Joshua Slocum

Joshua Slocum

Joshua A. Slocum (born February 20, 1844 in Wilmot , Nova Scotia , † November 1909 lost on the Atlantic ) was a sailor and travel writer who was the first single-handed sailor to complete a circumnavigation of the world . He was Canadian by birth , but had taken US citizenship in 1865 .

Youth and travel

As the son of a seafaring family, he was a cabin boy on the fishing boats in Fundy Bay at the age of twelve. At the age of sixteen he was hired as a seaman in the professional shipping industry and was promoted to captain of his first ship at the age of 25 . In 1870 he sailed the Bark Washington to Sydney. There he met the American Virginia Albertina Walker and married her on January 31, 1871. The marriage had four children.

The Washington was lost in the storm off Alaska when it ran aground, and Slocum took himself and the crew to safety in Kodiak in a homemade whaling boat. His reputation as a skilled sailor was cemented rather than impaired by this adventure, and Slocum was given command of several other ships. In 1884 he bought the barque Aquidneck and sailed her to Buenos Aires; there his wife Virginia died on July 25, 1884. In 1885 he married Henrietta M. Elliott. In February 1886 he went on a trip to Montevideo with his wife and young sons Garfield and Victor. At the end of 1887, the Aquidneck was lost in front of the Brazilian village of Guarakasava due to stranding on a sandbank. Slocum saved himself with his family. From the remains of the Aquidneck , he immediately built the Liberdade , a 35-foot (10.7 m) long boat with a sampan rig, with which he took himself and his family home.

The spray

The spray

In the winter of 1892 Slocum received a ship in need of repair from a friend, Captain Eben Pierce: the Spray , an old oystercatcher 11.2 m long (36 feet 9 inches) and 4.3 m wide that had struck ashore for seven years had been lying. Slocum completely rebuilt the boat at a cost of $ 553.62 for material. He invested a total of thirteen months of work in this ship. Initially, the Spray was rigged as a gaff cutter, i.e. with a gaff mainsail and a jib and outer jib as the foresail.

During the circumnavigation of the world, Slocum converted the Spray into a yawl : he shortened the mainsail boom and attached a mizzen mast with a small gaff driver sail to the stern . He also shortened the jib boom to make it easier to haul in the foresails.

The trip

On April 24, 1895, Slocum set out on his voyage from his home port of Boston , Massachusetts. In the ports of the American east coast, he first completed his equipment and sailed from Yarmouth to the Atlantic in May 1895, as he initially planned a circumnavigation in an easterly direction through the Suez Canal . He reached Gibraltar on August 4th via Horta on the Azores island of Fayal . There he was convinced that the southern Mediterranean was too dangerous for a single-handed sailor because of the piracy still prevailing there , and decided to circumnavigate the southern hemisphere in a westerly direction.

From Gibraltar he set off in a south-westerly direction, sailed past the Canary Island Fuerteventura and the Cape Verde Islands , crossed the equator and reached Pernambuco in Brazil on October 5th . After further stops in Rio de Janeiro , Montevideo and Buenos Aires , he sailed to Punta Arenas in the dreaded Magellan Strait and from there reached the Pacific at Cape Pilar on March 3, 1896. There he was driven back by the storm and was only able to leave the coast forty days later on April 13th.

Slocum reached Newcastle in Australia on October 1, 1896 via Robinson Island and Samoa . He stayed for over half a year, visited Sydney , Melbourne and Tasmania and did not continue his journey until April 16, 1897. He followed the east coast of Australia on the Great Barrier Reef , sailed through the Torres Strait , crossed the southern Indian Ocean via Christmas Island , the Cocos Islands , Rodrigues and Mauritius and reached Port Natal in South Africa on November 17, 1897 . He circled the Cape of Good Hope and after a stay in Cape Town he set out again on March 26, 1898 to cross the Atlantic in a north-westerly direction.

His course took him via St. Helena and Ascension, past Trinidad , Grenada and Dominica to Antigua, which he reached on June 1, 1898. The last stage took him directly to Newport (Rhode Island) , where he arrived on June 27, 1898. In three years and two months, Slocum had made a journey of over 46,000 miles as a sailor alone, which had taken him around the globe.

End of life

Slocum published his travel report Sailing Alone Around the World in 1899 , which quickly became a classic in travel, sea and adventure literature and has remained, not least because of its concise language with plenty of dry “Yankee humor”. Slocum did not acquire his first permanent residence until 1902 when he bought a farm on Martha's Vineyard . On November 14, 1909, at the age of 65, Joshua Slocum set out on another single-handed voyage to sail to the Orinoco , but never arrived there. It is believed that his boat was rammed by a whale or overrun by a steamer and that he was killed on this trip. In 1924 he was officially declared dead.

Works

• The Voyage of the Liberdade (1890)
• The Voyage of the Destroyer (1894) about the delivery of a warship to Brazil
• Sailing Alone Around the World (1899) free e-book with original graphics for the Gutenberg project

Alone around the world Bielefeld 1970, ISBN 3-7688-0242-6

• Sailing Alone Around the World (London - New York 1935)

Circumnavigation - all alone! FABrockhaus, Leipzig, 1937. Excellent German translation, including the nautical expressions, by Christian Sundsval

• "Sailing around the world alone" Aequator Verlag, Munich, 2014: Newly translated and for the first time in German with original graphics. ISBN 978-3-95737-000-6 ; E-book: ISBN 978-3-95737-002-0 ;

literature

• Geoffrey Wolff: The Hard Way Around. The Passages of Joshua Slocum . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2010, ISBN 978-1-4000-4342-2 .
  • Slocum. Only travel is life . Arche Literatur Verlag, Zurich / Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-7160-2655-7 . (Translated by Michael Kellner)

Web links

• Literature by and about Joshua Slocum in the catalog of the German National Library
• Joshua Slocum Society website
• Free audio book Sailing alone around the World at LibriVox
• Marko Rösseler: February 20th, 1844 - Birthday of the seaman Joshua Slocum WDR ZeitZeichen from February 20th, 2014. (Podcast)