On February 19, 1896, the Spray cleared Sandy Point and headed westward through the strait. The going was miserable: the labyrinthine channel acted as a funnel for contrary winds from the Pacific, which might be suddenly broken by williwaws blasting from random directions. Slocum beat against this severe seascape “with hardly so much as a bird in sight,” dodging hidden rocks and false channels, and facing a chaotic gauntlet of islands. The next morning he anchored long enough to celebrate his fifty-second birthday with a cup of coffee, and was no sooner under way again, in the neighborhood of Cape Froward, when he spotted “canoes manned by savages” coming in pursuit. It was a supplemental perversity of these hellish waters that while storms and fog kept natives ashore, any easing of conditions set them forth. And so it was that Slocum now heard the insistent cry of “Yammerschooner! Yammerschooner!” from the nearing canoes. This he had been taught to understand as forceful panhandling, and he shouted back, “No!”9 He also rigged scarecrows forward and aft to give the appearance of additional crew, a contrivance more reassuring to himself than persuasive to Black Pedro. For leading the charge toward the Spray was that very villain, and Slocum fired a shot—designed to miss—in his direction: “However, a miss was as good as a mile for Mr. ‘Black Pedro,’ as he it was, and no other, a leader in several bloody massacres. He made for the island now, and the others followed him. I knew by his Spanish lingo and by his full beard that he was the villain I have named, a renegade mongrel, and the worst murderer in Tierra del Fuego.”
During the Spray’s first passage through the Strait of Magellan—there would be another, and far more trying—Slocum dodged natives, and dropped and raised anchor again and again, until on March 3, exhausted by the effort, he reached Port Tamar, with Cape Pillar and the Pacific Ocean in sight to the west. He had now sailed 13,000 miles.
Here I felt the throb of the great ocean that lay before me. I knew now that I had put a world behind me, and that I was opening out another world ahead. I had passed the haunts of savages. Great piles of granite mountains of bleak and lifeless aspect were now astern; on some of them not even a speck of moss had ever grown. There was an unfinished newness all about the land. On the hill back of Port Tamar a small beacon had been thrown up, showing that some man had been there. But how could one tell but that he had died of loneliness and grief? In a bleak land is not the place to enjoy solitude … There was a sort of swan, smaller than a Muscovy duck, which might have been brought down with the gun, but in the loneliness of life about the dreary country I found myself in no mood to make one life less, except in self-defense.
What happened now raises Slocum’s voyage from merely extraordinary to miraculous. For once he entered Pacific waters a vicious northwest gale drove him back under bare poles, and with no hope of reentering the Strait of Magellan, “there seemed nothing to do but to keep on and go east about, after all.”
A pause is required. Even a writer as skilled as Joshua Slocum cannot possibly convey the reality of duration by the medium of prose. Even if he were to abandon his reflexive taciturnity, a writer cannot escape ellipsis: the Spray is moored at Fairhaven on page 10, and 13,000 miles later—on page 69—he writes that oh, wow, what a pity, he’ll have to cross the Atlantic again! We don’t read backward, even though Slocum—beaten back by wind or tide—sometimes sailed in reverse. There is no chance for a reader to be given to understand, through a linear and consecutive medium, the crabwise progress of the Spray, or the assault on Slocum’s senses hour after hour, and sometimes day after day, of nature’s din, the sea’s aggressiveness, the sometimes awful dampening of a sailor’s senses, not to mention his clothes, food, bunk, and body. Slocum has been detoured to the extreme latitudes of the southern oceans, adding thousands and thousands of miles to his journey, and this reversal unfolds in the space of a page, in the brief number of words needed to describe a shift of wind.
And what a wind! What a battering he took! Heading southeast, with two long hawsers trailing astern to break the combing seas, the Spray endured “the worst sea that Cape Horn or its wild regions could afford.” Meantime, having cooked himself an Irish stew in conformity with his custom always to prepare warm meals at sea, “my appetite was slim … (Confidentially, I was seasick!).” The man who added that parenthesis to his story was likely to come through okay, and so he did. “Even while the storm raged at its worst, my ship was wholesome and noble. My mind as to her seaworthiness was put at ease for aye.”
But seaworthiness cannot prevent a thirty-seven-foot sailboat from being crushed by rocks, and that was now nearly the Spray’s fate. On the fifth night of the storm—March 8, 1896—Slocum entered the worst patch of the world’s worst waters. Darwin had been there half a century earlier, and thus described the Milky Way, a broken strand of barely awash rocks barring the waters south of Cape Horn from the strait: “One sight of such a coast is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about shipwrecks, peril, and death.” Slocum sets the scene:
Night closed in before the sloop reached the land, leaving her feeling the way in pitchy darkness. I saw breakers ahead before long [and] was immediately startled by the tremendous roaring of breakers again ahead and on the lee bow. This puzzled me, for there should have been no broken water where I supposed myself to be. I kept off a good bit … but finding broken water also there, threw her head again offshore. In this way, among dangers, I spent the rest of the night. Hail and sleet in the fierce squalls cut my flesh till the blood trickled over my face; but what of that? It was daylight, and the sloop was in the midst of the Milky Way of the sea, which is northwest of Cape Horn, and it was the white breakers of a huge sea over sunken rocks which had threatened to engulf her through the night … This was the greatest sea adventure of my life. God knows how my vessel escaped.10
On March 10, Slocum anchored in the strait at St. Nicholas Bay, where he’d drunk his birthday coffee eighteen days before. He would fight his way westward for forty-three days and nights through the same waters he had traversed so painfully starting on Valentine’s Day. High on his list of anxieties stood the persistent threat of more “Yammerschooner!” demands. It requires little imagination to conjure an inventory of complaints against interloping white men by their unwelcoming hosts, but I hope the reader’s wish is to keep Joshua Slocum alive to endure more interesting dangers than deadly armed robbery at the hands of Black Pedro. Trust him to share this wish, and here—at anchor in wonderfully named Thieves’ Bay—he slept below while his gift from Samblich kept watch on deck:
Now, it is well known that one cannot step on a tack without saying something about it. A pretty good Christian will whistle when he steps on the “commercial end” of a carpet-tack; a savage will howl and claw the air, and that was just what happened that night about twelve o’clock, while I was asleep in the cabin, where the savages thought they “had me,” sloop and all, but changed their minds when they stepped on deck … I had no need of a dog; they howled like a pack of hounds. I had hardly use for a gun. They jumped pell-mell, some into their canoes and some into the sea, to cool off, I suppose, and there was a deal of free language over it as they went. I fired several guns when I came on deck, to let the rascals know that I was home, and then I turned in again, feeling sure I should not be disturbed any more by people who left in so great a hurry.
This is almost too good to be true, and with his customary diligence Walter Teller interviewed Slocum’s brother-in-law George Walker, who’d heard the yarn at first hand; the event having had no available witnesses, Walker was never able to authenticate it, though it “lost none of its interest for that reason.” Among his papers, Teller adds a parenthetical note to himself: “That’s just how I feel about the captain’s above paragraph.” And just how I feel, too.
After day upon day of uphill sailing, an evolved sense of determination overtook Slocum. In the face of the relentless battering he took, it would be inaccurate to describe this as resignation. Imagine hauling a heavy anchor and chain aboard every morning, let alone ha
ving to reset it when it dragged along the kelpy bottom or snagged on a rock. Imagine raising heavy sails and lowering them, furling and reefing them, patching and restitching them. Imagine the constant work of repairing broken spars with the primitive tools he carried.
Rockwell Kent—whose stunning drawings accompany Voyaging: Southward from the Strait of Magellan (1924), his account of sailing these waters in the wake of the Spray—tells of williwaws and foul currents, ghastly cold and exhaustion. He had known in advance of a “mountain sea … thundering eternally on granite shores,” in a region known as the Sailor’s Graveyard, offering a fine chance of “getting wrecked or drowned or eaten.” This provided Tierra del Fuego with “the spirit-stirring glamour of the terrible.” Kent had a friend aboard his small sailboat, and they had finally abandoned their plan to voyage from Punta Arenas to Cape Pillar after being beaten back time and again by headwinds, when a kind of fury overtook them:
Then with fatigue the glamor of adventure wanes, and loneliness comes over us and the sense that we are destitute of all that sustained our lives. We that have come so far and left so much then know, out of the poignant singleness of our desires, what in the confusion and abundance of life’s offerings is best. But no one tells—so intimately close and dear is that desire. And when at last, suddenly in the darkness here, I ask my companion what one thing he desires most out of the whole world, tonight—he starts at the shattered silence, and, slowly emerging from far away to here, covers his thoughts and answers, “A fair wind to carry us through Gabriel Channel.”
However, there’s an end to everything. “Mate,” I said one dreary night as we turned in, “I need a new chapter for my book. Tomorrow we sail no matter what happens.” And we did.
Unavailingly, as it fell out. But Victor Slocum, who understood better than anyone except his mother the seaborne character of his father, captures the ferocity that had evolved from his native determination and pugnacity: “Since the gale which drove him south, his attitude toward the entire transit of the strait had changed. It was now: ‘If you want to play ball, come on. I am ready for you and I can beat you at your own game.’ ” Or, as he writes in Sailing Alone Around the World, “I now enjoyed gales of wind as never before, and the Spray was never long without them during her struggles about Cape Horn. I became in a measure inured to the life, and began to think that one more trip through the strait, if perchance the sloop should be blown off again, would make me the aggressor.” Rockwell Kent, for his part, perhaps echoing the wrath of Lear on the heath, writes that “the unrelenting fury of the wind enraged us.”
Having salvaged wine and tallow from a ship wrecked at Langara Cove, near Borgia Bay, Slocum filled his water tanks and sailed through a snowstorm to Port Angosto, the jumping-off harbor for Cape Pillar. He tried and failed six times to beat out of the harbor, and a Chilean gunboat offered to tow the Spray back through the strait to Punta Arenas, which generosity the captain disdained. After all, why was he in this game, except to play? His ambition was neither commercial nor imperial; he’d already seen the world. He was here in a contest, and good sportsmanship was chief among its rules. A new virtue came to him, a kind of extreme patience: “I made up my mind after six attempts … to be in no further haste to sail.” So on the seventh try, on April 13, 1896, he made it out of the harbor, took a right turn and sailed into the Pacific after sixty-nine days of struggle, whereupon a huge “fine-weather sea,” as he called it, “broke over the sloop fore and aft … the last that swept over the Spray off Cape Horn. It seemed to wash away old regrets. All my troubles were now astern; summer was ahead; all the world was again before me.”
Thirteen days later he made landfall at night, off the islands of Juan Fernández. He spent ten days ashore where Alexander Selkirk, marooned and dwelling in a cave, had inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Joshua Slocum’s choice of destinations during his voyage around the world was often guided by his literary enthusiasms. Along the way one of Slocum’s most important ports of call would be Apia, at Samoa, where he met Fanny, recently the widow of his idol, Robert Louis Stevenson. Slocum’s abundant library aboard the Spray, updated as he traveled by swaps and gifts and new purchases, had been stocked with the help of Mabel Wagnalls, the young and unmarried daughter of the publisher who owned Funk and Wagnalls. Before the captain sailed from Boston, she had brought aboard a box of books and had written in Slocum’s log, “The Spray will return,” a vote of confidence that so moved the author of Sailing Alone Around the World that he dedicated his book to her.11
Ashore at Juan Fernández, Slocum was especially beguiled by the island’s children, an affection that cheered him his whole way around. He loved teaching kids the names of things, and liked to tease and be teased by them. It is helpful to remember that he grew up caring for many siblings, and had delighted in his own children when he had the means and leisure to care for them. Anybody who has been among children in the South Pacific has experienced how joyful they seem. The little girls dance without self-consciousness, and little boys—knowing the reputation some of their people have among civilized aliens such as vacation among them—might lick their lips and cry “Yum-yum,” before they laugh and run (neither fast nor far) away. No wonder Slocum remembered one experience at Juan Fernández as perhaps “the pleasantest on my whole voyage,” his final day ashore there, “when the children of the little community, one and all, went out with me to gather” quinces, peaches, and figs for the voyage.
But once under sail again, “with a free wind day after day,” he was not tempted to put into land for an astonishing seventy-two days. After making his desired northing, up to 12 degrees south of the equator, he ran down his longitude, as sailors say, week after week, riding the trade winds west. The Spray sailed herself during this period, while her master read and rested, his ordeal at Cape Horn and in the strait unforgotten.
My time was all taken up those days—not by standing at the helm; no man, I think, could stand or sit and steer a vessel round the world: I did better than that; for I sat and read my books, mended my clothes, or cooked my meals and ate them in peace. I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so I made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.
Spray made the Marquesas forty-three days and five thousand miles out from Juan Fernández, finding Nuku Hiva right where that high island, of Melville’s Typee, was meant to be found. Of all islands along his march, Nuku Hiva—romantic, lush, with abundant food and fresh water—should have seemed attractive to Slocum, but something pushed him forward, the push itself, perhaps. Perhaps this leg was the apogee of his evolution into a creature of the sea, at home on it, as he writes in Sailing Alone Around the World: “To know the laws that govern the winds, and to know that you know them, will give you an easy mind on your voyage round the world; otherwise you may tremble at the appearance of every cloud.”12
When, in clear weather, he spied lofty Nuku Hiva, within five miles of his dead reckoning position, he boasted, a rare indulgence: “This was wonderful … this was extraordinary. All navigators will tell you that from one day to another a ship may lose or gain more than five miles in her sailing-account, and again, in the matter of lunars, even expert lunarians are considered as doing clever work when they average within eight miles of the truth.” Rod Scher, whose Annotated Sailing Alone Around the World (2009) is more reliable in his sailing judgments than in his pyschologizing, puts this achievement in context:
Slocum’s feat of navigation is akin to magic. With only a few degrees of southerly error, he would have missed the Marquesas by hundreds of miles and, if he were lucky, perhaps fetched the islands of French Polynesia; if the error had been in a northerly direction, he might have encountered nothing at all until sighting the Marshall Islands, another 3,000 miles away.
In fact, the early history of the Marquesas was notable for the European explorers who sailed ri
ght past without noticing a peak as high as 3,900 feet atop lush green ridges and black, volcanic cliffs, impossible to miss—even given the frequency of clouds—at a distance of twenty miles.
Melville found Nuku Hiva, where he jumped ship in June 1842 after eighteen months aboard New Bedford’s Acushnet, hunting quite vainly for sperm whales in the South Pacific. The opening passage of his autobiographical first novel, Typee, makes a persuasive case for a sailor longing to go ashore after a hard passage at sea:
Six months at sea! Yes, reader, as I live, six months out of sight of land; cruising after the sperm-whale beneath the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the billows of the wide-rolling Pacific—the sky above, the sea around, and nothing else! Weeks and weeks ago our fresh provisions were all exhausted. There is not a sweet potato left; not a single yam … Oh! for a refreshing glimpse of one blade of grass—for a snuff at the fragrance of a handful of the loamy earth! Is there nothing fresh around us? Is there no green thing to be seen?
Melville’s longing raises the question of Slocum’s diet during such prolonged passages between ports as he was now undertaking. Flying fish, in their native latitudes, were a self-serving staple, and he kept aboard quantities of potatoes and salt cod. Biscuits were the sailor’s friend, especially when crumbled up or sopped in liquid. He carried an abundance of flour, and fried doughnuts from the tallow he had salvaged in the Strait of Magellan. Coffee and tea, with sugar, helped keep him warm and alert at night. Clifton Johnson—who profiled Slocum for Outing magazine in its October 1902 issue—used outtakes from his interview at Martha’s Vineyard for a follow-up article in Good Housekeeping (February 1903) about the captain’s diet and cooking techniques while aboard the Spray. He writes that “I repeat what he said in substantially his own words.”
The Hard Way Around Page 21
