Sailing Alone Around the World.

Notes

First edition, first printing. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author to his lecture manager on the front free endpaper, "Major J. B. Pond, yours truly Joshua Slocum, The Spray, New York, April 27th 1900", with Pond's bookplate to the front pastedown. Pond (1838-1903) was a civil war veteran and highly successful manager who also promoted Mark Twain, Henry Morton Stanley, Frederick Douglass, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Ellen Terry. An excellent association copy: Pond managed the regular lectures which provided Slocum's livelihood at this time, allowing him to promote the book and buy a small farm in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, in 1901. Pond wrote in his own work, Eccentricities of Genius, that Slocum was "able to write and describe the incidents of the entire voyage and his wonderful experiences in a manner so graphic and simple that it absolutely charms and fascinates his hearers as few ever did or ever could do" (Pond, p. 300). This superb narrative of the first single-handed circumnavigation of the globe aboard the Spray "has been compared favourably to Thoreau's Walden. Slocum perceived his world in a poetic manner and described his vision of reality with grace" (Toy).