The ‘adventurer’ Captain Voss
Knowledge about ships is not complete without knowledge of sailors. The world has seen many sailors float through its seas and oceans, fulfilling their commitment to adventure and excitement.
The most recent of the legendary sailors was Captain John Claus Voss (1858-1922), the American sailor credited with circumnavigating the world in a flimsy hand-built canoe called a TILIKUM. Tilikum’s trip was just one of several adventure trips by Voss around the world. The Xora and the Sea Queen were two other ships made famous by the eccentric sea captain Voss. This article aims to salute this great navigator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here is a brief summary of Captain Voss’s daring voyages across the world’s oceans.
The earliest record of Voss going to sea dates back to 1877, when he was an apprentice on the ship Seacraft and “filled all manner of positions from deckhand to master.” In 1901, when Captain Voss decided to go around the world in the ‘Tilikum’, he had already established himself as a successful businessman in the port city of Victoria.
He then owned several hotels in Victoria and had a growing family of two sons and a daughter. His daughter Carolyn was sixteen at the time. Tilikum’s voyage, which began in May 1901, ended on September 2, 1904 in Great Britain. Voss crossed the great Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic Ocean in her flimsy canoe, but could not save his marriage, which broke up sometime during this time.
Voss crossed the Atlantic from Cape Town in South Africa to Pernambuco in Brazil. In 1906, Voss remarried Mrs. Ann Croth of St. Louis, Missouri, but his girlfriend died in August of the same year. He lost his wife again in August of the same year. At the time he was back in his home port of Victoria and owned a St. Francis hotel.
JC Voss sold his hotel in 1907 and left for Japan the following year. In Japan, he commanded a sealing schooner in 1911, until the Japanese authorities banned sealing. In 1913, he seemed to disappear into the Pacific on the ship called the Sea Queen. Most people thought he was dead at sea, but Captain Voss resurfaced again in 1918 in the small Californian town of Tracy, where he took up driving a small passenger car, or Jitney, to transport people from part of the city to another. Voss charged a fare of five cents to his passengers.
Voss is also known to have gone on a “treasure hunting trip” from Port Victoria to the Cocos Islands off the coast of South America.
Captain Voss died on February 27, 1922 after leading an adventurous life. His daughter, Carolyn, described him as a “wonderful father to me” and it was largely due to his contributions that so much was learned about Captain Voss. Captain Voss also wrote a book in 1913, known as the ‘Adventurous Travels of Captain Voss’. This article is an effort to remember this forgotten sailor from the last decade.
