Cold Open

It’s just before noon on April 24th, 1895, in Boston, Massachusetts.

At the harbor, 51-year-old Joshua Slocum hurls a heavy bag onto the deck of his sailboat, a 36-foot sloop named Spray.

Inside the bag are the last clothes and provisions he needs for an epic and historic trip. Joshua intends to become the first person to sail around the world single-handedly.

His preparations are interrupted by a large steamship in the harbor blasting its horn. Joshua glares at it in disgust. He despises these modern ships with their boilers and engines. For a true seaman like him, there is only one way to travel the sea: by sail.

As Joshua scowls at the steamer, he barely notices the two figures appear at the dock behind him. His wife Hettie and his 14-year-old son have come to see him off.

The atmosphere is awkward. Joshua could be gone for years. So he doesn’t know what to say.

Rather than embrace his child, Joshua simply straightens the boy’s jacket and instructs him to look after his stepmother. His farewell to Hettie is even less sentimental. There is not much affection between them, and Joshua doesn’t even kiss her goodbye before turning away and climbing into his boat.

Joshua stows his bag in the cramped cabin, finding one last space among all his other supplies. Then, with barely a look back at the shore and his family, Joshua pushes off. His boat slowly drifts away from dock... and his journey has begun.

Joshua Slocum will spend the next three years circumnavigating the globe alone. Despite his decades of experience, though, the journey will be a perilous one. Joshua doesn’t have much money, and his boat is practically an antique. But he is also stubborn and foolhardy, so none of that stops him from setting sail from Boston Harbor on April 24th, 1895.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham, and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is April 24th, 1895: The First Solo Voyage Around The World.

Act One: Two Great Loves

It’s the winter of 1891, in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, four years before Joshua Slocum sets sail from Boston Harbor.

The 47-year-old Joshua is looking out to sea when he hears footsteps behind him, then feels a giant hand slap him on the back. It’s his old friend, Captain Ebenezer Peirce, who has asked Joshua to meet him here. He has something he wants Joshua to see.

After a quick hello, Ebenezer steers Joshua to a patch of grass, where a derelict sailboat sits rotting near the shore. There are large holes in the hull, its mast is split, and Joshua can barely make out the name Spray painted on its bows. But he still instantly falls in love—and when Ebenezer tells him the boat is his, Joshua almost bursts into tears.

Ever since he was a child in Nova Scotia, Joshua has been obsessed with the sea. As a boy, he would spend hours fashioning toy boats out of scraps of wood and metal. But whenever Joshua’s father found these, he would smash them to pieces. Childish toys and dreams of seeing the world were unacceptable to Joshua’s deeply religious father. But each time he broke one of his creations, Joshua would find the pieces and painstakingly put his boats back together again.

So, it's no surprise that as soon as he was old enough, Joshua ran away from home, and began a new life at sea. He travelled the world, sometimes in the employment of others, sometimes on his own, just seeing how far he could go with the wind behind him and the stars above. During one trip, at the age of 27, Joshua traveled all the way to Australia. There, he met and fell in love with Virginia Walker, a young American woman living in Sydney. The two married within a month of meeting, then set sail on Joshua’s boat. They were soon joined by a growing family. Over the next thirteen years, Joshua and Virginia had seven children, delivered at sea or in ports all over the world.

It was the life Joshua always dreamed of. But it wasn’t to last. In 1884, Virginia fell ill and died in Buenos Aires in Argentina.

Two years later, Joshua married 24-year-old Hettie Elliott and tried to recreate the life he’d had with Virginia by setting sail on an epic voyage with his new bride. But three days out of port, their ship was caught in a hurricane, and things went downhill from there. The crew contracted cholera and were forced to quarantine for six months. Then they were attacked by pirates.

After such a run of bad luck, Hettie never wanted to set foot on a boat again. But it would take more than a little bad weather, sickness, or piracy to stop Joshua from returning to the sea. Unfortunately for him, the following year, he ran a cargo ship aground and lost both the vessel and its contents. This incident left him broke and miserably marooned on dry land.

That's what makes Ebenezer's gift today all the more meaningful. Joshua immediately sets to work repairing the rotting vessel. Over the course of the next year, he replaces almost every inch of the 37-foot sloop. He starts by making the hull watertight, before moving on to the mast and sails, setting them up in such a way that the boat can virtually sail by itself.

Of course, all these repairs cost money—money that Joshua doesn’t have. He and his wife Hettie fight constantly about the ship. But Joshua insists the cost and effort will be worth it, because he has a plan.

Sailors have been trying to sail single-handedly around the world for years. No one has succeeded so far, but newspapers still seem eager to print stories about the attempts. Joshua is convinced that he can be the man to finally complete the journey, and he believes that when he does, he will then be able to sell his story for more than enough money to support his family.

Hettie remains unconvinced. But Joshua is not to be deterred, and on April 24th, 1895, Hettie can only watch as Joshua sets off on his voyage. She knows he may not return. The sea has taken younger and stronger men than him many times before. So, if Joshua Slocum is to survive and become the first person to circumnavigate the globe alone, he will need all his years of experience, help of strangers along the way, and more than a little bit of luck.

Act Two: Sailing Alone

It’s early morning on April 13th, 1896, in a bay in the Strait of Magellan, on the southern tip of Chile.

Sitting aboard his boat, the Spray, Joshua Slocum stares at the angry-looking sky and the wind whipping across the steel-gray seas in the distance. It’s been nearly a full year since he set off on his attempt to become the first man to sail solo around the world. But he’s been stuck in this same stretch of water for weeks.

The Strait of Magellan is a route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It’s safer than traveling through the wild seas around Cape Horn, a few hundred miles further south. But the Strait is still notoriously difficult to navigate. Joshua has had to call on all his experience to pilot a path through the treacherous currents, and now, the end is in sight. He can see the Pacific. But every time he tries to break out of the Strait into the open waters of the ocean beyond, fierce storms have driven him back.

Making matters worse, Joshua’s supplies are running low. Before he set off, he’d hoped to write about his journey and sell the stories to newspapers back home. But he’s found it hard to deliver articles on time—the winds and tides don’t follow printing press schedules, and Joshua has missed so many deadlines that no newspaper will publish him anymore.

This financial setback has meant Joshua hasn’t been able to replenish his supplies as much as he’d planned. And instead of replacing damaged equipment, he’s having to make do and mend. This means he’s trying to circle the globe without a working chronometer. This precise timepiece is an essential tool of navigation, enabling a sailor to precisely calculate their position on Earth. But Joshua didn’t have the fifteen dollars he needed to fix his, so he’s using an alternate method known as “dead reckoning.” This older, more difficult technique relies on taking measurements from the sun, moon, and stars to navigate across the oceans.

But even if he did have all the right gear, none of it would help him now. Joshua knows where he is. He just wants the weather and currents to let him leave.

And as he watches the skies, Joshua feels the wind begin to shift, and his spirits lift. Soon, a strong breeze is blowing from the south-east, exactly the right direction to carry him clear through the strait and out into the Pacific.

Quickly, Joshua pulls up anchor and sets out of the bay where he’s taken shelter. With the wind at his back, the Spray cuts sharply through the waves. But ahead, at the mouth of the strait, the seas are even rougher.

Gripping the helm, Joshua urges his little boat on. The wind howls through the rigging as he spots the last outcrop of rock in the strait before the Pacific Ocean.

Freezing water whips across the deck, almost blinding Joshua, and for a moment, he worries the Spray will be dashed against the rocks. But then suddenly, he’s past, and then, though, out of the Strait of Magellan. The Spray groans beneath him as the roaring currents beyond take hold of its hull and try to drag the boat off course. But with the powerful south-easterly wind still pushing on it, and Joshua’s steady arm at the wheel, the Spray claws its way through the fast-moving waters and finally reaches the Pacific.

For the next two weeks, Joshua sails up the coast of Chile, replenishing what supplies he can. He then turns west, into the vast tracts of ocean lying between him and Australia.

The journey across the Pacific takes him months. But as he nears the Australian coastline, his physical exhaustion is matched by a new ache. Sydney, Australia, is where he met his first wife and the love of his life, Virginia, and when he reaches Sydney in mid-October 1896, Joshua is overcome by memories. He spends the next few weeks close to the shore, meeting with locals eager to hear about his journey. But by early December, it’s time to leave again, and Joshua bids a fond farewell to the city that gave him so much.

Thousands of miles and many months of sailing still lie between Joshua and his final destination. But the greatest difficulty Joshua will face won’t be stormy waters or hostile ports. Instead, it will be an unexpected and unwanted addition to his crew.

Act Three: An Uninvited Guest

It’s April 1898, off the coast of the tiny island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, a year and four months after Joshua Slocum left Sydney, Australia.

Joshua scrambles across his weather-worn sloop, the Spray. He’s traveled almost all the way around the world, but he’s never faced anything like this. A small goat is clattering across the deck in terror, evading Joshua’s desperate grabs.

This animal was a gift to Joshua from a mischievous American he met on St. Helena. The man assured him it would be as companionable as a dog. But a few minutes ago, Joshua woke from a nap to find the goat munching on his rations. Scattered all across the deck were pieces of sail, rope, and even a map of the West Indies that had already fallen victim to the goat’s ravenous appetite.

So now, Joshua chases after the goat, but it slips through his fingers at every turn. After several aborted attempts to grab the animal, Joshua finally relents. One thing he has is time. So, he decides to wait for the goat to tire.

When it finally lies down to rest, Joshua ties a bowline around the creature’s neck, giving the animal the shortest of leashes. A few days later, Joshua stops off at the British garrison on Ascension Island, a volcanic dot in the ocean, 1,300 miles off the coast of Brazil. There, Joshua restocks his supplies and gets rid of his rebellious crew member. He hands the goat over to a Scottish sailor stationed on the island and swears never to take another animal on board for the rest of the voyage.

Back on the Spray and alone again, Joshua sets a course for home.

Just two months later, early on June 27th, 1898, Joshua enters port in Rhode Island. It’s the end of a journey that no other person in history has ever completed. But there’s no crowd of well-wishers waiting. No generalist from the press. Even his family doesn’t come to greet him. It’s a sad homecoming for a man who has been away so long.

But Joshua’s achievements don’t go unnoticed. A year after his return, he publishes an account of his 46,000-mile journey that becomes an instant classic of travel literature.

But despite his newfound fame, Joshua will struggle to find happiness on dry land. So, in 1908, at the age of 64, he will hoist sails on the Spray again and set off on one final journey.

Neither Joshua nor his ship will ever be seen again.

No one knows exactly when or how Joshua Slocum died. But one thing is certain: his final resting place was at the bottom of the ocean, a fitting gravesite for a man who spent his life on the waters, and who began his most famous voyage of all on April 24th, 1895.

Outro

Next on History Daily. April 25th, 1983. Soviet leader Yuri Andropov invites an American schoolgirl to visit the Soviet Union.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Mollie Baack.

Supervising Sound Designer Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Owen Paul Nicholls.

Edited by Joel Callen.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.