Sailing Alone Around the World
By George Varian, Thomas Fogarty and Joshua Slocum
4/5
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Reviews for Sailing Alone Around the World
197 ratings14 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Simply written, but great literature. Captain Slocum simply went around the world in a one-man ship, 19 feet long, and kept me thoroughly entertained with the story of it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Slocum was the first person recorded to have sailed solo around the world. It was such a feat a the time that various harbor masters and others he encountered along the way refused to believe it. His adventures included warding off hostile pirated through a combination of force and misdirection. He struggled against stormy seas and a miscreant goat. Despite these challenges and weeks at a time of solitude, he seemed to have enjoyed every bit of the nearly three-year journey. What I enjoyed most about his written account was the sagacity and humor he used to convey the magnitude of his achievements, all while coming across as quite humble. This book is an enjoyable tale of exploration and adventure, and an interesting character study.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Readable and light-hearted account of his round the world sailing trip. He was the first to do it alone in the late 1890s, starting from New England and on to Europe, etc. He spent a lot of time on land at various places so it took him over three years. Endnotes and glossary at the end help you keep up with his references, slang, and sailing terms. Worthwhile.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pretty entertaining. Could have been really dry, but Slocum showed a lot of humor and insight into human nature. He sailed in the mid to late 1890's facing pirates, cannibals, flat earthers, and a particularly nasty goat. It would make a great period movie.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Joshua Slocum did it, he wrote it up.Originally published in 1900, and the prey of reprinters ever since. It's not consciously literary, but has the charm of the immediate.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Despite the years that have passed, this is still an engaging read and all the more interesting for the voyage's place in history.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book is written in a breezy manner and with some narrative skill, but readers looking for a adventure tale about the rigours of the voyage will only get small tastes of that. As first suggested when he makes his oh-so-casual decision to undertake the voyage - there must have been more to this? - I think Mr. Slocum skims over the risks and dangers of his undertaking more than most writers would. Threats encountered are usually acknowledged and dismissed within a paragraph or two. This journey might have yielded a more gripping tale if its author had exposure to today's dramatizing. The fact that he wasn't, however, lends the story a humble charm. The bulk of the narrative is taken up with describing the people and places he encounters on his voyage around the world. Some romanticized descriptions of islands he visits - he was especially fond of Samoa - seem unlikely for being so idyllic. I read these as the pleasant memories of his stay, the way I might talk about a Carribbean vacation after I'm back at work. The rest is mostly descriptions of the course he sets. It's a fun book to follow along with a map. Beginning with his voyage up the New England coast, a good atlas will show you the harbours and islands he names along the way and you can follow his progress. Around Cape Horn especially, I found this imperative for fully understanding the route he was describing, which is otherwise a bit confusing. I appreciated it again as he set his course around Australia and across the Indian Ocean. By the time he visits Australia he is being heralded for the bravery of his journey thus far, and roped into making presentations to a long sequence of small communities that probably leaped at the chance for any sort of event to enliven their days. His tone here is only amused rather than proud. Pride only shines through when he is speaking of the Spray's performance, a vessel he built practically from scratch. Its reliability and his lifetime of nautical know-how prove more than a match for every challenge he encounters. The fact that this is primarily the story of whom he met may be the final proof of that. It's not the story I expected, but there's still no way to beat a solo-voyage-around-the-world tale as told by the man who lived it, any way he wants to tell it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A book, more written more than one hundred years ago, yet so current. I really enjoyed this, it dwarfs most of today's "Look, what a cool guy I am!" type adventure novels. It's amazing what Slocum achieved, without any modern (or not so modern) technology.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sailing Alone Around the World is a fine read. Slocum travelled 46,000 miles in 3 years, averaging about 40 miles per day. This slow progress is reflected in the tone and pace of the book - the account definitely includes lots of rose smelling along the way. The reader should not expect scary tales of roaring seas and rogue waves. As Slocum says, his purpose is not to "pow-wow" about the dangers of the "much maligned sea". Too much delight however can translate into too much cute and in so doing become a dull and trying reading. This book does come close to this at times. From my first reading of this book 30 years ago, I could not recall much other than his encounters with the villain Black Pedro and the astounding account of Slocum scrambling up the mast as a huge Atlantic wave completely submersed his boat below. Upon rereading I find again that while pleasurable, there is not much memorable in the book. Anticipating this, I chose the annotated version to read, thinking that Slocum's mannered understatement would find a perfect counterpoint in some well researched annotations. In principle this was a good idea, but this annotated version does not present all that much useful supplementary detail (for example in one annotation, Rod Scher confirms that Slocum's assertion that "islanders are always the kindest people in the world" does seem to be true). Not all but a good part of the annotation is lame commentary or filler. Having annotations also necessitates a format that reduces the size and detail of the maps and illustrations and squeezes the primary text. If you are going to read this book, read an unannotated version. To paraphrase Joshua Slocom: 'there is a great deal of fun in it".
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5More than one hundred years ago at the end of the century prior to the last a fifty-one year old man set sail for a trip around the world. Joshua Slocum capped his sea-going career with this trip in a sail boat, named The Spray, that he built himself and, upon his return, he memorialized his trip by writing the narrative of his trip, Sailing Alone around the World. His career had waned with the gradual demise of large sail-going ships and he put all of his years of experience on them, plus some help from friends and strangers along the way, into this voyage. The story he told about it still has power to grip the reader's imagination yet today. Many incidents are shared as he travels from place to place and is in and out of danger on several occasions, mostly due to the vagaries of mother nature. Some of those incidents were survived mainly through his own good luck in combination with his sailing experience, for it is clear that nature is more powerful than any sailing vessel, surely one so small as his single manned craft. Early on in his voyage he is chased by pirates, but eludes them and goes on to enjoy the hospitality of the British at Gibraltar. Their would be more hospitality that he would experience during his long three year trip and there would be a deadly encounter with a native, but no more pirates. I was impressed with his devotion to reading which he kept up both with books that he took with him and books that he obtained along the way. This was undoubtedly a life-long habit and it must have been helpful as he sat down to narrate his travels upon his return. I also marveled at the ebb and flow of time as the journey seemed to go more swiftly than one would expect a span of three years to unfold. There was one theme that grew over the course of the story, Joshua was not alone after all. His sailing ship, The Spray, had become much more than a mere container bobbing on the waves. No, it had become his close companion whose heart and soul was one with Joshua - a wonderful occurrence that only seafarers and readers could appreciate. At the conclusion of the book I had admiration for this humble man who took on a challenge that would defeat most men much younger than his fifty-one years and who succeeded. "If the Spray discovered no continents on her voyage, it may be that there were no more continents to be discovered; she did not seek new worlds, or sail to powwow about the dangers of the seas. The sea has been much maligned. To find one's way to lands already discovered is a good thing" (p 234)
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This sets out the amazing facts on the trip the author took a boat he reconstructed around the world, The boat was 37 feet long and 13 feet wide, and while he had some awesome perils to face, he makes it seem like a breeze most of the time--claiming the boat did not need a helmsman for great portions of his trip. The trip began Apr 24, 1895, and was completed 27 Jun 1898. Especially in the early portions of the book it is grippingly exciting.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a classic in the truest sense. It's a true account written by a man who did it. Not a fiction, which would be impressive enough, but the reflections of a pioneer on what he considered important. He does not present himself as an introspective post-modern, but an explorer gentleman whose priorities are not the day to day minutia of sailing, but the impact of his innovation on people. He is to be admired because he saw something new to be done and had the expertise and courage to do it. His book is to be admired because he had a pittance of education but spent his voyage reading and writing his account.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Written in the antique language of the turn-of-the century this book has a slightly stilted feel to it. For example, the original inhabitants of a place are referred to as savages. For all this, it is still a good sailing story, all the more so for it being, supposedly, the first single-handed circumnavigation of the world. It echos modern day sailing adventures in many ways - the same beauty of the sea, the delight in sea animals, the sense of grandeur and solitude, the pride of coping with the elements.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Charming, readable turn of the last century true sailing adventure. The perfect book to read when you can't affored to go anywhere on vacation.
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Sailing Alone Around the World - George Varian
Project Gutenberg's Sailing Alone Around The World, by Joshua Slocum
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Title: Sailing Alone Around The World
Author: Joshua Slocum
Illustrator: Thomas Fogarty
George Varian
Posting Date: October 12, 2010
Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6317]
[This file was first posted on November 25, 2002]
[Last updated: August 16, 2012]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAILING ALONE AROUND THE WORLD ***
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SAILING ALONE AROUND THE WORLD
The Spray
from a photograph taken in Australian waters.
SAILING ALONE AROUND THE WORLD
By
Captain Joshua Slocum
Illustrated by
THOMAS FOGARTY AND GEORGE VARIAN
TO THE ONE WHO SAID:
THE 'SPRAY' WILL COME BACK.
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Spray
(Frontispiece)
From A Photograph Taken In Australian Waters.
The Northern Light,
Captain Joshua Slocum, Bound For Liverpool, 1885
Cross-section Of The Spray
It'll Crawl
No Dorg Nor No Cat
The Deacon's Dream
Captain Slocum's Chronometer
Good Evening, Sir
He Also Sent His Card
Chart Of The Spray's
Course Around The World—april 24, 1895, To July 3, 1898
The Island Of Pico
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 Apparition At The Wheel
Coming To Anchor At Gibraltar
The Spray
At Anchor Off Gibraltar
Chased By Pirates
I Suddenly Remembered That I Could Not Swim
A Double Surprise
At The Sign Of The Comet
A Great Wave Off The Patagonian Coast
Entrance To The Strait Of Magellan
The Course Of The Spray
Through The Strait Of Magellan
The Man Who Wouldn't Ship Without Another Mon And A Doog
A Fuegian Girl
Looking West From Fortescue Bay, Where The Spray
Was Chased By Indians
A Brush With Fuegians
A Bit Of Friendly Assistance
Cape Pillar
They Howled Like A Pack Of Hounds
A Glimpse Of Sandy Point (Punta Arenas) In The Strait Of Magellan
Yammerschooner!
A Contrast In Lighting—the Electric Lights Of The Colombia
And The Canoe Fires Of The Fortescue Indians
Records Of Passages Through The Strait At The Head Of Borgia Bay
Salving Wreckage
The First Shot Uncovered Three Fuegians
The Spray
Approaching Juan Fernandez, Robinson Crusoe's Island
The House Of The King
Robinson Crusoe's Cave
The Man Who Called A Cabra A Goat
Meeting With The Whale
First Exchange Of Courtesies In Samoa
Vailima, The Home Of Robert Louis Stevenson
The Spray's
Course From Australia To South Africa
The Accident At Sydney
Captain Slocum Working The Spray
Out Of The Yarrow River, A Part Of Melbourne Harbor
The Shark On The Deck Of The Spray
On Board At St. Kilda. Retracing On The Chart The Course Of The Spray
From Boston
The Spray
In Her Port Duster At Devonport, Tasmania, February 22, 1897
Is It A-goin' To Blow?
The Spray
Leaving Sydney, Australia, In The New Suit Of Sails Given By Commodore Foy Of Australia
The Spray
Ashore For Boot-topping
At The Keeling Islands
Captain Slocum Drifting Out To Sea
The Spray
At Mauritius
Captain Joshua Slocum
Cartoon Printed In The Cape Town Owl
Of March 5, 1898, In Connection With An Item About Captain Slocum's Trip To Pretoria
Captain Slocum, Sir Alfred Milner (With The Tall Hat), And Colonel Saunderson, M. P., On The Bow Of The Spray
At Cape Town
The Spray in the storm of New York.
Reading Day And Night.
The Spray
Passed By The Oregon
Again Tied To The Old Stake At Fairhaven.
Plan Of The After Cabin Of The Spray
Deck-plan Of The Spray
Sail-plan Of The Spray
Steering-gear Of The Spray
Body-plan Of The Spray
Lines Of The Spray
SAILING ALONE AROUND THE WORLD
CHAPTER I
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.
In the fair land of Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other. On the northern slope of the range grows the hardy spruce-tree, well adapted for ship-timbers, of which many vessels of all classes have been built. The people of this coast, hardy, robust, and strong, are disposed to compete in the world's commerce, and it is nothing against the master mariner if the birthplace mentioned on his certificate be Nova Scotia. I was born in a cold spot, on coldest North Mountain, on a cold February 20, though I am a citizen of the United States—a naturalized Yankee, if it may be said that Nova Scotians are not Yankees in the truest sense of the word. On both sides my family were sailors; and if any Slocum should be found not seafaring, he will show at least an inclination to whittle models of boats and contemplate voyages. My 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. He was a good judge of a boat, but the old clay farm which some calamity made his was an anchor to him. He was not afraid of a capful of wind, and he never took a back seat at a camp-meeting or a good, old-fashioned revival.
As for myself, the wonderful sea charmed me from the first. At the age of eight I had already been afloat along with other boys on the bay, with chances greatly in favor of being drowned. When a lad I filled the important post of cook on a fishing-schooner; but I was not long in the galley, for the crew mutinied at the appearance of my first duff, and chucked me out
before I had a chance to shine as a culinary artist. The next step toward the goal of happiness found me before the mast in a full-rigged ship bound on a foreign voyage. Thus I came over the bows,
and not in through the cabin windows, to the command of a ship.
My best command was that of the magnificent ship Northern Light, of which I was part-owner. I had a right to be proud of her, for at that time—in the eighties—she was the finest American sailing-vessel afloat. Afterward I owned and sailed the Aquidneck, a little bark which of all man's handiwork seemed to me the nearest to perfection of beauty, and which in speed, when the wind blew, asked no favors of steamers, I had been nearly twenty years a shipmaster when I quit her deck on the coast of Brazil, where she was wrecked. My home voyage to New York with my family was made in the canoe Liberdade, without accident.
The Northern Light, Captain Joshua Slocum, bound for Liverpool, 1885. Drawn by W. Taber.
My voyages were all foreign. I sailed as freighter and trader principally to China, Australia, and Japan, and among the Spice Islands. Mine was not the sort of life to make one long to coil up one's ropes on land, the customs and ways of which I had finally almost forgotten. And so when times for freighters got bad, as at last they did, and I tried to quit the sea, what was there for an old sailor to do? I was born in the breezes, and I had studied the sea as perhaps few men have studied it, neglecting all else. Next in attractiveness, after seafaring, came ship-building. I longed to be master in both professions, and in a small way, in time, I accomplished my desire. From the decks of stout ships in the worst gales I had made calculations as to the size and sort of ship safest for all weather and all seas. Thus the voyage which I am now to narrate was a natural outcome not only of my love of adventure, but of my lifelong experience.
One midwinter day of 1892, in Boston, where I had been cast up from old ocean, so to speak, a year or two before, I was cogitating whether I should apply for a command, and again eat my bread and butter on the sea, or go to work at the shipyard, when I met an old acquaintance, a whaling-captain, who said: Come to Fairhaven and I'll give you a ship. But,
he added, she wants some repairs.
The captain's terms, when fully explained, were more than satisfactory to me. They included all the assistance I would require to fit the craft for sea. I was only too glad to accept, for I had already found that I could not obtain work in the shipyard without first paying fifty dollars to a society, and as for a ship to command—there were not enough ships to go round. Nearly all our tall vessels had been cut down for coal-barges, and were being ignominiously towed by the nose from port to port, while many worthy captains addressed themselves to Sailors' Snug Harbor.
The next day I landed at Fairhaven, opposite New Bedford, and found that my friend had something of a joke on me. For seven years the joke had been on him. The ship
proved to be a very antiquated sloop called the Spray, which the neighbors declared had been built in the year 1. She was affectionately propped up in a field, some distance from salt water, and was covered with canvas. The people of Fairhaven, I hardly need say, are thrifty and observant. For seven years they had asked, "I wonder what Captain Eben Pierce is going to do with the old Spray?" The day I appeared there was a buzz at the gossip exchange: at last some one had come and was actually at work on the old Spray. Breaking her up, I s'pose?
No; going to rebuild her.
Great was the amazement. Will it pay?
was the question which for a year or more I answered by declaring that I would make it pay.
My ax felled a stout oak-tree near by for a keel, and Farmer Howard, for a small sum of money, hauled in this and enough timbers for the frame of the new vessel. I rigged a steam-box and a pot for a boiler. The timbers for ribs, being straight saplings, were dressed and steamed till supple, and then bent over a log, where they were secured till set. Something tangible appeared every day to show for my labor, and the neighbors made the work sociable. It was a great day in the Spray shipyard when her new stem was set up and fastened to the new keel. Whaling-captains came from far to survey it. With one voice they pronounced it A 1,
and in their opinion fit to smash ice.
The oldest captain shook my hand warmly when the breast-hooks were put in, declaring that he could see no reason why the Spray should not cut in bow-head
yet off the coast of Greenland. The much-esteemed stem-piece was from the butt of the smartest kind of a pasture oak. It afterward split a coral patch in two at the Keeling Islands, and did not receive a blemish. Better timber for a ship than pasture white oak never grew. The breast-hooks, as well as all the ribs, were of this wood, and were steamed and bent into shape as required. It was hard upon March when I began work in earnest; the weather was cold; still, there were plenty of inspectors to back me with advice. When a whaling-captain hove in sight I just rested on my adz awhile and gammed
with him.
New Bedford, the home of whaling-captains, is connected with Fairhaven by a bridge, and the walking is good. They never worked along up
to the shipyard too often for me. It was the charming tales about arctic whaling that inspired me to put a double set of breast-hooks in the Spray, that she might shunt ice.
The seasons came quickly while I worked. Hardly were the ribs of the sloop up before apple-trees were in bloom. Then the daisies and the cherries came soon after. Close by the place where the old Spray had now dissolved rested the ashes of John Cook, a revered Pilgrim father. So the new Spray rose from hallowed ground. From the deck of the new craft I could put out my hand and pick cherries that grew over the little grave. The planks for the new vessel, which I soon came to put on, were of Georgia pine an inch and a half thick. The operation of putting them on was tedious, but, when on, the calking was easy. The outward edges stood slightly open to receive the calking, but the inner edges were so close that I could not see daylight between them. All the butts were fastened by through bolts, with screw-nuts tightening them to the timbers, so that there would be no complaint from them. Many bolts with screw-nuts were used in other parts of the construction, in all about a thousand. It was my purpose to make my vessel stout and strong.
Cross-section of the Spray.
Now, it is a law in Lloyd's that the Jane repaired all out of the old until she is entirely new is still the Jane. The Spray changed her being so gradually that it was hard to say at what point the old died or the new took birth, and it was no matter. The bulwarks I built up of white-oak stanchions fourteen inches high, and covered with seven-eighth-inch white pine. These stanchions, mortised through a two-inch covering-board, I calked with thin cedar wedges. They have remained perfectly tight ever since. The deck I made of one-and-a-half-inch by three-inch white pine spiked to beams, six by six inches, of yellow or Georgia pine, placed three feet apart. The deck-inclosures were one over the aperture of the main hatch, six feet by six, for a cooking-galley, and a trunk farther aft, about ten feet by twelve, for a cabin. Both of these rose about three feet above the deck, and were sunk sufficiently into the hold to afford head-room. In the spaces along the sides of the cabin, under the deck, I arranged a berth to sleep in, and shelves for small storage, not forgetting a place for the medicine-chest. In the midship hold, that is, the space between cabin and galley, under the deck, was room for provision of water, salt beef, etc., ample for many months.
The hull of my vessel being now put together as strongly as wood and iron could make her, and the various rooms partitioned off, I set about calking ship.
Grave fears were entertained by some that at this point I should fail. I myself gave some thought to the advisability of a professional calker.
The very first blow I struck on the cotton with the calking-iron, which I thought was right, many others thought wrong. It'll crawl!
cried a man from Marion, passing with a basket of clams on his back. It'll crawl!
cried another from West Island, when he saw me driving cotton into the seams. Bruno simply wagged his tail. Even Mr. Ben J——, a noted authority on whaling-ships, whose mind, however, was said to totter, asked rather confidently if I did not think it would crawl.
How fast will it crawl?
cried my old captain friend, who had been towed by many a lively sperm-whale. Tell us how fast,
cried he, that we may get into port in time.
'It'll crawl'
However, I