In 1895, This Man Sailed Around the World, Alone but for a Clock

Before Amelia Earhart owned the idea of going solo and then mysteriously disappearing; Joshua Slocum sailed into Newport harbor, completing a 40,000-mile trip around the world. It was 1 a.m. on June 27, 1898, and Slocum kept his ship, the Spray, close to the rocks in order to avoid the mines placed in the harbor, precautions in the on-going Spanish-America War.

While the war occupied the front-page headlines, the harbor’s guard ship greeted Slocum with a friendly “Spray, ahoy!” After three years, two months and two days, it must’ve been a profound relief to hear his name called by a friend, as Slocum had just circumnavigated the globe all alone.

Even in 1899, when Slocum published the account of his trip in the book Sailing Alone Around the World, he was an anachronism. The world was moving onto steam ships, which Slocum reportedly despised for their noise and smoke, so he crossed the oceans in a 36-foot sailboat. His only means of navigation were the stars and a “tin clock,” which he bought for a dollar.

“He used the tin clock to belittle the contemporary trend toward reliance on technology,” according to the maritime historian, Richard Santa Coloma, noting that this was far from the most effective way to navigate, even in 1895. “This clock, at its best and brand new, just might place you in the proper ocean, or at least in a neighboring continent.”

In 2003, Santa Coloma hunted down the same model clock, and found a working, hundred-year-old model. That might seem a little obsessive, but Slocum’s story inspires obsession. More than 800 replicas of the Spray have been built, and many have followed Slocum’s route around the world. There is an International Joshua Slocum Society, an Australian Joshua Slocum Spray Society and a Joshua Slocum website (with merch!) run by Slocum’s descendents. His book has been in print for a century, and is regarded as a travel literature classic.

Reading from my vantage in 2013, it was a strange and wonderful book. As Steinbeck traveled with his dog Charlie and Tom Hanks’ character chatted with Wilson the volleyball, the Spray is the other main character alongside Slocum—or maybe she even deserves billing above Slocum. He is mostly concerned with her peril, her injuries and her beauty with new sails he gets in Sydney.

Compared to your Eat Pray and Love style-narration, Slocum’s an aloof narrator. His childhood is dispensed with in a few paragraphs, neither of his wives—one deceased, one back in Nova Scotia with his children—were mentioned by name; it’s a sailing book, through and through.

You might wonder why he would undertake such a journey, all alone. “I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895, was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston, where the Spray had been moored snugly all winter.” That’s all you get: “I had resolved,” but he tells you exactly how much the Spray cost him, 13 months of labor and $553.62.

Even if he isn’t terribly personal, and his prose is rather sparse, Slocum manages to be endearing and compelling. After being advised to avoid going through the Red Sea and around the horn of Africa due to pirates, he is chased by pirates anyway near Morocco. He is thrown from the Spray off the coast of South America when he “suddenly remembered that [he] could not swim.”

Maybe my favorite part of the book is when Slocum eats some plums and white cheese and gets food poisoning, right as a storm is bearing down on the Spray. He is lying in the bottom of the boat with cramps when he looks up to see “a tall man at the helm.” The man doffs his antiquated-looking cap toward the ailing Slocum, and assures him that he is here to help.

And a smile, the faintest in the world, but still a smile, played on his face, which seemed not unkind when he spoke. "I have come to do you no harm. I have sailed free," he said, "but was never worse than a contrabandista. I am one of Columbus's crew," he continued. "I am the pilot of the Pinta come to aid you. Lie quiet, senor captain," he added, "and I will guide your ship to-night.

The hallucination admonishes Slocum for eating white cheese without knowing where it came from, and sings while steering the Spray through the stormy night, against Slocum’s objections.

He flirts with Samoan women in the Pacific, he pours kerosene on a centipede bite, he buys crickets for company in South Africa, Pluto and Scamp, but they die because it didn’t occur to him that crickets need to eat.

Upon its completion, his journey was only back page news, but with the publication of his book, Slocum became a mild celebrity. He and the Spray went up the Erie Canal to the Pan-American Exposition where he hobnobbed with Buffalo Bill Cody and had President William McKinley sign the Spray’s logbook an hour before McKinley was assassinated.

Theodore Roosevelt was a Slocum fan, and his son, Archie Roosevelt, got to ride on the Spray in its later, ailing years. Unhappy and unsuccessful as a hop farmer on Martha’s Vineyard, Slocum told Roosevelt he was planning to go down to Venezuela, to sail into the Amazon.

In November 1909, Slocum set out in the Spray to do just that. No one knows if he made it; after he left Boston, he and the Spray were never seen or heard from again.

I briefly spoke with Slocum’s great-grandson, Ralph Slocum, who lives in Rochester, NY. He told me there was still some interest in Slocum, but that it was waning. He used the phrase “dust-bin of history,” a couple of times.

If Slocum was a curious throwback in 1898, maybe the surprising thing is how long his legend endured. He will likely always remain an icon to sailors, and there’s enough mystery in Slocum’s story for books about him to keep coming out, like Geoffrey Wolff’s The Hard Way Around, which was published in 2010, which explores the sadness of losing his first wife as a possible motive to take to the sea completely by himself.

Slocum is probably just one Oscar-baiting movie from being right back in the American pantheon of lone legends. If a bit private, he’s undeniably—a man who lost his first wife in Buenos Aires and is determined not to lose his first love--sailing--to modernity’s belching furnaces. He tells the Samoans who came to greet him in a small boat that he came all that way “to hear you ladies sing.”

Self-effacing to the end, Slocum insisted that he just tied the ship’s helm in place and let the Spray steer itself, while he read Don Quioxte below deck and ate salted cod and turtle steaks. In the epilogue Slocum allows himself to opine encouragement to any who would follow:

“To young men contemplating a voyage I would say go. The tales of rough usage are for the most part exaggerations, as also are the stories of sea danger.”

Just pick up a clock, and go.