Sailing Alone Around The World – Joshua Slocum, 1900 ★★★

Playing Solitaire with Neptune

You have to be one tough fellow to sail around the world all by yourself in an age before radio communication, let alone satellite navigation. Yet it happened for the first time ever on June 27, 1898, when New Englander Joshua Slocum returned to Boston after more than three years circling the globe on his 37-foot-long sloop, the Spray.

It may seem remarkable to us now, and did so even more at the time, but Slocum himself recalls the voyage as more a pleasant lark than a death-defying high-endurance stunt:

No one can know the pleasure of sailing free over the great oceans save those who have had the experience. It is not necessary, in order to realize the utmost enjoyment of going around the globe, to sail alone, yet for once and the first time there was a great deal of fun in it.

As a reading experience, Sailing Alone Around The World is more cozy and less thrilling than I expected, emphasizing amiability over adventure. As someone familiar with Joshua Slocum’s legend mostly by the accident of sharing his last name, I expected an ornery cuss who kept his distance from civilization. Yet the Slocum who emerges in this book is not that at all.

Sure, he was solitary by choice, but he’s also cheerful and engaging, whether it is chatting up dockhands, entertaining visitors, amusing children, or giving lectures about his voyage during stops along the way. “Let one be without a friend, and see what will happen!” he writes early on in his narrative; he seldom seems without one here.

Joshua Slocum, believed to be in Brazil during his round-the-world voyage sometime in October, 1895. Image from https://www.whalingmuseum.org/explore/joshua-slocum/.

This includes a stowaway spider from Boston, a large number of books he takes with him (“my books were always my friends, let fail all else”) and for a brief spell at least, according to what he relates here, the long-dead pilot of the Pinta, which sailed with Columbus to the New World and with whom Slocum relates a long, amusing dialogue while suffering from a bout of sickness after eating some white cheese.

Even the moon offers boon companionship:

Then I turned my face eastward, and there, apparently at the very end of the bowsprit, was the smiling full moon rising out of the sea. Neptune himself coming over the bows could not have startled me more. “Good evening, sir,” I cried; “I’m glad to see you.” Many a long talk since then I had had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage.

Because it was a first-person account of a first-ever achievement, one expects some explanation as to how a boat could be fitted for such a daunting expedition, or how the sailing itself was accomplished. True, Sailing Alone Around The World discusses this, but mostly in the opening chapters and a brief appendix.

Most of the time, Slocum’s focus is on the people he meets, residents for of parts of the world easily overlooked then as now.

On Fayal (or Faial) Island in the Portuguese Azores, Slocum stays with a man who lives near a churchyard where his wife and children are buried. “I moved to this house from far off to be near the spot where I pray every morning,” he explained.

Slocum's journey included not one but three Atlantic crossings. "So far as I know, the Spray beat everything going across the Atlantic except the steamers," he wrote. Image from https://yuliadibrovska.wixsite.com/wordsqueeze/post/2018/04/09/sailing-alone-around-the-world-by-joshua-slocum

Nearing the Strait of Magellan, he fends off a native pirate named “Black Pedro,” whom Slocum calls “the worst murderer in Tierra del Fuego,” with the help of a handy rifle and carpet tacks scattered across the Spray’s open deck.

A little further along, making port at the Juan Fernández Islands off Chile, Slocum tells local children of the English names of fruit that grows off a tree. “Figgies, figgies!” they cheer.

Christmas Island, on the Indian Ocean near Java, prompts this lovely word portrait:

The surface of the island appeared evenly rounded from the sea to a considerable height in the center. In outline it was as smooth as a fish, and a long ocean swell, rolling up, broke against the sides, where it lay like a monster asleep, motionless on the sea.

However amazing his feat, Slocum is at pains to emphasize the ease with which most of it was accomplished. He did ride out some big storms, including a rare tornado that rocked Manhattan just as he was completing his voyage, but as a pilot he describes the adventure as pleasanter than one would expect.

Off the coast of Gibraltar, Slocum was chased by pirates, an episode captured in this painting by David W. Johnston. Image from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/around-the-world-with-joshua-slocum-feature.

Even when sailing, Slocum was not always alone. There was briefly a goat, which ate one of his most critically-needed charts and which he hurriedly gave away. He also had human company, including some young women who sailed with him for a day’s outing.

Being an object of curiosity as his voyage continued earned Slocum both notice and money. He needed the latter as port fees and cargo duties mounted. In Melbourne, he charged visitors sixpence apiece to board the Spray and look around, and “when this business got dull I caught a shark and charged them sixpence each to look at that.”

The most memorable anecdote Slocum tells is of the time he was introduced to South African President Paul Kruger, an ardent flat earther peeved by the very nature of Slocum’s undertaking:

His friend Judge Beyers, the gentleman who presented me, by mentioning that I was on a voyage around the world, unwittingly gave great offense to the venerable statesman, which we both regretted deeply. Mr. Kruger corrected the judge rather sharply, reminding him that the world is flat. “You don’t mean round the world,” said the president; “it is impossible! You mean in the world. Impossible! He said, “impossible!” and not another word did he utter either to the judge or to me.

The first edition of Sailing Alone came with many illustrations by Thomas Fogarty and George Varian. Here Slocum is depicted receiving dignitaries in Cape Town, South Africa, "land of distances and pure air." Image from https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/joshua-slocum-spray.html.

Politics seldom interfered during Slocum’s voyage, though the tail end of his voyage did coincide with the Spanish-American War, which led to an encounter with an American battleship where Slocum was asked if he had seen any Spanish vessels. In Cape Town, he was persistently told “The Spaniard will get you,” which amused him. “To all this I could only say that, even so, he would not get much.”

Slocum frequently jokes about being a one-man crew, reporting for “all hands” at quarantines and health inspections. He explains how he managed to handle his sails and steering without breaking much of a sweat. He basically set the sails, sat below, and let the boat steer itself in calmer weather by tying down the wheel. One page title reads: Three Hours’ Steering In Twenty-Three Days.

Reading this reminded me a lot of another book, Kon-Tiki. Both Slocum and Thor Heyerdahl similarly describe the sensation of being out in the wide Pacific with no land or other craft in sight. Both take pleasure in the wonders of nature.

The Kon-Tiki had its retinue of pilot fish; aboard the Spray, Slocum found himself escorted by a dolphin and three yellowtails, an ad hoc school which swam together in the sloop’s wake “except when in danger and when foraging about the sea.”

The sail plan of the Spray included an improvised bamboo jib. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sail-plan_of_the_Spray.jpg

A seasoned sailor of many decades’ experience, Slocum could do just about anything in the water – except swim. The Spray carried with it a lifeboat, a small dory Slocum sawed in two:

A whole dory would be heavy and awkward to handle alone. Manifestly there was not room on deck for more than half of a boat, which, after all, was better than no boat at all, and was large enough for one man. I perceived, moreover, that the newly arranged craft would answer for a washing-machine when placed athwartships, and also for a bath-tub.

Sailing Alone Around The World is a book of considerable charm that leaves many questions unanswered. Like what did the man’s wife think about his four-plus-year holiday? What motivated such an endeavor? Slocum says nothing. The man, who disappeared with the Spray in the West Indies in 1908 on another solo trip, proves something of an enigma.

The Spray at harbor in Buenos Aires, dwarfed by much larger ships. Image from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/around-the-world-with-joshua-slocum-feature.

He does offer a quiet religious sense of being at service to something larger, and with whom he finds himself at peace. Upon reaching the Pacific after some failed attempts at sailing around Tierra del Fuego, he is awestruck by the sudden expanse of endless blue before him: “Then was the time to uncover my head, for I sailed alone with God. The vast ocean was again around me, and the horizon was unbroken by land.”

It would be 20 years before anyone undertook such a solo voyage again, and by then the sailor, Harry Pidgeon, had use of the Panama Canal.

Sailing Alone Around The World was quite a commercial success when published; according to Wikipedia it remains in print today. The legend of Joshua Slocum continues to circle the globe; a river in Massachusetts, a plant in Mauritius, and an underwater glider which travels across oceans all bear his name. Which is nice to know, especially if you happen to bear it, too!