hallway round the world at the age of 23, in the 35-foot schooner, Cimba starting in Nova Scotia and ending in Fiji.

The Saga of Cimba (1939), his book about the adventure, is considered by some to be one of the best-written sea-taring tales of the century. It is a story of youth and adventure set in a world where there are still truly remote areas to be reached only by lonely voyages across empty oceans.

The dream of sailing round the world was one Maury had nurtured since childhood. During his teens he was determined to find the perfect small sailing boat for such a voyage. He spent six years saving and searching, with his colleague Carroll Huddleston, who was to become the Cimba 's first mate until unexpected disaster overtook him. They found Cimba in 1933, in a cove in Nova Scotia -- a miniature fishing schooner known as The White 'Un .

After buying her from her fisherman owner, Maury and Huddleston set to work to provide her with living accommodation, rechristened her Cimba and together with a third crew member, Warren Heisler, set out to Connecticut to complete her fitting out.

From the start, Cimba seemed to attract misadventure. On her first day out, a wind got up; the seas began to rise and Cimba and her crew found themselves in trouble. They managed to struggle into Long Island Sound and the port of Stamford, but while there, getting ready for the voyage, disaster struck.

On October 26, Warren Heisler went missing from a fishing schooner at sea; 10 days later, Carroll Huddleston somehow went overboard from Cimba during a vicious sleet storm.

Though urged by his friends to wait until the spring before setting sail, the 23-year-old Maury remained undeterred and immediately set about finding himself another shipmate. By the end of November he had signed on Russell "Dombey'' Dickinson, a young steamship officer then serving as skeleton skipper of a windjammer permanently moored at Rye Beach, New York.

On November 30 1933, the two men set sail from New York, cheered on by crowds of Wall Street well-wishers, bound for Bermuda.

Within a few hours, Cimba encountered the first of eight North Atlantic storms. That winter she was battered, swept off course, hove to for days and at last completely capsized. Nevertheless, Cimba survived where three larger sailing vessels had foundered.

From Bermuda, she sailed to Grand Turk, then to Panama, to the Galapagos and thence to the islands of the South Pacific -- the Marquesas, Tuamotu, Tahiti and Samoa.

After nearly two years at sea, living on a diet of tinned salmon, ship's biscuit and limeade, Maury and Dickinson eventually arrived in Fiji, where, following a sudden torrential downpour, the schooner drifted onto a coral reef off Suva, putting an end to the voyage.

Maury attended schools in Bermuda and in New York until he was 12, when a childhood illness ended his formal education.

Maury grew up sailing small boats. Aged 16, he persuaded his father to let him sail before the mast in America's last cargo-carrying full rigger, the Tusitala .