Sailing Alone Around the World

In 1895, a middle-aged sea captain with nothing left to prove set sail alone on a thirty-six-foot wooden sloop and became the first human being to circle the globe without crew or companion. Joshua Slocum had survived a lifetime at sea, lost his fortune, and at fifty-one should have been thinking about retirement. Instead, he pointed the Spray toward the horizon and didn't stop for three years, covering 46,000 miles through every ocean and every kind of danger the sea could muster. He fought pirates off Gibraltar, weathered raving tempests, scraped his hull over treacherous coral reefs, and traded with islanders who had never seen a white man. He ate flying fish for breakfast in the Pacific and drank with Henry Stanley in South Africa. But the real story is the one between a man and the sea, in silence, for a thousand days. This is adventure at its purest: not conquering nature, but conversing with it, alone, and surviving to tell the tale. A century and a quarter later, it remains the account of a record that still stands, and a prose style that still dazzles.