Toward the end of his first circumnavigation,Harry Pidgeon moored his yawl in Trinidad,along a quay in Port of Spain,and was soon peppered with questions,as always: 'Why don't you have any crew? Do you sail alone on a bet? Isn't it awfully difficult? How do you sleep at night?' When one man asked him,'What do you do for milk?' he retorted with a half smile,'No problem,I was weaned before I left!' Soon to be 56 years old,tanned by almost four years at sea,Harry Pidgeon was homeward bound in 1925 for Los Angeles,which he would reach in several months.Twenty-seven years after Joshua Slocum's pioneering voyage in SPRAY,Pidgeon would become the second person to complete a solo circumnavigation and the first to do so by way of the Panama Canal.His arrival was heralded by no fanfare,no blaring foghorns,no fireboats with water cannons pointed toward the sky.The rare journalists who interviewed him discovered a man for whom his extremely spartan boat was his only possession and his only home.
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