John Dyson was an author and magazine journalist with a strong sense of adventure and a dedication to scrupulous research. From his boyhood in New Zealand he had a passion for the sea; he produced his first book, on yachting, while still in his teens, and went on to write many more with nautical themes.

Perhaps the most notable was based on a reconstruction of Columbus’s voyage in the caravel Nina in 1492, which also resulted in two documentaries, for NBC and the BBC's Timewatch. Dyson had met a professor and navigation expert in Cadiz who had a theory that the Columbus log was scrambled in order to put competitors off the scent when they were trying to reach gold on the other side of the Atlantic. He had worked out that the navigation details in the original log did not make nautical sense. So Dyson instigated the building of a replica of the Nina, hired 20 Spanish nautical students and sailed her across to the West Indies, following the unscrambled diaries. The voyage was as authentic as possible. Everyone wore rough tunics of the kind the 1492 crew would have worn, there were no electrics on board, and the cooking was done on an open fire on deck, with live chickens and rabbits destined for the cooking pot. The resulting book went into many editions.

John Dyson was born in 1943, the son of a policeman of Dutch origin who had come to New Zealand via Java, and who built his own house just outside Auckland, where his five children enjoyed an idyllic outdoor childhood. This fostered a strong sense of independence, so much so that John, the oldest child and only boy, left home at 16 for a seven-month tour of Europe. Back in New Zealand, he joined the Auckland Star as a reporter, and at the age of 20 hitched a ride as a crew member of an American sailing yacht to Hong Kong where he got a job as armed forces reporter for the South China Morning Post, which sent him all over south-east Asia on assignment. Moving on to Britain, he was taken on as a reporter by the Manchester Evening News, then by the Daily Mail’s Manchester office. Sent to Leeds to cover a beauty contest for stable girls, he met Kate (surname), a young reporter for the Yorkshire Post, with whom he was to enjoy 45 years of happy marriage.

After a yacht journey through France to the Mediterranean, Dyson spotted an advertisement in an English newspaper used to wrap fruit in a Marseilles market. It was for a journalist on a magazine shortly to be launched by the Automobile Association, called Drive. Dyson worked there for XX years, thinking up some of its most successful stories and campaigns, such as the first ever Plant a Tree Day. Some of the results can still be seen by the M4 near Slough.

During this period Dyson wrote also many books. For the AA Book of the Seaside he travelled round virtually the entire coast of Britain to research it, while for The Hot Arctic he spent several months in the Arctic Circle and in the book discussed the many threats to the region that have since become commonplace. Next came South Seas Dream, which did for the Pacific what his previous book had done for the Arctic. He returned to New Zealand to write "Sink the Rainbow Warrior", about the French secret service’s blowing up the Greenpeace flagship. The book was serialised in the Observer.

Dyson then joined Reader’s Digest, the world’s best-selling magazine, working as a roving reporter for its European Editorial Office, which sent him all over the globe to write stories for its many worldwide editions. He wrote more than 200 stories for the Digest, which could involve weeks or even months of research even before the story was written to satisfy the magazine’s notorious fact-checkers, who rarely found much wrong with Dyson’s reports. He was greatly valued by his editors for his initiative, professionalism and endless fund of ideas. He specialised in adventure stories (or “dramas in real life” in Digest-speak), maritime yarns and environmental investigations. While a great lover of nature and wild places, Dyson was also something of a climate change sceptic, for instance writing a demolition of the case for wind farms long before they became a national issue.

He would often quietly help people after completing a story. On a recent assignment in Athens, he met the destitute survivors from a capsized refugee boat who had lost their papers and been beaten up by anti-immigrant thugs. Dyson arranged for the shipping company which owned the boat that had rescued them to take them to Holland where work could be found.

Dyson was a tall, handsome man who was devoted to his family. Having longed to own a boat all his life, he finally found the vessel of his dreams, a 31-foot ketch called Sovrana, which he enjoyed taking out at every opportunity. He is survived by his wife Kate and four children.

John Dyson, author and journalist, was born on March 12, 1943. He died of cancer on May 6, 2012.

By Robert Low

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mIrDN8XmdA&w=700]

Sleep
by Samuel Johnson
'The Idler' no. 32, Saturday, 25th November 1758

Among the innumerable mortifications that way-lay human arrogance on every side may well be reckoned our ignorance of the most common objects and effects, a defect of which we become more sensible by every attempt to supply it. Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiaritv with knowledge, and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things when they are shown their form or told their use; but the Speculatist, who is not content with superficial views, harrasses himself with fruitless curiosity, and still as he enquires more perceives only that he knows less.

Sleep is a state in which a great part of every life is passed. No animal has been yet discovered, whose existence is not varied with intervals of insensibility; and some late Philosophers have extended the empire of Sleep over the vegetable world.

Yet of this change so frequent, so great, so general, and so necessary, no searcher has yet found either the efficient or final cause; or can tell by what power the mind and body are thus chained down in irresistible stupefaction; or what benefits the animal receives from this alternate suspension of its active powers.

Whatever may be the multiplicity or contrariety of opinions upon this subject, Nature has taken sufficient care that Theory shall have little influence on Practice. The most diligent enquirer is not able long to keep his eyes open; the most eager disputant will begin about midnight to desert his argument; and once in four and twenty hours, the gay and the gloomy, the witty and the dull, the clamorous and the silent, the busy and the idle, are all overpowered by the gentle tyrant, and all lie down in the equality of Sleep.

Philosophy has often attempted to repress insolence, by asserting that all conditions are levelled by Death; a position which, however it may deject the happy, will seldom afford much comfort to the wretched. It is far more pleasing to consider that Sleep is equally a leveller with Death; that the time is never at a great distance, when the balm of rest shall be effused alike upon every head, when the diversities of life shall stop their operation, and the high and the low shall lie down together.

It is somewhere recorded of Alexander, that in the pride of conquests, and intoxication of flattery, he declared that he only perceived himself to be a man by the necessity of Sleep. Whether he considered Sleep as necessary to his mind or body, it was indeed a sufficient evidence of human infirmity; the body which required such frequency of renovation gave but faint promises of immortality; and the mind which, from time to time, sunk gladly into insensibility, had made no very near approaches to the felicity of the supreme and self-sufficient Nature.

I know not what can tend more to repress all the passions that disturb the peace of the world, than the consideration that there is no height of happiness or honour, from which man does not eagerly descend to a state of unconscious repose; that the best condition of life is such, that we contentedly quit its good to be disentangled from its evils; that in a few hours splendor fades before the eye, and praise itself deadens in the ear; the senses withdraw from their objects, and reason favours the retreat.

What then are the hopes and prospects of covetousness, ambition, and rapacity? Let him that desires most have all his desires gratified, he never shall attain a state, which he can, for a day and a night, contemplate with satisfaction, or from which, if he had the power of perpetual vigilance, he would not long for periodical separations.

All envy would be extinguished if it were universally known that there are none to be envied, and surely none can be much envied who are not pleased with themselves. There is reason to suspect that the distinctions of mankind have more show than value, when it is found that all agree to be weary alike of pleasures and of cares; that the powerful and the weak, the celebrated and obscure, join in one common wish, and implore from Nature's hand the nectar of oblivion.

Such is our desire of abstraction from ourselves, that very few are satisfied with the quantity of stupefaction which the needs of the body force upon the mind. Alexander himself added intemperance to sleep, and solaced with the fumes of wine the- sovereignty of the world; and almost every man has some art, by which he steals his thoughts away from his present state.

It is not much of life that is spent in close attention to any important duty. Many hours of every day are suffered to fly away without any traces left upon the intellects. We suffer phantoms to rise up before us, and amuse ourselves with the dance of airy images, which after a time we dismiss for ever, and know not how we have been busied.

Many have no happier moments than those that they pass in solitude, abandoned to their own imagination, which sometimes puts sceptres in their hands or mitres on their heads, shifts the scene of pleasure with endless variety, bids all the forms of beauty sparkle before them, and gluts them with every change of visionary luxury.

It is easy in these semi-slumbers to collect all the possibilities of happiness, to alter the course of the Sun, to bring back the past, and anticipate the future, to unite all the beauties of all seasons, and all the blessings of all climates, to receive and bestow felicity, and forget that misery is the lot of man. All this is a voluntary dream, a temporary recession from the realities of life to airy fictions; and habitual subjection of reason to fancy.

Others are afraid to be alone, and amuse themselves by a perpetual succession of companions: but the difference is not great; in solitude we have our dreams to ourselves, and in company we agree to dream in concert. The end sought in both is forgetfulness of ourselves.

Samuel Johnson, 1709 - 1784.