North-West by North – A Journal of a Voyage –

“It was a strange crew and an even stranger craft, the clumsy thirty-four-foot cutter Skaga, which set out from Newcastle, Australia, in 1932. Dora Birtles was one of the five on board – three women and two men – whose dream it was to sail to Singapore by way of New Guinea and the Java Sea.
The trip was to take them nearly eight months, and their experiences both on land and on sea were to prove as exhilarating, and often as desperate, as anything a hardened adventurer could have prescribed: pirating in the islands of the Great Barrier Reef; being marooned on a waterless island in the Torres Straits; weathering storms and seasickness, becalming and near-starvation, and experiencing too the fascination of new people and cultures, the beauty of the sea, sun and sky.

But this extraordinary book, out of print since 1935, is much more than a diary of an adventure. Most remarkable of all were the events played out between the five people on board – their tensions and rivalries, pettiness and generosity; their constant battles with anger and frustration, loyalty and restraint. With an eloquence as striking for its intensity as for its honesty, Dora Birtles has written an astonishingly personal memoir of the physical and psychological drama of life at sea.”