JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, After nearly sixty years, interest in Captain Joshua Slocum's single-handed voyage around the world grows rather than diminishes. The captain's own narrative, published in 1900lgoo by the Century Company, was kept in print for forty-eight years (and seventeen printings) by them and their successor companies. It was translated into Polish, German, French and Dutch, and has been widely read in England. In addition there have been a variety of reprints in other forms down to the present Dover Publications paper-back which, with the original Fogarty illustrations, is admirable value for a dollar.Seven years ago the captain's son Victor published Captain Joshua Slocum, The Life and Voyages of America's Best Known Sailor (New York: Sheridan House, 1950) which, while giving much information about his father's earlier life, still did not fully answer all the questions likely to arise in the minds of readers. The American Neptune's reviewer of Victor Slocum's book (X, 156) remarked: "After reading Sailing Alone Around the World and thus having kept company with the modest but far from inarticulate Captain for three years and more, he still remains an enigma. The curiosity and interest of the reader in the author's personality is likely to be keener at the very end of the story than at the beginning."Mr. Teller's pleasantly written and admirably documented new biography goes a very long way toward satisfying this curiosity. While holding a Guggenheim fellowship he searched widely and turned up considerable new information which he has used with skill in building up a portrait of a shipmaster, competent in sail, who could not or would not make the shift into steam that changing times imposed. The i8oo-ton ship Northern Light, built at Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1872, of which Slocum became master and part-owner in 1881, was the high point of his career as an orthodox shipmaster. In 1884, as Mr. Teller relates it,