BOOK · 1900
Sailing Alone Around the World
The first solo circumnavigation, told dry as bone and twice as honest.
The book that taught small-boat sailors that you don't need a budget - you need a plan, a tin of nails, and a way of looking at the world that refuses to be hurried.
Slocum left Boston in April 1895 aboard Spray, a 36-foot-9 sloop he rebuilt himself from a rotting oyster boat, and closed the loop at Newport three years and some 46,000 miles later - the first person to sail around the world alone. Serialized in The Century Magazine, published as a book in 1900, and never once out of print since.
His voice is the model for everything written about sailing after it: matter-of-fact about miracles, suspicious of his own bravery, generous to strangers, hard on rope. In 1909 he and Spray put to sea and were never seen again - somehow the only ending that fits.
Read it before you leave the dock. Then read it again at sea, or take the Bernard Mayes narration on watch with you.