40, 000 Thousand Miles in a Canoe - AND Sea Queen

In May 1901, just three years after Joshua Slocum's legendary solo voyage around the world, another professional seaman idled by the passing of the Age of Sail set off on an extraordinary ocean journey.

Captain said good-bye to his wife and children and put to sea from Victoria, British Columbia, with one other man in a converted Native American war canoe.

Voss's objective was to circle the world in a boat smaller than Slocum's Spray, and his canoe, which he named Tilikum, certainly qualified.

Although 38 feet long, it was a mere 5-1/2 feet wide and drew just 24 inches fully loaded.

When he first saw the canoe, he said, "It struck me at once that if we could make our proposed voyage we would not alone make a world's record for the smallest vessel but also the only canoe that had ever circumnavigated the globe." To prepare the dugout red-cedar canoe for an ocean voyage, Voss had built up the sides seven inches, decked it over, and added a tiny 5-by 8-foot cabin, a cockpit for steering, a small keel, and three small masts carrying four sails. He and his crew, a man named Luxton, left Victoria carrying 100 gallons of fresh water, three months' provisions, firearms, and navigation instruments.

Tilikum arrived in England on September 2, 1904 after a voyage of 40,000 miles.

Luxton abandoned the cruise in Fiji, and his replacement crew disappeared overboard at sea while standing night watch.

But Voss carried on, acquiring a profound respect for the seakeeping qualities of his cockleshell craft.

Voss related this voyage in his book The Venturesome Voyages of Captain Voss, first published in Yokohama in 1913. "The Venturesome Voyages" also included an earlier, inconsequential voyage from Vancouver to Cocos Island, off Panama, to scarch for buried treasure, and a later truncated but epic voyage from Japan in the tiny 19-foot yawl Sea Queen, during which Voss and his crew survived a typhoon at sea.

Together, "40,000 Miles in a Canoe" and "Sea Queen" established Voss as one of the great small boat voyagers of all time, ranking with Joshua Slocum.

Sailing author Weston Martyr wrote that "for myself I can only say that I have found every word of Voss's concerning ships and the sea to be pure gold. To this teaching I know I owe, at any rate, my life." For The Sailor's Classics, we will collect Voss's two great stories, leaving out "Seven Million Pounds Sterling." As with all our Sailor's Classics, the book will be introduced with a 2,500-word Jonathan Raban essay to put Voss's voyaging and writing in the context of classic stories of the sea as viewed from the decks of small sailboats.