The Hard Way Around

by Geoffrey Wolff

  Joshua Slocum with Gilbert Islanders (Photo credit 6.1)

  1 For a vessel to be “cranky” is to be unbalanced, tending under sail to tip to one side, confounding her natural and wind-driven inclination to heel to the other, or exacerbating her natural heel near to the tipping point. It is a dangerous condition, sometimes caused by cargo having shifted and sometimes—and more consequentially—by a flaw in the ship’s design.

  2 Robert D. Foulke, “Life in the Dying World of Sail, 1870–1910,” The Journal of British Studies 3, no. 1 (1963).

  3 A shipboard library was not a customary appurtenance of a shipmaster who shared ownership of his vessel with land-based investors. W. H. Bunting tells of the response of Arthur Sewall to an invoice for a walnut bookcase ordered by the captain from the builder of Indiana, a full-rigged Cape Horner being prepared for the command of John Delano: “I do not allow such ornaments in our Sewall ships. We do not intend our captains to be reading story books at sea. We intend our captains to spend their time on deck reading the weather and trying to make quick passages. Take your hatchet … and convert that thing into kindling wood.”

  4 The responses of book reviewers to subjects of biography are as unpredictable as the responses of a friend to someone introduced with the assurance “You’ll love her.” Or, in the case of Walter Teller writing The Search for Captain Slocum in 1956, “You’ll love him!” Reviewing Teller’s book for the Saturday Review (August 11, 1956), Robert Payne wrote of the man who beguiled Teller that he exhibited “a strange streak of sullenness and anger,” that he was “irascible,” a “crusty-tempered, hard-hitting and secretive old fogy” beneath whose external “canniness” there was “always something curiously rotten, something which has gone to seed.”

  SEVEN

  Mutiny

  There can be but one opinion as to the conduct of Capt. Slocumb [sic], of the Northern Light. Whatever may have been the offense of the unhappy wretch whom he tortured, the fact that Slocumb treated him with in-human barbarity is past contradiction. The mere imprisonment of the man in the hole where he was found by the officer who arrested him is sufficient proof that Slocumb is a brute who deserves the severest punishment.

  —New York Times editorial, November 29, 1883

  THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE would not officially open until May 1883, but when the Northern Light was towed up the East River to Pier 23 in Brooklyn, the structure had already ended the era of New York City’s dominance as a home port to the tallest of tall ships. The final break in the spans of the marvelous suspension bridge was closed over by the spring of 1882, and the Northern Light’s topmost masts had to be removed—“struck”—in order for her to pass upriver to her wharf and later to her loading pier, where she would take on that Faustian-bargain modern cargo—case oil, or kerosene—bound from a refinery to delivery in Japan. Victor believed that he remembered the Northern Light’s remaining topmost masthead—at least 120 feet high—being dabbed with paint by a playful bridge workman as the boy stared up from the deck of his father’s great ship to the overarching structure towering above her.

  The two Roeblings, John and Washington, designed, supervised, and built—in the most intimate, hands-on, hanging-from-scaffolds way—what was then the modern world’s most remarkable engineering feat. Washington’s father, John, died in 1869 of complications from a construction injury when bridge timbers crushed his toes. The son then took over, only to be paralyzed by decompression sickness after he examined the suspension bridge’s pylons. Many workers died fulfilling the dazzling vision of a soaring connection—a taming, as it was understood. And in 1885 the first jumper took his plunge to display its dramatic value as a place to fall literally from a great height.

  The Brooklyn Bridge, besides announcing itself as a barrier to the evolution of ever higher-masted sailing ships, was also an emphatic monument to iron and steel, in the making of which wood seemed almost incidental. And busy on the East River below its spans were steamboats of every size and ambition, from tugs to pleasure yachts to oceangoing passenger ships, in a hurry, leaving and arriving on schedules no sailing vessel could guarantee.

  Hart Crane’s extraordinary poem “To Brooklyn Bridge” (1926) is an artifact of twentieth-century modernism, but had it been written in 1883, Joshua Slocum surely would have found its lines prophetic. He would have understood its epigraph, taken from Satan’s response in the Book of Job when the Lord asks where he’s been: “from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.” Slocum must have marveled, and perhaps shuddered, at the din of construction, the glare of welding torches, the chainlike shadows cast by the sun behind its wires and cables, themselves a kind of grotesque caricature by magnification of his own ship’s rigging.

  Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,

  A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene;

  All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn …

  Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

  And he would have appreciated Crane’s apostrophe to the achievement: “O harp and altar, of the fury fused …” It is in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge that a reader today considers the quaint romantic artifice of the New York Tribune’s article titled “An American Family Afloat,” quoted above, its prose as plushy as the Northern Light’s upholstery. The feature’s lead is blind to its surrounding realities: “At Pier 23, East River, lies a typical American ship, commanded by a typical American sailor who has a typical American wife to accompany him on his long voyages, and to make his cabin as acceptable a home as he could have on shore.” Given that the modifier “typical” is always booby-trapped, the Tribune reporter seems ignorant even of what he knows that he knows: “A visit to her deck suggests two sad and striking thoughts, one that American sailing ships are becoming obsolete and the other that so few American sailors can be found.” And this was a fact, whether or not it was also a fact that Captain Joshua Slocum, as the reporter assured his readers, “is one of the most popular commanders sailing out of this port, both on account of his general capability and his kindness to his crew.” (It was notable that Slocum enjoyed working side by side with members of his crew at rigging, sail mending, and carpentry, and that this relaxation of formality was appreciated.)

  Walter Teller describes John Slocombe’s final visit to his son—their first meeting in twenty-two years, “like Joseph in Egypt sending for Jacob,” the father obeying “the summons”—as cordial. Seventeen years later, in a letter to his cousin Joel, the captain wrote with his customary runic reticence about family matters that during the reunion the two men “didn’t spend our time talking about fine large ships, our business was a quarter of a century back … ‘Joshua’ said he ‘do you remember the night in the little boat when we rowed all night on a lee-shore and the fishing vessels came into port with close reefed sail?’ Didn’t I remember it!”

  The old man, who died five years later, was “a fiscal failure” now past seventy, and he’d never met Virginia or his grandchildren by her and Joshua. He brought along his daughter by his second marriage, Emma, who visited with her half-brother for seven weeks. She described Joshua and Virginia as having been kind and attentive to the young country girl she had been, escorting her to museums and art galleries and on a tour of Harper’s publishing house (which suggests the vitality of Joshua Slocum’s preoccupation with writing). Emma’s hosts bought her gifts and took her to Coney Island “to hear [John Philip] Sousa’s band of one hundred pieces. I saw nothing but happiness between Josh and Virginia. I think there was nothing else. They seemed perfectly happy. Captain Josh was a kind, thoughtful and fine man.” The extended family enjoyed a few jolly picnics at Manhattan Beach, in the company of other shipmasters the Slocums had met somewhere on the seven seas.

  Akin to so many bucolic stories of the perfectly named Gilded Age, there was quicksand just beneath beachside band concerts and rot in those “black walnut bedsteads.” To pay for the Northern Light’s conspicuous graces, case oil was to be carried from on
e of the more than a hundred kerosene refineries on Newtown Creek to Yokohama. Newtown Creek would become notorious even before Slocum set out to round the world on the Spray as perhaps the most foully polluted industrial site in the United States, if not the planet. Located on a tributary of the East River north of the Brooklyn Bridge, it was where John D. Rockefeller located his plants to refine Ohio and Pennsylvania petroleum—displacing coal—into kerosene to light the world, and the place where he was busy turning his Astral Oil Company into that octopus so tamely titled Standard Oil. Case oil was an appropriately standardized cargo, packed in five-gallon tins, two tins to a case, and in feverish demand in Asia, where kerosene was rapidly replacing plant oil, in turn liberating farmland for food production.

  Already, in 1882, Newtown Creek’s waters (if the fluid that floated boats there could be thought of as H2O) corroded ship bottoms so quickly that masters found it prudent to load up with case oil and scoot on the earliest possible tide. But finding a crew to sail the Northern Light halfway around the world had become increasingly difficult. It wasn’t merely that the wages offered were laughably meager, or that the discipline enforced by officers was frequently sadistic, or the food disgusting and the hazards awful. No, these days young adventurers were now fetching up out west in camps such as Deadwood, where the floor of a saloon in the Black Hills was steadier under the feet of a drunk prospector than the ratline shaking a hungry sailor two hundred feet above the bedlam of a boiling sea.1

  Walter Teller, seeing the situation from Slocum’s point of view, writes that “foremast hands were being recruited from the dregs of society.” This is a recurring declaration in histories of whaling, mercantile shipping, and navies, as these pages have shown. But at this particular moment, on a ship that required a larger crew than the thirty or so finally recruited, it must be stressed that Teller wasn’t exaggerating when he wrote that aboard the Northern Light, as she prepared to cast off from Newtown Creek, “one found not only roving adventurers, and men seeking to escape the restraints of civilization, but drunkards, vagrants, criminals and degenerates.”

  The exact names, nationalities, ambitions, and résumés of the crew delivered to Captain Slocum by shipping agents—crimps—are details lost to time. But it may be assumed that they comprised the usual motley cohort of desperate men shanghaied by a well-organized ring of thugs while bewildered, bewitched, blackjacked, or beguiled ashore at rumpots, gambling dens, and bawdy houses. As custom would have dictated, the first two months of les miserables’ wages—so-called advance notes—would have been paid to the crimps as a fee for digging up and delivering the near dead, who could be presumed to be hungover, seasick, or at the least suffering seller’s remorse as they found themselves on an August afternoon being towed by a tug northward up Long Island Sound so that the Northern Light could avoid a return passage under the Brooklyn Bridge.

  In the customary and disgraceful way of things, the exploited crew would shrug, sullenly, and work gratis for two months, an enterprise known as “working up the dead horse,” and somewhere at sea (perhaps in the horse latitudes) a ceremony would attend the “burial of the dead horse,” with appropriate chanteys and perhaps rueful resolutions to be wiser next time ashore. But what happened after clearing Long Island Sound and heading seaward, bound for Yokohama, was not in the normal course of things. Victor, then eleven, was an interested witness to what took place.

  Having been signaled by Slocum that no further tow was needed, and some sails having been hoisted to carry the Northern Light to sea, the tug dropped the towing hawser and turned back toward New York. Too late did Slocum realize that his fine ship’s rudder had quit functioning during the tow, and that without it he couldn’t steer. Whether or not the mechanism had been sabotaged, the most urgent piece of business then was to ship the long hawser before the Northern Light ran over it, tangling it on her keel and further damaging her rudder. The steam donkey engine, used to turn a huge capstan that might have winched the hawser aboard, was in use raising the topsails. The machine’s larger purpose, to reduce the size of the crew necessary to sail such a large ship, was for the crew more of a rebuke than a benefit, especially given the engine’s nickname, so reminiscent of the loathed “donkey’s breakfast” upon which they tried to sleep. The common term at the time for the capstan itself—“niggerhead”—suggests the atmosphere of fellowship enjoyed by shipmates.

  But back to the loose end of that hawser. To the end of getting it in, at the best of times an onerous task, and in what might be imagined was a state of high excitement if not panic, Slocum’s new first mate—a bucko of the “real down east bull type that ‘ate ’em alive,’ ” in Victor’s words—swept through the forecastle and “chased all hands, drunk or sober, out on the deck and lined them up on the hawser, going down the line with a belaying pin to get the slackers into action.” Imagine the pandemonium: men abruptly roused from hangovers or worse, headaches induced by Mickey Finns or even blackjacks, to meet their chief mate and galley master, being force-fed belaying pin soup by a bellowing bucko bull. Imagine the din on deck, augmented by Captain Slocum’s fury that his New York tug was ignoring his signals of distress.

  The hawser having been successfully shipped, a signal was sent to nearby New London to fetch a pilot boat to tow the Northern Light in for repairs. This created a nice conundrum in maritime law, a spiderweb of evolving codes and contradictory subcodes that baffled attorneys around the world but was argued with unhesitating self-certainty by those ordinary seamen who made a specialty of knowing their rights, few as those were. Here was the question: Could the Northern Light’s voyage—putatively to Yokohama, Japan—be said to have ended here in New London, Connecticut, upon the master’s order to enter that port, not 150 miles from the ship’s embarkation point at Newtown Creek? And if the voyage had ended, were not the crewmen now entitled to leave the ship (and that “real down east bull type” mate) and to collect the full pay that they’d been promised?

  So insistently did many members of the crew demand these entitlements that, while under tow from the pilot boat, Slocum and his officers raised the signal aloft: “Mutiny On Board,” summoning the U.S. revenue cutter Grant. With this the crew, “armed with handspikes,” rushed the quarterdeck, where Slocum intercepted them “with a drawn revolver and a cool, clear-cut order to ‘Stop at peril of life.’ ” While it might seem churlish to doubt that anyone in such a situation—in the history of the world—ever said, exactly, “Stop at peril of life,” it is certain that what happened next was seriously ugly. In a letter to Walter Teller, Benjamin testified that he saw his mother holding revolvers in both hands, covering his father while the crew was searched for weapons. The captain ordered the mutiny’s ringleader to be put in irons. As the tough first mate was tricing the mutineer, the latter lunged at him with a sheath knife, stabbing him “furiously in the abdomen four times.” He died two months later of his wounds.2

  The revenue cutter having come alongside, the assailant was arrestedand the crew put under armed guard. The rudder was repaired, its securing pins having broken under stress. (Is it far-fetched to imagine that they had corroded while being soaked in that acid bath of Newtown Creek?) Then Slocum made what would prove the strategic error of appealing to the crew, “man to man,” as Victor writes, to continue to Japan under a new chief mate, who had seen naval service in the Civil War, “which had given him fighting enough to last the rest of his days.”

  The embers of mutiny, in Victor’s memory, continued to smolder as the Northern Light made her way south, crossing “The Line” with proper equatorial ceremony. Neptune climbed aboard to indulge stunts and cross-dressing in a spirit of Mardi Gras. (A favorite prank, designed to victimize greenhorn equator crossers, was to lay a hair across the lens of the telescope—horizontal to the horizon—and offer a prize to the first lookout who discovered The Line appearing out of the distance.) During the approach to the Cape of Good Hope the crew sang chanteys, but they must have been of the blues sort, because they were g
rumbling.

  After a month at sea, the Great Comet of 1882 appeared, portentously, given the circumstances of the remaining passages to Japan and back to New York. Late 1882 found the Northern Light running her easting down in the roaring forties, sailing at a smart clip from the cape to Australia’s Cape Leeuwin to Tasmania, where she headed north along Australia’s east coast. Two weeks before Christmas, sailing through the “Cannibal Isles,” known today more realistically as the Solomons, Slocum’s lookout spotted in midocean a small boat adrift with five aboard, three young men, an old woman, and an old man, who was their leader. Together with their boat, they were hoisted aboard the Northern Light and managed—using a mix of common words and hand signs—to convey that they were the survivors of a twenty-one-foot open whaleboat that had set out forty days earlier with seven additional Gilbert Island missionaries (the islanders’ term for converts to Christianity). Returning home after an interisland business visit, they had been blown six hundred miles out to sea by a monsoon, and the fate of the seven who had died was unspecified (but to Slocum and his family, unsuspicious). All survivors—nearly starved and alive only because monsoon-driven rain had provided drinking water—declined medication with brandy, declaring it “taboo,” a self-denial they soon learned to rationalize away.

  A few years later, Slocum wrote a short recollection, “Rescue of Some Gilbert Islanders,” which he meant but failed to append to the published version of his Voyage of the “Liberdade” (1894). It was finally printed, with a brief editor’s note, in Walter Teller’s collection of his writings, The Voyages of Joshua Slocum (1985). Like so many of Slocum’s adventures, this rescue played out publicly and dramatically. After feeding and tending to his new passengers, he attempted to lay a course for their home island of Abamama, but wind and currents foiled this plan. Next he thought to put them ashore at Pohnpei (formerly “Ponape”) in the Caroline group. At the terrified urging of the rescued survivors, who assured him they would be eaten by Caroline Islanders, the Northern Light continued another 2,400 miles to her destination, Yokohama, where the captain imagined this band of Christians would be welcomed, celebrated, and returned in comfort to Abamama. They arrived on January 15, 1883, and if the Gilbert Islanders were well fed and healthy, they found the snow-clad Japanese port bitterly cold.