In which Captain Joshua Slocum circumnavigated the globe.
In 1849 a 41-foot sailboat sailed from New Bedford for San Francisco—a 13,000-mile voyage around Cape Horn, the most notorious cape in the world—and in 226 days had arrived at her destination.
In 1877 a man and his wife sailed a 20-foot decked whaleboat from New Bedford to Penzance, England, in forty-nine days. In 1878 a certain Captain Andrews and his brother sailed from Boston to England in a boat only 15 feet 6 inches long. They made the crossing in forty-five days.
Captain Joshua Slocum is famous among small-boat sailors. He made a voyage of 5,000 miles from Brazil to the United States in a 33-foot decked dory built from material salvaged from a wrecked ship. Later he sailed alone around the world in the 37-foot yawl Spray, on a voyage that occupied three years and two months. Captain Voss, a Canadian, sailed 40,000 miles in a 40-foot Alaskan war canoe which he had decked and otherwise prepared for the voyage. In 1911 Captain Thomas Fleming Day and two companions sailed the 25-foot yawl Seabird from Providence, Rhode Island, to Gibraltar in thirty-seven days including a five-day stop at the Azores. In 1912 the same Captain Day, with another party, took the 35-foot motor cruiser Detroit from Detroit, Michigan, to St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1921 Alfred Loomis and some friends sailed a 28-foot yawl from New York to Panama. Nor have I listed more than a fraction of the small boats that have crossed wide stretches of open ocean. That such voyages are not so ridiculous as many people unacquainted with the sea believe is proved by the valuable services rendered by the British motor launches during the World War. These 60- and 80-foot motor boats patrolled the rough waters of the Irish and North seas and the English Channel throughout the long submarine campaign, and America, as I have said before, in 1917 and 1918, sent shoals of submarine chasers, each but 110 feet in length, across the Atlantic to England, Ireland, France, the Mediterranean, and even to the Arctic coast of Russia, all without the loss by shipwreck of a single vessel. Yet despite all this evidence that proves the seaworthiness of small vessels and proves, too, the essential kindliness of the sea, most people ashore think of long voyages in small boats as being foolhardy and suicidal.
Of course, many such voyages have been foolhardy, and some have been suicidal. But to the person who knows the sea and who knows boats such voyages need be neither the one nor the other. A properly designed and constructed small boat well handled is not likely to founder. When carelessness or lack of information enters into either the designing, the construction, or the operation of such a boat the result may be different, although the sea, being usually in kindly mood, allows many such to pass unscathed.
THE DETROIT
This 35-foot motorboat made the voyage from Detroit, Michigan, to St. Petersburg, Russia.
A RECONSTRUCTION OF ONE OF CALIGULA’S GALLEYS