The Boy Who Fell to Shore

Rating 4 of 5

The Boy Who Fell to Shore is the story of the life of Thomas Thor Tangvald.

Thomas was the son of Per Tangvald who was a respected minimalist blue water sailboat cruiser/live aboard. Per was rather famous in the sailing community having circumnavigated on a boat without an engine and written two well known stories about his cruising journeys Sea Gypsy and At Any Cost. The book is a bit of an expose on Per as he had the respect of many sailors and was citied by the influential Lin and Larry Pardey.

Per appears to have been a major asshole. Who took significant sailing risks his entire life. This resulted in the deaths of two of his wives, his daughter and himself. He was a chronic womanizer who liked taking up with young women. He would expect them to work so they could support his chosen “gypsy” life style. Honestly after reading the book I have no respect for the man.

Thomas unfortunately followed in his fathers footsteps. Rather then learning from the faults of the man he was unable to move beyond them. At age 15 after surviving the shipwreck that kills his father and younger sister Thomas is taken in by Clare Allcard who gets him a useful education and sets him a direction that could have resulted in a productive life.

Instead Thomas embraces all sorts of counter culture. Developes significant drug addictions and eventually dies at sea as a homeless man.

The book treats Thomas rather fairly I think. Explaining his self destructive lifestyle by way of his abusive father, step mother and other childhood traumas. I think this is fair. Thomas was raised by a terrible father in terrible conditions. But at some point we all must be responsible for at least ourselves and I don’t think that Thomas was ever able to do this.

I’m especially disappointed in how he treats his wife and children in the last part of the book. He could never resist his fathers selfish genes and after his son is born he’s unable to long term integrate into society and becomes obsessed with moving his family to Brazil. In an insane journey he sails his young son and pregnant wife to the edge of Brazil with no real plan on how they will settle there. Eventually the family ends up living as squatters in French Guyana. His young children get horrible infections living in filth. Its totally crazy yet he persists.

A lot of the memorandums on Thomas is as a bit of a “savant” but in truth I think he’s kind of an idiot. He’s lucky he didn’t kill his wife and boys through his foolish behavior. You can excuse being a degenerate on the conditions of your birth for a while, but eventually all people must take responsibility for their own conduct. This is especially when you have people around you depending on you like your sons. The only excuse I think that Thomas may have is that after years of substance abuse I’m guessing his brain was a bit fried. As a father though I’m not sure I’m willing to give that to him because in the end the results were terrible.

I struggled with rating The Boy Who Fell to Shore as its sort of a narrow interest book. Per and Thomas’s story is a common one. A asshole father raises a kid that turns into an alcoholic. Its main novelty is that it happens on sailboats rather then on land. But given Per’s fame in the sailing community and how well the book exposes him as a bit of a fraud I think its a good contribution to its niche so ultimately I rated the book 4 of 5 rather then 3 of 5. The book is well written, balanced in its reporting and easy to understand despite its many plot lines and characters. My major complaint about the book is that the pictures in it are black and white, grainy and hard to see. I think the book would strongly have benefited from a center insert containing color pictures of the various people, boats and places in the story.