Brier Island museum to honour renowned N.S. sailor's roots and 'spirit of adventure' Joshua Slocum was the first person to sail single-handedly around the world The legacy of a Nova Scotia seaman who became the first person to sail alone around the world is being revitalized by a group of residents on the tiny island where he grew up, more than a century after his historic feat. Joshua Slocum's formative years were spent on Brier Island off Digby Neck, N.S., where his father worked as a cobbler. In the late 1800s, Slocum circumnavigated the world on an 11-metre gaff-rigged oyster sloop named Spray, a three-year experience he recounted in his book, Sailing Alone Around the World. Kristina Inrig, a founding board member of the Joshua Slocum Society, recently told CBC Radio's Information Morning Nova Scotia that she and her family were inspired by Slocum's tale to move to Brier Island from Ontario. "His spirit of adventure is what really captivates me," said Inrig, whose family embarked on a 10-month sailing trip in 2017. "I'm a traveller, I'm an adventurer myself. And so this story of someone setting out on a 36-foot boat, which is about the same size as our sailboat, and then travelling around the world solo ... was just a captivating story.” In February, the Joshua Slocum Society acquired the building that once housed the Slocum boot shop in the village of Westport on Brier Island. The building, which served as a fish house for decades on Water Street, will be restored and turned into a museum modelled after a 19th-century cobbler shop, just like it would have been when Slocum was a boy. To complete the transformation, Inrig has been collecting antiques to fill the museum from all over Canada and the United States. “I just figured, well, why do this halfway? Let's collect all these amazing things, let's make the boot shop exciting," she said. "So I've been trying to collect a bit of a story of his life.” These items include a cobbler's bench from Ottawa, a model of Slocum's boat Spray from South Carolina, and an original letter written by Slocum from Florida. “It was a journey to go solo and travel with a U-Haul across Canada. Not quite Joshua Slocum standards, but that was fun,” she said with a laugh. The Slocum Boot Shop is set to open on June 27 — exactly 128 years after Slocum completed his world voyage on June 27, 1898, in Newport, R.I. Slocum was declared dead in 1924, having gone missing after setting out from Massachusetts on Spray some 15 years earlier. Spray was never recovered. MORE TOP STORIES With files from Information Morning Nova Scotia