‘Completely Mad’ Review: Across the Ocean With an Oar

In the summer of 1969, John Fairfax was somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean. He had set off from Spain’s Canary Islands some six months earlier, headed toward Florida in his 24-foot boat, Britannia. Meanwhile Tom McClean was heading in the opposite direction, from Newfoundland to Ireland, in his 20-foot Super Silver. Both men hoped to be the first to row solo across the Atlantic.

Fairfax’s route, at about 4,000 miles, was nearly twice as long as Mr. McClean’s, but he also had a four-month head start. On July 19, 1969, after 180 days at sea, Fairfax became the first man to cross the Atlantic—or any ocean—alone in a rowboat, landing to a hero’s welcome at Hollywood Beach, Fla. Eight days later, Mr. McClean landed at Blacksod Bay in County Mayo, Ireland. His trip lasted 70 days. Nobody knew he was coming. His first stop was at a pub.

More than 50 years later, James Hansen has produced a gripping account of the two voyages in “Completely Mad: Tom McClean, John Fairfax, and the Epic Race to Row Solo Across the Atlantic.” If you’ve never heard of these two men, there’s good reason for that: Their timing was atrocious. The day after Fairfax’s landing, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. (Mr. Hansen, an emeritus professor of history at Auburn University and a former NASA historian, wrote the authorized biography of Armstrong in 2005.)

Fairfax was the kind of man who could restore your faith in a random and amoral universe. Although a dashing fellow—he had spent months alone in the Amazonian jungle at the age of 13—he was also immature and self-aggrandizing, to say nothing of being, as Mr. Hansen tells us, a “profligate gambler, playboy, and former whiskey and gun smuggler.” Fairfax wasn’t a murderer, but not for lack of trying. As a lad, after quarrelling with another boy during a scouting trip, he stole the troop leader’s revolver and emptied it into the hut where the other boy was sleeping. “Years later,” Mr. Hansen writes, “John laughed about it dryly: ‘It was a miracle I didn’t kill someone.’ ”

Modesty was one thing the 32-year-old Fairfax didn’t take with him on his trans-Atlantic trip, declaring in his logbook:“I am doing more than thousands, millions of men have done before me.” He saw himself as a modern-day Odysseus and made frequent supplications to Venus. He claimed that he killed a shark with a knife when it attacked him after he went over the side to clean the boat. He even claimed to have “hitched a short ride” on the back of a whale. The author suggests that Fairfax’s only true love was his mother. Maybe. The reader will be forgiven for wondering if the feeling was mutual.

Twenty-six-year-old Tom McClean, on the other hand—note that his name precedes Fairfax’s in the subtitle—is the guy you’re rooting for, an orphan seeking to assert himself in the world. He joined Britain’s Parachute Regiment at 17 and quickly excelled as a soldier. His mates affectionately called him Moby because he was talkative and “spouted like a whale.” Six years into his military career, he was one of three men out of a class of 105 to be inducted into the Special Air Service.

Prior to his trans-Atlantic attempt, Mr. McClean had no experience of boats or the sea, but he was a man of action who knew how to survive. As he prepared to launch, he tried to hide his inexperience and was appealingly modest about the whole endeavor. “I wasn’t trying to be a hero,” he later recalled. “I just wanted to make my mark.”

Mr. McClean was adamant that his voyage be “absolutely unassisted.” He asked for nothing more from passing ships than his position. As for Fairfax, he stopped ships no less than 10 times. From a German freighter he accepted “a breakfast of four eggs and bacon and two cold beers, and they also gave me everything I needed except a couple minor items that I forgot to ask for.” A helicopter based on the U.S. aircraft carrier Saratoga dropped him a load “so heavy I could barely pull it inside Britannia and later on had to throw some overboard.” He stopped a large Canadian liner and presented it with his “shopping list.” The highly irritated captain thundered, “What in the name of God do you want shampoo for?”

Even with all this assistance, Fairfax nearly ruined his own triumph. Half a mile from Hollywood Beach, he tried to get a boat to tow him in. Only the catcalls from the waiting crowd spurred him to finish the trip under his own power.

Mr. McClean’s northerly route, while shorter, was the more perilous one. He expected—and encountered—gales that blew day and night for days on end with winds up to 70 miles an hour and waves that “looked like skyscrapers.” The cold that beset him in the icy Labrador Current led to frostbitten feet. Unlike Fairfax’s boat, Mr. McClean’s was not self-bailing. He spent whole nights at the pumps trying to keep Super Silver afloat. “I was literally fighting for my life, and I knew it.”

Six weeks into the trip Mr. McClean was filthy, caked with salt, reduced to “a mass of aches, bruises, blisters, salt sores, and a couple of agonizing boils.” A 15-foot shark appeared and accompanied him for days, so close that Mr. McClean could hear it scraping the bottom of the boat. He named the shark Bluey and was glad for the company. He knew the value of sheer guts. The S.A.S. motto, “Who dares wins,” was emblazoned on Super Silver’s bow.

After crossing the Atlantic, Fairfax went on, with his girlfriend, Silvia Cook, to make the first crossing of the Pacific in a row boat. He became a professional gambler in Las Vegas and continued in that vocation until his death in 2012. Mr. McClean still runs an adventure school in the Scottish highlands. In 1982 he set the record for the smallest sailboat to sail the Atlantic, crossing in the absurdly tiny 118-inch Giltspur. When another sailor beat that record in an even smaller boat, Mr. McClean responded by taking a chainsaw to the Giltspur, shortening it by more than two feet. He then sailed the 93-inch Giltspur II across the Atlantic to reclaim the title. That record still stands.

Mr. Heavey is a writer in Bethesda, Md.