Portal:United States Merchant Marine/Selected article/9
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Joshua Slocum (February 20, 1844 – on or shortly after 14 November 1909) was a Canadian-American seaman and adventurer, a noted writer, and the first man to sail single-handedly around the world. In 1900 he told the story of this in Sailing Alone Around the World. He disappeared in November 1909 while aboard his boat, the Spray, originally sloop-rigged, but re-rigged as a yawl in the midst of his circumnavigation, while Slocum was traversing the Strait of Magellan.
Joshua Slocum was born on 20 February 1844 in Mount Hanley Annapolis County, Nova Scotia (officially recorded as Wilmot Station), a community on the North Mountain within sight of the Bay of Fundy. The fifth of eleven children of John Slocum and Sarah Jane (Southern) Slocum, Joshua descended, on his father's side, from a Quaker who left the United States shortly after 1780 because of his opposition to the American War for Independence.
As a boy, he made several attempts to run away from home, finally succeeding, at age fourteen, by hiring on as a cabin boy and cook on a fishing schooner, but he soon returned home. In 1860, after the birth of the eleventh Slocum child and the subsequent death of his kindly mother, Joshua, then sixteen, left home for good. He and a friend signed on at Halifax as ordinary seamen on a merchant ship bound for Dublin, Ireland.
From Dublin, he crossed to Liverpool to become an ordinary seaman on the British merchant ship, Tangier (also recorded as Tanjore), bound for China. During two years as a seaman, he rounded Cape Horn twice, landed at Batavia (now Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies, and visited the Moluccas, Manila, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, and San Francisco. While at sea, he studied for the Board of Trade examination, and, at the age of eighteen, he received his certificate as a fully-qualified Second Mate. Slocum quickly rose through the ranks to become a Chief Mate on British ships transporting coal and grain between the British Isles and San Francisco.
In 1865, he settled in San Francisco, became an American citizen, and, after a period of salmon fishing and fur trading in the Oregon Territory of the northwest, he returned to the sea to pilot a schooner in the coastwise trade between San Francisco and Seattle. His first blue-water command, in 1869, was the barque Washington, which he took across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Australia, and home via Alaska.
He sailed for thirteen years out of the port of San Francisco, —— to China, Australia, the Spice Islands, and to Japan —— transporting mixed cargoes. Between 1869 and 1889, he was the master of eight vessels, the first four of which (the Washington, the Constitution, the Benjamin Aymar and the Amethyst) he commanded in the employ of others. Later, there would be four others that he himself owned, in whole or in part.
In November 1909 Slocum set sail for a winter trip to the West Indies, and was never heard from again. In July, 1910 his wife informed the newspapers that she believed he was lost at sea. In 1924 Joshua Slocum was declared legally dead.
