My best command was that of the magnificent ship _Northern Light_, of
which I was part-owner. I had a right to be proud of her, for at that
time--in the eighties--she was the finest American sailing-vessel
afloat. Afterward I owned and sailed the _Aquidneck_, a little bark
which of all man's handiwork seemed to me the nearest to perfection of
beauty, and which in speed, when the wind blew, asked no favors of
steamers, I had been nearly twenty years a shipmaster when I quit her
deck on the coast of Brazil, where she was wrecked. My home voyage to
New York with my family was made in the canoe _Liberdade_, without
accident.

[Illustration: Drawn by W. Taber. The _Northern Light_, Captain Joshua
Slocum, bound for Liverpool, 1885.]

My voyages were all foreign. I sailed as freighter and trader
principally to China, Australia, and Japan, and among the Spice
Islands. Mine was not the sort of life to make one long to coil up
one's ropes on land, the customs and ways of which I had finally
almost forgotten. And so when times for freighters got bad, as at last
they did, and I tried to quit the sea, what was there for an old
sailor to do? I was born in the breezes, and I had studied the sea as
perhaps few men have studied it, neglecting all else. Next in
attractiveness, after seafaring, came ship-building. I longed to be
master in both professions, and in a small way, in time, I
accomplished my desire. From the decks of stout ships in the worst
gales I had made calculations as to the size and sort of ship safest
for all weather and all seas. Thus the voyage which I am now to
narrate was a natural outcome not only of my love of adventure, but of
my lifelong experience.