The Naughty Girl who Crossed the World

When I announced the activation of my Postcard Echo Machine (PEM) I received a bevy of delightful postcards from all manner of folks. Of those, the winners for promptness were also the youngest: James and Kevin, to whom I am known as "Mr. Tom," asked for a Lego fact and a train fact, respectively. The PEM has gone largely dormant since that first initial flurry, but those two have not forgotten it.

Just recently I received an urgent missive from the pair of them, requesting with alacrity a fact about boats. Well, I used up all my writing time in crafting my response, so I have no choice but to share it with the Ostrich. The story serves as a fable, I think, and the lesson is this:

—If you're going to be a disobedient brat, devote your waywardness to something epic.

Dear Kevin and James,

Since you asked about boats, let me tell you all about a naughty girl named Laura Dekker.

Laura was born in New Zealand, while her parents were on a long sailing trip. She spent her first five years at sea. Then she moved to the Netherlands with her father, to go to school. On her sixth birthday, her father gave her a tiny sailboat of her own. She named the little boat Guppy. Her father started teaching her to sail it, staying close by in his own little boat.

For Laura's eighth birthday her father gave her a book about Tania Aebi, a woman who sailed around the world, all by herself.

When Laura was eleven, she helped her father in a sailing race, on a boat they borrowed from a friend. When the race was done, she asked the boat's owner if she could use it sometimes, and the owner said yes, if she kept it clean and took care of it. She named the boat Guppy, after her first little boat, and started sailing it whenever she could. That summer, her father let her sail around the Wadden Sea, with her dog, Spot, along for company.

In the winter, Laura's father gave her a loan to buy a sailboat just like the one she was borrowing. She named it—guess what—Guppy, and spent her whole summer vacation sailing around the Netherlands. She told her father she wanted to sail around the world, like Tania Aebi.

Her father thought a twelve-year-old was too young to sail around the world all by herself, but instead of saying no, he tried being clever. He told Laura she couldn't sail around the world unless she sailed to England first, to get experience. He knew that the weather was usually bad in the English Channel, and the ocean currents were strong. Most sailors don't want to cross the English Channel. He thought Laura wouldn't want to sail to England, and she'd change her mind about sailing around the world.

Do you think Laura changed her mind? I don't think so either.

Laura told her father she was going on a short sailing trip near home, during a school vacation. Instead, she steered out to sea. Three days later, after a difficult crossing, she docked her boat in Lowestoft, England. She walked to the library, and sent her father an email to tell him where she was.

The police in England called Laura's father, and said he should come get her. Laura's father told them she could sail back on her own. The police didn't like that answer. They put her in a children's home until her father came. So Laura's father went to England to fetch her from the children's home. He told everybody he was sorry for the trouble. Then he took Laura to her boat, wished her a safe voyage, and flew back to the Netherlands. Laura sailed home from England in a storm. The sea was rough, but the wind made her boat go very fast. She got back to the Netherlands by the next evening.

Now Laura's father believed she was ready to sail around the world, and he knew she'd try it anyway, whether he helped or not. They bought a bigger boat, which Laura named...Excelsior! (Just kidding. She named it Guppy.) She and her father started planning her voyage. Soon they announced her plan in the newspaper.

Well, the government of the Netherlands thought a thirteen-year-old was too young to sail around the world by herself, and they tried being clever a whole different way. A judge decided her father wasn't being a good parent, and called in other adults to look after her. They made her stop planning her trip. She sneaked out on training voyages anyway. When the police found out, they sent a boat to stop her, and made her father come help her sail home. The judge was not happy.

A few months later, Laura went missing. Her boat was at the dock, but they couldn't find Laura anywhere. Finally she turned up, safe and sound, on the island of Sint Maarten, all the way across the Atlantic ocean. The police took her home to Amsterdam, and made her answer a lot of questions.

When she was fourteen, a judge decided that Laura was allowed to go on her trip, if Laura's father said so. Laura's father said she was ready to start. Nobody else thought it was a good idea, and it probably wasn't, but Laura and her father sailed to Spain. She said good bye to her father at a little island called Gibraltar, and sailed away by herself, out into the Atlantic.

Laura didn't do her whole voyage all at once. She took lots of breaks. For a few weeks she joined the crew of a tall ship called Stad Amsterdam. Her mother came to visit her in the Caribbean islands, and other people visited her, too, but Laura did all the sailing by herself. She sailed through the Panama Canal. She navigated through dangerous reefs, and crossed whole oceans with hardly any sleep. She visited islands all through the Pacific. Her father came to see her in Australia. He helped her work on her boat, and they celebrated her 16th birthday together.

As Laura kept going, people started to get excited for her. Newspapers gave weekly reports on her progress. When she passed the tip of Africa, a whole fleet of racing boats came to meet her. To make her trip around the world official, she kept going, and crossed the Atlantic Ocean again. She arrived at the island of Sint Maarten on the 518th day after she left Gibraltar.

That made Laura Dekker the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone. And she'll probably keep that record for a long time, because most people's boring parents won't let them sail across one measly ocean by themselves.

Your devoted tycoon,
Mr. Tom