Voyage of the Liberdade

I have read this book, by Captain Slocum, author of the excellent Sailing Alone Around the World, published in 1894, pretty quickly after finishing the other book, as they are published in a compendium of the two.

As a narrative it consists of several parts - his trading around South America in his ship, the Aquidneck; the wreck of the Aquidneck; the construction of the Liberdade; the voyage of the Liberdade from Brazil to the USA.

A short book, some 150 pages, the first section explains that Slocum with his family and a crew of sailors are trading up and down the coast of South America. Trading, of course, is always risky and there are times of great success and times of failure.

The wreck of the Aquidneck was dealt with rapidly - in half a page. dangerous current and wind ‘caught her foul' and drive her onto the shore, ‘breaking her back'. She was loaded with timber for trading out of Brazil. All that could be salvaged from the cargo and the ship was taken, and the next stage of the book begins.

With no ship and limited savings, an nobody to save them, there was little point in Slocum and his family begging a ride back to the States, so he sets about designing a modest boat to make the journey home. A ‘canoe' he somewhat uncharitably calls it. 35' long, 7'6'' wide and draught of 2'6” with a covered deck (including a tarpaulin over the hold). Slocum describes in great detail the design and construction, explains where the materials came from and what he traded for new parts. Slocum says he designed her from his recollections of Cape Ann dories, although she was rigged like Chinese sampan (which Slocum considered the most convenient boat rig in the whole world). She is named the Liberdade, meaning of course Liberty in Portuguese.

And so her seaworthiness is proven in the voyage from Brazil to Barbados, to the Bahamas, to Puerto Rico and the USA. The last few chapters take the reader from the south up the American coast to New York and finally Boston.

While the writing is perhaps not as polished as in Sailing Alone Around the World, and some of the sentence structure slightly more archaic, it remains still a very readable short book.

4 stars