Sailing Alone Around the World - Softcover

Slocum, Joshua; Varella, Joćo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1482617722 ISBN 13: 9781482617726

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013

Synopsis

Slocum was like one of us. We always are preparing ourselves to be happy, and, such as him, carrying quality and faults.Shortly after his departure, arose before the navigator the magnificent portal of indecision, and in this moment, enters the panic zone which interprets as an attack of solitude, unprecedented terror, doubt that lasts for several days while the fog sawed into a lull in the Atlantic Ocean.Do you remember somewhat about this? Some situation like it in your own life?By last, clearly in the balance, to desist and come back with unavoidable reproving or persevere?He choosed go right ahead I don't know why. Perhaps, a bit of courage, as those who weigh too. On retribution, the Universe gave him three years of full happiness, conscious of the interaction with the Nature. Perils, pleasure of contemplation, proud of being capable, moments of tenderness, action, perseverance.Slocum is an example for all of us. Go ahead!10 illustrations were added (flying fish, USS Oregon, maps, etc) and 36 explanatory notes.

About this title

About the Author:

Joshua Slocum (1844–1909) was the first man to sail single-handedly around the world. He was a Canadian born, naturalised American seaman and adventurer, and a noted writer. In 1900 he told the story of this in Sailing Alone Around the World. He disappeared in November 1909 while aboard his boat, the Spray. In Fairhaven, Massachusetts, he rebuilt the gaff rigged sloop oyster boat named Spray. On April 24, 1895, he set sail from Boston, Massachusetts. After an extended visit to his boyhood home at Brier Island and visiting old haunts on the coast of Nova Scotia, Slocum took his departure from North America at Sambro Island Lighthouse near Halifax, Nova Scotia on July 3, 1895. Slocum navigated without a chronometer, instead relying on the traditional method of dead reckoning for longitude, which required only a cheap tin clock for approximate time, and noon-sun sights for latitude. On one long passage in the Pacific, Slocum also famously shot a lunar distance observation, decades after these observations had ceased to be commonly employed, which allowed him to check his longitude independently. However, Slocum's primary method for finding longitude was still dead reckoning; he made only one lunar observation during the entire circumnavigation. Slocum normally sailed the Spray without touching the helm. Due to the length of the sail plan relative to the hull, and the long keel, the Spray was capable of self-steering (unlike faster modern craft), and balanced stably on any course relative to the wind by adjusting or reefing the sails and by lashing the helm fast. He sailed 2,000 miles (3,200 km) west across the Pacific without once touching the helm. More than three years later, on June 27, 1898, he returned to Newport, Rhode Island, having circumnavigated the world, a distance of more than 46,000 miles (74,000 km). Slocum's return went almost unnoticed. The Spanish-American War which had begun two months earlier dominated the headlines. After the end of major hostilities, many American newspapers published articles describing Slocum's amazing adventure. In 1899 he published his account of the epic voyage in Sailing Alone Around the World, first serialized in The Century Magazine and then in several book-length editions.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

From Dennis A. Berthold’s Introduction to Sailing Alone Around the World

 

            There is nothing in sea literature like Sailing Alone Around the World, nor can there ever be again. Only one man was the first to sail around the world alone, and only one book recounts that astonishing voyage in his own words. This is that book.

            When Joshua Slocum left Boston on April 24, 1895, to sail around the world alone in the Spray, a 37-foot sloop he reconstructed himself, Mabel Wagnalls wrote in his log, The Spray will come back” (Teller, Joshua Slocum, p. 77; see For Further Reading”). Those words proved prophetic in more ways than one. Of course the Spray did come back three years later, anchoring on June 27, 1898, in Newport, Rhode Island. No one had ever circumnavigated the globe alone until Slocum did it, and not many have done so since. The Spray has also returned in the hundreds of full-sized replicas Slocum fans have built over the last century, many of them amazingly precise. Two books, Kenneth Slack’s In the Wake of the Spray (1966) and R. Bruce Roberts-Goodson’s Spray: The Ultimate Cruising Boat (1995), have documented this phenomenon, which began in 1903 and continues to the present. Between 1969 and 1995, Roberts-Goodson sold more than 5,000 sets of plans for Spray replicas of various sizes, and more than 800 of these have actually been built (Roberts-Goodson, p. viii). Hundreds of additional pleasure craft have been based on the Spray’s general lines and rig, and there are probably several thousand more inspired, to one degree or another, by Slocum’s modest sloop. Less ambitious Slocum fans can find kits in any good hobby store and build their own model at home. Right now, somewhere on the world’s oceans, someone is sailing a version of the Spray and keeping alive the remarkable story of a little boat that sailed around the world with only one crew member, the dauntless Yankee skipper Joshua Slocum.

As important as are the material reincarnations of the Spray, her voyage would be far less memorable if she had not also returned as a literary artifact, the inspiration and heroine, if you will, of one of the greatest sea narratives ever written. Like the Spray, Sailing Alone Around the World is Slocum’s original creation, and it has enjoyed a long life in many editions, reprintings, and retellings. It first appeared in serial form in Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, a popular periodical published in New York. As soon as the magazine series ended, Slocum’s tale was produced in book form, complete with the Century illustrations by Thomas Fogarty and George Varian. It sold 7,000 copies in its first year, and its original edition eventually sold more than 27,000 copies (Teller, pp. 179, 176). Since 1956 it has been widely available in paperback editions, including a dozen or so for young readers. Excerpts are frequently included in anthologies of nautical writing. It has been translated into Swedish, Polish, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Czech, and in 2003 and 2004, Japanese and Chinese. There is probably no time during its history that it has been out of print, an honor it shares with such American classics as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Portions of the book are frequently anthologized, and its durability has kept Slocum’s other extended sea narrative, Voyage of the Liberdade (1890), before the public as well. Slocum has his own author society, an active group of sailors, shipbuilders, and lovers of nautical literature who honor his boat, his book, and his remarkable feat with regattas, awards, a journal and newsletter, and various memorabilia, all available on the society’s website (see For Further Reading”).

So for all his seeming obscurity in the world of American literature, Slocum’s journey has fostered a world unto itself, a place where dedicated men and women spend years studying details of his boat; rebuilding it out of wood, fiberglass, reinforced concrete, aluminum, or steel; replicating his journey in whole or in part; and reading again and again the story of his amazing voyage.

Given such interest in the man and his boat, one would think we would know more about him today. He has been favored with a tireless biographer, Walter Magnes Teller, who assembled most of the key facts and documents in Slocum’s life and interviewed Slocum’s remaining family in the 1950s. Besides Sailing Alone, Slocum left a small published legacy of two additional accounts of voyages; a souvenir pamphlet about the Spray; a few unpublished letters to his editors, government officials, family, and friends; and scattered newspaper interviews with inquisitive journalists. Teller has collected and published most of this material, and after reading it our first impression is that we know this man as we would a traveling companion. Throughout Sailing Alone Slocum appears honest, forthright, and direct, like Henry David Thoreau in Walden (1854), a man who cared more for truth than money, love, or fame. Slocum is much more modest and unassuming than Thoreau, however. His writing style is straightforward and lucid, his nautical terminology is appropriate and precise, and he achieves a consistent humor by gently mocking himself as well as others. He admits his shortcomings as well as his accomplishments, as when he confesses to getting lost at Cape Horn, or feeling anxious about lecturing, or being so afraid of meeting pirates in the Mediterranean that he completely reverses his itinerary by sailing west around Cape Horn instead of going east through the Suez Canal. Thoreau described how he single-handedly built a cabin for only $28.12½; similarly, Slocum describes building the Spray for only $553.62. But Thoreau does not include any plans. Slocum does, along with a detailed account of how he built the boat. His diagrams of the Spray’s profile, deck plan, and rigging are reprinted in nearly every edition. They lend his narrative authenticity and credibility and reinforce the impression of Slocum’s sincerity. He presents himself as the real thing, an honest-to-goodness Yankee ship captain with a yarn to share and the salty language for telling it.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1482617722
• ISBN 13: 9781482617726
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 260
• Illustrator: Fogarty Thomas, Varian George, Varella Joćo