"Just for the Hell of It" : 327 



lowing but enlarging the lines of Day's Seabird to thirty-four feet 

 overall sixteen-foot nine-inch beam and five-foot draft. He taught 

 himself navigation and sailed around the world. When I visited 

 Pidgeon on his ship in New York I found that he was a knowledge- 

 able sailor, modest and quiet, but full of humor when he was 

 launched on a story, Pidgeon wrote an account of his circumnavi- 

 gation, but it seemed to me inarticulate compared to his conversation. 

 Perhaps his best stories did not fit within the covers of a book. 



Once before I had found myself on the deck of a small vessel that 

 had been around the world. This was the Spray, a thirty-seven-foot 

 yawl which Captain Joshua Slocum had sailed around the world in 

 three years and two months. Slocum had a right to his title of cap- 

 tain. He was a professional seaman and had actually been in com- 

 mand of a square-rigged ship. There is nothing reticent or inarticu- 

 late about his book, Around the World Alone. 



Slocum was sailing about the beginning of the present century, 

 but the record of ocean passages and small ships is as old as our 

 nation, and one might almost believe as old as history itself. It is a 

 matter of record, for example, that at the time when the Portuguese 

 had hardly begun their conquests and their establishment of colo- 

 nies in India a young Portuguese named Diogo Botelho seems to 

 have been in a hurry to get home and didn't want to wait for the 

 sailing time of the larger vessels. He took a boat seventeen feet long 

 and sailed this from India to Africa, then around Africa by way of 

 the Cape of Good Hope and so on to Lisbon. 



The American record of small-boat sailors seems to begin with a 

 Captain J. Cleveland of Salem, Massachusetts. In 1797 he took a 

 forty-three-ton cutter with a sloop rig and sailed it from Havre to 

 the Isle-de-France. He seems to have specialized in small-boat sail- 

 ing; for again he took a twenty-five-ton pilot boat and sailed it from 

 Calcutta to the Isle-de-France. Later he sailed from Canton to For- 

 mosa and from Formosa to Norfolk Sound in America. Cleveland 

 was not a "single-hander," for it seems that he usually had several 

 hands helping to make up the crew of his little vessels. It has been 

 said that he sailed a fifteen-foot cutter from the Cape of Good Hope 

 to Alaska, but this may be a mere exaggeration or legend based on 

 the reputation that his real passages had earned him. 



On the other hand there is no inherent reason why Cleveland's 

 passage in the fifteen-foot cutter from the Cape of Good Hope to 

 Alaska should be regarded either as impossible or improbable. The 

 proof of this statement is that it was about Cleveland's time that an- 



