The Hard Way Around

by Geoffrey Wolff

  After months at sea in uninviting waters, with a rough-and-ready crew and a hold full of dead fish, Victoria must have been a tempting place to rest at anchor, with its colonial civility, snug harbor, and rose gardens. But Slocum and his crew disdained the price offered for their haul and quickly set sail for the Columbia River, where the Pato was towed to Portland by a stern-wheeled steamer. Upon arrival, Slocum continued to speculate: using his catch as collateral, he borrowed enough money to pay off his crew, based on the price quoted for the San Francisco market. Virginia’s share was sixty dollars, with which she bought a Singer sewing machine. The children, too—baby Jessie included—were paid, according to detailed records kept by their mother.

  Their father, alert to chance, had decided to cut out the middleman in his sale of what he knew to be the first full fare of salt cod brought to Oregon. The final curing and packing in tins was done across the Willamette River in East Portland, and the family lived ashore near the Pato’s wharf during the following months, giving Victor his only experience of formal schooling. The owner of their boardinghouse became friendly with Virginia and gave her a canary named Peter, who as her son wrote would “live longer than his mistress.”

  Portland was already a lively city in the late 1870s, with a bustling red-light district, rough saloons, and many restaurants. Sailors routinely ignored warnings to be careful and stay sober lest they wake up with a broken crown, shanghaied on a derelict vessel (justly referred to in slang as an old hooker), and in debt to the shipmaster who’d paid a crimp two months’ wages to buy them. But a lively city is a hungry city, as Slocum was not slow to appreciate.

  He quickly went about his business, and few of his enterprises better dramatize what a carpe diem kind of fellow he was, remarkable even in such a carpe diem period in our carpe diem country’s history. Like a costume-jewelry salesman showing off his wares on his wrists and fingers, Slocum went from restaurant to fish market carrying one of his “Cape Cod turkeys” by its tail, but was surprised to encounter frank skepticism. It seemed his cod was too dark, since Portland diners were accustomed to white meat that had been bleached pale by astringent alum. A lemonade-from-lemons idea formed in an exclamatory bubble above the entrepreneur’s head, and he bought one of the bleached cod and thereafter went forth to potential buyers bearing one of each, preaching against the bitter evils of alum bleach and thus introducing to the people of Portland—soon to become the greenest good citizens of all—the benefits of natural, pure, organic, and dark food.

  Having wintered over in Portland, the Slocums sailed for Honolulu at the end of March 1878, with an eye to selling the Pato there. Fast and elegant, she was too small for carrying cargo, and Slocum had resolved to join the timber trade between the Philippine forests and Hong Kong boat builders. During the comfortable passage to Oahu, Slocum and his crew holystoned the decks, varnished the brightwork, and polished the brass. He rightly hoped to present her as a yacht rather than a codfish smack, though what she smelled like belowdecks has not been told.

  Slocum had a genius for putting himself in the way of opportunity. After a few interisland passages with general freight he and his family found themselves docked in Honolulu shortly after the departure of what Victor describes as “the crack mail schooner, Hilo,” which was “well out of the narrow coral entrance to [the harbor], when a belated sack of mail was rushed down” to the docks too late, to the postal official’s dismay. Victor quotes his father as calling out, “ ‘Heave aboard here, I’ll take it out to her.’ Beat the Hilo? Nothing like that was ever heard among the Islands.” The throng ashore saw the race was on, and a favorable gust, combined with a calm that slowed its rival, enabled the Pato to drive down upon the fabled mail schooner “like a train of cars.” Catching up, Slocum—with a pretty display of seamanship—sailed close enough to toss the mail aboard the Hilo.

  Soon after, word of the impromptu race was published in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser and a local planter offered to buy the Pato for $5,000 in twenty-dollar gold pieces. The Slocums booked passage to San Francisco on the German bark Christine. Shortly before sailing the planter tried to pay in silver rather than gold, a proposition Slocum refused. Victor recalls that his father held up the Christine’s departure more than an hour while negotiations were concluded. At last the captain was striding down the dock and up the gangplank with a sack in his hand. “It was gold. My mother was sitting on the after-deck in a wide rattan chair when the bag was tossed into her lap with—‘Virginia, there’s the schooner.’ ”

  In San Francisco Slocum soon singled out the Amethyst among the huge fleet anchored and wharfed in the harbor, many for sale. She was a bark of one hundred feet and four hundred tons (four times the Pato’s carrying capacity), oak-built and copper-fastened and with exquisite finish work by Thatcher Magoun in Medford, Massachusetts. The Amethyst had been launched in 1822, in a series including Topaz, Sapphire, and Emerald. She had been a passenger ship with the Jewell Line of Boston, carrying passengers to and from Liverpool, notably on one passage west of seventeen days. Even though the Amethyst held the round-trip transatlantic speed record for thirty years, the popularity of even speedier clippers had eclipsed her favor with passengers. After being used to hunt bowhead whales in the Bering Strait, and then unromantically to carry coal from Puget Sound to San Francisco, she was put up for sale at a price that Slocum could afford.

  As old and abused as she was, the Amethyst was in fine condition. Victor remembers especially the luxurious finish of the owner’s stateroom, “handsomely fitted up in mahogany and horsehair.” While Slocum refitted her for the timber trade, coppering her bottom (to protect against sea worms and delay the adhesion of speed-robbing algae and mussels) and cutting a hole in her bluff bow as a pass-through for lumber, his family lived ashore for a few months at the Clipper Hotel, at the foot of Market Street. Victor’s memories are as usual vividly narrated: the bustling waterfront and especially the arrivals and departures of the Sacramento ferry, her steam calliope releasing the pressure of her boilers by ear-splitting renditions of Verdi’s “The Prison Song” from Il Trovatore. Less nostalgically he recollects the virulent prejudice against “Celestials,” the “Heathen Chinee” brought to America’s West to build railroads and, once they were built, disdained as interlopers. After the Central Pacific had used up their labor, it was proposed they should be forcibly repatriated or, failing that, put to sleep. Victor recalls a night at the Clipper, as a boy of seven, being terrified by a torch-lit lynch mob passing beneath his hotel windows, led by followers of Dennis Kearney, a rabid racist and nativist (himself born in Cork County, Ireland, a sailor who jumped ship in San Francisco). He claims that his father had prepared himself at an open window to rotten-egg Kearney, “but my mother dragged [him] away from the window by his coat tails and told him that if he threw it and hit Kearney … the mob would burn down the hotel.”

  Joshua Slocum’s tender feelings for the Chinese (despite his friction with them at Subic Bay) must have owed more than a little to his dependence on their eagerness to buy the Philippine timber he hoped to sell them. During the three years he was the owner and master of the Amethyst, she traded exclusively “out east” in the Pacific. But before the Slocums sailed for Manila, Joshua made a trip by rail, alone, back home to Nova Scotia. En route he wrote dispatches for the Sacramento Bee, which clippings were lost with Slocum’s other papers; but reporting put a busy bee in his bonnet, his first venture as a freelancer. According to Victor, on his way east he found himself defending the honor of a lady whose privacy had been violated one night in her compartment, confronting the villain on a railway station platform in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Victor repeats his father’s account: “It was a biting, frosty morning and he said he felt extra athletic. He knocked the intruder cold.”

  Victor also reports that the captain did not visit his own father, the curmudgeon having remarried and moved to Lunenburg, on the Atlantic shore of Nova Scotia; but the failure of a reunion after a separation of eighteen
years cannot plausibly be put to the hundred or so miles between Brier Island and his father’s new home. Did Slocum think better of reconciliation? Some family feeling provoked the visit, because when he returned by train he brought along his youngest sister and brother, Ella and Ingram, who would sail with his family aboard the Amethyst, Ella to help pregnant Virginia with the children and Ingram to cook for the Slocums and the ship’s officers in the ship’s caboose galley, with headroom a foot lower than his six-foot-two height. To compound his discomfort, during the first leg of the Amethyst’s voyage she carried poorly stowed railroad iron, the shifting of which caused the vessel to roll sickeningly.

  From Honolulu they sailed to Guam, to take on water and fresh fruit and vegetables. Slocum was unimpressed by the islanders, describing them to his family as yahoos (he had been reading Gulliver’s Travels): “He found the natives,” Victor writes, “very like the Malays of the Philippines, indolent by nature and cruel to their animals.” On the scale of intolerance, Slocum’s prejudices fell well short of the British and Dutch colonials’ pukka-sahib vocabulary of disdain, with its “sea monkeys” and “cocoanut niggers,” but he was quick to generalize from isolated experiences. One might wish that a sea captain—intimately in contact with such polyglot fellow hostages aboard ship as Scandinavians, Irish, Chinese, Russians, Indians, and Pacific Islanders—would be educated in the futility of extrapolation, but one might wish many things.2

  From Guam Slocum sailed the Amethyst to Lagumanoc, a mountainous and rich lumber source on the north side of Tayabas Bay in the Philippines. He obtained a line of credit from a Manila banking house and began his trade between Luzon and Hong Kong to satisfy the demands of the Chinese emperor, who was determined to build a modern navy. But the forward motion of sailing ships is glacial contrasted to the jittery speed of economic markets, and before Slocum could make his fortune off the Chinese shipbuilders of Camagon, Narra, Tindalo, Betis, Ebony, and Dugan, the British seduced the Chinese from hardwood to iron, from mandarin junks to gunboats. In the meantime Slocum used the Amethyst as a showroom, improving her constantly to advertise the refinements of Philippine hardwood in whatever port he called. Her hull was dull black, and if her bluff bow and abrupt stern didn’t allow for the kind of elegance of line that black can encourage—“like a black velvet dress on a beautiful woman,” as Samuel Eliot Morison has it—she made a good show, scrubbed and freshly painted, her brass polished and her teak, mahogany, and rosewood varnished, her joiner work exquisite from stanchions and fife rails above deck to library shelves and cabin tables below. Victor recalls that his father, whose eyes were always open for a new market, drew a Hong Kong timber buyer’s attention to some especially beautiful rosewood filigree, suggesting that it would nicely adorn the man’s ornate coffins.

  It was in Lagumanoc in July 1879, when the Amethyst was taking on timber, that the Slocums’ little girl died soon after being born at sea and was embalmed in brandy, because—as Virginia wrote her mother in such anguish—“we would not leave her in this horid place.”3 Where they in fact left her is not known, but it is clear that whatever calamity fate delivered, they kept moving. During the winter they sailed ice from Hakodate, on Japan’s Tsugaru Strait—where the Amethyst’s deck and rigging were coated with ice—to Hong Kong,4 and coal from Nagasaki to Vladivostok and Shanghai, from which they carried gunpowder to Formosa—destined, as Victor writes, “to blow up some rebels.”

  It was at Atimonan, near several active volcanoes in the Philippines’ Lamon Bay, that the Slocums witnessed an earthquake. “The first sign of disturbance,” Victor reports, “was the rattling of the [anchor] chains in the hawse pipes and then the vessel began to vibrate … The water was boiling all over the bay.” And it was in the Philippines where—at the island of Bantigui—two of Victor’s most vivid childhood memories unfolded. While loading there the captain, “who always did a bit of timber cruising of his own,” noticed a huge rosewood tree growing on the slope of a hill above the beach and resolved to cut it down. The tree was so tall and thick that it required three days for the chopping gang carried on board the Amethyst to fell it, and then it had to be cut in half in order to drag it to the water to be floated to the mother ship. Still, the tree was too ungainly to be managed and had to be abandoned, which weighed heavy on Slocum’s heart, for he had estimated that it would fetch “five thousand dollars in San Francisco for bar tops.”

  This misbegotten enterprise was followed closely by an encounter with a couple of natives who paddled out to the anchored ship in their outrigger canoe with an item for sale. The merchandise was an impressively huge, perhaps zoo-sized, boa constrictor, but let Victor tell the tale: “[Their boat] was a small banca with the crew at each end and the boa, lashed head and tail and coiled around the outriggers, occupied the middle. The boa was lively and strained [at its] lashing … It was a fearful thing and the sight of it threw my little brother, Ben, into a fit of hysterics.”

  Benjamin wrote to Walter Teller that his father had longed to buy the snake, but that his mother was not persuaded this was a prudent investment. Closing his discussion of the episode, he noted: “Anything to make a dollar, danger or no. Father was a trader in any line.”

  Virginia’s influence on Joshua’s actions was often decisive; he trusted her absolutely to know his gifts and their limits, to protect him against the temptations of rashness but also to stir his boldness. Teller relates a story by way of illustration, set in late 1880 at Hong Kong in a harbor crowded with ships, though without tugs available to tow the Amethyst to a mooring. With his wife by his side at the wheel, Slocum entered the harbor under full sail, “heading for a narrow passageway between three British warships on the starboard side and a full rigged merchant ship on the port side,” as Teller quotes Benjamin’s letter of recollection. The Amethyst was coming down directly toward these vessels at such speed that the British deckhands and the admiral of the fleet of Her Majesty’s ships prepared for “a very severe smashup … looking for a crash of spars and torn sails.” Benjamin’s father kept coming—“Mother stood by him. Her silence gave him confidence.” Having threaded the needle and avoided collision “by inches,” Slocum found a vacancy, put the helm down, and “swung into the wind, and ‘let go the anchor’ order was given.” But then he realized that by failing to dip his ensign he had committed a breach of etiquette. So he wrote a note of apology to the admiral, who replied by commending Slocum for his bravura seamanship and inviting him to join him aboard for dinner, together with “the lady who stood beside you.”

  The next time the Amethyst entered Hong Kong harbor, in March 1881, Virginia was at full-term pregnancy with their final child, James A. Garfield Slocum, born on President Garfield’s inauguration day, and less than four months before the president was assassinated by Charles Guiteau.5

  On June 23 of the same year, back in Hong Kong, Slocum sold the Amethyst in order to buy a one-third interest in the Northern Light, at the time one of the most magnificent ships afloat, 233 feet in length, 44 feet wide, 28 feet deep in the hold, and registered at two thousand tons with three decks.

  The Northern Light (Photo credit 5.1)

  1 An eloquent account of the details of cod fishing and many other marine practices of Slocum’s time is The Maritime History of Maine: Three Centuries of Shipbuilding and Seafaring (1948), by William Hutchinson Rowe.

  2 For perspective it is fair to mention that Charles W. Domville-Fife’s Square-Rigger Days (1938) anthologizes a personal essay by William Deal titled “The Nigger of the Chelmsford,” which details a voyage from Sydney to London in 1893. Deal, described by Domville-Fife as “a fine sailor of the old school,” writes with such casual unselfconsciousness about the “nigger” of the title and his blockhead Swede and “dago” shipmates that Slocum’s slurs seem almost politically correct.

  3 In Alone at Sea, Ann Spencer writes that embalming kin in liquor was a common European and American seafaring practice, except aboard temperance vessels, whose method of preservation �
��was to coat the child in tar.”

  4 Ice was a hot commodity during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its traffic by sea may be said to have been invented on the Kennebec River, north of Bath, Maine. Shipments of “Kennebec Crystal” went as far from Maine as Calcutta—more than half the load arriving after half a year unmelted. New York market speculation on ice from Maine—complete with Tammany Hall bribes and cornered markets and unconscionably high fixed prices from New York to Baltimore—eventually drew the attention of the trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt, who sent Bath’s own Charles Morse to federal prison in Atlanta.

  5 Jessie Slocum Joyce, telling her story to Beth Day for Joshua Slocum, Sailor (1953), remembers that owing to her birthplace she was known by her siblings as “the Filipina,” Ben “the Australian,” Victor “the American,” and Garfield “our Chinese brother.”

  SIX

  Northern Light

  I had a right to be proud of her, for at that time—in the 1880s—she was the finest American sailing vessel afloat.

  —Sailing Alone Around the World

  TRAGIC IRONY IS EMBEDDED in Slocum’s description of the Northern Light as “my best command,” the kind of blindness that characterizes Oedipus before he plucks out his eyes. The sequential unraveling of the shipmaster’s overreaching pride in the Northern Light isn’t compelling tragic drama merely because it’s congruent with a kind of story formalized by Aristotle, but also because Aristotle’s description reveals such fundamental truths about human ambition, performance, and outcome. And just as Oedipus, a blind ex-king, recovered from his fall to experience consolation at Colonus, so did Slocum rise from his ruin to achieve heroic refreshment.