Within the space of four months, two writers who had run away to sea have returned home to launch a book each about container ships and the lives of those on board them. First there was Rose George, whose Deep Sea and Foreign Going has already been reviewed on Deskbound Traveller and serialised in the Telegraph Magazine. Next week, Chatto & Windus is due to publish Down to the Sea in Ships by Horatio Clare. Both writers travelled with Maersk, the largest container-shipping company in the world, so each presumably heard what the other was up to, though they don’t seem to have met. Both were a cause of puzzlement among the crew. “The seafarers thought I was crazy,” Clare recalls in a piece for the Financial Times. “‘Why are you here?’ they asked. ‘To see what your lives are like,’ I said, reluctant to admit the other reason. Since boyhood I had dreamt of setting sail on a ship bound for far away.”