The most unyielding of the Spray’s, and Slocum’s, detractors was Howard I. Chapelle, curator of maritime history at the Smithsonian Institution. In a letter to Donald Holm for the latter’s book about famous circumnavigators, he took a double-bitt ax to both captain and boat:
Slocum’s letters are like those of a 4th grader and rather backward at that. He was 60 percent fine seaman, 10 percent liar, and 30 percent showman, I would say. Had a lot of guts. He was going nowhere in no hurry so I suppose he sailed as the boat wanted to go … Poor Andrade was victimized by the old fraud [one Charles Mower, who had submitted approximate lines to Andrade] … Now we have no reliable plans as a basis for analysis. But the whole story of the wonderful abilities of Spray is now highly questionable.
For the purposes of this account, it’s enough to refer readers to Sailing Alone Around the World’s appendix, subtitled “Lines and Sail-plan of the Spray,” and to note that the most hotly debated aspect of her design was her “stiffness,” the quality of resisting heel—or tilt—with winds blowing more or less at right angles to her sails. It is agreed that her great beam afforded considerable initial stability. What is argued is what might happen when that was overcome: Would she heel or capsize?6 Because this is only an academic question—the Spray never capsized, unless you choose to believe that a capsize in 1908 killed her master—let’s let the brave little boat be.
But the New York Times was not finished deriding Slocum’s claims in his Century Illustrated Magazine serial. He had mentioned his visit to “Robinson Crusoe’s” cave at Juan Fernández as his first stop in the Pacific. A letter to the newspaper’s editor on November 18, 1899, asked whether “it could be possible that the cultured editor of The Century, as well as the traveled author, Capt. Slocum, have never read Crusoe, which repeatedly states the scene of the story is laid on the Island of Tobago, thirty miles west of Trinidad, in the West Indies, and where the native residents also point out the very cave of Master Robinson?” Poor Slocum! Juan Fernández boasted (truthfully) of being the site of Alexander Selkirk’s cave; this corporeal Alexander Selkirk inspired Daniel Defoe to write a tale that he—in company with many novelists—did not wish to have diminished as a mere rewrite of the day’s news. Thus he insisted that his castaway story was set in an entirely different ocean than Selkirk’s. Slocum shot back, his letter published November 28:
My esteemed critic in your Saturday Review clearly misunderstands my purpose in rehearsing the experiences of a voyage around the world. Many things in this age must necessarily go un touched. It is true that in my own poor narrative I had quite overlooked the hole in the ground on the Island of Tobago. I visited that spot when a lad on my first voyage to the West Indies. It was very disappointing. The cave referred to in my narrative was found cozy and comfortable.
No one needs to be told that Defoe found ed Robinson Crusoe on the self-imposed exile of Alexander Selkirk on the Island of Juan Fernandez. Nothing is more natural than the giving of his hero’s name to the lookout, bay, and cave that bear it. In speaking of Crusoe’s Cave, I but adopted the popular nomenclature, feeling under no obligation to argue for or against its literal correctness.
When your various editors and correspondents have done with me, Sir, it is evident that I shall stand exposed as a sailing master who knows nothing of navigation and a traveler wholly ignorant of the world.
An admirer in Slocum’s later years, Thomas Fleming Day, noted that he felt this derision keenly and spoke of it often. Of course he did. Astronauts might laugh at those who are convinced that the moon landing was a contrivance of Walter Cronkite and staged in a CBS studio, but the doubt of those who refuse to believe or honor any achievement they cannot imagine having accomplished themselves provokes a chill, even a repulsion. Much of the criticism of Slocum’s dares and successes bears an unbecoming meanness, and if he didn’t take it personally himself, his friends certainly did.
And there were new friends and admirers aplenty. Most reviewers of Sailing Alone Around the World were ecstatic. In England, Arthur Ransome, the celebrated children’s book writer, declared that “boys who do not like this book ought to be drowned at once,” even as Sir Edwin Arnold, a journalist and poet, went rather too far: “I do not hesitate to call it the most extraordinary book ever published.” Slocum was hardly uninterested in his critical reception, keeping track as well as clipping for his scrapbook. He was shrewd enough to realize that a preface submitted by Mabel Wagnalls was so adoring that it would do him more harm than good, and conspired with Century to keep it out of the book.
Lecture invitations spiked for a time. At the end of 1900, Slocum was one of eight speakers in New York’s Aldine Club at a notably excessive dinner in honor of Mark Twain, which many of New York’s luminaries attended—including Doubledays, Putnams, and Scribners from the publishing world. The New York Times reported on December 15 that Mr. Clemens
was framed in by a pilothouse, from the corners of which were suspended colored lights and the cornice of which bore the name of Alonzo Child, the name of one of the steamboats which Mr. Clemens used to pilot on the Mississippi River. The walls were festooned with hanging moss, and here and there were suspended oranges, gourds, and other Southern growths, while catfish were sailing about in aquariums.
This same spirit of postwar extravaganza inspired the Pan-American Exposition, which ran from May to November 1901. Slocum traveled up the Hudson River, with Hettie and Garfield aboard, towing the Spray with a small motorized lifeboat steered by his son. They stowed her masts on deck at Troy and followed the Erie Canal to the 350-acre fairgrounds in Buffalo, tying up on a lake named Gala Water. Slocum had hoped in vain to be invited to the previous year’s Paris Exposition Universelle, which celebrated the new century no more bumptiously than Buffalo’s display of invention, empire, and enterprise. World fairs have earned a reputation for price-gouging their visitors, but Buffalo set new standards, overcharging for trolley rides to the site, permits to take snapshots, and tickets for entrance to the exhibits and sideshows, among which the Spray was included along with daily faux-bullfights at the Mexico pavilion and “Chiquita the Doll Lady” and a prophetic (and hilariously fanciful) “Trip to the Moon” attraction. Indian tribes whooped, Buffalo Bill strutted, John Philip Sousa played, wild animals behaved tamely, Eskimos in front of fake igloos wore actual fur.
The souvenir guide encouraged tourists to climb aboard the Spray and “shake hands with the gallant captain, a man of stout heart and steady nerve, a veteran of the salt seas, and a man of mighty soul and character.” Slocum answered questions—let’s hope that they weren’t about the location of Robinson Crusoe’s cave or how he endured steering 46,000 miles without rest—and sold his books, leftover copies of The Voyage of the “Liberdade” for a dollar (twenty dollars in today’s money) and Sailing Alone Around the World for twice that sum. For two bits he sold a souvenir booklet, a compendium of blurbs extolling both him and his voyage, to which he attached a small square of the very sail blown out the night he negotiated the Milky Way back into the Strait of Magellan. He told about Moorish pirates and carpet tacks. He was a huckster, and he knew it. When he left the sideshow, long after Hettie and Garfield had gone home by railroad, he told a reporter, “I got two-thirds of the money owed me by the Exposition Company. I met fine people, was treated well, and considering everything, am satisfied.”7
So he bought Fag End, which he sometimes jokingly called Rudder Ranch, and declared himself ready to settle in with Hettie and start farming. But Garfield knew otherwise. He wrote that his father—who “was a mystery to me and will be to my dying day”—and Hettie “did not pull on the same rope. Hettie was cool to me. Father acted as though he wanted to be left alone.” Slocum sat for a long profile written by Clifton Johnson for Outing magazine (October 1902) that featured photographs of the captain in his garden—appearing most uncomfortable—turning soil with a hoe. He chose hops as a crop, but nothing much came of it. He quarreled with his brother Ornan, who ran a shoe stor
e on the island. In notes for his profile among Walter Teller’s papers, Johnson observed privately that Slocum “has a temper and explodes like a firecracker when affronted.” He also observed his charm, his relish at acting out incidents, his “knowing” winks and head wags and “keen” eyes, his “lithe” energy.
Grace Murray Brown, who saw much of Slocum at this time, wrote Teller that to Hettie the captain was always “kind and courtly.” In July 1952 Teller interviewed Henrietta, then Mrs. Ulysses E. Mayhew, who’d been widowed again in 1939 by the death of her second husband, a prominent Martha’s Vineyard merchant. Teller described in his notes “fine features, with an aristocratic look about her.” She was known to have thrown many letters and papers “into the stove,” and her memory was imperfect—she was ninety when she died later that year—but she confided that she called her first husband “ ‘Josh,’ or ‘Captain’ if I thought he needed the honor,” and that he “spoke his mind, that it did not hurt his feelings to let you know what he was thinking.”
Among his fellow islanders he was naturally controversial. Grace Murray Brown noticed, from the exquisitely perceptive perspective of a teenager, “how some found him affable and friendly while others saw him as eccentric … It is the little man who hugs the shore who would not render homage even to the Almighty if he were an off-islander.” And in fact Slocum was an off-islander, so often away from home aboard the Spray that the Vineyard Gazette referred to his arrivals in their comings-and-goings pages as “visits.” Garfield later wrote, “I could feel a storm coming up between them,” that he had heard “hush-hush talk” from his sister, Jessie, that their father and stepmother “had separated.”
How “hush-hush” could such a circumstance be? Slocum was desperately restless. He’d written to the Century Company that he meant to take the Spray on a voyage of exploration to Iceland, or perhaps to sell her in order to finance his purchase of a submarine. He wrote the Smithsonian Institution in February 1901 requesting that if and when a “flying ship” were launched, “I could have a second mates position on it to soar.” He had to an acute degree what Baudelaire termed in “Crowds” a hatred of home. When snow flew in New England, he regarded the Spray as his “winter overcoat”; unable to fly above or dive below the sea, and perhaps unenthusiastic about Iceland’s climate, he took off for the Caribbean.
From 1903 until 1908, Slocum lived mostly aboard the Spray, sailing south in the winters. He cruised summers along the New England coast as far east as Maine, but mostly near Martha’s Vineyard. He was particularly hospitable to youngsters who showed an interest in sailboats. Charlotte Richmond wrote to Teller that as an adolescent in Marion she had many times rowed out to the Spray’s anchorage at her mother’s request, bringing food supplies. “In time I grew to regard him almost as a good uncle, a teller of wonderful tales” and a generous gift giver.
A young gentleman-sailor, H. S. Smith, who would later write a remembrance of Slocum, gave Teller his impression of boarding the sloop with friends in New Bedford during this period:
Captain Slocum struck us all as looking like the typical beachcomber. He wore a battered old felt hat—originally black but bleached out irregularly from sun and rain—a collarless shirt open at the neck, a vest, unbuttoned trousers that would disgrace a clam-digger … He seemed in perfectly good spirits and when he spoke his language was that of a cultured gentleman …
Spray was dirty. Not just a little dirty but very dirty. Again, that is nothing against her. All vessels lying alongside a wharf get dirty … But my companions … all remarked “I would hate to sail that old trap across Long Island Sound if a stiff wind was blowing.” … Slocum, at the time we saw him, was much run down physically, and perhaps mentally. He was exceedingly lazy and indifferent to his surroundings.
At the beginning of April 1906, having spent the winter in the Caribbean islands, Slocum sailed from Grand Cayman to Key West and Beaufort, North Carolina, and on Wednesday, May 23, he tied the Spray to the dock of the Riverton (New Jersey) Yacht Club, directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. He had been invited to give a talk at the club the following evening; on Friday he invited the curious to come aboard. Among his many visitors was Elsie Wright, a twelve-year-old, who had stopped by after school with a young male friend. At the end of the day, done with hosting, Slocum crossed the river to Philadelphia, where he ate dinner at the home of Leslie W. Miller, a friend from Martha’s Vineyard and the principal of the School of Industrial Art, who a few years earlier had sat for a portrait by Thomas Eakins. After dinner Slocum asked young Percy Chase Miller to play the piano, which he did. Slocum seemed relaxed. At nine that night he returned to Riverton and was arrested as he descended from a trolley, charged with raping Elsie Wright. The following morning, after a hearing before a town recorder, he was committed to the county jail without bail.
The story of his arrest appeared immediately in newspapers in Boston and New York, and in the weekly Riverton New Era, datelined May 26 and headlined “CAPT. SLOCUM IN TROUBLE: Accused of Maltreating a Girl on His Famous Yacht, the ‘Spray.’” It told a woeful story, beginning with a reminder that Slocum, “formerly a commander of clippers,” had “been in trouble several times for alleged ill-treatment of his crews” and “has for several years … been living off the glory and the story of sailing alone around the world.” Then the reporter got down to business:
When Elsie got home [Friday afternoon] she told her parents [Mr. and Mrs. Charles D. Wright] and they called in Dr. C. S. Mills, who said she was not much injured, but was suffering from shock. Capt. Slocum … was arrested on his return [from Philadelphia] last night as he stepped off a trolley car. Captain Slocum asked that nothing should be said about his arrest. He said tonight in his defense that he was suffering from a mental aberration.
Other newspapers mocked Slocum’s feeble explanation for whatever trespass he might have committed. He was quoted by officers of the court as having referred to a “mental lapse” that might have been caused by an old concussion he suffered in Australia when he’d been hit in the head by a weighted heaving line thrown from a wharf. He was portrayed by a local newspaper as being “indignant at his arrest” and of having “ridiculed the charge against him and when being taken to the jail said he would be vindicated.” The Riverton New Era the following week observed that Slocum “was a good hand at spinning a yarn.”
Six days after Slocum’s arrest, bail was set at $1,000, which he could not pay, so he spent forty-two days in the Mt. Holly jail. Walter Teller, who thoroughly researched this episode, suggests decorously that “the aging traveler would seem to have been at a disadvantage in obtaining full consideration of the law.” Who wants to unravel all the strands of this frayed and tangled line? Whatever happened during Elsie Wright’s minutes aboard the tight quarters of the Spray, it surely wasn’t rape, as her physician and parents agreed. Indeed, Charles Wright wrote a letter to the Riverton New Era, which he asked the editor to publish, saying that the newspaper’s previous article had exaggerated the facts and that he and his wife were
greatly relieved to learn by questioning the child, also by Dr. C. S. Mills’ examination, that there was no attempt at rape for the child is not physically injured although greatly agitated by the indecent action and exposure of the person on the part of this creature now posing in the limelight of cheap notoriety. We regret exceedingly the necessity of publicity for the child’s sake but feel assured that the exposure of such a fiend will be regarded as a service rendered the public.
This letter—with its confounding emphasis on “exposure,” not to mention its confusion about what “limelight” can be enjoyed in a jail cell—comes from the heart. Evidently no one asked aloud the question: What happened? Clearly, something did that upset Elsie Wright extremely. Whether Slocum meant for it to happen, or didn’t even realize that it had, we will never know. If he ever gave a running account of exactly what occurred during their encounter, we don’t have it. But one would hope—despite newspaper and court
house decorums—that we could at least know what his accusers believe happened. Did he expose himself, or did Elsie otherwise see his penis? Was his fly undone, intentionally or carelessly? Did he say something obscene to her? Did she misinterpret as obscene or malignant some innocent thing he’d said? Did he touch her—on the hand, on the knee—indecently or glancingly? Anyone will remember from childhood the sometimes bewildering experience of being in the close company of old people. Children are often repelled by adoring grandparents, let alone strangers. I can imagine a young girl recoiling from a grizzled, bald, and bewhiskered old man with wrinkles, liver spots, an arthritic claw of a hand, bad breath, a few missing teeth. An unwelcome kiss on the cheek could have a potent effect on a child, who might well have been aboard the Spray only because she had been urged by her parents to visit. Whatever happened was done in daylight on deck or below in the cabin of a cramped little boat to which all comers had been welcomed. We don’t know where Elsie’s companion was during the incident, or what he witnessed or believed he had, or even whether he testified or was asked to.
The Hard Way Around Page 25
