Alone

CAPTAIN JOSHUA SLOCUM (384 pp.)--Victor Slocum--Sheridan House ($5).

Nobody else wanted the old sloop; for years she had been propped up and rotting away in a meadow not far from salt water. But lean, grizzle-bearded Captain Joshua Slocum desperately wanted the 36-footer, and he got her. By the time he had put in a year's work rebuilding the Spray into a staunch, well-found craft, he was ready to put to sea. One spring day in 1895, with only Slocum aboard, the Spray sailed out of Boston harbor on what turned out to be a 46,000-mile voyage. At 51, Joshua Slocum was doing what he had wanted to do since 16; he was sailing alone around the world in a small boat.

Thirty-eight months later, Slocum sailed the Spray into the harbor at Newport, R.I., the first man to circumnavigate the earth alone. He was soon shaking hands with Teddy Roosevelt in the White House and relating his adventures in a turn-of-the-century bestseller: Sailing Alone Around the World.

Mutual Protection. Other solitary mariners have followed in Slocum's track since then,* but none ever quite matched Slocum's achievement or his natural bent for storytelling: how he was chased by Moroccan pirates, rode out a tidal wave off the Patagonian coast, spent weeks beating his way through the Strait of Magellan and fighting off marauding Tierra del Fuego Indians. One night, glassy-eyed from lack of sleep and unable to stand watch any longer, he went below for rest--after sprinkling the deck with carpet tacks that had been brought along for just such an emergency. The barefooted Fuegians came aboard at midnight. Reported the laconic Slocum: "The savages thought they 'had me,' sloop and all, but changed their minds when they stepped on deck . . ."

Homeward bound and off the mouth of the Amazon one day in 1898, Slocum sighted the battleship Oregon heading toward him. On the last lap of her dash from the Pacific to get into the Spanish-American War, the Oregon hoisted the signals "C B T" which meant "Are there any men-of-war about?" To show which kind of warships she was looking for, the Oregon broke out a Spanish flag. Joshua Slocum answered "No." He could not resist adding: "Let us keep together for mutual protection." The Oregon's only acknowledgment was to dip her flag three times to the Spray's own lowered flag, and to hurry on.

Neptune's Laws. In trying to explain how he managed his round-the-world voyage, modest Captain Slocum wrote that "above all to be taken into account were some years of schooling, where I studied with diligence Neptune's laws." In this loose-knit but appealing biography, his son, Victor Slocum, who was 77 when he died last December, retells his father's best stories, adds some new ones and explains in detail just what kind of "schooling" old Captain Slocum had.

Nova Scotia-born Joshua Slocum taught himself navigation, by hard work advanced himself to master of clipper ships. But at a time when "our proud fleet of clipper ships was an anachronism," Skipper Slocum doggedly refused to switch to steam. By the 1890s he was without a ship and facing forced retirement. He began to think of his old boyhood dream of sailing alone around the world.

Slocum stuck to sail to the end. He grew tired of being a celebrity, doted on by lecturegoers, lionized at dinner parties where the guests came in "spiketails, white throat seizings and black ties." One "day in the fall of 1909, 65-year-old Joshua Slocum set out alone in the Spray again, bound for a winter in the West Indies. Neither Slocum nor the Spray was ever heard from again.

* Two who went all the way: the late French tennis star Alain Gerbault, who made the circuit in a 33-ft. cutter in the '20s; retired Iowa Farmer Harry Pidgeon, who did it twice in a 34-ft. yawl, once in the '20s, again in the mid-'30s.

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