[2] Soon after, he and his mother moved to Argentina where, aged thirteen, he left home to live in the jungle "like Tarzan", surviving by hunting and bartering skins with local peasants.

After a brief spell as a sailor on a Colombian boat he returned to Panama where he fell in with pirates and ended up spending three years smuggling guns, whiskey and cigarettes.

On 19 July 1969 he became the first person to row solo across an ocean when he arrived in Florida having set off from the Canary Islands.

The self-righting and self-bailing boat Britannia, now located in the National Maritime Museum Cornwall,[4] was designed by Uffa Fox.

In their letter the crew stated: Two years later in 1971 he set off with Sylvia Cook from San Francisco in an attempt to row across the Pacific Ocean in their boat Britannia II.