Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
caused many raised eyebrows among the smart pleasure-boat fra-
ternity in the various harbours where she berthed. Slocum was no
yachtsman, as he freely admitted, and his ship bore all the hallmarks
of a vessel designed by a practical, no-nonsense professional sailor,
who had experienced the ocean's every whim. Seventy years later
Francis Chichester, a true yachtsman, paid this tribute to the
Spray
's
design:
Joshua Slocum's Spray in the 1890s could attain a speed of 8 or
9 knots, though her hull shape would give modern yacht-designers the
horrors. Her stem and stern were nearly up and down, so that her wa-
terline length and overall length were nearly the same. Whatever the
modern designer's views on Spray, the fact remains that she not only
made fast passages - the 1,200 miles Slocum sailed in eight days in
1897 stood as a single-handed record for seventy years . . . - but she
was also a splendid, seaworthy boat.
8
After the building of
Spray
Slocum spent more than a year in tri-
als, fitting and adjustments. On 7 May 1895 he put out of Gloucester,
Massachusetts and made a leisurely progress back up the familiar
coastline to Nova Scotia. It was on 2 July that he said goodbye to the
American mainland and put out into the Atlantic - alone.
No man knows, until the experience is embraced or thrust upon
him, how he will react to complete solitude. You can do little to pre-
pare for it. You can do nothing to stave it off. When the mind is alert
and there is plenty to occupy it you are scarcely aware of the prob-
lem. It is in moments of boredom and fatigue that it makes itself felt,
sometimes in the most bizarre ways. If Slocum had wondered how
he would respond he soon found out. Three days out he ran into fog:
. . . in the dismal fog I felt myself drifting into loneliness, an insect
on a straw in the midst of the elements . .
