SPRAY: The Joshua Slocum Story

In 1895, a fifty-one-year-old sea captain with no crew, no funding, and a boat he rebuilt from a rotting oyster hull sailed out of Boston Harbor to do something no human being had ever done: circle the globe alone.Joshua Slocum had already lost everything once - his ship wrecked off the coast of Brazil, his wife dead at sea, his career as a merchant captain gone the way of the sailing ships themselves. What he had left was a half-derelict sloop named the Spray, a lifetime of hard-won seamanship, and nothing left to prove to anyone but himself.Spray follows Slocum from a boyhood on the wind-scoured cliffs of Nova Scotia, through the wrecks and reversals that should have ended his life at sea for good, to the three-year, forty-six-thousand-mile voyage that made him a legend - a solitary crossing of the Strait of Magellan, a fever-dream night off the Azores that still puzzles historians, a pilgrimage to the island that inspired Robinson Crusoe, and a homecoming into a world that could scarcely believe what he'd done.Drawn from Slocum's own writings, the recollections of his family, and years of research into the man behind the legend, this is a novel that puts you on the deck beside him - through the storms, the silence, and the sheer, stubborn will of a man who refused to let the sea have the last word.A story of solitude, survival, and the kind of courage that doesn't announce itself. If you've ever wondered what a person is capable of when they have nothing left to lose and everything left to prove, Spray is that story.