Slocum chose to have his case settled by a judge, without a jury, and pleaded New Jersey’s equivalent of nolo contendere. The Wrights’ representative in court asked Judge Joseph H. Gaskill for leniency, believing that Slocum “has no recollection of the crime,” which by now was said to be merely a “great indiscretion.” The judge, declaring that he was “very sorry to be obliged to administer reproof to a man of your experience and years” and that there had been “no attempt made to injure the person of the girl,” freed Slocum, barring him from ever again visiting Riverton “either by rail or water.”
In the aftermath, Grace Murray Brown assured Walter Teller that “we who knew the Captain had found him affectionate to a degree with young things just as I know my own dad was. We never heard of any dalliance with the fair sex.” But she also remembered hearing hushed talk from family members in Boston about her cousin, and recalled the “yellow journalism matter” as something that was “purported to have happened to the Roosevelt boys on board the Spray.”
Grace had conflated two proximate events. Joshua Slocum sailed the Spray directly from his Riverton banishment to Oyster Bay, Long Island, more specifically to Theodore Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill, the summer-house of the president of the United States and his family. Honest to goodness, who could make up such a life? Slocum was carrying rare orchids from the West Indies when he put into Riverton. All but one had died while he was in jail, and this he wanted to give to President Roosevelt. When he sailed into Oyster Bay, he intended merely to send the orchid ashore by messenger, with a note attached. In the event, waiting for the Spray dockside was Archibald Roosevelt, the president’s fifth child and a sailing enthusiast who had recognized Slocum’s sloop entering the harbor. Archie shook Slocum’s hand and invited him to Sagamore Hill to meet his father and join the family for dinner, an invitation that the twelve-year-old was (I assume) authorized to extend. The meeting must have gone well, because on August 6, 1906, exactly a month after Slocum sailed from Riverton, President Roosevelt wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge that “Archie is off for a week’s cruise with Captain Joshua Slocum—that man who takes his little boat, without any crew but himself, all around the world.”
In an age of registered sex offenders, this beggars belief. But even a century ago, how could it have come to pass? If Roosevelt hadn’t been aware when it happened that Slocum had been charged with rape, he must have known by the time he sent his son on a cruise alone with the captain. (The story had appeared in many newspapers, including those in New York, Philadelphia, and Henry Cabot Lodge’s hometown of Boston.) Security could not have been a matter of indifference to a president who took office owing to the assassination of William McKinley. So what motivated him to entrust his son to him? I rule out indifference, and doubt bravado. He must have believed—for whatever reason—that Slocum had not done what he had been charged with doing.
The cruise, to Newport, was a success, and boy and man became friends during their five days and nights together. Slocum taught him to navigate, and told a New Bedford newspaper that “Archie is one of the cleverest boys I have ever known … I like him because he always does what I tell him to … He knows how to set the sails at their proper balance and to lash the helm so that it skims along by itself. That is a trick which excites admiration wherever I go, and which few sailors understand. Archie learned the trick …”
Archie studied, “beyond my calculation,” as he wrote Teller, Slocum’s “sheets of calculations for the lunar observations he had made single-handedly,” a great feat “which is supposed to require three people to work out.” He learned to hawk curios when the Spray docked at ports along Long Island and in Block Island Sound. President Roosevelt wrote a gracious letter of thanks when the adventure was over, and Slocum decided that he wanted Archie to have the Liberdade, wherever she might have been just then. He traveled sometime in late 1906 to Archie’s boarding school, Groton, where he met the Reverend Endicott Peabody, the notoriously stiff headmaster. The president’s son recollected that Peabody—no friend of a Great Clockmaker religion—bristled at the captain’s ad hoc reply to an examination of his theological position. Nevertheless, Slocum was welcomed at the White House early in 1907.8
Now Slocum and the Spray were both running down. Archie remembered that the sloop was “the most incredibly dirty craft I have ever seen.” Writing in the Rudder magazine in 1968, W. H. Smith reports without fondness that “Captain Slocum probably was the worst ship’s husband I have encountered and I wasn’t a bit surprised when the Spray went missing … about four years later … [Her] planking was in poor shape. No two planks appeared to be of the same shape, size, or thickness, or even of the same kind of wood … The shape she was in would give the horrors to anyone who went to sea.”
Nonetheless, during the winter of 1907, the Spray took Slocum to lecture in Miami, where an audience member judged him to be “a very capable man; and a lonely, unhappy man.” Slocum then crossed to the Bahamas, where he visited a professional yacht captain from Martha’s Vineyard and gave a talk at Nassau’s Colonial Hotel, a black-tie event that earned him $460. Slocum and some of his audience adjourned to the grill—according to Ernest Dean, the yacht captain—where Slocum spun yarns and his companions became bawdy, “hilarious and liberal,” in Dean’s memory.
Along the waterfront in Nassau occurred the final known controversy of Slocum’s life, and it was at once violent and mysterious. Dean encountered the captain on a sponge fishermen’s dock, amid “four or five natives,” one of them holding a cloth to his bloody mouth. Excited and angry, Slocum explained that he had been splicing rigging on the Spray’s deck when the men—“ginned up some”—began denigrating the sloop, and one of them said, “loud enough for anyone to hear, ‘Any mon that says he sailed around the world in that thing is a goddom liar.’ I looked up in time to see which one said it, made a pier head leap, and with a couple of side-winders, unshipped his jaw.”
Slocum was not destined to end his days as a wharf rat. He dreamed of being the first through the Panama Canal, but was lost at sea seven years too early for that to have happened. Thomas Fleming Day, a young friend of his and the editor of the Rudder, later wrote a tribute:9
Captain Slocum was what we may call an uncommon man. He was extremely intelligent, and in his love of roaming and adventure reminded me of the celebrated Moorish traveler, Ibn Batuta, who wandered from Cape Spartel to the Yellow Sea, making friends with white, black and yellow; always observing, making men and manners his study, and living by the gifts of those whose ears he riddled with his tales of travel and adventure. Slocum, like Batuta, was a friendmaker, and everywhere he went the best of the land welcomed him, bid him to the board, and gave attention, while in his inimitable way he spun yarns of his voyages … Even old [“Oom Paul”] Krüger handed him a cup of coffee. From port to port he voyaged everywhere welcomed and entertained, and it was not until he reached this country … that a welcome was refused and his efforts belittled and ridiculed. The American newspapers, when they deigned to notice his voyage, made fun of his boat and himself, and several more than intimated the story of his single-handed world-circling voyage was a lie.
It was not until 1924, three years before Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic alone to Paris, that Joshua Slocum was declared legally dead. In fact he was last seen alive sixteen years earlier, on November 14, 1908,10 setting sail alone from Martha’s Vineyard to explore Venezuela’s Orinoco River and the headwaters of the Amazon, and then down that great river to the ocean. The exact circumstances of his death—the latitude and longitude, the day and time, the weather conditions—are not known. The nature of his end is manifest: lost at sea.
There are many ways to go missing at sea, alone at sixty-four on a small sailing vessel, and no end of speculation about what went wrong sometime after he embarked from Vineyard Haven. Heart attack or stroke can’t be ruled out, or any other of the body’s natural failures. A broken hip, even a broken leg, can kill a solo sailor. Pissing into the sea fro
m a heeling deck is a commonplace vulnerability of sailors, especially when groggy at night.
Listing only those misadventures we know him to have endured during his half century as a seaman and master mariner, he might have been broached or pooped or pitch-poled by a freak wave, swept overboard by a breaking sea, driven aground off Cape Hatteras or Cape Fear. Perhaps he was dismasted by a winter gale. The Spray’s tired planks might have sprung a leak so extreme that it sent him to the bottom. He might have struck a submerged log, or a whale might have stove him in. His worst fear at sea was to be struck by lightning or holed by a swordfish. We can safely discount the possibility that he was murdered by mutineers, and falling prey to pirates is improbable. A favorite theory has him run down and sunk in the shipping lanes, perhaps shrouded in fog, by one of the loathed steamships that put paid to his final years as a merchant seaman.
This speculation—that he was crushed by an iron hull, maybe as an untrustworthy lookout dozed on duty, that in effect he was murdered by modernity—is seductive for its poetic justice. This in turn is attractive for its congruence with Joshua Slocum’s poetic sensibility, his art and achievement as a writer.
I want Thomas Fleming Day, his fellow sailor, to have the final words of this memorial:
Slocum’s story is a remarkable one; I do not mean as the story of a voyage but as a piece of writing. It is absolutely devoid of any disfigurements betraying effort, and flows from page to page like a wind-favored tide. It is worthy to be placed beside any narrative writing in our language … Posterity will give this book a place, and your great-grandchildren will be advised to read Slocum’s Voyage, as a specimen of clean, pure narrative … Peace to Captain Slocum wherever he may sleep, for he deserves at least one whispered tribute of prayer from every sailorman for what he did to rob the sea of its bad name; and for such a man, who loved every cranny of her dear old blue heart, who for years made her windswept stretches his home and highway, what is more fitting than an ocean burial?
1 But in a letter from this period, to his editor, Slocum prudishly noted the “indecency” of Roman bath steam rooms popular in New York, adding that “I could never make up my mind to expose my person to the gaze of even my own class.”
2 Once again, the current was running hard against Slocum. The author of Eccentricities of Genius: Memories of Famous Men and Women of the Platform and Stage (1900), Major James Burton Pond, heard Slocum lecture several times, and he gives him a glowing review:
Captain Slocum is able to write and describe the incidents of the entire voyage and his wonderful experiences in a manner so graphic and simple that it absolutely charms and fascinates his hearers as few ever did or ever could do … It is wonderful to listen to the descriptions of some of his hairbreadth escapes and to hear him answer, as quick as a flash, questions of every conceivable sort put to him by expert seafaring auditors. I have listened for hours to these seeming tournaments in navigators’ skill, and never yet did the captain hesitate for an instant for a reply that went straight to the mark like a bullet.
Had [his voyage] occurred twenty years ago, it would have meant a fortune for Captain Slocum, and a stimulant for the lyceum such as it is impossible to secure under present conditions. “Because why?” you ask.
Responding to his own question, Pond—himself briefly Slocum’s lecture agent—explains that by 1900 the market was oversaturated by lecture agents’ clients.
3 Walter Teller reports that Century and its successor companies sold 27,700 copies in seventeen printings, and it was in print until 1948. Since 1954, Sheridan House has been an enthusiastic and successful publisher of books by and about Slocum. Sailing Alone Around the World has sold well over 50,000 copies in various editions, and has been translated into a great many languages.
4 In 1901, during Slocum’s journey to Buffalo, New York, for the Pan-American Exposition, a wiseacre newsman interviewed him somewhere upstate: “Navigator of the Spray Weighs Anchor and Sets Off Down the Raging Erie Canal,” reads the headline of the undated clip. After the subhead “Hand Which Held the Tiller Is Soon to Hold the Plow,” the article continues: “The horse that furnished the motive power to run the sloop down the canal will furnish the power to run a plow on the captain’s farm in Martha’s Vineyard. The hand that steered the tiller will steer the plow; the voice that refused to allow a woman to accompany him across the Atlantic will say ‘gee-up’ to the horse when it comes plowin’ time.” Ah, the perks of celebrity!
5 He is adamant: “I attacked her with proportional dividers, planimeter, rota-meter, Simpson’s rule, Froude’s coefficients, Dixon Kemp’s formulae, series, curves, differentials …” All these, whatever they might be, are good enough for me.
6 Writing in Rudder magazine many years after Andrade’s encomium to the Spray, another naval architect took a contrary view. Focusing principally on her beamy similarity to catboats and racing scows, designed of course for inland waters, John G. Hanna was uncompromising in his dismay:
Since the Suicide Squad has been for many years building ex act copies of Spray and will continue doing so for many years more unless restrained, perhaps I can save a life or two by explaining, as simply as possible, the basic reason … why Spray is the worst possible boat for anyone, and especially anyone lacking the experience and resourcefulness of Slocum, to take off soundings … Everyone who has handled [catboats] knows that, though they are extremely stiff initially, if they are ever heeled beyond a critical point, they flop right over as inevitably as a soup plate, which they resemble … A big lurching cross sea that would scarcely disturb a properly designed hull can—especially if it coincides, as it often does, with an extra-savage puff of a squall—flip over a Spray hull just as you would a poker chip.
7 Among the fine people who boarded the Spray was President William McKinley, later assassinated on the fairgrounds by an anarchist.
8 At this meeting he exchanged with the president an often quoted but to me mystifying bit of jocularity. Roosevelt said, “Captain, our adventures have been a little different.” Slocum replied, “That is true, Mr. President, but I see you got here first.” I confess not understanding where is “here.”
9 Thomas Fleming Day, “On Capt. Joshua Slocum,” in The Rudder Treasury: A Companion for Lovers of Small Boats, edited by Tom Davin (Sheridan House, 2003).
10 Probably because Slocum was declared dead as of 1909 by Martha’s Vineyard’s Dukes County Court, Walter Teller assumed that 1909 was the last date on which he was seen alive. In fact, further research by Ann Spencer, for her biography Alone at Sea, persuasively argues that Slocum was last seen departing from Martha’s Vineyard in November 1908. Teller, fastidious as he was about dates, seems to have become a prisoner of what he believed he knew, and in his notes and files, as well as his books, he systematically altered the date of recorded recollections of last sightings from 1908 to 1909.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Stowing aboard Captain Slocum’s vessels, sharing at a distance his adventures and mischances, has been one of my happier experiences. I was encouraged in this enterprise by Binky Urban and Sonny Mehta. Gary Fisketjon did everything within his considerable power to make what I wrote coherent, uncluttered, and obedient to logic. He is an inspired untangler of knots and, man alive, do I thank him! My brother, as acknowledged elsewhere, was reading Joshua Slocum while I was writing about him, and our conversations—sparked by Toby’s ungovernable curiosity, his eagerness to be astounded by audacity—spurred me at a crucial moment to finish my story and share it. My friends Maile Meloy and Ian Maxtone-Graham took my early pages literally to sea with them, and it was stimulating to get them back salt-stained and bleached by sun, rich with questions and demands.
Walter Teller’s Search for Captain Slocum—written during the early 1950s long before the Internet, search engines, online newspaper archives, and e-mail—was an exhaustive undertaking. Imagine trying to collect accurate shipping records from Hong Kong, Manila, the Okhotsk Sea, Sydney, Cape Town, Punta Arenas, and so on.
He did heroic work, notable for its liberal goodwill and common sense. Teller’s extensive collection of papers—correspondence, notes, clippings, and photos—are in the care of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, who kindly permitted me access to their treasures, through which Laura Pereira patiently guided me.
The National Library of Australia, in Sydney, provided me with the privately printed pamphlet supplied by Slocum to support his version of the mutinies aboard the Northern Light. I am grateful as well to Jennifer Pearce and Joel Slocum for help and encouragement. Adrian Studer shot (in color) the photograph I’ve used of the Ambassador, stranded in the Strait of Magellan; looking at is has made vivid how terrifying was Slocum’s passage through those waters.
A generous fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin gave me the luxury of colleagues with whom to discuss the perils and achievements of Captain Slocum, as well as time to write.
My wife, Priscilla, as again and again, listened and read and read and listened.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOURCES CITED
In addition to books and essays specified below, I have made use of daily journalism from New York, Boston, San Francisco, Sydney, Cape Town, and elsewhere, identified within the body of the text. This list usually cites the latest available editions, a few of which may have slightly altered titles.
Apollonio, Spencer, ed. The Last of the Cape Horners: Firsthand Accounts from the Final Days of the Commercial Tall Ships. Brassey’s, 2000.
Bunting, W. H. Live Yankees: The Sewalls and Their Ships. Tilbury House, 2009.
Catton, Bruce. “Mariner’s Quest.” American Heritage 10, no. 3 (1959).
Chatwin, Bruce. In Patagonia. Summit, 1977.
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