the illustrated edition [dedication] To the one who said: “The Spray will come back.” SAILING ALONE AROUND THE WORLD JOSHUA SLOCUM INTRODUCTION BY GEOFFREY WOLFF INTRODUCTION BY GEOFFREY WOLFF THE WEATHER WAS MILD ON THE DAY OF MY DEPARTURE FROM Gloucester. On the point ahead, as the Spray stood out of the cove, was a lively picture, for the front of a tall factory was a flutter of hand- kerchiefs and caps. Pretty faces peered out of the windows from the top to the bottom of the building, all smiling bon voyage. Some hailed me to know where away and why alone. Why? When I made as if to stand in, a hundred pairs of arms reached out, and said come, but the shore was dangerous! The sloop worked out of the bay against a light southwest wind, and about noon squared away off Eastern Point, receiving at the same time a hearty salute—the last of many kindnesses to her at Gloucester. The wind freshened off the point, and skipping along smoothly, the Spray was soon off Thatcher’s Island lights. Thence shaping her course east, by compass, to go north of Cashes Ledge and the Amen Rocks, I sat and considered the matter all over again, and asked myself once more whether it were best to sail beyond the ledge and rocks at all. —From Chapter II, Sailing Alone Around the World This photograph shows a replica of the Spray built by boat designer R. D. (Pete) Culler, who lived aboard the craft for twenty years with his wife, Toni. VIII SAILING ALONE AROUND THE WORLD INTRODUCTION IX But early in his voyage, especially, before he learned how gen- erously he would be welcomed and supplied in foreign ports and how successfully he could draw audiences to his lantern-slide lec- tures, he was desperate for money. He sailed for Gibraltar, he noted again and again, with $1.50 in his pocket. But by God he sailed! And watched and listened and meditated and in the end conveyed the essence of sailing alone on a small boat, itself a cosmic system whose complications a single person, with humility and experience and alertness, might hope to master. He was, after all, what believers might call the Spray’s maker. If her rudderhead twisted away in high seas, or a cabin-to-deck joint parted, he knew whose was the original sin. And this accounts for the lightness in his being as the sun sets behind him and he pushes ahead. “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.’” But later, inevitably, came fog, off fearsome Sable Island. This wasn’t the first ever to have settled on Joshua Slocum, but he was impressed by it: “One could almost ‘stand on it.’ It continued so for a number of days, the wind increasing to a gale. The waves rose A chart of the Spray’s three-year voyage around the world, Joshua Slocum. high, but I had a good ship. Still, in the dismal fog I felt myself which lasted from April 24, 1895, to July 3, 1898. drifting into loneliness, an insect on a straw in the midst of the absolute. Slocum’s announced intention had been to sail across elements.” Slocum’s phrasing here is strikingly akin to the narrator the Atlantic to Gibraltar, where he would enter the Mediterranean of Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897) musing that “the cor- To learn to despise the sound of one’s own voice is a sobering As soon as Slocum touches land on July 20, 1895, nineteen Sea, proceeding through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea, thence to respondent . watched the waves and wondered why he was there” event for an autobiographer, and for a shipmaster accustomed to his days out from Nova Scotia, the reader realizes how lovingly the the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope, running his east- Slocum would many times come to note what Crane described as commands being heard. But it must have been stirring, too, for to transatlantic passage has socialized the solo sailor. Ashore in ing down to Cape Horn and north from the South Atlantic toward nature’s flat indifference: “She did not seem cruel, nor beneficent, find oneself humbled by the sound of one’s own voice is nor the same the Azores at Faial, he’s pleased to accept islanders’ hospitality home. He believed this voyage would require two years. nor treacherous, nor wise.” thing as to hate the noise the world makes, and to regard oneself as and a tour with a young woman and her brother as interpreter. It required three years, two months, and two days to sail from But in the face of what Slocum felt like at sea, “an insect on an insect on a straw afloat is not to lose one’s wonder at the majesty of Generous well-wishers press gifts on him before he departs Horta home back to home, and after his arrival in Gibraltar, no aspect of his a straw,” it is little wonder that there came upon him, when fine a great sea. Perhaps I make too much of Slocum’s exactly described for Gibraltar four days later. His interpreter, Antonio, declares that itinerary went unmodified. In fact, he had announced in Fairhaven, weather returned, “the sense of solitude, which I could not shake epiphany following the gale-driven fog: “The acute pain of solitude he wishes to come with Slocum: “Antonio’s heart went out to one before assuring Eugene Hardy of the course laid out above, that he off. I used my voice often, at first giving some order about the af- experienced at first never returned. I had penetrated a mystery, and, John Wilson, and he was ready to sail for America by way of the would first take a tow to New York, then proceed down the east coast fairs of a ship, for I had been told that from disuse I should lose my by the way, I had sailed through a fog.” The diction unfolds its sug- two capes to meet his friend. ‘Do you know John Wilson of Boston?’ of South America, double Cape Horn east to west, and then . he’d speech . From my cabin I cried to an imaginary man at the helm. gestions: “acute pain” sharp enough to “penetrate” the “mystery” he cried. ‘I knew a John Wilson, I said, ‘but not of Boston.’ ‘He had see. For all its hindsight inevitability and rightness—that of all peo- ‘How does she head, there?’ But getting no reply, I was reminded of what lies beyond figurative blindness. Again and again Slocum’s one daughter and one son,’ said Antonio, by way of identifying his ple he would do what he did the best way he found to do it—there the more palpably of my condition. My voice sounded hollow on the attentive cadence refreshes tired phrasing; who could have guessed friend. If this reaches the right John Wilson, I am told to say that was always a wonderfully ad hoc character to his plans. empty air, and I dropped me practice.” how much life was left in such an off-hand castoff as “by the way”? ‘Antonio of Pico remembers him.’” XII SAL ILING A ONE AROUND THE WORLD INTRODUCTION XIII 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. N THE FAIR LAND OF NOVA SCOTIA, A MARITIME PROVINCE, THERE IS A Iridge 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 nat- uralized 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.