There has been a lot of talk of sailing at my house in the last couple of years, but so far very little action. We hope to remedy that this summer, and so to get into a suitably, or perhaps overly, ambitious mindset, I've been reading Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World, his account of the journey (24 April 1895 to 27 June 1898) that made him the first to circumnavigate the world single-handedly, by sail.
Slocum's story begins quite near here, actually, as he was born on the Annapolis Valley's North Mountain. The journey itself begins at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and from there north toward Sable Island and across the Atlantic to Gibraltar. But at this point he was warned that he should avoid the Mediterranean, which was then teeming with pirates, so he crossed back across the Atlantic to South America, through the Strait of Magellan, across the Pacific to Australia, to Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and then northward, eventually tying up at the same “cedar spile” in Fairhaven again three years later.
Although he does give several lectures along the way, in order to fund his trip, Slocum also seems to have had to do very little to publicize, and his arrival on new continents is generally preceded by newspaper reports of his progress and invitations to visit heads of state, self-appointed and otherwise. Among the people he encounters is President Kruger, of what is now South Africa, a believer in the Flat Earth theory:
Had this good but misguided fanatic been armed with a real weapon, the crew of the Spray would have died a martyr there and then. The next day, seeing him across the street, I bowed and made curves with my hands. He responded with a level, swimming movement of his hands, meaning “the world is flat.” (Chapter XVII)
And in Samoa, Slocum spends time with Robert Louis Stevenson's widow, Fanny, who gives him her husband's sailing directories for the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.
But it's Slocum's relationship with himself as crew of one, and with his ship, the Spray, that I found most entertaining. He gets a lot of pleasure out of little references to himself in his different responsibilities as “part” of the crew:
But the turtle-steak was good. I found no fault with the cook, and it was the rule of the voyage that the cook found no fault with me. There was never a ship's crew so well agreed. (Chapter IV)
That said, he also confesses fairly early on to occasionally needing someone outside the crew to talk to:
Then I turned my face eastward, and there, apparently at the very end of the bowsprit, was the smiling full moon rising out of the sea. Neptune himself coming over the bows could not have startled me more. “Good evening, sir,” I cried; “I'm glad to see you.” Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. (Chapter III)
About his trusty ship:
The Spray struggled and tossed for ten days, making only three hundred miles on her course in all that time. I didn't say anything! (Chapter V)
Many of the incidents were ludicrous. When I found myself, for instance, disentangling the sloop's mast from the branches of a tree after she had drifted three times around a small island, against my will, it seemed more than one's nerves could bear, and I had to speak about it, so I thought, or die of lockjaw, and I apostrophized the Spray as an impatient farmer might his horse or his ox. “Didn't you know,” cried I—“didn't you know that you couldn't climb a tree?” But the poor old Spray had essayed, and successfully too, nearly everything else in the Strait of Magellan, and my heart softened toward her when I thought of what she had gone through. (Chapter X)
Reading Slocum has reminded me that most of the travel literature I read is fairly recent in vintage, not more than three or four decades old in most cases, and I'd like to add some more of the ur-travelogues. Here are a few I'd like to track down:
Robert Louis Stevenson's The Amateur Emigrant (In three parts, it details the journey Stevenson made from Scotland to California to reunite with his future wife Fanny–whom Slocum later met in Samoa–once she'd determined to divorce her first husband.)
Basho's The Narrow Road to the Interior and The Narrow Road to the Deep North (These are haibun, part prose and part poetry.)
Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle
Freya Stark's accounts of her travels in the Middle East (There is an interesting article about Stark in The New Yorker's April 18th issue.)
J. Smeaton Chase's California Coast Trails and Yosemite Trails
William Morris's Icelandic Journals
Other recommendations?
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