Author Simon Winchester speaks of sheep and shipwrecks at Cary Institute

MILLBROOK — Listening to Simon Winchester speak at the Cary Institute on Thursday, Dec. 2, was like having an intimate dinner conversation with the most fascinating man at the table.

Winchester, the author of several New York Times bestsellers including “The Professor and the Madman,� was there to talk about his newest book, “Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories.�

He immediately rejected the suggestion of William Schlesinger, the head of the Cary Institute, to read from the book as “too boring.� Instead, he told the story of the origin of the idea to write about this vast ocean.

An inveterate traveler, Winchester found himself in the forests of southern Chile on a dark evening. In search of a place to stay for the night, he stumbled upon a castle built by a Scottish sheep rancher. After dinner, the butler made him comfortable in the library, where he read a riveting book about the Skeleton Coast of southwestern Africa. He had discovered the topic for his next book.

Winchester, a geologist by training, became a writer at the encouragement of well-known author James Morris, later Jan Morris. He began as a journalist and moved on to travel writing and narrative nonfiction. “Pacific Rising: the Emergence of a New World Culture,� published in 1991, only sold two copies, Winchester recounted in his self-deprecating manner. Its failure with readers, Winchester said, made him realize that the Pacific was “not an ocean of the past,� filled with human history.

His newest book, which originally began as a biography of the Atlantic, starts at the beginning — 195 million years ago when Pangaea began to break apart into continents.

Winchester recounted some of his favorite parts of the book. There’s the section on how the sheep of the Faroe Islands are hoisted onto tiny rock outcrops on the sea cliffs, where they spent the summer eating grass fertilized by puffins. In the autumn, the Faroe Islanders, direct descendents of the Vikings, scale the cliffs again on ropes to remove the fattened sheep from their solitary pasture and slaughter them for meat.

His Atlantic tales also include how the invention of acetone for torpedoing German submarines resulted in the Balfour Doctrine and the creation of Israel.

Personal experiences, like inadvertently insulting the residents of the isolated island of Tristan de Cunha, 1,800 miles west of Capetown, made the lecture come alive. The audience, accustomed to more serious topics at Cary, laughed out loud.

Winchester ended his talk with the story of a shipwreck on the Skeleton Coast in 1942 that stranded 62 men. A  South African harbor tug that tried to reach the group sank, killing the men on board, including Angus Campbell Macintyre, first mate. Winchester said Macintyre died  “trying to save lives,â€� and his body “lies unfound somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.â€� Winchester dedicated the book to him.

“Atlantic� has been selected as one of the best nonfiction books of 2010 by the Washington Post and was reviewed as a “thriller history� in the New York Times book section on Sunday, Dec. 12.

In 2006, Winchester was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his “services to journalism and literature,� an honor he didn’t mention on Friday evening. He lives on a farm in Sandisfield, Mass., where his hobbies include beekeeping and cider making, and in New York City.