The Hard Way Around

by Geoffrey Wolff

  Slocum emphasized that he was never short on rations, a casual reassurance in light of the well-known danger of contracting scurvy on any passage approaching sixty days at sea. (Sir Francis Chichester tells of cases that began as few as twelve days alone at sea, announced by depression, loose teeth, and boils, and provoked by an insufficiency of vitamins C and D from fresh fruit and vegetables. Slocum and his crews—during all the voyages that he mastered—were never said to have suffered this ubiquitous malady.) He relished mangoes, but complained that they were so juicy that after eating them he needed a bath.

  Many of his supplies he put by in tin cans, which he trusted only himself to seal with solder. He used curry as a staple, for its flavor and qualities as a preservative, a taste he had acquired in South Asia. From firsthand experience in the Okhotsk Sea he had become expert at preparing salt cod, not “these little tom cods, skinned and bleached and tasteless … but big fellows, thick as a board and broad as a sole of shoe leather.” Potatoes he baked in their skins. In common with coastal Yankees everywhere, he was fiercely proud of his chowder-making powers. Slocum didn’t bother trying to catch fish during his voyage, but took potluck from the sea: “Often I’d get up in the morning and find [flying fish] down the forescuttle right alongside the frying pan.” That throwaway phrase “get up in the morning” is worthy of attention: he got up from sleeping, that is, while the Spray kept herself company. It has been estimated that a steamer and sailboat on a collision course have at most twenty minutes from the moment they see each other on the horizon—assuming clear weather by day or clear weather by night with bright lights aloft—to avoid crashing. There were passages of thousands of miles during which Slocum never saw another ship in the Pacific. Despite a close call—a “startled snort” and wetting from the flukes of a humpback “plowing the ocean at night while [he] was below”—Slocum trusted whales to see him and get out of his way, and his way avoided reefs. (Sounds easy, doesn’t it?)

  At noon on July 16, 1896, Slocum anchored at Apia, a harbor at Samoa, after the longest unbroken passage of his voyage. He didn’t rush ashore, but rather spread an awning across the Spray’s cockpit, where he sat alone listening to voices ashore, particularly to women singing. To understand Slocum fully, one would have to understand him at that moment—not rushing ashore—with his baffling complexity of relief and pride, hunger for society, and disciplined delay of gratification. His mix was not patchwork but constitutional, appetite governed by restraint to an almost heroic degree.

  He lingered more than a month at Samoa, where he was befriended by Fanny Stevenson, who came aboard the Spray the day after she anchored, together with envoys from the U.S. consul ashore, who invited Slocum to festivities in his honor. From this port onward, the circumnavigator was destined to be celebrated wherever he went, being entertained and flattered by personages—tribal chiefs, explorers, foreign emissaries—who were justly impressed by the ambition and achievement of the master of the Spray. Slocum responded well to adulation, and despite his disdain for self-celebration he manages to drop into Sailing Alone Around the World the names and résumés of celebrities as various as “Oom Paul” (Uncle Paul) Krüger, the president of Transvaal; and the late Robert Louis Stevenson, whose grave he visited with Fanny on Samoa. Stevenson, forty-four, had died there eighteen months earlier, and his headstone inscription stirred deep emotions in Slocum: “Home is the Sailor, home from the sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.”

  Fanny, an American, knowing that Slocum idolized her late husband above all writers and travelers, invited him to visit the Stevenson villa, Vailima, where her guest was encouraged to use the writer’s desk to compose letters. She then pressed upon her new friend volumes of sailing directions for the Mediterranean, inscribed “To Captain Slocum,” with the assurance that her husband “would be pleased that they should be passed on to the sort of seafaring man that he liked above all others.” For his part, Slocum wrote of Fanny, who, along with her husband, “had voyaged in all manner of rickety craft among the islands of the Pacific,” that “our tastes were similar.” Fanny must have made him think of Virginia, as though he needed reminding.

  On August 20, 1896, after selling the last of his salvaged tallow to a German trader who would use it for candles and soap, Slocum shipped the Spray’s anchor and sailed from Samoa, setting a course north of Fiji; after forty-two days of gales he took refuge halfway around the world from Boston, at Newcastle, New South Wales, and ten days later, October 10, arrived at Sydney Harbor. Many visitors came aboard in Newcastle, and his arrival there was announced by the Australian newspapers, extravagant in their praise. A writer bylined “The Pilot” wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that, among explorers seeking new frontiers.

  Captain Slocum [might have been] placed in a special class of derangement by himself … [But instead he] is feted by British squadrons and hailed everywhere as a worthy descendant of an illustrious line of sea-kings. And so probably it will be to the end of time; the highest intellectual development is not likely ever to lessen the delight which we all naturally feel in stirring action—in worthy deeds worthily carried to an end.

  Well, it’s always folly to predict what “we all” feel or will feel about anything or anyone. Slocum was greeted in Sydney by a police boat “giving me a pluck into anchorage while they gathered data from an old scrap-book of mine, which seemed to interest them.”

  Nothing escapes the vigilance of the New South Wales police; their reputation is known the world over. They made a shrewd guess that I could give them some useful information, and they were the first to meet me. Someone said they came to arrest me, and—well, let it go at that.

  Casual readers of Sailing Alone Around the World—scrupulous readers, too—should be forgiven for failing to comprehend that Slocum is alluding here to the continuation of his feud and legal entanglements with none other than Henry A. Slater, arch villain of the Northern Light’s Grand Guignol. Here is Slocum at his most bewildering: “—well, let it go at that.” It is one thing to allude to his visit to Virginia’s grave in Buenos Aires, and his tears while anchored at the mouth of the River Plata. Why refer at all now to the Slater fiasco in Sydney? He must be writing out of some sense of fair play, of confessional obligation to readers he is at pains to befriend.

  His trouble with Slater continued in Sydney (as it ended in New York) as farce. The course of the feud—but not its truth—is thoroughly documented by newspaper accounts in the collection of the National Library of Australia that give both sides’ charges and countercharges.

  Slater, after recanting his charge, had left the United States and settled in Sydney, where the ex-convict—at no handicap in a society founded by ex-convicts—became a policeman. Severely indignant about Australia’s celebration of Slocum’s arrival in Newcastle, he began a raucous campaign against his former master’s reputation that reached its apogee in the slanderous article published in the Sydney Daily Telegraph the morning before the Spray sailed into that port.13 A provocation in Slater’s first-person account caught Slocum’s attention: “I ask the public before making a god of this man to wait until I am placed face to face with him. I do not make these statements to gain notoriety, or even sympathy, but simply to show my fellow-citizens what kind of man they are dealing with in Captain Joshua Slocum.”

  The last we heard of Slater—twelve years earlier, in 1884, having recanted in sworn testimony before a New York justice of the peace (and the editor of the Nautical Gazette) the very charges he was now elaborating—he was suing the tort lawyer who had fired him up to make false charges. So in 1896 he was either spectacularly forgetful or ferociously angry that his confession hadn’t better rewarded him. But Slocum quickly struck back—“disgusted,” as he wrote, by Slater’s slanders—and shared that “old scrap-book” (indeed!) with the Sydney police and press. Moreover, he had his accuser brought before a magistrate of Sydney’s Water Police Court, charging him with making violent threats. He quoted one of Slater’s recent public declama
tions: “This Captain Slocum, God help him when we meet. I’ll not be responsible for my actions. This man you are making an angel of, I’ll make an angel of him when I get hold of him.” One witness for Slocum was his brother-in-law, George Washington Walker, who had sailed aboard the Washington during Virginia’s honeymoon voyage to Cook Inlet. Another witness, a police detective, testified that Slater had said, addressing a crowd at the General Post Office, “Captain Slocum is a coward. He daren’t meet me face to face. But I will force him to meet me.”

  Testimony in the matter of Slater v. Slocum was printed on October 12, 1896, in the Sydney Morning Herald. Slater directly asked Slocum: “Are you afraid of me?” Slocum replied: “Well, you are a most excitable man, and from the language you have used, you might possibly do me an injury. I certainly am, to a certain extent, afraid of you.” Slater, compelled by the court to pay an eighty-pound bond as surety that he would keep the peace for six months, said to his tormentor: “You ought to be at least morally afraid of me.”

  As always in feuds stirred by daily newspapers, both sides gained adherents. But, overwhelmingly, it was Slocum who was vindicated; his remaining months in Australia and Tasmania brought him new and generous friends, as well as increasing celebrity.

  The title of Herman Melville’s poem “The Maldive Shark” is perfectly calibrated, objectively naming a geographical location even as it suggests subterranean malice. In sixteen lines it captures the relentless predator—“phlegmatical one,” “dotard lethargic and dull, pale ravener of horrible meat”—from the point of view of “sleek little pilot-fish” who alertly accompany it. They swim unnoticed near the shark’s “saw-pit” mouth, “his charnel of maw.” Melville’s characters are perhaps the most famous anthropomorphists in literature, but the author himself manages not to confuse natural brutality with human malice.

  Slocum took the sea’s aggression even less personally than Melville, so it’s odd how much potent and totemic evil he conferred on this beast. Soon after clearing Tierra del Fuego’s battering, he killed one, even as he reflected on his evolving pacificity:

  On the tenth day from Cape Pillar a shark came along, the first of its kind on this part of the voyage to get into trouble. I harpooned him and took out his ugly jaws. I had not till then felt inclined to take the life of any animal, but when John Shark hove in sight my sympathy flew to the winds. It is a fact that in Magellan I let pass many ducks that would have made a good stew, for I had no mind in the lonesome strait to take the life of any living thing.

  In the neighborhood of coral reefs “hungry sharks”—aren’t they designed to stay hungry?—would swim near the Spray. “I own to a satisfaction in shooting them as one would a tiger. Sharks, after all, are the tigers of the sea. Nothing is more dreadful to the mind of a sailor, I think, than a possible encounter with a hungry shark.” There is no suggestion elsewhere in his writing or history that Slocum conferred motive on nature’s malignity, whether in contrary winds, freak waves, tempests, doldrums, maelstroms, volcanoes, earthquakes, or diseases.

  Shortly before Christmas of 1896, while in Melbourne and preparing to cross the Bass Strait to Tasmania, he combined this loathing with his entrepreneurial zest in quite a sideshow. Harbor authorities, to Slocum’s irritation, were charging what he considered excessive port fees. Spoiled by free tows and dockage, not to mention gifts of food and services, he now “squared the matter” by charging the curious citizens of Melbourne sixpence each for coming aboard the Spray for a look around. Then:

  when this business got dull I caught a shark and charged them sixpence each to look at that. The shark was twelve feet six inches in length, and carried a progeny of twenty-six, not one of them less than two feet in length. A slit of a knife let them out in a canoe full of water, which, changed constantly, kept them alive one whole day. In less than an hour from the time I heard of the ugly brute it was on deck and on exhibition, with rather more than the amount of the Spray’s tonnage dues already collected.14

  On something of a good-idea roll, he then hired an inventive Irish local, a celebrated waterfront-tavern raconteur, to give a carnival barker’s spiel about sharks and their cruelties while Slocum busied himself—as employers will—with more pleasurable pursuits ashore.

  Slocum spent the winter months of 1897 in Tasmania, twenty-five thousand miles and almost two years from home, whatever “home” might have meant to him. Certainly it crossed his mind to make his home in these waters. He was welcomed with increasing fervor, learning now to lecture about his adventures with lantern slides to paying audiences in Hobart and elsewhere. An anonymous admirer in Hobart put aboard the Spray an envelope containing a five-pound note—equivalent to five hundred dollars today—that Slocum promised himself he would pass along to someone needier than himself. This he did, and soon, contributing the money to a local charity in Cooktown, Queensland, the croc-infested bucket-of-blood nexus of the Australian gold rush, where aborigines from New Guinea suffered terribly after being brought there to mine gold.15

  Another change of itinerary had brought Slocum to Cooktown. He had planned to sail south and west around Australia’s Cape Leeuwin, but pack ice drifting up from Antarctica had scotched this plan, instead sending him north around the continent, inside the lagoon of the spectacularly beautiful Great Barrier Reef, 1,200 miles of coral dividing the rocky coast of Queensland from the Coral Sea. As he had followed in Magellan’s wake, he now was plowing waters explored in 1770 by Captain James Cook, on the Endeavor.

  On May 20, 1897, the Spray rounded Great Sandy Point and picked up the trade winds, enabling him to sail through the treacherous reef system at night, against the advice of local mariners. Slocum decided it was less taxing to remain vigilant through the night than to anchor and haul anchor again and again. He mentions a few times in the latter half of Sailing Alone Around the World how acutely his body continued to feel the aches and strains of his exertions in the Strait of Magellan. After bouncing without consequence off a reef north of Cooktown (within sight of a lightship anchored to warn of the hazard), Slocum arrived on Thursday Island, off the northern tip of Queensland, on June 20, two days before Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. As the only American ashore on the tiny island, he was entertained—and royally—by British authorities at a corroboree performed by hundreds of native warriors and their families from the mainland. “When they do a thing on Thursday Island they do it with a roar,” dancing with their weapons, wearing war paint and beating animal bones against drums. And the captain was keen to show his own colors, flying her “noble” Stars and Stripes as high up the Spray’s masthead as the flag could be raised.

  When departing from Thursday Island on June 24, Slocum was anxious about what lay ahead, across the Indian Ocean at the Cape of Good Hope. Remembering his travails there aboard the Northern Light, he refused to confront those waters during the winter. Deliberately stalling his arrival off South Africa, he nevertheless racked up huge distances sailing the trade winds, aiming to pass to the south of Timor and over three thousand miles to the Cocos (or Keeling) Islands southwest of Java, coral specks nine miles square whose history is as confused as their name. En route, the Spray sailed through the Arafura Sea.

  where for days she sailed in water milky white and green and purple. It was my good fortune to enter the sea on the last quarter of the moon, the advantage being that in the dark nights I witnessed the phosphorescent light effect at night in its greatest splendor. The sea, where the sloop disturbed it, seemed all ablaze, so that by its light I could see the smallest articles on deck, and her wake was a path of fire.

  Having for twenty-three days sailed west, “true as a hair,” along the latitude of 10 degrees, 25 minutes south, charting his progress by dead reckoning and adjusting his course to allow for the upper-air disturbances he’d noticed, he decided on July 17 that his “reckoning was up.”

  Springing aloft, I saw from half-way up the mast cocoanut-trees standing out of the water ahead. I expected to see this; still, it thrilled me a
s an electric shock might have done. I slid down the mast, trembling under the strangest sensations; and not able to resist the impulse, I sat on deck and gave way to my emotions. To folks in a parlor on shore this may seem weak indeed, but I am telling the story of a voyage alone.

  Slocum spent more than a month on the Cocos Islands. He admired the boat-building skills of the natives and was amused by the history of the atoll, which had been discovered and named in 1609 by the British East India Company’s Captain William Keeling. In 1825 the islands were explored by John Clunies-Ross, a Scottish merchant seaman who brought his wife and mother-in-law to live there in paradise. But by the time he arrived, Eden had fallen. A wealthy man of uncertain morals, Alexander Hare, had chosen this place to install a seraglio of forty Malay women in a villa. When Clunies-Ross and his family turned up, in the company of eight Scottish sailors, he was dismayed to discover Hare and ordered his sailors to force him and his ladies across a narrow channel to a neighboring sand spit. Let Slocum tell the story:

  From this time on Hare had a hard time of it. He and Ross did not get on well as neighbors. The islands were too small and too near for characters so widely different. Hare had “oceans of money,” and might have lived well in London; but he had been governor of a wild colony in Borneo, and could not confine himself to the tame life that prosy civilization affords. And so he hung on to the atoll with his forty women, retreating little by little before Ross and his sturdy crew, till at last he found himself and his harem on the little island known to this day as Prison Island, where, like Bluebeard, he confined his wives in a castle. The channel between the islands was narrow, the water was not deep, and the eight Scotch sailors wore long boots.