“I have found every word of Voss’s concerning ships and the sea to be pure gold.”–Weston Martyr, sailing author

On May 27, 1901, Captain John C. Voss, accompanied by journalist Norman Luxton, put to sea in Tilikum, a thirty-eight-foot by five-foot dugout canoe purchased on Vancouver Island from Nootka Indians. Voss was a professional sailor who, like Joshua Slocum, had been idled in the twilight of commercial sail. Luxton, a nautical innocent, was along to record the voyage for posterity. Slocum’s best-seller, Sailing Alone around the World, had been published the year before, and Voss and Luxton’s goal was to make a name for themselves by circling the globe in a vessel smaller than Slocum’s Spray. Drawing a mere 24 inches fully loaded, and outfitted by Voss with a deck, a small keel, three stubby masts, a cockpit for the helmsman, and a tiny cabin, the Tilikum was without doubt the oddest (and hence, the most newsworthy) craft ever to attempt a deep-sea voyage.

Three years and several months later, on September 2, 1904, Tilikum arrived in England after a voyage of 40,000 miles–a journey fraught with perilous and exotic adventures on both land and sea. Luxton abandoned the voyage in the South Seas, and his replacement was lost overboard in a storm. Voss carried on, and in 1912 – 13, while in Japan, he wrote The Venturesome Voyages of Captain Voss, the book that established him alongside Slocum as one of the greatest small-boat navigators of all time.

This volume in The Sailor’s Classics restores in its entirety Captain Voss’s account of his adventures in the Tilikum, together with the more noteworthy of the two remaining narratives in the original book, a truncated but epic voyage through a typhoon in the 19-foot yawl Sea Queen. In the words of series editor Jonathan Raban, “to possess this book is to have at your elbow your own compact fount of growling sea-wisdom, the classic primer on small-boat handling under all imaginable conditions.” For sailors and armchair adventurers alike, this book is an unforgettable read.

Captain John Claus Voss said of himself, “My seafaring life commenced in 1877, when I was quite a young man, and was spent in large sailing vessels, during which period I have filled all sorts of positions from deck boy up to master.” It is unclear what year Voss was born, possibly 1861, possibly earlier, but in the 1890s he left the sea for residence in Victoria, British Columbia, where he was listed as proprietor or co-proprietor of several hotels by 1895. By that time he was married with two sons and a daughter. His career in small boats began in 1897. His greatest voyage, in the Indian war canoe Tilikum, began in May 1901. After reaching England in 1904, Voss joined an expedition to Equador to search for gold, finally returning to Victoria in March 1906, by which time his marriage had ended and his former wife had moved to Oregon with the younger children. He married again in the spring of 1906, but his bride died in August of that same year. Voss went back to sea commanding sealing schooners until 1911, when sealing was banned by international treaty. Finding himself in Japan, he undertook the voyage of the Sea Queen described in this book. Later he fitted out yet another small vessel and vanished from Yokohama into the Pacific. Many presumed that he had drowned, but new evidence suggests that he spent his last years in the small inland California town of Tracy, where he drove a Model T jitney, or taxi, and is photographed with his daughter in 1920. He evidently died in Tracy in 1922.

pp. 320 illusts #200425

First published as “The venturesome voyages of Captain Voss”, 1913