A short life of the author
Robert Manry (2 June 1918 – 19 February 1971) was an American journalist and amateur sailor who, in the summer of 1965, sailed alone across the Atlantic Ocean in a 13.5-foot sloop named Tinkerbelle — at the time one of the smallest boats ever to make the crossing. The voyage took seventy-eight days, from Falmouth, Massachusetts, to Falmouth, England, and it made Manry, a quiet, bespectacled copy editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, into an unlikely international celebrity. His book Tinkerbelle (1966) is a classic of small-boat sailing literature and one of the most appealing adventure narratives of the 1960s — the story of an ordinary man who decided to do something extraordinary, not for fame or money, but because the dream of crossing an ocean had lived in him for years and he was afraid that if he didn’t act on it, he never would.
Life
Manry was born in Landour, India, where his parents served as Presbyterian missionaries. He grew up in the United States and served in the Army during World War II. After the war, he settled in Cleveland, Ohio, and took a job as a copy editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he worked the night shift for years — a quiet, steady, unexciting job. He sailed small boats on Lake Erie and dreamed of the open ocean.
In 1964, he bought Tinkerbelle, a thirteen-and-a-half-foot Old Town sailing dinghy (a Whitecap model), and began planning his Atlantic crossing. He told almost no one at the newspaper. He modified the boat modestly — adding a small cuddy for sleeping, reinforcing the hull, installing a rudimentary self-steering device — and on 1 June 1965, he sailed out of Falmouth harbor in Massachusetts, headed for England.
The Voyage
The crossing was exactly as dangerous as anyone would expect from a boat shorter than most automobiles. Manry was capsized repeatedly by storms. He was nearly run down by freighters whose lookouts could not see a boat the size of a bathtub. He suffered sleep deprivation, hallucinations, equipment failures, and the relentless psychological pressure of being alone on the North Atlantic in a vessel that offered no margin for error. He navigated by sextant and dead reckoning.
What makes Tinkerbelle a great book rather than merely an exciting one is Manry’s temperament. He was not a braggart or a thrill-seeker. He was a thoughtful, self-deprecating, mildly anxious middle-aged man who wanted to test himself against something real. His prose is modest, precise, and occasionally very funny. He describes his fears without embarrassment and his moments of joy — a perfect sunset, a pod of dolphins, the first sight of the English coast — with genuine wonder. The book has the quiet authority of a man who is telling the truth about what it felt like to be alone and afraid and determined.
The Plain Dealer, which initially did not know Manry had left on the voyage, broke the story midway through the crossing, and by the time Tinkerbelle approached the English coast, Manry had become front-page news worldwide. He arrived in Falmouth, England, on 17 August 1965, to a crowd of thousands. The BBC covered the arrival live.
After the Voyage
Manry returned to a hero’s welcome in Cleveland. He left the Plain Dealer, wrote Tinkerbelle, and made the lecture circuit. He planned a second voyage — a circumnavigation — but died of a heart attack in 1971, at age fifty-two, before he could undertake it. Tinkerbelle the boat was eventually donated to the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, where it is displayed.
Legacy
Tinkerbelle belongs to a tradition of small-boat voyaging literature that includes Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World (1900), Francis Chichester’s The Lonely Sea and the Sky (1964), and Webb Chiles’s Storm Passage (1977). Manry’s book is the most accessible of these — the most fully human, the least interested in proving anything beyond the proposition that an ordinary person can do something remarkable. The book has been translated into numerous languages and remains in print.
Manry’s voyage also inspired other small-boat crossings. Hugo Vihlen crossed the Atlantic in an even smaller boat (5 feet 11 inches) in 1968, explicitly inspired by Manry. The competitive miniaturisation of Atlantic crossings eventually became a recognised category of record-keeping, though the spirit of Manry’s voyage — which was personal rather than competitive — has not always survived in his successors.
Collecting Manry
Tinkerbelle (1966, Harper & Row) in first edition with dust jacket brings $40–$100. The book is not rare — it was a bestseller — but fine copies with unfaded jackets are uncommon. Signed copies are scarce because Manry died only five years after publication. Association copies or inscribed copies command significant premiums. The UK edition (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967) is less common. Later paperback editions are inexpensive and widely available.