Site Navigation:

Site Search:

Looking for more? Search for Articles on the Nauticapedia Site.

Around the World in a Dugout Canoe – The untold story of Captain John Voss and the Tilikum

by John MacFarlane and Lynn Salmon 2019

Book Voss

This is the first independent account of the remarkable voyage of the Tilikum. It is now available in the USA and on the international market. It was the 2019 winner of the prestigious John Lyman Book Prize of the North American Society of Ocean History as the "Best Book Published in 2019".

Anticipating fame and wealth, Captain John Voss set out from Victoria, BC, in 1901, seeking to claim the world record for the smallest vessel ever to circumnavigate the globe. For the journey, he procured an authentic dugout cedar canoe from an Indigenous village on the east coast of Vancouver Island.

For three years Voss and the Tilikum, aided by a rotating cast of characters, visited Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil and finally England, weathering heavy gales at sea and attracting large crowds of spectators on shore. The austere on–board conditions and simple navigational equipment Voss used throughout the voyage are a testimony to his skill and to the solid construction of the Nuu–Chah–Nulth vessel.

Both Voss and his original mate, newspaperman N.K. Luxton, later wrote about their journey in accounts compromised by poor memories, brazen egos and outright lies. Stories of murder, cannibalism and high–seas terror have been repeated elsewhere without any regard to the truth. Now, over a century later, a full and fair account of the voyage—and the magnitude of Voss’s accomplishment–is at last fully detailed.

In this groundbreaking work, marine historians John MacFarlane and Lynn Salmon sift fact from fiction, critically examining the claims of Voss’s and Luxton’s manuscripts against research from libraries, archives, museums and primary sources around the world. Including unpublished photographs, letters and ephemera from the voyage, Around the World in a Dugout Canoe tells the real story of a little–understood character and his cedar canoe. It is an enduring story of courage, adventure, sheer luck and at times tragedy.

The book is available through independent book stores in British Columbia, and has been released in the United States in April 2020 (and is also available through Amazon (for international sales) – but please support your local book seller if you can!


To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John (2019) Around the World in a Dugout Canoe. Nauticapedia.ca 2019. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Book_Voss_gallery.php

Nauticapedia

Site News: May 07, 2024

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 92,798 vessel histories (with 15,646 images and 13,431 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters). The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,616 entries (with 4,013 images).

In 2023 the Nauticapedia celebrated the 50th Anniversary of it’s original inception in 1973 (initially it was on 3" x 5" file cards). It has developed, expanded, digitized and enlarged in those ensuing years to what it is now online. If it was printed out it would fill more than 300,000 pages!

My special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into a semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.

Also my special thanks to my volunteer content accuracy checker, John Spivey of Irvine CA USA, who has proofread thousands of Nauticapedia vessel histories and provided input to improve more than 11,000 entries. His attention to detail has been a huge unexpected bonus in improving and updating the vessel detail content.

© 2002-2023