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1939: Seven Years by Kayak from Germany to Australia, Then Arrested the Moment He Landed

Oskar Speck left Hamburg on May 13, 1932, paddling an 18 foot Faltboot, a folding kayak made of rubber and canvas, carrying five gallons of water, a small movie camera and a Mauser pistol. His route ran down the Danube, across the Mediterranean, overland to the Euphrates, down the Persian Gulf and on through Baluchistan and India, surviving on water mixed with condensed milk, cheese and chocolate, and once covering 90 miles in a single 65 hour stretch without leaving the boat.

In 1933, while at Alexandretta, he received a telegram from the Nazi government ordering him home now that “the Fuehrer is here”; he ignored it and kept paddling. He was reported dead more than once along the way, including after a close call with a shark in the Persian Gulf: “They thought the sharks had got me,” he later said, “but I am still here.”

After roughly seven years at sea, Speck finally reached Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, only to be arrested on arrival and interned as an enemy alien, World War II having begun just three weeks earlier. He spent the next six years locked up in prisoner-of-war camps across Australia.

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