Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072)

by Spencer, Ann

  When they arrived back in Massachusetts, the family unit was again split apart. They had no home on land, so Hettie took lodgings with her sister in Boston — the same sister who had expressed her disapproval of the marriage and hadn’t the time of day for the captain. Hettie may have secretly been in agreement, for years later one of Slocum’s cousins recalled Hettie’s feelings on returning home from her wedding trip. As Grace Brown remembered it, “Hettie found she was not wholly for that life. It was bad all around taking Virginia’s place as a wife and trying to do right by the children.” Slocum stayed with his aunt on his father’s side, Naomi Slocombe Gates, at 69 Saratoga Street, East Boston. Victor and Ben Aymar found their own lodgings, while young Jessie and Garfield stayed with Hettie. Garfield confirmed that the family split involved more than a need to find lodgings when he wrote, “Father did not come to the house.” As Grace Brown saw it, Slocum sorely missed Virginia: “His love for Hettie was not as vital but he seemed very kind and courtly. His children I am told came second to his great love for Virginia.”

  Slocum, now forty-five years old, found himself staring down his shortcomings and failures at every turn. He was effectively penniless, but perhaps the most humiliating aspect of the whole miserable turn of events was that he had to accept the shameful end of his lengthy career — he would never again be hired by a shipping company. The undeniable fact was that he had stranded his last command. Author and sailor Joseph Conrad wrote of the powerful sense of loss a sailor experiences in such circumstances: “More than any other event does stranding bring to the sailor a sense of utter and dismal failure … To keep ships afloat is his business; it is his trust; it is the effective formula at the bottom of all these vague impulses, dreams, and illusions that go to the making up of a boy’s vocation … but saved or not saved, there remains with her commander a distinct sense of loss, a flavour in the mouth of the real, abiding danger that lurks in all the forms of human existence. It is an acquisition, too, that feeling. A man may be the better for it, but he will not be the same.”

  From East Boston, Slocum continued his letter-writing battle with the State Department to take on the Brazilian government for the Aquidneck’s loss. Perhaps he was displacing the blame for stranding his vessel, or at least trying to diffuse it. His arguments were lengthy and self-serving; he began to sound like a tedious crank. Ben Aymar recalled his father searching for employment during this period and said that Slocum “spent much of his time in contacting his former business associates, seeking a lead to something acceptable.” This was a tough mid-life transition for the captain: the job he was most qualified for simply no longer existed. His experiences in tramp freighting had given him some preparation for this change in status. His years wandering between ports hustling for jobs had helped him develop the driven yet flexible attitude he would need to survive as a freelancer. To make money or return to the water, he would have to rely entirely on his own wiliness. Anyone who knew Slocum was aware that he was not only inventive but also awesomely tenacious.

  Slocum decided to cash in on the attention that had come his way with the Liberdade adventure. He wrote a chronicle of the trip, although he had his reservations about his abilities as an author. He claimed that he wrote with “a hand alas! that has grasped the sextant more often than the plane or pen.” His 175-page self-published book, Voyage of the Liberdade, was copyrighted in 1890. The Yarmouth Herald, out of his native Nova Scotia, gave the captain’s first book a fine review: “It is a very interesting narrative of thrilling adventure, pluck and endurance rarely to be met with. It is a story of chances, privations and hardships which are not generally encountered in voyages between South America and U.S. ports.” The same reviewer praised Slocum for his nautical skills, adding that the story was “a record of skilful seamanship and perils encountered with ready resource.” As for his skills as an author, the reviewer remarked, “The book is written in a rollicking spirit, and shows considerable literary ability.” Slocum, although not entirely comfortable telling sea stories with his pen, was to go on to greater literary fame. Voyage of the Liberdade sowed the seeds for his future endeavors.

  Aside from writing, Slocum picked up whatever work he could find on the Boston waterfront. He was offered a job on a steamer but told Garfield that accepting such employment would be his undoing: “I would have to get used to steamships and I do not like steamships.” There was no budging him on this point. He was immovable on other issues as well. When asked to pay the fifty-dollar union fee to work as a stevedore, he flatly refused. He was then asked which church he belonged to, and was indignant that the question was even raised: “It didn’t seem to suffice that I belonged to God’s great church that knew no bounds of creed or sect.”

  One day in the winter of 1892, Slocum was pacing the waterfront weighing his options when he met up with a wealthy, retired whaling captain, Eben Pierce. Pierce’s offer to give him an antiquated sloop was the best opportunity he had had for almost two years. His hopes raised, he went off to Fairhaven the next day to meet the Spray, which lay beached on a pasture on Poverty Point. Once again he was facing a seemingly impossible venture — just the kind that inspired him. He thrived on the challenge of defying unbeatable odds. Captain Pierce invited Slocum to live at his house while he rebuilt the boat. Ben Aymar often visited, and Hettie came for weekends when she could get away. Besides keeping up her duties as a stepmother, she helped make financial ends meet by working as a dressmaker and gown-fitter in Boston. Slocum’s arrangement with Pierce, who had made part of his fortune inventing whaling gear, gave Slocum the freedom to devote large amounts of time and his own passionate determination to reconstructing the Spray. But he did have to pick up work to cover his building costs, which in the end totaled $553.62.

  Heaven only knows what the villagers thought when he stopped work temporarily to tow an iron gunboat from New York to Brazil. The Destroyer, which Slocum referred to as “the first ship of the strong right arm of future Brazil,” was just one of the warships the Brazilian president had purchased to defend himself against opposing forces within his own country. Of his time as navigator-in-command of the ship under tow, Slocum later wrote, “Frankly it was with a thrill of delight that I joined the service of Brazil to lend a hand to the legal government of a people in whose country I had spent happy days.” There were several other, less humanitarian reasons why the job offer had appealed to the captain. For one thing, he needed the money to continue with his building. But there was an even more compelling reason: if Slocum had a bee in his bonnet, as the Fairhaven neighbors sensed, it was over the loss of the Aquidneck. So when the opportunity presented itself to sail back to the country he blamed for his decline, Slocum jumped at it: “Confidentially: I was burning to get a rake at Mello and his Aquideban. He it was who in that ship expelled my bark, the Aquidneck from Ilha Grand some years ago … I was burning to let him know and palpably feel that this time I had in dynamite instead of hay.” Bravado aside, Slocum clearly did not want to get embroiled in the ordeals of the war, nor did he wish to dirty his hands as a soldier of fortune. “Being a man of a peaceful turn of mind, however, no fighting was expected of me, except in the battle with the elements.” His position aboard the gunboat was of “navigator in command.” His job, as it had been when the Liberdade was under tow, would be to keep the Destroyer on course and stable.

  The trip proved futile. Slocum sailed on December 7, 1893, probably with his head full of just how he would deal forcefully with the Aquidneck issue. The irony was that a letter written by the State Department two days later would just miss the tenacious — and by this time vengeful — captain. It contained their final word on the Aquidneck, direct and conclusive: “This Department therefore, does not feel warranted in taking any further action.” Another bit of irony followed after he arrived in Brazil. The Destroyer was accidentally, though some felt quite deliberately, sunk. Not only was Slocum without compensation for the loss of the Aquidneck, but he would have to head home by steamer, unpaid
for his job on the Destroyer. On his return, he vented his frustration at this misadventure by writing his second book. Voyage of the Destroyer from New York to Brazil ended up being so poorly produced that Slocum decided against selling the copies he had self-published. He gave them away, and even then he had a hard time getting rid of them. As to the Destroyer, Slocum wrote, “>Alas! for all our hardships and perils! The latest account that I heard said that the Destroyer lay undone in the basin. The tide ebbing and flowing through her broken hull — a rendezvous for eels and crawfish — and now those high and dry sailors say they had a ‘narrow escape.’”

  There was one more piece of strange news about Slocum to keep the tongues wagging in Fairhaven. Their strange neighbor had been challenged to a duel by a British soldier of fortune. It seems that Lieutenant Carlos A. Rivers felt he had been misrepresented in Voyage of the Destroyer. According to the Boston Sun of August 3, 1894, Rivers was charging that the captain had “ridiculed and defamed him in his recently published book by declaring he was worsted ignominously in a bout with the colored cook, and that his sword was not the historic Toledo blade which the owner claimed it to be.” Rivers promised Slocum he would meet him “anywhere at any time and place, and with any weapons.” Slocum didn’t appear fazed, and replied that his wife’s feelings had to be considered and that in general “duellists should consult their wives.” He backed out of the confrontation, declaring, “My wife would be disturbed to be left a widow … It is better that I catch fish than fight him.”

  When Slocum spent any length of time on dry land he quickly became embroiled in legalities, unpleasantness and trouble. Escape to the sea constantly beckoned, and now he put his mind to what he might do with the Spray, which he had launched on a trial sail in Buzzards Bay, with just himself and Captain Pierce aboard. Slocum was proud of his accomplishment, boasting that “she sat on the water like a swan.” This captain, who had once commanded a 220-foot vessel, was describing a sloop thirty-six feet nine inches long, fourteen feet two inches wide, and four feet two inches deep in her hold, with net tonnage of nine tons and almost thirteen tons gross. The Spray was plain and rough in her construction, but seaworthy with her oak keel and frames, pine hull planking, white pine deck and concrete ballast. Slocum had replaced her centerboard with a stout keel, which he had cut from an oak in a local pasture, and had fashioned the mast from “a smart New Hampshire spruce.” Once again he was master of his own vessel.

  Slocum’s next task was to answer the question that haunted him: “What was there for an old sailor to do?” For Slocum was an “old” sailor; now fifty-one, he had spent over two-thirds of his life on the ocean. As a merchant mariner he had been around the world five times over every kind of sea. His knowledge of ocean conditions, weather and navigation was vast — far beyond the grasp of an ordinary seaman. He knew the sea intuitively. After a year of trying to make a living by fishing and chartering small party cruises, Slocum felt himself beckoned by a plan to surpass all his previous adventures. He pined to be back on the ocean, where, as he well knew, he functioned best. He was tired of struggling to make a living, tired of defending and justifying himself to others. In the year following the launch, the Spray became his home; he had no other, and no ties to keep him on land. Life with Hettie in Boston held no appeal. In a letter to a friend, biographer Walter Teller reflected on Hettie’s part in Slocum’s decision to embark on a solo voyage around the world: “I’m glad you’re quite frank about Hettie. As she had no children nothing said about her will hurt anyone. Perhaps the world owes her something — that is, if she had been more companionable the Captain might never have sailed alone and a great adventure of the human spirit might have come off quite differently.” According to Slocum, when he invited Hettie to join him on his latest adventure, she answered curtly, “Joshua, I’ve had a v’yage.”

  Once he had made up his mind to sail alone around the world, Slocum was filled with purpose and drive. It was a means to display his daring and his impressive navigational skills. The plan also had a practical purpose, which he explained to a reporter from the Boston Daily Globe: “The object of the trip? Well, it is mainly to make money. I see money ahead if I get through safely. I shan’t carry much cargo, but I expect the Spray will be pretty well filled with curios of various kinds before she gets back.” For well over a year before the voyage he had been busying himself with plans to finance it, partly by writing a syndicated newspaper column. Roberts Brothers in Boston agreed to be his agent, and Slocum hustled to find newspapers that would run his dispatches. The positive response excited him, and he wrote enthusiastically to Eugene Hardy at Roberts Brothers: “My Syndicade is filling up … This morning I got the great Mr. Watterson: The Louisville Courier Journal.” Slocum’s reading of Watterson’s letter was too optimistic: all the Courier editor had conveyed was an interest in paying Slocum for what the paper chose to print. His reply to Slocum had been clear: “I can not contract with you for the whole of your series of letters. Knowing your reputation I can count on the letters being of interest but our using them might depend on other contingencies.”

  As he continued to court financial support, the captain looked after the physical preparations. One of his first concerns was to stock his library. Just as in his earlier sailing days, he considered a library on board a necessity. He wrote to Hardy again to ask for books, explaining, “Mr. Wagnalls of the house of Funk and Wagnalls told me the other day that he would also put me up some. I may be able to pay for all this kindness at some future time but not now.” He added that he wasn’t fussy about the condition of the books, and that “a ‘shop-worn’ book would be as good for me as any; so far as the outside goes.” When the books arrived, Slocum sent Hardy a note of gratitude signed “A thousand thanks.” He enthused over Hardy’s choices, noting a “Mr. Stephensons” (Robert Louis Stevenson) and praising in particular a new book called A Strange Career. This biography of the bold English prospector and frontiersman John Gladwin Jebb obviously struck a deep chord with Slocum. The book’s foreword, by H. Rider Haggard, made this acknowledgment of Jebb: “Rarely if ever in this nineteenth century, has a man lived so strange and varied an existence. ‘Adventures are to the adventurous,’ the saying tells us, and certainly they were to Mr. Jebb. From the time he came to manhood he was a wanderer.” Surely Slocum, with his life of romance and adventure, not only identified with Jebb but was inspired by his success. In anticipation of quieter moments, Slocum created a poets’ corner featuring the works of Burns, Tennyson, Longfellow, Lamb and Cervantes. He was a voracious reader, as the Boston Herald noted in a feature it ran before he left: “The library of the Spray includes such books as Darwin’s ‘The Descent of Man’ and ‘Expression of the Emotions,’ ‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson,’ ‘Newcomb’s Popular Astronomy,’ ‘The Life of Macaulay,’ Mark Twain’s ‘Life on the Mississippi,’ Todd’s ‘Total Eclipses of the Sun,’ Bates’ ‘The Naturalist of the Amazon,’ Shakespeare …”

  In stark contrast to his well-stocked library, Slocum sailed with a bare minimum of navigational tools. He planned to circle the globe with what odds and ends he had gathered from years on the water: a sextant and a compass, his charts, and the most current of Massey patent taffrail logs, which he would trail behind the Spray to calculate her speed and determine distance. He planned to buy a clock along the way. He told a reporter, “I don’t go out like the dumb and blind. Understanding nautical astronomy, I will, of course, navigate the world around with some degree of precision natural to any first-rate navigator.”

  He carried few medicines, and some disinfectants; according to Victor, on the Liberdade the family medicine chest had consisted of Brazil nuts, pepper, cinnamon and table salt. Slocum had always enjoyed a strong constitution, with unusual stamina and strength. The Boston Herald stated that the Captain never had sick days and observed that “Capt. Josh is a kinky salt, 51 years old, as spry as a kitten and as nimble as a monkey.” As for the condition of the boat that would transport him, Slocum boasted of t
he Spray’s seaworthiness, and especially of her ability to steer herself. He claimed his little sloop was “very easily managed, even in a breeze.”

  Over the years the seaworthiness of the Spray has been the subject of many a spirited debate among sailors and marine historians. In the May 1940 issue of The Rudder, John Hanna wrote a cautionary note to those sailors who wished to build a copy of the Spray, referring to them as “the suicide squad.” He spelled out a few facts: “A big lurching cross sea, that would scarcely disturb a properly designed hull, can — especially if it coincides, as it often does, with an extra-savage puff of a squall — flip over a Spray hull just as you would a poker chip … Perhaps I can save a life or two by explaining, as simply as possible, the basic reason (skipping many other good reasons) why Spray is the worst possible boat for anyone, and especially anyone lacking the experience and resourcefulness of Slocum, to take off soundings.” He then points out that boats fashioned after the famous sloop are stiff, and should they ever heel beyond a critical point, “they flop right over as inevitably as a soup plate, which they resemble.”

  Howard Chapelle, a curator in the Smithsonian Institution’s Division of Transportation, was every bit as harsh: “The Spray was a poor job, badly framed and fastened. Slocum was not a boat carpenter, of course. The Spray had been a typical Long Island Sound centreboard oyster sloop originally, and [Slocum] added a little to the outside depth of her keel, doing all rebuilding himself, without adequate funds … It is sheer ignorance to tout this damned bucket as a ‘splendid ship’ for she was not even a good oyster sloop with her board out.”