. Its title:  The Old Man & the Sea.

New York Times