The Hard Way Around

by Geoffrey Wolff

  And so he did, fitting out at first in Boston, where he attempted to interest several newspapers in underwriting his solo voyage in return for his serial dispatches from ports along the way. Reporters haunted major waterfronts in Slocum’s day much as they did police stations, on the hunt for stories to amaze the jaded, and a solo voyage around the world had the right mix of bravado, folly, and potential catastrophe to attract attention. Nor is it difficult to grasp why the adventure appealed to Slocum. At fifty-one he had sailed five times around the world; he was an inspired navigator, a serial survivor of crises, and he had nothing better to do. But what of Hettie? On April 16, 1895, he confided to an interviewer for the Boston Herald that he hoped to make enough money from the voyage to buy a little farm and settle down on it with his wife and children, and he did in fact buy Hettie such a farm. Always decorous in public statements about his family, he told a Boston Globe reporter that he would sail with Hettie if “my wife changes her mind about staying ashore.” He knew better. In The Search for Captain Slocum, the most striking contrast between Walter Teller’s 1956 and 1971 versions is his judgment of Joshua and Henrietta’s marriage. The later account is tentative, perhaps gentled by Teller’s longer experience of human mysteries. In 1956 he was more certain of what was what, and his bluntness—however unmerciful—sounds about right:

  The captain’s home was not with Hettie, who may have loved him once, but scarcely understood him. She was no Virginia with flashing eyes and brilliant intuitions, the game companion on deck, the reading companion in the cabin. Hettie was doomed to disappoint and to be disappointed … On the one hand there was the still young, and by now bewildered, dressmaker. On the other the sea-drawn escapologist at a critical stage of life. She could not have been important to him, though he tried to consider her. Their incompatibility was deeply distressing, but it had its uses.

  Teller deleted this passage entirely from his revision, but he continued to believe, and to write in letters collected among his New Bedford papers, that the world could thank Hettie for her husband’s voyage, and for Sailing Alone Around the World, because his wish to escape her company—the tone-deaf “escapologist” locution—drove him out to sea. “Perhaps the world owes [her] something—that is, if she had been more companionable the Captain might never have sailed alone,” Teller wrote to Grace Murray Brown. And Garfield had scribbled in the margin of a letter to Teller that “I could feel a storm coming up between [Joshua and Hettie].”6

  Whatever his marital considerations, a week before his leave-taking on April 24 he was described by the Boston Herald as “a kinky salt,” “spry as a kitten and nimble as a monkey.” Imagine again his freedoms: from schedules, customs regulations, treaties, towboats, seditious mumbling below decks, caprices of national and international politics, children’s welfare … His first sentences at sea, bound a mere twenty miles or so northeast for Cape Ann, sing the praises of his solitude:

  I heard the clanking of the dismal bell on Norman’s Woe as we went by; and the reef where the schooner Hesperus struck I passed close aboard. The “bones” of a wreck tossed up lay bleaching on the shore abreast … I made for the cove, a lovely branch of Gloucester’s fine harbor, again to look the Spray over and again to weigh the voyage, and my feelings, and all that … It was my first experience of coming into port alone, with a craft of any size, and in among shipping. Old fishermen ran down to the wharf for which the Spray was heading apparently intent upon braining herself there … I let go the wheel, stepped quickly forward, and downed the jib. The sloop naturally rounded in the wind, and just ranging ahead, laid her cheek against a mooring-pile at the windward corner of the wharf, so quietly, after all, that she would not have broken an egg.

  This passage precisely describes a place, an emotion, a circumstance, and an action. Norman’s Woe is a rocky reef near Gloucester, and it rang a bell to warn sailors away from it. It was the site of awful shipwrecks, perhaps the worst the wreck of the Favorite during the winter blizzard of 1839, washing twenty bodies ashore at Cape Ann and inspiring Longfellow’s “Wreck of the Hesperus” (1839). But a reader doesn’t gasp aloud at a run of efficient exposition. “I heard the clanking of the dismal bell on Norman’s Woe as we went by.” Coming upon those words when I was first led to Joshua Slocum fifty years ago, expecting to experience a yarn of briny adventures, was all the more breathtaking for being un-promised by the casual hope expressed by my friend, loaning me his copy of Sailing Alone Around the World, that I would “enjoy a pretty good story.” Goodness!

  Joshua Slocum aboard the Spray (Photo credit 10.3)

  1 Harper’s Weekly (November 23, 1889) would report that the Liberdade was a featured display that fall at Boston’s Maritime Exhibition, as a fine example of American shipbuilding ingenuity. But whatever her merits, she was a floating pup tent. Slocum continued to show her off in New England waters until he gave her to the Smithsonian, which gave her back, whereupon she was dismantled and stored in some barn or pasture, her whereabouts unknown since 1908. She made a poor impression on Slocum’s young Martha’s Vineyard neighbor, Joseph Chase Allen, who boarded her at anchor at Vineyard Haven: “The predominating color on and about her was brown, the brown of plug tobacco.” He noted also that “her cabin was a hut, of the type seen in pictures of tropical countries,” with a crudely thatched roof of overlapping leaves.

  2 In Sailing Alone Around the World, a rare outburst of indignation interrupts Slocum’s blissful passage in the Indian Ocean when he encounters a steamer “groping her way in the dark and making the night dismal with her own black smoke.” Speaking of the steam liner Olympia in the mid-Atlantic, he noted that her captain—who had hailed him—was too young to be a match for the sea and that “there were no porpoises skipping along” with the smoke belcher, inasmuch as porpoises “always prefer sailing ships.”

  3 At eighty, Eben Pierce was run down in New Bedford by an electric trolley car. “Captain Pierce’s right leg was found wedged into the rear brake shoe,” reported the Boston Herald of May 8, 1902. “One of the last remaining relics of the old whaling days … he lived fifteen minutes.”

  4 For the inquisitive, an entertaining diversion might be H. W. Wilson’s Ironclads in Action: A Sketch of Naval Warfare from 1855 to 1895 (1896), with an unvarnished account of the limitations, indeed uselessness, of the experimental naval follies our government sold to the innocents of Brazil.

  5 “Confidentially,” as Slocum writes in The Voyage of the “Destroyer” (1894), “I was burning to get a rake at Mello and his Aquideban. He it was, who in that ship expelled my bark … some years ago, under the cowardly pretext that we might have sickness on board … I was burning to let him know and palpably feel that this time I had in dynamite instead of hay. It would have been, maybe, too great a joke.”

  6 In Nautical Quarterly, no. 3 (1978), Donald B. Sharp writes of Slocum as a sailing master rather than a solo adventurer, and he takes sharp and fair issue with Teller’s dismissal of Hettie—in contrast to Virginia—as uninspiring and inadequate to a great man’s needs. “This opinion,” writes Sharp,

  does great injustice to Henrietta … What seems to be the difference is that the man Henrietta married was not the man Virginia married. Virginia married a ship captain who was prospering during the dying days of sail: Henrietta married a man who found himself unable to earn a living for his wife and family in the age of steam. If they grew distant, it was partly because Slocum had to face Henrietta as a failure of sorts … Stumping vainly around the waterfront looking for a job is not the same as sailing your own ship …

  ELEVEN

  The Great Adventure

  The weather was mild on the day of my departure from Gloucester. On the point ahead, as the Spray stood out of the cove, was a lively picture, for the front of a tall factory was a flutter of handkerchiefs and caps. Pretty faces peered out of the windows from the top to the bottom of the building, all smiling bon voyage. Some hailed me to know where away and why alone. Why? When I made as if to stand
in, a hundred pairs of arms reached out, and said come, but the shore was dangerous! The sloop worked out of the bay against a light southwest wind, and about noon squared away off Eastern Point, receiving at the same time a hearty salute—the last of many kindnesses to her at Gloucester. The wind freshened off the point, and skipping along smoothly, the Spray was soon off Thatcher’s Island lights. Thence shaping her course east, by compass, to go north of Cashes Ledge and the Amen Rocks, I sat and considered the matter all over again, and asked myself once more whether it were best to sail beyond the ledge and rocks at all.

  —Sailing Alone Around the World

  IT’S THRILLING TO STUMBLE ACROSS a chunk of gold lying in your path, even if you’d gone seeking something like it. Or finding what’s wonderfully termed a “passage” in a piece of music or movie you get to impose on a captive audience, at Thanksgiving, say, or on your own birthday. I’m thinking of the playlist I hope visitors at my wake will agree to listen to. Something from a book or play, writing you get to read aloud, maybe hamming it up: Falstaff lying to Prince Hal about his rout of the highwaymen on Gad’s Hill (“in buckram?”) or Nabokov telling about his father’s blanket toss in Speak, Memory. In hindsight I can’t pretend to have been surprised to find gold in those hills, but when I came upon the passage quoted above, and what followed it, I was stunned, and it’s simple joy to get to share it. Having meant to read a sea adventure, hoping it would have the Yankee virtues—sly wit, stoicism, descriptive accuracy—that its fans advertised, I stumbled on this run of language, bearing its load so easily, and the emotional burden it discharges so cunningly. Taking my breath away, it made me feel what I can only describe as love.

  Well, okay. But why? The passage above is packed as tightly as the Spray’s hold with the logbook essentials: weather, location, wind direction and force, observed positions and intended course. A reader always knows where he or she is aboard the Spray. But behold the “lively picture”! The perspective from Slocum’s position is both fixed aboard the Spray and in motion with her, jittery and tender as he and his vessel respond to gusts and emotional eddies. The faces at the factory windows, the Sirens beckoning with their arms—Come in! Come in!—are vividly seductive, almost shocking in their erotic charge. “Some hailed me to know where away and why alone. Why?” Could the reader’s question be shaped more succinctly or prettily? “But the shore was dangerous.” This declarative sentence conveys both a simple fact and the most complex autobiographical account of the singular ambitions and limits of the author’s personality.

  But free of the land, where a less inspired sailor and writer might take a deep breath and enjoy the day, with a fresh wind off Gloucester’s point and the Spray “skipping along smoothly,” Slocum is alert to hazards: “Cashes Ledge and the Amen Rocks”—real obstructions with their actual names, however resonantly admonitory, that can tear the bottom out of a vessel. And asking himself, with stunning cadence, “whether it were best to sail beyond the ledge and rocks at all,” he answers: Yes!

  No book can continue without interruption such fine concentration and suggestiveness over more than two hundred pages, and Sailing Alone Around the World gives way, as it must, to passages responsible for conveying the business of its narrative: names and dates, latitudes and longitudes, capsule histories of islands and colonies, meteorology and geography. But the quality of Slocum’s best runs of writing is extraordinary, making it sad but not in the least surprising that his greatest commercial failure during the enterprise that follows was as a writer.

  Well, a particular kind of writer, a freelance journalist. With an eye to practicality, making the Spray pay, Slocum had changed her hailing port from Fairhaven to Boston, although Fairhaven and New Bedford, home to the world’s greatest whaling fleets, might have been at least as well-known between Cape Cod and the Antipodes.1 He then set about setting up a syndicate to cover his costs by printing the serial account of his circumnavigation. He enlisted as his agent Eugene Hardy, of Roberts Brothers, a Boston publisher, and Hardy received tentative commitments from the Boston Globe and Louisville Courier-Journal. The story of his despair as a travel writer, and his putative patrons’ serial disappointment with their captain, makes a bitter footnote to Sailing Alone Around the World. In brief: the newspapers were irritated that Slocum took his own sweet time getting under way, seeming to loiter as he did in Boston, then Gloucester, and then on Brier Island and in the Bay of Fundy. Weeks went by before the Spray left Sable Island astern on July 4, 1895, bound for the Azores and Gibraltar.

  Aside from fitting out for his voyage in Nova Scotia, and managing to involve himself in a controversy in Halifax that threatened to provoke a fistfight, Slocum was visiting family members and trying to explain to his agent and editors why the timetable of a small boat being sailed alone around the world could not be as exact as newspapers might wish. There was also the issue of his itinerary, which his syndicate partners wanted to publish as absolute. Slocum’s announced intention had been to sail across the Atlantic to Gibraltar, where he would enter the Mediterranean Sea, proceeding through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea, thence to the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope, running his easting down to Cape Horn and north from the South Atlantic toward home. He believed this voyage would require two years.

  It required three years, two months, and two days to sail from home back to home, and after his arrival in Gibraltar, no aspect of his itinerary went unmodified. In fact, he had announced in Fairhaven, before assuring Eugene Hardy of the course laid out above, that he would first take a tow to New York, then proceed down the east coast of South America, double Cape Horn east to west, and then … he’d see. For all its hindsight inevitability and rightness—that of all people he would do what he did the best way he found to do it—there was always a wonderfully ad hoc character to his plans.

  But early in his voyage, especially, before he learned how generously he would be welcomed and supplied in foreign ports and how successfully he could draw audiences to his lantern-slide lectures, he was desperate for money. He sailed for Gibraltar, he noted again and again, with $1.50 in his pocket.

  But by God he sailed! And watched and listened and meditated and in the end conveyed the essence of sailing alone on a small boat, itself a cosmic system whose complications a single person, with humility and experience and alertness, might hope to master. He was, after all, what believers might call the Spray’s maker. If her rudderhead twisted away in high seas, or a cabin-to-deck joint parted, he knew whose was the original sin. And this accounts for the lightness in his being as the sun sets behind him and he pushes ahead. “Then I turned my face eastward, and there, apparently at the very end of the bowsprit, was the smiling full moon rising out of the sea. Neptune himself coming over the bows could not have startled me more. ‘Good evening, sir,’ I cried; ‘I’m glad to see you.’ ”

  But later, inevitably, came fog, off fearsome Sable Island. This wasn’t the first ever to have settled on Joshua Slocum, but he was impressed by it: “One could almost ‘stand on it.’ It continued so for a number of days, the wind increasing to a gale. The waves rose high, but I had a good ship. Still, in the dismal fog I felt myself drifting into loneliness, an insect on a straw in the midst of the elements.” Slocum’s phrasing here is strikingly akin to the narrator of Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897) musing that “the correspondent … watched the waves and wondered why he was there.” Slocum would many times come to note what Crane described as nature’s flat indifference: “She did not seem cruel, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise.”

  But in the face of what Slocum felt like at sea, “an insect on a straw,” it is little wonder that there came upon him, when fine weather returned, “the sense of solitude, which I could not shake off. I used my voice often, at first giving some order about the affairs of a ship, for I had been told that from disuse I should lose my speech … From my cabin I cried to an imaginary man at the helm, ‘How does she head, there?’ But getting no reply, I was reminded the mo
re palpably of my condition. My voice sounded hollow on the empty air, and I dropped the practice.”

  To learn to despise the sound of one’s own voice is a sobering event for an autobiographer, and for a shipmaster accustomed to his commands being heard. But it must have been stirring, too, for to find oneself humbled by the sound of one’s own voice is not the same thing as to hate the noise the world makes, and to regard oneself as an insect on a straw afloat is not to lose one’s wonder at the majesty of a great sea. Perhaps I make too much of Slocum’s exactly described epiphany following the gale-driven fog: “The acute pain of solitude experienced at first never returned. I had penetrated a mystery, and, by the way, I had sailed through a fog.” The diction unfolds its suggestions: “acute pain” sharp enough to “penetrate” the “mystery” of what lies beyond figurative blindness. Again and again Slocum’s attentive cadence refreshes tired phrasing; who could have guessed how much life was left in such an offhand castoff as “by the way”?

  As soon as Slocum touches land on July 20, 1895, nineteen days out from Nova Scotia, the reader realizes how lovingly the transatlantic passage has socialized the solo sailor. Ashore in the Azores at Faial, he’s pleased to accept islanders’ hospitality and a tour with a young woman and her brother as interpreter. Generous well-wishers press gifts on him before he departs Horta for Gibraltar four days later. His interpreter, Antonio, declares that he wishes to come with Slocum: “Antonio’s heart went out to one John Wilson, and he was ready to sail for America by way of the two capes to meet his friend. ‘Do you know John Wilson of Boston?’ he cried. ‘I knew a John Wilson,’ I said, ‘but not of Boston.’ ‘He had one daughter and one son,’ said Antonio, by way of identifying his friend. If this reaches the right John Wilson, I am told to say that ‘Antonio of Pico remembers him.’ ”