The Man Who Could Not Swim

Joshua Slocum ran away to sea at fourteen, rose to captain square-rigged ships across every ocean, and in 1895, at the age of fifty-one, set out from Boston to sail alone around the world. His vessel was a rotting oyster sloop called the Spray, which he had rebuilt with his own hands for $553.62. His navigation equipment consisted of a tin clock he'd bought for a dollar because the face was smashed.

He could not swim.

The greatest solo mariner in history — 46,000 miles of open ocean, three years alone — considered learning to swim entirely pointless. He crossed the Indian Ocean without touching the helm for two thousand miles. He navigated by dead reckoning and noon-sun sights, methods other sailors had abandoned decades earlier. Passing through Tierra del Fuego, warned that indigenous people might board him in the night, he scattered carpet tacks across the deck and went to sleep. He was woken by yelps. "It is well known," he wrote later, "that one cannot step on a tack without saying something about it."

He returned to Rhode Island at one in the morning, dropped anchor in the dark. The Spanish-American War had started two months earlier and taken all the headlines.

His book became a classic. More than eight hundred replicas of the Spray have been built since.

In November 1909, Slocum sailed out of Martha's Vineyard, bound for Venezuela. The ocean he had trusted his whole life kept him.