Sailing Alone Around the World
1900
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.
Editions
X-Ray
“I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.””
— Joshua Slocum
“Now, it it well known that one cannot step on a tack without saying something about it.””
— Joshua Slocum
“...as the day wore on I watched the birds all flying in one direction, and said, "Land lies there.””
— Joshua Slocum
“You must then know the sea, and know that you know it, and not forget that it was made to be sailed over.””
— Joshua Slocum
“for what is a man in a storm like this?””
— Joshua Slocum
“I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895, was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston, where the Spray had been moored snugly all winter. The twelve-o’clock whistles were blowing just as the sloop shot ahead under full sail. A””
— Joshua Slocum
“I grasped her gunwale and held on as she turned bottom up, for I suddenly remembered that I could not swim.””
— Joshua Slocum
“advice from any one, for I had a right to my own opinions in matters pertaining to the sea. That the best of sailors might do worse than even I alone was borne in upon me not a league from Boston docks, where a great steamship, fully manned, officered, and piloted, lay stranded and broken. This was the Venetian. She was broken completely in two over a ledge. So in the first hour of my lone voyage I had proof that the Spray could at least do better than this full-handed steamship, for I was already farther on my voyage than she. "Take warning, Spray, and have a care," I uttered””
— Joshua Slocum
“The sea was confused and treacherous. In such a time as this the old fisherman prayed, 'Remember Lord, my ship is small and thy sea is so wide.””
— Joshua Slocum
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Slocum, Joshua. Sailing Alone Around the World. Lex, lex-books.com/book/sailing-alone-around-the-world-c7dcaeba-8886-4d99-9b5b-b8df85139415.Slocum, J. (1900). Sailing Alone Around the World. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/sailing-alone-around-the-world-c7dcaeba-8886-4d99-9b5b-b8df85139415Slocum, Joshua. Sailing Alone Around the World. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/sailing-alone-around-the-world-c7dcaeba-8886-4d99-9b5b-b8df85139415.
