Slocum inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame

By Tom Mason

In a province that has spawned more than its share of great sailors, Joshua Slocum’s name has a special ring. The Nova Scotia native who became a naturalized American citizen was the first person in history to circumnavigate the world alone. He accomplished the feat in an age before self steering gear, radios and electronic navigation in a 37-foot wooden sloop called Spray that he rebuilt himself from a rotten derelict in a Massachusetts field. Slocum later authored a best-selling book about his feat and became one of the most celebrated adventurers in the world in the first decade of the 20th century. Now the newly established Sailing Hall of Fame in Annapolis Maryland has recognized the accomplishments of this great sailor and sea captain by making him part of their first group of inductees.

“I don’t think there is a sailor today who doesn’t know who Joshua Slocum was,” says Lee Tawney, the executive director of the National Sailing Hall of Fame. “He was even more famous in his own day.”

Slocum was born in 1844, just four years after steamships started sailing regularly across the Atlantic, in a tiny community called Hanley tucked into Nova Scotia’s North Mountain. He died 65 years later on the cusp of a new age, when sails were replaced by steam turbines and the craft of sailing was relegated to the realm of sport. He was a pioneer of that new sport, and also of a new genre of nonfiction – the solo adventurer book.

In the Sailing Hall of Fame, Slocum takes his place alongside a few contemporaries and a number of more modern pioneers, like media mogul and ocean racer extraordinaire Ted Turner, famed catamaran designer Hobie Alter and America’s cup champion Dennis Conner – 15 inductees in all. The group was selected from 180 sailors, technicians and contributors to the sport who were nominated by the sailing community at large.

Slocum was a remarkable man for a number of reasons. Not only was he an intrepid sailor and a skilled boatbuilder who built and sailed the tiny Spray around the world, he was also a brilliant writer. His 1899 book Sailing Alone Around the World was a page turner, and still rings today with his observations, dry humour and understated tales of adventure. There is a matter-of-factness about his accounts, as if the voyage was just a casual vacation jaunt. He chronicles the minutiae of day to day life at sea: a fight between two spiders; collecting fruit on remote Juan Fernandez Island with a group of Spanish children; the loneliness of star specked Pacific sky and the intricacies of celestial navigation. But it’s also a book laced with adventure. Slocum changes course 180 degrees and heads back across the Atlantic when he’s chased off North Africa by a boat he presumes to be filled with pirates. In the Straits of Magellan he sprinkles his deck with carpet tacks, a ruse that saves him one night from a group of barefoot marauders who have quietly boarded the Spray.

It’s a metaphysical journey as well. Slocum hears lonely voices in the mid-Atlantic fog hailing his boat by name; and during a bout of food-poisoned delirium he sees the ghost of one of Columbus’ crew piloting his boat through the choppy waters of the Azores. Through it all he explores the depths of his own solitary psyche in a way that has become a staple of sailing adventure books.

In his own day “Sailing Alone Around the World” was a best seller and it made the humble seafarer financially comfortable in his later years. It also made him a celebrity and a friend to president Theodore Roosevelt and others – something he wasn’t entirely prepared to deal with. He continued his solo voyages on Spray, journeying every fall from his home on Martha’s Vineyard to winter in the Caribbean. It was on one of these voyages in November 1909 that Slocum’s improbable luck ran out. He was too good a sailor, say some of his supporters, and must have been run down by a ship or collided with a whale in the dead of night. One naval architect who studied the design years later aid the Spray had a fatal flaw and was prone to capsize at a certain angle of heel – something that probably should have happened years earlier. But perhaps Slocum just used up all of his lives and fell from the mast top or lost his helm in a November hurricane. He never learned to swim, saying the skill wouldn’t be of any use anyway to a sailor lost at sea.

Lee Tawney says the Sailing Hall of Fame will help to keep the accomplishments of this remarkable sailor alive. It’s also a vital step in boosting the profile of the sport of sailing – a profile that has waned somewhat in America in recent years. “Sailing was the only major sport in North America that didn’t have its own hall of fame,” he says. “Baseball, football, basketball, tennis – they all have one. You hear commentators in other sports talking about ‘future hall-of-famers’ all the time, and we felt that that was something that sailing needed as well. It’s an important way to celebrate our heroes and to encourage young people to get involved in the sport.”

The Hall’s permanent home is still on the drawing board – a modern building that will be completed in a few years. But don’t expect to see Slocum and other inductees on a row of brass plaques when the doors open. Tawney envisions a more interactive display honouring each hall-of-famer – detailed touch screens crafted from Corning smart glass technology that would include photographs, historic recreations and Google Earth displays of the voyages of Slocum and other circumnavigators. “He was such a character,” Tawney says. “You can see it in the photograph we use of him, the one where he’s wearing the big straw hat. We want to show visitors to the Hall of Fame just what kind of man Joshua was. We want him to be a real inspiration to the young people who visit with us.”