Admirers of Slocum should be less impressed by his marksmanship than by his boat-building skill (which would yield him his two vessels of self-rescue, the Liberdade and the Spray) and his writing. Victor Slocum read the journal that his father kept to detail his explorations of the Columbia River, Gray’s Harbor (an estuary south of the Olympia rain forest), Puget Sound, and British Columbia. He recollected “humorous allusions” to the vagaries of the fishing and trapping life, together with accounts of encounters with bears and wildcats, but no copy of this, his earliest narrative, has survived. Nevertheless, it is notable that Slocum, without formal schooling, had from his teenage years been drawn toward literary record making, storytelling meant to please strangers.
In 1869, at twenty-five, he got his first command, a seventy-five-foot coasting schooner plying between San Francisco and nearby Half Moon Bay, from which he carried pumpkins, potatoes, and barley back to the city. Sailing the Montana must have been a breeze for Slocum, but now, prepared by his experience selling fish and pelts, he also became a trader, the owner’s agent in the matter of selecting goods and setting a price for their transport. Soon Slocum stepped up in responsibility by becoming the master of a larger coasting schooner carrying wheat to Seattle and coal back, a position that he received owing to his experience carrying grain from San Francisco to Liverpool and Cardiff. Local cargo carried by fast coastal schooners was shipping for fees only recently unheard of, from sixty to a hundred dollars per ton.
During the 1860s the worldwide desire for California wheat—“so hard and dry,” according to William Hutchinson Rowe, “that it would stand the 14,000-mile voyage around the Horn and arrive in the European ports in prime condition”—had a more lasting impact on the prosperity of California than had the payday in 1848 at Sutter’s Mill. Hard-grained California wheat was in high demand from British and Irish millers, and the great grain races to Liverpool from San Francisco and Australia, carrying each new harvest, were followed avidly by landlubbers as well as seamen. But as W. H. Bunting writes in Live Yankees,4 “the fastest ship was not necessarily the most profitable ship—a damaged cargo was remembered long after a quick passage had been forgotten.” The sunny Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys—connected by waterways to San Francisco—produced grain exports from the Golden Gate that increased in value in a single year from $1,750,000 to $6,718,000. No small potatoes, 400 percent. Carrying grain was tricky and could be dangerous; poison gas from decaying wheat blinded and killed members of more than one crew. (Perhaps it is best to stipulate that carrying anything aboard a piece of wood floating on an ocean—and certainly human beings—could be dangerous.)
Slocum’s third command was the 110-foot barkentine Constitution. Ann Spencer specifies this ship carried “cotton seeds, lumber, machinery and shingles” to Guayamus, Mexico, and from there salt to Carmen Island in the Gulf of California.5 Having returned to San Francisco, Slocum was sent in the Constitution to the Antipodes, specifically Sydney.
It’s tempting to oversell the significance of someone so young being trusted to command a valuable sailing ship and its crew and freight on a voyage to the ends of the earth. Slocum’s rapid advance from ordinary seaman to master was not that exceptional in a transient culture where so many were speculating, hopping from chance to chance. Anybody could look for gold, and anyone with a bag of gold dust could try to buy cheap and sell dear. But few could command a sailing ship, and the ones who wished to but couldn’t were either found out or sunk by the time the first gale hit them.
Slocum sailed for Sydney in early November, and less than three months later—on January 31, 1871—he was married. He met Virginia Albertina Walker by the happy circumstance of being in a lively port city at the same time that a lovely young woman with an adventurous spirit was out and about at the kinds of dances and dinners to which promising young sea captains would be invited. Like San Francisco, Sydney was energetically evolving socially as well as economically, and was hospitable to outsiders. How could it have been otherwise in a refugee colony settled about fifteen minutes ago by exiled criminals?
Virginia Walker was twenty when she met Slocum, and was like him a wanderer on the earth. She had been born on New York’s Staten Island at the height of the California gold fever, to which her father, William, succumbed. A disappointed forty-niner, he then moved his family to Australia just after 1852, hoping to find gold in New South Wales and Victoria. Australia’s prospectors—the so-called diggers of song and legend—found tons of the stuff, but Walker returned in Sydney to the trade he had previously practiced in New York, becoming the owner of a stationery store that was prosperous enough for him to indulge his love of amateur theater. (Victor Slocum remembered that his “genial” grandfather Walker “could repeat any speech in Hamlet if given the first line.”) He was a volunteer fireman, an estimable hobby that seems to call forth a better class of eccentrics, and Victor reports that he owned a cockatoo that liked to shout out, when bored, “Fire, fire, Walker, fire!” Virginia’s sister was a successful opera singer, a contralto; they had a younger brother named George.
It wasn’t unusual for fluid societies with tons of ore and banknotes loose on the streets to ape such expressions of grandeur as London and New York displayed. In addition to theaters and opera houses, the citizens of Sydney liked to have grand balls in honor of visiting ships’ officers from around the civilized world, and at one of these Virginia—costumed as Columbia, America’s own Gem of the Ocean—was photographed leading the grand march; at the “tuckout,” as locals called the banquet, William Walker was the toastmaster. These celebrations were memorialized in a red plush album carried by his mother, as Victor remembered, and when it was brought out to impress (or more likely amuse) visitors aboard one or another of Slocum’s ships, “I noticed that my father always put on a bored and disinterested look.”
Slocum had been on his own in an almost exclusively masculine world since his mother’s death—which seems to have so wounded him that he never brought himself to write about her, or talk to his children about her, save to praise the flapjacks that emerged from her fireplace on North Mountain. And bearing in mind his increasing inclination toward solitude (that Alone in the title of his magnum opus deserves emphasis), it is startling that his encounter with Virginia Walker swept him off course so suddenly and completely that they were married scarcely two weeks after they met.
By this time, Slocum had been at sea for eleven years, experiencing the striking lonely-in-a-crowd inwardness of his chosen calling. Not for him the theatrical roller-coaster rides of his fellow sailors, the drinking, brawling, and whoring in port followed by hangovers and perhaps the disgrace of being shanghaied. Slocum was either on watch or studying his craft or reading or looking around with his eyes wide open. He had elevated himself to a person of consequence, someone electing to stand out and above and apart. No wonder, as Samuel Eliot Morison writes with piquant chauvinism, that “a promising sea captain generally had the pick of the pretty girls in his home town. ‘She’s good enough to marry an East Indian cap’n!’ was the highest commendation for a Cape Cod damsel.”
Being at sea for months at a time—without the ameliorating drama of a dangerous hunt that invigorated whalers’ experience—imposed, in Robert Foulke’s nice phrase, “an inexorable captivity” and a sense of isolation on the crew. To have chosen such a life, as opposed to having been drugged or crimped or hoaxed aboard, was almost defiant in its acceptance of alienation.
In Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana describes the consequence of what Foulke describes as “intellectual poverty,” the outcome of “constant propinquity,” during a long voyage around Cape Horn:
Any change was sought… [to] break the monotony of the time; and even the two hours’ trick at the wheel which came round to us in turn, once in every other watch, was looked upon as a relief. The never-failing resource of long yarns, which eke out many a watch, seemed to fail us now; for we had been so long together that we had heard each other’s st
ories told over and over again till we had them by heart; each one knew the whole history of each of the others, and we were fairly and literally talked out.
Though the British merchant marine—its ships known familiarly as lime-juicers—was more highly esteemed on the seven seas, and better supported by its government and investors, its vessels better crewed by superior masters and at more generous pay, American custom was more casual in the matter of so-called hen frigates, ships with masters’ wives aboard. This indulgence defied sailors’ stubborn superstition that bad luck inevitably followed the boarding of their ship by a woman, despite sailors’ counterintuitive conviction that Neptune could be calmed by a ship’s figurehead of a naked woman fashioned from wood. Although there’s no record that Slocum took acceptance of voyaging couples into account when—having previously shipped on Her Majesty Victoria’s ships—he became a citizen of the United States, why else choose a circumstance that would put him aboard American hell ships, shorthanded and brutalized by bucko mates?
For Virginia’s part, she told her first child, Victor, that she knew as soon as she saw Joshua that he “was just the kind of a man she wanted, not the stuffy sort she saw in conventional Sydney society.” Perhaps owing to the class anxieties fostered by a convict society, stuffy Poms did their best to domesticate the rough-and-tumble Down Under of diggers, swagmen, and jackeroos, but Virginia’s notion of the good life was obviously fueled by her love of adventure. Described by an admirer as “regal in bearing but light-hearted too,” an excellent rider, she liked to take her horses into the Blue Mountains outback on camping trips, sleeping under the stars. She boasted that her mother was descended from Native Americans of the Lenni-Lenape (Delaware) tribe of New Jersey and southern New York.
Slocum’s appearance was stern and sober. Prematurely balding, he appeared and behaved older than his age, with sunken cheeks and a deliberately fixed gaze. Virginia Walker’s features in contrast were frank and welcoming, and her eyes remarkable, as golden as an eagle’s in her children’s memory. It is clear that this couple, rationally suitable in tastes and ambition, were right—maybe even “destined”—for each other. But from its beginning their marriage was much, much more than a wise and lucky match. Everyone who reported having watched them together remarked that they were so absorbed with each other, so palpably affectionate and love-struck, that they created an aura of exclusion around themselves. A young female cousin described Joshua as “an ardent person,” in Virginia’s company, “certainly demonstrative in showing affection.” The couple liked to laugh, even—or especially—if the jokes were private. (No small matter, especially given the isolation of a ship in mid-ocean. One shipmaster’s wife, quoted in Hen Frigates,6 complains of growing “so lonely at sea, I almost forget how to laugh.”)
They must have agreed to forgo the formal wedding and jamboree sought by her father, who gave his formal consent that “Virginia Albertina Walker, Spinster … being under the age of twenty-one years,” be married to “Joshua Slocum, Master Mariner of Massachusetts [sic],” in a family ceremony by a Baptist minister. And then, almost immediately, she kissed her mother, father, and sister goodbye, boarded the Constitution carrying her riding outfit—whip most definitely included—and sailed off carrying coal and tomatoes to San Francisco (roughly seven thousand miles away, given the deflections of the sailing route) with her twelve-year-old brother aboard. They arrived May 4 and departed two days later on the Washington, a bark of 110 feet also owned by Nicholas Bichard.
This was to be their honeymoon trip, a voyage to Cook Inlet near Kodiak Island to fish the chinook salmon runs—just the sort of adventure Virginia Slocum relished, into the wilderness and exposed to extreme conditions. Her husband saw it as greatly raising the stakes of his previous fishing ventures: fortunes could be made from selling salmon in the port cities of the Pacific Northwest.
The risks were at least as great as the rewards. Victor Slocum’s biography claims that his father was “the first American to enter Cook Inlet when the Russians left after the Alaska Purchase,” made by U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward in 1867. However unbeckoning this territory—variously known as Andrew Johnson’s polar bear garden, Seward’s Icebox, and Seward’s Folly—actually was, that claim cannot be true. New Bedford whalers were taking bowheads and right whales from the Kodiak grounds more than a decade before Tsar Alexander II sold out to the United States. What was true was that these treacherous waters, almost as tide-scoured as Slocum’s native Bay of Fundy, had only primitively been charted by the Russians. Cook Inlet, a 180-mile glacial fjord, is subject to tidal bores, waves as high as six feet traveling as fast as fifteen knots. Portions of the silted, muddy, and foul bottom—exposed at low tide—have the baleful characteristics of quicksand, winds are chill, and fog is frequent, with rocky ledges abounding.
Victor Slocum, who later visited these waters without his parents, characterizes their nature and situation: “At the head of the inlet the rise and fall of the tide is greater than anywhere else in the world except in the Bay of Fundy. It is forty feet during the springs, making a five or six knot ebb which carries with it huge blocks of ice, tree trunks and every kind of fluvial debris that could be emptied out of the headwaters.” The one hazard the newlyweds would have been spared, thanks to the summer season, was ice.
What young George Walker later described as the greatest experience of his life must have been all that and more. Herds of fur seals—known as sleepers for their custom of floating on their backs with their flippers across their snouts—could be seen in the company of beluga whales. On Kodiak Island roamed the bears of the same name, which, because they do not hibernate and eat a steady diet of salmon, are the largest in the world. Sailing up the Pacific coast from San Francisco, the Washington’s crew had prepared for the salmon run at Cook Inlet’s Kasilof River by building several gillnet punts from Slocum’s design. Meantime, the master and his bride settled into their constricted quarters, which were far superior to any he had enjoyed as an ordinary seaman, able seaman, or mate. Their cabin—paneled in satinwood or perhaps bird’s-eye maple—would have been equipped with a washstand, desk, sofa, bookshelves (for Slocum was always well stocked with fiction, poetry, books about the sea, and natural history). Walter Teller speculates that what natural light penetrated the cabin “came from a transom through which Virginia might have an excellent view of the legs of the man at the wheel, and perhaps a little sky beyond, criss-crossed by the ship’s rigging.” The Slocums’ sleeping berth would have been swung on gimbals, likewise the dining table. Meals would be taken with the ship’s mates, some of them rough as cobs, indifferent to hygiene and often surly, resentful of a woman aboard.
If “hen frigate” sounds derogatory, it was meant to. Putting aside until later the frustrations imposed on sailors by infants bawling and toddlers scampering underfoot and even aloft, ships—especially those as small as the Washington—were unfriendly places for women. Exceptions were made, as Teller notes, for a few wives who showed “sportsmanship and usefulness,” by caring for the sick, mending clothes, and learning to navigate. “It was a rarely courageous wife who accompanied her husband on more than one voyage.” From the time she married until her death thirteen years later off Buenos Aires, Virginia sailed wherever Joshua sailed, learning her ropes and how to box the compass—putting a name to each direction from due north 360 degrees back around to due north—as well as nautical taxonomy.
It wasn’t that their fishing venture to Cook Inlet was all fair winds and gentle seas. They had timed their arrival to coincide with not only the June chinook salmon run on the Kasilof River but also the midnight sun; this lent the crew both the opportunity of working day and night and the drawback of working night and day. They anchored the Washington in what seemed like a protected spot two miles offshore, and on the lee side of rocky Karluk Reef, setting up camp along a beach at the mouth of the Kasilof River, not far from where the Kenai entered the inlet. Slocum and his crew socialized and traded lore with fis
hing members of the Ninilchik tribe, among whom lived mixed-race descendants of Russian convicts who’d been transported here during Catherine the Great’s reign to hunt sea otters. Unfazed by such rough yobbo neighbors, Virginia was awed by the country’s extreme natural menace, with volcanoes, moose, lynx, wildcats, and bears in abundance. She liked to shoot her .44 Henry rifle and should perhaps be forgiven as a creature of pre-enlightened sensibilities for having bagged an eagle on the wing. (As late as 1962, Alaska paid a bounty for the claws of our national emblem.) Family legend has it that she also came close to bagging her husband the night he returned prematurely and stealthily toward their tent after gathering supplies aboard the Washington. According to Victor, his father was on the right end of a Sharps .50-70 carbine when he was menaced along the banks of the Kenai by an ill-tempered Kodiak bear: “He had once been clawed and bitten by a bear while in British Columbia and knew bear nature better than to take another chance. The pelt of this particular bear was one of the largest ever taken from Kenai, and it was long afterwards stretched out on the floor of a bungalow in Sydney, to the astonishment of the natives.”
Such stories, whatever their grounding in fact, are reward enough for reading children’s biographies of their parents. One can imagine young Victor, on a visit to his Sydney grandparents, wrestling with the bearskin rug—claws and yellowed teeth preserved—and learning (or believing he had) about these hairbreadth escapes. His summary of the Cook Inlet adventure, however, is less dramatic, a laconic declaration followed by a qualifying throwaway that characterized his father’s literary style: “The fishing was carried out successfully except for the loss of the vessel.” The Washington, light in ballast in order to welcome a huge load of fish, was buffeted so mercilessly by williwaws—explosive gusts peculiar to mountainous fjords—that she “snapped at her [anchor] cables, which were veered out to the bitter end.” On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, while all were ashore, a brutal gale at high tide drove her high onto the beach. “The bones of the Washington, bleaching in the sands,” as Victor wrote in 1950, “are still a warning.”
The Hard Way Around Page 5
