The Hard Way Around

by Geoffrey Wolff

  It’s unknown whether Virginia encouraged the sale of the Amethyst to finance Slocum’s stake in the Northern Light, but it’s likely that she did. The Amethyst, so much smaller than their new vessel, was possibly the oldest then afloat among American merchant ships; she was showing her age, having been battered in a five-day typhoon in the South China Sea, during which the captain lashed himself to the helm and Virginia locked the children below.

  Boat envy is a universal malady, and the Northern Light was as “beautiful as her name,” as Slocum wrote. (She was named in honor of a previous Northern Light, a clipper launched in 1851, two years later sailing around Cape Horn from San Francisco to Boston in seventy-six days, a record that held until 1993.) The new Northern Light, with twice the carrying capacity of her namesake, had also been launched near Boston. At the time Slocum bought his interest in her, the so-called medium clipper, a three-skysailyard windjammer, had been at sea for eight years. She had been sailed to Hong Kong by John E. Kenney, an American commander who—for reasons unspecified—was eager to sell his ownership share. The transfer was overseen by the duty-free port’s U.S. consul John Singleton Mosby—that Mosby, the Mosby’s Rangers’ Confederate Colonel Mosby. Mosby had filed the birth certificate for the newborn Garfield on the Slocums’ previous visit to Hong Kong, and like Slocum he had risen through the ranks from private to his exalted place; the two hot-tempered men warmed quickly to each other, though Virginia—notably unsqueamish—could not endure the sight of his disfiguring saber scars.

  But let us relish Victor’s eloquence on the subject of the new ship:

  No one of the present generation [mid-twentieth century] can form any sort of an idea of the majestic grandeur of a ship of the Northern Light class, not only as a picture, tearing along under a cloud of canvas, but even when lying quietly at anchor with a forest of yards correctly squared and harbor stows on the sails. It was a sight to compel a feeling of awe merely to look aloft to trace out the massive hempen shrouds and backstays, to say nothing of tracing out the leads of the running gear. To know that was in itself an education, and to be master of all was a big job …

  How big a job, and how vast its psychological complexities, would become one of the two most argued and unresolved mysteries of Joshua Slocum’s character and reputation. There existed among many forecastle crews a farcical resentment of their master’s perquisites, living a carefree life on the bounding main, all moonlight and gentle breezes, while they struggled with tempests and cobbly seas. While it was true that the captain of a sailing ship by strict custom delegated all executive duties of running his vessel to first and second mates, leaving himself seemingly free of responsibilities, in reality he had an unrelenting liability to keep the crew alive and well, the ship afloat, the cargo safe. The master had to understand, and often calculate on the spot, the weight and bulk limit of cargo he could carry without causing his vessel to be crank or slow, to pitch or yaw.1 He had to grasp better than any stevedore the art of loading: what to carry deep in the hold, what between decks, what on deck, and whether forward, aft, or amidships. He had to comprehend what were the properties of such freight as cotton, sulfur (whose fumes could blind a crew member as surely as the methane emitted by a cargo of rotting bananas), guano, pianos, nitrate (whose great weight came with foul odor), locomotives, and even rice (a weevil-ridden and hateful cargo that, if wet, produced a steaming and unendurable stench). Moreover, he had to be alert to changes—that is, future values—in the commodities market. In addition to seamanship, crowd psychology, medical practice, the code and common laws of ships and sailors, and the nature of commercial exchanges, the master, believed by his ordinary seamen to be lounging in his deck chair by day and banqueting at night, had to write coherent business letters, keep meticulous accounts, and have the social grace to mingle with merchants and consuls in any seaport in the world. Few sea urchins from Nova Scotia could fit this bill.

  And now consider the scale of the Northern Light. By one measure she was five times greater than the Amethyst, requiring a crew of forty-five and difficult indeed to handle. Robert Foulke describes the cohort of modified clippers to which she belonged: “Larger, heavier and clumsier than the clippers, these ships were not thoroughbreds: they were often over-masted to make up for increased weight; their length sometimes made them cranky in maneuver and unmanageable when running before heavy seas; their low freeboard made work on decks which were almost constantly awash exceedingly dangerous.”2

  Foulke refers to vessels of the latter Northern Light’s class as belonging to a period of “decadence” in deepwater shipping. If, as her subsequent history shows, there was a fatal flaw—the outcome of cheapjack construction—at the heart of his huge new command, how could as experienced a mariner as Slocum have missed it? All too easily, comes the ready answer. His own son’s estimation above of her “majestic grandeur” is blindingly seductive, and ship surveys during the heyday of merchant shipping in the late nineteenth century were no more reliable than house inspections during the subprime mortgage boom of the early twenty-first.

  To stretch the analogy, one should not discount the granite counter effect, the in-ground pool effect, the cherry cabinet effect. The Slocums weren’t merely investing in a long-haul cargo carrier; they were buying their dream house, and as a dwelling the Northern Light was extraordinary. From her figurehead to her rounded stern, she had plenty of the “wow” factors that real estate agents like to sell. But even more tempting must have been the master’s quarters, with room for Virginia’s piano and Joshua’s library. Victor remembers his father’s reading chairs and volumes of Gibbon and Macaulay, Cervantes and Dickens, as essential furniture. “One of the cabins of the Northern Light contained a library of at least five hundred volumes representing the standard works of the great writers. Such company at sea made an ideal atmosphere … The cabin, with its orderly and well fitted bookcases, looked very much like the study of a literary worker or a college professor.”3

  Writing to Walter Teller in her old age about visiting the Northern Light in New York as a girl in 1882, Slocum’s half-sister Emma recollected that “everything was there as in a modern apartment. There was a pantry boy, a Philippino …” And writing for the New York Tribune in June of that year, a reporter described the Northern Light in his headline as “An American Family Afloat.”

  No one, to look at the graceful lines of this vessel, her Yankee rigging and sails, her bold cutwater and her noble stern, could mistake her for any other than an American ship.

  This vessel is the clipper ship Northern Light, owned by Benner and Pinckney of this city … The tautness, trimness, and cleanliness of this vessel, from keelson to truck and from stem to stern, are features not common on merchant ships … The neat canvas cover over the steering-wheel bearing the vessel’s name and hailing port, worked with silk, is the handiwork of the captain’s wife. Descending to the main cabin, one wonders whether or not he is in some comfortable apartment ashore.

  When a Tribune reporter visited the ship, Mrs. Slocum sat busily engaged with her little girl at needlework. Her baby boy was fast asleep in his Chinese cradle. An older son was putting his room in order and a second son was sketching. The captain’s stateroom is a commodious apartment, furnished with a double berth which one might mistake for a black walnut bedstead; a transom upholstered like a lounge; a library, chairs, carpets, wardrobe and the chronometers. This room is abaft the main cabin, which is furnished like a parlor. In this latter apartment are the square piano, center table, sofa, easy chairs and carpets, while on the walls hang several oil paintings.

  In front of the parlor is the dining room, which, together with the other rooms, exhibit a neatness of which only a woman’s hand is capable.

  Going on deck, the captain showed with great pride the cleanly kept steam engine in the after end of the forward house. It was used for handling cargo, condensing water, extinguishing fire, pumping the bilges or for other emergencies. The carpenter shop was next visited. In this wa
s a long bench with vise, a lathe, saws and other tools for new work or repairing.

  But before the Northern Light docked in New York, she sailed from Hong Kong, where the Slocums took her over, to Liverpool. It would be helpful to have some record of the survey that was performed on her while negotiations proceeded for Slocum to purchase Captain Kenney’s interest in the newish vessel. The age of a boat can tell little or reveal much, and even more perplexingly a new ship may be the worse for her youth and an old one the better for her maturity. If the Amethyst was the oldest American vessel afloat, she had also been lovingly fashioned from first-rate materials and fastened extravagantly with copper fittings. Just as the earliest fiberglass yachts are often still afloat, having been extravagantly overbuilt (in part due to ignorance of the new material’s strength), so did innovative construction techniques for such modified clippers as the Northern Light often encourage overconfidence in the durability of vessels soon to be burdened by huge cargoes and expected to carry acres of sail while driving through extreme seas at extreme latitudes.

  When Slocum sold her, the Amethyst had been sailed for almost sixty years. But ships of the Northern Light’s class were estimated to have a useful life of from merely eight to eleven years; by one reckoning the grace period between launching and “disaster and deterioration” might average ten years. When the Slocums bought in at Hong Kong, their vessel had been sailed hard for more than eight years. It was customary to have a ship surveyed from stem to stern, from masthead to keel bottom, every seven years. This was crucial for ships of such extreme size: the longer a ship, the greater the stress on the hull’s integrity, especially on her bow, stern, and rudder mechanism. Examination of ships’ records at the times they changed hands—the Northern Light had been sold for $95,000 a few years before Slocum bought his share at a now unknown price—reveal widespread chicanery. Even if the surveyors weren’t bought off, the sellers or their agents were good or even masterful at disguising flaws (many of them hidden underwater) in the hull, mechanisms, rigging, and keel bolts of huge contrivances being advertised as in A1 condition.

  While there’s no way of knowing whether Slocum was gulled into trading up to the Northern Light, it’s certain that hardheaded prudence often enjoys a holiday when sailboats are being considered. And it’s also certain that the most costly and dangerous crises that the Northern Light would suffer under Slocum’s command—her rudder breaking away in Long Island Sound and her rudderhead completely twisting off and her topsides springing huge leaks during a storm off the Cape of Good Hope—were structural failures that render his boast that she was the “finest American sailing vessel afloat” at best wishful, at worst delusional.

  But structural problems paled before the grief soon to be suffered by the ship’s crew, and by the Slocums on account of her crew. Aboard what her master titles “this magnificent ship, my best command,” the early signs were auspicious. Having, in Walter Teller’s estimation, struggled to “the top of the tree” at age thirty-seven, with Virginia and their four children comfortably installed aboard, Slocum sailed from Hong Kong to Manila, where he took on a load of hemp and sugar to be delivered in Liverpool, going west near Sumatra, through the Sunda Strait to the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope. Victor recalls a stop in Java for produce and livestock, and that aboard the Northern Light during that voyage to the Mersey River there were pet monkeys and civets to set against the rats. The crew was disarmingly competent, British sailors taken aboard in Hong Kong after their passage from Cardiff carrying coal. This was a singing crew, handy with such chanteys as “Hanging Johnny” and “Blow the Man Down.” Song, which encouraged the rhythmic pulling of lines and hauling of cables, was always a good sign, the equivalent of a miner’s canary tweeting happily away. When this crew grumbled it was because they wearied of chicken and eggs in their diet, and longed instead for their customary salted mystery meat.

  Tempting as it is to delay explaining what sailors ate aboard ship, it is now the time for an account. The meat, salted pork or beef or horse, was often high-smelling and always coarse with gristle. Dried beans were favored above pea soup, in which maggots floated to the top. Ship’s biscuits harbored weevils. Figs and raisins were home to white worms. And as awful as the food was, there was never enough of it.

  After six months at sea, the Northern Light entered the Mersey on Christmas Day of 1881, church bells sounding through the fog, and delivered the largest shipment of sugar ever to have been off-loaded at Liverpool. Even before she was docked much of the crew left their ship to waste their pay, never to appear aboard again. She then had her bowsprit replaced and bottom recoppered after the removal of such an accumulation of barnacles from the tropical seas that even these experienced ship repairers were amazed by their profusion. (Victor believed that the awful condition of the Northern Light’s bottom accounted for the unusually slow passage of 160 days from Manila.)

  Meantime, Virginia used the time dockside to take her children on educational excursions to Liverpool factories, where the Philippine raw sugar was made ready for teacups and Philippine hemp fiber became twisted rope. And it was also dockside that there occurred a prophetic altercation between her husband and the rigger commissioned to fabricate and install the new bowsprit.

  Slocum had recently used his fists in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and many who knew him as a boy and young man testified that he was unwilling to shy from a fight. Back in 1871, soon after marrying Virginia, he had successfully defended himself against a charge in San Francisco of beating and wounding a crewman aboard the Constitution. Interviewing Slocum years later aboard the Spray, a reporter for the Boston Sun described him as a mature and settled mariner, “as tough as wrought iron and as lively on his feet as a chicken … His fist is not only big, but has a hard, horny Jim Corbett cast that inspires respect.” As an afterthought, the reporter noted that Slocum was “a good shot with the pistol.”

  Now, back in Liverpool, the rigger failed to appear with his workers to install the new bowsprit, and Slocum instructed his first mate to assemble a crew to do the job themselves. Once this was done, the rigger came on board in what Victor describes as “a truculent mood. An altercation ensued on the main deck … and the Captain was cited to appear in court next morning.” His son—displaying both a case of “my old man can whip your old man” and a wink to the knowing regarding the wiles of plaintiffs—tells with pride that the rigger appeared in court “very much bandaged and attended by both a doctor and a nurse.” The case—no harm no foul?—was dismissed.

  But what lingers, and provokes debate, is the temperament (and temper) of Joshua Slocum as a master at sea.4 His children, who saw him daily and in trying circumstances during many long passages at sea, remembered him as gentle and witty with them and with their mother, a tease and sometimes a whimsical show-off. As Grace Murray Brown wrote to Walter Teller, Slocum’s own father had been “too harsh to be taken straight,” causing him to run off to sea after his mother died, but his rough experience as a child didn’t necessarily smooth his edges as a father figure aboard ship. Mrs. Brown, who loved the memory of her much older cousin, remembered that Slocum’s “contempt could be very potent,” that he could be sarcastic and blunt, “crusty or cutting,” and that “he was capable of letting his irascible side show up if sufficient provocation was given or even suspected … Small slights would rankle and never be forgotten or forgiven.”

  By Victor Slocum’s account, the crew that sailed on the Northern Light from Liverpool to New York was a “typical Western Ocean hard case crew, with a bucko mate to match.” This description, with amplification, might provide a context for the horror shows that would be played upon the Northern Light’s ample stage during her voyages over the next two years. The bucko mate to whom Victor refers was known as Black Taylor, a “swarthy down-easter,” one of that breed of Maine coasters who were said to fear only God and Cape Cod. Slocum, according to his son, had a lifelong respect for Taylor, and trusted him. But “bucko mate” is no ter
m of affection. As we have seen, aboard American “blood boats” and “hell ships” these men squeezed work from the crew by lavishing on them “belaying pin soup” and brass knuckles affixed to a “bunch of fives.” The degree of brutality indulged by a bucko mate in service to his vessel’s needs was governed only by the humanity and attention of his master, and Victor explains that Black Taylor’s gave him a green light: “ ‘Mr. Taylor, you know what to do. And if you have any trouble with those soldiers and sea lawyers, I will pay the expense in New York.’ ”

  “Soldiers” was a term of derision for sailors who weren’t. “Larrikin”—a wise guy and loafer—was a synonym. During the leisurely forty-day passage to New York, following the northeast trade winds, Slocum meant to put the Northern Light in apple pie order to show her off not only to her two-thirds owners but also to his father, whom he had invited to travel to the city—all expenses covered—to regard the height to which Joshua had climbed at the age of thirty-eight. (This would be Joshua’s first shipboard visit to New York.) But a leisurely sail, counterintuitively, is anathema to a crew. A sailor cannot be expected to holystone decks or polish brass or varnish brightwork during a gale, or even while rolling morosely in the heat of the equatorial doldrums, though when the weather abates, as in the trade winds, it was time to tar the standing rigging and scrape and paint the masts, bulwarks, and deckhouses. As Victor marvels earlier about his father’s management of the Amethyst, “he could find more work for the mate in a minute than the mate could do in a day.” In the event, work did get done on the Northern Light between Liverpool and Sandy Hook, performed however grudgingly by the crew or encouraged brutally by Black Taylor. If there was an ugly aftermath to this passage, it was recorded in the memories and on the bodies of those who made up what Victor denigrated as a “typical Western Ocean hard case crew.” Sailors who had served on American ships of the time were easily identified by scars, a limp, or a mangled hand. And no doubt the pride-driven zeal indulged during that task-mastering passage to New York left an invisible scar on Slocum’s reputation.