In June 1822 three sailors set out from Livorno on the Tuscan coast of Italy and headed for their home port of Lerici, some 36nm up the coast in a 29ft yacht. The weather was hot and thundery, the boat was heavily canvassed and open with no deck. She was seen heading north at a good clip before disappearing from sight as she sailed into the murk of a thundery shower that passed to the north of the town. The crew were never seen alive again. This brutal little vignette was played out in the great days of sail with monotonous regularity. Death was a simple fact of, well, life. What makes the story stand out was that among the crew was the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Indeed, he was the owner of the boat, and the death of a notable romantic poet has seen the circumstances of the voyage revisited and pored over endlessly.
I wouldn’t say that it was exactly the aforementioned poet’s misfortunes that led me to be cruising down the Ligurian coast but it’s fair to say he played a part. You see, some years earlier I had submitted a book proposal to Bloomsbury publishing regarding the poet’s brief, doomed, flirtation with yachting and had stated as part of this book, I would sail my own boat in the wake of Shelley. This seemed like a long shot as my boat lay to a swinging mooring in Poole Harbour but it turned out that this was more attainable than I thought, and a couple of years later I picked up my boat from a swinging mooring off the port of Lerici in the Bay of Poets to start my trip. It was August and very hot but I can thoroughly recommend the town, a beautiful port at the southern end of the Cinque Terre. The Cinque Terre for the uninitiated is a group of five small villages perched on the coast directly to the north of Lerici, which are all inaccessible by road and incredibly picturesque, perching on steep slopes overlooking the
