John Fairfax (rower)

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John Fairfax is a British rower and adventurer and in 1969 became the first person to row solo across an ocean.

Fairfax was born in Italy to an English father and Bulgarian mother. As a child he was expelled from the Italian Boy Scouts for opening fire on a hut full of fellow Scouts with a revolver. Soon after that he moved with his mother to Argentina. When he was 13 he left home to live in the jungle “like Tarzan”. Fairfax survived by hunting and bartering skins with local peasants. It was as a teenager that he also read for the first time about Frank Samuelsen and George Harbo’s famous row across the Atlantic which up to that point was the only ever ocean row. Fairfax said that from this point on he knew that someday he would row across the Atlantic himself.[citation needed]

In 1959 he flew to New York and drove across America to San Francisco. Having run out of money Fairfax decided to return to his mother in Argentina by bike. He got as far as Guatemala on his bike and then hitchhiked on to Panama. After a brief spell as a sailor on a Colombian boat he returned to Panama where he fell in with pirates and ended up spending three years smuggling guns, whiskey and cigarettes. After a dramatic escape from the pirates and the authorities he returned to Argentina on horseback.

Back in Argentina he first read of Chay Blyth and John Ridgway’s successful row across the Atlantic and realised that if he wanted to be the first person to row solo across the Atlantic he would have to do it soon.

After returning to England it took Fairfax two years to prepare for the row. On 19th July 1969 he became the first person to row solo across an ocean when he arrived in Florida having set off from the Canary Islands. The row took 180 days. Upon completion of his row he received a message of congratulations from the crew of Apollo 11 who had walked on the moon the day after he had completed his voyage. In their letter the crew stated:

"Yours, however, was the accomplishment of one resourceful individual, while ours depended upon the help of thousands of dedicated workers in the United States and all over the world. As fellow explorers, we salute you on this great occasion."

Two years later in 1971 he set off with Sylvia Cook from San Francisco in an attempt to row across the Pacific. Cook had replied to a personal ad that Fairfax had put in the Times when looking for support for his first row. The pair arrived at Hayman Island in Australia 361 days later in the process becoming the first people to ever row across the Pacific and Cook becoming the first woman to ever row across an ocean.

He was featured on the UK This is your life in January 1970.