The Fifteen Year Circumnavigation of the S.V. Sapien
Seeking Grants

Yes indeed, we are seeking funding for our trip. Click the links on the left to see the HTML versions of these documents, or click below for the Word/Excel and PDF versions.

Grant Proposal - Word / PDF

Grant Budget - Excel / PDF

Quick Facts - Word / PDF

We need supporters of all kinds. Whether you have advice on the trip or the grant, know people who might be interested, or have money with which you'd like to make this possible - please contact us or pass along the link to this page.

Because we're hoping that our grant proposal will be spread far and wide, we wrote a rather generic letter of introduction. If you want to copy this and send it to a friend, please do! Or just read below for a condensed version of what we're trying to do.

To Whom It May Concern:

Thank you for your attention to this letter of introduction. We, Dena Hankins and James Lane, are seeking funding for a research project and sailing adventure around the world. Using a boat on which we already live and sail, we will embark on a trip with this mission: we will sail slowly around the world, using wind, solar, and human power as much as possible, engaging people in artistic exchanges using storytelling and images in order to create a better understanding of the word civilization, and sparking people to continue to think about, talk about, and work on creating civilization on a global scale. We will focus on the local working people of each geographical area we visit, finding socially responsible jobs and working with them in order to better understand their contributions to global civilization.

Personal Background

Dena’s Story
I have been itinerant all my life, moving as dictated by my father’s employer, the United States Air Force. Wide experience, even within the relatively close cultural climate of the various regions of the United States, impressed upon me the importance of developing a broad perspective on communication and problem-solving. After earning my BA in English, I decided to gain real-life knowledge and act to change something in the world at the same time. I accepted a job with a feminist sex toy company, Toys in Babeland.

In this job, I performed direct activism in partnership with our customers, changing the atmosphere of social repression that stymies people’s physical lives. I also began to consider political activism more seriously but found most organizations too narrowly focused for my needs. As a globalist and multiculturalist, I was unsatisfied with devoting myself to specific, geographically limited changes or projects. My nonviolent participation in Seattle’s protest of the World Trade Organization’s meeting in 1999 served to shift me farther from the local, one-issue-at-a-time method of activism. Even such a large, successful gathering had only a certain amount of impact. I wanted to get to the roots of the problems.

James’ Story
I hauled my first mainsail on a Hobie Cat when I was 9 years old and have been a sucker for this kind of incredibly expensive pain ever since. From the late 70's to mid 80's, I spent my teens helping to rebuild Saul Sternberg's Bristol Herreshoff 63' wooden topsail schooner, the S.V. She-La, whilst "scoring my chops" on small boats on Lake Travis in Austin, Texas, with my friends. In 1985, I sailed from Corpus Christi, Texas, to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, as first mate aboard the S.V. She-La.

As a photographer, I have been stealing images of the world around me and storing them on emulsified film and hard drive space for the greater part of my adult life. My first paying gig was at 14 years old - I was the "Photographer" (with finger quotes and a self-conscious grin) at my sister's 1979 wedding on a borrowed Cannon AE-1. I’ve since shot hundreds of thousands of photos, including the Denny's menu, the cover of David Miles Huber’s best selling book "Modern Recording Techniques", and the Toys in Babeland on-line sex toy catalog. That last was a digital shoot. Almost overnight, my academic specialty and M.F.A specificity, being manual 35mm, high speed black and white photography, had become all but obsolete, or better yet "Artistic and/or Obscure". Ultimately, the environmental concerns inspired me to give up shooting on film. I no longer have to dump toxic chemicals into our water supply in order to make my visual impact on our species. Now I shoot primarily digital photography on my Nikon Cool-Pix 5700 or my silly little "shoe-phone-camera", all of my processing is done with Adobe Photoshop 7 on my Sony Vaio, and I publish my work on our website, www.svsapien.net. So now, after 31 years of sailing and 26 years exposing the world on average 1/250th of a second at a time, I have the means and the motivation of a 21st century adventurer and I don't have to destroy anything to show my work to the world.

Dena and James, Active Together
One day, James decided to look up “civilization” in an old college dictionary. One of the definitions was “a situation of urban comfort.” This horrified us and we kept looking. Time and again, we found dissatisfying definitions of civilization that focused on technology and tools. We believe that the things – the technology – of a people do not constitute civilization, but rather are byproducts of civilized behavior. We began to think about the manifestations of civilization, and we developed the belief that those are human, social, and artistic in nature. The dictionaries say that civilization manifests itself in a plow; we say that it manifests itself in people, their relationships with each other, and the stories they imbue with their understanding of civilization. What is the meaning of the word civilization, what are the observable effects of civilized behavior, and what are the causes or ground situations that lead to civilization?

For suggestions, we turned to Montesquieu, Kant, Voltaire, Herder, and swarms of other theorists, but they were making sweeping generalizations about humanity without learning from a global sampling of human beings. We wanted to follow a line of inquiry that would show us what is actually working for the mass of humanity. After reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, we realized that the working people of the world were widely ignored or studied as curiosities. We wanted to meet them and learn from them. We needed to travel.

Description of Activities

In 1999, we celebrated the purchase of our first boat. We agreed that a sailboat provided the best base of operations from which to survey the people of the world and attempt to come to an international understanding of civilization. We have since sailed the Pacific on three voyages, and we know that entering a new part of the world by boat is an experience that shows off the best of a civilization as a first impression.

For the purposes of this trip, culture begins with the workers – immersion means working. We will do whatever short-term jobs give us access to inspiring people and their civilized creations, whether that means washing dishes, repairing boats, setting up off-the-grid power systems and wireless computer networks from island to island, or some yet to be developed skill. We will enter communities – both sailing and land-based – around the world, looking for the effects of civilization. In the short term (two to four years), this will mean sailing among the islands of the South Pacific; in the long run, we hope to reach most of the world. Where we see people living in ways that exhibit these effects, we will stop, work with the people we want to observe, and search out the root causes of those effects. We want to avoid the wrongs and rights of morality and stick to the functional question: What works to create civilized effects? Since our experience of each place will be subjective and skewed by our personal history, we will seek these causes by exchanging stories and images as well as through direct observation. Sailing to the next port, we will bring the stories we’ve learned to another place and start again the process of meeting people, working, and trading with artists and storytellers. Over time, we will develop a set of stories and tools that are from living successes.

Our aim is two-fold: to search for the common and universal policies or states of being that allow civilization to thrive and to bring the question of civilization to a large number of people on the deepest level possible. In the first point, slow travel and immersion will provide opportunities for us to study the causes of civilization and distill ideas that can be applied by communities seeking to be more civilized. In the second and more immediately realizable point, writing, storytelling, and the sharing of images will provide the means for us to leave behind a wide swath of people who will continue to ponder, on the largest of scales as well as the smallest, what a working global civilization will look like.

Closing

We hope that you consider us for funding. Financial help would allow us to set sail sooner rather than later and would free us up to find jobs or volunteer work that will further our study and allow us to stop whenever necessary, for as long as is necessary, in each place we identify as having new lessons to teach. Without such funding, our travels will be much more difficult and our search will be more haphazard. We have too much dedication to and enthusiasm for our project to be sidetracked, but to do this right, we need help. We have put six years of work into getting ready for this, including starting our trip with the voyages that brought us from Seattle to the Bay Area. We would be grateful for your help in this voyage of exploration and discovery, and we believe that we would contribute significantly to the understanding of humanity’s most civilized nature.

Thank you,
Dena Hankins and James Lane