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

by Spencer, Ann

  The praise and recognition he had earned for his writing gave Slocum the confidence to dream about new possibilities for a man of his skills. He was flattered by an introduction given by his cousin Joel Slocum to a lecture he delivered in Concord, New Hampshire, and later wrote to his admiring relative, “You see I had, with my many accomplishments (excuse me) forgotten that I was a poet … and the words came up new and crisp. You said ‘prophetic’ and you were entirely right.” The same month his book came out, Slocum was considering some kind of submarine adventure. He wrote to C.C. Buel, “I hope that the Century will not forget me and my Iceland trip! It may not be of absorbing interest — but I have a voyage in mind that will fasten itself upon all classes of readers and to realize that voyage I am looking to the disposal, first, of the Spray; people buy things rare in history someone may buy my old boat and so help me into my submarine explorer.”

  Once again, nothing came of his plan, and Slocum grew increasingly restless. He and Hettie again took rooms in New York, where he paced and tried to arrive at a new plan. One scheme was outlandish even for Slocum: he thought he might try his hand at aviation, and sent a naive letter of inquiry to Professor Otis Mason at the Smithsonian Institution. “I am not the old fossil that some take me for,” he asserted, “and I am not for old ideas when new are better.” Mason was a colleague of aviation pioneer Samuel Pierpont Langley, who had gained worldwide attention with his unmanned free flights. Slocum saw himself as holding a second mate’s position on a flying ship, and pointed out his qualifications: “I consider the human mind above all else that we know of in this world. You will see that at any rate I could trust even my own poor head to find my way about independent of the machine we call chronometer. I sailed scientifically, too.” What Professor Mason made of Slocum’s proposal isn’t known.

  Son Garfield, who was living on the Spray during the winter of 1901, believed that his father needed to be alone, away from Hettie. He summed up the matter simply: “I assume that he and Hettie did not pull on the same rope.” Finally, Slocum came up with a plan: he would take the Spray to Buffalo to exhibit at the Pan-American Exposition. The Spray had always been an attraction, and at every stop on his circumnavigation Slocum had picked up curios to display. A New York Post reporter marveled at the treasures he had found aboard: “The cabins of the Spray are now an instructive museum. He shows you a piece of rock which was taken from Robinson Crusoe’s cave, native weapons, mats from the several islands he has visited, and also a fair-sized canoe hewn out of the solid wood. He has marine curiosities in abundance, the collection of coral being especially good.” Another reporter remarked on “a hold full of curiosities, shells, sea fans, canoes, bamboo sticks … He has several books full of newspaper clippings.” Others recalled seeing a Hammond typewriter, an Australian boomerang and a Zulu spear. Some remembered how Slocum welcomed visitors and showed them around the Spray for the price of an autograph in her visitors’ book. But not always — others recalled paying ten cents to board and that Slocum later upped the entry fee to a quarter.

  Slocum exhibited the Spray in Buffalo from May to November 1901. Traveling there and back was complicated. He purchased a lifeboat, and a small engine to power it, to tow the sloop up the Hudson River as far as Troy; there it entered the Erie Canal with its mast unstepped and secured to the deck. In Buffalo the Spray was hauled out, raised in a sling and loaded onto a dray to be pulled by horses to the exposition’s lakeside site. The Spray was moored in one of the fairground lagoons, just past the Electric Tower and the performance stadium. A sideshow atmosphere prevailed. Slocum shared the limelight with Chiquita the Human Doll, an infant incubator, a hula dancer, and Eskimos (as they were then billed) exhibited in imitation snow igloos. The “Bennett Illustrated Souvenir Guide Pan-American Exposition, 1901” advertised Slocum as “A Daring New England Yankee.” As for why one would want to visit him, the brochure explained, “The captain made ports where none were ever made before and picked up numberless curios which constituted the cargo of the ‘Spray’ when he once more hove to in Boston harbor. This curio collection, as well as his vessel, he has brought with him to the Exposition, and it will be to the profit of every visitor to shake hands with the gallant captain, a man of stout heart and steady nerve, a veteran of the salt sea, and a man of mighty mould and character.” After paying an admission fee, fair-goers were rowed out in the Spray’s dory to meet the captain, who regaled them with tales from his travels, the “carpet tacks on the deck” yarn being a big crowd pleaser.

  Always eager to make a buck, Slocum came up with an ingenious bit of marketing. He had saved the old sail that had taken the Spray as far as Australia. He cut it up and inserted small pieces of it — “A piece of her original mainsail, which was torn, beyond repair, in the gale off Cape Horn, 4th to 8th of March, 1896 — a fierce tempest!” — inside the booklet he sold. Thus, the real reason for buying the booklet was to acquire the little “Sloop Spray” souvenir that accompanied it. For some admirers this was like buying a piece of the true cross.

  By the end of the exposition, Slocum had squirreled away enough money to buy his first house and some land. The Spray was a poignant sight as she headed down the Erie Canal with, as the local paper noted, “an old work horse for a sail.” When asked if he had had the horse sharp shod, a Buffalo newspaper reported Slocum’s answer: “‘You see’, explained the captain, ‘it don’t make much difference which way the wind blows, we get there just the same. No, I didn’t have the horse sharp shod. The canal don’t go over many hills between here and the Hudson’”

  The man who had not had a permanent address since childhood was now going home to a family farm in the Cape Cod village of West Tisbury. And the Buffalo paper didn’t miss the significance of the moment: “The horse that furnished the motive power to run the sloop down the canal will furnish the power to run a plow on the captain’s farm in Martha’s Vineyard. The hand that steered the tiller of the Spray will steer the plow; the hand that refused to allow a woman to accompany him across the Atlantic will say ‘gee-up’ to the horse, when it comes plowin’ time.”

  But he was one of that rare breed that is alive only at sea. When we first went aboard, he had been sitting, or perhaps slumped is the better word, by the wheel in an attitude that betokened complete dejection. There was an air about him of abstraction and disinterest that was so deep it was as though he was living in a private dream world.

  But the minute the lines were off and the Spray gathered way, he had turned into quite another man. He moved precisely, firmly, quickly but not hastily, about the ship’s business, and he had the Spray in hand about as effortlessly as anyone could. There was, I do believe, a sparkle in his eye, and there was little aboard that he didn’t notice. He didn’t say much, but you knew that he was a ship’s captain, if from nothing else, from his confident bearing, and from the quiet preciseness of his commands.

  — H.S. Smith in The Skipper, March 1968

  12

  Swallowing the Anchor?

  Ports are no good … ships rot… men go to the devil.

  — Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea

  On land sailors are square pegs, and it quickly became obvious to the people of Martha’s Vineyard that their famous captain was an eccentric, to put it kindly. Living aboard boats most of his life had made Slocum an outsider to polite society. But he had decided to give this “land living” a try, or so he told the papers on his way home from Buffalo.

  Martha’s Vineyard offered Hettie her first home as a married woman. For sixteen years she had been forced to move back and forth between relatives, to make do and live with whoever would have her. In effect, she had been abandoned financially and emotionally by her husband, left behind to care for his children. But that was about to change, or so it seemed; her husband was on his way home and intending to stay ashore. The small house on Martha’s Vineyard had cost Slocum $305 — money he had made from his world lecturing and book peddling. The June 26, 1902 edition of the Vineyar
d Gazette noted that “Capt. and Mrs. Slocum arrived Saturday and occupied their newly purchased house on the Sabbath.”

  The village of West Tisbury was the agricultural heart of the island. Slocum had decided he would become a farmer; the Spray would be moored nearby and taken out only for short business trips. Slocum was “swallowing the anchor” — at least, that was the impression given in an article by Clifton Johnson in the October 1902 issue of Outing magazine: “Of late the captain has become a thoroughgoing landsman and has cast anchor on a little Martha’s Vineyard farm, where he lives on the outskirts of a rural village with several old sea captains for neighbors. His house is one of the most ancient on the island — an oak-ribbed ark of a dwelling with warped floors and tiny window panes and open fireplaces. Its aspect is at present rather forlorn and naked, but the captain knows how to wield the hammer and the saw, and will soon make it snug.”

  The hammering and sawing resulted in a small boxed porch on the front of the house. Other additions were not quite so conventional. Slocum had designed the Liberdade with a mind to dories, sampans and native canoes, and the same eclectic touch was evident in his land home. He created overhanging eaves, influenced by the houses in the South Pacific, where such eaves were necessary for shade. One of his West Tisbury neighbors complained that Slocum showed no regard for architectural unity when he added a Japanese-style roof over the front of the house. However, a local newspaper was impressed, declaring that “it was his own taste which transformed it into one of the most attractive places on the island.” In a letter to Walter Teller, Garfield remembered that his father had liked the house because of the large timbers and because the knees put him in mind of a ship’s hold. Another neighbor recalled the house as having a “marine flavor.” Beside the front door the captain arranged shells and coral. Throughout Fag End, as Slocum named the old house, there was more evidence of a seafaring man’s touch: starfish, sea fans, brain coral and some old scallop shells. One relative relieved him of a large clam shell with fluted edges, to use for a birdbath in her garden. Slocum held on to the most enormous shells, as they were perfect for ballasting the Spray.

  Slocum had plans for making the most of the land at Fag End, or Rudder Ranch as he jokingly referred to his property in a letter to Clifton Johnson. And Johnson in his article for Outing was impressed by how quickly the old seadog seemed to be getting his land legs: “In a single season he has become an enthusiastic agriculturist, is proud of his flourishing garden and would like to own and make fruitful all the land about. He delights to point out the beauties of the sturdy oak woods which overspread much of the region, the promising condition of the abounding huckleberry bushes, the possibilities of the wet hollows for cranberry culture and of the protected slopes for fruit trees.”

  What didn’t appear in the article were Johnson’s impressions of Slocum’s character. The journalist’s scribbled notes offer insights that would have annoyed Slocum. He observed that the captain “has a temper and explodes like a firecracker when he is affronted … Likes to relate his experiences and observations … Wags his head and gestures and sometimes acts out bits.” He summed up Slocum as “lithe, nervous, energetic … He looks 10 years younger than he really is.” Although it is not known what evidence Johnson had for the following remark, he also cited a quality that would have been essential to Slocum at sea: “Never loses his head in an emergency.”

  Now that Slocum was landlocked, people were finally getting to know him, warts and all. His temper was something he could no longer hide away and take for a sail. One of Slocum’s cousins, Grace Murray Brown, remembered him as “capable of letting his irascible side show up if sufficient provocation was given or was suspected. One could not hide anything from a mind like his … slights would never be forgotten or forgiven.” She felt that her uncle (as she called Slocum) had a capacity for caring for people of like sympathies, but was also too impatient when he could not “be as independent as his nature demanded.” Perhaps she summed him up best when she pointed out in a letter to Teller, “I can not be too emphatic in saying Uncle Josh did not suffer fools gladly … that may be hackneyed but he never bothered with anything or anyone who did not measure up. But was so appreciative when he found them acceptable.”

  Slocum was often testy with his brother Ornan, who lived on the island and ran a shoe shop in Vineyard Haven. Ornan did not have his brother’s strong constitution, and Joshua had little patience for him. When the kindly but slower-moving younger brother came to help Joshua plant fruit trees at the West Tisbury farm, the two ended up bickering, as they always did. Slocum was outraged at Ornan, whom he accused of running the cultivator or the horse up against his precious trees. Grace Brown remembers it as “a terrible row … the Captain said Ornan was trying to ruin his beautiful little trees out of pure cussedness.” The family folklore as related by Grace Brown is that after the explosion, they refused to speak to each other “until one day they ran afoul of one another on a narrow path. Ornan, goodhearted soul, thought what two jackasses they were, so as they were about to pass eyes straight ahead, Ornan gave Josh the shoulder spinning him around. Luckily Josh had his sealegs on or this tale might have ended differently. Ornan with a wide grin greeted him with a ‘Good morning Captain’. Josh relented by gripping his brother’s hand in a lusty shake and a cry, ‘How are you Ornan?’ So ended that bit.” Ornan never did return to work the cultivator. In fact, Joshua’s days with the cultivator were drawing to a close. He was wearying of land life. He tried growing hops the second season on the Vineyard, but was not successful.

  It was becoming obvious to the islanders that their famous captain was having trouble adapting to land life. Joseph Chase Allen was a boy of about eight when he knew Slocum on Martha’s Vineyard. He described the captain this way: “very quick in his movements, spoke rapidly, clipped off his sentences, inclined to be snappy in his speech as men will be who are accustomed to give orders, and not the kind of man one would be tempted to take liberties with.” Islanders long remembered Slocum giving one young man a cutting lecture on the proper way to come up alongside a boat without smashing into it.

  Allen also remembered some of Slocum’s eccentricities, which were the outcome of a long, solitary life. On one occasion he and Slocum joined a small coach of travelers coming home from the island ferry. One of the passengers was a well-dressed lady. “I was on the front seat,” Allen recalled, “when I heard a hell of a rustle of paper. The man leans forward and says to the woman, ‘I hope you don’t object to the smell of salt codfish.’ I looked round and he had the biggest jack-knife I ever saw in my life and was hewing chunks off the fish and eating it and he ate a good deal of it the way to West Tisbury. That was Slocum in 1904.”

  There was no missing the fact that Slocum was an old seadog. Even his relatives didn’t know what to expect next. According to Grace Brown, her whole family knew that Slocum had a gift for the dramatic, but he still could surprise them. In everyday conversation, her Uncle Josh would just start shouting poetry by Robert Burns that he had memorized. Another day, “he burst upon our view by way of the kitchen with an enormous salt cod tucked under his wing with just a paper around its middle but the tail sticking out and part of the other end where the head was happily off. Mother laughed so at the sight that father and the rest of us came in from our share of the jobs. Captain had been up and down Atlantic Avenue renewing friendships along the wharves where one of the old salts gave him the cod.”

  Slocum still had his sea captain friends, but wasn’t a popular man with other contemporaries. He made small efforts to contribute to island life with his famous stereopticon lectures. The West Tisbury News advertised “an account of his voyage around the world, at Agricultural Hall, Thanksgiving evening, November 27th. Capt. Slocum has kindly offered to donate the proceeds of his lecture to the Congregational Church.” But one islander who heard him lecture about his sea adventures felt that Slocum had become “a little alienated to social joys”; “I daresay the local gossip of Wes
t Tisbury had become a little tame to one who had spread tacks on the deck of his boat in Tierra del Fuego,” he speculated. In his short time on land Slocum had gained a reputation for being opinionated, acerbic and difficult to befriend. As Hettie put it with subtle irony, “It did not hurt his feelings to let you know what he was thinking.” She joked that she referred to him as “Josh, Joshua, or Captain if I thought he needed the honor.”

  Grace Brown expressed some sympathy for Slocum’s growing uneasiness. “A winter would be unthinkable for a man of his volatile nature holed up in a small house in a small village,” she opined. “It might have been manageable if Hettie had had a different makeup but even a siren would have a hard time of it … to keep his wings clipped.” More and more often, Slocum was seen aboard the Spray. During some of that time, Garfield sailed around the island with his father. He noticed how Slocum paced the deck, stared out to the horizon, and then simply went below with his books. Garfield was worried about his father’s growing agitation: “Father was a changed man when he returned from his lone voyage. He acted to me like he wanted to be alone. That voyage was a terrible strain on him. Father was so different when he returned from sailing alone, he did not talk to me much. He appeared to be deep in thought.” It was obvious to all who knew him that it was time for him to be alone again — to return to life aboard the only home that made sense to him, the Spray.