Alan Villiers was born in Melbourne in 1903, and from boyhood he had an intense and overriding passion for the sea and sailing ships in particular, first sailing himself shortly after the end of the First World War in merchant barques between Australia and New Zealand. In 1921, after a lucky break won him a job as a journalist on the Hobart Mercury, he produced his first book based on his experience on a whaling expedition to the Antarctic, soon followed by his account of the voyage of the Herzogin Cecilie on its voyage from Australia to Great Britain. Over the next decades he sailed all over the world, including in his own ship the Joseph Conrad. His account of his trip around Saudi Arabia by dhow in 1938-9 has recently been reprinted by the National Maritime Museum, sumptuously illustrated with Villiers' own photographs of the trip from their archive. His career coincided with the end of sail, and in his twenty-nine books he captured for readers the passing of that romantic world that had drawn men to the sea for centuries, as well as the dangers that meant many never returned home.