Still avoiding Malcolm Lowry.
And so this, in a Dover Thrift Edition, with abundant suggestions as to further reading...
And the last few pages as well...some wonderful looking detours - "Great Dirigibles: Their Triumphs and Disasters", for one, but there are many others.
Back to the book at hand: Captain John Slocum Completes, over 3 years, the first solo circumnavigation of the globe in a boat of his own devising.
Lightly amusing, the voyage undertaken between 1895 - 1898, the world then largely civilized, pirates off the coast of Africa, savages of Terra de Fuego, otherwise the world at this time has been largely tamed and is a civilized place.
Link - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Slocum
That said, this has rather inspired me to embellish my list of pronouns to include "Captain", whereas before it was just "Doctor" and "His Holiness" and "King of Kings", which actually trips off the tongue better if said after my name.
Of interest, he refers to the Captain of Christopher Columbus's "Pinto" as "assisting" him when he was too fevered or exhausted to take the wheel, a not infrequent hallucination of those without companions in perilous situations, which he takes as matter-of-fact and attends no supernatural import. Or being greeted by people in South Africa that want to persuade him he's on a fool's errand, as everybody knows the world is flat (how little has changed!).
Of amusement, he while in Juan Fernandez remarks that the people are happy without a police officer or lawyer amongst them, and they all seem healthy enough without doctors. This, of course, would be true but we'll never get back to that idyll.
Or when he arrives at Samoa, being greeted by the natives has this exchange:
"You man come 'lone?"
Again I answered yes.
"I don't believe that. You had other mans, and you eat 'em"
Comical now, but at the time a very reasoned approach to how one might sail singlehandedly to Samoa.
On Samoa as well he meets Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, wife of the famous author, from here around the Cape of Good Hope, stopping in ports to be feted and give lectures on his travels to date, which largely subsidize his further adventures.
He ends up becalmed in the Wide Sargasso Sea, which reminds me of the scene in the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" where our hero is becalmed, and, finally, he completes his tour round the world, declaring himself: "I was 10 years younger than the day I felled the first tree for the construction of the 'Spray'".
On November 14, 1909 he put to sea for the last time, never to be heard of since.
Link - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_disappeared_mysteriously_at_sea
I am not sure that "Disappeared Mysteriously at Sea" is a genuine category, the sea by it's nature a devouring force that leaves little evidence of it's appetite.
Nevertheless, an intriguing, lightly told tale, 3 years travelling about the world to be digested in 3 hours of reading.