photo above of the Spray, is in the public domain
disclaimer: I don’t know a damn thing about sailing, especially the sort of long distance sailing as recounted by Joshua Slocum (ne Slocombe) in Sailing Alone Around the World. When I say not a damn thing I mean to convey that I have access to a rotting 17 foot sailing vessel that I take out about once a year and manage, somehow, to sail it around for a couple of hours without killing myself or others – although I have been known to come back to the dock a bit wet. A small bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, and thus begins my fascination with the book Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum. Published in 1899, it quickly became an international best seller, as I think it well should be. It details the first solo circumnavigation of the globe, at least in the modern era.
This is a good book by a someone who is a better sailor than he is a writer. This is not a knock on the man’s abilities, as an excellent sailor and an earnest writer he has managed to pull off both much better than I expect I ever will. As interesting to me as the tales of what used to be exotic, far away places (but are now well recognized fodder for travel channel “1-hour specials”), is the affectation and presumably false modesty that seems to have been the fashion of the time in the late 19th century. Slocum spends much time re-spinning tales of places and storms where other boats have met their doom, and somehow in his retelling of traversing the same storms and treacheries it is the Spray (the boat’s name) that seems to magically keep the author safe. Obviously, it’s the other way around. However, this “little boat that could” type miniature epic does have it’s charm. No doubt the audience at the time, to whom the yarn was pitched, were even more enthralled. This is easily established by the accolades heaped on Slocum: meetings with the US President, having the boat hauled up the Erie Canal to the Pan-American Exposition, being invited to speak at dinner in honor of Mark Twain.
In parsing through the work, though, I cannot help long for a little more intimate vivisection of the man. Not prone to introspection, we see the surface of the eggshell but get nothing of the internal workings. Pity, anyone who forsakes society for years, months spent largely in solitude sailing (in places so remote that they were nearly off the map), has almost certainly got to have some interesting machinations churning in his psyche.
About 10 years after the original serialized publication of Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum set out to sail for the West Indies with the intent of wintering there, and then on to explore some of the great South American rivers. He was never heard from again.