Wild life | 13 August 2011

Indian Ocean

On Hassan’s dhow, shaped like Vasco da Gama’s caravel, I can forget about dry land for a fortnight of holiday. If I could, I’d give it all up and set sail for the outer islands — to Aldabra, to the Chagos, to Socotra. And then I realise I am beached without my old friend Lorenzo Ricciardi. Where on earth are you when I need you, Lorenzo?
When I lived in London I was a castaway. Then one day Lorenzo zoomed up in his gunmetal grey Spider with an I ♥ KENYA bumper sticker. He had white hair, wild eyes hidden by aviator goggles, and he wore baggy-armed musketeer shirts. He’d abandon the Spider in the street wherever we stopped and stride away, somehow invisible to traffic wardens.

Lorenzo was born in a Milanese prison after his mother was caught short en route to hospital. The Nazis destroyed his childhood home as he watched. He acted Christ in Ben Hur, in which you never see his face. Lorenzo was — is — an adventurer from a bygone era, a successor to Henri de Monfried. Using a secret gambling system, he amassed enough money on the roulette tables of Divonne to buy an ocean-going dhow on which he happily sailed through a string of monsoons until he sank his ship off the island of Grande Comore.

Out of that adventure he wrote The Voyage of the Mir-el-Lah. His wife, Mirella, a famous photographer, took the pictures. In this, my favourite sea adventure (Collins, 1980, now out of print), Lorenzo shows what it is to be truly free and without fear. North of Madagascar a cyclone hits and the sambuk begins to break up. ‘The time had come when a sailor must turn to God for help,’ he writes.