Martin Creamer, who died recently at the age of 104, was a retired professor of geography at Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, in Glassboro, N.J. He is best remembered, however, for sailing around the world on a 36-foot sailboat without the use of navigational instruments. That is without the use of a watch, a radio, a compass, a sextant, or GPS. He is believed to be the only person ever to do so.

At 66, Creamer set off on December 21, 1982, aboard his steel-hulled boat — the 36-foot Globe Star.”  His 513-day journey would entail nearly a year at sea, plus time in ports for repairs and reprovisioning.

NJ.com recounts that Creamer’s 30,000-mile journey started in National Park in Gloucester County, where he sailed to Cape May. After staying in Cape May a couple of days, because of weather conditions, Creamer and his crew sailed east to Cape Town in South Africa via Dakar, West Africa.

From there, he traveled to Australia, New Zealand, Cape Horn, the Falkland Islands, and along the South American coastline northward, via Cape Verdes and Bermuda. He returned to National Park, New Jersey on May 17, 1984.

The epic trip wasn’t Creamer’s first experience with ocean sailing — he had previously sailed from Cape May to Bermuda nearly a decade earlier. He also sailed to and from Ireland, the Azores in Portugal, and Dakar, Senegal in the 1970s.

As a condition laid down by Mrs. Creamer, he did carry a sextant, clock, compass and radio. Those instruments, however, were kept in a sealed locker below deck, to be opened only in an emergency. It never was. He did use an hourglass to help keep track of crew watches.

He relied on rudimentary celestial navigation, using the relative positions of the sun, moon, and stars to guide him. As a geographer, he used his extensive knowledge of currents, winds, and the angle of sun by day, and the moon and stars by night. 

The New York Times notes that under cloud-massed skies, Creamer could divine his location from the color and temperature of the water, the presence of particular birds and insects …

Skills like these, he long maintained, had let the master mariners of antiquity answer the seafarer’s ever-present, life-or-death question — Where am I? — and in so doing sail safely around the world.

“From everything I’ve read, the ancients didn’t feel uncomfortable out there,” Professor Creamer told The New York Times in 1978. “They didn’t have navigational tools, but they didn’t seem afraid to go to sea. I felt they might have known what they were doing, that they might have made predictable landfalls, and having once hit a coast could have returned there.”

Years later, the professor explained his motivation to a geography class. “You might ask, ‘How could anybody, sane or insane, get himself in such a fix?’ I was hooked. Taken hostage by an idea,” he said, recalling how the notion to circle the globe came to him in the middle of one idle night. “I just wanted to do it so badly.”

Marvin Creamer took his last substantial sailing trip at the age of 95 with his son, Kurt, and two of his grandsons. They sailed from Maine to Bermuda, and then from Bermuda to North Carolina.

Thanks to Alaric Bond for contributing to this post.