Kwailan La Borde, widow of Harold La Borde and first mate on his voyages of high adventure, passed away at the age of 91 on Wednesday night. Mr La Borde preceded her in 2016.
It’s difficult today to convey the impact of the La Bordes’ first and second circumnavigations of the globe. A modern ocean voyage today is largely an affectation, aboard powerful ocean liners which find their apotheosis in multi-storey cruise ships.
A young Harold La Borde, realising he was a sailor as a teen, proceeded to build his own boats beginning with a 3.35 metre dingy. He studied cartography, and the boats got bigger. By 1960, Mr La Borde had built an eight-metre ketch, the Hummingbird, crossing the Atlantic with his wife and friend Buck Wong Chong. The 36-day crossing set a world record. The Nigerian government recruited them to coach their youth for two years.
On their return, they spent three years building the Hummingbird II, a 12-metre plywood ketch, raising funds after its construction by sailing charters. In 1969, the La Bordes, with five-year-old son Pierre, set out to circumnavigate the globe on a four-year voyage that remains their most celebrated and best known. The state bought the vessel in 1973 after their return and it remains on display at a museum on South Quay.
They built a third boat, the Humming Bird III and between 1984 and 1986, and circumnavigated the globe again, this time in the opposite direction. Their final Atlantic voyage brought the national flag to our team at the Barcelona Olympic Games.
By this time, the La Bordes were largely retired coaching and training a small cadre of sailors, craftsmen and entrepreneurs, but the larger lessons of their epic adventure were lost to successive generations. Their experience was not sought. Their stories never taught.
But they left us their example and chronicles of their epic lives in books, the last written by Mrs La Borde as she told her story. They built a boat and sailed the Atlantic to England. They built another and sailed around the world. They sailed their third boat around the world in the opposite direction.
That museum on South Quay doesn’t capture the staggering courage required to navigate on the open ocean by the stars. The confidence in their abilities that it would have required to step into a world that was known in far less detail and immediacy than we enjoy today.
Their journey was both an acknowledgement of the size of the world and a determined acceptance of it. The intimacy of that kind of global thinking, of understanding the relationship between the pull of the waves and the shifting of the wind are what small-island states in the Caribbean need today more than ever to understand the changes that climate change will bring to our shores.
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