THE ANCIENT MARINER - A Brief History of the Circumnavigators - page 293

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THE ANCIENT MARINER
To face the elements is, to be sure, no light matter when the sea is
in its grandest mood. You must then know the sea, and know that you
know it, and not forget that it was made to be sailed over. 1
If ever a man had a love affair with the ocean that man was Cap-
tain Joshua Slocum who, at the age of fifty-four, became the first man
to sail around the world single-handed. He had learned his craft in
four decades on the clippers, and had become one of the finest mar-
iners afloat. Yet he also possessed another talent, rare among nautic-
al men: he could translate experience into rugged but tender prose.
His two published works, The Voyage of the Liberdade and Sailing
Alone Around the World , are like extended love sonnets but crammed
with keen observation and fine detail about the handling of small sail-
ing craft. They are the sort of books that Coleridge's ancient mariner
might have written if the poet had left him to his own devices. Sailing
Alone is both a practical and a moving account of circumnavigation; it
is not surprising that it has become the deep-sea yachtsman's bible.
In true romantic fashion, Joshua Slocum ran away to sea at the
age of twelve. That was in 1856 when, because 'the wonderful sea
charmed me from the first', 2 he could no longer endure life on his
father's Nova Scotia farm. Over the next thirty years he worked his
way up from cabin boy to owner-master, achieving promotion to com-
mand, as he put it 'over the bows and not in through the cabin win-
dows'. 3
Slocum's career thus coincided with the last, glorious days of
commercial sail. He served on several of the magnificent tall ships
plying to China and Australia out of London and San Francisco. By