by Spencer, Ann
A malfunctioning rudder brought them into New London, Connecticut, for minor repairs. Once in port, a cocky portion of the crew took liberties with the rules outlined by the shipping rings. They argued that the voyage was technically over once they made port and that they were entitled to leave ship with their advanced wages. Hell broke loose, and mutiny was in the air. Within minutes, the chief officer of the Northern Light was fatally stabbed in a scuffle to subdue the mutineers’ ringleader. A swift-thinking and courageous Virginia was at her husband’s side, covering him with a revolver in each hand. The crew was searched, the Coast Guard was called in, the mutineers were arrested and the remaining troublemakers were incarcerated aboard ship. Slocum secured a new chief officer.
In December the discordant crew and their troubled captain were given a strange opportunity to bond together in a humanitarian act. Two weeks before Christmas, as they were sailing through the South Sea Islands, a small open craft was spotted floating in the middle of the ocean. As the Northern Light drew near, Slocum saw five desperate-looking souls aboard. When they were thrown a line and hoisted up to the Northern Light’s deck, the gravity of the situation became apparent. The four men and one woman were starving and near death. The survivors were offered brandy to warm them, but two refused, even in their weakened state, explaining that they were missionaries. (At that time in the South Seas, “missionary” meant anyone who had adopted the Christian faith.) After being given the chance to rest, they told their gruesome tale.
They had begun as a party of twelve Gilbert Islanders on a mission from their king to a neighboring Polynesian island. On their return trip they encountered a storm that set their twenty-one-foot open boat drifting. For over a month the islanders had been “at the scant mercy of a changing monsoon.” All that time they had lived on dried bananas, what flying fish landed aboard and the diminished remains of their water supply. Over one-third of their water had been lost immediately when a jug smashed. Slocum wanted to return the survivors to their island, but the Northern Light was drifting westward on a strong equatorial current. The party refused to be put off on another island along the way, so Slocum took them to Japan. He felt he had no other moral choice in the matter and was inspired by the fictional adventures of Sinbad the sailor. The passage he recalled read, “When we behold a ship-wrecked person on the shore of the sea, … we take him with us and feed him and give him drink, and if he be naked we clothe him, and when we arrive at the port of safety we give him something of our property as a present, and act toward him with kindness and favor for the sake of God whose name be exalted.”
They arrived in Japan in mid-January. The little band was impressed by the look of the snowy countryside, but the cold winter “racked their joints with pain.” Virginia had been attending to the needs of the one lady islander; now, with this change of climate she found warmer clothing for the five of them. The odd assortment of old coats and poorly fitting mismatched suits for the men, and the dress and woollen shawl for the woman, came from the family’s “slop chest.” Slocum confessed that he was “at a loss to know what to do with these waifs of the ocean”; they seemed so helpless and out of place in Japan. Finally, he secured passage for them to their home island on the mission ship Morning Star.
After unloading the cargo of case oil in Japan, the Northern Light headed for the Philippines to pick up a cargo of hemp and sugar bound for Liverpool. Sailing through the Sunda Strait in August 1883, she passed by Krakatoa, a volcanic island that was then erupting. Although the initial eruption had been in May, “paroxysmal explosions” were still occurring. Stones and ash were shooting seventeen miles or farther out of the volcano’s mouth, whipping up the seas and causing fifty-foot waves to crash around the Northern Light. Ben Aymar later reflected on the treacherous passage: “Had we been three days later in that region we would have been suffocated by the fumes.” For many days to follow, an ash-covered Northern Light made her way in a dense haze through seas of floating pumice stone.
The spewing ash was visible around the world in the form of intensely brilliant red sunsets. Their seeming glory were an ironic portent for the captain and his beloved Virginia. Although reckoned to be a sailor’s delight, those beautiful sunsets were really an illusion, an omen of an uncertain dawn.
Washington D.C. 10th Feb. 1885
Dear Mother
… I feel most of the time that Virginia is with me and helping me and that her noble soul is helping support her mother … and I doubt not at all but that she is with you and me more now than before — It has pained me tho to have to give up my beautiful wife when we wer gettin so many enjoyable friends and gettin in comfortable circumstances — I would have had some money in hand by this time if I hadnt got crazy and runn my vessel onshore. As it is now I am just swimming out of trouble on borowd money …
The children are just lovely and healthy. I shall strive to do well by my loved ones children I shall try mother to make her Happy in Heaven she was I know happy with me here — she knew that I loved her dearely, and always loved to be in her company — What a terrible separation this has been to me I sen you a photo of or dear ones grave — the name Virginia is in gold and shall be kept in gold as long as I live
Good bye Dear mother. We will write you from Brazil.
Yours in affliction
/s/ Josh
— From Joshua Slocum’s letter to
Virginia’s mother
4
Ebb and Flow
When she died, father never recovered. He was like a ship with a broken rudder.
— Garfield Slocum
Off the Cape of Good Hope, fierce seas twisted the Northern Light’s rudderhead completely off and she started leaking through the seams in the topsides. As water seeped into the lower hold, the cargo of sugar melted. Pumping the bilge was not feasible: it would have been like pumping out corn syrup. In an effort to lower the ship’s center of gravity and prevent her from keeling over, Slocum jettisoned bales of hemp from the middle deck. Slowly, in heavy seas, the vessel righted. Eventually the Northern Light made it safely to a South African port, where she spent two months being overhauled.
Once again murderous trouble was brewing for Captain Slocum. Before the Northern Light sailed, one of the crew took ill and the captain had to find a replacement — not an easy task in a foreign port. The new second mate was Henry A. Slater, an ex-convict who, it is believed, signed on after arranging with other crew members to murder Slocum and take over the Northern Light. Whatever the truth in this, Slater tried to incite a mutiny shortly after the vessel left port. Slocum could afford no further setbacks. Taking the law into his own hands, he imprisoned Slater. The Northern Light sailed for another fifty-three days to New York with the ship’s prisoner in irons. Later, in a newspaper article, Slocum described his approach to matters of discipline at sea. He referred to himself as “not a martinet, but I have ideas of how to run a ship. The old shipmasters treated their crews like intelligent beings, giving them plenty of leeway, but holding them with a strong hand in an emergency. That’s my style.” Years later, a relative of Slocum’s, Grace Murray Brown, recalled a family story she had heard regarding Slocum’s discipline: “My brother met an old seaman in some Chinese port who had sailed under the captain. He said Captain Slocum was considered a hard man but no one ever felt unsafe under his command.”
Slocum may not have considered himself a martinet, but the Slater affair was not about to blow over. As soon as his ship docked in New York harbor, Slocum was charged with false and cruel imprisonment, convicted on Slater’s evidence and fined five hundred dollars. Slater was later to make apologies to Slocum. This sudden change of heart came about on January 12, 1884, in the form of a confession of sorts to B.S. Osborn, editor of the Nautical Gazette. Slater explained that he had learned later of some of the crew’s manipulations in the whole ordeal: “I now see that both Captain Slocum and myself have been made the dupes of the very men who ought to have protected us, and the whole affair is made
to get money out of Captain Slocum, to be distributed among them.” His story made the Boston Herald, which reported, “‘Slater said he came voluntarily,’ said Mr. Osborn. ‘He said he had put Slocum in a bad hole, and was in an equally bad hole himself. He said he did not know what he had been doing. He had signed lots of papers, but did not know what they were.’”
The confession did little to alter Slocum’s image or end his plight. While he was busy defending himself in lawsuits, another captain was employed to take charge of the Northern Light. Much more than Slocum’s reputation had been affected; the episode at sea had cost him financially. Early in 1884, Slocum was forced to give up his part ownership in the beloved Northern Light. However, selling his shares did little to alleviate his money problems. The ship needed a complete overhaul, and in the 1880s, doing such work on a sail-driven ship was no longer considered economically practical. As sail gave way to steam, Slocum’s career as a sailing master was fading. He would never again be master of a vessel to compare with “the magnificent ship.” This point must have hit home when he got wind of the Northern Light’s fate: she had been reduced in size and put to work as a coal barge. Slocum reflected on the pitiful spectacle of his “best command” as she was “ignominiously towed by the nose from port to port.” Her fate foreshadowed his own — Slocum’s glory days had ended, and his fortunes had entered a downward spiral.
Slocum’s pride in and love of sailing may have blinded him to his own best interests. Logically, he should have accepted the death of sail, adapted to the new technology of steam, and got on with his life. But the pathetic fate of the Northern Light did nothing to shatter his illusions. It would take a more dramatic event to make him recognize that his career as a sailing captain was over, and such an event was not long in coming. Slocum bought his final chance as a sailing master when he handed over the last of the gold pieces he had made from the Pato contract to purchase the Aquidneck, a bark a fraction of the size of the Northern Light. Built in Mystic, Connecticut, in 1865, the Aquidneck was only 138 feet long compared with the Northern Light’s 220 feet, and it had only one deck, to the previous ship’s three. But Slocum was proud, and boasted that the fast and efficient little bark was “the nearest in perfection to beauty.” While the Aquidneck was being made seaworthy, Virginia and the children stayed ashore with Slocum’s sister in the Boston area. Her daughter, Jessie, would later reflect how important that break was for her mother: the perils of Northern Light’s tumultuous eighteen-month circumnavigation had exhausted her. Both Slocum biographer Walter Teller and Slocum’s son Victor concluded that the “constant alarms” of the sea had undermined her health. Jessie herself wrote, “Her heart was not strong.” Virginia’s in-laws were impressed by the captain’s wife, proclaiming her to be a “handsome woman.” They noticed how in love Virginia and Joshua were and remarked that they “could be completely oblivious of everyone and everything if they could be together.” This was after thirteen years of marriage, and after they had spent every day together in small quarters and under rough conditions.
Although Virginia had rested and relaxed, her health would never again be what it had been before babies, mutinies, strandings and court cases took their toll. Nevertheless, later that spring she sailed with her family aboard the repaired Aquidneck. Garfield, only three at the time, would remember the Aquidneck vividly and, years later, in a letter to Slocum biographer Walter Teller, he wrote down his impressions: “the stateroom doors painted light blue and gold … a skylight with colored glass, a canary that sang all day — a beautiful singer. Also a square grand piano bolted to the deck.” The domestic arrangements of this floating home easily transcended the mundane. “The deck house was amidships: A fully equipped carpenter shop, galley, staterooms for the bosun, cook and carpenter. On the roof were pens for sheep, pigs and fowl.” Victor also remembered the Aquidneck, and seems to have inherited his father’s knack for embellishment when he proclaimed the bark to be “as close to a yacht as a merchantman could be.”
The passage south to Pernambuco, on Brazil’s eastern tip, was clear sailing. The young family even stopped to picnic in a coconut grove. But during the sail south along the coast for Buenos Aires, life aboard ship fell apart for the Slocums. Viriginia became ill, stopped all domestic work, and took to her bed. Her last sight of land was Santa Catarina Island. Garfield later remembered that his once vibrant mother had no energy or desire to take up her embroidery or her tapestry: “She left her needle where she stopped.” In Buenos Aires, Slocum hoped to pick up a cargo bound for Australia. Virginia was weak, and she wished to go home to Sydney. Before he left for shore, he and his wife agreed on a signal that would call him back to the ship if the need arose. Ben Aymar later recalled that his mother got up for the first time in weeks and began to salt butter. Her conversation was filled with thoughts of going home. But it was not a call to her earthly home that had given Virginia her last few hours of renewed strength. She became increasingly weak and asked her twelve-year-old son to put up the signal. She knew Joshua would hurry back to the boat at the appearance of the blue-and-white letter “J” as soon as Ben Aymar hoisted it. Slocum returned by noon; Virginia was dead by eight o’clock that evening. It was July 25, 1884, less than a month before her thirty-fifth birthday. The cause of her death was not recorded, but family members speculated. While Virginia’s brother, George Walker, felt that her early death was related to childbirth or possibly miscarriage, Ben Aymar remembered that “she often fainted when trouble disturbed her” and agreed with his sister that her death was a result of heart problems. Virginia Albertina Walker Slocum was buried in the English cemetery in Buenos Aires. Slocum recorded the details of her short life and death in Virginia’s family Bible, adding the line, “Thy will be done not ours!”
Slocum was plunged into a state of utter grief. For fourteen years Virginia had been his guiding strength. He trusted her and had come to rely on her perceptive wisdom. Ben Aymar remembered the quiet power his mother’s presence brought to family life: “Mother’s eyes were a brilliant golden color — I have seen such eyes on our Golden Eagles — she knew how to use them, too, but very calmly.” He later reflected that his mother “on many occasions had proved herself to be very psychic,” and that Slocum “learned to understand her powers of intuition and … relied on them fully until she passed on.” The young son and the other children watched helplessly as their father’s “ill fortunes gathered rapidly from the time of her death.”
The first of Slocum’s “ill fortunes” came just a few days later when he ran his ship aground on a sandbar. He paid to clear the Aquidneck and quickly returned to Boston with his little family, which was soon to split up. Ben Aymar vowed never to go to sea again — a decision perhaps fueled by grief and by the allure of a stable home life on land with his aunts, Joshua’s sisters, who had known and liked his mother. He later recalled that his father wept at his young son’s conviction. The youngest three Slocums remained with their aunts, Etta and Alice, in Massachusetts, while Victor stayed with his father on the Aquidneck. Slocum was stunned by his losses, and found that fending for himself without his wife’s wisdom was a desperate struggle. He busied himself with fast passages between Baltimore and Pernambuco. On one voyage he was shipping a cargo of pianos and cordwood when the Aquidneck suddenly began pitching, which caused the cordwood to start rolling around and bowling into the pianos, causing their strings to snap. The symbolism is inescapable: Slocum, a man rocked by grief and ready to snap, was captaining a ship that was rocking and audibly snapping.
Garfield compared his grieving father to “a ship with a broken rudder.” A ship without a rudder is at the mercy of the waves. If a big sea hits broadside, the ship broaches. A ship that cannot be steered can easily capsize or drift aimlessly. The only way to avoid disaster is to jury-rig some sort of rudder, and that is what Slocum did in the first year after Virginia’s death, in his growing loneliness and melancholy.
In 1885, while he was visiting Ben Aymar, Jessie and Garf
ield in Massachusetts, he met his twenty-four-year-old first cousin, Hettie from Nova Scotia. Henrietta Miller Elliott was her real name, and she was from Annapolis County, where Slocum had spent the first eight years of his life. The forty-two-year-old Slocum was attentive to his comely cousin and, as another Slocum relative observed, “Hettie was no doubt bedazzled by his attentions when he was considered successful.” Joshua married Hettie on February 22, 1886, in Boston. Six days later the newlyweds began their married life together on the Aquidneck.
The young bride’s honeymoon was a passage to Montevideo with a crew of ten and a cargo of case oil. The nightmare began with Slocum’s decision to sail despite storm warnings. It’s hard to imagine how Hettie must have felt about her new life with the middle-aged captain. She was not accustomed to life on ships, and she most certainly did not have Virginia’s resilient spirit. The voyage to Uruguay was beset with frequent and terrible storms. A hurricane struck early out of New York and the Aquidneck started leaking. Victor, who was then fifteen, sailed as mate and remembered the heavy seas flooding the main deck and the pumps running continuously for thirty-six hours. Even Slocum, with his years of experience, reckoned it a bad storm, “for out on the Atlantic our bark could carry only a mere rag of a foresail, somewhat larger than a table-cloth … Mountains of seas swept clean over the bark in their mad race, filling her decks full to the top of the bulwarks, and shaking things generally.”
Once the cargo was unloaded, Hettie got a small taste of how rough life could be among sailors, as Slocum had to bar and lock his hold, which was full of wine salvaged from a Spanish ship up river. The Aquidneck’s next cargo was bales of alfalfa hay bound for Rio de Janeiro. The trip began with near shipwreck due to a pilot’s incompetence. In fact, the entire crew was suspect, having been delivered by a “vile crimp,” according to Slocum. Subsequently, the Aquidneck was refused entry into Rio because of a cholera outbreak in Rosario, where the hay had been loaded; the ship was sent instead to a nearby quarantine station at Ilha Grande. Slocum was unable to gain clearance to Rio harbor and was turned away at gunpoint when he questioned the ruling. The Brazilian authorities refused even to allow him to take on provisions. With the gun pointed at his ship, and with his family aboard, Slocum had no alternative but to sail back to Rosario with the hay. There they waited until Rio lifted its quarantine restrictions.
