Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072)
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Two other sources lend credence to a 1908 departure. Alice C. Longaker, whose family spent their summers at Lagoon Heights on Martha’s Vineyard, sent Teller an excerpt from her father’s record book chronicling those vacations. His entry for August 13, 1910, reads: “Capt. Joshua Slocum left Vineyard Haven on the day before Thanksgiving (1908) in the Spray for some southern port (Probably the Bahamas) and was never heard from to this date. Am not certain that the above is correct. He may have sailed from New Bedford.” Teller wrote “1909” in the margin of her letter. Thomas Fleming Day, editor of The Rudder, wrote of Slocum’s departure in the magazine’s January 1911 edition: “I’m afraid we must give up all hope of ever seeing the old skipper again; it is now over two years [my emphasis] since he departed on his last voyage. He told me that he was going up the Orinoco River, and through the Rio Negro into the Amazon and home that way, and there is no news that he ever made the river or any port, and surely some of my correspondents would have seen Spray and sent word.” Over two years from the publication date would establish the beginning of Slocum’s final voyage as November 1908.
So, most of the evidence, including Hettie’s obituary, points to November 12, 1908, as the date Slocum set sail. That would have made him sixty-four years old. The second and more mysterious question concerns what happened to him. No evidence has ever been found. His jumble of books, newspaper clippings, curios, notebooks and charts, along with his sextant and his framed letter from President Roosevelt, all went down with the Spray.
Of course, everybody had a theory at the time. In his article “Quite Another Matter,” which appeared in The Rudder in March 1968, H.S. Smith reflected, “Captain Slocum probably was the worst ship’s husband I have encountered, and I wasn’t a bit surprised when the Spray went missing about four years later. To me, this always has been something of an anomaly even though I have seen my share of craft that seemed well handled but poorly kept.” He reflected on the boat’s construction: “Spray’s planking was in poor shape. No two planks appeared to be of the same shape, size, or thickness, or even of the same kind of wood … the shape she was in would give the horrors to anyone who went to sea. It could be the captain took care of some of the neglect as soon as he quit the land, but there was nothing in the world he could have done for the way she had been roughly cobbled together in the first place.”
Captain Levi Jackson was one of those who contended for last man to see the Spray. He was fishing for cod off the Muskeget Channel shoals when he spotted Slocum’s boat. He considered it an unwise time for a sailing boat to be heading southeast, as there was a heavy wind coming from that direction. Jackson could only assume that Slocum was lost on the shoals, where many ships had been wrecked. A local paper reported, “The last person known to have seen the Spray is Captain Levi Jackson of Edgartown, Massachusetts on November 12th, 1908 when the Spray sailed for the West Indies. On that night a severe gale sprang up from the southeast hauling to the southwest, making a heavy cross sea and the sloop is thought to have been caught in a tide rip and tripped foundering before an offing was made. No wreckage was ever found.”
The theory that the Spray had gone down suddenly near landfall was supported by a Vineyarder, Captain Donald Lemar Poole, who became a close confidant of Walter Teller. It was a speculation that Slocum would have appreciated, as he knew how real a possibility such an outcome was. After his return from the circumnavigation voyage, Slocum had written, “I had sailed over oceans. I have since completed a course over them all and sailed around the whole world without so nearly meeting a fatality as on that trip on the lagoon through a squall which sent us drifting helplessly to sea where we should have been incontinently lost.”
Victor Slocum considered it most likely that his father was run down in the shipping lanes by a steamer. Hettie had her own theory, which she expressed in her letter to Mrs. McNutt: “I am always deeply impressed that some thing serious has happened. Nor do I consider it strange if the ‘Spray’ has not met her fate at sea … Captain Slocum’s love for adventure I have always believed led him beyond all reason, for his own good, and the well being of his family … I really think that the voyage to West Indies was more than he was physically able to stand.” Indeed, Slocum’s physical condition was far from peak. It is possible that he collapsed or blacked out and fell overboard, or became despondent and allowed the sea to take him. He might also have died in a remote port or settlement.
Garfield Slocum said his father had always wanted to be buried at sea. Garfield’s older brother, Ben Aymar, mused awkwardly about this in a letter to Teller: “Have been picturing the last hours of Capt JS and the Spray this way: Captain J was a quick striker, practical to the core as he sailed southward alone, he may have had a deep thinking spell on his trip only a few hours out from Martha’s Vineyard. He could visualize correctly. In a vision he could see the Spray as his final answer to all attempts he had made to regain his forever hard earned reputation as a sailor … I pictured him on first studying on how to completely rob the sharks of any chances to profit from his proposed [illegible]. He decides to clean deck, no drifting telltales … heavy etching on deck … he sails on awaiting a final answer to his contemplated exit — the coast is clear, beautiful weather report — that perfect mystery and he was equal to perfecting his final act on earth. He heard this courtly still voice and obeyed.”
For years afterward there were unconfirmed sightings of Slocum in the Caribbean and South America. The New Bedford Standard ran this story on May 27, 1911: “Lone mariner reported: White man seen on the Orinoco River, maybe Captain Slocum, commander of the famous sloop Spray [who] planned to explore the headwaters of the South American River when he landed here in November 1908. When he left here in November, 1908, Captain Slocum never reported at West Indies where he intended to stop.” In a 1913 journal entry, Alice C. Longaker’s mother noted, “Mr. O.J. Slocum stopped in to see us a while on Labor Day … He says he had heard that his brother, the Captain was alive and down in the Orionoco Country. He says that if he is alive he will ‘turn up’ at the celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal.”
Because Slocum had been such a larger-than-life seadog, there were bound to be unbelievable accounts. Years later a tall tale emerged that someone had seen a man who looked exactly like Slocum in Washington, D.C., the only difference being that the Slocum look-alike had a wooden leg. Others felt that a showman like Slocum would just turn up one day with another wild tale of adventure to tell. Reports in a New York paper told of an explorer sighted along the Amazon River who people were positive was Captain Slocum. The explorer said that he was living with the natives. When the rumors reached Hettie, all she could say was, “No one can make me believe that because first of all Josh would not go native, he just would not mix with them in any sense expecially living among them … If it were so he must have lost his mind and is really lost.” Another strange rumor was that Slocum was living like French painter Paul Gauguin — on a tropical island with three or more wives.
Over the years, no authenticated claims developed, and it was accepted that Captain Slocum had gone down in the Spray. Hettie filed the Absentee petition concerning Slocum’s disappearance to the Dukes County Court on April 22, 1912. On January 15, 1924, he was declared legally dead on the day he supposedly had last set sail — November 14, 1909.
Since then, another theory has surfaced that, if valid, would solve the mystery of Slocum’s disappearance once and for all. In a 1959 article in the Quincy, Massachusetts, Patriot Ledger, “Capt. Slocum Story: Solution of Sea Mystery Indicated in New Facts,” Edward Rowe Snow declared, “One of the world’s greatest sea mysteries, the loss of the Spray … may have been solved yesterday at the offices of the Quincy Patriot Ledger by the disclosure that Capt. Joshua Slocum, who vanished at sea in 1909, may have been run down by a steamer off one of the Lesser Antilles within a relatively few hours after he had left the home of a farmer of the vicinity.” The source of the revelation was Captain Charles H. Bond, whom
Snow considered unimpeachable, having checked into his background and references. Bond had heard the story from Felix Meinickheim, a planter on the islands. According to Meinickheim, Slocum arrived on Turtle Island, Lesser Antilles, and visited with him for a few days. Then he left to explore the Orinoco River as he had planned. Captain Bond continued his story to Snow: “But Captain Slocum was destined never to complete his plans, and here is how it happened. Two nights after Captain Slocum left, Felix Meinickheim was sailing on the little mail steamer which took passengers and freight island to island.” Meinickheim observed something not quite right about the mail boat: just above the waterline there was a deep cut in the stem. The captain of the mail boat told him they had run down a native boat the night before. Meinickheim asked how he could be sure it was a native boat. The answer “Who else could it be?” left the planter uneasy. On further questioning, he learned that the boat had been run down between midnight and four a.m. As Bond told the story to Snow, the second mate on that graveyard watch admitted to Meinickheim that “it had been a terribly dark night, overcast, and at the moment of contact with the other craft, there definitely was no one at the wheel of the other vessel … In the few seconds when I saw the other craft, I made out that she was not a native of this area.”
Meinickheim pieced the puzzle together. The Spray was the only non-native boat cruising the waters, and the timing of the accident coincided with where Slocum would most probably have been. The planter and the steamer’s officers decided to keep the story quiet. It came out fifty years later because, as Bond explained, “There is no one now alive today who will suffer from my revelation of what really took place to send Captain Slocum to his death aboard the Spray.” This story can never be proven, but it has the ring of truth, or at least probability, to it.
Thomas Fleming Day’s tribute to the lost captain in The Rudder’s January 1911 edition ended on a meditative note: “Peace to Captain Slocum wherever he may sleep, for he deserves at least one whispered tribute of prayer from every sailorman for what he did to rob the sea of its bad name; and for such a man, who loved every cranny of her dear old blue heart, who for years made her windswept stretches his home and highway, what is more fitting than an ocean burial?”
Joshua Slocum’s life story has adventure, passion, tragedy, loss, scandal and a mysterious end. Its hero was part poet, philosopher, dreamer, hustler and adventurer. He was a pioneer, an explorer and a wonderful spinner of tales. But not far beneath his surface was a troubled, misunderstood and desperately insecure man. Hard-headed, irascible and eccentric as he was, Captain Slocum lived his life the only way it made sense to him, and in so doing accomplished a transcendent feat of seamanship. Slocum lived his life with little compromise, and where he knew he could live it best — on the sea. And in the end, the sea claimed him as her own.
On Brier Island, where Slocum as a child was lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the waves, in Westport Baptist Church, there is a verse inscribed on a bronze plaque on Pew 13. The verse is from an ancient psalmody that was found in a Westport home, and seems a fitting requiem for an old sailor who had always listened to and could never ignore the sea’s calling.
Not in the churchyard shall he sleep,
Amid the silent gloom;
His home was on the mighty deep,
And there shall be his tomb.
He loved his own bright, deep blue sea;
O’er it he loved to roam;
And now his winding sheet shall be
That same bright ocean’s foam.
No village bell shall toll for him
Its mournful, solemn dirge;
The winds shall chant a requiem
To him beneath the surge.
Appendix 1
A “Log” of Joshua Slocum’s Circumnavigation aboard the Spray, 1895—98
1895
April
24 Sets sail from Boston harbor.
May
7 Spray sails from Gloucester, Mass.
13 Visits boyhood home of Brier Island, N.S.
July
1 Spray sails from Yarmouth, N.S.
10 Making 150 miles a day, Spray 1,200 miles east of Cape Sable.
19 Flores Island, in the Azores.
20 Arrives in Faial, Azores.
24 Sets sail from Horta, Faial.
26 J.S. ill from meal of plums and white cheese.
August
4 Arrives Gibraltar.
24 U.S. Consul at Gibraltar visits Spray.
25 Sails from Gibraltar, chased by pirates.
31 End of three days of squalls.
September
2 “Scudding her for the channel between Africa and the island of Fuerteventura” in the Canaries.
10 “Then leaving the Cape Verde Islands out of sight astern, I found myself once more sailing a lonely sea and in a solitude supreme all around.”
16—20 Becalmed by mid-Atlantic doldrums; only 300 miles sailed in ten days.
26 Latitude 5º North, longitude 26º 30’ West.
30 Crosses the equator at longitude 29º 30’ W.
October
5 Casts anchor in Pernambuco harbor, forty days out from Gibraltar.
6—23 Repairs and adjustments made to the Spray.
24 Sets sail for Rio de Janeiro.
November
5 Arrives Rio de Janeiro.
6—27 “As I had decided to give the Spray a yawl rig for the tempestuous waters of Patagonia, I here placed on the stern a semicircular brace to support a jigger mast.”
28 Sails from Rio de Janeiro.
December
11 Spray beached north of Montevideo, Uruguay; “I suddenly remembered that I could not swim.”
12 Anchors in Maldonado Bay.
? Sails to Montevideo. Dock and repair, free of charge by Royal Mail Steamship Company; carpenters mend keel and dory.
29 Spray sails to Buenos Aires with Captain Howard, a friend from Cape Cod, aboard.
30 Arrives Buenos Aires.
1896
January
? “I unshipped the sloop’s mast at Buenos Aires and shortened it by seven feet. I reduced the length of the bowsprit by about five feet …”
26 Sails from Buenos Aires.
27 Up the River Plate against a headwind. February
11 Spray rounds Cape Virgins; enters the Strait of Magellan, battles rain squalls for thirty hours.
14 Anchors at Punta Arenas, Chile; warnings about hostile Fuegian settlements.
19 Sails from Punta Arenas, “into the country and very core of the savage Fuegians.”
20 Celebrates fifty-second birthday with a cup of coffee south of Charles Island. Spray stays anchored in bed of kelp for two days of heavy winds.
March
3 Sails from Port Tamar for Cape Pillar; gathering storm in the northwest.
7 Fourth day of gales; Spray driven southeast toward the pitch of the Cape.
8 Spray in the midst of the Milky Way of the Sea. Having sighted and steered for Fury Island, she sails in through the Cockburn Channel.
9 A williwaw carries the sloop out of the cove into deep sea.
10 Reaches St. Nicholas Bay, “where I had cast anchor February 19,” having circumnavigated the “wildest part of desolate Tierra del Fuego.”
April
13 Spray leaves Port Angosto for the seventh and last time.
26 Spray makes landfall by night at Juan Fernández.
May-June
5 Spray sails from Juan Fernández. Sailing “with a free wind day after day.”
July
16 Arrives in Samoa after seventy-two days without a port.
17 Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson visits the Spray
August-September
20 Spray sails from Samoa; sets course north of the Horn Islands and Fiji, instead of south and down west side of the archipelago.
October
2 Arrives in Newcastle, Australia, after a forty-two-day stormy passage.
10 Spray arrives in
Sydney.
Mid-October-November
Remains docked in Sydney, where J.S. receives many visitors and is feted by admirers.
December
6 Leaves Sydney, planning to sail to Mauritius by way of Cape Leeuwin on Australia’s west coast.
20 Anchors at Waterloo Bay for three days for protection from fierce winds.
25 Christmas Day at a berth in Melbourne harbor.
1897
January-March
Jan 24 Leaves Melbourne; waits out bad summer weather in Tasmania. Forced to abandon plans to sail around Cape Leeuwin. Gives first public lecture, in Tasmania in February.
April
16 Weighs anchor to head round Cape Howe and up to Cape Bundoora.
22 Arrives again in Sydney, after clear passage.
May
9 Sets sail from Sydney for Port Stevens.
20 Rounds Great Sandy Cape and picks up the trade winds.
24 Sails through the islands near the Barrier Reef.
26 Spray anchors at Port Denison, Queensland.
28 Public lecture in Bowen, illustrated by stereopticon.
29 Sets sail for Cooktown.
31 Arrives Cooktown.
June
6 Sets sail, heading north.
10 Mid-channel in Torres Strait.
22 Only American ship represented at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee on Thursday Island, off Australia’s northern tip.
24 Sets course for Keeling (Cocos) Islands, 2,700 miles away.
26 “Latitude by observation at noon, 10º 23’ S.”
27 “133 miles on the log. Latitude by observation at noon 10º 25’ S.”
28 Continues sailing west on parallel of 10º 25’ S., “as true as a hair.”
July
2 Island of Timor in view.
11 Christmas Island in sight.
17 Casts anchor at Keeling (Cocos) Islands; twenty-three days out from Thursday Island.