The day before he was released in Brooklyn he broke two pairs of shackles. A weak man couldn’t do that. His weakness was all shammed, and the men on the ship were all of one opinion in that respect. He was a perfect sham in every respect. See how quick he got well. When we went down to release him, Slater called for a clean change of clothing, and the mate gave it to him. He then went back into his cabin. He took off his pants and shirt and came out naked. The [ship] was full of reporters and other people, and the cunning of Slater created undeserved sympathy for him. Slater came out trembling, and feigned so much weakness that he reached the deck with apparent difficulty. He had good drawers, pants, stockings, etc, if he wanted to wear them. There was no vermin in his prison except cockroaches, and they were all over the ship. He used to catch them and put them in a pan. When they were taken away from him he would become very angry. He had some reason for wanting to keep them. I can truthfully say that Slater never was injured or brutally treated on the Northern Light. He was punished for his actions, and that justly deserved.
Capt. Slocum is as fine a man as ever I want to have anything to do with. He is a worker himself, and expects everybody else to be. He hates a loafer, and don’t want anyone soldiering on him, but he is kind, cheerful and generous to his men. I have read the evidence against the captain in the New York papers, but very little of the testimony favorable to the captain was printed. They were one-sided reports, and I was disgusted with the reading of them.7
By this time the public was hungrier for tales of shipmasters’ cruelty than for penny-dreadful accounts of crews’ mutinous treachery, and especially in San Francisco, the city hosting the world’s most notorious crimps. In 1888 a booklet entitled The Red Record: Ecce! Tyrannus was published in San Francisco by the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, detailing instances of brutality aboard ship and naming captains previously accused in The Coast Seaman’s Journal. The booklet’s cover was illustrated by a drawing of a disembodied fist gripping a belaying pin dripping with blood.
It would be folly to generalize about the distribution of rights and wrongs between human beings at sea. Nothing other than specific instances can inform judgment, and contesting those in the Northern Light drama is like watching one of those Laurel and Hardy revenge comedies in which no offense—a slap in the face or a broken window—can ever go unanswered or unescalated. Thus Slocum’s charge was followed by Slater’s countercharge, which was followed by the testimony in court on December 8, 1883, by the shipmaster Everett Staples, of the Charter Oak, that Slater’s discharge papers from his service were forgeries and his service as a mate was a pipe dream. Captain Staples, a Maine sailor of impeccable reputation, declared he was extraordinarily incompetent and idle even as an ordinary seaman, feigning illness as an excuse to escape his duties, and fell into that category known as sea lawyers, concluding that “since he has parted from me I hope that [he] has improved morally, as when I knew him last in my judgment he was a magnificent scoundrel and no seaman.”
The locution “sea lawyer” brings us closer to the end of this squalid chapter—but by no means to Henry Slater’s obsession with Joshua Slocum. One month after Captain Staples had addressed the court, Slater gave a bizarre interview, swearing to its truth before a notary public, to the editor of the influential Nautical Gazette, attesting to the falsehood of his claims against Slocum and claiming he himself had been the victim of a conniving tort lawyer named Isaac Angel. He had been drawn, unwittingly and innocently, into a scheme to extort money from Slocum and his fellow owners of the Northern Light by “these designing persons,” tossing into his jackpot of villains the deputy marshals who had been sent to arrest him. The papers he’d signed he now repudiated, “for I was confused and sick [in Ludlow Street jail] and knew not what I was signing,” claiming as well to have been ignorant that he had in fact sued Captain Slocum, “an A-One man, a genuine Yankee captain of high reputation.”
This new farrago of charges, published on January 13, 1884, by the New York Sun, inspired Isaac Angel’s $2,000 suit for libel against that newspaper. That complaint failed a year later when the court learned that the reputation of Mr. Angel—who had been indicted in Massachusetts on more than fifty charges of theft, false dealing, and cigar smuggling—was of no material value even before the Sun brought him to New York’s attention.
Whether Slater’s recantation came at a price in dollars, and if so who paid it, is not known. Despite Slocum’s vindication, he had been declared a “brute” by the nation’s newspaper of record. And while he was busy defending himself against criminal accusations, the Northern Light had sailed from New York with a new master. Slocum’s controlling partners, having had their sugar pumped overboard and their hemp jettisoned, having paid for the renovations in New London and Port Elizabeth, bought out his interest in her at a painful discount. They would soon sell the great ship, then stripped of her masts and “ignominiously towed” by her nose as a coal barge, as her proud ex-owner explained in Sailing Alone Around the World.
This is a good juncture at which to consider what a strange and discouraging impression is left by the biographical treatment of Slocum during these unhappy events. Perhaps it is naive to be amazed that everyone, even a writer of such otherwise good human sense as Walter Teller, accepts that this command marked the high-tide line of Slocum’s career. This is akin to endorsing Howard Hughes’s delusion that the Spruce Goose, owing to its monstrous scale, was the finest airplane ever to (almost) fly. That the Northern Light was flawed—its rudder poorly designed, its planks leaking at their seams, its crew a gang of criminals, its cargo chucked into the sea—seems to count for nothing set beside the outward show that she presented to the world: costly and grand, biggest and best-looking. How American, it is tempting to write, how imperial. How vulgar, how sad.
The Aquidneck (Photo credit 7.1)
1 In his Maritime History of Maine, William Hutchinson Rowe notes, “Very queer specimens were often brought aboard by the crimps. Three of the crew furnished to the St. Stephen at San Francisco in 1877 were cowboys who had never seen salt water until the week before.”
2 Sheath knives were overwhelmingly the weapons of choice in episodes of grave shipboard violence, so much so that, as Bunting writes, it had been illegal since 1868 to wear such a knife aboard an American ship. Captains were required to “enforce the statute or face a fifty-dollar fine for every omission. But despite this severe penalty it is unlikely that any shipboard regulation has been more flagrantly ignored,” since the sheath knife was considered an all but essential appendage to a sailor’s hands while he worked aloft, not to mention its utility in his mess kit. In New London, after persuading the crew to continue on the voyage to Yokohama, Slocum had every sheath knife aboard confiscated and then returned to its owner with the tip struck off. As Victor argues, “The point of a sheath knife adds nothing to its proper use, and the best intentioned in the crew saw no injustice in an order which placed every man on an equal footing as far as suspicion went.”
3 Shortly before, in Manila, aboard the William H. Besse, under the command of Captain B. C. Baker, Slocum had responded to a call for help from Mrs. Baker, whose husband was ashore. A member of the crew had fallen gravely ill, and Slocum went below to the forecastle to nurse the sailor. Removing his coat, he cradled the dying man’s head in his lap. Later that night, two more sailors from the William H. Besse died of cholera. The vessel—together with her sister ship, the Bourne, and the Northern Light—fled Manila at the tail end of a monsoon storm.
4 Krakatoa’s “paroxysmal explosions,” the final destructive blasts of August 26 and 27, have been estimated to have been two hundred megatons in force, a factor of 13,000 greater than the Hiroshima Little Boy and four times that of the largest nuclear test explosion ever recorded. It caused tidal waves, killed at least thirty-six thousand, and two years later was the cause of the so-called Yellow Days that blanketed much of the earth in dust, creating sunsets of heart-stopping beauty. Writing to Walter Teller, Benjamin Sl
ocum believed that “had we been three days in that region we would have been suffocated by the fumes.”
5 Dimmock testifies: “He would make all the noise possible, and sing obscene songs that the captain’s wife must hear.”
6 Sydney Daily Telegraph, October 9, 1896 (Australian National Library).
7 Dimmock’s testimony—given to a New York Telegram reporter—appeared during the course of Slocum’s trial. Slocum kept the undated clipping, and printed it in the chapbook he produced in his defense, more than a decade later, in Sydney.
EIGHT
Stranding
In this story of a voyage filled with adventures common to the life of a sailor it is only right that I should square myself and explain how it happened that on a subsequent voyage I sailed all alone. It came about in this manner: After the events which I am about to relate, and when I cast about for a hand to join my new ship, the person I wished to have along said, “Joshua, I’ve had a v’yage,” which indeed was the truth. Madame was thinking of the cruise when in a short three years we had experienced many of the vicissitudes of sea life and traversed the round of plagues, such as cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, and the like; the whole ending in mutiny and ship wreck.
—JOSHUA SLOCUM, The Voyage of the “Liberdade”
THE MISADVENTURES ABOARD THE Northern Light were heartbreaking, literally, for Virginia. How exactly the malady had first shown itself is unrecorded, but her children were unanimous in lamenting their mother’s weak heart. To the demands that weather and violent motion put on a woman going deep sea must be added her recent history among would-be mutineers and cutthroats. Victor likened it to “voyaging with a volcano under the hatches,” and believed that the “constant alarms at sea had undermined her health.” In addition to the shame her husband had suffered, the Slocums’ financial distress was acute. Without a home ashore and unsettled after the New York trials, Virginia and the children traveled to Boston to distribute themselves among Joshua’s married sisters during the winter of 1884, while her husband sought a new command.
This was a depressing challenge, confirming that the glory days of sail were done. The reasons suggested earlier were exacerbated by the toll taken on America’s merchant fleet by the Civil War, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 providing passage for steamships from Europe to the Indian Ocean without rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Nevertheless, as Slocum would emphasize a few years later, he despised steamships, remaining stubbornly loyal to those “tramp” sailing vessels that were left to pick up the shipping world’s droppings, odd lots of freight destined to far-flung ports in no hurry to receive them.
In this economic climate, Slocum traveled south by train to Baltimore, celebrated for the fast clippers among its fleet. There he offered the winning bid at auction on the Aquidneck, a “trim and tidy craft,” as he would describe her, 326 tons and 138 feet long. The money came from the last of his savings, an amount put aside when he received his gold pieces from the sale of the Pato. Slocum told the story of the Aquidneck in several versions, but the details of her purchase appear only in an article published in Outing: An Illustrated Magazine of Recreation (November 1902): “The auctioneer, while selling the Aquidneck, dwelled upon the lucky side of her character while he harangued; throwing a wink my way … he bawled, ‘Sailors know what a lucky ship means’ and forthwith I gave the extra bid that fetched the bark.”
That extra bid, together with what he’d need to spend to get her ready for sea, tapped out Slocum so completely that he couldn’t afford to insure her. Built in Mystic, Connecticut, in 1865, she was a pretty bark, with three masts and a rakish bowsprit. It’s a wonder to note Slocum’s unflagging enthusiasm for his vessels, even as he now traded down by a factor of five or more from the Northern Light. His new boat was beautiful, he boasted, and, “when the wind blew” fast, asked “no favors of steamers.”
In early March 1884, the family came aboard the Aquidneck in Baltimore with enthusiasm. Many years later Garfield Slocum gave Walter Teller his recollection of the Aquidneck’s layout: on deck were pens for sheep, pigs, and chickens, and below a well-equipped workshop for the carpenter and master staterooms; the saloon on board was “a beautiful room” with a “parquetry floor … The captain’s room had a full size bed … and the other rooms a single bunk,” and oil lamps swung on gimbals. “There was a long table and in rough weather racks were put on the table, [which] was built around the mizzenmast. Swivel chairs were bolted to the deck around the table.” Above them was a stained-glass skylight, and keeping the family company “a canary that sang all day—a beautiful singer. Also a square grand piano was bolted to the deck … There was a cabinet with glass doors for carbines, guns and revolvers and ammunition.” He remembered his father at that time as generous—lavishing books and toys on his children—but “stern.”
Bright memories, closely juxtaposed with ominous rumbles—the canary chirping at revolvers and ammunition—seem always to characterize the Slocums’ circumstances. Virginia had needed her respite ashore in Boston, a break from shouting and stabbing and shooting and the clank of irons binding a swine who sang dirty lyrics to her gospel songs. At least the Aquidneck’s crew would be smaller in number—undermanned at ten, in addition to the family members—than the Northern Light gang.
It began well, with a comfortable and fast passage carrying flour to Pernambuco, on the easternmost bulge of Brazil, near enough the equator to provide a hot and humid climate that was made more comfortable by reliable trade winds. While anchored behind a breakwater as they discharged flour, the family often had picnics ashore in a nearby coconut grove. Pernambuco would be the site of many a Slocum adventure, but during this voyage it was merely a port of call on the Aquidneck’s route to Buenos Aires. In mid-July, sailing past the luscious island of Santa Catarina, six hundred miles southwest of Rio and more than a thousand miles northeast of Buenos Aires, Virginia suddenly fell ill and began to deteriorate quickly. Writing to Walter Teller, Garfield remembered that his mother quit her chores (she had been making candy), lost her energy, and put aside the tapestry he had been watching her create; she “left her needle where she stopped” and crawled into her berth. Reflecting years later on their mother’s decline, the children agreed that she had seemed energetic and characteristically joyful during picnics a few days earlier. But, as young as they were, they had been mindful that her lack of stamina had lately alarmed their father.
Imagine what it must have been like for her adoring husband to realize that Virginia was suffering, then to continue sailing south—for at least six days—to get help in Buenos Aires. During that passage, he promised his wife that he would try to find freight to be carried to Sydney, so she could see her home and family again. Having reached the Plata River, Slocum had to anchor the Aquidneck in the outer roads, a dozen miles from Buenos Aires, owing to the river’s shallow delta and unreliably dredged channels. Virginia seemed to recover enough on July 25 to rise from her berth to make butter. That morning Joshua set out in a launch to look for business, having agreed with her on a signal—the blue-and-white flag letter J—to be hoisted in the event that she needed him to return from shore. Almost immediately the flag went up, hoisted by Benjamin, then twelve. It was near noon; Joshua returned to the Aquidneck immediately and that evening summoned his children to kneel at their mother’s bedside, and then she died, at thirty-four.
Her brother, George Walker, believed that she died from the consequences of a miscarriage, but no evidence supports his hunch. The Slocum children agreed that her heart killed her, probably a congenital or rheumatic-fever-induced defect such as valvular stenosis or congestive cardiomyopathy: heart failure. (She had more than once fainted when acutely stressed.) What Joshua knew he did not share. “I never cared to ask father,” as Benjamin confided to Walter Teller. That he found Joshua’s reticence unassailable is less extraordinary than the breach in that reticence many years after Virginia’s death, when father and son were looking together at a photograph, and “tears s
treamed over [father’s] face. Finally he said, ‘Your mother had the eyes of an eagle and she … saw things I could never see.’ ”
In this light, it’s good to remember that bravura display of ship handling in Hong Kong harbor when Joshua steered the Amethyst among a fleet of British warships crowding the anchorage, with Virginia at his side. Whatever she said to him that day, or imparted by body language, he chose precisely the right moment—indeed the only possible moment—to turn the wheel hard over, rounding his full-rigged bark into the wind to carry it to a stop, without over- or underrunning, precisely where there was a vacant spot to drop its anchor. A failure of patience (heading up too soon) or of nerve (delaying) would have brought a scandalous collision. In addition, his composure—witnessed by the world’s most celebrated sailors—determined whether Slocum’s feat would be regarded as the lucky chance of a daredevil or the deliberate seamanship of a masterful captain.
Judges of Slocum’s history must take seriously Benjamin’s judgment that his mother knew his father “better than all others. She knew father could sail ships. She also knew more about father than herself. On many occasions mother had proved herself to be very psychic … Father learned to understand her powers of intuition and he relied on it fully until she passed on. His ill fortunes gathered rapidly from the time of her death.” Later he added: “Father’s days were done with the passing of mother. They were pals.”
Virginia was buried in the English Cemetery at Buenos Aires. In her Bible Joshua wrote—under the rubric “Family Record”—her name, dates of birth and death, and, on a separate line, “Thy will be done not ours!” This headlong exclamation, stripped of punctuation, leaves a reader unsure whether this was composed in resignation or defiance.
Petey, the canary, quit singing, and Victor records that before the anchor was up after his mother’s burial, the bird, having “made glad music for us for seven years in calm and storm … fell victim to a strange cat which came aboard.” This tidy and sympathetic mystery shows signs of apocrypha, but nevertheless has value as a display of grief’s narrative tropism toward allegory.
The Hard Way Around Page 14
