Sailing Alone Around the World

CONTENTS

Maps

Joshua Slocum

Foreword by Dame Ellen MacArthur

Introduction by Walter Magnes Teller

1 A blue-nose ancestry with Yankee proclivities – Youthful fondness for the sea – Master of the ship Northern Light – Loss of the Aquidneck – Return home from Brazil in the canoe Liberdade – The gift of a ‘ship’ – The rebuilding of the Spray – Conundrums in regard to finance and calking – The launching of the Spray

2 Failure as a fisherman – A voyage around the world projected – From Boston to Gloucester – Fitting out for the ocean voyage – Half of a dory for a ship’s boat – The run from Gloucester to Nova Scotia – A shaking up in home waters – Among old friends

3 Goodbye to the American coast – Off Sable Island in a fog – In the open sea – The man in the moon takes an interest in the voyage – The first fit of loneliness – The Spray encounters La Vaguisa – A bottle of wine from the Spaniard – A bout of words with the captain of the Java – The steamship Olympia spoken – Arrival at the Azores

4 Squally weather in the Azores – High living – Delirious from cheese and plums – The pilot of the Pinta – At Gibraltar – Compliments exchanged with the British navy – A picnic on the Morocco shore

5 Sailing from Gibraltar with the assistance of her Majesty’s tug – The Spray ’s course changed from the Suez Canal to Cape Horn – Chased by a Moorish pirate – A comparison with Columbus – The Canary Islands – The Cape Verde Islands – Sea life – Arrival at Pernambuco – A bill against the Brazilian government – Preparing for the stormy weather of the Cape

6 Departure from Rio de Janeiro – The Spray ashore on the sands of Uruguay – A narrow escape from shipwreck – The boy who found a sloop – The Spray floated but somewhat damaged – Courtesies from the British consul at Maldonado – A warm greeting at Montevideo – An excursion to Buenos Aires – Shortening the mast and bowsprit

7 Weighing anchor at Buenos Aires – An outburst of emotion at the mouth of the Plate – Submerged by a great wave – A stormy entrance to the strait – Captain Samblich’s happy gift of a bag of carpet-tacks – Off Cape Froward – Chased by Indians from Fortescue Bay – A miss-shot for ‘Black Pedro’ – Taking in supplies of wood and water at Three Island Cove – Animal life

8 From Cape Pillar into the Pacific – Driven by a tempest toward Cape Horn – Captain Slocum’s greatest sea adventure – Beaching the strait again by way of Cockburn Channel – Some savages find the carpet-tacks – Danger from firebrands – A series of fierce williwaws – Again sailing westward

9 Repairing the Spray ’s sails – Savages and an obstreperous anchor – A spider-fight – An encounter with Black Pedro – A visit to the steamship Colombia – On the defensive against a fleet of canoes – A record of voyages through the strait – A chance cargo of tallow

10 Running to Port Angosto in a snow-storm – A defective sheetrope places the Spray in peril – The Spray as a target for a Fuegian arrow – The island of Alan Erric – Again in the open Pacific – The run to the island of Juan Fernandez – An absentee king – At Robinson Crusoe’s anchorage

11 The islanders at Juan Fernandez entertained with Yankee doughnuts – The beauties of Robinson Crusoe’s realm – The mountain monument to Alexander Selkirk – Robinson Crusoe’s cave – A stroll with the children of the island – Westward ho! with a friendly gale – A month’s free sailing with the Southern Cross and the sun for guides – Sighting the Marquesas – Experience in reckoning

12 Seventy-two days without a port – Whales and birds – A peep into the Spray ’s galley – Flying-fish for breakfast – A welcome at Apia – A visit from Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson – At Vailima – Samoan hospitality – Arrested for fast riding – An amusing merry-go-round – Teachers and pupils of Papauta College – At the mercy of sea-nymphs

13 Samoan royalty – King Malietoa – Goodbye to friends at Vailima – Leaving Fiji to the south – Arrival at Newcastle, Australia – The yachts of Sydney – A ducking on the Spray – Commodore Foy presents the sloop with a new suit of sails – On to Melbourne – A shark that proved to be valuable – A change of course – The ‘Rain of Blood’ – In Tasmania

14 A testimonial from a lady – Cruising round Tasmania – The skipper delivers his first lecture on the voyage – Abundant provisions – An inspection of the Spray for safety at Devonport – Again at Sydney – Northward bound for Torres Strait – An amateur shipwreck – Friends on the Australian coast – Perils of a coral sea

15 Arrival at Port Denison, Queensland – A lecture – Reminiscences of Captain Cook – Lecturing for charity at Cooktown – A happy escape from a coral reef – Home Island, Sunday Island, Bird Island – An American pearl-fisherman – Jubilee at Thursday Island – A new ensign for the Spray – Booby Island – Across the Indian Ocean – Christmas Island

16 A call for careful navigation – Three hours’ steering in twenty-three days – Arrival at the Keeling Cocos Islands – A curious chapter of social history – A welcome from the children of the islands – Cleaning and painting the Spray on the beach – A Mohammedan blessing for a pot of jam – Keeling as a paradise – A risky adventure in a small boat – Away to Rodriguez – Taken for Antichrist – The governor calms the fears of the people – A lecture – A convent in the hills

17 A clean bill of health at Mauritius – Sailing the voyage over again in the opera-house – A newly discovered plant named in honour of the Spray ’s skipper – A party of young ladies out for a sail – A bivouac on deck – A warm reception at Durban – A friendly cross-examination by Henry M Stanley – Three wise Boers seek proof of the flatness of the earth – Leaving South Africa

18 Rounding the ‘Cape of Storms’ in olden time – A rough Christmas – The Spray ties up for a three months’ rest at Cape Town – A railway trip to the Transvaal – President Krüger’s odd definition of the Spray ’s voyage – His terse sayings – Distinguished guests on the Spray – Cocoanut fibre as a padlock – Courtesies from the admiral of the Queen’s navy – Off for St Helena – Land in sight

19 In the isle of Napoleon’s exile – Two lectures – A guest in the ghost-room at Plantation House – An excursion to historic Longwood – Coffee in the husk, and a goat to shell it – The Spray ’s ill luck with animals – A prejudice against small dogs – A rat, the Boston spider, and the cannibal cricket – Ascension Island

20 In the favouring current off Cape St Roque, Brazil – All at sea regarding the Spanish-American war – An exchange of signals with the battle-ship Oregon – Off Dreyfus’s prison on Devil’s Island – Reappearance to the Spray of the north star – The light on Trinidad – A charming introduction to Grenada – Talks to friendly auditors

21 Clearing for home – In the calm belt – A sea covered with sargasso – The jibstay parts in a gale – Welcomed by a tornado off Fire Island – A change of plan – Arrival at Newport – End of a cruise of over forty-six thousand miles – The Spray again at Fairhaven

APPENDIX

Lines and Sail-Plan of the Spray

Chart of the Spray’s course around the world – April 24 1895 to July 3 1898

Chart of the Spray’s Atlantic voyages from Boston to Gibraltar, thence to the Strait of Magellan, in 1895, and finally homeward bound from the Cape of Good Hope in 1898

The course of the Spray through the Strait of Magellan

Top: The Spray’s course from the Strait of Magellan to Torres Strait

Bottom: The Spray’s course from Australia to South Africa

JOSHUA SLOCUM

Born in Nova Scotia on 20th February 1844, Joshua Slocombe (he changed the spelling later in life) was the fifth of eleven children. He ran away from home several times as a young man, eventually to become a cabin boy on a fishing schooner at the age of 14. He went on to sail on several merchant ships crossing the Atlantic or trading to the Far East, rising in the ranks to Chief Mate on British vessels transporting coal and grain between Britain and San Francisco.

Slocum settled in San Francisco in 1865, becoming a US citizen, and worked the coastal trade between California and Seattle. He secured his first transoceanic command in 1869, sailing across the Pacific, and was so highly regarded by his employers that even after one vessel was wrecked, because he had managed to save all of the crew and most of the cargo, he was immediately given another command.

He met his first wife in Sydney in 1870 and they had seven children, all born at sea or in foreign ports. Three of them died in infancy. After his first wife died in 1884 he remarried but his second wife was not as keen on the seafaring life as her husband was.

Slocum rebuilt the gaff-rigged sloop oyster boat Spray in Massachusetts. He set sail on the voyage that made him famous from Boston on 24th April 1895 and returned more than three years later, on 27th June 1898, having sailed more than 46,000 miles and becoming the first person to complete a solo circumnavigation in the process. His return went largely unnoticed, however, due to the Spanish-American War, but newspapers eventually began to publish articles about Slocum’s endeavours.

His account of the voyage was serialised in 1899 and Sailing Alone Around the World was first published in book form a year later. It was a bestseller that brought Slocum widespread fame. He went on to give an address at a dinner honouring Mark Twain and met President Theodore Roosevelt several times, both at the White House and at Roosevelt’s New York estate. Revenue from sales of the book and fees from speaking engagements gave Slocum a level of financial security that allowed him to spend most of his time sailing aboard the Spray.

By 1909 this income had waned, however. Slocum conceived of a voyage along the rivers of South America with the hope of securing another profitable book deal. He set sail in November 1909 but neither he nor the Spray were seen again.

FOREWORD

BY DAME ELLEN MACARTHUR

Unlike Captain Joshua Slocum I was not born by the sea, nor did I come from a family of sailors, so for me as a child his words were in themselves an adventure. Especially for me too, as having felt that feeling of freedom when I went to sea for the first time aged four I dreamt that one day, somehow, I would sail around the world. I was naturally inquisitive, reading every book I could on sailing, so it was perhaps not surprising that I picked up this one. Being written by the first man in history to undertake this trip made the book special, something that could never be created again. Its words danced from the pages, and as I read I felt I was satisfying my desire to learn, to explore and to understand what it felt like to handle a boat at sea. I remember late at night reading in my bedroom with a torch, not being able to put down such a beautifully written story, but not wanting to get in trouble for not being asleep!

Picking up this book once again to read is as exciting as the first time I laid eyes on it. The story is told in a manner which carries you along in a descriptive way, not just about what he does and sees, but also how he feels. But what really resonates with me now is the author’s relationship with the sea, the skies, his boat and the elements. Of course a lot has changed since his trip began back in 1895, but I marvel at what has not changed in those years that have passed… Embarking today on a voyage around the world you would still see the spray turn to gems as it was caught by the sun, fog so thick you could ‘almost stand on’ it, and the striking outline of the island of Pico exactly as Captain Slocum saw it all those years ago.

You would still go through huge extremes, and deal with all that was thrown at you. After all, that is what makes a true adventure – and long may they continue.

INTRODUCTION

BY WALTER MAGNES TELLER

The first man to sail around the world all alone was a brown-bearded, bald-headed Massachusetts skipper named Slocum. He was 51 when he started from Boston on 24th April 1895 in the Spray, a 37ft sloop of 9 tons register net which he himself had rebuilt from a derelict hulk.

More than three years later, on 27th June 1898, he dropped anchor in Newport, Rhode Island, having cruised 46,000 miles entirely by sail and entirely alone. He had gone without power, radio, money, advertising sponsor, insurance or hospitalisation. He had crossed the Atlantic to Gibraltar, then crossed it again following Magellan’s course southwestward, gone through the Straits, traversed the Pacific (much of the time with the wheel lashed while he sat below reading, cooking or mending his clothes), rounded the Cape of Good Hope and, crossing the Atlantic for the third time, made it home. Men have gone around the world in small boats since; some single-handed. But none has made the voyage Slocum made and none has written a book to compare with Sailing Alone Around the World.

Since its first publication, all manner of blue-water men have called it a classic of sailing – which it is. But the Slocum saga in and of itself, that is to say, as literary stuff, is fully as successful as the exploit it tells of. Direct, bluff and vivid; studded with passages of salty vitality, of poetic prose, and of King James English, Sailing Alone Around the World is, first of all, a classic of narrative writing. It is no mere record of events, however, for Slocum is very much alive in his book.

Ship-bred and Victorian reticence notwithstanding – which is, incidentally, one of his charms – to the careful reader the captain is rather revealing. And it’s just these revelations into character which provide not only the book’s greatest interest but raise it into the ranks of the best. One might sum up the matter thus: as the first man to sail around the world alone, Captain Joshua Slocum, as surely as Noah, is acknowledged as among the immortals of maritime history.

In literary history, on the other hand, he hardly is known at all. Among men of letters, Van Wyck Brooks is one of the few to reckon with him. In The Confident Years he writes that Slocum’s ‘story might have been described as a nautical equivalent to Thoreau’s account of his life in the hut at Walden¹.’

As for courses in American literature at colleges and schools, I know of none in which Slocum is read. In the 1930s, however, Professor J Duncan Spaeth of Princeton University included Sailing Alone in his reading list, American Life and Letters. Some time around the turn of the century, Spaeth had visited the captain and crew of the Spray. ‘I remember the visit very well,’ he wrote me, ‘especially the cabin lined with books. I was struck with the cosy and liveable atmosphere, not like a yacht at all but more like that of the master of an old-fashioned full-rigged ship. I remember seeing an edition of Hakluyt’s Voyages, well worn and evidently well read, the classical history of those seafarers, Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher, on whose style Slocum’s own was modelled… Slocum was the pioneer author in a genre that has now become popular… Yes, you are right in saying I believed him not only memorable as a navigator but as a writer.’

Sailing Alone Around the World was first published serially in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine from September 1899 through March 1900. The publication date of the book by the Century Company was 24th March 1900. It was a generous-sized and well-designed volume, bound in blue cloth, and embellished with drawings by Thomas Fogarty and George Varian, two of the leading illustrators of their day. Their sketches are authentic as well as delightful for Slocum worked with them.

Five thousand copies were struck off to start with while a second printing of 2,500 was ordered within a few months. In the course of time fifteen small printings were to follow. The book was published in England in 1900 by Sampson Low, Marston and Co Ltd. An abridged edition for use in schools were brought out by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1903². The Polish rights were sold in 1927. Blue Ribbon Books Inc brought out in 1930 a popular priced edition. A German translation appeared in 1936, a French edition followed, a new edition in England in 1948, followed by a paper-covered reprint by the tens of thousands. The English are usually discerning in their reading of American authors.

Now at last comes this new edition at home. Truly great records of human experience survive the generations in which they were written. Though the world Slocum sailed in sounds curiously nineteenth century, his predicament remains a twentieth century one.

* * *

Joshua Slocum was a naturalised Yankee. He was born in Nova Scotia, in Annapolis County by the Bay of Fundy, 20th February 1844. It was a seagoing environment for in those days Nova Scotia had the largest tonnage in proportion to population in the world.

He was the fifth child of Sarah Jane Southern and John Slocomb (sic). His mother was daughter of the keeper of the Southwest Point Light. His father was ‘the sort of man who, if wrecked on a desolate island, would find his way home if he had a jack-knife and could find a tree.’

The Slocombs, of English origin, led by a certain John Slocomb called John the Exile, had gone from the United States to Canada about 1783. John the Exile, a Quaker elder and presumably opposed to war, was a displaced person of the American Revolution. Considered a Loyalist, he had been granted 500 acres by the British and it was on or close by that same farm that Joshua was born³.

When the boy was eight the family moved down country to Briar Island where his father made leather fishermen’s boots and where Joshua was set to work with him. But his father did not prosper, and his mother’s health was failing. One surmises condition were rugged in shop and home. Joshua made attempts to run away – at 14 he was cook on a fishing schooner – till in 1860 when the eleventh child was born and the mother died, he left home for good and went deep-water.

First as ordinary seaman, then as mate, young Joshua made voyages under English and American flags to many parts of the world. In 1869, on the California coast, he obtained his first command. He sailed 13 years out of San Francisco to China, Australia, the Spice Islands and Japan.

On 31st January 1871 he married at Sydney, Australia, an American girl, Virginia Albertina Walker, who for the rest of her life accompanied him on his voyages and by whom he had three sons and a daughter, all born on board ship or in foreign ports. Virginia died 25th July 1884, aged 35, and is buried in Buenos Aires.

Around 1874 Slocum built at Subig Bay, Philippines, a steamer for a British marine architect. In 1882 he bought shares in the three-skysailyard ship, Northern Light, which he also commanded. ‘I had a right to be proud of her for at that time – in the 1880s – she was the finest American sailing vessel afloat⁴.’ Two years later he sold out his interest and bought the Aquidneck, ‘a little bark which of all man’s handiwork seemed to me the nearest to perfection of beauty.’

In 1886, with his children and a new young wife, Henrietta M Elliott (1862–1952) – she was a first cousin whom he’d married that year – he set out to trade and carry freight along the South American coast. But in the last days of 1887 the Aquidneck stranded on a sandbar and was wrecked. The crew was paid off out of what could be salved while Slocum, unwilling to return as a castaway, went to work and on the coast of Brazil built a 35ft canoe. Half Cape Ann dory, half Japanese sampan, and rigged like a Chinese junk, she was the Liberdade, so named because she was launched on the day the Brazilian slaves were freed. And in her the dauntless captain and his wife, and oldest and youngest sons, sailed to Washington DC, 5,500 miles away.

At this point – in the prime of his life – everything had fallen away. The death of his first wife whom he had loved has been noted. He’d experienced cholera aboard the Aquidneck, and smallpox, and a mutiny in which he had shot two men. He had had to stand trial and expense. And then, after all, he had lost the ship which had represented his worldly success. Now his profession was gone as well. The age