page_title: Sailing Alone Around the World
section_title: The book
hierarchical_section_title: Sailing Alone Around the World / The book
context_page_description: Sailing Alone Around the World is a sailing memoir by Joshua Slocum in 1900 about his single-handed global circumnavigation aboard the sloop Spray. Slocum was the first person to sail around the world alone. The book was an immediate success and highly influential in inspiring later travelers.
context_section_description: Slocum attracted considerable international interest by his journey, particularly once he had entered the Pacific. He was awaited at most of his ports of call, and gave lectures and lantern-slide shows to well-filled halls. His journal was first published in installments before being issued in book form in 1900. The book was lavishly illustrated.
  Slocum tells his story as a sequence of adventures, understating his own part and giving credit always to the Spray.  He invents a crew-member, a supposed pilot of Columbus' Pinta, to take credit for the safety of the vessel while he sleeps.
  The trip itinerary was as follows: Fairhaven, Boston, Gloucester, Nova Scotia, Azores, Gibraltar, (Morocco), Canary Islands, Cape Verde Islands, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, Maldonado, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Strait of Magellan, Cockburn Channel, Port Angosto, Juan Fernandez, Marquesas, Samoa, Fiji, Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania, Cooktown, Christmas Island, Keeling Cocos, Rodrigues, Mauritius, Durban, Cape Town, (Transvaal), St Helena, Ascension Island, Devil's Island, Trinidad, Grenada, Newport, Fairhaven.
  Highlights of the journey included perils of sailing blue water, such as fog, gales, danger of collision, loneliness, doldrums, navigation, fatigue, gear failure. Other perils of coastal navigation included pirates, attack by 'savages', embayment, shoals and coral reefs, stranding, and shipwreck.
  Passing by Tierra del Fuego, he was warned that he might be attacked by the indigenous Yahgan Indians in the night, so he sprinkled tacks on the deck. He was awakened in the middle of the night by yelps of pain. He was proud of resourcefully defending himself.
  He devised a system of lashing the wheel into what a later era might call a kind of mechanical autopilot. He took pride in the fact that the Spray sailed 2000 miles west across the Pacific without his once touching the helm.
caption: The Spray
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