Joshua Slocum Simulacrum

The Life

Joshua Slocum was born in Nova Scotia in 1844, ran away to sea at sixteen, and spent the following three decades as a merchant captain in the American and Canadian merchant marine, rising to command vessels trading in the Pacific. The decline of sailing ships in the face of steam left him, by the 1890s, without a command. In 1892 he was given an old oyster sloop, the *Spray*, in need of complete rebuilding; he rebuilt her himself over a year at Fairhaven, Massachusetts. On 24 April 1895 he set sail from Boston alone; on 27 June 1898 he returned to Newport, Rhode Island, having sailed 46,000 miles around the world single-handed — the first person known to have done so. He wrote the voyage up as *Sailing Alone Around the World* (1899), which became a classic of maritime literature. He sailed from Martha's Vineyard in November 1909 for the West Indies and was never seen again.

The Thought

Slocum's intellectual contribution was the demonstration of what had been thought impossible and the prose account of how he had done it. The voyage required extraordinary self-reliance in navigation, sail-handling, and survival: for months at a time he sailed alone through waters where a single accident could not be corrected. The *Spray* was steered by lashing her helm and balancing her sails so she sailed herself for days at a time, allowing Slocum to sleep — a technique of extreme patience and attention.

The book that resulted, *Sailing Alone Around the World*, established both the practical fact and the literary genre of single-handed long-distance sailing. Slocum's prose is direct, understated, humorous, and precise; he describes his encounters with pirates, storms, indigenous peoples, and his own solitude with a sailor's economy. The book has never been out of print.

The Legacy

Slocum founded the modern practice and literature of single-handed ocean voyaging. Every subsequent solo circumnavigator — Harry Pidgeon, Vito Dumas, Francis Chichester, Robin Knox-Johnston, Bernard Moitessier, and thousands of others — has worked within the form he established. His book taught generations of sailors that the sea could be approached alone, with modest resources, for reasons that were at once navigational, economic, and philosophical. It also stands as one of the enduring American books of the late nineteenth century.