Davy’s Reviews > The Hard Way Around: the Passages of Joshua Slocum > Status Update

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."