Status Updates From The Hard Way Around: the Pa...

This was a riveting read of a boy, reared in incredible hardship, who rises to the highest levels in sailing frigates. But what is far more interesting than this "boy makes good" is what he does as the days of sail come to an end with the rise of coal powered steamships. This is the story of a free spirit with incredible skill and determination. I actually envy him. What a life!

If you enjoy sailing and you’ve read about Joshua Slocum, you may enjoy this book. It wasn’t for me and I couldn’t finish. I liked the stories in between the descriptions of each of Slocum’s adventures and some of the excerpts from other books, but the book didn’t flow very well for me. Slocum is an interesting “character” and I enjoyed learning about him but this was a bit difficult for me to read.

It is well known that one cannot step on a tack without saying something about it.

As the Liberdade neared Barbados, pushed by the trade winds, flying fish launched themselves onto the Slocums' deck, so eager were they to be fried in butter for breakfast.

Fleas skipped about in the hay as happy as larks, and nearly as big.

"A favorite prank, designed to victimize greenhorn equator crossers, was to lay a hair across the lens of the telescope--horizontal to the horizon--and offer a prize to the first lookout who discovered The Line appearing out of the distance."

One might wish that a sea captain--intimately in contact with such polyglot fellow hostages aboard ship as Scandinavians, Irish, Chinese, Russians, Indians, and Pacific Islanders--would be educated in the futility of extrapolation, but one might wish many things."

"...the awful story of a shipmaster receiving news that one of his children had died, but his correspondent had neglected to tell him which one."

"A gaudy figurehead would surely invite disdain."

"Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company."