“I had studied the sea as perhaps few men have studied it, neglecting all else,” Slocum wrote in the fourth paragraph of Sailing Alone Around the World. Nobody knew this better than Slocum himself. He was the perfect example of the sort of man who made his own luck. Ever since he’d embarked on his first voyage before the mast aboard a lumber carrier sailing from Saint John, New Brunswick, to Dublin, Ireland, Slocum had relied upon his intelligence, physical toughness, strict sobriety, and a growing mastery of the sextant and mathematics to claw his way from the fo’c’s’le to the captain’s quarters. He was the prototypical self-reliant, self-made man. One wouldn’t think that Slocum, with his innate and highly developed skills as a seaman, boat handler, and shipmaster, ever had to count on fickle luck. Published in March 1900, the beautiful first edition of Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World sold quickly. As the years passed and the near-misses multiplied, he gave his good fortune, his angel, a name. Starting with that frightening fall aboard AGRA that should have ended his life, Slocum had always sailed with an angel upon his shoulder. But, deep down, Joshua Slocum knew that something else lay behind a portion of his success. That he’d made his remarkable voyage in what then seemed to most people to be a foolishly small boat was confirmation of his superior seamanship. One can only guess what Slocum thought about as he awaited the shutter’s click. When he did so, Slocum usually, though not always, presented his scar-free right side to the camera. Thanks to his 1895–98 solo circumnavigation in his 36′9″ sloop SPRAY and his 1900 book about the experience, Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum would become a famous man, and he was called upon at times to sit for a portrait. His fall was broken and his life saved by collision with the main yard, which he struck on his head, cutting a gash over his left eye, which is the only mark of disfigurement on his face.” He “was gathering in the sail, when a gust struck him, and pitched him off. In April 1895, some 30 years after he scampered aloft that day, Slocum told a Boston Herald reporter the shocking thing that happened to him. The crew is ordered aloft and one of them, a young seaman named Joshua Slocum, begins climbing nimbly to AGRA’s main upper topsail yard. Shaw tells his mate it is time to reduce sail. Now, as the wind gusts become stronger, Capt. She has turned in runs of 350 miles per day, only about 50 miles less than the fastest clipper ships. She is of a type known as a “moderate clipper,” designed to carry more cargo at some sacrifice in speed compared to the “full” clippers, whose heyday is all but finished. Foster & Co., the 174′ AGRA is still a relatively new vessel. Launched in 1862 at the redoubtable Medford, Massachusetts, yard of J.T. Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, probably sometime in 1866, a ship named AGRA faces a rising wind.

Slocum sailing around the world