Sailing Alone Around the World

In 1895 Joshua Slocum set out from Boston aboard the Spray, a thirty-seven-foot sloop he had rebuilt by hand, and three years later he returned as the first person to sail alone around the world. This memoir of that voyage covers 46,000 miles of open ocean, storms off the coast of South America, encounters with pirates and curious islanders, and the long stretches of solitude that tested him. Slocum writes plainly and with dry humor, whether describing repairs at sea or coaxing his self-steering boat through the night. Published in 1900, it remains one of the great accounts of seamanship and endurance under sail. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.