Peter Bird

History’s greatest ocean-rowing career started with a classified ad.

It was 1972, and Peter Bird was selling velvet paintings door-to-door, the latest in a string of dead-end jobs he’d held since leaving school at fifteen. Derek King was the new man on the crew, having answered a newspaper ad cynically targeting the counterculture youth of early 1970s London: “Heads and freaks — daily bread. Call Wendy.”

King called the number and soon found himself puttering up the M1 in a car full of kitschy paintings and longhaired salesmen. Someone asked about his hobbies, and King mentioned that he’d just rowed a small boat around Ireland. Bird nearly skidded off the road.

While the others fanned out to knock doors, Bird steered King into a pub and plied him with questions, not least of which was how he planned to top his Ireland adventure. King replied that he was preparing to row around the world. As a matter of fact, he told Bird, he was