Historical Fiction
The Spice Man
The purpose of historical novels about famous explorers is to weave reality and fiction together. The relationship between Francisco Serrão and Ferdinand Magellan and the letters to his cousin from the Spiceries (the Molucca Sea islands of Ternate and Tidore in modern Indonesia)), have been overlooked – as have Serrão and his life and times. In the far-ranging story of The Spice Man are woven the Papal Legate, female soldier/sailors, the mysterious Bachelor of Cananeia and many others who may have interacted with historically documented contemporaries such as Cristoforo Colombo, Amerigo Vespucci, the astronomer Abraham Zacuto, the geographer Duarte Pacheco Pereira and the traveller Ludovico di Varthema. Some are fictional; many are not. Set in a narrative that encompasses an understanding of the oceans, of offshore navigation and of Early Modern politics, the story brings to life not only a Portuguese explorer but the overall winners and losers in this Age of Portuguese exploration. It is a lesser-known epic tale that the Spanish conquest of the New World has all too often overshadowed.
Autobiography
Keeping on the Lights
Oil and the Family – An Autobiography
There are very few books about North Sea exploration. There are even fewer about the professional life of a geologist working in the British National Oil Corporation at the time of its big oil and gas discoveries made by multi-partnership groups during the 1970s and 1980s. Keeping on the Lights describes the early exploration of the North Sea - an endeavour which the political commentator Anthony Barnett noted with hindsight in 2013 ‘was one that has been largely forgotten but which made an unsung contribution to Britain’s economy at a critical time’. The book is also about overcoming work/life challenges and an affectionate window into the life of the Johnson family, its adventures and its joys and sadness of bringing up and losing a handicapped daughter. A Postscript describes The Industrialisation of China and the overwhelming impact this phenomenon has had on global climate since 1990.
Autobiography
Fifty Days on the Spanish Main
Venezuela 1990
A Venezuelan diary from October 1990 to February 1991. It is Fifty Days on the Spanish Main that once embraced a coastline extending all around the Gulf of Mexico and the southern Caribbean shoreline – from Florida to the delta of the river Orinoco. For three centuries, the Spanish Main was a place of treasure, of romance, of derring-do and of danger. At its heart lay the shores and hinterland of that part of the South American landmass occupied by the country now called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. In some ways, Venezuela – a beautiful country - is still a place of treasure, romance, derring-do and danger, but – sadly – those 1990 days of living, travelling and working as a senior oil industry consultant in Caracas are no more. As the story goes: ‘When God made Venezuela, he gave it everything: sunshine but with a climate that was not too hot; palm trees and high mountains; inexhaustible natural resources; huge supplies of oil; beautiful scenery; Caribbean beaches…’ But God said, ‘Yes, but wait until you see what kind of politician I put there.’
Literary Adventure
The Edge of Europe
September 1989 – A last look behind the Iron Curtain
The timing was purely coincidental. In between a two-year appointment as an exploration company General Manager in Indonesia and a consultancy project in Venezuela and at the end of a nine-month family sabbatical on the French Riviera, I needed to drive our Renault 4 back to Paris and sell it. The drive took a rather circuitous route: Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Austria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. As I started out, it was on intercontinental motorways at the height of the holiday season. People everywhere seemed to be dashing from one edge of Europe to the other. But where were the edges of Europe? Since WW2, an Iron Curtain had defined its eastern limit. But I was intrigued and decided to use the journey to explore beyond this barrier. To make the trip a travel memoir book about a real journey. An Iron Curtain book. But was it a potentially hazardous idea? Or could it be that, behind the curtain, was a ‘looking glass’ world similar but barely different from Western Europe? Or were there now two Europes where the fortified barrier marking where the Allied Armies had once met the Soviet Armies divided the peninsula? With a deep breath, I drove south, east and then north. But the autumn months of 1989 were tumultuous times. I had set off on a journey seeking the Edge of Europe but found I was unwittingly encountering the Hinge of History.
Literary Adventure
Latin American Weekends
Short Journeys to South and Central America
At the start of the 1990s, my time as a senior exploration consultant in Caracas, Venezuela was punctuated with several long weekends: Independence Day, Labour Day, Army Day, Navy Day, Flag Day and the Day of Indigenous Resistance. It seemed a waste to hang around in one place. In Venezuela, I was perched on the northern margin of Latin America, and a whole continent lay to the south. Furthermore, the islands of the Caribbean and the spine of Central America beckoned invitingly to the north. It was time to use the location; it was time to get away more. The ‘weekend’ journeys I made from Venezuela (using a wide variety of national airlines and car rental companies) to Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile caught the magnificently varied and beautiful landmass of South and Central America at an optimum time for adventure travel writing. Latin American Weekends visits eleven countries in as many months but hopefully – offers an exciting and all-encompassing South America adventure book.
Literary Adventure
Walking with Mr Belloc
The Path to Rome – A Walk from Toul to the Tiber
A journey on foot involving crossing Europe in a straight line from near Paris to the Eternal City sounds like a daft idea. That is, until you read Hilaire Belloc’s charming account of in his classic 1901 book The Path to Rome.
Re-treading Hilaire Belloc’s Path to Rome proved to be both a hiking adventure and an endurance test. It was also the first of three transalpine long-distance hikes completed in the years from 2008 to 2011 on retirement from a career in international oil & gas exploration. Writing up such a journey in the shadow of Belloc, however – like his original classic – invariably turns out to be an autobiography about life and travel. The Walking with Mr Belloc journey was not an easy stroll at just over 900 kilometres in 44 days. Not all walked, admittedly - but mostly so and at an average of 20.5 kilometres a day, bearing a 19-kilogram pack. Hopefully, following the Edwardian author along the Moselle Valley, across three Alpine passes and along the baking roadside of Lombardy and Tuscany has some echo of his travel literature. And remember…it’s not getting to Rome that’s important. The journey is the thing. Mr Belloc knew that.
Literary Adventure
The Alpine Diary
A Walk from Vienna to Venice
The long-distance Alpine hike A Walk from Vienna to Venice is recorded in this – the second of three hiking adventure books. With a fondness for the cities at the start and finish of the 550-kilometre journey, the summer of 2011 seemed the time to bridge the gap of the country in between – the rugged mountain landscape of Alpine Austria and northern Italy known as the Eastern Alps and the Dolomites. For someone with a geological background, setting off on a forty-day hike from Vienna to Venice was easier for me than for my wife, Elaine. Although her linguistic expertise proved useful when we met fellow travellers, it offered less assistance when confronted with scree, snow or hurricane-force winds. But, with great fortitude, she companionably weathered a week in the wet Wienerwald before concluding that this trans-Alpine ‘Johnson Grit Test’ was likely to get worse than better. From the town of Pernitz, I travelled on alone but always with an awareness of the historical hinterland of the country I was encountering. Especially so when I found that my journey resonated with the 5,000year-old Ötzi – the Bronze Age traveller released by the ice of the Ötztaler Alpen in 1991.
Literary Adventure
The Spanish Road
A Journey from Genoa to Ghent
Crossing the Alps was becoming something of a habit. The inspiration for writing The Spanish Road as a literary travel book came from reading The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567, the historian Professor Geoffrey Parker’s excellent 1972 study. My journey from Genoa to Ghent of 1290 kilometres (367 kilometres on foot and the remainder by train or rental car) took 19 days. In one sense, the Spanish Road describes a long-distance Alpine hike, in another sense, it is a book about eastern France; in yet another sense, it weaves together the presence of such characters as the Victorian explorer Sir William Conway, the climber Edward Whymper, the writer Gertrude Stein, the gastronome Brillat-Savarin, the Green Fairy, the painter Gustave Courbet and the Army of Flanders soldier Guy Fawkes. Most importantly, it is a memoir about the real journey of the sixteenth century Spanish Army as it made its way to the Eighty Years' War in the Low Countries. The Spanish Road was – and is – a long haul. Then and now.
Sailing
Nine Summers to the Nile
Mediterranean Passages of Penguin II
‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven’. Such words fit this travel literature book, Nine Summers to the Nile, encapsulating the Mediterranean yacht cruising adventures made by the Johnson Family and friends in their 12-metre Moody 38 yacht from 2001 to 2009 across the Bay of Biscay to Portugal and Gibraltar,. then Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and, finally, Egypt. The (largely coastal) passages from Torquay in the UK to the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean covered 7,322 sea miles. Looking back, as dark clouds have begun to gather in the 2020s, those years seem like a halcyon period of sunshine and global sanity. They were the best of times to write a yachting book, particularly about sailing in Turkey and about locations there that were not normally visited by others – from the land or the sea.
Sailing
What’s a Greek Urn!
Catching Wind in the Aegean
“Is September 2013 the best time to try single-handed sailing northwards up the Aegean?” said my wife Elaine, when I broached the idea one August evening in our home in Blackheath, London. “It’s still too hot in the Eastern Mediterranean. I don’t want to go. And what about all the military activity on the way - all those submarines and warships heading towards Cyprus and Syria? And all that trouble in Greece. You would be best taking a crewmate. What about neighbour Ricky? God knows what could happen if America lobs a missile into Damascus or the Greeks have their savings requisitioned like those poor Cypriots.” We compromised on a three-day try-out of lone sailing in Penguin II, starting from our marina berth in Kemer on the Turkish Riviera. When I reached Marmaris after a 160 nautical mile westward passage, Ricky would join me for the remainder of the 1,200-mile Aegean cruise. What’s a Greek Urn! Is both a sailing adventure travel book and a realisation that not all Mediterranean yacht cruising adventures work out as planned.
Sailing
Two Italian Islands
Sicily & Sardinia – travels by land & sea
It seemed an interesting idea – compare and contrast Two Italian Islands whilst my yacht Penguin II was based at Marina di Ragusa, looking out on the Sicilian Channel. I’d got there after sailing over 11,000 sea miles from the UK to the eastern end of the Mediterranean and back again with family and friends. I knew Sicily and Sardinia were different from each other, but I was amazed to find out how little they shared of a common history and culture extending back over several millennia. The two circumnavigations – the 523 sea miles of Sicily in October 2015 and the 805 sea miles of Sardinia in September 2016 - were both single-handed, probably a little late in the season, and immensely enjoyable. There are many ways to visit Italy. A country with large islands like Sicily and Sardinia has the advantage of allowing a geographic and cultural boundary to be drawn around some parts more easily than others. This makes for a book about Italy that is different from the many others which that country has inspired. It is also a book about Mediterranean cruising adventures and the long history of sailing on what the Romans called ‘The Middle Sea’.
Sailing
All at Sea – Mostly!
Short Pieces
Geographically, four of these twelve Short Pieces are about sailing adventures in Italy. One is set in Malta, one in Greece, one in North Cyprus, one in Syria and one – since it describes a night spent offshore at a location equidistant from Egypt, Gaza, Israel and South Cyprus – took place in the middle of nowhere. Thus were All at Sea -Mostly! The odd one out is a hiking adventure book to the 3,535 metre high Rifugio Mantova al Vioz – the ‘highest manned mountain hut in the Central Alps - in Italy’s Stevio National Park.
Sailing
Between the Sheets
Taking two Penguins from Tobermory to Trieste
The two Penguins? Both are sailing boats – the first Penguin being a 6.7-metre E Boat designed for racing around Scottish buoys, which I converted into a small cruising yacht in my garden. It was a vessel to learn the art of sailing on – mostly alone but sometimes with family or friends. For the most part, the family and friends were well out of it – the art of sailing being learned on the West coast of Scotland: rain, mist, fog and fierce tidal streams that only occasionally relented to permit the sun to reveal a place of great beauty. The adventures of the first Penguin covered 1,246 sea miles and reached offshore as far as the Outer Hebrides and Northern Ireland. Later, in English waters, another 450 sea miles were covered in bringing the E-Boat down the Irish Sea from the Clyde to the Bristol Channel. But this was not the boat that went from Tobermory to Trieste - the other Penguin was. Penguin II a major jump in size and seriousness – the 12-metre centre cockpit Moody 38 designed by Bill Dixon and purchased new at the 1994 London Boat Show. Penguin II was an ocean-going vessel. Initially based at Brighton Marina and not a million miles from our home in Blackheath, southeast London, it was this much-cherished vessel that my wife, family and friends crossed the English Channel thirty-six times in yachting adventures to northern France, southern Ireland and the Bay of Biscay. Then, in 2001, it was time for Mediterranean yacht cruising adventures. Most of Between the Sheets is a log of summer cruises in an eighteen-year odyssey of coastal and offshore journeys touching on Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, the islands of Sicily and Sardinia before finally arriving in Trieste at the top of the Adriatic in 2019. Then the pandemic struck!
Sailing
The Adriatic Passage
Acheilion to Mirimar
The Adriatic Passage is a book about Italy. More specifically, it is a description of a 585-sea-mile passage up the eastern side of the Italian Peninsula. My single-handed sailing adventure started at the Greek island of Corfu and, like many sole journeys, was as much a time for reflection as for describing the long and mostly low-lying coast from Puglia to the Veneto – and as much a literary travel book as a 19-day narrative of sailing (mostly motoring) from Corfu’s Acheilion to Trieste’s Mirimar. The cruise was to form the core of a narrative that linked six historical fiction vignettes ranging from Brindisi’s Roman slaves, Mussolini’s Gran Sasso rescue, Casanova’s escape in Venice, to the ill-fated Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian’s building of Mirimare. The vignettes still await creation.