by Stan Grayson
COURTESY THE NEW BEDFORD WHALING MUSEUM
Joshua Slocum’s SPRAY sails near Sydney, Australia, where Slocum was given much-needed new sails during his pioneering solo circumnavigation. Throughout his sailing career, Slocum experienced many fortuitous events and near misses, and came to acknowledge his good fortune as “Slocum’s luck.”
COURTESY THE NEW BEDFORD WHALING MUSEUM
Slocum circa 1883, when he was 39.
Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, probably sometime in 1866, a ship named AGRA faces a rising wind. Launched in 1862 at the redoubtable Medford, Massachusetts, yard of J.T. Foster & Co., the 174′ AGRA is still a relatively new vessel. She is of a type known as a “moderate clipper,” designed to carry more cargo at some sacrifice in speed compared to the “full” clippers, whose heyday is all but finished. Still, AGRA can move. She has turned in runs of 350 miles per day, only about 50 miles less than the fastest clipper ships. Now, as the wind gusts become stronger, Capt. Shaw tells his mate it is time to reduce sail. The crew is ordered aloft and one of them, a young seaman named Joshua Slocum, begins climbing nimbly to AGRA’s main upper topsail yard.