The forgotten adventurer who kayaked 50,000km around the world

Australia Broadcast Center

2 days ago

When German Oskar Speck came ashore on tiny Saibai Island in the Torres Strait, he was greeted by three Australian policemen and the cold shock of arrest.
It was September 1939, and the kayaker had just spent seven years paddling from Germany to Australia, an astonishing 50,000-kilometre journey down rivers and across oceans in his collapsible kayak.
But instead of receiving a hero's welcome, he was arrested and sent to Victoria, where he was interned at a wartime camp in Tatura.
The world had changed since Speck had begun his voyage in 1932. Just three weeks before his arrival, his country, led by Adolf Hitler, had invaded Poland and was now at war with France and Britain.
But why did Speck spend years navigating long stretches of rough ocean water on a kayak made for leisurely river paddling? And what happened to him after he was arrested?
Born in 1907 in a village near Hamburg, Speck's life following World War I was difficult.
He'd been forced to leave school at 14 and began working at a time when Germany was grappling with the harsh penalties imposed by the Treaty of Versailles.
Along with millions of other Germans, Speck soon found himself unemployed. In a 1987 interview with SBS journalist Margot Cuthill, he described this period as "catastrophic".
But lured with the promise of work in the copper mines of Cyprus, he came up with a solution that combined his interests in geology and kayaking.
"I owned a collapsible boat and was a member of a boating club," he told Cuthill.
Despite not knowing how to swim, Speck packed his kayak, drove to the southern German city of Ulm and began paddling the Danube River towards the then-Yugoslavian border.
Speck's kayak was nothing like the modern fibreglass kayaks that are common today.
Made from laminated rubber and canvas, its light wooden frame allowed it to be taken apart for travel on the train or the bus. It was named Sonnenschein — German for sunshine.
Speck paddled through Austria and Hungary, passing cities like Vienna and Budapest before reaching the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border.
"Then the Danube started to get boring and I had heard that nobody had ever sailed down the Vardar in Macedonia before. So, I decided to paddle to Skopje in Macedonia and become the first," he told Cuthill.
He eventually reached the port city of Thessaloniki in Greece. Here he learned that "faltboots" — folding boats like the one he was using — were "not built for the sea".
"Take just one wave wrong and your boat will spin sideways. You'll turn over and be swamped. Your first capsize on the open ocean will be your last," Speck told the Australasian Post in 1956.
But he learned new skills that would help him sail and paddle the kayak in ocean waters as opposed to the river.
He was forced to hug the coast so he could sleep on land each night, which meant enduring long open-water crossings between islands that sometimes lasted 34 hours.
By the time Speck reached Cyprus, his original idea of working in the copper mines had lost its appeal.
"I wanted much more to make a kayak voyage that would go down in history. It was about now that I first said to myself, 'Why not Australia'?" he told the Australasian Post.
Meanwhile, Back home in Germany, Hitler was busy brutally establishing his dictatorship.
According to Penny Cuthbert, curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Speck then completed his first extended ocean crossing, paddling two days across open water without sleep until he reached Syria.
He applied for permission to travel through the Suez Canal but was denied. So he folded up his kayak and caught a bus to the Euphrates River instead.
Once there, he paddled through the Syrian city of Raqqa, Iraq's capital Baghdad and the southern port town of Basra.
According to Vanity Fair, on the Euphrates and along the Persian Gulf, the river's shoreline was "so barren that just finding food and water became a serious problem". For 14 days he didn't see a single person and survived on dates growing on the riverside's trees.
At one point, gale winds forced him onto a tiny island for a week. His only company was a decomposing corpse that had washed ashore.
Then his boat was stolen.
"Somebody must have seen me landing, pulled my boat into the water and disappeared.
"There I sat, wearing only my shorts, no passport, no money, no luggage, no boat, nothing," he told Cuthill.
The culprits turned out to be the police themselves, who led him back to his boat after Speck offered to pay them a substantial bribe.
A sponsorship with the Pioneer Folding Boat Company meant Speck had access to replacement crafts throughout his journey. He also had a little bit of financial help from his family.
But Speck mostly lived on his wits, raising money by giving talks and writing articles.
When he reached the Persian Gulf, he hugged the coast of Iran but a bad case of malaria forced him to pause his voyage.
As soon as he felt better, he set off for today's Pakistan, rounding the southernmost cape of India before going around Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and through the Bay of Bengal.
Life on the water had become an "endless monotony of paddling", and Speck's body longed for sleep. But when he would stop for the night, it took a long time before he could unlock his hands, which were welded into their gripping posture on the paddle.
His kayak was originally a two-seater but had been modified to a six-seater, so he had to use a special technique to store his clothes, maps, food and water.
But what exactly did he eat?
According to Cuthill, most villagers were happy to welcome him by slaughtering a chicken in his honour.
On board he carried coconuts, tins of sardines and meat, as well as tinned condensed milk, which he would sip as he paddled.
By the time Burma (today's Myanmar) appeared on the horizon in April 1936, Speck had been paddling for four years.
His family was tired of sending him money.
They wanted him to come back to work in the new Germany, now industrialising and rearming as a totalitarian Nazi state.
In a letter back home, Speck retorted that making the longest solo kayak paddle in history was doing enough for the new Germany.
"It would have worked out for him so well to go back," Cuthill tells ABC Radio National's Rewind.
"He would have been celebrated, there would have been books made about him, he would have been [Joseph] Goebbels' little pet.
"He didn't go back."
Some photos show Speck flying a swastika on his kayak, a symbol used by Nazis and their sympathisers but Margot Cuthill says it wasn't because Speck was a Nazi.
In September 1935, the Nazi flag became the only national flag in Germany, so he sailed under a German flag.
After paddling through Burma, Thailand and then the Malay Peninsula to Singapore, Speck travelled through Indonesia, island by island.
Over the course of his journey, he'd been given great hospitality from local villagers, but suddenly something went terribly wrong. On the island of Lakor he was attacked by locals armed with knives and machetes.
According to Cuthbert, he tried to defend himself with an unloaded pistol, but was overwhelmed and eventually tied up with buffalo hide, his boat and possessions plundered.
Despite being beaten until he was semi-conscious, Speck managed to escape, reaching his boat and paddling all the way back to Surabaya in East Java for medical attention.
But when he was well enough to resume his journey, the Dutch East Indies authorities wouldn't allow him to travel the southern coast of New Guinea, instead forcing him to go the long way around.
In September 1939, Speck finally rounded the eastern tip of New Guinea after braving huge surf, sharks and crocodiles.
Bill O'Donnell, who was 10 years old at the time, was looking out of his school window on Samurai Island when he saw Speck arrive aboard his kayak.
"He stayed with us that night, had dinner. During the evening, Dad tuned into Germany on the shortwave radio and it was the first time I ever heard Hitler make a speech," he says
"He was carrying on in full voice and Oscar Speck apparently wasn't terribly interested. And then we farewelled him at about 7am the following morning off the beach."
Speck soon after arrived in Daru only to be told that World War II had begun and that he was now an enemy. He was ordered to proceed to Thursday Island, located north of Cape York Peninsula in Far North Queensland.
Authorities felt it only fair to let him continue into the Torres Strait so that he could finish his voyage in Australian waters. So from Daru, he was able to get to the island of Saibai.
Once there, he was greeted by three Australian police officers who congratulated him on his trip and then placed him under arrest. Australia by then was at war with Germany.
"They were very friendly and very polite and everything, but I was declared a prisoner of war," Speck told Cuthill.
He was transported via Thursday Island to the Tatura internment camp in Victoria.
The Australian government arrested citizens born in enemy countries, even if they had done nothing wrong, and housed them in camps like the one in Tatura.
Speck managed to escape Tatura by hiding in a tool chest that was being taken out of the camp but he was eventually apprehended in a Melbourne suburb.
His punishment was 28 days in solitary confinement and a transfer to the Loveday internment camp in South Australia.
Built in 1941 near the South Australian town of Cobdogla, halfway between Adelaide and Mildura, Loveday was the largest internment camp in Australia.
The facility produced vegetables and fruit, and had a working poultry farm and piggery. It also maintained a poppy crop for opium production.
Speck spent three years at Loveday but was finally released in January 1946, shortly after Germany's defeat and the end of World War II.
At Loveday he had learned how to cut opal and within days of his release from the camp he was mining opal at Lightning Ridge. He stayed in Australia, and went on to become a successful opal dealer.
Speck never married or had children. In his last letter to his sister Greta many years later, he wrote:
"I am satisfied. Recognition or no recognition.
"We have a strange situation, one of the most difficult world records to this day and it will still be in a hundred years and wholly unknown. But I am satisfied. The war interfered much more with millions of fates. Why shouldn't I be satisfied?"
In March 1993, Speck died at the age of 86, after a long illness. He was buried in Point Clare Cemetery in New South Wales.