Forgotten pioneers: Ann Davison was the first woman to sail single-handed across the Atlantic
YACHT-Redaktion
· 31.10.2025
Ann Davison was a pilot, had flown small aeroplanes and lived on a small island in a lake. Then, together with her husband Frank, she bought an old boat with which they wanted to travel around the world. After two years of hard work, but far from complete restoration, they left their home in England in May 1949 to escape their creditors.
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What followed was a two-week nightmare of sleepless days and nights, engine breakdowns, unfavourable winds and faulty navigation. The boat ran aground on the rocks of Portland Bill, a headland in the English Channel with treacherous currents. Ann and her husband had to abandon it in the middle of the night and try to get ashore. However, the tide pulled them out to sea and they had to shout at each other to communicate in the raging sea. Their life raft - an open carley dinghy with a canvas hull held together by ropes - flipped over several times.
The two survived the night and the next morning. Then the waves increased in height and carried them further out to sea. The cold and a particularly strong wave hit Frank so hard that he drowned. Ann drifted on, dazed, until finally the capsizing tide and a shift in the wind gave her the opportunity to bring the life raft close enough to shore with a paddle to swim the rest of the way to safety. She managed to climb onto the rocks, where she found help. Despite all the horror and exhaustion, she realised at that moment that she had to get back out to sea. Her relationship with the high seas, she wrote, could not and must not end like this.
Giving life a new meaning
A few years later, Davison bought a wooden sailing boat, which - was it coincidence or fate? - was named "Felicity Ann". She wanted to become the first woman to attempt to sail alone across one of the great oceans. Frank had gained experience as a single-handed sailor on the Gulf of St Lawrence, but that was before Ann had met him. Ann wasn't trying to outdo him with her plan, nor was she trying to prove anything or make any kind of statement. She wanted nothing less than to give her life a new meaning.
Info: Ann Davison
The British woman was the first woman to cross the Atlantic in 1952/53. She had hardly any sailing experience when she set off from Plymouth. Her "Felicity Ann" was only seven metres long and made of wood. Davison subsequently wrote a book about her adventure, which was published in German under the title "... und mein Schiff ist so klein". More information about the boat: nwswb.edu/felicityann
After all, she must have had a certain charisma, because she received a great deal of enthusiastic help in her attempt to acquire and equip the "Felicity Ann". She pursued her project single-mindedly for several months until she left the port of Plymouth on 18 May 1952 at the age of 38, three years and one day after setting sail with Frank.
In the hustle and bustle of the descent, she almost collided with one of the escort boats, but in the end the convoy of press people and friends stayed behind. The sun was setting. Ann tried to relax and kept an eye out for other boats. Sitting in the cockpit, she looked for a comfortable position to steer.
For the second time, she headed west and found herself in the same waters where she had drifted with the life raft, but this time alone, on her own boat and with the firm intention of sailing directly to Madeira Island, some 1,200 nautical miles away.
Boat equipment rudimentary according to the time
Davison was painfully aware that she knew next to nothing about the engine that was on board, and even less about sailing. She had been given a brief introduction to astronomical navigation, which she said had left her rather confused, but as she was prone to self-deprecation, you wouldn't have to take her word for it.
From her experience as a pilot of small aeroplanes, she was familiar with reading maps (including nautical charts for navigation), compass bearings and dead reckoning. She had a radio on board, so she could listen to the BBC and set the on-board clock using the time signals. However, she could not make contact with others herself, not even with ships in the vicinity. Radios with bidirectional transmission, radar equipment that could recognise ships and the course of the coast, and echo sounders for measuring depth were still in their infancy and were available to very few sailors.
Above all, however, Davison had neither an electrical nor a mechanical device on board with which the "Felicity Ann" could have steered itself. She sat at the tiller hour after hour, day after day. When conditions allowed, she could fix the tiller or combine it with the sail position and leave the boat to its own devices for a short time. Most of the time, however, in order to be able to eat or sleep in peace, she had to turn the sails so that the boat was stable in the water without travelling ahead. Or she would hoist the sails. Either way, she didn't get any closer to her destination during this time, unless she moved away from it.
Coastal cruises allow Davison to gain experience
As the "Felicity Ann" was a wooden boat, it always took on a little water, at least at the beginning of a voyage, even though the planks were already swollen. Now the wood adapted to the movements on the open sea. On the fifth day of her voyage, the bilge pumps were clogged because they had picked up sawdust and other residues from the work at the shipyard. Ann felt unable to get the pumps running again. She was "too dull with fatigue", as she put it. Because her boat was deep in the water, she had French fishermen tow her to the harbour of Douarnenez on the Atlantic coast of Brittany. She then continued her journey in an unplanned way: she travelled along the coast, first to Vigo, then to Gibraltar and finally to Casablanca.
She started her Atlantic crossing at the height of public interest in the ocean.
This tactic proved to be spot on, as it allowed Davison to gain experience along the way, find out which supplies she needed and which she didn't, and make mistakes that she shouldn't have made on the open sea.
Off the coasts of Spain and Portugal, the "Felicity Ann" and her skipper had to keep away from the large shipping routes that led into the many harbours and beware of the Portuguese Current. In the thick fog off Finisterre, Davison was forced to hit a frying pan because she had forgotten to take a foghorn with her. On the way to Gibraltar, she was almost rammed by a merchant ship in the middle of the night.
"The seas were wild," she wrote about herself and her boat, "and we were lying with not a shred of sail turned, when suddenly a steamer appeared on the crest of a wave. A triangle of lights, the red port light, the green starboard light and the white steamer light, came straight towards us."
Davison didn't have time to set sail and make a break for it. So she went below deck to start the engine. Such built-in marine engines for small boats had been around for several decades, but the five-horsepower diesel still had to be started by hand. Davison knelt down in front of the engine and - "fuelled by my fear" - turned the crank until the engine came to life. Then she returned to the cockpit and put it into gear. The propeller began to turn. At the last moment, she managed to avoid the freighter. It probably hadn't even noticed her. "There was no sleep for me after that," says Davison.
Davison's adventure captures the spirit of the times
Ann Davison's account of her Atlantic crossing is entitled "... and my ship is so small" and is, in my opinion, one of the most artful, meticulous, entertaining and poetic books ever written by a single-handed sailor on her return.
When Davison set off on her journey, Thor Heyerdahl and his companions had just successfully completed their voyage from Peru to French Polynesia. The expedition on a raft, the 1951 book "Kon-Tiki", which became a bestseller, and the Oscar-winning documentary film of the same name triggered a wave of enthusiasm in Europe and North America for everything to do with the ocean and the escape from the world it promised.
Together with his colleague Émile Gagnan, the Frenchman Jacques Cousteau invented the regulator and made the first underwater films.
In 1951, the American ichthyologist Eugenie Clark was the first marine biologist ever to publish her memoirs under the title "Lady with a Spear", which promptly became a huge success.
Rachel Carson had two books on the New York Times bestseller lists. "Under the Sea Wind" from 1941 and "Secrets of the Sea" from 1951 tell a captivating, scientifically backed natural history of the sea.
In an article in the magazine "Life", Davison described her Atlantic crossing for the first time in 1953. The article is framed by gruesome black and white photos from the Korean War - soldiers carelessly marching past corpses and pointing their rifles at "enemy" North Korean soldiers - and a colour advertisement for the 1953 Hollywood film "Return to Paradise". Against the backdrop of the turquoise ocean, scantily clad women and smooching sailors can be seen, which Gary Cooper took to the South Sea island.
Provisions for 60 days
Almost at the height of public interest in the ocean, Ann Davison left Gran Canaria behind on 20 November 1952 on board the "Felicity Ann" and set off across the Atlantic. Just a few days later, the world learnt that the USA had detonated the first hydrogen bomb in the Marshall Islands a few weeks earlier. The mushroom cloud reached a height of fifteen kilometres.
Davison was about to embark on a voyage of 2,600 nautical miles. It began with dark clouds and rain, but a promising wind. She knew that a few weeks before her, a French doctor named Alain Bombard had set off in an inflatable boat just 4.6 metres long with only one sail.
Bombard had a sextant, a close-meshed fishing net and two cameras, which the magazine "Life" had given him. Apart from a few emergency rations, there were no provisions on board, but that was part of his plan, as he wanted to prove that the ocean had enough drinking water and food to feed a person "by the nutritional value of plankton alone", as "Life" put it. Bombard's destination was Barbados, where he arrived after just over two months. The following year, he published the book "Im Schlauchboot über den Atlantik".
Davison had drinking water and food such as eggs, fruit, potatoes, cornflour and rusks for sixty days on board the "Felicity Ann", a quantity that she herself considered to be overly cautious, as she estimated that the entire journey would take between thirty and forty days. The steady trade winds usually make for a comparatively relaxed journey westwards to the Caribbean.
Passat apparently missed
In the Canary Islands, a friend had given her a tin of plum pudding with the words: "You'll probably be at your destination by Christmas, but you can never be too sure." But although her departure was delayed, Davison assumed that she would spend Christmas having a drink in English Harbour on Antigua or somewhere nearby. She hadn't even packed a nautical almanac for the coming year, which was essential for astronomical navigation.
Davison had sixty days' worth of food on board, which she herself considered overly cautious.
On Christmas Day, Ann Davison, close to madness, was bobbing in a sea area where, for all she knew, the trade winds should be blowing. She had obviously missed it. Only on a few days of her journey had the wind been on her side. She had only rarely seen the puffy cumuli that sailors heading from Europe to the Caribbean had been following for centuries, and only for a few hours at most, so that by 25 December she had only covered half the distance at best. She couldn't be completely sure because she didn't really trust her navigational skills.
She lacked experience. Then there was the fear of storms. And no weather report reached her.
The cabin of her boat was like a sauna, the sea surface like lead. On days when the sea was calm, she would run the engine for two hours just to get out of the water and feel the wind in her face. She realised with trepidation that the hull of the "Felicity Ann" was covered in heavy fouling, which slowed the boat down even more.
When the wind did blow, it was usually from the west. Small, traditionally rigged boats like the "Felicity Ann" sail best when the wind blows from fifty or sixty degrees. So to sail west in a westerly wind, she had to head north-north-west, then tack and continue south-south-west. On the open sea, where no medium-term weather forecast reached her, it was not easy to decide when to tack. She had no way of knowing when the wind would shift, where the currents would take her and which bow would get her closer to her destination faster. She also lacked experience.
Then there was the fear of storms. The hurricane season had not yet begun, but the atypical weather made them fear that a storm was on its way. Occasionally, heavy gusts came down that seemed to come out of nowhere. There was no one she could consult with. Even her radio reception was disrupted. And because she couldn't listen to the BBC, she consulted all the books she had on board about the weather on the Atlantic. However, she wasn't much smarter afterwards.
Psychological and emotional pressure
Anyone who has not experienced such a situation can hardly imagine how great the emotional pressure and doubts are. They are further fuelled by the lack of sleep that enveloped Davison like a veil as she spent day after day on her boat, which was only seven metres long, staring out at the endless expanse of the ocean.
Davison decided to open the tin of plum pudding. When she bit into the sweet cake, she had a hard time swallowing the dried fruit it contained. Without further ado, she took the tin and threw it overboard in a high arc, where it bobbed on the surface of the water for several hours before coming to her senses and sinking.
When you move as slowly as Davison or Dr Bombard, you sometimes find solace in the fact that you have an enormous amount of time to contemplate the environment in which you find yourself, in this case the temperate latitudes of the Atlantic. But even if one day a rainbow brightened her mood, Davison was not one of those who would have been infected by the environmentalism that emerged in the early 1950s. Her journey was under different auspices.
After 65 days at sea, she dropped anchor in a small harbour on Dominica.
At no point in her book is it about the ocean as such, about the salt water and the call that so many Ishmaels followed, gathering in the harbours or boarding a ship alone.
Hardly any affinity with the ocean
One could ask why Davison has not undertaken a hike through the Alps or the Rocky Mountains. We never heard from her that the ocean is boundless and free, that it has healing powers or that we need to protect it. Nor did she make a note of which animals she saw in what numbers or what behaviour she observed.
Davison's ocean was like a purgatory where there was mostly calm. He had taken her husband away from her. When she smoked a cigarette, she flicked the butt carelessly into the sea. She did the same with the rubbish that accumulated every day. When some tin cans floated towards her in the middle of the sea, she did not react with disgust or indignation. She took them as a comforting sign that she was not alone in the wide world and as an assurance that there were other people around her.
Practical instructions for sailors were still being published very hesitantly at the time, but Davison would not have taken such books on board anyway, if the impression is not deceptive. Apart from a book about fish, she preferred titles that dealt with navigation. There were also volumes of poetry.
She was not one of those who considered the squeaking dolphins that accompanied the boat to be her friends. Even when she sat down to write her book after the voyage, she did not reveal any spiritual connection to marine mammals or any other life form of the high seas.
The sea as a wilderness in which you have to assert yourself
If Davison had an affinity at all, it was for the schools of fish that followed the Felicity Ann, especially the small ones that feasted on the hull's vegetation. She made no attempt to fish - the thought of killing a fish made her uncomfortable - but she did not disdain the flying fish that landed on deck and died there. The first time she did it, she felt obliged to do so because she had read about it so often. She fried the fish in butter and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Davison mentions fish and other sea creatures only very rarely and as if they were oddly shaped clouds or, to choose a land-based example, a plant in a front garden that catches her eye in a foreign land. Basically, these passages are no more than a spice that she adds to her book without linking them to a moral message or a statement about the state of the ocean.
An incident that took place in mid-January provides more eloquent information about her relationship with the sea. While her journey westwards dragged on for a gruelling length of time, three large sharks joined the "Felicity Ann". Two accompanied her sideways and one followed in her wake. Davison found the animals "indescribably sinister", coming so close to the boat that she only had to reach out to touch them.
Davison believed that man could no more appreciate the sea than the sky or outer space. For her, the sea was a wilderness in which one had to assert oneself, so she was more in the tradition of Joseph Conrad than in the wake of Rachel Carson and Jacques Cousteau. For Davison, the love of the sea was the love of seafaring and the "illusion of mastering the ocean".
Arrival after 65 days
After a gruelling sixty-five days alone at sea, which had left her with a painful sty and several abscesses, among other things, Ann Davison dropped anchor in a small harbour on Dominica on the afternoon of 24 January 1953. She had thus become the first woman to cross an ocean alone.
The last words of her book are about courage, which she describes as a mixture of resilience, determination and the ability to learn from mistakes.
I bought my copy of the book at an antiquarian bookshop. On the last page, the previous owner has made some notes in pencil, the last words of the book are underlined with straight lines: "But I had to sail thousands of miles across the ocean to find out that courage is the key to life."
The book: "Alone at sea"
Author Richard J. King traces the history of single-handed sailing in this book, which has now been published in German. He also explores the question of the motives that drove the protagonists and describes numerous long-forgotten pioneering deeds. mare, 28 euros
