JUST A SPECK ON THE OCEAN
Updated: Aug 20
Do you know about Oskar Speck? He was born one of seven children to a woodcutter in a village near Hamburg, Germany in 1907 (a crazy time to have been born there.) Oskar was a schoolchild through WWI and left at age 14, as was pretty typical at that time. He worked selling sacks of woodchips and dung to farmers as the penalties of the Treaty of Versailles came into force and with them hyperinflation of the 1920s followed by the Great Depression.
Alongside millions of other Germans, Herr Speck would find himself unemployed. With economic collapse shuttering the factory he worked at and then struggling to find a new job, Oskar started looking for opportunities elsewhere. There were rumours of mining jobs available in the copper mines of Cyprus. Since ancient times copper had been mined on the island and Roman slag heaps in the Skouriotissa region had directed an American prospector to the source of the metal in the early 20th century. Soon Colonel Seeley Mudd, another American, founded the Cyprus Mines Corporation to exploit the resource and respond to the mass electrification that came with the Second Industrial Revolution.
At the same time, kayaking was becoming a fad across Europe and these canvas-skinned, folding flatbootes were all the rage. Oskar bought himself a 5.5 metre two-man kayak and named it Sunnschien (Sunshine). He thought he would pack it along with several hundred pounds of luggage (three five-gallon water tanks, camping gear, some tinned meat and condensed milk, a camera and a pistol, a journal, a compass, and some charts) and try to make his way across Europe and out to the Mediterranean to the island of Cyprus.
Speck departed from Ulm, in the south of Germany, on the Danube River between Stuttgart and Munich, in May of 1932. A great time to be getting out of Dodge[berg]. He paddled the swift currents and locks until the waterway transitioned from a shallow stream into a major river near Bavaria. Through Ingolstadt to Regensburg and over the border into Austria he went. Through Vienna to Bratislava and on to Budapest, Hungary. With no money he is forced to linger and beg for food and resources. By then he had tired of the Danube, deciding that the river was too tame (typical male), and wished not to ride out to the Black Sea but to head south through what was then Yugoslavia toward the Aegean Sea. He heard that no one had ever sailed down the rough Vardar River so decided to paddle to the city of Skopje to become the first.
Oskar managed the difficult trip but severely damaged his kayak in the rapids and as the river froze over in the winter Speck was forced hole up in Veles for repairs, where he took odd jobs through to the spring of 1933. Once the river thawed he headed down the Vardar (called the Axios in Greece) to the Axios Delta and the port city of Thessaloniki on the Aegean. There Oskar learned from locals that his flatboote would not survive a sea voyage and that he was destined to capsize if he attempted the open sea for the last leg of his trip. That was a particularly stern warning as, oh yeah, young Oskar Speck did not know how to swim.
THE MED
So Speck added a small mast and sail and some splashguards to his little kayak to make travel more efficient and prevent the craft from being swamped by the waves he would have to endure in the dozens of hours of open sea travel he planned between Greek islands to make it to Turkey's coastline.
Speck quickly learned that taking his little boat out on the sea was like riding a bike: he had to stay moving to keep from capsizing, which he still managed to do all the time despite his best efforts. From the islands near Athens he managed his way across to Rhodes and on to the Turkish coast. He wound along the coastline and then out into the Mediterranean, making the 70km trek to Cyprus. Long before reaching the island, Oskar realized he wasn’t very excited about the copper mining. But he would stay on Cyprus until winter. He decided “I wanted much more to make a kayak voyage that would go down in history.”
THE MID
So what did Speck do? What any normal person would do: He headed east, on a two-day crossing to Syria before collapsing his watercraft and packing all his gear onto a bus. He would travel a roadless desert route 300km overland to Maskanah, 100km east of Aleppo on the Lake Assad section of the Euphrates River.
