Harry PidgeonCritiques

Account of a single-handed circumnavigation, east to west from California, in 1921-25, in a self built boat. Told in a low-key style, Harry Pidgeon recounts the highs and the lows of a remarkable journey, working with wind and weather over four years.

Harry Pidgeon, a farm boy from Iowa did not even see the sea until he was eighteen but by then he had “mucked about” a bit in boats as do most lads and after a spell in Alaska, he decided to build one of the famous Rudder Magazines ’Islander’ sloops. Having completed his thirty four foot wooden sailing boat, single-handed, without “too much trouble” he said, he launched and sailed it – single-handed – to Hawaii.

He accepted a crew for the return, who joined with a brand new guitar. He was, he said, going to learn how to play it, during his “spare time” on the voyage. Harry concluded that this crew-hand somewhat lacked experience of sailing a sloop across an ocean. “However, we got on well enough”. Reading this book it is difficult to imagine anyone not being able to ‘get along' with the calm, competent Harry Pigeon.

Joshua Slocomb had only completed the first single-handed some thirty years before in his famous sloop ‘Spray’who was just three feet longer that the ”Islander”, but Slocomb had more thirty years sea-going experience behind him. With boundless confidence and, perhaps wisely, single-handed again, Harry decided to sail across the Pacific (and never was an Ocean more misnamed) to see ‘the islands’ and, like Slocomb, “kinda, sorta” forgot to stop.

Written in a rather dry, straightforward and chronological manner Pidgeon’s tale lacks that marvelous prose that the relatively unlettered Slocomb astoundingly produced in his account. But arm-chair sailors and old reminiscers like me will still enjoy reading these travels and the marvelous islands, peoples, trails and the ultimate success of Harry Pidgeon’s circumnavigation around the world. And, unlike Josh Slocomb he did not get corrected by President Kruger who had insisted that Slocomb had misspoke – he meant, Kruger insisted, across the world – it was, after all, said the President of the South African Boer Nation, flat.

Harry would have agreed with Slocomb.