A child's dream of marine escape
Born into a farming family, young Joshua vanished as soon as possible to chat on the Bay of Fundy about everything that floats. After several runaways, he left the Slocombe family home (he would later only change his name to Slocum) in 1860, at the age of 16, after his mother's postpartum death with the birth of her eleventh child. He then enlisted as a deckhand on a sailboat bound for Europe.
He then joined the British Merchant Navy and settled in San Francisco where he became a US citizen and tried his hand at the fur trade and salmon fishing before obtaining his first command in cabotage. He met his wife in Australia and married her a month later before embarking her for a decade of commercial sailing, during which they had seven children, lived on board in all the seas of the world and even survived a shipwreck.
Back in the USA, the encounter with the Spray found him unsilvered and quite depressed when he returned from an abominable steam destroyer convoy between the United States and Brazil.
The great journey of the spray
After a long period of reconstruction carried out by Joshua Slocum, the Spray left the US coast on 24 April 1895 for Europe. After his transatlantic crossing, once past Gibraltar, the dangers of piracy infesting the eastern Mediterranean prevented him from crossing the Suez Canal. He is turning back towards Brazil in order to turn Cape Horn. Once in Tierra del Fuego, after breaking his boom, installing a mizzen mast and waiting 40 days, he passes through the Strait of Magellan and then cingle towards the Marquesas and Melanesia.
His stops and meetings, such as the one in Samoa with Robert Louis Stevenson's widow (who gave him the Mediterranean Nautical Instructions that belonged to his late husband, author of "Treasure Island") or later with the President of the Transvaal Republic in Cape Town (South Africa) Paul Kruger (who firmly believed that the earth was flat!), were the occasion for lucrative conferences that allowed him to finance his trip.
After many adventures, including several pirate attacks repelled with large calibre rifles or bedbugs spread on the deck at night, Joshua Slocum brought his Spray back to port on 27 June 1897 after a 46,000 mile journey, becoming the first man to complete a solo round the world voyage.
He then published "Sailing alone around the world" in which he recounted his solitary equipment.
At 65 years of age, Joshua Slocum disappeared at sea aboard Spray in November 1909 on his way to the West Indies.
Stopovers around the world of Spray
- Fairhaven (USA).
- Boston Whaler 320 Vantage
- Gloucester
- Nova Scotia
- In the Azores, for the time of a ranking you were ahead of Jean-Luc. At that moment did you think you could arrive in Les Sables-d'Olonne before lui??
- Gibraltar
- u-turn in the Mediterranean
- Canary Islands
- Cape Verde Islands
- Pernambuco
- Rio de Janeiro
- Maldonado
- Montevideo
- Buenos Aires,
- magellan Strait
- Cockburn Channel
- Port Angosto (Chile)
- Juan Fernandez
- Marquesas Islands
- Samoa Islands Samoa
- Fiji Islands
- Sydney
- Melbourne
- Tasmania
- Cooktown
- Christmas Island
- Keeling Cocos
- Rodrigues Island
- Mauritius Island
- Durban
- The capelage
- Island of St Helena
- Ascension Island
- Devil's Island
- Trinidad and Tobago
- Grenada Island
- Newport
- Fairhaven (USA).
