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shopify.com/promo. It's

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July 3rd 1895 and

0:48

another remarkable event is about to be

0:50

uncovered by Aria,

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Rebecca and Ollie. The

0:55

Retrospectors! So

0:58

it was today in history in 1895 that

1:00

Captain Joshua Slocum set sail

1:02

from Nova Scotia in a

1:04

formally dilapidated old oyster sloop

1:06

that he'd fixed up himself

1:08

for a very specific purpose,

1:10

mounting the first ever solo

1:12

circumnavigation of the world. Yeah

1:15

some sources give the departure date as the 24th

1:17

of April which was indeed the day he left

1:19

Boston to begin the adventure but from there he

1:21

had sailed up the coast to Nova Scotia which

1:23

is where he'd grown up. So this was the

1:26

morning he actually set sail out into the Atlantic

1:28

after a supper of strawberries and tea the night

1:30

before as he sort of bobbed along the coast

1:32

waiting to get started. He passed the lighthouse at

1:34

Sambro Island and from there headed into open water

1:37

and he wrote in his memoir, I watched light

1:39

after light sink a stern as I sailed into

1:41

the unbounded sea till Sambro the last of them

1:43

all was below the horizon. So

1:45

this was the first time that

1:48

anyone documented themselves going around the

1:50

world just for pleasure. This

1:52

was considered a fool's errand. Why waste your

1:54

energy, why put yourself in danger for no

1:56

particular objective other than your own pleasure you

1:58

can go yacht and around the harbour if that's what

2:00

you want to do. And he

2:03

was, I mean we'll get into this but

2:05

I get the sense being motivated emotionally by

2:07

the death of his wife, his first wife.

2:10

He was sort of on the rebound but with

2:13

a ship basically. And that ship was called The

2:15

Spray. And it's interesting a

2:17

lot of what we know about this journey

2:20

is from the memoir that you mentioned, his

2:22

own account of the voyage, Sailing Alone Around

2:24

the World. And that book is dedicated to

2:26

quote, the one who said The Spray will

2:28

come back. Which really goes to show

2:30

most people thought when he talked to them

2:32

about his plans, he was

2:35

going to die. Yeah, you

2:37

know Slocum was a quite

2:39

complex character who was

2:41

given to depression and was

2:43

said to not fare very well

2:45

on land. And as the world

2:48

in the late 19th century was

2:50

moving towards more efficient steamships, his

2:52

traditional sailing skills were becoming quite

2:54

obsolete. And with his own

2:56

life at a standstill, he was offered

2:58

this ship by a friend who said

3:01

that he had this boat that wants some repairs.

3:03

It turned out to be an old oyster dredger

3:05

from about 1800. And in 1893 he just started

3:07

to rebuild it and over the

3:11

course of 13 months he created this ship

3:14

that he said was now so sturdy

3:16

that it was fit to smash ice. Yeah,

3:18

he was 51 years old at

3:20

this point, he had spent his life at sea,

3:22

he left his home in Nova Scotia at 14

3:24

as a cabin boy, later became a merchant ship

3:27

captain and it was on a stop in Sydney

3:29

that he met his first wife Virginia, she was

3:31

the child of American immigrants actually, California Gold Rush

3:33

family. They just carried on going

3:35

till they got to Australia. She sailed with

3:37

him, she was like a proper captain's wife

3:39

character, she gave birth to all of their

3:41

children either at sea or in foreign ports.

3:44

I mean, you can't She was

3:46

the perfect woman for him. Then she

3:48

died in 1884. Two years later he

3:50

remarried Henrietta Elliott who was a classic

3:53

rebound marriage. She was 18 years

3:55

younger than him. She was also his cousin but I

3:57

don't think that's not classic. That's different. cousin

4:00

but you know but the problem was that

4:02

she was not a captain's wife character and

4:04

that's not really her fault because during their

4:06

first voyage together there was a cholera outbreak

4:09

lots of people on the boat died and

4:11

also they they were quarantined for six months

4:13

they were then attacked by pirates and shipwrecked

4:15

Slocum stood trial for murdering one of the

4:17

pirates he was acquitted then they

4:19

washed up in Brazil in a shipwreck where Slocum

4:21

had to build them a new ship from scratch

4:24

to sail them home so as you can imagine

4:26

after this she was not keen to do any

4:28

more sailing so they really yeah

4:30

they didn't really have that common interest anymore and

4:32

Slocum eventually started dedicating a lot of his passion

4:34

towards the oyster sloop spray which was literally his

4:36

baby at this point well this is it you

4:39

know it's kind of like the guy who retreats

4:41

to the shed isn't it and then slowly ends

4:43

up living there i mean

4:45

his sons from that first marriage

4:47

said many years later quote father's

4:49

days were done with the passing

4:51

of mother another one wrote

4:53

when she died father never recovered he

4:55

was like a ship with a broken

4:58

rudder and this metaphor i think is

5:00

not difficult to superimpose on what he

5:02

did with the spray right i mean

5:04

here he is in his

5:06

50s kind of broken man rebuilding

5:08

a boat from dereliction i don't think it's

5:10

too much of a stretch to

5:13

imagine that he saw himself projected in

5:15

that boat it took him 13 months

5:17

to repair the thing it cost him 553 dollars

5:20

that he did not have he wrote

5:22

that when the ship was launched she

5:24

quote sat the water like a swan

5:26

yeah the boat may have been good

5:28

but actually the stuff that he was

5:31

bringing with him was incredibly rudimentary his

5:33

chronometer was broken and he

5:35

decided that rather than paying the expense of

5:37

15 dollars he'd get himself a

5:39

tin clock for one dollar and just completed

5:42

the whole voyage with that instead and his

5:44

own seamanship and so he got this uh

5:46

journey underway he first went across to gibralta

5:48

he came across some pirates there but miraculously

5:51

managed to get away from them yeah by

5:53

crossing back don't just skip over that he

5:55

crossed the atlantic twice but because at Gibraltar

5:58

he was warned by Brits, don't go any

6:00

further into the Met because of the fear

6:02

of the pirate city who'd already counted. So

6:04

he went back the way he came and

6:07

he carried on. Yeah,

6:09

and it took him 18 days, see

6:11

before he landed anywhere, he landed in the Azores

6:13

where he was met by the American consul and

6:15

the naval officer. The people who came out to

6:17

meet him would like get, the crowds would get

6:19

bigger and bigger as this would go on. You

6:21

know, his first stop, just a couple of people.

6:23

And then he went on to Gibraltar, this time

6:25

he was kind of toasted, hosted and toasted by

6:27

American and British naval officials who indeed warned him

6:30

about the piracy in the Red Sea. And when

6:32

he left Gibraltar, he was almost immediately chased by

6:34

a pirate boat. So that's when he decided to

6:36

change course, not sail through the Suez Canal and

6:38

Eastwards, but sail Westwards around South America. And it

6:40

was another 40 days before he landed in Brazil.

6:42

And I think that's a really interesting element of

6:44

the story is that although he became famous for

6:46

navigating the world solo, his account of the weird

6:48

makes it clear that he was a very sociable

6:51

person and he really struggled with the solitude. You

6:53

know, lots of the highlights of his account are

6:55

encountering passing ships. You know, sometimes they like throw

6:57

him a bottle of wine, and

6:59

he even writes at one point, people have

7:01

hardly time nowadays to speak even on the

7:03

broad ocean. And even there's a bit where

7:05

he writes about becoming extremely unwell from eating

7:08

too many plums, basically passing out on

7:10

the deck in the middle of a storm. But

7:12

during that he has a hallucination of a friendly

7:14

sailor taking the helm for the night. In reality,

7:17

the sleep that he was in the spray,

7:19

it's been studied since. And modern

7:22

analysts have said that it was a really

7:24

well-balanced ship, meaning that it was easier for

7:26

a person to navigate solo because it could

7:28

hold its course by itself, although they have

7:30

also said that anyone apart from Slocum essentially

7:32

would have been completely screwed trying to sell

7:34

this thing around the world. But like, it's

7:36

just interesting that even when he's having these

7:38

hallucinations, he's hallucinating that there are other people with him

7:40

and talking to him and taking care of him. Not

7:42

just people, people from history. It's worth

7:44

saying the hallucination was one of Columbus's

7:46

crew who said to him

7:48

in rhyme, you did wrong, captain, to

7:50

mix cheese with plums. White cheese is

7:52

never safe unless you know whence it

7:54

comes. I mean, what a

7:57

great hallucination. Next

8:00

time I hallucinate, I want it to be about

8:02

one of Columbus's crew rhyming about cheese. Yeah,

8:07

so he sets out from Rio de

8:09

Janeiro in late November. He runs into

8:11

rough weather and in early December, he

8:13

nearly drowned when his lifeboat capsized while

8:15

he was trying to tow the spray

8:18

back out to sea. And

8:20

he then, quote, suddenly remembered that I

8:22

could not swim because this is one

8:24

of the strange things about him. He's

8:26

this amazing seafarer, but he could never

8:28

swim. And that does tie in lately. Why

8:30

would you not learn to swim? You're going to spend a

8:33

year and a half building a boat. Just spend a few

8:35

hours a day. As Rebecca said

8:37

in our sharks episode, we'd come back to the

8:39

whole question of why people for

8:41

generations didn't do any swimming. But

8:44

he was another one of them. And so, yeah, so

8:46

he carried on with the help actually of a local

8:48

who managed to tow his boat

8:50

away using a horse. He

8:53

then rounded Cape Horn in March of 1896. And

8:56

there he survived encounters with whales,

8:59

sharks, a coral reef on his

9:01

way, journeying to the Pacific, where

9:03

he went through a bunch of

9:05

islands, Samoa, Fiji and Tonga, before

9:08

arriving in Newcastle in Australia and

9:10

then ultimately making his way to

9:12

Sydney. He certainly didn't have a death

9:14

wish. He put up a very good fight against

9:16

a lot of incredibly dangerous incidents. Since he was

9:18

going around Tierra del Fuego at the bottom of

9:20

South America, he had to fire his gun quite

9:22

a lot of times to ward off walkers, including

9:24

one that was carrying any notorious outlaw known as

9:26

Black Pedro who came on board the ship. And

9:28

they had a very tense standoff. And then Slocum

9:30

did this thing where he would like dress up,

9:32

he'd like go into the cabin, dress up in

9:35

a different outfit and come out the other side

9:37

to try and give the impression that there were

9:39

a few people on board. I

9:41

just love the idea of him below deck going, go

9:44

get him boys. No, hold me back. I'm going to

9:46

go get him chief. So

9:49

after he left Australia, he sailed up the

9:51

East Coast, went through Indonesia across the Indian

9:53

Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope. So

9:55

then he makes it back to the United

9:57

States, but unfortunately by the time he gets...

10:00

there, Spain had declared

10:02

war at the entrance to

10:04

the port of Newport, there

10:06

were loads of mines and so he had

10:08

to sail really close to the shore, a

10:11

sailor recognised his boat and called out spray

10:13

ahoy. Yeah and his reception

10:15

in Newport was actually quite low key because

10:17

as you mentioned the Spanish-American war had broken

10:20

out and those headlines were taking up newspaper

10:22

attention rather than this quirky weird around the

10:24

world but his memoir with the pleasingly straightforward

10:26

title Sailing Alone Around the World was

10:29

serialised in 1899 and it published as a book the

10:32

following year and it was a big hit and between the

10:34

book revenue and the lectures that he you know he went

10:36

on to sort of the lecture circuit to talk about the

10:38

voyage he was able to make a good income. He was

10:40

able to eat as much plums and cheese as he wanted

10:45

but sadly I mean I say sadly

10:47

he was lost at sea on

10:49

the spray in 1909 bound for the headwaters of the

10:53

Orinoco River in Venezuela but I

10:55

do think slightly that is kind of how he would have

10:58

wanted to have gone I mean like I say that could

11:00

have happened at any time in this historic

11:02

journey of of the spray and

11:05

ultimately I think he would have carried on going

11:07

until he was lost at sea. Guys I think

11:09

it was a Reggie Perrin thing because we know

11:11

that he was really good at going into his

11:13

cabin in one outfit and coming out differently he

11:15

could have just started a new life in Venezuela.

11:20

Tomorrow hamburgers

11:22

hamburgers hamburgers hot onions in the

11:25

middle pickle on top. Ditch

11:28

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