During World War II, when English households faced food rationing, a Manchester boy named John Lynch took matters into his own hands.

He snagged brook trout by the gills and snatched eggs from robins' nests for his family's meatless table.

Later, his resourceful nature led him to circle the globe on merchant ships, then revolutionize the South Florida/Latin America/Caribbean sea trade as president and CEO of Seaboard Marine.

On Sept. 17, Lynch died as he had lived: on his own terms. Rather than labor on a ventilator following complications from a drug allergy, the 76-year-old widower told his six children, his lawyer, a psychiatrist and doctors at Jacksonville's Mayo Clinic to turn off his breathing machine. He was 86.

``It wasn't open for discussion,'' said son John R.W. Lynch, a Fort Myers firefighter.

``We said, `We want you to stay.' He did it completely on his own.''

The same combination of confidence, courage and pragmatism defined the elder Lynch's journey from a bombed-out house in Manchester to the executive suites of multinational corporations.

Along the way, he pursued adventure travel -- and a Panama Canal ship pilot's daughter -- indulged a passion for gourmet cuisine, ran a French-style restaurant in Chile, mastered the Spanish language, and became a U.S. citizen.

After heading Grace Line's operations in parts of Latin America, he joined Seaboard in 1988, serving as its president from 1992 until 2005.

A prolific spinner of yarns, Lynch could be sharp-tongued and salty one moment, polished and gracious the next.

He was equally comfortable ``fishing backwaters with the good ol' boys'' as he was meeting with the leaders of nations where he did business, his son said.

A statement from Seaboard said that under Lynch, ``the company grew from a small roll-on/roll-off carrier, operating in Central America, to the leading carrier based in the Port of Miami providing services to more than 25 different countries.''

Executive Vice President Bruce Brecheisen credited his late friend's success to an obsession with customer service and an intuitive grasp of market forces.

Lynch ``took calculated chances with a good sense of timing,'' Brecheisen said.

``He had an eye for opportunities when others couldn't see them.''

Among his guiding principles: ``Engage your brain before you open your mouth.''

For 10 of his most productive years, John Lynch also cared for his ill wife, Virginia Russell Lynch.

His father ``was home every night taking care of her,'' son John said. And after she died of cancer in 1998, he kept daughter Alexandra, who has Down syndrome, at home with him in Tavares, in North Central Florida.

``To me, that's what made him a man,'' his son said.

John Lynch was the oldest of three brothers whose father quit Manchester's coal mines for the wartime aviation industry.

``We left under heavy bombing,'' brother Alan Lynch recalls. ``The town was in flames . . . The front of the house was blown in.''

Toward the end of the war, the family settled in the port city of Southampton. John enrolled at the prestigious Warsash Maritime Academy, which sent him to sea as a teenager. He became a full-time sailor with the old South American Saint Line.

Brother Robin Lynch, of New Jersey, said John often found himself in dicey situations: on a ship pinned down by shelling during the 1955 overthrow of Argentine President Juan Perón; in Colombia during the 1960s, when ``guerrillas were still active and it was pretty violent;'' and in Chile in 1970 as the Marxist Salvador Allende became president and American companies like Grace ``were busy selling their assets.''