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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 Including unpublished photographs, letters and ephemera from the voyage, Around the World in a Dugout Canoe tells the real story of a little–understood character and his cedar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: December 21, 2024

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,824 vessel histories (with 16,274 images and 13,929 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

Vessel records are currently being reviewed and updated with more than 45,000 processed so far this year (2024).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3996 images).

Thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of vessel histories in the database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.

Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he has contributed to illustrate British Columbia’s floating heritage.

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

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