This sentence, Joshua Slocum's advice from the appendix to Sailing Alone Around the World of 1900, needs editing these days. Foremost, it should be directed equally at young women, not just young men. Come to think of it, "young" needs work: Modern oceanic voyagers are both much younger and much older than the good captain could ever have imagined. Solitude still works, but of course on social media you can be alone with everyone. The old merchant mariner might have been amazed, too, that these days teams of people go to sea as volunteers, each person making a better person of the others and the boat making better people of them all.
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