He sailed alone around the world on a rebuilt 36-foot oyster boat, becoming history's first solo circumnavigator. Then he set sail one last time and was never seen again.
Joshua Slocum (1844–1909) was a Nova Scotian-born sea captain who had spent his life sailing the world's oceans. By his early 50s he was broke, his ship destroyed, and his career over. A friend offered him a rotting 36-foot oyster boat called the Spray. Slocum rebuilt it by hand over 13 months and decided to sail it alone around the world.
On April 24, 1895, Slocum departed Boston. He navigated largely by dead reckoning — without a chronometer — relying on noon-sun sightings and his own deep experience with the sea. The Spray was so well-balanced that it could sail for days on certain headings without Slocum touching the helm, leaving him free to read, cook, and sleep.
Slocum covered more than 46,000 miles across three years and returned to Newport, Rhode Island on June 27, 1898 — the first person in history to have sailed around the world alone. He arrived to find his achievement largely ignored because the Spanish-American War had consumed the public's attention that summer.
He wrote a book about the voyage, *Sailing Alone Around the World* (1899), which became an international bestseller and is still considered one of the greatest sailing narratives ever written. He met President Theodore Roosevelt, who told him: 'Captain, our adventures have been a little different.'
Slocum never learned to swim — he considered it pointless for ocean sailors who would simply die of hypothermia or exhaustion anyway. On November 14, 1909, he sailed the aging Spray out of Martha's Vineyard, bound for South American rivers. He was never heard from again. His wife had him declared legally dead in 1924.