Sailing Alone around the World

I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.

Now, it it well known that one cannot step on a tack without saying something about it.

...as the day wore on I watched the birds all flying in one direction, and said, "Land lies there.

You must then know the sea, and know that you know it, and not forget that it was made to be sailed over.

for what is a man in a storm like this?

I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895, was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston, where the Spray had been moored snugly all winter. The twelve-o’clock whistles were blowing just as the sloop shot ahead under full sail. A

I grasped her gunwale and held on as she turned bottom up, for I suddenly remembered that I could not swim.

advice from any one, for I had a right to my own opinions in matters pertaining to the sea. That the best of sailors might do worse than even I alone was borne in upon me not a league from Boston docks, where a great steamship, fully manned, officered, and piloted, lay stranded and broken. This was the Venetian. She was broken completely in two over a ledge. So in the first hour of my lone voyage I had proof that the Spray could at least do better than this full-handed steamship, for I was already farther on my voyage than she. "Take warning, Spray, and have a care," I uttered

The sea was confused and treacherous. In such a time as this the old fisherman prayed, 'Remember Lord, my ship is small and thy sea is so wide.

There are no poetry enshrined freighters on the sea now. It is a prosy life when we have no time to bid one another good morning.

I found no fault with the cook, and it was the rule of the voyage that the cook found no fault with me. There was never a ship’s crew so well agreed.

I was just saying, "Now I lay me," when I was seized by a determination to try yet once more, so that no one of the prophets of evil I had left behind me could say, "I told you so.

But where, after all, would be the poetry of the sea were there no wild waves?

I suddenly remembered that I could not swim.

The officers who are over-sure, and "know it all like a book," are the ones, I have observed, who wreck the most ships and lose the most lives.

They have great reason to love their country and to fear the white man's yoke, for once harnessed to the plow, their life would no longer be a poem.

It was the 13th of the month, and 13 is my lucky number

I knew now that I had put a world behind me, and that I was opening out another world ahead. I had passed the haunts of savages. Great piles of granite mountains of bleak and lifeless aspect were now astern ;