Sailing Alone Around The World

In 1895, Joshua Slocum set sail from Boston in an eleven-meter sloop he rebuilt with his own hands, and vanished into the loneliness of the open ocean. For three years he sailed alone through tempests and doldrums, through piracy and near-shipwreck, across 46,000 miles of churning sea. He faced the Pacific's vast emptiness and the Atlantic's wrath, surviving by wit and will in a vessel so small modern sailors would call it insane to attempt what he did. Sailing Alone Around the World is neither mere adventure yarn nor dry nautical account: it is a meditation on solitude, rendered in prose of surprising intimacy and dry humor. Slocum writes of watching dolphins by moonlight, of anchorages in forgotten islands, of the strange fellowship a man finds when the only voice for weeks is his own. Here is the last great voyage of the Age of Sail, chronicled by the one man who proved it could be done. It remains the book every dreamer of escape reaches for.