Joshua Slocum
First person to sail alone around the world, in a rebuilt oyster boat, when steam had ended his career
Joshua Slocum was born on a farm in Nova Scotia, ran away to sea at sixteen after his mother died, and worked his way up from cook to master of large sailing ships trading across the Pacific. He married in Sydney, raised his children aboard ship, and lost his wife Virginia to illness in Buenos Aires in 1884. Within a few years he had also lost his ship, wrecked on a sandbar in Brazil, and found that steam had taken the work that sailing captains once had. In his late forties he was, in his own words, without occupation.
An old friend offered him a ship that turned out to be a derelict oyster sloop rotting in a field in Massachusetts. Slocum spent thirteen months rebuilding the Spray plank by plank, and on 24 April 1895, aged 51, sailed out of Boston alone.
He crossed the Atlantic, was turned back from the Suez route by pirates off Gibraltar, and instead fought his way through the Strait of Magellan, where he scattered carpet tacks on deck at night to deter raiders. He steered by dead reckoning with a tin clock, read in the cabin while the boat sailed itself, and once claimed to have been kept company by the pilot of Columbus's ship during a fever. He arrived home in June 1898 after 46,000 miles.
His book, Sailing Alone Around the World, made him famous. In November 1909 he set off for South America in the ageing Spray and was never seen again.