Sailing Alone Around the World (1900)

This book is written in a breezy manner and with some narrative skill, but readers looking for an adventure tale about the rigours of the voyage will only get small tastes of that. As first suggested when he makes his oh-so-casual decision to undertake the voyage - there must have been more to this? - I think Mr. Slocum skims over the risks and dangers of his undertaking more than most writers would. Threats encountered are usually acknowledged and dismissed within a paragraph or two. This journey might have yielded a more gripping tale if its author had exposure to today's dramatizing.

The fact that he didn't, however, lends the story a charming humility. The bulk of the narrative is taken up with describing the people and places he encounters on his voyage around the world. Some romanticized descriptions of islands he visits - he was especially fond of Samoa - seem unlikely for being so idyllic. I read these as the pleasant memories of his stay, the way I might talk about a Carribbean vacation after I'm back at work. The rest is mostly descriptions of the course he sets. It's a fun book to follow along with a map. Beginning with his voyage up the New England coast, a good atlas will show you the harbours and islands he names along the way and you can follow his progress. Around Cape Horn especially, I found this imperative for fully understanding the route he was describing, which is otherwise a bit confusing. I appreciated it again as he set his course around Australia and across the Indian Ocean.

By the time he visits Australia he is being heralded for the bravery of his journey thus far, and roped into making presentations to a long sequence of small communities that probably leaped at the chance for any sort of event to enliven their days. His tone here is only amused rather than proud. Pride only shines through when he is speaking of the Spray's performance, a vessel he built practically from scratch. Its reliability and his lifetime of nautical know-how prove more than a match for every challenge he encounters. The fact that this is primarily the story of whom he met may be the final proof of that. It's not the story I expected, but there's still no way to beat a solo-voyage-around-the-world tale as told by the man who lived it, any way he wants to tell it. ( )

A book, more written more than one hundred years ago, yet so current. I really enjoyed this, it dwarfs most of today's "Look, what a cool guy I am!" type adventure novels. It's amazing what Slocum achieved, without any modern (or not so modern) technology. ( )

Slocum was the first person to sail around the world alone, and history's lucky that he happened to be such an amazing writer. Except for the occasional bit of Victorian racism, this reads very much like a modern chronicle. ( )

Sailing Alone Around the World is a fine read. Slocum travelled 46,000 miles in 3 years, averaging about 40 miles per day. This slow progress is reflected in the tone and pace of the book - the account definitely includes lots of rose smelling along the way. The reader should not expect scary tales of roaring seas and rogue waves. As Slocum says, his purpose is not to "pow-wow" about the dangers of the "much maligned sea". Too much delight however can translate into too much cute and in so doing become a dull and trying reading. This book does come close to this at times. From my first reading of this book 30 years ago, I could not recall much other than his encounters with the villain Black Pedro and the astounding account of Slocum scrambling up the mast as a huge Atlantic wave completely submersed his boat below. Upon rereading I find again that while pleasurable, there is not much memorable in the book. Anticipating this, I chose the annotated version to read, thinking that Slocum's mannered understatement would find a perfect counterpoint in some well researched annotations. In principle this was a good idea, but this annotated version does not present all that much useful supplementary detail (for example in one annotation, Rod Scher confirms that Slocum's assertion that "islanders are always the kindest people in the world" does seem to be true). Not all but a good part of the annotation is lame commentary or filler. Having annotations also necessitates a format that reduces the size and detail of the maps and illustrations and squeezes the primary text. If you are going to read this book, read an unannotated version. To paraphrase Joshua Slocom: 'there is a great deal of fun in it". ( )

An independent man builds himself a sailing yacht and visits places around the world. When on shore, Slocum is willing enough to enjoy the company of other humans, but during his times of plowing the waves he displays no desperate need of the the modern person to be in constant, continuous communication with everyone else on Facebook and Twitter.

The conversational diary style as well as the theme of solitude remind me of Tom Neale's An Island to Oneself.