I was trapped at SEA for 10yrs by Capt. Cook-obsessed parents on round-the-world trip…my childhood was lost to the waves

A BRIT spent her entire childhood “trapped” at sea after her Captain Cook-obsessed parents dragged her along on a perilous round-the-globe voyage for a decade.

Suzanne Heywood, 55, lived an ordinary life in Southampton before being whisked away on a sailing trip with her younger brother aged just seven.

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Suzanne Heywood

Suzanne Heywood

The family, whose last name was Cook, were inspired by the infamous explorer to undertake a three-year voyage.

Captain Cook’s 18th-century journey took him through Plymouth , Tenerife , Cape Town , New Zealand , Hawaii , and the Bering Strait via the North American coast.

But Suzanne’s wild “family holiday”, during which she suffered a fractured skull, ended up lasting a decade after her father decided to continue sailing through dangerous storms and icy waves.

She says the boat felt like a “prison” and she was robbed of her childhood despite her parents claiming it was the “opportunity of a lifetime”.

As a young girl, she had no friends and was forced to seek out an education for herself – signing up for a correspondence school.

When they left in 1976, her dad explained: “We’re going to follow Captain Cook. After all, we share the captain’s surname, so who better to do it?”

His vessel of choice was an “enormous boat with a long, curved bow, two masts and a raised deck” called Wavewalker, which Suzanne’s 2023 memoir is named after.

They travelled to places like Ilha de Santo Antão in the Cape Verde islands, South America, South Africa and then Australia .

Suzanne was ready to ditch life at sea when their cabin tipped backwards during a storm in the Indian Ocean.

The waves became fiercer, over 50ft high and strong gusts were blowing from the direction of the South Pole.

The Cooks put on their life-jackets and Suzanne grabbed her counter-top rail while clutching a cupboard door at the same time.

They survived the terrifying storm, and her dad managed to navigate them to Île Amsterdam in the southern Indian Ocean.

The turbulence was so bad Suzanne was left with major swelling and a fractured skull, and medics believed she could have brain damage.

She underwent a staggering seven surgeries on a tiny island, all done without anaesthetic.

Eventually, she managed to escape life at sea when her parents enrolled her and her brother Jon at a school in New Zealand when they were 16 and 15 years old.

Her parents carried on sailing.

She said: “For nine months, we lived alone in a small hut beside a lake in a country in which I only knew one adult (who lived several hours away).

“I kept working through my correspondence lessons, posting them off each week. I also wrote to every university I’d ever heard of, asking them if they would let me apply to be a student.”

Eventually, she landed a spot at Oxford University and with the money she earned picking kiwis booked a flight home.

But she was left scarred from what her parents described as an “adventure”, after years of on-boat family tension and a “strange, difficult childhood”.

She wrote in The Guardian : “My parents always claimed our time on Wavewalker was wonderful and told me I’d had a privileged upbringing.

“But many parts of my childhood were worse than I’d been willing to admit.”

However, the emotional strain only fuelled Suzanne’s determination to get an education.

Suzanne told the Canadian talk show The Morning Show : “I was unable to have friends, go to school, do all the things you’d normally do as child.”

“You can educate yourself under the most extreme circumstances.

“As it became clear my parents had no intention of going back and putting me back into school, I decided I had to educate myself.

“It was the only lifeline I had, the only way to get off this boat.”

She wrote in The Huffington Post: “I kept working through my correspondence lessons, posting them off each week.

“I also wrote to every university I’d ever heard of, asking if they would let me apply to be a student. Most wrote back saying that they would not consider me.”

Suzanne attributes her continual success, later becoming a top civil servant and novelist, to her “extreme upbringing”.

Her hard work paid off but she struggled with friendship after years of social isolation and reliance on tinned food.

She started to thrive socially and academically after her first year at Oxford and even went on to do a PhD at Cambridge.

Suzanne later underwent therapy to reverse years of damage to her mental health and is now a successful businesswoman with a CBE.

She was married to David Cameron ‘s Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood before he died and had three children with him.

Suzanne Heywood

Suzanne Heywood