The First Person to Sail Alone Around the World
On this day · 27 June 1898
After three years and 46,000 miles, a lone sea captain ghosted into Newport harbor at 1 a.m. and into the record books.
In April 1895, a 51-year-old former merchant-ship captain named Joshua Slocum slipped his dock lines in Boston and set out to do something no one had ever done: sail entirely around the world alone. His vessel was the Spray, a weathered 36-foot 9-inch oyster sloop he had rebuilt by hand.
The route carried him through the Atlantic, the treacherous waters off South America, across the Indian Ocean, and back home again. By the time he was finished, Slocum had covered roughly 46,000 miles over three years, two months, and two days of solitary navigation, often steering by lashing the helm and trusting the Spray to hold her course.
He was the first person in recorded history to sail around the world singlehandedly.
The voyage ended at 1 a.m. on June 27, 1898, when the Spray quietly entered the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island. The homecoming drew little notice amid the Spanish-American War, but Slocum’s 1900 memoir, Sailing Alone Around the World, made his lonely circumnavigation famous and cemented his place in maritime history.
Sources & references
3 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 3 independent sources.
