Following the births of Victor (1872) and Benjamin (1873), daughter Jessie was born in the Philippines in 1875. Unlike her unlucky twin siblings born in 1877 and her sister born in 1879, she survived, like her brothers, into old age. In 1881, the Slocums’ youngest child and third son was born aboard ship in Hong Kong. Slocum’s first command after he lost the Washington was the B. Aymar, a so-called packet—that is, a fast-sailing carrier of passengers and of timely packages and mail—of 128 feet that was named for its owner, the prominent New York merchant Benjamin Aymar. (She was capacious enough to have carried more than 180 passengers to New York from Antwerp in 1857.) After some pleasurable passages shuttling between San Francisco and Honolulu, a milk run with abundant opportunities for the couple to socialize in the civilized ports of call at both ends of the voyage, the Slocums decided in 1873 to venture east as far as Japan and Australia.
Virginia eventually had four young children to raise and educate aboard various vessels, and her children and kin testify that she did a crackerjack job. She lavished love on her husband and children, and this affection was returned without the formality natural to their standing and the era’s mores, with abundant storytelling, singing, and teasing.
Daughter Jessie, in a letter to Walter Teller, remembered her mother as “a remarkable woman. Not many had the stamina she had. There are none today [1952] would live as she had to. She lived truly as the Book of Ruth says.” (“For wherever you go, I will go,” saith that good woman.) But duty was only the bedrock of Virginia Slocum’s tough and tender virtues. She played the harp, guitar, and piano, and several of her husband’s vessels were equipped with pianos on which she taught her children songs. (Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna” was a favorite, along with any of his “Ethiopian” songs.) She conducted Sunday-school lessons and created scrapbooks from found art discovered from Saigon to Montevideo. The family experienced a floating geography lesson, arbitrary in its details but as inclusive as the ocean’s limits.
Growing up aboard ship was peculiar, of course, and mothers especially fretted that it would leave their children ill prepared for life ashore. Well and good for a daughter to know how to reef a topsail or a son how to use signal flags to communicate from the stem with the helmsman. “He is all ship, can’t sing a note but knows considerable about a ship,” complained one shipmaster’s wife about her little boy. Another mother at sea reported that her fourteen-month-old daughter “can pull on the ropes, and sing out like any old sailor … and she pulls on every string or anything else she can get hold of.” Joan Druett tells of a particular pair of young sisters so “black with sin” (in a kinsman’s view) that they were known as Pot and Kettle; they climbed the ratlines and swore like, well, sailors. Many children who learned to walk at sea, with that wide-stanced gait produced by “sea legs” to keep upright on a rolling deck, remarked on how difficult the first days of walking instead on land were by comparison, and it was customary that sea kids’ speech would seem curiously archaic, infused as it was by the cadences and lexicon of an antique culture, untutored by idiomatic landlubber influences.
But the deficits of growing up in a constricted space only a hundred feet long by thirty wide and traveling with very imperfect strangers, by fits and starts and through extreme weather, had to have been outweighed by the adventure of it all. An analogy might be the lure for many of whaling: despite the noisome and deadly nature of the work, despite the exploitation of its laborers, despite the years of separation from land suffered by crews, it was undeniably thrilling. The brief bursts of adrenaline triggered by the sight of a whale, the harpooning, the contest with a huge creature, the rush of surviving a Nantucket sleigh ride—these kicks made many seamen return willingly to endure a lot worse than penal servitude. Nevertheless, of the Slocums’ children only Victor devoted his life to sailing vessels and steamships.
An offhand detail in Victor Slocum’s brief New York Times obituary in 1949 refers to his mother as having been “a school teacher.” The Slocum children spent their early years in the Pacific, between Australia and the coast of Siberia, with extensive visits to Honolulu, Manila, and Canton, and from 1872 through 1883 Virginia strictly observed, during the three hours before noon of every weekday, lessons in spelling, reading, and arithmetic. (Mathematics—like astronomy—was vividly practical, a necessary set of rules applied to the problem of determining the ship’s position.) Discipline was enforced, in Victor’s memory, “by a switch stuck over a picture in the cabin and the culprit had to fetch it himself when it was needed, but that, as I must say, was not often.” On deck they learned to splice and to tie knots, and studied sewing with the sailmaker. On Saturdays they did chores, cleaning their quarters and mending their own clothes. They amused themselves with whist and dominoes, and above all they talked. At Sunday school, a matter of indifference to Joshua, Virginia set a lesson to be memorized from the Bible, and memorization—as was the happy custom of Victorian schooling—played a principal part in their brood’s education. The Slocums’ taste was catholic, and Victor remembers with fondness his parents’ amused instruction in a foreign language using a German comic book they bought the children in Hong Kong. Virginia’s experience of her father’s passion for Shakespeare inspired her to infect her own offspring with the bug, which she already shared with her husband.
And his shipboard library was extensive. Victor recalled many volumes about the sea: histories of battles and explorations, reproductions of ancient charts and mathematical tables, books of natural history, botany, and ornithology (Darwin and Huxley). Victor vividly remembered animated discussions at the galley table about Washington Irving’s popular biography of Christopher Columbus, “the great navigator’s triumphs and misfortunes as well as the shameful treatment of the Indians by the gang of cruel adventurers at their heels.”
This recollection reflects the confusion of conflicting images, not only of Joshua Slocum but also of all the other Americans and Europeans venturing to the edges of the world, not to discover or conquer but to trade and often to exploit and cheat. Exploitation was race- and colorblind, and if pirates abounded in Malaysia and the South China Sea, cannibals were known to satisfy their appetites with missionaries chancing to wash ashore and fall captive during mealtimes in the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides. It was for no fanciful reason that Slocum had fake gunports painted on both the B. Aymar and the Amethyst. Readers of Sailing Alone Around the World will find vigorous contempt for the wily “savages” of Tierra del Fuego a few pages distant from Slocum’s paean to the sweet-voiced singing of brown-skinned children during his romantic idyll in the South Pacific.
In addition to studying texts devoted to the technical aspects of his calling—navigation and marine design—Slocum favored the work of essayists like Lamb, Addison, Twain, and Macaulay, as well as such historians as Gibbon and Hume. Victor observes that his father “was always looking [for] models of style” to develop his own writing. He loved fiction and poetry: Pickwick Papers was a special favorite—testimony to his nice sense of the ridiculous—and in verse he had of course memorized Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Given Slocum’s extraordinary adventures, it is tautologically fitting, even charming, to learn from his son that he “simply reveled in the tales of Sinbad the Sailor.”
As soon as Victor was old enough to understand a story, he shivered from fright at his father’s enlargement of the child’s dimly recollected encounter with Bully Hayes, a theatrically notorious pirate, at the Malaysian island of Oulan. After enjoying a postprandial promenade with Virginia around the deck of the B. Aymar, Slocum would often tell stories to his two-and-a-half-year-old son. “By this time,” Victor writes, “I had acquired both the faculties of observation and memory. I soon began to remember things because there was always so much going on worth remembering.” His own dreams were troubled by accounts of the cunning Chinese and Malay brigands too cowardly to “attack a foreign devil merchant ship in a brisk breeze, but instead lurking on the horizon waiting for a v
essel to be becalmed or grounded on a sand bar, usually near the mouth of a river.” Then they would man their oars, “swarm aboard, murder the ship’s people and tow the whole thing inshore for plunder.”
Bully Hayes was a white devil, the last of the buccaneers, born in Cleveland in 1829, in his prime active in the New Hebrides and the Loyalty Islands of the South Seas. He captured natives, transported them to Australia, and sold them to Brisbane planters—the old and familiar trade of “blackbirding” or man-stealing. Another of Hayes’s trades was so-called filibustering, a nice term for piracy. Joshua Slocum recalled that that “resourceful ruffian … hove across my course” in 1873.4 At that time Hayes was posing as a missionary, a ruse to save himself from hanging, and in the lagoon of Oulan he came alongside the B. Aymar paddled by a crew “amazingly tattooed and fairly belted with knives.” Fully bearded, tall, and massively muscular, the pirate wore “an air of great dignity and authority. His speech was slow and sprinkled with godly phrases.” And what booty did he demand in return for the boatload of bananas he had brought Captain Slocum? A Bible, of course. “ ‘My own copy of the Holy Scriptures has been worn out by much use,’ he explained, ‘and my natives are sitting in darkness waiting for the reading of The Word.’ ”
Hayes complained that on the Micronesian island of Ponape, as the outcome of a dispute with “a tattooed savage” (the island’s king), Hayes’s first mate, “Lanky” Pease, plundered the island of timber and buffalo, and loaded the cargo aboard their vessel, crewed by “wild-eyed Mongolians.” The pirate/missionary didn’t neglect to observe that “the old packet needed a washing out after those coolies.” Hayes then told Slocum of his mate’s rascality and, forgetting his missionary manners, exclaimed: “I wouldn’t have been so put out about it if he had been content with a fair cargo of buffalo, but, God damn him, he took so many that he had to cut holes in the deck to let their horns stick up through. By the Great Shark, when I meet him, he dies!”
In fact, another mate—one “Dutch Pete”—murdered Hayes four years later, after a quarrel, and dumped him overboard, where he was no doubt taken as salvage by Beelzebub.
The Slocums’ children had fond memories of Christmas in Asian ports. The stockings, hung one year from the mizzenmast, were filled by Santa with Japanese toys and Chinese treats. Jessie remembered a carved Melanesian doll. Victor recalled being excited to receive a fanciful kite and a paper rooster in China. There was always a roasted turkey or goose dinner, and plum pudding for the crew. The kids—dressed in Chinese suits, tasseled caps, and turned-up shoes—would be photographed, then rowed around the harbor to other hen frigates to celebrate with any children present while their mother socialized with other shipmasters’ wives.
Because Slocum, like other merchant captains, was busy in port with customs officers and consignees and suppliers and shipwrights and riggers and consular officers, Virginia was left to her ingenuity. During an age of formality and rigid class distinction ashore, on-the-fly get-togethers between masters’ wives dispensed with decorums. Local lore was precious, and methods for discovering and paying a fair price for clothes and fresh fruit were as important as techniques for dealing with hostile seamen were potentially life-and-death. (No evidence suggests that Virginia took much interest in the exotic food—curries and guava and bouillabaisse, say—to which her travels must have introduced her. Her children remembered her as a rough-and-ready cook, with a range extending from chowder to blueberry pie.) Many journals of captain’s wives during this period detail these rare social occasions, much as a novelist of manners or an anthropologist might observe the speech and furnishings of others. Whether got up in simple bed-ticking dresses for comfort in tropical ports or fully rigged out in floor-sweeping skirts and shawls, enhanced (as Druett describes) by “mittens, tippets, fringes, beadings and bonnets so beloved by Victorians,” they assumed themselves to be women of consequence.
So starved were sailing wives and children for company while at sea that they even (briefly) envied whalers, who stayed at sea for so long that they never missed an opportunity, when spying another whaler at sea, to heave to for news, an exchange of food, and a gam. Joan Druett tells in offering rewards to any member of his crew spotting a ship at sea, the sight of “someone in the world beside ourselves.” Afforded such luck, the ships might approach closely enough—risking and not always avoiding collision—to exchange messages chalked on blackboards. Virginia Slocum was so sociable a woman that it might have been an insupportable burden to be separated from her friends and extended family in Sydney, but no evidence suggests that she ever complained.
And nothing in her husband’s writing expresses any concern for her experience or emotions. About his mother and Virginia, Slocum’s reticence seems pathological, but efforts to put him on the couch are insolent and unavailing. For all his goodwill, fine manners, and common sense, Walter Teller commissioned a graphologist to study Slocum’s penmanship, principally to unravel the mystery of his refusal to make any but the most glancing—and grief-burdened—allusions to Virginia’s death, and none at all to her life. Readers are directed to their imaginations to see and overhear the couple together, perhaps on a calm night at sea, leaning over the rail, discussing in voices pitched low to assure privacy their ambitions or fears or elemental affection for each other.
Her children vividly recollected a series of caged canaries, a popular shipboard diversion. Monkeys were common aboard the Slocums’ larger ships. Cats were also sometimes taken aboard, but the time would inevitably come—often in the worst of weather—when they decided to climb aloft, thus claiming all nine lives in a fell swoop. Benjamin fondly noted another arrow in his mother’s quiver, the pleasure she took from killing sharks: “To spend a few hours with sharks, in mid-ocean,” as he wrote Teller, “Mother and I teamed up. It was my job to get the shark interested in coming close up. I used a new tin can with a string on it to attract the shark close under the stern where Mother dispatched it with her .32 caliber revolver with which she never needed but one shot. How I loved to see her do it.”5 Even if the unerringness of her aim was exaggerated by a loving son’s memory, her competence is as impressive as her enthusiasm was robust, and on several occasions she would need to aim her revolver at human beings. Yet, as her daughter wrote to Teller, even then it was known that “her heart was not strong.”
Despite shooting sharks and playing the piano and teaching her children lessons and assisting her husband with navigation and listening to her birds sing, Virginia Slocum’s lot at sea was monotony. Rockwell Kent wrote in Voyaging, his remarkable account of sailing in the roaring forties, that before any roaring began there was a steady, less dramatic hum.
With the disappearance of land the ship at sea becomes a planetary body moving in the orbit of its prescribed course through the fluid universe of the ocean … The true record of a voyage on the sea must be a record of those illusive imaginings of the almost unconscious mind responding to the hypnotic monotony of the ship’s vibrations, of the liquid rustling of the water streaming past her sides … and the even seething pattern of her wake. The memory of it is of prolonged and changeless contentment.
Well, for the landbound, that’s the conundrum, isn’t it? Did this constitute the ecstasy of a natural rhythm or the drip-drip-drip-drip of a water torture? It seems that Virginia and Joshua Slocum never asked, bless them. If love cannot conquer all, it can surely confound conventional expectations of what is tolerable. As a kinswoman wrote Teller, the Slocums “were deeply in love and could be completely oblivious of everyone and everything if they could be together.”
The B. Aymar (Photo credit 4.1)
The Amethyst (Photo credit 4.2)
1 Joan Druett reports that during the nineteenth century more than seventy citizens of the small town of Searsport, Maine, were born at sea.
2 Included in Charles W. Domville-Fife’s Square-Rigger Days: Autobiographies of Sail (1938).
3 W. H. Bunting quotes a master’s letter home, Captain Joe Sewall aboar
d the Edward Sewall, regarding a winter storm off Cape Hatteras, following an easy passage from Hong Kong: “In the height of the blizzard Feb’y 9 Mrs S[ewall] was confined and gave birth to a fine large hearty boy. Everything went well, except the cold was severe and the ship tossing about on large seas. Feb’y 14 the baby suddenly took an ill turn and in a few hours strangled to death with croup.”
4 Slocum’s final published work, “Bully Hayes, the Last Buccaneer,” appeared in Outing in March 1906. It’s an as-told-to adventure yarn, only infrequently told in Slocum’s understated idiom. Hayes deserved the hype: he once attended a play in Sydney devoted to exaggerations of his misdeeds, including pillage and rape, and declared himself—moments before eluding capture by the police—to be well pleased with the performance. The story as reported in Victor’s biography is unintentionally a jamboree of fabulation, with Slocum retailing the lies of the buccaneer to conform to a Sinbadish narrative plan concocted by Outing’s reporter, whose version Victor then consulted as an aide-mémoire.
5 Hatred and fear of sharks were universal among seamen. In Sailing Alone Around the World, when Slocum encountered “wolves of the sea,” he took time from solitary sailing to “shoot them through the head.” It was believed they could smell death before it arrived, and that a shark following in a ship’s wake announced that someone aboard would soon die, and that, if caught and brought aboard, their stomachs would contain sailors’ remains. Let’s assume they generally didn’t, though a French naturalist of the sixteenth century asserted that sharks adored eating white men, and Englishmen above all.
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