Sailing Alone around the World

Captain Joshua Slocum, born in Nova Scotia in 1844 and who later became an American citizen, had been lured by the sea his entire life. At 14 he ran away to work as a cook on a fishing schooner and two years later when his mother died he left home for good, enlisting as an ordinary seaman on a British merchant ship bound for Ireland. Then from Britain he shipped again sailing for China, the Philippines, and Singapore, and by 18 he had been awarded the certificate of second mate.

Around 1870 he was given command of a merchant ship that he sailed out of San Francisco to Japan, China, the Spice Islands, and Sydney Australia, where he met an American woman, Virginia Albertina Walker, who he married. The two were well matched for ship life and together for the next 13 years sailed the world, with Virginia giving birth to and schooling their seven children (only four survived) on the various ships that Slocum commanded. 

But this ideal marriage to the sea and a wife did not last and Virginia took ill and died. Two years later Slocum married his cousin Henrietta aka Hetty and with a crew of 10, including two of Slocum's sons, the newlyweds set out for South America. The voyage was conflicted with problems -- a cholera outbreak, a smallpox epidemic, and a mutinous crew before finally running aground near Paranagua, Brazil. Stranded, Slocum salvaged what he could from the wreck and constructed the Liberdade, a 35-foot long "canoe" that he sailed for 5,500 miles home, the adventure that he later published in his Voyages of the Liberdade, 1890. Hetty was completely disenchanted with ship life, and on their honeymoon voyage at that, and the forever-after land-loving Hetty and old sea-wolf Slocum stayed married but pretty much only in name.

With the advent of steamships, sailing the seas became steaming the seas, yet old-school Slocum refused to adjust. In 1892 Slocum was offered the rotting shell of a 37-foot long oyster boat, the Spray, which Slocum rebuilt from the keel up. And with this oyster boat Slocum determined to circumnavigate the earth alone, a feat emphatically expressed as impossible.

Many books by Joshua Slocum titled Sailing Alone around the World. I read the Barnes and Noble 2005 edition. It came with a timeline of Slocum's life juxtaposed with world events affecting him (e.g. the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 affecting his solitary return) and a glossary of sea terms.

In April 1895 Slocum sets sail aboard the Spray. He had almost no money and lacked critical navigational equipment. The last leg of his journey he even lacked a map as the goat that had kindly been given him as a companion chewed through his ropes, equipment and seemed to have a palette partial for maps. On June 27 Slocum sails into Newport, Rhode Island, completing the world's first solo circumnavigation, a passage of 46,000 miles. 

To earn money for his journey, along the way at various ports he would entertain people in halls and informal places with his stories, charging them a small fee. At some of these ports he would stay but a few days or even hours while at others he would stay for extended periods of time, like at the southern tip of Africa where he was given a free rail pass and just wandered, enjoying the sites, for three months. On his return to the States, he achieved great fame and his adventures printed first as a serial and later as a book, Sailing Alone around the World, were well received. With the proceeds he was able to purchase a house on the Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. 

Yet, the sea still called and restless Slocum sailed off to the Caribbean for the winter of 1905, returning with rare Caribbean orchids for President Theodore Roosevelt. On November 14, 1909, the aging Slocum in the aging Spray set sail for South America, and the story of him and his Spray, which to this day is one of the most replicated boats due to its reliable and well-balanced construction, disappeared. 

Sailing Alone around the World (Barnes and Nobles 2005), p 230-231

Amitav Ghoush: The Hungry Tide

The story unfolds in an immense archipelago of islands, the Sundarbans, between the sea and the plains of Bengal on the easternmost coast of India. Without clear borders to divide salt and fresh waters and with islands criss-crossed with man-eating tigers and huge crocodiles, in decades past a visionary Scotsman founded a utopian settlement where people of all races, classes and religions could live together. However, with the arrival of the good-intentioned Piyali Roy of Indian descent but still stubbornly American, and her scholarly pursuit of the rare river dolphins, the ecobalance of quiet community begins to fragment.

As as cetologist seeking the rare and elusive river dolphins, Piya hires Fokir, an illiterate peasant man, to guide her through the backwaters to map out the dolphin's territory, while Kanai, an older businessman with some infatuation with Piya's youth and drive becomes her translator and mentor of sorts, and so the tides of life begin to turn.

The women in the fishing village where Piya ended up were unusual in that during the day they were devoid of marital reds. Because fishing took the lives of many men, women in their twenties and more fortunately in their thirties would become widows, and so as soon as their men left to go fishing (what other livelihood could there be in this remote island region?), the women changed to saris of white mourning, removed the bangles from their wrists and washed the vermilion from their hair as if to ward off the evil eye and hold misfortune at bay. Shedding the symbols of marriage would have been unthinkable in other parts of India, but here it was done with hopes of preventing bad luck.

It was the freshwater Gangetic dolphins, discovered by William Roxburgh, that were said to explicitly delight in the freshwaters of the Ganges and cavort in the labyrinth of rivers and creeks in the South and Southeast of Calcutta that drew Piya to the backwaters. Once in contact with Fokir who knew the tide waters intimately and had an immediate connection to Piya, she was taken to see the rare elusive dolphins. Orcaella were of two kinds: one liked the salt waters of the coast while the other preferred the rivers and fresh water. There seemed to be no biological difference but rather a choice based on habitat selection, and while the numbers of salt-water preferring dolphins were in the thousands, those preferring the fresh waters were in the mere hundreds and were a fast dwindling breed.

Before coming to these tide waters, Piya had already spent three years working as an Orcaella specialist. She had worked everywhere the Irrawaddy dolphins were found - Burma, northern Australia, the Philippines, coastal Thailand, everywhere in fact except where the first entered the record-book of zoological reckoning: India. Now she was here.

Piya learns more about herself and her choice in studying cetology as she encounters the strangely remote island world of ebbing salt waters. Born in July, her zodiac sign is the crab and she had always wondered why, of all the many interesting animals in the world, a society would choose to honor a crab every twelve years, but in the coastal labyrinth of islands she begins to understand. Crabs are launderers of the mud, scrubbing it grain by grain. Their feet and sides are lined with hairs forming microscopic brushes and spoons. They are a sanitation department and a janitorial team rolled into one - they keep the mangroves alive by removing leaves and litter, and without them the mangroves would choke in their own debris. In fact, they comprise a fantastically large portion of the coastal waters biomass. They likely outweigh the trees and the leaves. They are keystone builders and caretakers of the biomass and should therefore have more recognition than crocodiles, tigers and dolphins who seem to get by far the largest portion of research attention. Ah, and if Fokir hadn't been in pursuit of crabs, she wouldn't even be aware of the vicinity of the dolphins. Maybe the ancients had gotten it right after all - perhaps it was the crabs that rule the tide of her destiny.

Ah, but tigers played a big role to in the balance of the ecosystem. The Sundarbans were remote and official research was sketchy but the wife of the Scotsman who had initially established the utopia had been keeping records for years on tiger killings and it was her guess that among the network of islands, one person a day was killed by tigers. Though the number was shocking, the woman referenced 4,218 humans killed by tigers in lower Bengal between 1860 and 1866. The number was compiled by J. Fayrer, the English naturalist who coined the phrase "Royal Bengal Tiger".

The story ends with the death of Fokir, the mourning of Piya, her departure and finally her return "home", the surprising term she used for the Indian backwaters where she had so recently been emotionally traumatized in. But in her defense, she says she came "home" because to her home was where the dolphins were. The tides had gone out, and yet there should be no surprise that they have returned.