On August 22, 1897, Slocum sailed westward, and on September 8 he arrived at Rodrigues Island, where he was mistaken—owing to the locals’ misinterpretation of a sermon delivered by the resident missionary—for the Antichrist. One woman took refuge in her hut throughout his week-long visit, and the island’s British governor could not persuade her that it was safe to leave. Servants of the crown—gloved hand in gnarled paw—had brought to this benighted and superstitious colony all the benefits of civilization, transforming it (in Slocum’s neat phrase) into “a land of napkins and cut glass.”
After a three-day sail from Rodrigues, the Spray next anchored at the island of Mauritius on September 19. Here, at the height of the best season, Slocum planned to wait out storms off the Cape of Good Hope. Once again his celebrity—perhaps abetted by charm—gained him the advantage of a thorough refitting of his ship. Little wonder he chose this island, described by Mark Twain (with tongue only partly in cheek) in Following the Equator: “From one citizen you gather the idea that Mauritius was made first, and then heaven.” Slocum lingered here, enjoying the beaches and amusing the children, on one occasion taking seven girls and their chaperone for an overnight sail.16 Around this time the New York Times—having misunderstood the Spray’s intended port of call to be Yokohama—reported that “it would appear [Slocum] has given up his attempt to circumnavigate the globe.” (The newspaper also added that he had been “attacked by pirates on the coast of Japan in early October of last year, but he managed to escape from them.” Where do they get this stuff?) True, he was still eleven thousand miles from home, but having sailed with him this far, readers know such a distance to be for this seaman a mere pleasure cruise.
The bogus account from New York had been preceded on August 24 by the New Bedford Evening Times, which headlined its dispatch: “PROBABLY LOST. Family of Josiah [sic] Slocum Relinquish All Hope … Believed That He Was Drowned During a Heavy Storm.” Reporting that he had been “intent on circumnavigating the globe in a cockle shell,” the newspaper declared that “Captain Slocum kept those at home posted as to his movements and when weeks and then months passed without word from him the fear became the belief that he was no more.” This article rightly excited Walter Teller’s curiosity, and for his Search for Captain Slocum he asked those of the Slocum children still alive whether they, or Hettie, had in fact received letters from him during the voyage. The responses were unsettling. If Hettie had got any letters, she probably burned them. Victor doesn’t quote from or refer to letters in his biography. Jessie couldn’t remember. Garfield wrote that he had never had any kind of letter from his father.
If these are facts, they’re also distressing. Whether intended or merely feckless, Slocum’s silence seems perverse, worse than emotionally stingy, especially in light of his generous correspondence with Joseph Gilder, the admiring critic of The Voyage of the “Liberdade”—a long letter located by its author as from the “Spray tied to a palm-tree at Keeling-Cocos,” and dated four days before the New Bedford newspaper suggested he was probably lost at sea.
At least the Evening Times’s “cockle shell” was said to have been circling the “globe.” That the earth was round rather than a flat square was a matter of heated dispute in the region of Slocum’s next port of call, Port Natal (Durban), South Africa. Following a three-week passage from Mauritius, weathering gales and an electric storm in the Mozambique Channel, the Spray arrived on November 17, 1897, and remained there for almost a month, until the beginning of the Cape of Good Hope’s summer. During his stay in South Africa, Slocum, using his courtesy pass to the local railroads, rode to Transvaal to visit President Johannes Paulus Krüger, notoriously and pugnaciously a believer in a flat earth. The circumnavigator was cut dead by the glowering Boer after avowing that he was sailing “around,” not “in,” the world. (The British, with imaginable glee, lampooned this dispute in the Cape Town Owl by the medium of a cartoon.)
In Durban, he also met Henry Morton Stanley, the journalist-explorer who had discovered the long-missing David Livingstone. Slocum sparred with the great man:
I hauled close to the wind, to go slow, for Mr. Stanley was a nautical man once himself—on the Nyanza [River], I think,—and of course my desire was to appear in the best light before a man of his experience. He looked me over carefully, and said, “What an example of patience!” “Patience is all that is required,” I ventured to reply. He then asked if my vessel had water-tight compartments. I explained that she was all water-tight and all compartment. “What if she should strike a rock?” he asked. “Compartments would not save her if she should hit the rocks lying along her course,” said I; adding, “she must be kept away from the rocks.”
Slocum kept the Spray clear, arriving at Cape Town in January after plowing through huge seas: she “ducked me under water three times for a Christmas box. I got wet and did not like it a bit.” After delivering lectures that filled his larder,17 Slocum was towed from the harbor on March 26, 1898, and pointed north-northwest for home, his final long leg, “ ‘off on her alone,’ as they say in Australia.” By April 11, with a steady southeasterly at his back, he had logged two thousand miles in eleven days on an extraordinary run to St. Helena, that “speck in the sea” so unloved by Napoleon. Slocum was as usual celebrated, and well paid to lecture. To mark the esteem in which he was held, an American friend of the British governor put a goat aboard the Spray. It’s unknown why such a stern master as Slocum, who had resisted the temptation to sail with pets, permitted this passenger, but he explains what happened:
[The goat giver] urged that the animal, besides being useful, would be as companionable as a dog. I soon found that my sailing-companion, this sort of dog with horns, had to be tied up entirely. The mistake I made was that I did not chain him to the mast instead of tying him with grass ropes less securely, and this I learned to my cost. Except for the first day, before the beast got his sea-legs on, I had no peace of mind. After that … this incarnation of evil threatened to devour everything from flying-jib to stern-davits. He was the worst pirate I met on the whole voyage. He began his depredations by eating my chart of the West Indies, in the cabin, one day, while I was about my work for’ard, thinking that the critter was securely tied on deck … Alas! there was not a rope in the sloop proof against that goat’s awful teeth! … Next the goat devoured my straw hat … This last unkind stroke decided his fate.
It would be no outrage to reason or justice to imagine that this fate meant swimming home to St. Helena. But on April 27, 1898, the sometimes bellicose captain stopped at Ascension Island—a dependency known to the controlling British as a stone frigate, HMS Ascension, close to midway between Brazil and Africa—for the purpose of delivering mail from St. Helena and putting ashore the damnable goat, accepted alive and well fed by a local farmer after a suitable bribe. Whatever else transpired on the island, its citizens either neglected to report or didn’t know that the United States had declared war on Spain two days earlier.
On May 8 the Spray crossed her track, occupying the same patch of ocean that she had occupied on October 2, 1895. Slocum notes the event: “I felt a contentment in knowing that the Spray had encircled the globe, and even as an adventure alone I was in no way discouraged as to its utility, and said to myself, ‘Let what will happen, the voyage is now on record.’ A period was made.” What a lovely word, that “period”: a moving full stop, let’s say, an epic epoch marker, the end of something that can be read both on a chart and in a sentence. By going around toward the goal that was the start, Slocum was in the same place but a different person. Nothing quite compares to a circumnavigation, which might be why Oom Paul so fervently denied that there could be any such thing. Alone, only one person could do it first. To climb a mountain—the highest mountain—is to reach a pinnacle, but it’s a linear round-trip; the return, despite its rigor, is an anticlimax. Been there …
Six days later the Spray intercepted the USS Oregon, “rapidly appearing on the horizon, like a citadel,” which had steam
ed sixty-seven days and 12,000 miles from San Francisco to respond to the explosion aboard the Maine and join the fight against Spain. (That delay prodded the cutting of the Panama Canal.) The battleship signaled, “Are there any men-of-war about?,” showing a Spanish flag to suggest whose these might be. Thus Slocum learned that he was about to sail into contested waters. He signaled back, to a warship a thousand times his size: “Let us keep together for mutual protection”—a joke lost on the Oregon’s captain, Charles E. Clark.
Now Slocum cruised through the Caribbean. Anyone who has been aboard a sailboat there in May and June will be jealous of the captain on this leg of his voyage, until remembering the goat’s mischief and realizing that Slocum was sailing chartless through reef-strewn waters. He was unable to replace his charts in Grenada or Antigua, where he lectured and got papers from the U.S. consulate to enter his home territory. On June 5 he sailed toward Cape Hatteras but was delayed by calms in the horse latitudes, where the air was so still he read Robert Louis Stevenson by candlelight in the cockpit.
Off Long Island, on June 23, he sailed into “baffling squalls and fretful cobble-seas,” followed by an electrical storm and tornado:
In the Gulf Stream, thus late in June, hailstones were pelting the Spray, and lightning was pouring down from the clouds, not in flashes alone, but in almost continuous streams. By slants, however, day and night I worked the sloop in toward the coast, where, on the 25th of June, off Fire Island, she fell into the tornado which, an hour earlier, had swept over New York city with lightning that wrecked buildings and sent trees flying about in splinters; even ships at docks had parted their moorings and smashed into other ships, doing great damage. It was the climax storm of the voyage … I had seen one electric storm on the voyage, off the coast of Madagascar, but it was unlike this one. Here the lightning kept on longer, and thunderbolts fell in the sea all about. Up to this time I was bound for New York; but when all was over I rose, made sail, and hove the sloop round from starboard to port tack, to make for a quiet harbor to think the matter over …
As storms will, this one passed, having broken the jib stay at the Spray’s masthead. She limped toward Point Judith on the Rhode Island shore, rounded Beavertail, and crept into the mined harbor of Newport. An hour after midnight on June 27, 1898—after forty-six thousand miles, three years, two months, and two days—his welcome home came in the form of a challenge from the guard ship Dexter. “There goes a craft!” the wary navy man shouted. “I threw up a light at once and heard the hail, ‘Spray, ahoy!’ It was the voice of a friend, and I knew that a friend would not fire on the Spray.”
It would be nice to know that Joshua Slocum was right about that, but he was not.
1 Walter Teller reports that Slocum was asked by South Sea Islanders if the “Boston” painted on the Spray’s stern was near Fairhaven.
2 The route Slocum finally took was remarkably similar to Ferdinand Magellan’s in 1519–21, a likeness probably incidental to Slocum’s familiarity with all the waters he traversed. (He was inexperienced in the Mediterranean.) He had also briefly considered crossing from the Atlantic to the Pacific by having the Spray hauled by the Panama railway across the isthmus, but the expense was prohibitive, the heat stifling, the cholera and yellow fever prevalent. As W. H. Bunting writes, “ ‘Isthmus fever’ took more lives than did Cape Horn ‘snorters.’ ” He’d take his chances with Magellan, in the dire strait named for him.
3 See Atul Gawande’s “Hellhole” in the New Yorker of March 30, 2009, and—more directly relevant—Sir Francis Chichester’s Gipsy Moth Circles the World (1968), wherein that stoic adventurer confesses that “after three months of solitude I felt that it was all too much; that I could not stand it, and could easily go mad with it. All this is weak nonsense, I know, but that is how I felt when twisting about in my bunk.” And this despite keeping in touch with the world by twice-weekly radio dispatches during his nine-month, record-breaking, solo circumnavigation. The downside of communication was made evident to Chichester when he was asked by a reporter, as he approached his homecoming in Plymouth, what he had eaten while rounding Cape Horn. The sailor’s reply: “Strongly urge you stop questioning and interviewing me which poisons the romantic attraction of this voyage.”
4 That Slocum—like Sir Francis Chichester after him—recoiled from hullabaloo after solitude is shown in his reaction to the Spray’s welcome in Montevideo, where she “was greeted by steam-whistles till I felt embarrassed and wished that I had arrived unobserved. The voyage so far alone may have seemed to the Uruguayans a feat worthy of some recognition; but there was so much of it yet ahead, and of such an arduous nature, that any demonstration at this point seemed, somehow, like boasting prematurely.”
5 Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977)—an eclectic book of storytelling, anthropology, natural history, political history, and legend—heaps an even greater portion of contempt not on the Fuegians but on Darwin himself, accusing him of lapsing into “that common failing of naturalists: to marvel at the intricate perfection of other creatures and recoil from the squalor of man.”
6 A few of the strait’s place-names hint at its nature: Famine Reach, Desolation Bay, Last Hope Inlet, and—my favorite—Useless Bay.
7 An Austrian, and not to be confused with the “Black Pedro” whom readers will soon meet.
8 Rockwell Kent offers countervailing testimony from the point of view of the Firemen, whose territory and way of life had been invaded by foreign meddlers, Christians, in the “ruthless pursuit of their benevolence.”
9 Chatwin tells of a missionary among the Fuegians, Thomas Bridges, who compiled before his death in 1898 a dictionary of the natives’ language, listing a vocabulary of 32,000 words. Whether or not “yammerschooner” was among them, it is certain that the people to whom Slocum shouted “No!” knew the names, “as complex as Linneaen Latin, of everything that swam or sprouted, crawled or flew” in their neighborhood, had words to describe the least signs of approaching shifts in weather, not to mention the geography of the place in which Slocum, by necessity, was taking such a lively interest.
10 A casual reader might accuse Slocum of carelessness in his use of absolutes, but in fact he was fastidious in his record keeping: the “most dismal of all my nights at sea” (aboard the pestilent Aquidneck) is very different from the “most exciting boat-ride of my life” (aboard the Liberdade, towed by the Finance), and quite distinct from the “hardest voyage that I ever made, without any exception” (aboard the Destroyer).
11 Spray’s library, at the time he sailed from Boston, included the poems of Burns and Tennyson, Darwin’s Descent of Man, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, Trevelyan’s Life of Macaulay, a set of Shakespeare, and—perhaps most prophetically—Don Quixote.
12 It’s interesting to contrast this offhand passage with the confession of Conor O’Brien, another legendary long-distance sailor: O’Brien was frightened silly by big waves and winds. In the early days at sea “I used to be scared of every puff of wind … I really took things ridiculously seriously; even after two years I connect my passage down the Atlantic with nothing else but anxious readings of the barometer and thermometer, and speculations about wind and weather.”
13 See pp. 104–7 above for a long excerpt from the article in question.
14 Six years later, on the Massachusetts coast in Marion, Slocum earned a mention in a local newspaper for his heroic slaying of a shark that had terrified bathers at the fashionable Sippican Casino. He caught this one from the float at the beach club, using “a big hook and chunk of pork.”
15 Slocum was always fastidious about repaying debts, however small. In addition to repaying the fifty dollars he’d had to borrow in Gibraltar, and from Durban, South Africa, the twenty dollars that had been advanced to Victor by Roberts Brothers of Boston, he actively honored the reciprocal custom among sailors of putting ashore stores in remote places visited by voyagers in need, whether owing to shipwreck or simple hardship. In Tierra del Fuego he removed a dozen a
nd more letters that had been nailed to trees, most left by sealers and whalers, “with the request that the first homeward-bound ship would carry them along and see to their mailing, which had been the custom of this strange postal service for many years. Some of the letters brought back by our boat were directed to New Bedford, and some to Fairhaven, Massachusetts.” For Slocum, so long accustomed to solitude, decency of action was unrelated to being observed.
16 Bruce Catton, writing in American Heritage (April 1959), marveled at Slocum’s warm reception:
He comes in out of the ocean and suddenly he knows everyone and everyone is glad to help him … Why? Because he had the knack of making people like him; but more, it would seem because the quest he was on was something that touched everyone … because he was not just performing a stunt—he was looking for something which the world thought it had lost, and because he looked for it so bravely and with such simplicity of mind the world discovered that it was still there, and he got it.
I’m not certain about “simplicity of mind,” but Catton’s profile got it, especially in an earlier paragraph, noting that “he had fun at it.”
17 The Cape Argus reported that “the placard rarely exhibited in Cape Town, ‘House Full,’ had to be put up early in the evening… [There was] a large attendance of ladies [and] frequent applause rewarding [his] powers of description.”
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