Bernard Moitessier was born in 1925 in French Indochina and learned seafaring as a crew member on traditional trade junks. In 1952 he bought a rotting junk in Indonesia to sail single-handed to France, stopped a leak in the Indian Ocean by diving under the hull with a greased, tarred canvas patch, and after 85 days wrecked on Diego Garcia because his dead reckoning missed a three-knot current. He spent three years in Mauritius running a charcoal and guano business to build a new boat, then wrecked again between Trinidad and St. Lucia after falling asleep. Back in France he wrote a book, used the proceeds to build the 39-foot steel ketch Joshua, named for Joshua Slocum, and sailed with his wife Francoise to Tahiti. Needing to return for her children, they went east around Cape Horn and in 1966 set a record for the longest nonstop yacht passage: over 14,000 miles in 126 days.

That record made him a favorite for the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, the first single-handed nonstop sail around the world, though he disliked its press and commercial side and left Plymouth months after other starters. While passing film canisters to a freighter, suction pulled Joshua into its stern and bent the bowsprit, which he straightened with winches and steel cables. Becalmed in the doldrums, he fought depression with yoga headstands on deck. After rounding Cape Horn and poised to post the fastest time, he fired a message onto a passing ship with a slingshot, quit the race to protect his soul, and sailed on to Tahiti, logging over 37,000 miles nonstop. Robin Knox-Johnston won the race.

• He wrote The Long Way about the voyage while living on an atoll and growing fruit and vegetables.
• In 1982, on a charter with actor Klaus Kinski off Mexico, a freak onshore storm beached Joshua and filled her with sand.
• He sold the wreck to locals for twenty dollars, and Joshua was later restored for a maritime museum in France.
• He protested nuclear testing in the South Pacific and waterfront overdevelopment in Tahiti.
• Visitors to his grave in Brittany leave slingshots instead of flowers.