The Secret of the Strait
Book 2
I’m delighted to introduce The Secret of the Strait, Book 1 in The Joshua Slocum Historical Mysteries series. If you enjoy sailing adventures, long-buried clues, distant waters, and mysteries surrounding one of history’s most fascinating sailors, this story is for you.
What happens when a man returns home with a truth powerful people have paid to bury?
About the Story
In 1895, Captain Joshua Slocum sailed from Boston aboard the Spray, a rebuilt sloop measuring scarcely thirty-seven feet. He had no crew. His ambition was simple to describe yet almost impossible to imagine: to sail alone around the world.
His voyage carried him across the Atlantic, down the coast of South America, through the Strait of Magellan, across the Pacific, around the Cape of Good Hope, and home again. When Slocum returned in 1898, he had accomplished something no one was known to have done before. His account, Sailing Alone Around the World, made him one of the most celebrated sailors of his age.
But no published account can reveal the whole truth of a voyage.
A sailor remembers what the log records: wind, current, distance, damage, and repair. Yet he also remembers what cannot be measured so easily—a light where no light should be, a voice drifting across black water, or the unsettling sense that another vessel has altered course for reasons it cannot—or will not—explain.
This story begins in Boston in 1906, eight years after Slocum’s return. Thomas Hale, a newspaper reporter and former merchant sailor, believes he has come to ask routine questions about a famous voyage. Instead, he discovers that several pages are missing from Slocum’s private journal. The trail leads back to the Strait of Magellan in February 1896—and to an abandoned ship whose fate was never made public.