Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
5
ON APRIL
24, 1895, Captain Joshua Slocum set out from Boston on the first solo circumnavigation of the globe,
with “the waves dancing joyously across Massachusetts Bay.” He soon put Marblehead astern and set his sails
for “Gloucester's fine harbour,” where he provisioned his little sloop, Spray, for the long voyage ahead. But first
Slocum wanted to visit his birthplace, Westport, on Brier Island, near the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. Along the
way, he anchored to handline “three cod and two haddocks, one hake, and, best of all, a small halibut.” Then
heading east, he passed the many islands of Maine's coast, one of which he dubbed “Island of Frogs,” for the
million-strong chorus of spring peepers that echoed across the water. The light of Gannet Rock welcomed him
into home waters, where he passed over the “worst-tide race in the Bay of Fundy,” which, he confessed, gave
him a “terrible thrashing.”
In this first leg of his great adventure, chronicled in the classic Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum tra-
versed nearly the entire breadth of the Gulf of Maine before entering the Bay of Fundy. We now recognize that
these two linked bodies of water form a single oceanographic unit that stretches from the dramatic dunes of
Cape Cod, along the rocky, island-studded coast of Maine, to the great expanses of mudflat and salt marsh at the
head of the Bay of Fundy, home of the highest tides in the world.
