When one reads of Slocum’s later wrecks and strandings, his dismastings and gale-shredded sails, it is as tempting to imagine his shock at the first devastation to a vessel under his command as it is instructive later to learn with what equanimity he accepted calamity. Victor wondered why Joshua’s recollection of his father’s brutality never seemed “greatly resented by his son … who rather regarded it as a just exercise of parental authority … I have heard him tell his mates about it at the cabin table. They thought it was pretty rough.”
Rough was how it was in “Nova Scarcity,” up there in extremis, with hard soil, hard weather, and hard Bay of Fundy tides. The Slocombes—originally settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from England—were among five hundred nominal Loyalist refugees banished to Digby Island in 1783, where they were granted five hundred acres. The Slocombes were in fact Quaker pacifists—enemies of war—rather than supporters of King George, but according to whatever principle or purpose, they were naysayers even to Revolutionary naysayers. They were tough and needed to be. Self-reliant and hardy, they accepted with pride the ethnic and cultural tag “bluenose,” applied to Slocombes. (Joshua’s grandfather was known as “John-the-Exile” after fleeing Massachusetts and the prospect of being drafted into either the Continental Army or King George’s Redcoats.) It is a testimony to Slocum’s empathy that at fifty-four he wrote an uncharacteristically revealing outburst to his cousin Joel: “Poor father! What a load he carried and how he grubbed a living, for us all, out of the old clay farm. And how I’ve seen him break down when he came back to the ‘Family Altar’ after the season of laying it aside … and cry Father, Father!”
Born into a stoic culture, he wasn’t about to complain, yet as Walter Teller,3 his earliest biographer, concluded, he was “one of the breed who struggle against the world’s arrangements.” This characterization requires modification, for Slocum not only accepted but welcomed that branch of cosmic governance ruled by nature. A boy growing up within sight and smell of the ferocious Bay of Fundy tides—violently ebbing and flowing as much as forty-eight feet between low and high, the oceans’ most extreme rise and fall, stirred by whirlpools and beset by standing waves—couldn’t walk along the beach without learning quickly to understand the consequences of such immense pulls of moon and sun. He would have been alert to the effects of wind blowing across water, heard the far-off “rote” or roar of seas breaking, read signs in the sky for premonitions of trouble, accepted the menace of fog, smelled the aroma of seaweed at low tide, experienced the dangers of hypothermia, heard stories of sailors lost to bad luck or bad judgment.
Bad luck was a tricky question, and some born sailors tried to dodge happenstance by ritualized superstition while others accepted it with an attitude akin to sangfroid, if not derision. The polar explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, taking a hard line on roller-coaster rides of luck, maintained that the experience of “adventure” at sea was merely a confirmation of incompetence and improper preparation.
Instruction in kismet was quotidian along the Bay of Fundy. Like most of his fellow dwellers on the Nova Scotia shore, Slocum purposefully did not learn how to swim, on the theory that pathetically dog-paddling against the sea’s freezing inhospitality was folly, and that being unable to swim would encourage a sailor neither to fall overboard—likely weighed down by oilskins and seaboots—nor to err in seamanship and sink. How to keep his footing aboard, and how to understand where in the world he happened to be, were the lessons he set out to learn at sixteen, when he left for good both his father and Nova Scotia, escaping to sea. Unlike Orpheus fleeing Hades, he needed no warning: Joshua Slocum would not look back.
1 David T. Hugo, “Nova Scotia to Martha’s Vineyard: Notes on Captain Joshua Slocum,” The Dukes County Intelligencer (August 1969).
2 Victor Slocum, Capt. Joshua Slocum: The Life and Voyages of America’s Best Known Sailor (Sheridan House, 1950).
3 Much is known of Slocum’s history, owing to his books and letters, the biography written by his eldest son, Victor, and notably Walter Teller’s works. Teller’s research for the first version of his biography—The Search for Joshua Slocum—was prodigious; after that book was published in 1953, new material flooded to the author, who used it to publish a revised version in 1978.
TWO
Coming Aboard Through the Hawse-Hole
The wonderful sea charmed me from the first. At the age of eight I had already been afloat along with other boys on the bay, with chances greatly in favor of being drowned. When a lad I filled the important post of cook on a fishing-schooner; but I was not long in the galley, for the crew mutinied at the appearance of my first duff, and “chucked me out” before I had a chance to shine as a culinary artist. The next step toward the goal of happiness found me before the mast in a full-rigged ship bound on a foreign voyage. Thus I came “over the bows,” and not in through the cabin windows, to the command of a ship.
—Sailing Alone Around the World
JOSHUA SLOCUM BUILT his first sailing vessel while he was still on the farm up on the windward side—the cold, barren, snow-holding side—of North Mountain, from which he was forcefully reminded of the theatricality of the Bay of Fundy. Sea smells were stirred by the tide and driven to him by gusts, and he could sometimes hear waves breaking against the rocky headlands. When the dense fog burned off, he could even see the sea. No older than eight, by the shore of a tiny millpond set a mile downhill at the edge of the farm, he lashed together three stout fence rails to make a raft and rigged this with a fence-rail mast, to which he attached bed-linen rags. Thus, downwind, he made his first shore-to-far-shore crossings. (Transatlantic sailors refer to their enterprise, when successful, as “crossing the pond.”) This was his introduction to boat building, and to the lesson that sailing “downhill,” as they say, was fun and fast; poling back upwind was a drag.1
Later, when he got a rare break from pegging boots at the Westport shack, he would fish for cod or mackerel in local waters aboard neighbors’ smacks, affording many an opportunity to be drowned. Slocum was determinedly ironic about his inability to swim. In Sailing Alone Around the World he wrote about an event that occurred forty years after he became a professional sailor, when he ran the Spray aground off the coast of Brazil; trying to kedge her off using an anchor that he had rowed to seaward and hurled from a dory, he managed to capsize the dory, an alarming development: “I grasped her gunwale and held on as she turned bottom up, for I suddenly remembered that I could not swim.”
Joshua Slocum’s Liverpool (Photo credit 2.1)
Joshua Slocum’s San Francisco (Photo credit 2.2)
To live in such a busy harbor as Westport at that time was to be soaked in maritime history, lore, diction, and tempting opportunity. Along the Nova Scotia coastline were riggers and coopers, blacksmiths and fish brokers, sail lofts and chandleries, the whole culture dominated by seamen. It can’t be overstressed how busy maritime commerce was in the mid-nineteenth century. Down the coast and up the Penobscot River at Bangor, Maine, three thousand ships arrived in 1860, sixty during Bastille Day of that year on a single incoming tide, in the space of two hours. These were mostly lumber schooners, akin to the deal drogher Slocum would presently board. “Sail was everywhere,” as Peter H. Spectre wrote in the magazine Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors. “Cargo carriers, passenger packets, fishing craft—there were so many at any one time that the waters were white with sails. The coast was like a huge highway of sail.” The lighthouse keeper at Owl’s Head, on Penobscot Bay, counted during 1876 more than sixteen thousand schooners from his vantage. “Just schooners. That figure does not include sailing vessels of other rigs.” Spectre doubts the accuracy of that census, hypothesizing that the keeper stepped outside once an hour to count. Becalmed schooners, or those breasting a tidal current, would have been counted more than once, especially on a clear day. So Spectre halves the number, and halves it again. Four thousand schooners in one year, more than ten each day, summer and winter.
But more crucial
than the ubiquity of vessels in fashioning Joshua Slocum’s ambition would have been his contacts with neighbors and the sons of neighbors returned from voyaging. There were so many opportunities to go to sea—fishing, whaling, coastal carriage, long-haul trade to India, China, the West Indies, and Europe, not to mention naval service—that a Westport boy would have had to search for a reason to reject the call. In Live Yankees: The Sewalls and Their Ships, W. H. Bunting quotes a man who grew up during the age of sail on midcoast Maine’s Kennebec River: “Many boys that we knew went off in the ships and came back perhaps in a year or two for a little stay in town, swaggering a good deal and telling … tales of spice-lands and strange foreign cities—of Lima and Callao, and ‘Frisco’ and South Seas, and adventures in the ‘Roaring Forties.’ ” And for the young adolescents of Westport, who might a century later have traded opinions and debated the merits of a Chevy flat-six against a Ford V-8, their preoccupation was with the sail plans of barks and brigantines, the properties of oak versus cedar for planking.
At thirteen, sick of tanning hides and of having his own tanned for building his ship model, he ran off to sea as a so-called peggy (probably from having to peg away at menial chores) on a fishing schooner, having claimed he could cook, not that it mattered much to the vessel’s master. In the nineteenth century, cooks—at the bottom of the shipboard pecking order—were often sailors who had lost a limb or an eye, fitting them for nothing useful. But even by these lax standards, Slocum’s performance at the cookstove was derisory (he “couldn’t cook hot water for a barber’s shop,” in a contemporary taunt), and when his ship returned to port in Westport he was jettisoned, to return hangdog to his mother, yet another thrashing from his father, and three more years of pickling and whacking.
For an ambitious boy perched on the tip of an island on the quiet side of the Bay of Fundy, the options were few. He could try farming, but he’d seen more than he wanted of the back end of a worn-out plow horse. Working in the boot shop was a bitter daily lesson in the limits of commerce in Nova Scarcity. He could fish, if only he could afford to buy his own smack. When his mother died in 1860—four days before he turned sixteen—he made good his escape. His failure as a peggy had taught him that seagoing was drudgery. But anyone with a hobby, or a weakness for playing solitaire, will understand that to impugn an experience of drudgery—without specifying its precise nature—is less than useful. Gathering eggs from chickens is drudgery marginally less taxing, for some, than feeding chickens. Pegging boots is drudgery, for sure. So is beating upwind, tacking back and forth against a foul tide, but many people dream about spending every discretionary dollar they possess—and usually more—to make that drudgery possible.
Going to sea was a fine education for many kids from Nova Scotia and New England. In Saigon or Manila, Yokohama or Batavia, Archangel or Calcutta, the Fijis or Rio, the Moluccas or the Spice Islands, they might expect to run into friends from Searsport or Bath, Halifax or Digby Island. They were rescued from provincialism, not that white-man’s-burden jingoism wasn’t epidemic in the nineteenth century, when North Americans collided with Heathen Chinee and ignoble savages inhabiting the wild waters of Tierra del Fuego. British sailors especially were quick to describe East Indians as “tinted Baboos” or “snuff and butter jelly bellies.” But young sailors—those with open eyes and ears—learned to cook and eat foreign food, to wear and appreciate foreign clothes, to play foreign games, to understand the singularity of the world’s people.
As Slocum elliptically summarizes his situation in the sketch above, he began his career “before the mast,” though “full-rigged ship” might leave a grander impression than the facts warrant. In Saint John, New Brunswick, Slocum and a friend from Brier Island shipped aboard a deal drogher, bound for Dublin, as ordinary seamen. There was great demand in Europe—whose forests had been felled relentlessly—for wood from North America. Millions of board feet from Port Medway, Nova Scotia, were rafted downriver in spring or skidded over the ice to be loaded aboard square-riggers, scores at a time loading in ports within a hundred miles of Westport.2 “Deal” was rough-cut dimensioned lumber (fir or pine timber, nine by three inches, to be cut to the required length at its destination), and “drogher” was a term of contempt—“half-tide rock” was another—for a cheaply cobbled, worn-out, and leaky ship, despised by sailors not only for trying unavailingly to sink (failing only because of the buoyant cargo stacked in the hold and chained on deck) but also because an ordinary seaman, in order to keep the sea from swamping his bunk, had to spend more than a little time manning the pumps. At that, Slocum’s first ship was better than many deal droghers, some no better than rafts with trees for masts and rags for sails. Some coastal tubs carrying long lumber down the Penobscot River from Bangor were so overloaded that they barely made it to port, their hulls submerged and the helmsman—who couldn’t see forward over the woodpile—up to his knees in water.
Slocum went to sea with relish. After all, during his most impressionable years of boyhood, he had listened to sagas not only of the young sailors visiting home in Westport but also of the heroic and record-breaking passages of Cape Horn clippers carrying prospectors to the gold fields of California.3 He would have heard the warnings—that to break those speed records masters ran hell ships, driving their vessels mercilessly and their crews brutally—but also of the fabulous paydays earned by captains who rounded the Horn. And he meant to be a captain. He knew himself. He would be a captain. Yet what Joshua Slocum could not have known in 1860 was that the glory days of sail—fleets of rake-hulled, towering-masted, overcanvased, overdriven clippers—had already ended.
As his son Victor writes, from the perspective of an American merchant seaman, halfway through his biography of his father:
Our proud fleet of clipper ships was an anachronism. It was out of date as early as the fifties, for while American investors in marine securities were sentimentally applauding skysails, stunsails and fast passages around Cape Horn, the only importance of the clipper ship to us was that it was the culminating expression of our own national sea-mindedness before it went into decay. It is true that this was a glorious period of marine supremacy, but that is all the good it did us; and the sweeping of the seas with unrivaled tonnage and of the skies with unmatched clouds of towering canvas was only an idle boast.
The years of great prosperity for American (and maritime provincial) shipbuilding ran from 1840 to 1858, two years before Slocum’s embarkation. Across the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, at Saint John, they were cranking out miles of wood deal droghers, clumsy “Saint John’s Spruce Boxes.” But in Europe, by 1860, iron was replacing wood in shipbuilding, and steam was replacing sail. Nothing in Joshua Slocum’s history suggests that he could have tolerated the culture of the iron steamship, stinking of coal, burning the eyes with cinders, and requiring the ordinary seaman to chip rust hour upon hour in the dank prison of the hold. No: Slocum’s craft had to be fashioned of wood and driven by wind.
Come out of the Golden Gate,
Go round the Horn with streamers,
Carry royals early and late;
But, brother, be not over-elate—
All hands save ship! has startled dreamers.
In 1924 Joseph Conrad, in one of the pieces collected in his Last Essays, sounded a sentimental elegy for the life to which Slocum had been called:
The last days of sailing ships were short if one thinks of the countless ages since the first sail of leather or rudely woven rushes was displayed to the wind. Stretching the period both ways to the utmost, it lasted from 1850 to 1910. Just sixty years. Two generations. The winking of an eye. Hardly the time to drop a prophetic tear. For the pathos of that era lies in the fact that when the sailing ships and the art of sailing them reached their perfection, they were already doomed. It was a swift doom, but it is consoling to know that there was no decadence.
Citing only the abuse of sailors by shipmasters, there was decadence aplenty, but even if Slocum had been able to foresee
the death of his chosen life at its commencement, what might he have done differently? Doesn’t everyone know that in our beginning is our end? But So what doesn’t account for his plunge off the deep end. Almost any calling that might be considered—poet or autoworker or jazz pianist—seems from the perspective of common sense to be quixotic and probably doomed. Maybe it is enough to say So what?
Still, to reach the head of the worm-eaten mast soon destined to break off at its base, Slocum had to begin to climb. In contrast to midshipmen in merchant shipping (apprentice sailors who had paid to come “in through the cabin windows” and learn the ropes), ordinary seamen (“in by the hawse-hole,” referring to the foul place in the bow through which the anchor chain passed) were the roughest of grunt laborers. This made Slocum’s rapid rise through the ranks notable. He would later take greater pride from his rapid elevation at seventeen to second mate than from anything else in his career.
One of the first to have boarded quayside in Saint John, Slocum watched his fellow ordinary seamen delivered drunk to the drogher by a shipping agent, wheeling them piled like cordwood on an open cart. This forecastle crew were recruited or shanghaied by so-called crimps, who used booze and gambling and whores to put them in debt, and they made rough companions. Hungover and seasick during their first days at sea, they nevertheless knew how to keep a ship afloat.
Samuel Eliot Morison, in his Maritime History of Massachusetts, describes the society Slocum had just joined. In 1860 potential seamen with grit and ambition—perhaps less parochial than Joshua Slocum—had options conceivably more attractive than being bounced around the hard ocean: to the west fertile land could be cultivated and gold found for the grasping in California and Australia. Steam was replacing wind as a motive force, so extreme methods were used to gather sailing men: “boarding-house keepers [made] it their interest to rob and drug seamen in order to sign them on,” pocketing a fee of three months’ advance wages. “The percentage of foreigners and incompetents increased. Men of all nations, and of the most depraved and criminal classes, some of them sailors but many not, were hoisted, literally dead to the world, aboard the clippers. Habitual drunkards formed the only considerable native element in this human hash.”
The Hard Way Around Page 2
