The Hard Way Around

by Geoffrey Wolff

  FIVE

  Enterprises

  My mother, with her three children, made the best of jungle life during the construction of the steamer. The air was heavy and damp and there was the poison of vegetation as well as the peril of venomous creeping things. Up through the cracks in the split bamboo flooring could crawl centipedes, scorpions, and even a small boa if it took a notion to come in at night, and hang down from the rafters, tail first. We found that both centipedes and scorpions had a habit of crawling into our shoes while they were not in use, so it Hen Frigates of shipmasterswas routine to shake and search everything while dressing in the morning … Nearby was a swamp filled with crocodiles, and their barkings were added to the singing of locusts. Only in forests like those in the Philippines can one hear such a nocturnal roar. It affects the superstitious tendencies of the natives. It will get a white man if he is alone too long in such a jungle.

  —VICTOR SLOCUM, Capt. Joshua Slocum

  THE SLOCUMS’ THIRD CHILD, Jessie Lena, was born in June 1875 while the B. Aymar was at anchor in Subic Bay. The New York merchant who had given his name to the vessel was brought low by the Panic of 1873—caused by the burst bubble of America’s exuberant enthusiasm for railroad stocks—and his East Indies trader was sold, marooning the family on the beach. And what a beach it was!

  Still, Victor Slocum’s elaboration of the perfect ghastliness of the flora and fauna at Olangapo on Subic Bay requires some modification. Boa constrictors there were, though of moderate size and pacific disposition, despite his memory of them being ten to twelve feet long and his claim to “have a picture of one thirty feet [with] a body as thick as a man’s.” But he failed to mention the cobras and Wagler’s pit vipers native to the region. Scorpions there were and centipedes so venomous that one of the few deaths attributed to the pest’s bite occurred in the Philippines, the victim a ten-year-old child, the same age as the Philippine schoolgirl who was attacked and decapitated by a crocodile while she was paddling her canoe to school.

  Olongapo, sixty miles from Manila and contiguous with Bataan, is now a city of a quarter million, and until recently adjacent to a huge United States naval base. In 1875 it was the site of preindustrial shipbuilding enterprises, affording access to good timber on the inland slopes—where the boa constrictors were kept company by hordes of chattering monkeys—and having the advantage of a perfect launching beach, with deep water near to shore.

  The Slocums came here owing to a meeting between Joshua and Edward Jackson, the English entrepreneur and naval architect who had brokered the sale of the B. Aymar to a Shanghai shipping firm. A go-getter, Jackson wanted to build a 150-ton steamer of his design to be used in the Philippine Islands for the transport of passengers and freight. Commissioning Slocum to supervise the construction was not a hard sell, given that he was high and dry with three children and shipbuilding was, after sailing in deep water, his favorite calling.

  His first challenge was to build a native nipa hut at the inland edge of the beach. Bamboo, with a thatched roof, nipa huts are elevated (those crocodiles!), and for stilts Slocum used molave, a fine-grained hardwood resistant to rot, uninviting to ants, and also used locally for ships. To support his hut against the assaults of inevitable typhoons, Slocum applied his skill as a rigger to stay it, as though the center-pole were a mast, with what Victor describes as “stout ropes of twisted rattan secured to stakes driven into the ground.” This precaution had never before been displayed at Subic Bay, and it drew attention—and resentment—to Slocum and his family, particularly from the Chinese, who until then were the go-to cohort when a ship needed building. They in turn were resented by native Tagal laborers, whose character Victor esteemed more greatly than that of the “Chinamen,” despite what he took to be Tagal fecklessness: “any native would much rather go to a cockfight than work.”

  Beneath the floor of their hut the Slocums kept pigs and those fowl not in the fight game. The tropical climate—today a plus for tourists—was frequently as oppressively damp and suffocating as a barber’s hot towel. Joshua busied himself getting Jackson’s steamer hull built—the engine and fittings would be installed at Manila—and Virginia kept her sons and infant daughter out of danger, and in Victor’s case out of mischief. They spent a year at this adventure, as constructing the vessel was slow work. “It was as though,” Victor reports, “this was the first vessel ever to be built. Monkeys screeched and scampered from the trees as they fell to the woodsmen’s axes. Tagal sawyers ripped the timber into scantling and plank by hand, using a single frame saw.” Of the writers who have memorialized Joshua Slocum’s history, he is the most specific about the processes that excited his father’s ingenuity and dismay. A reader will learn from Victor’s Capt. Joshua Slocum exactly how fishermen’s boots were hand-lasted in his grandfather’s shop on Brier Island, as well as the difficulties and the virtues of building a hull from timber native to Olongapo. John McPhee would approve of Victor’s avidity for sequence and procedure. It’s fair to assume that by the time he was five years old, and witnessing the work at Olongapo, he had begun to absorb the habit of studying the nature and uses of things and techniques from the example of his father’s emphatic competence. There is pleasure to be taken from reading about the hardwoods available on Luzon for such construction. The molave mentioned above was impervious to sea worms and “came in logs thirty-five feet long by twenty-four inches square, often crooked, which made it all the more suitable for ship frames. There was … Dugan, the ironwood, which sinks like a stone … together with Luan, which was used to plank the Manila galleons because the Spaniards discovered that it did not splinter with shot… [and] the tall Mangachpuy, springy and durable for masts and decks.” In addition, because his father later bought Philippine timber to sell in China, the inventory is named—“Ebony, Camagon, Narra and Tindalo”—perhaps as much for the music of the nouns as for their value in fine joinery.

  The heavy logs, having been felled in the jungle, were skidded to the beach by carabaos, domesticated water buffalo weighing as much as a ton and—when docile—able to haul daunting loads. Trust Victor to excite even these ponderous beasts: “Though apparently clumsy, carabaos can be very quick and sure with their horns; a cow, to protect her calf, was once known to hook a shark out of the water and to rip it open.” Shortly before the hull was completed, humans rather than carabaos, crocs, boa constrictors, scorpions, or centipedes put the family in deadly peril. Virginia, whose prescience was displayed again and again (beginning at Cook Inlet during the fiasco and triumph of their salmon-fishing adventure), had been wary of the sullen Chinese muttering near her at Olongapo. One night, while Joshua was conducting business in Manila, she heard shouting near the hut and went to the doorway to find a crowd carrying lit torches. There had been rumors that the Chinese meant to murder the Slocums in their sleep, as a warning against other foreigners ambitious to build boats in their precinct. The torch-lit crowd was made up of Tagals who’d worked on the Slocums’ hut as well as Edward Jackson’s steamship, and they had installed themselves—unbidden—as bodyguards.

  In the end, the Chinese contented themselves with sabotaging the boat’s launching by pulling the tracks out of alignment, thus derailing the heavy vessel in the sand. The Tagals—orchestrating a veritable rodeo of buffalo—managed to drag her afloat at high tide, whereupon she was towed to Manila to be fitted with boiler, engine, and conveniences.

  Now it was time for Slocum to be paid by Edward Jackson, who declared himself pleased with the mariner’s work. But—as was to happen all too often to this square-dealing man—his employer’s contract had fine-printed codicils. Giving an excuse that has gone unrecorded, Jackson offered Slocum in place of the money he’d been promised—take it or leave it—a forty-five-ton schooner named Pato, the Spanish word for “duck” (the noun rather than the imperative verb).

  Slocum’s logs, journals, and incoming correspondence were lost with him when the Spray disappeared in 1908, so it is impossible to reconstruct either the e
xtent of his Olongapo losses or his attitude toward Jackson. But Victor Slocum is emphatic about his mother’s haste to get her family off that muggy and pest-ridden beach, away from “venemous creeping things” and Chinese shipwrights—“a savage lot,” descended from pirates—scheming to seize or destroy the steamship. Almost as an afterthought, he adds that so fierce and unabated was the hostility of the leader of this Chinese mob “that his son, six years afterwards, attempted to stab the Captain while ashore in Manila.” (Indeed, attempts on Joshua Slocum’s life, usually at knifepoint, became almost routine during the following dozen or so years.)

  The Pato was more yacht than drogher. Designed and built by Edward Jackson, she was inspired by the schooner Sappho, defender of the second America’s Cup and holder for thirty-six years of the record for the fastest west-to-east transatlantic crossing—twelve days—which she set shortly before the Pato was built in the Philippines. Seventy-two feet long (shorter than the Sappho by thirty) and forty-five tons, the Slocums’ new home afloat still lacked a cabin-house when they boarded her, but what work had been completed was of high quality. While she was much smaller than the Washington or the B. Aymar, her fine lines and impressive turn of speed inspired admiration and even envy among Slocum’s fellow shipmasters, and he soon reckoned that he had landed on his feet after Jackson’s breach of agreement.

  He put their new boat to work right away, transporting general cargo interisland through the Philippines. The Slocums took a cat aboard named Flagstaff, owing to the determined verticality of her tail in all winds, and soon the Pato was chartered by the insurance underwriters of a British bark run aground on a coral reef (prophetically named on the Admiralty chart as North Danger Reef) almost five hundred miles from Manila, a valuable cargo of Chinese tea and silk in her hold. The salvage mission required three round-trips between Manila and the wrecked bark to transfer and deliver the goods, and such was Slocum’s resourcefulness during the process that he immediately got a commission to carry cargo from Manila to Hong Kong.

  During that voyage he had a bright idea, and Virginia, pregnant again, leaped at its boldness. They would go fishing again! And thus it was that Joshua Slocum embarked on one of his most stirring adventures: a voyage from Manila and through Hong Kong and Yokohama to Kamchatka and the cod-fishing grounds of the Okhotsk Sea.

  Bound on the west by Siberia and on the east by the Kamchatka Peninsula, with the Kuril Islands barring its southern mouth, the Okhotsk Sea was remote and forbidding, iced over much of the year. Its isolation and hostility excited Slocum’s practical as well as venturesome motives. The fishing grounds, only recently discovered by Europeans and Americans, were rich and lightly exploited. Whalers were sailing into the sea to take bowheads, and the salmon runs rivaled what Cook Inlet had provided, but Slocum was on the hunt for cod.

  He got the idea aboard the Pato while sailing toward Hong Kong and sorting through sea chests that had accompanied him and Virginia since their misadventure in Alaska. One of his chests held knives used to split fish, and handling them after six years was enough to change the course he had charted for his family aboard their trim schooner, fast enough to deliver light cargo but surely not designed to carry fish in her hold. Nor was the crew he hired in Hong Kong suitable for yacht racing; “flotsam of the North Pacific,” as Victor characterizes them, they must have seemed a rough gang to ship aboard a small vessel carrying three children and a wife six months or more pregnant with twins. “Enough seal poachers, sea otter hunters … were found on the beach [at Hong Kong] to make a fishing crew willing to go on shares. These were of the type that the Captain had come to know on the Northwest Coast and they got on well together.”

  In the event, the adventure that summer was as thrilling as discovering gold nuggets strewn for the taking, “a stirring voyage and altogether a delightful time on the fishing grounds,” as Slocum would write after it ended, even if the aftermath—the death of those twins in Portland—caused the Slocums’ second son, Benjamin, to write Walter Teller that “the ocean is no place to raise a family.” His older brother disagreed, recalling this excursion in enthusiastic detail. Victor was old enough at five to remember the events vividly and young enough to have their drama amplified by their very novelty.

  Victor’s account of that summer is lavish, detailed, and for the first time in his book he doesn’t rely on what his father later wrote or told him. He elaborates every aspect of the adventure—the geography, history, biological diversity, and culture of the Okhotsk Sea—with his research as a grown writer, fueled by his thrill at having been there, seen that, and done so in the company of his parents and young siblings. For Slocum’s later biographers, Walter Teller and Ann Spencer, the cod-fishing episode was an interlude in the busy to-ings and fro-ings in a merchant seaman’s itinerary, and they each devote roughly a dutiful page to the events that began with the Slocums’ boarding of the Pato in Manila and ended with her sale two years later in Honolulu. Victor’s account runs sixteen animated pages, starting with his father’s purchase in Hong Kong of four fishing dories, nested in pairs and strapped to the Pato’s deck as she voyaged almost three thousand miles north to the Siberian port of Petropavlovsk.

  This route took them through the Formosa Strait, where they sailed among what Victor characterizes as “the great fleet of trading and fishing junks,” an encounter worth remarking inasmuch as the speed, stiffness, and dry decks of these Asian vessels deeply influenced Joshua Slocum’s later design of his self-built rescue vessel, the Liberdade. The journey continued north through the Korea Strait, with Japan to the southeast, and after twenty-five days and two thousand miles, the Pato entered the Okhotsk. Three days later, “my mother, all aglow with excitement, called me on deck to see the high conical peak of Mount Villuchinski, white and glistening in the morning sunlight, high above the fog drifting upon the sea.” Seven thousand feet high and twenty miles distant, “it was one of the sights never to be forgotten in one’s lifetime.” (For such outbursts of wholehearted astonishment and affection, Capt. Joshua Slocum: The Adventures of America’s Best Known Sailor should be valued above what could have been merely an opportunity to cash in on having a famous father.)

  By the time Slocum and his family and speculative crew had wet their lines in the Sea of Okhotsk, the process of taking and cleaning and salting cod had been refined—if that’s the best word for a mess of scales and guts—off the coast of New England. First, everyone worked on shares determined by formulas bearing on ownership of the vessel, the cost of fitting her out, and the purchase price of salt to cure the fare (as the total catch was termed). Slocum found the best fishing grounds by informed trial and error, every now and then casting a baited line over the rail near the shoreline of Cape Lopatka. Victor earned the privilege of claiming to have caught—by happy accident and in defiance of his father’s command to keep his hands off the fishing gear—the first and one of the biggest of the twenty-five thousand cod they were soon to haul on board.

  As soon as the captain was satisfied that this was the place, he anchored in twenty fathoms (120 feet) and the dories nested on the Pato’s deck were launched and rowed, trailing trawls 1,200 feet long with baited hooks every twelve feet. This was hand-over-fist work, and everyone joined in, most eagerly Virginia, four days after delivering her ill-fated twins. They soon realized that they had grossly underestimated their haul, bringing along only enough salt to cure a small catch for the Manila market. But luck ebbed and flowed like a Fundy tide for the Slocums, and here, sailing over the horizon at this isolated spot on the Okhotsk, loomed none other than the Constitution, the vessel on which Victor had been born. She, too, had been hauling cod, and was loaded to her gunwales with fish and about to shovel her excess salt into the ocean, but instead it went free of charge into the Pato’s holds.

  Then the fun really began. There’s nothing like price-per-unit scavenging to get the blood running hot, and in addition to whatever share each crew member would receive when the fare was sold in port, each cod
caught by hand line from the mother vessel drew a bounty of twenty-five cents, with Victor’s and Benjamin’s catches tallied along with Virginia’s. As Victor remembered, “the sinker no sooner touched bottom than you had one … In two weeks the schooner was loaded to her marks.” There was a bit more to the process than dangling bait on a hook and hauling in money. The catch had to be salt-cured to arrest the natural process of decay caused by enzymes and bacteria, but for dry-curing each fish had to have the greatest amount of its meat salted down. Once taken aboard the cod moved along a gruesome assembly line, described in detail by Elijah Kellogg in The Fisher Boys of Pleasant Cove (1874)1: a “throater” slit the fish’s throat and pulled out its tongue before slicing open the belly and cutting grooves on each side of its head. Next a “header” broke off the head and tore out the liver (saved for oil) and entrails, moving the remaining body along to the “splitter,” who stripped out the backbone and dropped the rest into the hold to the “salter,” who did what his name suggests, with a fine judgment as to how much salt to apply and how most efficiently to “kench them down,” arranging them in tiers, alternating napes and tails.

  Having already abandoned his plan to take their fare to Manila’s paltry and pinch-fist market, Slocum decided to sail it to Victoria, on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, a distance of 2,900 miles following the curve of the Aleutian Islands along the great circle route, requiring more sophisticated navigation—constant shifts of heading as opposed to straight-line (rhumb-line) sailing—and the prospect of cold and dense fog. For Victor, the adventure continued, as landing parties in the Aleutians came back aboard with geese, and a member of the crew asked to be put ashore with his rifle to bag the Pato a bear. “In an hour he hailed us from the beach and when he tumbled over the rail he was covered with mud and badly shocked from fright … No one could get anything out of him further than that he had found the bear.”