Magellan went by sail. Wiley Post went by airplane. Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones went by hot air balloon. But circumnavigating the world by pedal boat? In perhaps the last great first for circumnavigation, Englishmen Stevie Smith and Jason Lewis of Expedition 360 have already completed 25,000 of a 40,000 mile journey relying entirely on human power — pedal boat, bicycle, roller blade and kayak.

Whatever the method of transportation, Smith and Lewis have been using an iBook, PowerBook and satellite communications to transmit logs, still images and video clips of their adventures for broadcast on the Expedition 360 website, which has attracted thousands of fans and supporters around the world since the expedition began in 1994. Smith also used his daily journal entries on the iBook to write ”Pedaling to Hawaii,” (see end of article) an adventure story to raise the hairs on every mother’s neck.

Put Your Heart into It

“Expedition 360 is not really about me or Jason,” says Smith. “It’s about all the people who put their heart into what they can do.” From the beginning, Smith says, the goal of the expedition was partly a physical challenge because it’s “perhaps the last great first to be done” — though he confesses that the financial and logistical aspects of the trip have proven equally demanding. “And,” Smith writes, “as an inspirational goal it is empowering, because it shows that ordinary people, filled with passion and helped by others, can accomplish the most extraordinary things.”

Zero Longitude

Smith and Lewis’s adventure is nothing if not extraordinary. When he conceived the adventure, Smith had never been on any kind of expedition, had no knowledge of the sea and had no money. Yet, from London’s Greenwich Meridian, the zero degree line of longitude, Smith and Lewis found a way to pedal to Portugal — on bikes over land and in their custom-built pedal boat, Moksha, over sea. Then they pedal-boated 4,300 miles across the Atlantic to Florida. Roller bladed and biked across America. Pedal-boated to Hawaii and then, Lewis traveling solo, to Australia. Not without incident. A car mowed down Lewis as he was rollerblading across America, breaking both his legs. The Moksha capsized off the coast of California and had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Funds dried up. Uncooperative currents and winds made a dead end of one leg of their journey.

“I’ve worried about money. I’ve worried about weather. My iBook is one of the things I haven’t had to worry about.”

12 Years…Pedaling

With astonishing courage and perseverance — and help from exactly the right people at uncanny moments — Smith and Lewis reached Hawaii in November, 1998, four years after they began. Now, while Smith undertakes a speaking tour in the UK to launch his book, Lewis is island-hopping up the Indonesian chain of islands to Malaysia by bicycle and kayak. By the time the pair arrives back at Greenwich Meridian Line, they will have spent between 11 and 12 years — pedaling.

Apple on Board

Throughout the Indonesian leg of his journey, Lewis is kayaking light, technologically speaking. His setup: a PowerBook, Sony DV camera, Irridium phone for satellite transmission, collapsible antenna dish and two solar panels to power a 12-volt battery. Lewis uses the PowerBook to edit a new geography series for the Discovery Education channel and clips for the expedition’s Video Exchange Program, though Kenny Brown, a BBC cameraman, edited some of the footage for documentaries broadcast on the Discovery Channel.

iBook Book Tour

Smith used his iBook with a digital projector for talks to hundreds of schools and community organizations throughout the world. Now he’s using it for his book tour in the UK. “We have about 5,000 still images that we’ve transferred onto CDs,” Smith says. “I keep about 600 of them in iPhoto so I can create presentations for different groups. “It’s so easy to go into iPhoto and pluck what you want for a particular audience,” he adds. “I also can pop in video clips from the documentaries to use as background.

Learning to Enjoy the Present

From the time Smith conceived the idea for Expedition 360 — while bored and staring out his office window on a gray and rainy Monday — “everybody involved has changed tremendously,” he says. “It’s taught us a huge amount of patience. You’re traveling very slowly, and it’s a very complex, painstaking business to prepare yourself to pedal across an ocean. “It’s such a vast and distant goal, to get to the other side of the ocean or to go around the world by human power. It becomes largely meaningless. So you learn to enjoy the present a lot more.”

The Hidden Blessing of Money Problems

Smith says the struggle for funding also taught him valuable lessons in being resourceful and the nature of people. “We call it a people-powered expedition because people come in and out in uncannily fortuitous places with the right skills for that particular moment in time,” he says. “For example, when our boat had been wrecked in a failed bid to get to Hawaii, we had to rebuild pretty much everything. When we needed someone to help us with electronics, this fabulous electrician just turned up and helped us out hugely. Another person helped me with the woodworking skills to rebuild parts of the boat that had been damaged.”

Electronics and Soul

Smith says even artists appeared at serendipitous moments to paint a heroes-journey symbol on the bow of the boat. “We always leave shore with a beautiful design on our bow from a local tradition,” he says. “In San Francisco, when we were rebuilding our boat, a Native American Indian appeared to paint a beautiful sacred raven. “The same thing happened in Hawaii, the Solomons, Australia. The symbol isn’t an essential piece of equipment, but it’s an example of how people turn up at the right moment and do what’s necessary. “If we’d been fully funded from the start,” Smith adds, “I think it would have been a much less interesting journey.”

‘Pedalling to Hawaii:
A Human-Powered Adventure’
Stevie Smith’s “hilarious, entertaining and refreshingly non-heroic” account of the journey pedalling from England to Hawaii has been published by Summersdale Press in the UK. The U.S. edition will be published by Countryman Press, a division of W. W. Norton, in June 2006. Signed first editions are available from the website.