Joshua Slocum on Martha's Vineyard: The Sailor Who Farmed West Tisbury and Vanished from Vineyard Haven

On a November day in 1909 a small, worn sloop left Vineyard Haven harbour with one old man aboard, bound for South America, and was never seen again. The man was Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail alone around the world, and for the last eight years of his life he had been, to his own mild surprise, a farmer in West Tisbury. His book is still in print, his boat is still argued over by naval architects, and the island keeps his traces lightly: a marker stone by a fence on a country road, a harbour that was his last home port, a pamphlet with a scrap of his sail in the museum's archives. This is the story, and what a visitor can actually find of it.

The voyage that made him

Slocum was born in Nova Scotia in 1844, went to sea at sixteen, and spent thirty years as a merchant captain in the age when sail was losing to steam. By his fifties he had no ship. A friend in Fairhaven, across the water from New Bedford, gave him a derelict oyster sloop called Spray, and Slocum rebuilt her plank by plank over 1891 and 1892 into a stubby, beamy boat a little under 37 feet long. On April 24, 1895 he sailed her out of Boston alone. He came back into Newport, Rhode Island on June 27, 1898, three years and more than 46,000 miles later, having crossed every ocean, threaded the Strait of Magellan twice, and, by his own account, outrun a pirate felucca off the Moroccan coast. Nobody had ever done it single-handed. The Century Magazine serialised his story from 1899 and it came out as a book, Sailing Alone Around the World, in 1900. It is one of the few sailing classics that non-sailors read for pleasure, dry and funny and completely without heroics, and it has never been out of print.

Fag End: the farm in West Tisbury

The book and the lecture circuit gave Slocum the first money he had ever had that did not depend on a ship, and in 1901 he spent it on a small farm on the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road. He called the place Fag End. The house was already old when he bought it, built in 1743, and he added rooms; a post in the kitchen carries the carving "Slocum 1902" and the name of the Falmouth lumber yard that supplied the timber. He grew hops in a valley near the house, and, in the Vineyard Gazette's later judgment, farmed poorly, which was a family tradition. The island did not make much of him; the museum’s own note on him says islanders called him an off-islander, and left it at that. Within two years he was restless: he sailed the Spray up the New England coast in summer and down to the West Indies in winter, lecturing and selling copies of the book from the deck, and came back to the farm between times. The Martha's Vineyard Museum has a photograph of the Spray at Menemsha in June 1903, and a Sloop Spray Souvenir pamphlet from 1901 that his wife Henrietta put together, with a swatch of the original sail bound into it.

November 1909

He was sixty-five. The Spray was tired and so, by the accounts of people who saw him that autumn, was he. He told people he meant to sail to the West Indies and then up the Orinoco River in Venezuela, and on November 14, 1909 he left Vineyard Haven alone. No wreckage was found, no word came, and no theory has ever been proved: a collision with a steamer at night, a storm, a boat simply too old for one more passage. Henrietta waited at Fag End, then sold the house, according to island memory, to a silent-film actress. In 1924 he was declared legally dead. Sailing Alone had a hundred years of readers ahead of it, and sailors have been building replicas of the Spray ever since to find out whether the boat really was as steady as he said.

What you can see

At a glance

How we checked this

The voyage dates, the Spray’s dimensions and the 1924 declaration are from Slocum’s own book and his biographers as summarised in the standard references. The farm purchase, the 1743 house, the "Slocum 1902" post, the marker stone and the sale to an actress are from the Martha’s Vineyard Times West Tisbury column of December 13, 2021; the hops from the Times of October 2, 2019; "farmed it poorly" from the Vineyard Gazette of March 24, 2011, which gives his departure as 1908 where every other source, including the museum, gives November 1909. The museum holdings are from the finding aid to the Joshua Slocum Collection, Record Unit 336. A 1980 book of Eisenstaedt photographs says Slocum wrote Sailing Alone at the farm; the book was published before he bought it, so we have not repeated that. The photographs are ours. The house is private and we give no directions beyond the road.