Książka o tematyce żeglarskiej w II Rzeczypospolitej – relacje z jachtowych wypraw morskich

Abstract

Accounts of marine yachting expeditions, beside memoirs of travelling onboard sailing ships, occupy an important place among books devoted to seafaring, published in Poland in the years 1918-1939. These accounts of marine yachting journeys undertaken by Poles in the interwar period as a peculiar form of travel writing yielded fruit in as many as thirteen books, two of which were republished before the outbreak of World War Two, and two after the war. Almost half of the books (six titles) were written by general Mariusz Zaruski, an indefatigable populariser of marine yachting; his travelogues depict his cruises from the 1920s and the 1930s, undertaken on various yachts to ports of the Baltic and the North Sea. Authors of two publications each were Kraków’s seafarer Jan Józef Fischer and Władysław Wagner, the first Pole to sail around the world. The authors of remaining publications were Czesław Czarnowski, a medical doctor and an enthusiastic yachtsman from Wilno (Vilnius), owner of the yacht “Juarand”, lieutenant Andrzej Bohomolec, who described the transatlantic journey of “Dalia” and engineer Józef Tuliszkowski, whose memoirs cover his student life at Riga and his attempts at doing yachting there. Although varying in style and quality, all discussed accounts bear testimony to the Poles’ love of the sea. After much struggle and 123 years of foreign rule, the Poles gained access to the Baltic Sea. The stretch of the coast, barely 71-kilometer long, became Poland’s true “window on the world”.