What happened beginning the following morning was a tamer version of the many accounts that astonish readers of Ernest Shackleton’s heroic rescue in 1915–16 of his crew from Antarctic ice. First, the crew agreed to continue fishing through the chinook run. Meanwhile Slocum, with the assistance of a ship’s carpenter, constructed a thirty-five-foot whaleboat from bits and pieces of the stranded Washington, adding to his fleet of gillnetting punts and two lifeboats, with a view toward not only seeking the comparative safety of Kodiak Island, two hundred miles distant, but also carrying their haul of salmon to market. So as the carpenter and his apprentices built the whaleboat, the rest of the crew continued to fish.
Trading bad luck for good, they’d just finished fishing when a U.S. revenue cutter (precursor of the Coast Guard) steamed into Cook Inlet, offering rescue to Slocum and his crew but not—understandably—to his fish. He accepted passage to Kodiak only for Virginia, electing to remain (with young George Walker at his side) until the abundant catch had been made ready for shipping. Then, posting an armed member of his crew “to keep off Indians and bears,” as Victor puts it, he set out with his makeshift fleet, using the power of ebbing tides to carry him four or five hours at a brisk pace from beach to beach. Then they crossed from the mouth of Cook Inlet to Kodiak Island, with the help of a favorable wind pushing the jury-rigged sails of the three largest boats.
There they discovered a couple of Russian sealers with empty holds, which Slocum chartered to fetch the salmon catch from the Kasilof; the fare was then loaded, with his crew, aboard the bark Czarevitch, which for the right price detoured from its mission to harvest and ship natural ice to warm ports, instead carrying the happy survivors and their treasure to San Francisco. There, adding the loss of the Washington to his other expenses, the vessel’s owner sold the fish and pocketed a profit. Slocum’s reputation seems to have survived without grave injury the loss of the Washington. Though he would not again command a ship owned by Nicholas Bichard, he and Virginia were invited to live aboard Bichard’s Constitution—berthed alongside Hathaway’s Wharf in the port of San Francisco—while he sought his next posting. And here, on January 10, 1872, Victor was born, the first of seven Slocum children born on vessels, most at sea.
Victor Slocum in China (Photo credit 3.1)
1 In The Voyage of the “Liberdade” (1890), he still held “these monsters,” with their “rows of pearly teeth,” to be the sea’s most awful peril. Amplifying his indifference to the skill of swimming, he muses: “How it is that sailors can go in bathing, as they often do, in the face of a danger so terrible, is past my comprehension.”
2 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860 (Northeastern University Press, 1961).
3 The Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria, situated where canneries once stood, has exhibited an old wooden drift boat, one of thousands comprising the Pacific gillnetting fleet, the design prototype of which the museum credits to Joshua Slocum.
4 This is a trove of first-person accounts and original documents culled by Bunting from the papers of the Sewall family, the most prominent shipping family of Bath, Maine, “City of Ships.” The Sewalls accounted for an astonishing percentage of the vessels—wood and metal—that comprised the American merchant marine of the nineteenth century. Three of the most profitable were named Harvester, Thrasher, and Reaper.
5 In her biography of Slocum, Alone at Sea, Spencer makes coherent sense of the chronology by which Slocum came to his second command. Her account was made possible by the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which holds in its Walter Teller Collection the results of records researched in daunting detail by Leon Fredrich, a maritime scholar intrigued with dates and weights and shipping manifests. Before Fredrich pinned down which vessels were in fact Slocum’s second and third commands—the Constitution and then the Washington, both owned by Nicholas Bichard, a San Francisco immigrant from Guernsey—Victor Slocum’s sometimes shaky memory and Walter Teller’s good-faith inference got the sequence and ports of call reversed.
6 Joan Druett, Hen Frigates: Passion and Peril, Nineteenth-Century Women at Sea (Touchstone, 1999).
FOUR
Love Stories
Two of my children were born on this voyage [aboard the Pato at Petropavlovsk]; they were two months old when we arrived at Oregon—four days old when we began to take in fish … Yes Sir, we had a stirring voyage and altogether a delightful time on the fishing grounds [off the Sea of Okhotsk] for every codfish [of 23,000 total catch] that came in over the rail was a quarter of a dollar—clear … a great success.
—JOSHUA SLOCUM, in a letter to John W. Edmonds
dated May 3, 1890, failing to mention that
the unnamed twins died in infancy in Portland,
soon after the fish were landed, in September 1877
My hand shakes so now I can hardley write. Dear Mother my Dear little baby died the other day … Every time her teeth would start to come she would cry all night if I would cut them through the gum would grow together again. The night she died she had one convulsion after another I gave her a hot bath and some medecine and was quite quiet infact I thought she was going to come around when she gave a quiet sigh and was gone. Dear Josh embalmed her in brandy for we would not leave her in this horid place she did look so pretty after she died Dearest Mother I canot write any more.
—VIRGINIA WALKER SLOCUM, in a letter from
Lagumanoc, Philippines, dated July 17, 1879
QUOTING INFORMAL PROSE of the nineteenth century, it is tempting to regularize writers’ spelling and punctuation; the biographer realizes that the conventions of usage and syntax were less constrictive then, and it’s nasty to sic the grammar of purloined letters and diaries never meant for publication. But in Virginia Slocum’s agonized letter to her mother in Sydney, the gathering storm of grief is perfectly conveyed in her run-on sentences and abrupt tonal shift from panic to hope to ghastly resignation.
So, too, does her husband’s jolly letter about the months during which their unnamed twins of unspecified gender died of untold causes capture utterly the imperviousness of Slocum’s emotional bulkheads, tightly sealed against the penetration of despair or complaint. He refuses to speak of the voyage and its aftermath as having been anything other than “a great success.”
To have lost three of seven children in infancy would seem to anyone born after the general use in privileged societies of penicillin—and vaccines protecting against measles, mumps, diphtheria, whooping cough, scarlet fever, and smallpox—unendurable. Indeed, the grief was no doubt as intense for Joshua as for Virginia, but a world where such losses were unremarkable must be understood to be vastly different from our own. Samuel Eliot Morison writes of the Phineas Pendleton returning to a New England port from Peru with her lower masts painted black. A widowed captain’s wife was aboard, her husband and their three children having died of diphtheria. Grief is not date-stamped. Lines written by John Donne or Ben Jonson or Anne Bradstreet cannot be surpassed in controlled agony, but the Slocums—having lost aboard ship three of their first five children—did not on that account desert nor even rebuke the sea. Neither did they leave off adding to their family.
The reality facing a merchant seaman such as Joshua Slocum was that just as he couldn’t guarantee the delivery of goods by timetable, neither could he expect to be paid to move freight if he was unwilling to spend long periods away from home. He had to take whatever was offered, often loading at out-of-the-way ports goods destined for ports similar but distant. Although merchant mariners were not at sea for such protracted terms as whalers (it was not unknown for a Nantucket wife to wait five years for her husband’s return), two years was a common period of separation. That the Slocums could not afford to buy and maintain a home ashore, whether in San Francisco or Sydney, was secondary to their delight in each other, so they made their home afloat, aboard whatever vessel from whichever hailing port offered the most attractive deal. It is certain that Virginia approved of this life
, embraced it with a whole heart, and though there were other masters’ wives who shared her enthusiasm, none could have exceeded it.
And this despite discomforts and perils. Homesickness was exacerbated by the anxiety of receiving family news while traveling halfway around the world, and the uncertainty of this news ever catching up. It could take more than a year to convey a letter from an exotic port to its San Francisco or Boston or Westport or Sydney destination. To keep abreast of bad news as well as good, holding a family together aboard ship might have seemed less distressful than leaving immediate family ashore. Joan Druett, in Hen Frigates, tells the awful story of a shipmaster receiving news that “one of his children had died, but his correspondent had neglected to tell him which one.”
Children delivered by stork aboard hen frigates sometimes specified their birthplaces in latitude and longitude rather than place-name, the place being simply the sea (or, more specifically, the Bering Sea or the Sunda Strait).1 Imagine being offshore during a full term of pregnancy. Morning sickness was compounded by seasickness, from which almost every deepwater man or woman suffered at least occasionally. “Paying homage to Neptune” was the jocund euphemism for the black comedy of puking, but nothing can adequately account for the despair provoked by that malady suffered so routinely by human beings who cast off from shore. There can’t be many readers who haven’t experienced the astonishing willingness of a person in the full throes of seasickness to die. If the cargo was stinky—fish, let’s say—or the bilges dirty or the weather severe enough to drive the sufferer belowdecks: oh, dear! It was so bad, so sapping of energy and will, as to “unfit one for every effort,” inducing “a feeling of extreme indifference to everything,” in the words of a shipmaster’s wife describing the first week of a long voyage from Boston in 1853. Yawning segues into dizziness, cold sweats, shortness of breath, drooling. In Women of the Sea (1962), Edward Rowe Snow quotes from the log his mother began in January 1883 aboard her father’s bark Russell, bound for Santos, Brazil, from Liverpool. An American girl of fourteen at the time, she was exhilarated by her first day at sea: “I feel so happy; I just want to shout right out and tell everybody I am going on a long sea voyage with Father and Mother. All the boys and girls I know think I am lucky and want to come, too.” Next day the plot shifts, like the deck underfoot, and her prose with it: “Our ship is rolling. Mother and I are awfully seasick. I can’t write any more, and perhaps I never can.” But she can, and does: “I feel terribly bad! I will climb into my bed, or bunk as the sailors call it, and stay there forever, maybe. Oh, dear, I said good-by to the land today, but now I guess I’ll say good-by to the world.” The ship plows and bucks west across the North Atlantic, and another day dooms: “If only the ship would stay still one minute, but she tosses and rolls, creaks and shivers and makes us all miserable. Lucky are those boys and girls who didn’t come. The wind has increased to a gale.” She lives, of course, to tell the tale, heard around her Winthrop, Massachusetts, hearth with many a knowing nod and reminiscing grin.
Seasickness is a bit like gout in its failure to evoke an empathetic response from those not suffering it. But so grave was the immediate consequence of the affliction that sailors new to the sea were routinely pampered by even bucko mates for the first few days, allowed to lie groaning in the fetal position in the yawing, pitching, rolling hell of their donkey-breakfast bunks. In “My First Voyage,” an essay by J. G. Bisset, the veteran sailor and shipmaster remembers with painful vividness how it was for his apprentice self on his first day out of Liverpool, on the bark County of Pembroke, bound for Melbourne, Australia, around the Cape of Good Hope: “I threw myself into the bunk, fully dressed, and fell asleep.” What seemed only minutes later he was turned out to go on watch, “but after a violent spasm of seasickness, climbed back again, and prayed that the ship might go down quickly and take me with it.”2 While it was a danger to the ship and its crew to send such a sick boy aloft, a mate’s patience was notoriously limited, and this one’s cure for Bisset was a pint of seawater scooped out of scuppers awash with heavy seas, up on deck where he had been dragged by the scruff of his neck. “ ‘Drink that; it’ll make a sailor of you.’ ” It seems it did.
At least the water forced down Bisset’s throat wasn’t contaminated. Many afloat were not so lucky, with drinking water polluted by bilge-water or worse leaking into the casks and tanks. Organisms thrived in the heat of the tropics, and a sulfurous stink was the least of the water’s offenses. After all, in those days “fresh” water would be pumped aboard directly from such noxious sources as Buenos Aires’s muddy (and quixotically named) Rio Plata, or from the alligator-teeming and fetid canals of Batavia. Typhoid fever, known also as cesspool fever, was a common hazard of drinking—while holding one’s nose and averting one’s eyes—water from such sources.
Then add pregnancy to the situation. The peril of miscarriage was acute for storm-tossed expectant mothers sailing through extreme climate zones, erratically nourished and stress-inducingly detested by the crew. Virginia Slocum had to rely on her husband to attend her as midwife; he was also required to act as ship’s doctor, setting fractures, sewing gashes, diagnosing tropical diseases. There is no record of Slocum’s record as a diagnostician and healer, but a popular treatment of his time was purgation by castor oil and/or enemas and/or bloodletting. A more drastic cure was blistering by mustard or caustic pitch, perhaps on the principle of curing a headache by smashing one’s thumb with a hammer. Given the haphazard state of nineteenth-century seaborne medicine, a healthy dose of benign neglect might have been the tenderest care an ailing sailor or pregnant woman could receive.
Now imagine that the mother thrives and gives birth. Stormy seas could break through a skylight and drown a baby in its crib. (Like most awful things, it happened.) Newborns died from insufficient mother’s milk, those who weren’t kept alive (temporarily) on a diet of rice water, sugar, and crushed ship’s biscuits. Some children, the daughter Virginia lost in the Philippines among them, died of infections caused by teething. And as dangerous as it was for babies afloat, there is evidence—witness the Slocum twins dying in Portland—that ashore they would be subject to diseases from which they had been effectively quarantined at sea, where they developed no immunity. Cholera was a common horror, carried by ships from port to port, killing one in five of those who contracted it, and those died horribly and within a day: the victim might awake feeling fine, be bent double by cramps and dehydrated by diarrhea before lunch, and dead by dinner. (Slocum would experience the ravages of cholera off the east coast of South America in 1887, most of his crew killed off within a few days.) And there was dengue fever, accurately reviled as “breakbone fever” by the tropical sailors who suffered its agonizing joint pain. There were also—to rattle off a few alphabetically—appendicitis, beriberi, the croup, malaria (which had almost killed Slocum himself in Batavia), scurvy, typhus, and yellow fever.3
Put aside the dire possibilities and consider the domestic dailyness. Imagine cleaning diapers, or being a sailor forced to accept on intimate terms the challenge of changing diapers. Who would care to be that sailor off watch, trying to sleep through the caterwauling of a baby crying for milk or from colic? Imagine being a sailor dodging the master’s toddler on deck, as the child learns to crawl and to walk and—inevitably—to climb in the rigging. (Kids got thrown around in heavy seas and were always in danger of being swept overboard, so a sailor might need to grow an extra limb: one hand for the ship, one for himself, and one for the captain’s little girl.) Children born on warships got the cursed title “son of a gun,” and there was good reason for sailors to expostulate about their miniature shipmates.
On the other hand, it’s not for nothing that Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous is a classic of social and generational collision, hauling by literal accident a spoiled boy aboard a Grand Banks fishing schooner that rescues him from death at sea. And who could fail to envy Jim Hawkins’s education by Long John Silver and his parrot in Treasure Island?
Joan Druett tells of children learning to curse and tell yarns; one six-year-old, in reaction to being spanked, nearly broke his mother’s wrist. And, while little boys and girls on deck were treated as almost indistinguishable creatures by the crew, the former learned especially quickly from their shipmaster fathers the privileges of command: “[Seven-year-old] Harry has been amusing himself hauling ropes and giving the sailors orders to haul … then to belay and then telling the man at the wheel to shake her a little so they can haul the sheets home, and with his hands behind his back, resting on his heels looking aloft (his favorite attitude).” Instead of running away to sea, inasmuch as they were already there, bold children often violated boundaries by going forward to the ordinary seamen in the forecastle, where presumably they would be subject to the baleful influences of irreverent yarns and corrupt chanteys. These visits were no picnic for the sailors, who often resented being put in peril of the master’s wrath. But many actually liked hanging out with kids, when they had the leisure, and whittled model ships or carved scrimshaw for them or taught them knots.
What might seem peculiar to shorebound chauvinists and feminists—that masters often joined their wives at knitting and embroidering and sewing, or helping with the laundry—was a wholesome product of the unquestioned masculine power exerted by a ship captain “running his easting down,” rounding Cape Stiff before a full gale with all sails flying. Expressions of sadness—weeping—came easily to many sailors, and even Slocum was scrupulous to record in Sailing Alone Around the World several times when he gave way to his emotions, as he chose to phrase it.
The Hard Way Around Page 6
