A day to remember. A London day to remember.
A daily dose of London you’re never going to forget.
A man came home to Greenwich on this day in 2007.
He’d been out for thirteen years.
Thirteen years, two months and twenty-three days, to be exact.
And he hadn’t been living abroad.
He’d been coming home.
He’d just taken the long way round.
The very long way round.
Forty-six thousand, five hundred and five miles.
Around the world.
And he’d done the whole thing without an engine.
Without a sail.
Without so much as a little outboard motor to help him along.
He’d walked.
He’d cycled.
He’d rollerbladed.
He’d kayaked.
He’d rowed.
He’d swum.
And for thousands upon thousands of miles of ocean he’d sat in a little wooden boat and pedalled.
With his legs.
Around the world.
This is London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
And today we’re in Greenwich.
We’re standing on one of the most famous imaginary lines in the world.
The Prime Meridian.
Zero degrees longitude.
The line from which east and west are measured.
And on July 12th, 1994, a 26-year-old Englishman called Jason Lewis set off from here.
On a bicycle.
He had a friend with him.
Steve Smith.
And they had an idea.
An absolutely preposterous idea.
They were going to go round the world.
Using nothing but human power.
No motors.
No sails.
Muscle power only.
And I love Jason Lewis’s response when Steve Smith first suggested it.
Basically:
“When do we start?”
Now there are ideas you have over a pint which look distinctly less attractive the following morning.
This one survived breakfast.
And lunch.
And the next day.
And eventually it survived thirteen years.
So.
Greenwich.
July 12th, 1994.
Off they go.
Think about London that summer.
John Major is Prime Minister.
Tony Blair hasn’t even become Labour leader yet.
There is no London Eye.
There is no Millennium Bridge.
And here’s the one I really like.
There is no Millennium Dome.
It doesn’t exist.
Jason Lewis is going to go round the planet and by the time he comes back there will be a gigantic white tent sitting beside the Thames to greet him.
That’s how long he’s away.
First, south through Britain.
Then across the Channel.
Then through France and down to Portugal.
And there the land ran out.
—————
Waiting for them was the extraordinary contraption which was going to make this whole enterprise possible.
A 26-foot wooden pedal boat.
Called Moksha.
Moksha.
A Sanskrit word.
Liberation.
Freedom.
It looked a bit like a torpedo with a cabin stuck on top.
You sat inside it.
And pedalled.
Think of one of those pedalos you hire on a boating lake.
Then point it at the Atlantic.
Off you go.
Lewis and Smith pedalled Moksha across the Atlantic.
One hundred and eleven days.
One hundred and eleven days.
Pedalling.
Across an ocean.
There was a near collision with a trawler.
A whale took an interest in them.
The boat capsized.
Jason Lewis went overboard.
Eventually, in February 1995, they reached Miami.
———————-
They had made the first east-to-west crossing of the Atlantic by pedal boat.
Personally, at that point I’d have found the nearest airport.
Bought a ticket to Heathrow.
Gone home.
Had a bath.
Jason Lewis put on a pair of rollerblades.
And set off across America.
Three thousand five hundred miles.
On rollerblades.
And then, in Colorado, disaster.
An 82-year-old driver hit him.
Both his legs were broken.
One of them so badly damaged there was a danger it might have to be amputated.
Now just think about that.
Your plan is to go round the world using human power.
Your legs are the engine.
And somebody breaks both of them.
That should be the end of the story.
It wasn’t.
Nine months later Jason Lewis was back on his feet.
And back on the journey.
Eventually he reached San Francisco.
Moksha went back into the water.
San Francisco to Hawaii.
Two thousand four hundred miles.
Fifty-four days.
And somewhere along the way this adventure stopped being a trip.
It became a life.
His original companion, Steve Smith, eventually decided enough was enough.
Jason carried on.
Across the Pacific.
At one point he would pedal all day, go to sleep, wake up in the morning and discover the currents had taken him virtually back to where he’d started.
Imagine that.
Ten hours on the pedals.
Sweat.
Blisters.
Exhaustion.
Bed.
Wake up.
Congratulations.
You’re still here.
Jason later said that was one of the most demoralising parts of the whole expedition.
But there were livelier moments.
A shark attacked the boat’s propeller.
He caught malaria.
Twice.
He suffered blood poisoning more than a thousand miles from land.
He encountered civil war in the Solomon Islands.
He was robbed at machete point in Sumatra.
And then there was the crocodile.
Australia.
A saltwater crocodile.
A very large saltwater crocodile.
It came after him.
Chased the boat.
Chased Jason onto the beach.
And when he tried to fend it off with a paddle, it bit through the paddle blade.
At which point you’d be entitled to conclude that the world really didn’t want to be circumnavigated.
Still he carried on.
Australia.
South-east Asia.
China.
Tibet.
India.
Across towards Africa.
At various points he simply ran out of money.
So he stopped.
Worked.
Earned some dosh.
And started again from exactly where he’d left off.
At one stage he was tens of thousands of pounds in debt.
He worked on a farm in Colorado.
He worked in a funeral parlour in Australia.
There’s something wonderfully unglamorous about that.
This wasn’t some vast expedition with helicopters overhead and a corporate hospitality tent waiting at the next checkpoint.
Jason Lewis needs money.
Jason Lewis gets a job.
Jason Lewis earns money.
Jason Lewis gets back on his bicycle.
Round the world he goes.
Eventually Africa.
jih-BOO-tee
Djibouti.
Ethiopia.
Sudan.
Egypt.
And Egypt produced another slight difficulty.
They thought he might be a spy.
To be fair, imagine the interview.
“Occupation?”
“Explorer.”
“Where have you come from?”
“Greenwich.”
“How did you get here?”
“I pedalled.”
“Sir, would you come with us please?”
His communications equipment, cameras and GPS did nothing to make him look less suspicious.
He was detained.
Eventually released.
And on he went.
Africa behind him.
Turkey.
Europe.
Home was getting closer.
And now something wonderful happens to this story.
It gets smaller.
For thirteen years the map has been enormous.
Atlantic Ocean.
Pacific Ocean.
Australia.
Tibet.
Africa.
Now the place names begin to sound familiar again.
France.
Belgium.
English Channel.
Kent.
Thames.
London.
Greenwich.
The world is shrinking back down around him.
He gets Moksha across the Channel.
He comes up the Thames.
And imagine that moment.
After thirteen years.
After oceans.
After mountains.
After malaria.
After broken legs.
After the crocodile.
After being arrested as a suspected spy.
London comes into view.
And there, beside the Thames, is something which wasn’t there when he left.
The Dome.
An enormous albino tortoise undergoing a serious acupuncture treatment.
A building from another London.
A London thirteen years further on.
Keep pedalling.
Past it.
Up the river.
Greenwich ahead.
October 6th, 2007.
Crowds are waiting.
The Duke of Gloucester is there.
Steve Smith is there.
The man who’d started the journey with him all those years before.
Shortly before one o’clock in the afternoon Jason Lewis brings Moksha ashore.
The little wooden boat which has crossed oceans is put onto a trolley.
And he pulls it towards a line.
An imaginary line.
Zero degrees longitude.
The Greenwich Meridian.
The line he crossed going the other way on July 12th, 1994.
And at 12.43 pm Jason Lewis crosses it again.
The circle closes.
Forty-six thousand, five hundred and five miles.
Five continents.
Two oceans.
One sea.
Thirteen years.
No motor.
No sail.
Human power.
Guinness World Records recognises it as the first circumnavigation of the Earth without wind or motor assistance.
And Jason Lewis?
He was 40 when he came home. He’d been 26 when he set off.
He crossed that line and burst into tears.
“I blubbed like a baby,” he said afterwards.
Quite right too.
And there’s something about Greenwich that makes this story perfect.
It couldn’t end anywhere else.
The Prime Meridian is only a line we’ve agreed to imagine.
You can’t see longitude.
You can’t trip over it.
There isn’t a groove cut into planet Earth.
But we need lines like that.
They tell us where we are.
And this particular line told Jason Lewis something else.
You’re home.
He had gone west from zero.
Kept going.
And eventually arrived back at zero from the other direction.
Which gives us our word of the day.
Circumnavigate.
A lovely word.
From the Latin “circum”, around.
And “navigare”, to sail or navigate.
To travel all the way around something.
Circumnavigate.
Although in Jason Lewis’s case the definition requires a footnote.
Because sailing was precisely what he wasn’t allowed to do.
Wind power was cheating.
Motor power was cheating.
If Jason Lewis wanted to move forward, Jason Lewis had to move Jason Lewis forward.
And maybe that’s why I like this story so much.
Forty-six thousand miles sounds impossible.
Crossing the Atlantic in a pedal boat sounds impossible.
Crossing America on rollerblades sounds ridiculous.
Going on after having both legs broken sounds frankly deranged.
But nobody pedals forty-six thousand miles in one go.
You pedal this turn.
Then the next one.
Then the next one.
One revolution.
One mile.
One day.
Then another.
Until one morning a white dome appears beside the Thames.
And then Greenwich.
And then a little brass line in the ground.
And you discover that if you keep going for long enough,
sometimes you get back to where you started.
On October 6th, 2007, Jason Lewis did.
He’d been out for thirteen years.
Quite a way to get home.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
And this has been London Calling.
London Calling with your daily London fix.
See you tomorrow.