SAILING ALONE AROUND THE WORLD, memoir by Canadian sailor Joshua Slocum, the first person to circumnavigate the globe all by himself.
Slocum was born in 1844 in Wilmot, Nova Scotia, and got his first job on a British merchant ship at age sixteen. At twenty-five he married an Australian woman named Virginia, who would live with him on ships for fourteen years. Four of their seven children were born at sea. Virginia died in 1884 on a voyage to South America. Two years later Slocum married a cousin, Henrietta, and moved to Fairhaven, Massachusetts. After surviving one shipwreck Henrietta refused to sail with him again.
By the time Slocum hit upon the idea of sailing alone around the world he had already had a lifetime’s worth of seafaring adventures, which he recounted in the travelogues Voyage of the Liberdade (1889) and Voyage of the Destroyer (1894), about two particularly harrowing journeys that included a shipwreck and a mutiny.
Slocum spent the year 1893 in Massachusetts fixing up an old oyster boat called the Spray, a thirty-seven-foot, one-masted sloop that was nearly a century old and had been sitting in a field in Fairhaven for seven years. Despite its unprepossessing appearance Slocum fell in love with the boat and hatched his outrageously ambitious plan to sail around the world on his own.
Slocum set off from Boston in the Spray on April 25, 1895, with only a fisherman’s lantern for a navigation aid. His voyage took three years and two months, during which time he covered forty-six thousand miles.
He first sailed to Nova Scotia before heading across the Atlantic. When he reached Gibraltar, British naval officers warned him about pirates in the Mediterranean and advised him to return whence he came. Slocum turned around and sailed back across the Atlantic, heading to South America.
As he made his way down the coast of the continent he ran into an old sailing friend who gave him a bag of carpet tacks and advised him to lay them on his deck at night to ward off intruders. Sure enough, one night as he was passing by Tierra del Fuego he awoke to the pained cries of a band of Indigenous Yahgan who had stolen aboard the ship and stumbled onto the tacks.
Slocum made it past South America and traveled for sixty-two days across the Pacific to Samoa and thence to Australia, where he was greeted with amazement. He thereupon traversed the Indian Ocean in twenty-three days before landing in Madagascar, where he struggled to explain himself to European officials who believed the world was flat. In South Africa he was gifted a goat, which briefly sailed with him and nibbled at his nautical charts. On Christmas Day in 1897 Slocum rounded the Cape of Good Hope and crossed the Atlantic back to Brazil, after which he sailed north and arrived in Newport, Rhode Island, on June 25, 1898. He docked the Spray back home in Fairhaven on July 3.
Despite his unprecedented accomplishment Slocum received little fanfare upon his return owing to the recent outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Yet once his journals from the trip were published serially in the Century Magazine, his feat began to attract more attention, and when they were published in book form in 1900 as Sailing Alone Around the World, it was an instant best- seller. Slocum became a minor celebrity and made enough money to buy a farm.
The ever-restless Slocum returned to the sea in the Spray in 1905. Four years later he sailed from New England to the Cayman Islands but was never heard from again. He and his ship were presumed lost at sea and he was declared legally dead in 1924.
So grueling are the physical and mental demands of solo circumnavigation that in the century and a quarter since Slocum’s achievement, less than four hundred people have accomplished the same feat.