I liked this book; I liked it a lot.
I picked it up as soon as I saw it for sale, having read and enjoyed Mackinnon’s earlier The unlikely voyage of Jack de Crow.
That book—Jack de Crow—chronicled Mackinnon’s journey in 1997 in a Mirror dinghy from North Shropshire to the Black Sea. [A friend had put me onto this book, knowing that I own a Mirror—sitting unused now for some time, I’m ashamed to report.]
This new book [well, 2010 new] is an account of Mackinnon’s travels from New Zealand to the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland. [And just to complicate things further the earlier Jack de Crow book takes place after the later World’s end book.]
There is a story behind this latest adventure—undertaken in the early 1990s but recounted some twenty years later—and is, as anything Mackinnon, not entirely straightforward.
Mackinnon had been on Iona in 1982 and had found, by chance, the so-called ‘well of eternal youth’. He had swum in it then, and later, after he had left the island, discovered in a book on Iona that he needed to drink the water, and at sunrise. He also discovered that to receive this gift, a pilgrim would need to travel there “over land and over sea”. And this was crucial to the story that follows.
The journey started, fortuitously I think, in New Zealand. Mackinnon had planned to fly to New Zealand for a holiday. He simply cancelled the return ticket and started for Iona from the antipodes, which, for me, is pretty neat.
Mackinnon’s rules were simple [well, I guess the rules of the well of eternal youth were simple]. He had to travel to Iona without flying [“over land and over sea”].
And what an adventure it is. It is, of course, difficult to separate truth from fiction, but then, who cares really, when the story is so good?
His zig-zagging journey as he secured lifts and passages from New Zealand to New Caledonia to Gladstone then on to Darwin and through the Indonesian islands to Singapore makes up the first part of this fascinating story. And if all that seemed like an ever more unlikely romp, the second part, where Mackinnon chronicles his adventures north to Laos and China [all without visas], back to Penang then by ship and ferry to Egypt and the southern European mainland is a real hoot.
Mackinnon makes it, of course, to Iona, and you’ll have to read the book for his visit to the well of eternal youth.
His pencil drawings are a great pleasure. What an impressive skill, being able to chronicle a journey with line drawings, rather than a camera. And Mackinnon has provided several self-drawn maps to clarify the detail of his travels in Indonesia and Laos.
I did have a little trouble sorting out the chronology of this book and of Mackinnon’s life, and his friends and relatives. I know that this is really only a minor thing, it is the story, after all, that we should be interested in. But my mind works like that.
Anyway, go and grab a copy of this book—it is a great adventure well told.
My verdict: A great read.
A. J. Mackinnon, The well at the world’s end, Black Inc., 2nd ed., Collingwood, 2011.
After matter [no need to read this folks—it’s here just because I puzzle about things].
The edition I have is called the second edition [with an ISBN of 9781863955430] and I have no idea why. Nothing in the book or in the National Library of Australia catalogue entry tells us what makes this a second edition. And, to complicate things further, the NLA’s 2nd edition is dated 2014 with an ISBN of 9781863956666. If I had an infinite amount of time [which I clearly don’t], I’d pursue this. As it is, it will need to go on the ever-growing unresolved puzzles pile.
[Last reviewed: 4 July 2015.]
Dossier 48 