Harry Pidgeon doesn't seek out adventure, but it finds him in his 34-foot yawl. He's shipwrecked in Africa, boarded by cannibals, and hits an oil tanker. The farmer from Iowa, becomes in 1924 the first man to sail around the world by way of the Panama Canal in a small yacht. He also does this record making circumnavigation alone in his homemade sailboat, the Islander.

This is the first eBook edition of Pidgeon's classic. Harry Pidgeon has been unfairly forgotten by sailors in favor of Joshua Slocum’s whose works have exploded in eBook form. In many ways, the experience of Harry Pidgeon is more relevant to modern sailors than Mr. Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World since Pidgeon pioneered the modern trade-wind circumnavigation route going through the Panama Canal and rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Slocum’s route through the Straits of Magellan, instead of the Panama Canal, is rarely used by cruisers and never used by sailboat racers. The Cape Horn route is very uncommon, but it is favored over the treacherous Straits of Magellan in Patagonia, which Mr. Slocum wrote so much about. Slocum’s circumnavigation ended in 1898, and he was lost at sea in 1909 prior to the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914.

Harry Pidgeon is not only the first man to sail solo around the world by way of the Panama Canal, but also, he is the first man to captain a small yacht of any small crew around the world by way of the Panama Canal. “Only one other man ever has circumnavigated the globe in a small boat, according to the records of the cruising club. He was Joshua Slocum,” writes the Associated Press about Mr. Pidgeon’s Blue Water Medal presentation by the Cruising Club of America in 1926. Thus, Mr. Pidgeon was not just a solo-sailing pioneer, but a pioneer of the trade-wind circumnavigation for all yachtsman. (Mr. Pidgeon’s map of his route has few deviations from the route that the World ARC Rally has its yachts take at the time of writing almost a century later.) Mr. Pidgeon went on to be the first man to sail the globe solo twice and to sail the world in a small yacht twice. Mr. Pidgeon is so much more than the “second” man to circumnavigate the world in a yacht. Pigeon’s 1921 to 1924 trade-wind circumnavigation, through the Panama Canal, should be generally recognized as a sailing first equal to the achievements of Joshua Slocum and Robin Knox-Johnston. (Mr. Knox-Johnston was the first man to sail around the world solo, non-stop, and unassisted.)

Unlike Captain Slocum, who was a professional ship captain, cruising enthusiasts can identify with Harry Pidgeon because he was not a professional mariner. He pioneered the model of the amateur, long-distance cruiser. He not only pioneered what Jimmy Cornell calls the world cruising routes, but also, he pioneered the ideal of a man who earned his living away from the sea to explore the globe on a small yacht. The de-professionalization of sailboat cruising that he pioneered may be as important as the trade-wind circumnavigation route that he first completed in a small sailboat.

Harry Pidgeon was a photographer whose work was featured in National Geographic and many of his pictures from nearly a century ago are reproduced in this eBook edition.

Harry Pidgeon died in 1954.

Below is a sample from the text:
"The Islander was my first attempt at building a sailboat, but I don’t suppose there ever was an amateur built craft that so nearly fulfilled the dream of her owner, or that a landman ever came so near to weaving a magic carpet of the sea.

As a youth I was not favorably situated for taking up a seafaring career, but I had many qualifications for the job. My love of the sea did not come from early association, for I was born on a farm in Iowa and did not see salt water until I went to California, when I was eighteen years of age. So far as I know, none of my ancestors ever followed the sea."

This edition contains a note from the editor, Linus Wilson, of Oxriver Publishing.