I normally love an adventure book. This should have ticked all my boxes and it’s just dull. Technically dense in all the wrong spots.

This would have been a great book if it focuses more on the sea and sailing part instead of the land activities, meeting with island governors, natives and whatnots. The writer was clearly a great sailor and that is why I wished the seamanship part was explored more. He spent three years and two months sailing. How did he get through all those storms, gale, sleet and gigantic waves and the ever changing, redoubtable, mischievous winds?

Any recommendation of a sailing book that focuses only on the sea part?

A classic adventure story written by a very interesting man. It is well written, but since it is real life there are some points that get a bit dull. He was a remarkable guy, even apart from rebuilding a boat and sailing it around the world alone. When the introduction talked about his having to shoot a sailor on his boat during a mutiny, and his disappearance without a trace, it sounds like some of the most exciting parts of his life may not have made it in the book. It is a bit uncomfortable, though, to think of his wife at home while he was gallivanting around the world on a solo pleasure voyage. Although he does not directly say it in the text, his voyage was part of a book deal. (Despite his mocking Americans for not having a spirit of adventure when they ask him whether the voyage would pay)

He runs into some interesting people along the way, including the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson, and visits Robinson Crusoe Island.

Two of the most exciting parts of his story were being chased by pirates in the Mediterranean, and fending off natives from seizing his boat during his repeated attempts to round Cape Horn. Even though his voyage was just over a hundred years ago, in many ways it took place in a very different world.

A good travel account. Made me want to learn to sail. Slocum makes it sound like, apart from a few rough patches, the trip was actually pretty easy. I think that's generally true of most travel. People believe it's harder than it is because the rough patches make the good stories.

«Самое суровое море вовсе не страшно для хорошо подготовленного судна»

While I'm usually captivated by stories of adventuring around the world, this book didn't do much for me, at least nothing compared to Kon-Tiki which I read just a few months ago.

Enjoyed this book. I listened to it and narrator Bernard Mayes did a wonderful job but I think reading it would have been better. Less than halfway through I had to Google a map on his route. Once I had this map, the story got a lot more enjoyable. If you find the synopsis interesting, pick up this book. If you just feel middling about it, skip it. Overall, an excellent and fascinating book.

I enjoyed this travelogue that represents in some form the end of an era. Joshua Slocum published this as a book in 1900. Not only did he sail alone around the world, he was the first person to do so. He accomplished this on an abandoned oyster boat that he restored as a sloop, which was only 37 feet in length, and 14 feet wide. Not only did he sail alone in a self-restored old boat, he did so without even knowing how to swim!

Slocum navigated with just a tin clock without a chronometer. He writes directly, but full of jargon, such that a glossary is useful. He doesn't dwell on the long, uneventful passages, as he has rigged his boat to be largely self-steering, and seemed to have only one period of serious danger (though with the amount of time he mentions gales, he likely minimized his accounts of these dangers). He spent a leisurely three years on this adventure, describing ports of call, and a wide variety of people, the native Fuegians of the Magellan Strait, who pursued him hostilely; meeting the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, shortly after Stevenson died; spending a long time in the future country of Australia; and meeting Dr. Stanley in Africa; as well as angering the Prime Minister of the Transvaal, who held on to the belief that the world was flat in the 1890s, despite confronting the man who was just completing the circumnavigation as people had since the time of Magellan.

You get the sense from this travelogue that he enjoyed meeting and talking with people, but was most content being alone on a long reach across a sparkling ocean with a strong wind and a full sail.