Joshua Slocum (February 20, 1844 - 1909?) was a Canadian seaman and adventurer and the first man to sail single handed around the world.

Born in Wilmot , Nova Scotia, he ran away from home at the age of twelve and earned a living as a cabin boy among the fishermen of the Bay of Fundy. At sixteen he shipped "before the mast", rising to his first command nine years later.

Slocum spent most of his life at sea. When shipwrecked on his way to Montevideo in 1887, he sold the wreckage, paid off his crew and built the Liberdale, a 35-foot junk-rigged boat, in which he and his family sailed home to Washington, DC. In 1894 he published Voyage of the Liberdale describing this adventure.

On April 24, 1895, in a rebuilt 36′ 9″ (11.2 metre) yawl-rigged fishing boat named Spray, he set sail from Boston, Massachusetts. More than three years later, he returned to Newport, Rhode Island on June 27, 1898 having circumnavigated the world, a distance of 46,000 miles (74,000 km). In 1899 he wrote his classic, Sailing Alone Around the World , a classic of travel literature, describing this voyage.

This book is a classic adventure story of the Age of Sail; Arthur Ransome said of it that "boys who do not like this book ought to be drowned at once."

In November 1909 he set sail for the Orinoco River in Spray and disappeared. It was assumed he was run down by a steamer or struck by a whale, the Spray being too sound a craft and Slocum too experienced a mariner for any other cause to be considered likely, and in 1924 he was declared legally dead.

A ferry named for him served the two Digby Neck runs between 1973 and 2004;[1] it was the ferry in the film version of Dolores Claiborne.

An autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, designed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, was named after his ship SPRAY. It became the first AUV to cross the Gulf Stream [2]

Over the years since Slocum's death a number of attempts at more or less reconstructing the Spray have been undertaken, with various degrees of success. [Will attempt a list at a later time. Too Old 02:11, 2005 Apr 21 (UTC)]

External link

• Project Gutenberg e-text of Sailing Alone Around the World
• HTML e-text of Sailing Alone Around the World with illustrations