Tamata and the Alliance

The adventures of Bernard Moitessier--French sailor, explorer and writer, in his own words. This memoir encompasses his childhood in Southeast Asia, his war experience fighting the Viet Minh, and his numerous sea exploits.

This fascinating memoir spans the time from Moitessier''s magical childhood in Vietnam to months before his death, is a beautifully written saga of physical adventure and spiritual growth.Born in the French Indochina in 1925, Bernard Moitessier grew up astride two cultures--French and Vietnamese--in a turbulent era that moved dramatically from peace to war. Imprisoned during the Japanese occupation, he was later drafted to fight the Viet Minh in a French war that foreshadowed America''s own Vietnam involvement two decades later.Tamata tells how the 25-year-old Moitessier left Vietnam to answer the call of the sea. He led the life of a sea-gypsy, wandering the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic, and the Caribbean, learning the ways of boats and the sea and surviving two catastrophic shipwrecks. His greatest sailing adventures followed, the Tahiti-Alicante passage and his ten month round-the-world solo voyage in 1969 when he withdrew from the Golden Globe Race and sailed on to Tahiti.Moitessier then spent three years on a remote atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago. Called "Tamata" ("try it!") by his Tuamotu friends, he built a Polynesian-style house, planted coconut trees, and gradually transformed the sun-blasted coral into a speck of green in the middle of the South Pacific.After living in the United States, he spent the last years of his life in France. He is buried in a small fishing village in Brittany.