Sailing Alone Around the World

Sailing Alone around the World by Joshua Slocum
Published: 1900
Narrated by: Bernard Mayes
Length: 07:25 (273 pages)

I was looking for a non-fiction adventure read after Pirate Hunters earlier in the year, and I came across this. It’s the memoir of Joshua Slocum, the first man to solo circumnavigate the globe by boat. And he’s Canadian! I didn’t pay much attention in my young school days, but I don’t remember ever hearing about him before reading this. During the entire book, I was thinking that it was amazing more people hadn’t heard of him, particularly in Canada, but then I realized that it’s very possibly just me. After a bit of Googling, it looks like there’s quite a few boats, restaurants and monuments named in his honour. Is it just boating enthusiasts or is his journey general knowledge? I’m not sure, but it was an exciting discovery for me.

Slocum grew up in Nova Scotia, left at the age of fourteen to work on a boat, and later became an American citizen. Even though I think he thought of himself more as American by the end of his life, I’m still counting him as one of ours!

Joshua Slocum was a complete badass. Not only did he circumnavigate the globe, but he rebuilt his ship, the Spray, by himself from a decrepit and abandoned oyster boat he discovered in a field. He also did this all on a limited budget. He wasn’t even able to afford a replacement for his broken chronometer watch and had to haggle down a tin clock with a broken faceplate to take with him. He didn’t need an exact timepiece because he navigated by measuring lunar distance, which was apparently already an outdated method at the time of his trip, and his tin clock worked fine for that. At one point a goat he had on board, that was gifted to him, ate his charts of the West Indies (and his straw hat) and he was forced to navigate the dangerous reefs without them until he made it to port.

One thing I found particularly shocking was a passage midway through the book where he casually dropped in the fact that he couldn’t swim. Just off the coast of Uruguay, the Spray ran aground, and he nearly drowned while trying to save the boat. How ridiculous it would be to sail halfway around the world and drown twenty feet from the shore in calm water. You’d think after a lifetime of working on the water it would come up. I mean, wear some water wings at the very least.

I sprang from the oars to my feet, and lifted the anchor above my head, threw it clear just as she was turning over. I grasped her gunwale and held on as she turned bottom up, for I suddenly remembered that I could not swim.

I was a bit surprised that he mainly wrote about events occurring in and around ports, which I guess does make sense. I was expecting long passages waxing poetic about loneliness at sea, but he was quite chipper about the trip and clearly enjoyed himself throughout. He really glossed over the hardships he endured, and when he did mention them, it was often with humour. I guess someone who is going to attempt a long dangerous trip like this (he later went missing on a similar circumnavigation) needs to be the sort of person that gets on with things and doesn’t dwell on negative thoughts and experiences.

I was listening to this on audiobook, and I’m not sure if the physical book had a map of the route at the beginning, but I found it a little jarring at first how he seemed to jump around the globe. I think this was compounded by how he wrote more about the ports than the actual sailing. One minute he was in Nova Scotia, and then he’s docking in Gibraltar, and wait now he’s in Rio de Janeiro, and now he’s visiting Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife Fanny (who sounds like a fascinating person in her own right) in Samoa, and now he’s having dinner with the South African president in Cape Town, and I was beginning to wonder if this was just a series of out-of-order anecdotes.

He also visited Gloucester on the way out, and I didn’t know there was a Gloucester in Massachusetts, so I was wondering how we managed to stop in England on the way from Boston to Nova Scotia. I eventually pieced together the route in my head, but seeing a map before starting would have really helped, especially since he had to adjust his route so dramatically. He was planning to sail through the Mediterranean, which is why he started by heading across the Atlantic to Gibraltar. There was still the lingering threat of piracy at this time, and after he was chased by a pirate ship, he decided to cross the Atlantic again and take a western route through the Strait of Magellan. That feels like such an insane detour to decide on, but it was clearly the right choice for him.

This was a bit slow in parts and the audio was a little muddy, which took some getting used to, but it’s a fascinating look at a remarkable achievement. I really enjoyed his writing, very clear with light-hearted humour, and he’d even occasionally write about the books he was reading while on the boat, which I’m always happy to see.