He left Greenwich on a bicycle in the summer of 1994 with Stevie Smith, and the two of them pedalled a wooden boat called Moksha from Portugal to Florida — roughly four months of it, two men taking turns on the pedals, no engine, no sail, nothing but legs and a following sea when they were lucky.
Then North America on inline skates, which is where the arithmetic goes wrong. A car hit him in Pueblo, Colorado, in 1996. Both legs broken. Something like nine months before he could carry his own weight again. He went back to the exact bit of road and carried on. The Pacific came in 2000, pedalled, which nobody had done, and the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea and a lot of road in between, with different people climbing aboard for different legs and climbing off again. Stevie had already gone home by then. Starting a thing and handing it on is not failing at it.
Thirteen years and about three months out, and he came back up the Thames and across the meridian line in 2007. There's a photograph of Moksha on the river that week, yellow, ZERO EMISSIONS on the hull, little flags strung from the mast, the dome of the arena behind her. What I'd want is the list of everyone who met him at a landfall with water and a bed — the ones in Hawaii, in Australia, in Djibouti. He didn't feed himself for thirteen years.
They took: one pedal boat, two sets of legs, one very long atlas, no motor at all.
The line itself is just a brass strip in the courtyard up the hill, which is a small thing to walk across after thirteen years. And the river down there has the old foot tunnel under it, open since 1902, lifts and white tiles, still the quietest way across on legs alone.
On the Australian leg a saltwater crocodile came and had a look at Moksha, which up there counts as a formal greeting. A boat that low and that slow reads as something worth inspecting, and they're in no hurry about it.