''What if she should strike a rock?' he asked. I explained that she was all water-tight and all compartment. He looked me over carefully, and said, ''What an example of patience!'''Patience is all that is required,' I ventured to reply.'He then asked if my vessel had water-tight compartments. Stanley was a nautical man once himself, - on the Nyanza, I think, - and of course my desire was to appear in the best light before a man of his experience. That made three of us.'In Africa he met the explorer Henry Stanley:'Mr. Then the piece of bowsprit which I had sawed off at Buenos Aires, and which I had still on board, I arranged forward on the lookout, dressed as a seaman, attaching a line by which I could pull it into motion. Perhaps it was even less time than that, but it seemed a long while, for under great excitement one lives fast, and in a few seconds one may think a great deal of one's past life.'He met determined pirates in Tierra del Fuego:'I was not for letting on that I was alone, and so I stepped into the cabin, and, passing through the hold, came out at the fore-scuttle, changing my clothes as I went along. It may have been a minute that from my hold in the rigging I could see no part of the Spray's hull. She shook in every timber and reeled under the weight of the sea, but rose quickly out of it, and rode grandly over the rollers that followed.

The mountain of water submerged my vessel. I had only a moment to get all sail down and myself up on the peak halliards, out of danger, when I saw the mighty crest towering masthead-high above me. He is a captivating writer as well observant, humorous, and evocative: 'For, one day, well off the Patagonian coast, while the sloop was reaching under short sail, a tremendous wave, the culmination, it seemed, of many waves, rolled down upon her in a storm, roaring as it came. At loose ends at fifty-one, he was offered an old oyster boat which he rebuilt into the 37' Spray and in 1895 he took off from Boston for the Straits of Gibraltar. Marooned in Brazil, he built a 'canoe' in which he returned to America (see The Voyage of the Liberdade). The epitome of Yankee independence, he had risen from a seaman to the captain of his own ship. Joshua Slocum, one of the most famous of American sea captains, really was the first to single-handedly circumnavigate the world.

Book sailing alone around the world