Danger is My Destiny

First edition, first impression.  224pp.  Black cloth-covered boards with gilt lettering on the spine.  8vo.  Cloth is worn and brushed, gently rounded at corners and spine ends.  Very slightly cocked.  Heavily spotted on text block edges and lightly so on endpapers and first and last few leaves.

Not a pretty copy of this now hard to find autobiography but robust, complete and readable.  An adventurer who makes Thor Heyerdahl look like an amateur describes his life at sea – a sailor during the first world war and a lieutenant in the Commandos during the second world war, he went on to retrace Darwin’s voyage on HMS Beagle, spent time as a whaler, a pearl diver and performing rescue mission (nearly being murdered on a mission in the trackless Amazon Basin) and fled a Japanese prison camp and destroyed mines and Nazi installations.