First Around Alone

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But Slocum never sweated the dangers of global sea travel, which is part of the appeal of the book. Mostly he wrote about the people he met along the way. While ostensibly a solo voyager, he bumped into his share of characters-thieves in Tierra del Fuego, English colonial governors, an Argentinian who claimed a comet was coming, old sea captains, the widow of Robert Louis Stevenson, Indonesian children who studied his shark wounds. In Chile, he introduced a lucky village to donuts.

Surprisingly, for an epic solo sailor, Slocum felt that being alone was unhealthy. At one point, in Tierra del Fuego, he couldn't bear to hunt for food. 'There was sort of a swan, smaller than a Muscovy duck, which might have been brought down with a gun, but in the loneliness of life about that dreary country I found myself in no mood to make one life less, except in self-defense.'

But his epic feat turned lonely days into lecture audiences and brisk book sales. 'I had profited in many ways by the voyage,' he wrote. 'As for aging, the dial of my life was turned back ten years.'

Slocum spent the next years sailing at his leisure. He set off in 1909 to seek the Amazon's headwaters in Venezuela. But he never arrived. He and his ship disappeared off the map. The most likely cause of death: collision with a steamship, according to Victor Slocum.

It's an ending he probably would have approved of. 'He had led, not a comfortable life, perhaps, but one that demanded meaning,' said one of his chroniclers, Walter Teller. 'If Slocum lived by miracles, he didn't count on them.

FromEscape(October, 1999). Subscriptions: $18/yr. (4 issues) from Box 462255, Escondido, CA 92046.

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