Captain John Voss, left, aboard the Tilikum in Samoa. “So diminutive,” one Australian reporter wrote of the boat, “one wondered and admired the pluck, perseverance and skill displayed in bringing her across the 9,200 miles of trackless ocean.”
City of Vancouver Archives
In 1901, the Canadian mariner John Voss set sail from British Columbia in a modified dugout canoe. He was headed for Australia, seeking adventure—and the world record for smallest vessel to circumnavigate the globe.
Voss had found a sponsor and first mate in the thrill-seeking Canadian journalist Norman Luxton. Deciding a typical sealing schooner would be “too easy,” Voss purchased an Indigenous whaling canoe carved by the Nuu-chah-nulth people on Vancouver Island, a 38-foot-long hollowed-out cedar trunk nicknamed the Tilikum, a Chinook word evoking community. He outfitted it with sails and decking, and on May 21, 1901, Voss and Luxton set out for the South Pacific. Their only map was a one-sheet chart of the Pacific, and they had no proper chronometer. Voss couldn’t even swim.
It took 58 claustrophobic days to reach Fiji, and the captain was “taciturn, almost surly,” Luxton later wrote in an account of the voyage. Soon after they’d reached Fiji, a depressed and fearful Luxton abandoned ship, but Voss simply found a new first mate and soldiered on. “He had something about him, an aura of power and confidence,” Luxton recalled.
In the early 20th century, small vessels did not regularly sail very far offshore, says John M. MacFarlane, curator emeritus of the Maritime Museum of British Columbia and co-author of a 2019 book about Voss’ exploits. When Tilikum’s voyage ended in London, the canoe was displayed at Earl’s Court, where audiences marveled at its slim body, its lack of guardrails and the very idea that a small crew could have survived more than three years in it. Voss had earned the reputation of a madman. Even so, as MacFarlane and co-author Lynn J. Salmon write, he proved a practical and confident mariner, “not part of the mainstream of society but rather an individualist—a survivor.”
