A few days later Slocum ran the Aquidneck hard aground on a sandbar in the Plata River and had to pay dearly to have her rescued. He set out at once to sail for Baltimore, and from Washington, six months after Virginia died, he wrote to his mother-in-law, reporting that his family would have been more secure financially “if I hadnt got crazy and runn my vessel onshore. As it is now I am just swimming out of trouble on borowd money.” His fanciful figure of speech—“swimming out of trouble”—reveals how far off course he had strayed.1 The figures of speech gather like buzzards around such calamities: Garfield Slocum wrote Walter Teller that when Virginia died, his father “never recovered. He was like a ship with a broken rudder.”
Many sailors believe that short of death, stranding (running a vessel aground) is the most awful catastrophe a seaman can experience. Joseph Conrad—in The Mirror of the Sea—writes of the experience:
It is as if an invisible hand had been stealthily uplifted from the bottom to catch hold of her keel as it glides through the water.
More than any other event does stranding bring to the sailor a sense of utter and dismal failure. There are strandings and strandings, but I am safe to say that ninety per cent of them are occasions in which a sailor, without dishonor, may well wish himself dead …
“Taking the ground” is the professional expression for a ship that is stranded in gentle circumstances. But the feeling is more as if the ground had taken hold of her. It is for those on her deck a surprising sensation. It is as if your feet had been caught in an imponderable snare; you feel the balance of your body threatened, and the steady poise of your mind is destroyed at once …
And that is very terrible. After all, the only mission of a seaman’s calling is to keep ships’ keels off the ground. Thus the moment of her stranding takes away from him every excuse for his continued existence. To keep ships afloat is his business; it is his trust; it is the effective formula of the bottom of all these vague impulses, dreams, and illusions that go to the making up of a boy’s vocation. The grip of the land upon the keel of your ship, even if nothing worse comes of it than the wear and tear of tackle and the loss of time, remains in a seaman’s memory an indelibly fixed taste of disaster … To be “run ashore” has the littleness, poignancy, and bitterness of human error.
Joshua Slocum in his grief was not one to bore holes in the bottom of his vessel to sink it. His first thought was for his motherless children, and he brought them to Boston to rejoin his sisters while he—with Victor, now fourteen and first mate and as sturdy as a windlass, in his father’s boast—made the Aquidneck’s trade the shipping of goods to and among countries along the Atlantic coast of South America. As soon as Benjamin was safe ashore with his aunt Etta, he declared—a resolution he honored for the rest of his life—never again to go to sea.2
To keep distracted by work, Slocum made three fast back-and-forth passages between Baltimore and Pernambuco. These were eventful. Carrying machinery and pianos south, the Aquidneck, rolling violently, broke the cargo loose in the hold, the damage announced by snapping piano strings, followed figuratively by money fluttering from the master’s pocket. And coming back north on the last round-trip during the late fall of 1885, as the Aquidneck entered the Gulf Stream, Slocum looked aloft to see that the mainmast rigging had parted. To save the ship it was necessary to bring down and cut free other masts and trestles and yards, an unholy mess of wires and canvas, leaving only a few small sails flying. Slocum and son and crew were then hit by a ten-day gale. During its course a young Norwegian ordinary seaman who had shipped aboard at Pernambuco went missing, assumed to have been lost overboard. During the tenth day, a seagoing tug approached the Aquidneck off the Delaware coast and offered to tow Slocum to New York for an exorbitant fee. At sea this is usually the moment when a captain, at the crew’s urging, says, “Sure, whatever, get us out of here, just get us home.” But Slocum dismissed the offer, and the tug skipper—who gave, in Victor’s words, “a twirl to his wheel, and an emphatic jingle on his engine room bell”—turned away and was almost over the horizon when he recalculated his prospects and returned, agreeing to tow the Aquidneck to Brooklyn for the price of the coal the journey required. Once the ship was tied up to Pierrepoint Stores on the East River, the ghost of young Olaf arose from below, where the terrified Norwegian had hidden himself, alive on a diet of sugar, since the gale began.
While the Aquidneck was being repaired and rerigged during the winter, père et fils entrained for Boston, where the former met and on February 22, 1886, married his first cousin, Henrietta M. Elliott. “Hettie” was twenty-four at the time, one of seven sisters, a spinner, weaver, dressmaker, and gown fitter who had moved to Boston from Mount Hanley, Slocum’s own birthplace in Nova Scotia, from which he’d run away two years before his future wife was born. Photos show a robust woman with a sturdy face and frank expression. Grace Murray Brown described her at the time as “very pretty,” and Joshua as “kind and courtly.” He was also, in Benjamin’s recollection, “sad and very much alone, seeking company and a remedy for his lonely life.”3 On dry land and beneath the shelter of a sturdy roof, the travels and adventures of a seafaring father and widower of forty-two, conveyed with the estimable narrative powers at his command, must have been seductive to a young woman from the Maritime Provinces. The situation recalls Othello telling the youthful Desdemona the story of his dramatic life, the “battles, sieges, fortunes” he has experienced, the “most disastrous chances” and “hairbreadth ’scapes.” “It was my hint to speak,” as Othello relates, “of the Cannibals that each other eat / … and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders.” Like Desdemona’s father, Hettie’s parents opposed the marriage, though less dramatically, and for reasons that need no elaboration beyond their hunch that for Slocum, with four children, two of them younger than ten, their daughter was principally attractive as a convenience. (Moreover, her suitor assumed that she would join him at sea.) She disregarded their misgivings and the deal was done. Bedazzled, she couldn’t have had a clue what she was in for when she left immediately after the wedding for New York, where six days later she boarded her husband’s vessel for a honeymoon voyage carrying case oil to Monte video.
They sailed right into a monstrous winter tempest of hurricane intensity. It was blowing forty knots when they left, so it wasn’t as though the storm took them by storm, its ferocity having been forecast with unusual accuracy and specificity. In fact, even as Slocum set sail, New York was so blustery and cold that ships were torn from their moorings and the Hudson River froze solid. Why, with teenaged Victor, five-year-old Garfield, and his new bride aboard, did Slocum behave so recklessly? Or did hard Atlantic weather seem to him so commonplace that braving its bullying seemed no great shakes? In his story there have been so many gales and buffetings and towering seas—and will be so many more to come—that this three-day blow will be condensed to its singularity, which was the imminent threat of the Aquidneck sinking. Running before winds of eighty and ninety knots, the vessel, newly refitted in Brooklyn, began to take huge seas aboard from astern. These waves were not draining through the scuppers as they should, washing along the decks and emptying into the ocean. The bark began to sit lower and lower and move slower and slower, offering a sluggish target for the following seas. Everyone except Garfield and Hettie, confined below and seasick, manned either the pumps or the helm for thirty-six hours, nonstop. Victor remembered it was a “desperate sensation, pumping for all you were worth, and at the same time feeling that the ship was going down under you. It was like pumping the Atlantic Ocean through the vessel.”
His father sounded the hold with a rod and discovered six feet of water, rising. To prevent capsize, he readied axes stowed on deck to chop down the Aquidneck’s masts. He stocked the lifeboats with food and water and clothes, and was on the point of ordering his crew and family to abandon ship when a kind of outraged refusal seized him, compelling him to find and repair the leak. He had already hung over the sides, searching for sprung
planks or uncaulked seams, but then chanced to notice that a rough seal, twelve feet in length, where the deckhouse joined the deck, had been insecurely fastened. Through this joint gallons were streaming into the hold. He and Victor managed to jam ropes and sailcloth into the gap, stopping the leak just as the gale decided to blow itself out.
Every sailor who has experienced hurricane-strength winds at sea marvels above all at the noise of the onslaught, the roar and scream and anger. Hettie later confessed to her husband that during the height of the storm, with the wind shrieking and no human voice audible, she believed herself and Garfield to be the only survivors after the decks had been swept clean of human beings, or perhaps that they’d been abandoned.
They dropped anchor at Montevideo, on the northern shore of the Plata River, on May 5, two months after leaving New York. The days following the horror of the winter gale had been clear, indeed wonderful sailing, with the Aquidneck skipping along with a bone in her teeth—as sailors call the benign bow wave that announces a vessel traveling near her maximum hull speed—and porpoises riding the waves. Wet clothes were dried, chanteys were sung. The memory of pain is mercifully brief; if Hettie was staring intently at her hole cards, she stayed in the game nonetheless. And so in Montevideo, after discharging his cargo of case oil, Slocum sailed the Aquidneck in ballast nine hundred miles north to Antonina, Brazil. It makes sense to assume that such a canny and well-connected shipmaster would have been alert to international disputes between Argentina and Brazil—including outbreaks of war—but he had determined to provide for his family by trading between the countries. During the early summer of 1886, he carried a cargo of yerba maté back to Buenos Aires, and from there was commissioned to salvage a cargo of Bordeaux from a Spanish ship that had run aground on the Plata and deliver this wine two hundred miles up the Paraná River to Rosario. Hettie now had her first foreshadowing of mutinies to come when her husband had to lock and guard the hold to prevent his sailors from drinking his cargo dry.
At the port of Rosario there began the kind of collisions between fairness and circumstance that keep trial lawyers joyful and drive sane people mad. First, Slocum struck a commonplace business agreement with an Argentine merchant to transport bales of alfalfa from Rosario to Rio de Janeiro, where a Brazilian merchant wished to buy the alfalfa. But it chanced that just when the alfalfa was loaded and the Aquidneck was ready to sail in the fall of 1886, a cholera outbreak was decimating parts of Argentina, Rosario among them. Slocum, like all international merchant shipmasters, required clearance from the Brazilian consul to take his freight to Rio—which clearance, putatively owing to Brazil’s reasonable fear of Argentina’s deadly disease, but also to international spite, was denied. Slocum was required to enter Brazilian quarantine at Ilha Grande, sixty miles west of Rio, to be disinfected before discharging his cargo. While burdensome, this requirement did not delay Slocum’s departure from Rosario, and on January 7, 1887, he entered the harbor of Ilha Grande, a lovely island of perfect beaches and pristine rain forests, indeed an ideal destination for a much-delayed honeymoon.
Here port officials ordered him—pointedly, turning the heavy guns of the armored battleship Aquidiban at the Aquidneck—to leave Brazilian waters, even though his documents were in order.4 Denied permission to come ashore to replenish food and water for his crew, he was sent back to Argentina. From Slocum’s point of view, he had been grievously wronged: singled out for betrayal, his American flag insulted, his investment of labor and expenses stolen from him, his personal honor affronted.
He now had to decide what to do with the alfalfa. A fellow captain suggested that he dump the bales overboard, and Slocum—bless him!—still had sufficient sly humor to report that this captain’s hailing port was Boston, where they knew a thing or two about dumping freight over the side. But he was also stubborn, so he sailed back to Rosario, where he might have returned the hay to its original owner. This he did not do, deciding with characteristic obduracy to wait out the epidemic. On April 9, Brazilian ports reopened and Slocum sailed immediately, arriving in Rio to discharge his cargo on May 11, 1887, after a brief visit to Ilha Grande for the pleasure of thumbing his nose at “the authorities.” He had lost a great deal of money to bad luck. Fifteen years later, writing in “The Voyage of the Aquidneck,” the plaintiff still felt freshly wounded: “A thunderbolt striking from a clear sky could not have surprised us more or worked us much greater harm—to be ruined in business or struck by lightning, being equally bad.” (No, actually, they are not.)
The crew that sailed aboard the Aquidneck to Rio replaced a crew made up mostly of Finns who’d made such alcoholic hullabaloo ashore in Rosario in their “drunken frenzy,” as Victor reports, that they’d been jailed by the Argentine police. Their replacements were “a gang much worse … When the cholera was at its height the jails were opened and the birds released. We shipped at least four of these who were guilty either of murder or highway robbery. They were all sheep thieves. One of them a burly scoundrel, with an ugly saber cut across his face, was known as ‘Dangerous Jack’; while ‘Bloody Tommy’ was more of a sneak.” The shipping agent who shanghaied this motley crew was “Dutch Harry,” for whom Slocum developed a wholesome loathing. But after slandering him in The Voyage of the “Liberdade,” Slocum thought better of naming him the “vilest crimp” in Rosario, below whom there came one “worse than he, one ‘Pete the Greek,’ who cut off the ears of a rival boarding-master … and threw them into the river.” At any rate, Dutch Harry was hanged soon after.
In The Voyage of the “Liberdade” Joshua’s prose rolls merrily as he remembers—from the sanctuary of time and distance—this unspeakable bunch “picked up here and there out of the few brothels [that] had not been pulled down during the cholera, and out of the streets or from the fields.” With these brigands aboard in Rio, the Aquidneck loaded a consignment of pitch, tar, flour, kerosene, wine, and three pianos at Rio’s Dom Pedro docks, where a “change of rats” was made, and “fleas, too, skipped about in the hay as happy as larks, and nearly as big.” Slocum also suggests that Hettie had a bit of fun ashore. She bought a “tall hat, which I saw nights looming up like a dreadful stack of hay,” which he resolved to pitch into the sea.
That was the most benign of the plots being hatched aboard the Aquidneck, now en route south to Brazil’s Paranaguá River and upriver to Antonina to load a cargo of yerba maté. It was an index of how difficult it had become to find shipping commissions that Slocum was carrying this cargo free of charge, merely to act as ballast. But he was also indemnified against damage to the freight, assuming that he would exercise prudence. So when the Aquidneck was struck by a pampero—a vicious offshore wind that arises on the pampas—and knocked on her beam ends and partially dismasted, Slocum was not responsible for the damage to the pianos (fearfully out of tune, as he reported) that he was again carrying.
On July 23, 1887, at anchor in Paranaguá Bay, Slocum was asleep when Hettie was awakened in alarm by the sound of crewmen walking and whispering near the aft end of the Aquidneck, an area of the vessel—“abaft the mainmast,” as sailors say—strictly off-limits to ordinary seamen, who have shipped “before the mast.”
Hettie stirred her husband awake, and he went on deck carrying a loaded .56 carbine. He had earlier that day rebuked Dangerous Jack (James Aiken) and Bloody Tommy (Thomas Maloney) for insubordination, and would have been a fool, so soon after the incidents aboard the Northern Light, not to have been mindful that his family’s survival depended upon his resolve. On deck, he ordered the mutineers forward, but Maloney jeered at him and Aiken attacked him with a sheath knife. Slocum shot and wounded Dangerous Jack, whereupon Bloody Tommy lunged with his knife and Slocum shot him dead.
Victor writes persuasively of the situation: “ ‘Dangerous Jack,’ ploughed by a .56, I took ashore about midnight, still howling and cursing. ‘Bloody Tommy’ was left where he fell for the police to inspect the next morning. Face down on deck, and in the rigor of death, he still clutched the sa
me knife he had used killing sheep.”
Slocum was arrested and charged with murder and jailed in Antonina for a month until his trial on August 23, at which he pleaded self-defense and was acquitted and released. Three months later, the U.S. consul general in Rio reported to the Department of State in Washington that the Brazilian proceedings had been in every respect thorough and good-willed, and “the verdict is in my opinion a righteous one.” In the meantime, trying to keep family and vessel afloat, Slocum had hired a Spanish shipmaster to take the Aquidneck’s cargo to Montevideo, with Victor aboard as first mate, leaving Hettie and Garfield ashore. When he was released from jail in Antonina, the captain traveled alone by steamship to Montevideo to resume command of his ship.
The dismissal of his Spanish replacement provoked another dispute between Slocum and his crew, who insisted that they be paid off and rehired, a demand that found favor with the U.S. consul in Montevideo.5 During this interval the protesting employees seem to have done some sightseeing and gift buying for their families at home. It is interesting that this crew—almost all Brazilian—were sober when they went ashore and sober when they returned, a virtue characteristic among Brazil’s sailors of the time. However, virtue did not protect them from exposure to smallpox at the boardinghouse where they slept, and having been enlisted by Slocum they sailed north toward Paranaguá carrying that disease.
The first hint of the nightmare about to descend on the Aquidneck was a complaint from one trusted sailor that he was suffering from chills and a fever, but he didn’t beg off his duties, merely requested a dose of quinine to ease what he took to be a recurrence of malaria. A couple of days later, he and three crewmates were felled by spinal rigor and Slocum—if not his men—recognized these deadly symptoms as smallpox. He altered course immediately for Maldonado, east of Montevideo along the coast of Uruguay. With a wet easterly storm already blowing hard, the Aquidneck raised signals of distress asking for emergency medical help for port officials to see. These went unanswered for thirty-six hours, and when answered it was by a couple of uniformed Uruguayan “yahoos,” borne by rowboat to command the shipmaster to leave their port at once, the dead and dying crew’s disease being immediately manifest.6
The Hard Way Around Page 15
