JUST ABOUT THIS TIME LAST YEAR, I CAME ACROSS a scene that chimed with the season, and that stayed with me. It was in a book called Heart of Oak, by Tristan Jones, a Welsh adventurer who died last year after a life that began on his father’s tramp steamer in 1924 and took him across nearly half a million miles of ocean. He first signed on as a deck hand aboard a cargo ship at 14, joined the Royal Navy two years later, and after the war went sailing on his own, crossing the Atlantic twenty times and circling the globe nearly four. The New York Times obituary said of him, “He moved from place to place as if the world had invited him in.” At the time of his death, he was living in Phuket, Thailand, teaching disabled children how to sail.

Heart of Oak, one of 19 books he wrote, tells of his service in the British navy. It was not easy service. Sunk three times before his 18th birthday, Jones, posted to a destroyer, saw HMS Hood —with her 42,000 tons of steel and her 15-inch guns—simply vaporize when a shell from the great German battle cruiser Bismarck found her magazines, and he was there a few very grueling days later to watch the Bismarck roll over and sink.

By the next spring, the hard-pressed British fleet was beginning to get some help. In March 1942, Jones was experimenting with the still novel task of shaving when he glanced “through the bathroom scuttle and noticed some strange ships, destroyers with two funnels and no scuttles, a couple of cruisers and the like, and it took me a moment or two to realize that the ensigns being hoisted on their stern-staffs were American.”

He first worked with them on the Murmansk run, that lethal exercise of taking matériel up to Russia at a time when convoy losses were running 40 percent.

This particular convoy left Hvalfjord, Iceland, in late June. A few days out, German bombers found it, and Jones watched with considerable envy the prodigal spray of antiaircraft fire the American destroyers put up: “We were often being bollocked and charged for wasting ammo.” One of the men at Jones’s battle station said, “Them Yanks got ‘Enry Ford down below, churnin’ bloody shells out.”

But all this ordnance wasn’t enough. “At about 3;00, the first merchantman—a U.S. freighter loaded to the gunnels with ammo for the Red Army—took a tin fish and suddenly disintegrated into flame and smoke. One of our rescue ships headed over to seek survivors. Everyone in the convoy knew that it was merely a gesture. No one could have survived that blast, which physically shook us, even at five miles distance.”

They were more shaken by what followed. “A sort of low moan went around our ship’s deck, from man to man, from the skipper