The Hard Way Around

by Geoffrey Wolff

  TWELVE

  What Came After

  Sailor or landsman, there is some kind of Cape Horn for all. Boys! Beware of it; prepare for it in time Graybeards! Thank God it is passed.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, White-Jacket

  WHEN THE YACHTSMEN OF Newport awoke in their Gilded Age mansions on June 28, 1898, and heard the news of the day, it was not in celebration of Joshua Slocum. They were busy remembering the Maine, and when word began drifting around the harbor that an old man of fifty-four was claiming to have sailed his rickety tub around the world alone, many didn’t believe him. This set a high standard for the incredulity and outright skepticism that would begrudge Slocum’s achievement well past his death. The Newport Herald reported on its third page that a “staunch-looking little craft” had “swung lazily into the harbor” early the previous morning. Observing that the Spray “was a stranger in these waters,” the brief notice said she had “attracted the attention of the early risers,” whose desultory curiosity the vessel’s “solitary occupant” appeared to ignore. Accustomed to being greeted by the hail of steamboat whistles and the huzzahs of dockside spectators at ports from Montevideo to Melbourne, from the Cocos to Cape Town, Slocum now found himself required to prove the veracity of his voyage by referring doubters to his visa-stamped yacht license. Finally believed, he was then rumored to be a diamond smuggler.

  No wonder he got the hell and gone out of Newport. “On July 3, with a fair wind, she waltzed beautifully round the coast and up the Acushnet River to Fairhaven, where I secured her to the cedar spile driven in the bank to hold her when she was launched. I could bring her no nearer home.”

  A few days later, the Fairhaven Star welcomed him back under the headline “AN INTREPID NAVIGATOR: Capt. Slocum Arrives in Fairhaven from a Voyage Around the World.”

  Leaving Fag End and Hettie (Photo credit 12.1)

  The captain came to Fairhaven for a little rest, to put the Spray back in condition, and renew his acquaintance with his many friends in Fairhaven. The hold of the Spray is filled with all kinds of curiosities gathered from various parts of the world. Judging from the books of newspaper clippings in the captain’s possession, he is considered an excellent lecturer and has been honored by high officials everywhere. He has a stereopticon and 300 excellent slides, which he uses to illustrate his lectures.

  Captain Slocum said he intends to remain around here a few days and will then go cruising with his wife and son. He intends to go to London before long.

  Among the mementos brought home by Captain Slocum is a big bamboo stick given him by the widow of Robert Louis Stevenson. The bamboo was grown by the novelist.

  He knew what he had done: “To find one’s way to lands already discovered is a good thing, and the Spray made the discovery that even the worst sea is not so terrible to a well-appointed ship. No king, no country, no treasury at all, was taxed for the voyage of the Spray, and she accomplished all that she undertook to do.” He was proud that the Spray was tight, without leaks, and he insisted from the beginning—again faced with skeptics—that she had steered herself across great expanses of ocean. As to his health and frame of mind, he also spoke plainly and pridefully: “Was the crew well? Was I not? … As for aging, why, the dial of my life was turned back till my friends all said, ‘Slocum is young again.’ ”

  Who were these friends, and where? Despite Slocum’s cavalier suggestion that he would go cruising with his wife, Hettie had not welcomed her husband home. Mabel Wagnalls, who had added to Slocum’s library before he sailed in 1895, and who had promised that he would return, traveled to Newport from New York to greet him. Soon, Victor (now twenty-six) and Garfield (fifteen) visited their father in Fairhaven, and after only a few days at home he was already edgy and restless. The war with Spain had not only stolen his headlines, but also stirred his emotions. William Randolph Hearst would have been proud. So wrapped in bunting was the captain, so spoiling for a fight, that the day before Independence Day he fired off a rant of a letter to the New Bedford Evening Standard, shouting hysterical answers with cartoonish bellicosity to many questions that he had not been asked:

  I want to give your people an earache … I burn to be of use now of all times. I spent the best of my life in the Philippine islands, China and Japan, but there is some life still in the old man … I am not fanatically suffering for a fight, but I am longing to be useful. Does Mr. McKinley want pilots for the Philippines and Guam? If more fighting men were wanted I would be nothing loth … But my heart is too full to write. I only blurr the paper. America is all right! … I’ll fight for it! But it is peace we want, not war! And peace we’re going to have, if we have to lick all creation to get it!

  Making allowances for Slocum’s war fever, this letter announces a distressing exaggeration of his temperamental weaknesses: impulsiveness and hair-trigger belligerence, especially when overexcited by sentimentality. The rigor and discipline and unwavering concentration of reason required by his circumnavigation was now relaxed, and the consequences must have been bewildering to his friends, his family, and himself. He had to have been shocked by the waves of indifference that swamped news of his achievement. He must have been set adrift, without chart or compass, by the end of this enterprise. He had, literally, no place to go from here. Crossing his track near the equator had put a period to his sentence, and bringing the Spray home to her launching place had redeemed the caretaking he believed had been entrusted to him. He was once again an exhausted man living in the oppressive quarters of a small boat moored to a stake near Poverty Point.

  A few churlish critics—with voices loud enough to be heard—sneered at him for using up his fifteen minutes before he actually earned them. Should he not have anticipated skepticism and even hostility? Naysayers accused him of being a show-off or a misanthropic hermit or both. Slocum was a lousy family man. The Spray was a tub, clearly incapable of self-steering as well as—to the lunatic fringe of doubters—impossible to keep afloat and in danger of capsizing at any moment, even in Fairhaven harbor. (The specifics of these harangues are addressed later in this chapter.)

  How could he have reckoned on such a welcome home? The war was a joker in the deck, but what might he himself have done differently? He was emotionally and physiologically exhausted in the aftermath of three years of exertion and focused purpose. Professional athletes often break down in tears at the end of sixty minutes of play. Should Slocum have guarded against this, perhaps suppressing his ambition in the name of prudence?

  A genius at navigation, dead reckoning, calculating lunar tables, and surviving tempests, he was frequently lost on land. Slocum was a slipshod housekeeper below the Spray’s deck, and with her cargo of curios—coral, for instance, and giant tridacna conch shells scavenged in the Cocos—she gave off ripe whiffs often associated with low tides. He suffered from arthritic hands and fingers and he had liver spots on his skin, which had been insulted by the sun for over forty years. He was missing some teeth. After all his time alone at sea he had grown careless about his appearance, sometimes leaving his trousers unbuttoned, perhaps heeding nature’s calls without Victorian regard for the proprieties.1

  At the same time, one does well to remember among whom he had recently and successfully socialized and prospered as a public performer. And it was with an eye to rescuing his fortunes that he turned almost at once to the lecture hall. Within days of arriving at Fairhaven, Slocum gave a performance at the New Bedford city hall. Garfield operated the lantern slide projector while Victor presided over the box office, “with satisfying results,” as he remembered. The hall was “jammed to the carlins; the old salts … occupying the front seats long before the appointed time.” By now the captain was a bravura spellbinder. It’s easy to read how well he spun a yarn, and even black-and-white photos—failing to reveal the vivid blue of his eyes—convey ferocious vision and command. It would be fascinating to hear his voice, conditioned as it was with the idioms and inflections of ports around the world, with the sailor’s rich idio
m close to the lips. Moreover, the podium was a perfect place from which to show off his humility. He liked to make fun of his baldness, remarking that the winds in the Strait of Magellan were strong enough to blow the hair off a dog’s back, and—rubbing his pate—had also carried away his hat. Audiences enjoyed listening to him, and no wonder.

  He landed a few years too late on the lecture circuit to harvest the bonanza fees that had enriched the likes of Mark Twain, Buffalo Bill, Oscar Wilde, and Charles Dickens back in the heyday.2 The invitations he’d anticipated to lecture in London were not forthcoming, but during the late summer of 1898, he and Hettie rented a room in New York City, and at the end of October he spoke to a large audience at Carnegie Hall about his ambition—reported as far afield as the Atchison, Kansas Daily Globe—to find financing for a large “college ship” that would carry as many as three hundred students for a voyage of two years around the world, “the time to be spent in steady, practical work and the desirable recreation that visits to Oceania and the Orient would supply.” Slocum’s hope to find a wholesome use for sailing vessels and what was left of their crews, to instruct “young people in the science of nautical astronomy” and biology, was forward-looking. Moreover, to his Carnegie Hall audience he made much of his insistence that women be included among the students, that indeed he “wouldn’t have anything to do with the scheme … if women could not be included in its benefits.”

  Although his narratives of adventures aboard the Liberdade and the Destroyer were commercial failures, Slocum hoped before he left Fairhaven aboard the Spray in 1895 that his financial security would be redeemed by what he wrote about his exploit. When a reporter in Boston asked him why he was doing this, he immediately answered, “to make money.” Even so, that—pace Samuel Johnson’s “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”—was not the sole motive for his self-exile to the Spray’s cabin to compose Sailing Alone Around the World. Having begun writing in East Boston, where he once again lodged on the generosity of Hettie’s sister, he worked steadily. Soon swept away by his voyage, and referring to the ships’ logs he had kept throughout his career, he felt a responsibility to what he realized was a great story.

  During his circumnavigation he had corresponded with Richard Watson Gilder, an editor of Century Illustrated Magazine who had wired Slocum about writing an article. “I have very decided literary tastes,” Slocum had replied, “and could enter into such parts as I am able to do with a great deal of energy.”

  Slocum was always diffident about early drafts of his work, realizing that he was an uncertain master of spelling and syntax, and believing—as any sane writer would—that he was capable of failures of clarity and proportion. He knew he needed sympathetic and even obtrusive editing, and he not only received it, but was grateful for it. Anyone who has examined the extensive documentation of his editorial exchanges—in papers collected at the New York Public Library’s Century Collection, or among the Walter Teller Collection in New Bedford—will realize that his published prose is very much in his own voice. The editorial back-and-forth between writer and editors (notably Clarence Clough Buel at the Century) will interest those who practice such collaboration, as it clearly reveals the process: violent swings from anxiety to ambition on the part of the writer, and curiosity tempered by interrogation and skepticism on the part of an editor wishing to check facts and resolve inconsistencies, as well as to break down his author’s reticence without embarrassing either him or the publisher. After the final changes had been made, Slocum wrote Buel that while “I do not pose as a professional writer I should not leave a libel on the American Shipmaster,” following that sentiment with a condensed account of the entire course of any writer’s temperamental swings: “I was considerably interested in the story at the time of telling it and didn’t see the enormous sunken ledges that I see now.”

  The first installment of Sailing Alone Around the World appeared in 1899 in the September issue of Century Illustrated Magazine, continuing monthly through the following March. The whole was published by the Century Company in April 1900, wonderfully illustrated by George Varian and Thomas Fogarty, whose sketches are used in many of the editions of Slocum’s masterwork still in print.3

  During the early summer of 1899, Slocum corrected his typescript and galleys here and there along the New England coast, but beginning in July he was using the return address of Cottage City, in the town of Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard. As early as 1897, members of Slocum’s Massachusetts family had begun renting modest cottages on the island. Hettie enjoyed being there—how could she not?—and her husband was said by one kinswoman to have been especially impressed by what he found in one of the local graveyards: the names of many shipmasters who had died very old. As far back as his composition of The Voyage of the “Destroyer,” Slocum had spoken with perhaps dutiful wistfulness of returning to his earliest experiences as a farmer: “I began to think of the little farm, which so many years ago I promised myself. I say now, I could almost hear the potatoes growing—but not quite.”

  Now, with the publication of his book, the cultivation of some piece of land was a lively possibility. Even before the first installment appeared he had written to C. C. Buel thanking him for his editorial help: “Best of all, I see my ship coming in under full sail freighted to the load-line.” (His figures of speech were not yet, nor would they ever be, clustered around “plows,” “silos” or “bushels.”)4 Following the appearance of the third installment in November 1899, he wrote Buel again: “The Century did well by me … No one knows how much I have been paid. When they ask me I say ‘double the amount agreed upon’—which is so. They say ‘how much is that?’—I say enough to buy me a house … All the old women will be sending in sea stories and be looking for [grand] houses … when they hear of my amazing success.” What Slocum in fact bought and named “Fag End” was a Martha’s Vineyard farm—later expanded to fifty acres—at West Tisbury.

  Even before the book was published, an unbylined writer for the New York Times began taking potshots at Slocum’s account of his extended runs in the Pacific during which the Spray was said to be self-steered. The columnist complained that it was “a sore trial to the temper—and a somewhat severe trial to the credulity—to all who have or pretend a knowledge of matters nautical” that Slocum had not shown proof that “his boat would keep on her course all night” while he read, cooked, or slept below. “The tale is painfully hard to believe,” he wrote on November 7, 1899. “We won’t say that the Captain has been treating the truth with irreverence.” In other words, since the columnist knew this couldn’t possibly be true, well, it wasn’t.

  Livid, Slocum wrote to Buel from New York’s United States Hotel: “The Times joker I can stow any time in my waistcoat pocket,” and his reply was published by the Times on November 11:

  I am honored by a criticism from an old salt … It is possible that things occurred on the voyage of the Spray inexplicable to some mariners, even of vast experience, and I can only regret not having met them before the articles … were written so that I might have taken them on a sail in the Spray to demonstrate her prowess. As the matter stands, it is now out of my power to further elucidate …

  This unpretentious sloop, built by one pair of hands, after circumnavigating the globe, is sound and snug and tight. She does not leak a drop. This would be called a great story by some; nevertheless it is a hard fact.

  The story of the voyage is constructed on the same seaworthy lines; that is, it remains waterproof which your navigating officer will discover, I trust, if only he exercise to the end that patience necessary on a voyage around the world.

  The newspaper churl was unpersuaded, replying that he was “ready to believe almost anything about a ship or a boat, but belief and readiness to believe are not quite equivalent, and unfortunately Capt. Slocum is not in a demonstrative or explanatory mood.”

  How—if the Spray had not been self-steered, or rigged by her builder to stay on course in steady winds—was S
locum imagined to have crossed oceans? It is pretty well established that boats do not anchor every night midocean. Given the number of days between dated visa stamps in countries far apart, the Spray had to have been constantly under way for months at a time. Was the pilot of the Pinta stowed away? Did the goat do tricks at the helm as well as devour the charts? If his sloop had not been rigged to self-steer, Joshua Slocum did not sail alone around the world.

  To give the skeptic his due, the Spray’s seaworthiness has never been a settled matter. Readers have heard the opinion of Robert Perry as to her “weird” shape, and though many naval architects and experienced sailors have praised her, a great many others have slandered a design thought to be awkward, even deadly. In the Wake of the “Spray,” a labor of love by Kenneth E. Slack, an Australian chemist who devoted years to analyzing disputes about her design and suitability as a blue-water cruiser, doesn’t settle arguments over Slocum’s craft but does remind readers that almost a thousand replicas of the Spray have been built, by professionals and amateurs, of wood, steel, aluminum, fiberglass, and Ferro-cement. Some have been slavish replications and others rough modifications, expressions of her spirit or attempts to copy her lines exactly. (That an exact calculation of those lines has never been agreed upon helped feed the debate.) Some of these inspirations crossed oceans; some sank or capsized.

  The vehemence of the dispute, already raging soon after the publication of Sailing Alone Around the World, has been its most distinguishing characteristic. The enthusiasts’ team was led by Cipriano Andrade, a naval architect who in June 1909 published in Rudder magazine a survey of the Spray’s lines, dimensions, sail plan, displacement, and probable response to the variety of extreme conditions Slocum experienced during his voyage. He took the figures by which he calculated from a half-model rather than from the hull herself, leading extreme skeptics to discard his considerations as having no practical value. Andrade concluded, “the curve of stability shows that Spray was theoretically uncapsizable,” and that her theoretical hull speed was an impressive eight knots. (She made, for a known fact, noon-to-noon runs exceeding an average speed of eight knots, though during most of them she got a lift from one current or another, such as the Gulf Stream.) As to self-steering, Andrade—“after a thorough analysis of the Spray’s lines”—found her to have “a theoretically perfect balance. Her balance is marvelous—almost uncanny.”5 He concluded his analysis “with a feeling of profound admiration and respect. She is not only an able boat, but a beautiful boat; using the term ‘beautiful’ as defined by Charles Elliot Norton, ‘that form most perfectly adapted to perform its allotted work.’ ”