Joshua Slocum: The Non-Swimmer Who Sailed the Spray Alone Around the World

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Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail single handed around the globe, never learned to swim and saw no point in it a thousand miles from land. Born into a family of 11 children near Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy, he hated the smell of leather in his father's boot shop, left for good at 16 after his mother died, and studied mathematics, lunar observations, and dead reckoning during off watches until he earned a second mate's certificate at 18. Settling in San Francisco and becoming an American citizen, he commanded his first blue water ship by 1869, married Virginia Albertina Walker in Australia in 1871, and raised a family at sea, tethering the children to the deck in rough weather. After Virginia died in Buenos Aires in 1884 he married his cousin Henrietta and took her aboard the Aquidneck.

That voyage brought a hurricane, cholera and a six month quarantine, a pirate attack in which Slocum shot a man and stood trial before acquittal, smallpox, and a wreck off Brazil in 1887. He built the 35 foot junk rigged Liberdade from the wreckage and sailed his family about 5,500 miles home. In April 1895, at 51, he left Boston alone in the Spray, a 36 foot oyster sloop he had rebuilt after it rotted seven years in a Massachusetts field, and returned to Rhode Island in June 1898 after 46,000 miles. Sailing Alone Around the World became a bestseller, but in November 1909, at 65 and low on money, he sailed for South America and was never seen again.

• He saved his wife, children, crew, and part of the cargo when the Washington was wrecked by a gale in Alaska.
• In 1893 he delivered the torpedo boat Destroyer to Brazil partly to strike at Admiral Melo, who had ordered his quarantine, and the crew burned furniture to keep her boilers lit.
• He navigated with a cheap tin clock and lunar distances instead of a marine chronometer.
• He balanced the Spray so well that she sailed 2,000 miles across the Indian Ocean without him touching the helm.
• When Theodore Roosevelt said Slocum's adventures outshone his own, Slocum replied, "That is true, Mr. President, but I see you got here first."