These are busy days in ocean rowing. The Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge has finishing up and the Bouvet Guyane Solo Atlantic Rowing Race 2012 is well underway. There have been races across the Indian Ocean and races are scheduled for the Pacific. It is easy then to forget that before John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, rowed across the Atlantic in 1969, no one had ever done so alone. In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Syliva Cook, became the the first to row across the Pacific. Fairfax died, apparently of a heart attack on February 8th at this home in Henderson, Nev., near Las Vegas.
John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74
For all its bravura, Mr. Fairfax’s seafaring almost pales beside his earlier ventures. Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Greene, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in.
At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.
At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.
Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself. His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of adventure-based reality television.
The only child of an English father and a Bulgarian mother, John Fairfax was born on May 21, 1937, in Rome, where his mother had family; he scarcely knew his father, who worked in London for the BBC
In recent years, Mr. Fairfax made his living playing baccarat, the card game also favored by James Bond.
Baccarat is equal parts skill and chance. It lets the player wield consummate mastery while consigning him simultaneously to the caprices of fate.