Joshua Slocum biography
Many sailors have achieved fame for certain feat theirs. Many sailors will be remembered for something they have done.
However there is one remarkable totally outstanding persona in the history of sailing and this is Joshua Slocum. He is not only the person who first circumnavigated the globe alone, all by himself, he was the first to build a bridge between the masses and sailing. Before him, sailing was reserved to men who practiced it as a job. Joshua Slocum made sailing popular by writing wonderful books, which people read with the same thrill and fascination as they did when the books first came out in the 19th century. Even though uneducated, the natural talent and the disposition he had, turned him into one of the most successful and read authors in the world. He inspired people like Joseph Conrad and many many ordinary people who had no attitude or interest in sailing. Joshua's whole life was dedicated to sea and he is frank and honest to the very last word of his books. His spirit is contagious and once you have read about his sea adventures, you will regard sailing with different eyes. All of his writing sounds absolutely relevant and up-to-date, even though they had been written more than a century ago. Perhaps it is because of his candidness and serenity, or is it the fact that he lived though everything that he explains and talks about, but many people find his books truly fascinating and impossible to put down.
He was born in Canada but ran away at the age of 12 to become a cabin boy (he did cooking at some fishermen's ship). When he was 16 years old, he made his first trip across the Atlantic ocean. His diligence and hard work on the ships made him rise in ranks. Little by little, he became one of the youngest captains in history - at the age of 25 he already was leading a big trade ship - a schooner servicing the route between San Francisco and Seattle.
Nearly all of his life passed at sea. He married wife Virginia in Sydney, and she spent all of his life and bore 7 children at sea, right beside him.
Joshua was an extremely self-confident man. For example, when "Washington", the ship steered by him, ran aground somewhere around Alaska, he built a smaller vessel and still managed to finish and bring his cargo to San Francisco. The owners of Washington gave him another ship - "Constitution" (at which his first child was born).
There was another case of bad luck - he had a wreck on his way to Montevideo in 1887, but he always managed to turn the odds in his favour - he sold the wreckage, paid fairly to the crew and built the "Liberdade", a 10-metre junk-rigged boat, with which he and his family sailed home to Washington, DC. In 1894 he published a slim volume called "The voyage of the Liberdade", where he described the journey.
Then he changed ships again - he took the 45-tonne schooner "Pato", which he used long years to travel to numerous places around the world, carrying different types of cargo to different destinations. His wife was as extraordinary as himself, she was down-to-earth, and very reliable. Not only did she bear seven children at sea, she raised them, she educated them, she even taught them music at a piano, who was nailed to the floor in the cabin. Unfortunately she died rather young, which devastated Slocum.
The first solo circumnavigation of the globe was done with a 11.3-metre sloop-rigged former fishing boat, named "Spray". He had some trouble in the Strait of Magellan, so the boat had to be re-rigged as a yawl.
On April 24, 1895, he started his historic journey, and three years later, and after 72 000 km he returned back to Newport, Rhode Island.
In 1899 he depicted the voyage in "Sailing Alone Around the World" - a book now considered a classic of travel literature. It is a wonderful adventure story, a sailing textbook and quality literature. Writer Arthur Ransome declared, "boys who do not like this book ought to be drowned at once" .
In November 1909, he set sails for Orinoco river, but never came back. His disappearance is a mystery even today. He was extremely experienced and the yacht was in good condition, so the reason is really unclear.
In the 1960s the French sailor Bernard Moitessier named his 11-metre ketch-rigged boat "Joshua" in honor of Slocum. It was this boat, in which Moitessier sailed from Tahiti to France, passing through six days and nights of deadly storms near Cape Horn. He sailed Joshua in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race around the world, making great time, only to drop out near the end and sail on to Tahiti.
An underwater glider, a type of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), designed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, was called in honour of Slocum's ship Spray. It became the first AUV to cross the Gulf Stream. Ferries named in his honour (Joshua Slocum and Spray served the two Digby Neck runs between 1973 and 2004. The Joshua Slocum was featured in the film version of Dolores Claiborne.
Over the years, a number of attempts reconstructing it has been taken with various degree of success.
The Slocum River in Dartmouth, Massachusetts was named in commemoration of this great man and brilliant sailor.
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