The idea of a lone man crossing the Pacific Ocean on a largely handmade raft seems like the basis for one of our increasingly more outlandish reality shows. Or, potentially the folly of a billionaire adventurer blessed with more dollars than desires for preservation. Now, add to that idea the fact that the raft was designed with no blueprint and no sketch. It didn’t posses a railing to keep anything, or anyone, from spilling overboard. The only shelter was a six-by-eight foot hut constructed from bamboo and balsa boards. The sailor piloting this haphazard vessel would need 115 days to cover almost 7,000 miles. The whole crazy scheme sounds like the plan of a documentary filmmaker hauling an IMAX movie camera, support crew, emergency beacons, and plenty of media attention.

However, as T.R. Pearson recounts in Seaworthy: Adrift with William Willis in the Golden Age of Rafting, this expedition was actually the quest of a 60-year-old man in 1954. Driven by nothing more than a need for adventure and a desire to push his body and mind to the limits, William Willis survived on rye flour and mugs of seawater in his bid to travel from South America to Australia.

Pearson, the author of ten novels including A Short History of a Small Place, Cry Me a River, and Blue Ridge, is a master of voice and vernacular. In his fiction, Pearson’s language tends to be more antiquated, more polished, and more sophisticated while remaining no less Southern than writers who just drop the “g” off a few words and sprinkle around “them there” in their dialogue. In Seaworthy, his first book of nonfiction, the Virginia native pulls back on the vernacular but still displays his trademark voice:

He carried by way of provisions only olive oil and flour, honey and lemon juice, garlic and evaporated milk. Since he intended to drink from the sea, a personal practice of long standing, he’d dispensed with the bother of stowing so much as the first ounce of fresh water… He’d shipped no proper radio, had but a sextant for his bearing, sailing directions to guide him.

Instead of simply saying the man carried this item as a provision, Pearson inverts the sentence and writes “he carried by way of provisions.” He writes almost the way a musician plays behind the beat in a manner that is unique, engaging, and lends an old-world feel. Pearson’s style provides the reader a welcoming warmth that contrasts with the frigid cold Willis felt on his travels.

At 15, William Willis left Hamburg, Germany on a ship bound for Santa Rosalia in the Gulf of California. On this voyage, the teenager learned to drink a cupful of seawater every day, one of his many strange medicinal habits that lasted throughout his life. After his initial voyage, Willis caught on a few more ships, then cut timber in Texas, toiled as a stevedore on the Galveston docks, unloaded flour from trains in Pennsylvania, worked construction in Cleveland, drove rivets in a San Francisco shipyard, and was a plumber’s helper in Kansas City.

While in San Francisco, Willis found that his personal tastes and difficult finances were well suited to the strict diet followed by yogis. He generally ate little but unrefined foods and studied rhythmic breathing and chewing so his food would release the most vitamins possible. In 1926, inspired by a teacher’s observation that “you are a seeker,” Willis moved to New York City. Determined to take advantage of the Public Library, he read voraciously while his sparse eating habits bordered on starvation.

On a whim to help someone in need, and more importantly, to experience a sense of adventure that was lacking in his library life, Willis rescued his landlord’s son who was imprisoned in the South American country of French Guiana. It was just the sort of quest that would mark William Willis’ life and had been foreseen by his instructors in San Francisco:

It seems the yogi who had encouraged Willis to fill his upper lobes with air had also informed him, ‘The impossible attracts you,’ which Willis saw fit to embrace as an article of faith.

After a few calm years with his new wife in New York City, Willis became determined to discover “how much I really can go through in the way of hardships—I mean living on starvation rations and working around the clock—working day after day without sleep and exposing myself to everything the sea and sky have in the way of bad weather.” Challenged by Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition, Willis decided to cross the Pacific on a raft not because he wanted to prove any scientific theory but just to complete a “pilgrimage to the shrine of my philosophy.”

Willis’ first trip on a raft named Seven Little Sisters and his subsequent 1963 expedition on Age Unlimited at the age of 70 saw him battle gale-force winds, searing bouts of blindness, shark attacks, equipment failure, and spoiled drinking water by using his typically eccentric methods. His radio transmitters never seemed to work so Willis believed he was better off communicating with his wife via telepathy. Having previously refused surgery to treat his double hernia, Willis eased the pain by hauling himself up and then dangling upside down from the mast, sometimes for eight hours at a stretch. He sang to stave off loneliness, navigated treacherous reefs with a verve that astonished local sailors, and devised ingenious ways to handle the problems his own thrifty preparation inevitably caused.

The life of William Willis was a testament to adventure, to self-reliance, and perhaps to a bit of fool’s luck. He covered almost 18,000 miles of ocean by himself on the most primitive of vessels under the most deprived conditions. His story is an amazing saga of the sea and T.R. Pearson renders the tale beautifully. In Seaworthy: Adrift with William Willis in the Golden Age of Rafting Pearson’s voice provides a warmth and a grace that was all too lacking in the troubles Willis faced.