JUST A SPECK ON THE OCEAN
- Aug 15
- 11 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
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.
The Euphrates took Oskar southward through the heart of Iraq to Fallujah, Baghdad, Basra, and out to the Persian Gulf. Aside from the harsh conditions, extreme heat, and a lack of food (where he was forced to live off dates from palms along the river wherever he found them), Speck, this alien specimen, was regularly shot at by locals along the way. He also got stranded in the Euphrates on an island with a corpse where he was forced to hunker down and wait for a serious storm to pass. Here Oskar was almost permanently stranded when his boat was stolen, but he was able to recover it with a bribe.
Speck reached the Persian Gulf and continued on to Iran. He cruised up the Strait of Hormuz to Bandar Abbas, where he finds himself stranded once again, this time for six months while waiting for a new kayak to arrive from home, from Pionier Faltbootwerft, which would become his regular supplier. At this point in his adventure he also picks up a customary bout of malaria and is unable to leave Iran until September of 1934.
Eventually Oskar sets off, through the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea along Iran’s barren and rugged eastern coast (the region that swallowed most of Alexander the Great’s army) past Makran on his way to British India, now Pakistan. It wasn’t until November 19th, 1934 that he arrived in the Balochistan region, near Gwadar. There Speck is welcomed by locals and British officials, who wine and dine his and help fund some of the next leg of his travel. Elsewhere in the region such a strange sight justified some conspiracy thinking and he was also briefly arrested under suspicion that he was likely a spy, or at the very least that something weird was going on.
TO THE BAY AND STRAIT
From there Oskar made his way along the coast of India. From Porbandar, the childhood home of Mahatma Gandhi on the Arabian Sea in Gujarat, he travelled all the way down to Cape Comorin (today Kanyakumari), the southernmost tip of India, capsizing multiple times along the way, of course. From there Speck crossed over to Sri Lanka, arriving in Colombo on May 13th, 1935, exactly three years after he first dipped his kayak into the Danube. There he was forced to wait out monsoon season. He would remain on the island for three months before being able to leave. He also had to send away for just one more new kayak to continue his adventure, which he picks up in Madras (now Chennai) on the east coast of India.
It takes Speck until January of 1936 to travel all the way up the Bay of Bengal to reach Calcutta (Kolkata) in the northeast, near the border of what is today Bangladesh (capsizing no less than five times along the way). And it takes him until August of that year to travel all the way south, through Myanmar to the Andaman Sea, down the coast of Thailand and the Strait of Malacca to peninsular Malaysia to Georgetown on the island of Penang. The Straits Echo reported his arrival at about 4:45pm on August 9th. They wrote that “Speck left Germany with a bitter frame of mind and to-day the bitterness had gone — washed out by the thousands of miles of ocean and what remains is a sunny temperament and a boundless confidence in his ability to reach the ‘Journey’s end.’” Speck stayed two weeks on Penang before heading on to Singapore, where he arrives after another three months of travel.
TO INDO
In Singapore Speck has to pick up another replacement kayak before heading off to Indonesia. He travels along the southeastern coast of Sumatra and her muddy mangroves to Java. Soerabaijasch Handelsblad, the local Dutch-language broadsheet, reports his arrival in port, Tanjung Priok, in the capital of Jakarta (then Batavia), on December 10th, 1936. Herr Speck was received most enthusiastically by a crowd, including many from the German community in town as well as the German Consul General and the local Nazi Party district group leader (Ortsgruppenleiter). There he delivered lectures about his adventure to the local German Club, received financial support, and acquired a new camera to document the rest of his journey. Most unfortunately, consistent with the German national flag after 1935, Speck decided from that point to start flying a little swastika pennant from his kayak.
Speck left Jakarta in January of 1937 and crossed along the north of the island to the city of Surabaya where he stayed for five weeks, finally leaving in March to make his way over to Bali. In Bali his malaria flared up and harsh weather and currents ensure onward travel is difficult. Like most people, he was also likely content to linger in Bali for a bit. After multiple attempts to cross between islands, Speck made it across the 1,000km stretch of archipelago, past Lombok, past West Nusa Tenggara, Sumba, and East Nusa Tenggara, to arrive in Timor in July, two months behind schedule and after being blown 40 miles off course by monsoon winds. The weather kept him in the Portuguese outpost of Dili for three months before he was able to begin his island-hopping once again, on September 26th, 1937.
TROUBLE
Though he struggled with the distance, Speck eventually reached the island of Lakor, around 300km east of Dili. While spending a night sleeping in his kayak on the beach, more than a dozen locals attacked him. He brandished an unloaded pistol but was quickly overpowered and beaten up. He was bound with hide and left on the beach while all his belongings were looted. As the story goes, he was able to chew himself free of his bindings, recover some belongings, and escape in his kayak. The attack, however, left him with a punctured eardrum.
He reached safety at the village of Saumlaki, another 350km east, in the Tanimbar Islands. But medical help was limited there. He was sent on a boat to Ambon, 500km north, for treatment while his damaged boat and gear were left behind. They couldn't help Oskar, however, and he was sent all the way back to Surabaya on Java, back 2,000kms to the west, to a military hospital, where he underwent surgery on his ear. He spent several months recovering and needed to procure yet another replacement kayak from Germany. His recovery and further logistics cost him another year.
Wary about Speck’s incident and him causing further problems, the Dutch colonial authorities refused him permission to travel a similar route to the one he had taken and directed him instead to take a much farther northern route all the way around New Guinea, which would add thousands of kilometers on his trip to his final destination of Australia.
ON TO AUS
Undeterred and with a new kayak, by mid-1938 Speck resumed his adventure from the Tanimbar Islands, between Timor and New Guinea. He continued via the Kei Islands to the north and circled West Papua to the town of Manokwari on the north of the island by Christmas Eve 1938. There he stayed several weeks before pressing on, past Jayapura to round the whole island and eventually arrived in Port Moresby, the capital of New Guinea, on the far south of the island in early August of 1939. To get there he endured exhaustion and supply shortages (often due to distrust or hostilities with locals) as well as further troubles with malaria along with encounters with sharks and crocodiles.
In early September, on the island of Daru, west of Port Moresby and just before crossing into Australian territory and south through the Torres Strait islands, Speck learns of the German invasion of Poland a week earlier. On September 20th, he reaches Saibai Island and continues on to Thursday Island, at the northernmost tip of Queensland. There, with Britain having declared war on Germany, three Australian police arrest Speck as an enemy alien, flying the enemy flag in a dominion of the British Empire — but not before congratulating him on his tremendous achievement, coming all the way from Germany and covering more than 50,000km.
Of course, Oskar had been absent for Gleichschaltung and the Reichstag fire, the Enabling Act and the rise of the SA and Schutzstaffel, the signing of the Reichskonkordat and the Aktion Kolibri (Operation Hummingbird), the merging of the powers of the presidency into the office of the chancellor and the death of Hindenburg, the violation of the Treaty of Versailles with re-armament and the remilitarization of the Rhineland, German troops entering Austria and the Kristallnacht pogrom. All the same, Speck would be interrogated on suspicion of being a spy. His camera and film, copious notes and German passport, and flying a swastika pennant did not help his case. Speck would be held on Thursday Island for about a month.
THE CAMPS
From there, Oskar was transferred to a WWI prison camp in Brisbane before being moved on to Tatura Internment Camp in Victoria, about 200km north of Melbourne. As Japan and Italy signed their Tripartite Pact with Germany and legions of meth-heads went on to invade Denmark and Norway, followed by the Netherlands and Belgium, Luxembourg and France, Yugoslavia and Greece, this outback camp would soon become home to thousands of German, Italian, and Japanese internees (but also 1,500 British nationals and others from China, Iran, Russia, Finland, Hungary, Portugal, and the US) for the duration of the war. But Speck grew tired of his imprisonment.
On January 9th, 1943, Speck was able to figure out how to hide in a tool chest and sneak out of the camp. During roll-call the same day, however, one of his friends was caught answering to Speck’s name and the authorities were alerted that the survivalist and long-distance traveler was on the run. After two weeks, he was captured in Melbourne sporting civilian clothes and with a bicycle, camping gear, and some cash. Labelling him a “prisoner of ingenuity”, Speck was returned to Tatura and given a month in solitary confinement before being once again transferred, this time to Loveday Internment Camp, 250kms east of Adelaide in South Australia and labelled a security risk.
Though the German leader was dead at the end of April 1945 and victory in Europe declared a few days later and then Imperial Japan announcing surrender in August, Speck and other internees remained in the prison system until early 1946.
POST-JOURNEY
14 years after he left Germany and now at almost 39 years of age, as soon as he was released Speck travelled to the outback New South Wales town of Lightning Ridge (roughly 700kms southwest of Brisbane) and began working in the opal mines. Eventually he learned to cut opal and got into opal dealing. He became a successful opal merchant and obtained Australian citizenship. In the early 1950s, Speck bought land on a hillside overlooking the sea at Killcare Heights, on the Central Coast of New South Wales. He hand-built his own home there, developed gardens, and at times operated an opal workshop on a neighbouring block. In the 1970s Oskar returned to visit Germany but found the place entirely unfamiliar and was happy to retire in Australia.
Speck neither married nor had any children. For 30 years his partner Nancy Jean Steele commuted weekly from Sydney to Killcare to spend time with him, moving in with him in the final years of his life. After his death in March of 1993 at age 86, Nancy bequeathed a large collection of his diaries, letters, photographs, film, and other effects to the Australian National Maritime Museum, much of which has now been digitized.
Amazingly, in 2016 Sandy Robson, a 42-year-old sea-kayaker from Western Australia, completed a five-an-a-half-year voyage retracing much of Oskar Speck’s route through 20 different countries from Germany to Australia (including authentic attacks from pirates, crocodiles, and malaria mosquitoes).
RESOURCES
Australian National Maritime Museum - Oskar Speck: documents, artefacts, movies, and photos
Oskar Speck, photos from Australian National Maritime Museum
The forgotten adventurer who kayaked 50,000km around the world
Christine Winter (2017) Removing danger: the making of dangerous internees in Australia, in Crowley & Dawson (eds) Homefronts: Britain and the Empire at war 1939-1945
