He Couldn't Have Done It Without Her-Exy Johnson's Seafaring Legacy

摘要

Robert Johnson stands in his kitchen wearing a teal-and-white Hawaiian shirt, a nod to his childhood spent sailing around the world aboard his parents' sailing vessel, Yankee, more than seventy years ago. When I explain that I'm interested in learning more about his mother, he methodically goes through the familiar chronology he has told and retold over the years to the many fans of Irving and Exy Johnson's accounts of life at sea, including Around Cape Horn, the classic mini-documentary shot and narrated by Robert's father, sailing legend Irving Johnson. The exchange with Robert and his wife, Betsy, reveals other stories that show why the Los Angeles Times called Exy the "doyenne of sailing." So much is known about Robert's famous seafaring father, but there is more to Yankees story, especially given the period in which the story takes place. As Exy explained in their first book, Westward Bound on the Schooner Yankee (1936), women "learned first of all that the best thing we could do in nine out often cases was to keep still.. .There is something about a woman's voice that can sound terrible on a boat at times." Yet former shipmates remember Exy as the glue that kept Yankee voyages together, and Robert reflects that, beyond those shipmates, "a lot of people don't realize how really important my mother was to the whole thing being successful at all."