What a fabulous adventure. In 1925, an Anglo-American journalist Negley Farson and his English wife (a member of the Bram family of Dracula fame) , realizing a long-held ambition, sailed from Holland down through the Rhine, the river Main, the Ludwig Canal (Der Ludwigskanal) and Danube, through the fabled ’Iron Gates’ to the Black Sea in a small wooden cruiser. The cruise was a duplication of one a couple of decades earlier by British artists Donald Maxwell and Cottington Taylor told in the book ”A Cruise across Europe”(http://www.librarything.com/work/8041829/book/86875222), and amazingly, duplicated many decades later in a tiny Optimist Dinghy, (“borrowed” from a school where he had been teaching) by an Australian adventurer, A. J. Mackinnon , and recounted in his book The Unlikely Voyage of Jack De Crow (http://www.librarything.com/work/385803/book/71235140).

Unlikely voyage is a classic understatement … foolhardy, difficult, challenging … and for the reader, pure, thrilling fascination. This trip, undertaken so soon after the first of the World Wars, in which the author had served as a member of the then Royal British Air Force encountered many of the residuals of that conflict – prickly hostility to the USA flag of their cruiser ”Flame” in Germany, to the detritus of the various disastrously misled “Peace Conferences” in the ever-disputed and disrupted Balkans.

We are given charming descriptions of ‘roughing it’ in the little (8’x6’) cabin of the cruiser but delightful contrasts with going off on a shoot with the leader of Hungary, Admiral Horthy, Frason, with his varied and astonishing background so ably to mix with Presidents and peasant alike. He copes as equally and humorously with a mutiny from his ‘crew’ (his wife) and the disgusts of such ‘developing’ counties as Montenegro, where the prayer is offered to the new monarch…”Your Majesty, we pray that you will see to it that every man is permitted to emigrate”. He draws interesting comparisons with the Scots and the ‘wooly, wild’ peoples of his voyage, noting the presence of bagpipes and kilts (“skirts’) and hard-hitting free men.

Showing a marked tolerance of the Muslim world, mores, customs and attitudes to women that most of his more well-travelled readers would be challenged to match he draws his well-described, history-rich journey to an end at the very gates of the east, in the Black Sea.

All this and a sailing, cruising yarn among astounding rivers … highly recommended reading.

The American journalist Negley Farson and his wife (who is quaintly referred to throughout as "the Crew") sailed from Holland to the Black Sea in 1925 via the Rhine, Main, Ludwig Canal and Danube. This was essentially the same route followed twenty years earlier by the British artists Donald Maxwell and Cottington Taylor: indeed, if Farson's report of what he was told by the canal superintendent at Bamberg is correct, only one other pleasure boat apart from his and Maxwell's had been though the Ludwig Canal since the turn of the century. Given that the canal was in a pretty run-down condition by 1925, with work on its replacement due to start any day, Farson's passage may well have been the last by a non-commercial craft. (In the event, work on the new canal started in 1939 but was abandoned due to the war; it finally opened in 1992.)

Farson's account of the trip is a bit disjointed. Up to Vienna, it's written in more-or-less the standard self-deprecating style of cruising literature: accidents, near-misses, misunderstandings with foreign officials and shopkeepers, drinking sessions with friendly barge skippers, etc. It could have been written by any retired British doctor/lawyer/civil servant on a boating holiday. However, as we get into Hungary and what-was-then-Yugoslavia, Farson seems to pull off his mask and reveal himself as a good old-fashioned American foreign correspondent, veteran of the First World War and the Russian revolution, as much at ease on a shooting weekend with Admiral Horthy as he is roughing it with peasants and fishermen. The writing in these chapters is much more lively than in the Rotterdam-to-Vienna section, and there's much more interest in the world outside the boat, in particular the human suffering and complex political situation left behind by the war. Their actual journey gets rather neglected. However, when you read them as a book, you notice odd repetitions and jumps in continuity. One suspects that he was initially commissioned to write a series of separate articles on his travels in central and eastern Europe and only later had the idea of sticking them into a book, together with a new introductory section about his journey to the Danube. On the other hand, it might be that as someone with professional interests centred on Russia, he just couldn't work up much interest in Holland and Germany.

All the same, an interesting document of its time.

[I read the book as a pdf from archive.org, and the scanning quality wasn't really good enough to get much impression of Mrs Farson's photographs. However, they do look interesting, as far as you can make them out.] ( )