Sailing Alone: A Surprising History of Isolation and Survival at Sea

By Richard J. King

Viking 2024

“Sailing a boat, historically and today, is in large portion a literary endeavor,” Richard King writes at the outset of his fantastic new book Sailing Alone: A Surprising History of Isolation and Survival at Sea, “the study of human life on recreational boats, especially those of single-handers, is as much literary analysis as it is history or sociology.” 

This tendency of sailors to spin yarns, in addition to being true, also works smoothly as a pre-emptive save on King’s part, since 90% of his book centers on and springs from literary works. He could easily have written a sailor’s yarn of his own, since in 2007 he sailed across the Atlantic in his 28-foot sailboat Fox, and something of that yarn is here in the DNA of the larger book, and that makes Sailing Alone far more fascinating than it might otherwise have been. In these pages, in addition to telling some of his own adventures, he also recounts many, many adventures found in the books written by other people who’ve undertaken the fundamentally insane task of sailing alone across vast swaths of ocean. 

It’s one of the most delightful aspects of Sailing Alone: it’s an endlessly enthusiastic rambling book-chat. Naturally, the single book that looms over this one more than any other is Joshua Slocum’s 1900 ur-text for the subject, Sailing Alone Around the World, the most-read and most-imitated work of nautical literature in the English language. King has an unstintingly high opinion of both the voyage (the first single-handed sailing trip around the world) and the book it produced. “Although rarely considered as such, and for all his personal flaws, Slocum’s voyage should appear on the same shelf as accounts of the greatest individual achievements in modern human history,” he writes. “He had no support team and barely a whiff of assistance at any point, before or during his voyages, anywhere.” 

But although Slocum is profiled and then name-checked on virtually every page, Sailing Alone Around the World is far from the only great sailing and adventure work recommended and wonderfully fleshed out. Readers learn all about Francis Chicester’s Gipsy Moth Circles the World, Thor Herydahl’s Kon-Tiki, The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson, Eugenie Clark’s Lady with a Spear, and Ann Davison’s 1956 book My Ship Is So Small, which King describes as “one of the most artistic and most thoughtful, funny, and surreptitiously poetic narratives ever penned by a solo sailor after their return home.” 

Working his way through all those old yards, although those lively, perennially gripping books, plus many far less-known works, King teases out their several commonalities: stories about epiphanies at sea, dangers from weather and other mariners, literal fish stories. Many of these subjects get chapters of their own, often sharply opinionated. The chapter on sharks, for instance, is decidedly skeptical about the many horror stories sailors have brought back and immortalized on the page. “Every single-handed sailing story, it seems, needs to have some yarn about a shark, second only to at least one storm, one ecstasy-so-pure moment of sailing, one clever repair, and one near miss by a passing ship,” he writes. “If the solo mariner did not see a shark directly, they will talk about how they imagined sharks when they had to dive into the water to fix something or when they dared to indulge in a mid-ocean swim.” The subtext is clear: those mariners are mostly making this stuff up. Readers who’ve actually done some long-distance solo sailing can judge for themselves. Perhaps they can think back to a time when they had to slip into murky water in order to fix a rudder and then notice which part of their anatomy tenses up at the memory. 

All of which is not to discount the interest of King’s own adventures; his narrative voice is self-effacing, but even so, his experiences during his single-handed voyage are fascinatingly related. He might be fairly low-key on sharks, but he’s encountered many of the horror stories he finds in the books of other people, including the darker thoughts that inevitably intrude on the long quiet moments. “Over the course of my trans-Atlantic crossing alone, despite having many more technological and physical comforts than previous generations of single-handlers, I still experienced all manner of intensities, facets and feelings of loneliness, helplessness, inadequacy, and missing others, such as when I saw something beautiful and wished that I might be able to share it with someone,” he writes. “I also had a common type of loneliness regarding the regular reminder of being so minuscule in the middle of an indifferent ocean under low dark clouds, a landlessness where I might disappear and no one ashore would know how or why or even when exactly.”

Of course, the fact that Joshua Slocum hovers over the whole of Sailing Alone invites a darker inference, since Slocum is famous not only for his great book but for the fact that he sailed his Spray out of Martha’s Vineyard in 1908 and was never seen again. Luckily, King sold his boat. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News