The Hard Way Around

by Geoffrey Wolff

  And just at this dismal moment came the encounter that changed everything, a lucky break for literature. Think of Melville’s Ishmael walking along a Manhattan sidewalk during “a damp, drizzly November in my soul,” finding himself “involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet,” such that “it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” But let Slocum tell it:

  Mine was not the sort of life to make one long to coil up one’s ropes on land, the customs and ways of which I had finally almost forgotten. And so when times for freighters got bad, as at last they did, and I tried to quit the sea, what was there for an old sailor to do? I was born in the breezes, and I had studied the sea as perhaps few men have studied it, neglecting all else … One midwinter day of 1892, in Boston, where I had been cast up from old ocean, so to speak, a year or two before, I was cogitating whether I should apply for a command, and again eat my bread and butter on the sea, or go to work at the shipyard, when I met an old acquaintance, a whaling-captain, who said: “Come to Fairhaven and I’ll give you a ship. But,” he added, “she wants some repairs.” The captain’s terms, when fully explained, were more than satisfactory to me.

  The old acquaintance was Captain Eben Pierce of New Bedford, the city Melville chooses to launch Ishmael’s briny narrative. Slocum and Pierce went way back, already friends when the Pato paused near Pierce’s whale ship, the James Allen, for a visit and an exchange of fresh food in the Okhotsk Sea. Pierce had thrived as a whaler, and had added to his fortune by the invention and sale of diabolically effective shotgun-style harpoon weapons, advertised in local newspapers as “Pierce Bomb Lances and Shoulder Guns,” the latter selling for forty-five dollars and boasting that “whalemen say the recoil is very light.” It has become conventional for writers about the Spray to accuse Pierce of having played a mordant prank on Slocum by offering him the command of the corpse of an ancient oyster sloop rotting in a pasture at Fairhaven’s Poverty Point, across the water from New Bedford. Slocum probably encouraged this hard judgment by remarking in Sailing Alone Around the World that upon seeing the derelict he “found that my friend had something of a joke on me.”

  Not at all. This was inspired matchmaking, and to encourage Slocum toward embarking on the adventure of a lifetime, the bachelor Pierce offered him free room and board and welcomed visits from Hettie and his children while the new master of the Spray set about translating the hulk into a world traveler.3 Slocum paid only for the materials needed to rebuild what he himself puts in quotation marks as the “ship.” He details, in Sailing Alone Around the World, the process of restoring (reimagining, really) a craft combining the qualities of sturdiness, simplicity of sail handling, and protection from the elements that he had learned most to value from his decades as a shipmaster and recent experience as the designer and captain of the Liberdade.

  The origins of the Spray are unclear. Claude Berube, a naval historian, declares on the first page of his recent biography of the early nineteenth-century U.S. Navy captain Charles Stewart that she was built in Philadelphia in 1789. Robert H. Perry—a respected contemporary designer of blue-water yachts—has written in Sail magazine that she was built in Australia in 1810 to be used for fishing. Perry adds that she was “probably a weird-shaped boat even when she was new,” extremely beamy at more than fourteen feet for a waterline length of thirty-two feet. Her length overall was thirty-seven feet with a bowsprit, and she had enormous displacement for a boat her size, almost eighteen tons.

  Slocum addresses the interesting question of when exactly a vessel being rebuilt with new materials and specifications ceases to be what it was and becomes something else. It is certain that her original makers had no reason to overbuild her as Slocum did, laying her keel from a pasture white oak, so called for its history of having grown in an open field from an acorn to a solitary survivor, exposed to battering gales in the very meadow at Poverty Point where Slocum felled it and shaped it with his steam box. Such oak, twisted and bent by wind, was prestressed and so tough that the Spray’s keel would split a huge coral head in two during a mishap in the Indian Ocean’s Cocos Islands, leaving the vessel virtually unmarked.

  As Slocum worked, whaling captains would drop by the Spray with Eben Pierce for a gam, speculating on whether her shipwright could possibly “make her pay.” They agreed that she was stout, venturing in Victor Slocum’s memory that she was “fit to smash ice” while hunting for bowheads off the coast of Greenland. Her construction in general was as heavy as her keel, planked with yellow Georgia pine, which was also used for her massive deck beams. Her mast was shaped from live New Hampshire spruce, and as Slocum labored, “something tangible appeared every day” and “the neighbors made the work sociable.” The Spray had two sheltered cabins, both aft of the mast, and remembering the near sinking of the Aquidneck during his honeymoon voyage with Hettie, Slocum took special care to caulk her tight and to fasten her with more than a thousand through bolts.

  Hettie, during the period of the Spray’s construction, visited on weekends from Boston, where she was living with her family and working again as a gown fitter, in addition to caring for Jessie and Garfield. It’s not known where the money came from, but the Spray cost Slocum $553.62, about the annual salary of a schoolteacher, and despite working at odd jobs around the shipyards of Fairhaven and New Bedford, he was broke once again. The Panic of 1893, bursting another bubble of railroad stock speculation and creating a run on America’s banks, did nothing to encourage the prospects of a dressmaker and gown fitter, and if the Spray was afloat, the Slocum family was underwater.

  But wait! As ever, there’s more! In November 1893 there began in Brazil an uprising against the elected government with which Slocum—through the State Department—had had so much sorry business. This civil war was launched by the same Admiral Custodio de Mello who had six years before barred the Aquidneck and her cargo of hay from entering Rio—with the admiral’s gunship artillery trained upon Slocum and his family. Now de Mello had seized control of Brazil’s navy and was demanding—for reasons that might have made sense at the time—the resignation of Brazil’s president, General Floriano Peixoto.

  In consequence, Peixoto’s government wanted warships with which to confront de Mello’s, and toward this end was buying up from arms dealers what was on the market and at the ready. The United States, happy to oblige, offered for sale the Destroyer, a bizarre ironclad, torpedo-firing 150-foot steamer that had some of the qualities—not always intended—of a submarine. She had been dreamed up by the designer of the Monitor (the Merrimac’s foe in the 1862 battle of the ironclads at Hampton Roads, Virginia), John Ericsson, who had died in 1889 before she could be battle-tested or even confirmed as seaworthy. Brazil’s new armada of curiosities also included the Nictheroy, armed with a Zalinski pneumatic cannon—history’s biggest BB gun—for the comically off-target aerial bombardment of forts by missiles carrying fifty pounds of dynamite.4

  How Slocum came to the attention of the government he was suing and slandering is easy enough to imagine, but why he was recommended as just the fellow to deliver the Destroyer from New York to Bahia remains a puzzlement. Perhaps his voyage from Brazil aboard the Liberdade had encouraged President Peixoto’s esteem. It was also true that going to sea and perhaps to war in such a contraption was a discouraging prospect to sailors of prudence. Insurance companies refused to indemnify members of the crew. Seamen were recruited for the voyage mostly by virtue of their ignorance of the sea, and assured they would be well paid—during a time of economic depression—and that the sea to the south of the Gulf Stream was “like a lake,” as Victor Slocum put it, adding “but what lake [they] failed to say.”

  Peixoto’s agents, who had purchased the Destroyer for $100,000, promised Slocum $20,000 to deliver the vessel safely. This would be an unorthodox delivery, as the ship
was to be towed the entire distance by the oceangoing tug Santuit, because once loaded with ammunition the gunship had no cargo space remaining for coal. (Ironclads in Action offers a simpler reason: the warship’s engines had broken down, not least among the reasons our navy was happy to sell her.) Slocum must have remembered without affection the tow that the Liberdade received six years before from the cinder-spewing and oil-spreading Finance into safe haven at Pernambuco. Now, in deference to the reality that the Destroyer would follow where the Santuit led, on a leash of 1,800 feet, Slocum’s title was navigator-in-command, a titular demotion from master that more amused than irritated him.

  It was good that he was amused, because his part in Brazil’s civil war was from beginning to end a farce, a comedy that nevertheless threatened every day that it endured to turn mortally catastrophic. Joshua Slocum’s second book, The Voyage of the “Destroyer” from New York to Brazil, like his first book self-published, relates an extraordinary and often hilarious story of the two-month voyage that ended—miraculously—at Bahia on February 13, 1894. In a pamphlet of twenty-five or so pages, Slocum gives a comprehensive inventory of the sea’s and mankind’s available perils and cruelties, together with nature’s mercies and mankind’s generosity. Odysseus would appreciate the tale’s virtues.

  Two days after the Destroyer cleared Sandy Hook, the State Department mailed to Hettie’s East Boston address its final letter to Slocum regarding his claims against Brazil in the matter of the Aquidneck. The archive assembled by Walter Teller of correspondence from, to, and regarding Slocum’s losses runs thirty densely printed pages, beginning on October 31, 1887. To summarize his complaints, titled by him at the end of 1888 a “chapter of disasters”: he was turned away from Rio at Ilha Grande on the receiving end of the Aquidiban’s nine-inch guns, Admiral de Mello ordering his turrets trained on not only the Slocum family but also the Stars and Stripes. This resulted in a profitless return to Argentina and a change of crew from seamen to pirates, which led to a mutiny, the shooting of two mutineers, a charge of murder, and a costly and humiliating trial. There followed the horror of the Aquidneck’s miserable fate as a “floating pest house,” as Slocum called it. “We have sailed on a sea of troubles,” he complained. Slocum laid the stranding of the Aquidneck to the account of Brazil, pricing his loss at $10,000, through the agency of the same Admiral de Mello that Brazil’s President Peixoto meant to blow to smithereens with the Destroyer. In the event, our State Department—agreeing with Brazil that (rudeness aside) the danger of spreading cholera to their country by allowing Argentine forage to be off-loaded at Rio outweighed considerations of “mercantile profits”—wrote to the plaintiff that “it is believed that this Government would in a similar case adopt the same measures. This Department therefore does not feel warranted in taking any further action.”5

  With its navigator-in-command and a crew of thirteen, the Destroyer got under way on December 7, 1893, from Red Hook’s Erie Basin. It was immediately towed into and destroyed a projecting pier. Designed to terrify the wicked only when used in smooth waters, the vessel was soon storm-tossed in no less an Atlantic winter gale than had nearly sunk the Aquidneck during Hettie’s honeymoon voyage. While her steam engines were useless for propulsion, they could be fired up to blow the Destroyer’s whistle and (thanks be!) operate her pumps. Within twenty-eight hours the ship was filling with so much water—from seas awash on her decks and flooding her torpedo tube—that it was a miracle the hulk didn’t sink, though if you wait a bit, she will!

  From the comfort of a steamer carrying Slocum home from Brazil to Boston several months later, and then from the cozy shelter of the cabin of the Spray at anchor in Fairhaven, the survivor reminisced about the adventure:

  Great quantities of water goes over the ship. She washes heavily, still, going often under the seas, like a great duck, fond of diving. Everything is wet. There is not a dry place in the entire ship! We are most literally sailing under the sea … Believe me, the Destroyer, to-night, was just about ready to make her last dive under the sea, to go down deeper than ever before.

  They kept her afloat by firing her pump engines not with coal—which cotton wadding and gunpowder had displaced as cargo—but by pitching on the fire whatever would burn, including cooking oil, tables and chairs from the wardrooms, and huge chunks of smoked pork. A week after taking tow from Santuit, Slocum—nearly swept from the Destroyer’s wheel by cross-seas—exclaims, “We suffer!” The crew behaved heroically despite the presence among them of at least one saboteur working for Admiral de Mello’s cause. The storm broke, the seas abated, “and we get in under the lee of a small island for shelter and rest—Ye Gods—a rest!”

  He rates this passage through and under the sea as “the hardest voyage that I ever made, without any exception at all.” But after a near mutiny that was tame by Northern Light and Aquidneck standards, with only a sliver of one sailor’s liver lost to another sailor’s rigging knife (in a dispute over a bottle of rum), the warship reached her intended destination of Bahia, putatively a war zone, on February 13, 1894. Slocum explains how it was:

  Everything was funeral quietness … The occasional pop of a champagne cork, at the “Paris” on the hill, might have been heard, but that was all, except the sunset gun … The average Brazilian Naval man is an amphibious being, spending his time about equally between hotel and harbor, and is never dangerous.

  I was astonished at the quietness of Bahia, there was not even target practice. Indeed the further we got away from stirring New York, the less it looked like war in Brazil…

  President Peixoto’s officers did not welcome the Destroyer, bringing as she did a combative atmosphere to the peace heretofore reigning in Bahia.

  As it proved, however, there was no danger in meeting the enemy, nor any cause of alarm. [Peixoto], it is well known, was fitted out with peaceful, harmless people in his ships; Mello’s outfit was the same. Both sides as harmless as jay birds! Why should they kill each other? That the Destroyer, then, most formidable ship of all, must in some way be disposed of, went without saying. When first she came to Bahia though, and it was reported that this was the long hoped “money ship” to follow the fleet—and pay the bills—the large iron “tank” in which the crew lived fitting in size their expectations of the chest out of which they would all get rich. Many visitors came to see her and called her a very handsome ship, saying many pretty things concerning “her lines,” etc. But when to their great disappointment, instead of bank notes teeming forth, they beheld sea-begrimed tars tumbling out of the “tank,” and worse still barrels of gunpowder being hoisted out, they said, “Nao maes,” we give it up!

  Slocum wonderfully captured the seasick warriors’ point of view: “Let us each die a natural death. Let us all die friends on deck, since there is no one to help us into the sea, and let us have no more war.” In fact, Peixoto’s sailors scuttled their own ship, and inasmuch as she was now of no use to combatants of either team, Brazil refused to pay the navigator-in-command a single penny of the $20,000 he had been promised. It’s not known who paid for his steamer passage home, but Slocum did get from the experience an excellent yarn from whose sale he hoped to profit. This wouldn’t happen, either, since his self-published pamphlet was of such poor physical quality that he was reduced to giving copies away to friends and a few reviewers.

  The Boston papers, delighted with Slocum’s ridicule of foreign cupidity and vainglorious truculence, applauded The Voyage of the “Destroyer,” and especially its final words:

  The revolt began in Rio, somewhere in September, 1893, the date don’t matter much. The funny war so far as the navy was concerned finished of itself in March, 1894. No historian can ever say more.

  They may tell of hot firing and hot fires but it was by the heat of the sun, and by that child of filth, yellow fever, that most lives were lost. In this way … some of the members of our own expedition were taken. Were it not indeed for these darker shades, I could now look back with unalloyed pleasure ov
er the voyage of the Destroyer; the voyage of past hardships, now so pleasant to bear. The voyage which gave to the crew, and myself, withal, no end of fun.

  But that was not quite the end of it, because the newspapers’ approving reviews of Slocum’s pamphlet came to the attention of a sputtering popinjay, Lieutenant Carlos A. Rivers, a young soldier of fortune attached to the British Marine Artillery, armed with a huge sword and weighed down with “handsome gold bands for his caps,” who had been imposed on the crew of the Destroyer as a military adviser and as a sailor “was a good judge of a hotel,” in Slocum’s words. This fool—self-described as a Hero of the Sudan, as Slocum many, many times reminded his readers—was fond of challenging crew members to duels, and while attempting to defend his honor as a gentleman against a slight imagined to have come from the Destroyer’s cook (“Big Alec of Salem”), he was beaten about the head by that black man’s iron skillet.

  Now, slandered by reviews of Joshua Slocum’s pamphlet, the Hero of the Sudan challenged the master of the Spray to a duel. Advised of this dare by the Boston Sun’s correspondent, Slocum replied: “There are my wife’s feelings to be thought of. I have always been of the opinion that duelists should consult their wives.”

  Slocum, sitting on the Fairhaven wharf alongside the Spray, untangling the knots in a fishing line, was asked by the Sun reporter whether he worried that Lieutenant Rivers was “on your track.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” the captain responded. “He is rapacious, and a fire eater. When he comes for me I shall wrap myself up in the American flag and dare him to do his worst … It is better that I catch fish than fight him. Just say that I am a man with a big fist. Do anything to discourage a duel. Good day.”

  In fact, Slocum was catching no fish from the Spray. Having fired (almost) his final salvo at treacherous Brazil by dud torpedo, unavailing lawsuit, and unselling pamphlet, he thought to wrest some kind of a living by hiring the Spray and himself out to charter parties during the summer season of 1894 for the purpose of company picnics and fishing trips, “only to find,” as he writes in Sailing Alone Around the World, “that I had not the cunning properly to bait a hook. But at last the time arrived to weigh anchor and get to sea in earnest.”