Ashore, Slocum advertised their plight and by publicity managed to raise sufficient funds to rescue the shivering group from the paper house in which they had been installed by the local Bible society. Because the survivors were not American, the U.S. consul was powerless to pay for their homeward passage, but the Slocums circulated a subscription list and raised $750 on the first day, principally from European merchants but also notably from a private donation by the American ambassador to Japan. The money rolled in at such a rate that Slocum put an ad in the local paper begging that contributions cease. With the help of gratis passage aboard the Pacific Mail Steam Ship Company’s City of Tokio to San Francisco, where they cashed a large letter of credit in their favor, the group steamed to Honolulu and thence by chartered schooner to Abamama, a total circuit of 11,000 miles.
Enacting Clare Boothe Luce’s axiom that no good deed goes unpunished, the fate of the funds collected on behalf of the shipwrecked Christians was challenged by the aforementioned Bible society, provoking an investigative report in the New York Times, which inspired in its turn a letter from Slocum to the editor of that newspaper, published on January 11, 1884, a year after the events in question and approximately six weeks after the quoted Times editorial labeled Slocum a “brute.” In reply to the question of where the money went, Slocum, aboard the Northern Light in New York, wrote:
On our late voyage to Yokohama we had the good fortune to rescue a party of converted South Sea Islanders. This has been reported to the Christian world, and the Captain’s account of their religious state has been made much use of for advertising purposes, to which it was not intended … [My] part in the rescue was a duty thrown upon [me] through circumstances. [My] duty was discharged—as any true sailor would discharge a duty—simply by doing it … It was a matter of no small concern to know what I should do with them:
I applied to the missionaries at Yokohama for their relief; they gave me none. The Bible Society had nothing but Bibles to give … By telling their story through the press kind sympathy was raised. Then came funds for their aid … Of the uses to which the [cash] were applied I was to be informed. I handed the money over to the Bible Society man with the understanding that he would send me such a statement at this port. Apparently that gentleman has forgotten the agreement.
More consular business was afoot in Yokohama, concerning mutineers still aboard the Northern Light. Soon after rescuing the Gilbert Islanders, Slocum heard rumors from the forecastle that a Russian crew member—in defiance of the policy established in New London that possession of a pointed sheath knife was “a declaration of war against the government of the ship”—had been grinding the tip of what Victor calls a “villainous looking knife” and bragging that “it would ‘be in the Captain’s heart before they made Yokohama.’ ” Admitting as much under questioning, he was put in irons until he could be turned over to the U.S. consul there.
As has been noted, consuls had almost absolute authority over ships and crews of their flags while in port. Slocum’s most recent consequential experience with such a personage had been in Hong Kong with John Singleton Mosby, who was famously fond of ship captains and the hospitality they offered. (He was just as infamously hostile to the complaints of ordinary seamen, and a terror to black crew members charged with offenses at sea.) When the ship anchored, Slocum requested that the shackled mutineer be removed from the Northern Light and face charges.
But the consul declared ex cathedra that the knife wielder instead be detained ashore in Yokohama but returned to the ship before Slocum sailed for Manila. This poured gasoline on the fire. The pent-up crewman brooded, Victor tells, fanning his “morose hatred into a blind fury.” Meanwhile, the Northern Light’s chief mate was ailing and her second ashore and besotted by gin. As Slocum prepared to sail in ballast to Manila to pick up a cargo of sugar and hemp for New York, his crew grumbled and threatened not to work the ship. With the aid of the donkey engine, the anchor was brought short just as the consul’s steam launch came alongside—in the spirit of Captain, you seem to have left this ashore—bearing the violent mutineer, who was meant, by prior agreement with Slocum, to have been disarmed. He wasn’t disarmed, and when escorted up the gangway by two consular constables he broke free and “made a run at [Slocum] with a knife.” Missing his mark, he was restrained and bound in irons to the backstay. Believing, correctly, that the mutineer had confederates aboard, Slocum went below and fetched from the ship’s armory a repeating carbine, with which he ordered the two constables down the gangway to their launch. Then, from the wheelhouse, armed, he ordered the sails and anchor lifted. In Manila, where a cholera epidemic raged, the prisoner was accidentally on purpose allowed to escape from an open hatch, and finally—for just a little while—the Northern Light was at peace.
That is, if sailing through what Victor reasonably ranks as “the most appalling catastrophe since the dawn of human history”—the eruption and fallout from the volcano Krakatoa—may be termed peaceful. The Northern Light was passing through the Sunda Strait, between Java and Sumatra, during the late spring of 1883, while Krakatoa was in full eruption. The sea boiled. An American ship, the William H. Besse,3 within easy signaling range aft and closely accompanied by the Bourne, came up hard aground on a brand-new lava reef raised in the exact spot through which the Northern Light, with a deeper draft, had just sailed. (The Bourne, having touched bottom and bounced off, got to deep water and managed to tow the William H. Besse off the reef.) Fretting about the ever-changing depth, Slocum ordered the lead line cast, and it came up from the bottom with its tallowed tip melted. A bright column of fire threw up ashes and smoke to an altitude of seventeen miles. A volcanic explosion was heard in Perth, more than two thousand miles distant, and at Batavia, a hundred miles away, where the detonations were described as “deafening.” At Mauritius, thousands of miles distant on the other side of the Indian Ocean, in response to what was thought to be the roar of heavy guns, naval artillery troops were ordered to their posts. Having been heard from approximately three thousand miles away, the noise is estimated—though who knows how?—to have been the loudest sound in recorded history. The air stank of sulfur and the sea near the Northern Light turned white with pumice ash, but she was nevertheless afloat and her crew—having slipped past yet another knifepoint—alive if not well.4
Borne west by the Agulhas Current, but against the force of a westerly gale, the ship now sought to clear the Cape of Good Hope the wrong way around, against the trade winds. This collision of wind and current kicks up mountainous seas in the extreme latitudes, and the Northern Light was forced to heave to, lower sails, and try to ride out the mess until the gale blew itself out. Unexpectedly—as such disasters always seem to arrive—her rudderhead twisted off, the same fatal flaw that had crippled her off New London in the placid waters of Long Island Sound. Here the situation was grave, potentially deadly, for with no means of steering the Northern Light was at imminent risk of being pooped, broached, or pitch-poled.
And like some sick-joke reprise, that wasn’t all. As towering seas swept over her deck and lower rigging, the water’s weight caused her to wallow, straining her planks, opening seams, and causing torrential leaks. Because any crewman manning pumps on deck would have been swept overboard, the captain had to rely on his steam donkey engine to pump her holds. And this at first seemed to work—a rare case of steam behaving as Joshua Slocum’s friend—until it was noticed that the floodwater being pumped overboard was diminishing in volume and darkening in color. They were pumping molasses! The sea had mixed with the sugar, and just as a jury-rig had been completed to steer her, the Northern Light was getting crank, listing thirty degrees to port, the symptoms of a ship loaded with too much weight too shallow in her hold and not enough deep. The sugar that was now pump-clogging syrup had been stowed deep, so Slocum had to give the order to jettison as much of the hemp as could be thrown into the waters off the Cape of Good Hope. Borne by the current, “bales of hemp floated to windward as far as we could see,
” Victor relates.
Once more the Slocums had survived, and the captain’s ingenuity and seamanship were audacious. Suddenly they were only twenty miles from land, and the safe harbor of Port Elizabeth, at South Africa’s eastern cape.
Here begins the end of Joshua Slocum’s tragic mastery of that “magnificent ship” that represented to him—in defiance of his miserable experience aboard her—the zenith of his career. The Northern Light spent two months in Port Elizabeth being completely overhauled. Her topsides and deck had to be recaulked to stop leaks. Her rudder again was repaired. She was rerigged, her hemp standing rigging—holding her masts in place—replaced by steel wire. Her remaining cargo of sugar and hemp was restowed. And finally, the ailing mate was replaced by a presentable new officer, Henry A. Slater, twenty-six, whose papers—later proved to be forgeries—commended him as a capable British seaman, visiting the Cape Colony to restore his health.
Not until the Northern Light was at sea, bound for New York, did Slocum learn that Slater was an incompetent hustler who had boasted even before signing aboard that he would murder the Slocums and together with malcontent accomplices seize the Northern Light and use her for purposes to be specified later. Or so Slocum’s friends and admirers were later to declare. Attempting to sort out what happened on the troubled ship is like trying a case in court—appropriately enough, because that was where the so-called facts were determined. All parties claimed injury, and in fact all suffered. At this distance, of course, it is impossible to know what happened aboard the Northern Light.
The problem facing a judge of the events today is illuminated by the uncertainty surrounding America’s most infamous and most laboriously recorded and eyewitnessed mutiny: the Somers incident. The hanging at sea of three seamen found guilty of plotting to seize the USS Somers—a navy training ship—occurred in 1842, forty-one years before the Slater debacle, steeping it in legend rather than blurring its memory. Like the 1789 mutiny on the HMS Bounty, the events leading to that crisis were disputed, aggravated by the high standing of the characters on both sides of the divide. The Somers, a hundred-foot brig, was commanded by Alexander Slidell MacKenzie, an esteemed writer. His first mate was Guert Gansevoort, first cousin of Herman Melville, whose Billy Budd was more than a little inspired by the case. The Henry Slater of the Somers incident was a seventeen-year-old trainee midshipman, Philip Spencer, the son of the U.S. secretary of war, John C. Spencer. The boy, with a record of nastiness and petty delinquency, occupied his free time during a training cruise in the South Atlantic hatching an elaborate plot to seize control of the Somers, murder any officers or crew who opposed him, sail the ship to Cuba’s Isle of Pines, and transform her—fully armed as she was—into a pirate ship, idealized in a crude drawing by young Spencer as flying a skull-and-crossbones ensign! At first, as word trickled from the forecastle to Commander MacKenzie, thanks to Gansevoort, this scheme was regarded as too silly to cause alarm, but then Spencer and his closest confederates began asking questions about navigational details relevant to the nearby West Indies, and when MacKenzie had Spencer’s cramped quarters searched a scarf was discovered on which the names of likely fellow mutineers were written in Greek.
Anyone who has been a party to a kangaroo court that can reduce ladies and gentlemen to the subhuman state of a lynch mob—searching for the locker room thief or the bathroom graffiti vandal—can easily imagine how a captain’s mast (a military trial at sea) can build like a freak wave, overtaking all common sense and proportion. The hunt for a defendant’s evasions and lies can have primitive fervor, and so it did during the court-martial of Spencer and two of his sidekicks, Samuel Cromwell and Elisha Small. On December 1, 1842, the ship’s crew was called to attention and ordered to cheer the American ensign three times as the three were hoisted already hanged into the ship’s yardarms, where they were left to dangle high in the rigging for almost two hours before they were cut down and buried at sea. Commander MacKenzie, who of course had attracted the undying enmity of his superior, Secretary of War John C. Spencer, was himself tried at a court-martial for murder, and acquitted, but his reputation was ruined. The U.S. Naval Academy was founded in 1845 in revulsion against the formerly haphazard practices of training military sailors aboard such vessels as the Somers (which was lost in a squall in 1846).
It is the question of haphazard practice as opposed to strict custom that creates the friction in the case of Slater versus Slocum. In the culture of crimps, slave wages, spoiled food, vermin-infested quarters, heart-pounding crises followed by brain-numbing doldrums, there must have been—somewhere in the wide world—happy ships commanded by wise and gentle masters providing delicious fresh food and plenty of it, lending their voices to singalongs on deck under the light of the moon, their sails filled by winds a little aft of the beam blowing at a steady twenty knots, as porpoises played in the bow waves. If Joshua Slocum stepped aboard or heard about such a ship, he never told anyone.
Instead, he exercised the power necessarily conferred on captains to rule and to overrule. Ten years after the Slater dispute, Slocum admitted to a reporter for the Boston Sun that he had not been “a martinet, but I have ideas of how to run a ship. The old shipmasters treated their crews like intelligent beings, giving them plenty of leeway, but holding them with a strong hand in an emergency.” With a waterspout, say, bearing down on a ship, or a freak wave overtaking her from astern, or the sight ahead of waves breaking on a reef where none was meant to be, authority had to be reliably located. And, as Lord Acton famously declared a few years after the Northern Light disturbances, power tends to corrupt and absolute power to corrupt absolutely. In practice, the application of the power of an effective captain is subtly tempered by experience-tutored custom. After all, his authority—given that he is so outnumbered—relies on the consent of the governed. If the underlying authority is absolute, the executive management of the ship is delegated; with a crew of dozens working in teams hundreds of feet distant from one another, how could it be otherwise?
It was on this issue of delegation that Joshua Slocum and Henry Slater had their first confrontation, from which a serial debacle developed. The Northern Light was a week out of Port Elizabeth when Slater, as third mate, was directing a team of ordinary seamen to adjust the rigging of the mizzenmast, located aft near the wheelhouse. His specific commands, to hoist one thing above another, had led to a tangle of lines and a jammed halyard, inviting from someone aloft irreverent accusations that Slater didn’t know what he was doing. These few facts seem to have been undisputed, but a reader may well wonder why it had taken a week for an impostor’s incompetence to be revealed: to manage the rigging of a ship without knowing the ropes must be like trying to pilot an airplane without having flown in one.
Slocum, his attention drawn to the confusion at the mizzenmast, instructed Slater to correct his work. According to Slater’s own testimony in one of the many versions of events that he narrated to newspaper reporters, the captain at the mizzenmast “found fault with my work. I pointed out that I was competent to do the work.” To rebuke a mate in front of the crew was a provocative gesture, as Slocum understood, but according to Victor’s version, “the mate told the Captain ‘to mind his own damned business,’ ” upon which insubordination Slocum immediately broke Slater in rank, ordering him forward to the forecastle. (According to Slater’s version, Slocum—in response to Slater’s defense of his competence—produced a sheath knife and “rushed over and struck at me. I caught his hand, twisted the knife out of his grasp, and threw it overboard. He then went below.” On the face of it, this sequence seems implausible.)
Other eyewitness testimony came from William H. Dimmock, who had joined the Northern Light as her carpenter’s mate in New London. According to Dimmock’s unfriendly-to-definite-articles account:
Slater had replied to Slocum’s instruction to correct his rigging mistake “that no man on the ship could tell him his business” … Slater told captain he was third mate of the ship, and knew his busin
ess. His language and manner were insulting, and he took a belaying pin out of the rail as if to strike the captain. Captain Slocum informed Slater that he was disrated, saying, “You are no longer an officer of this ship: take your things from the [officers’] cabin and go into boatswain’s room.” Slater refused to go, but after a few hours went forward among the men.
It seems incredible that hours passed between insults—let alone attempted or even threatened violence—and some resolution to what was unambiguously mutinous behavior. Other than fire aboard ship, no calamity was more feared than mutiny. Casual violence might have been a leftover from the barbarity of the Civil War’s recent slaughter, but aboard ship it was even more hazardous than to hurl an insult haphazardly in a Wild West saloon to stir the latent hostility between the many governed and their few governors. An indecisive despot—a shipmaster who would either walk away from a violent confrontation and flee to the refuge of his cabin (Slater’s version) or permit a mutineer to disobey a direct order for “a few hours” (Dimmock’s version)—would be an intolerable peril to his crew.
The Hard Way Around Page 12
