A Brief History of Circumnavigators

by Derek Wilson

  Life now simply resolved itself into one of imperative urges, and the most imperative urge of all was sleep. I wanted oblivion with every fibre of my being. And here we were right at the entrance to the Straits where ships were crowding through like sheep at a gate. One might as well pull up in the middle of Broadway for a quiet nap.

  Extreme fatigue does strange things. As in a dream I became aware of two other people aboard, and as in a dream it seemed perfectly natural that they should be there. One of them sat on the coachroof and the other came aft holding on to the boom, quiescent in its gallows. ‘O.K.,’ he said, ‘You kip down. We’ll keep watch.’ Obediently I went below and slept till morning.

  Stretching and yawning and still weary, I climbed into the cockpit in the light of day. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That was good . . .’ but they had gone. Never had the cockpit looked so empty.12

  Slocum, too, made for Gibraltar, intending to go by way of the Suez Canal. But he was cautioned about Barbary pirates and, indeed, had a brush with a Moroccan felucca as soon as he left the Rock. Thus warned, Slocum changed his plans. In fact, he completely reversed them and decided to go west about. The man’s nonchalance is breathtaking. Only a mariner fully conversant with the world’s tides, winds and currents could have calmly made such a radical change to well-laid plans. The course he now followed was to be very similar to that taken by the first circumnavigator of all, 370 years before.

  Recrossing the Atlantic, Spray came to Brazil on 5 October, where her owner had many nautical friends and business contacts, thanks to the years spent trading in and out of South American ports. Indeed, it seems that Slocum was a stranger in very few of the places he called at. Everywhere he went he was received hospitably and usually found some sea captain, consul or factor to smooth his path through local formalities. In Pernambuco it was Dr Perera, proprietor of El Commerciojornal, who entertained the wayfarer in his waterfront mansion and insisted on feeding him up for the voyage. Slocum, like all brave men and women who attempt the ‘impossible’, was heavily dependent on those who gave him encouragement and support. It was not just the practical assistance he valued. Even more important were the assurances of goodwill that met him in every port of call and the morale- boosting encomiums of those who told him ‘you can do it’. There were Jeremiahs in plenty who had told him before he set out that he was crazy. Indeed, when he came to write his account of the voyage, Slocum dedicated it, ‘To the one* who said: “The Spray will come back”.’ Was there really only one? Something armchair critics never realise is the effect their words have on adventurers like Slocum. Perhaps it is because they look upon such bold spirits as belonging to a different order of being, impervious to such common afflictions as self-doubt and hesitancy. Slocum would have agreed with Chichester: ‘negative wishings and willings on the part of different people use up valuable strength in resisting them, just as prayer and positive wellwishing give strength, and lend support.’13

  Slocum made his way steadily southwards, planning to reach the Straits of Magellan at the height of the southern summer. He made frequent stops to take on food and pay social calls. By now the lone yachtsman’s fame was going before him. At Montevideo he:

  was greeted by steam-whistles till I felt embarrassed and wished that I had arrived unobserved. The voyage so far along 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.14

  However, fame had its compensations. A local shipping agency insisted on paying for any repairs Spray needed and on giving Slocum twenty pounds towards his expenses. At Buenos Aires, where he arrived on New Year’s Day 1896, the Spray was given free berthing and her captain was entertained at the home of Mr Mulhall, ‘the warmest heart, I think, outside of Ireland’.

  But the elements were not so hospitable. The seas off the Plate estuary are notorious. Thomas Chaloner, three hundred years earlier, had encountered there ‘the fury of storms which, indeed, I think to be such as worser might not be endured’.15 Slocum’s departure from Buenos Aires on 26 January was deceptively peaceful. He had to be towed out of harbour in a flat calm, the water’s surface looking ‘like a silver disk’. But the mood rapidly changed:

  a gale came up soon after, and caused an ugly sea, and instead of being all silver, as before, the river was now all mud. . . . I cast anchor before dark in the best lee I could find near the land, but was tossed miserably all night, heartsore of choppy seas.16

  Soon he was off the desolate coast of Patagonia, which those who have seen it know to be the bleakest and most cheerless stretch of coastline on the face of the earth. Even Slocum, the seasoned mariner, was depressed by it and ‘resolved then that I would anchor no more north of the Strait of Magellan’.17 He stood well out to sea to avoid the treacherous currents swirling around the craggy shore, only to find that he had exchanged one potential danger for another:

  . . . while the sloop was reaching under short sail, a tremendous wave, the culmination, it seemed, of many waves, rolled down upon her in a storm, roaring as it came. I had only a moment to get all sail down and myself upon the peak halliards, out of danger, when I saw the mighty crest towering masthead-high above me. The mountain of water submerged my vessel. She shook in every timber and reeled under the weight of the sea, but rose quickly out of it, and rode grandly over the rollers that followed. It may have been a minute that from my hold in the rigging I could see no part of the Spray’s hull . . . However, the incident, which filled me with fear, was only one more test of the Spray’s seaworthiness. It reassured me against rude Cape Horn.18

  Generally speaking, Slocum had timed his arrival well. After the incident with the freak wave he had a good run as far as Cape Virgins, and slipped easily inside Magellan’s Strait.

  But this hostile region was not going to let him off scot free. A storm sprang up that night as he lay at anchor and pummelled Spray for thirty hours. But she withstood it and thereafter Slocum enjoyed a trouble-free passage through the Straits. On 3 March he passed Cape Pilar, believing that ‘the blind Horn’s hate’ was behind him. He was wrong. Ahead of him lay what he would later call his greatest adventure.

  Spray sailed out of the shelter of the land straight into a north-westerly tempest. There was nothing for it but to take in all sail and run before the wind under bare poles. Day after day the little boat was driven back towards Cape Horn. Slocum again changed his plans: he would make for the Falklands, refit there and cross the southern Atlantic, going east about after all – if he survived the screeching fury of wind and waves:

  No ship in the world could have stood up against so violent a gale . . . And so she drove southeast, as though about to round the Horn, while the waves rose and fell and bellowed their never-ending story of the sea . . . She was running now with a reefed forestaysail, the sheets flat amidship. I paid out two long ropes to steady her course and to break combing seas astern, and I lashed the helm amidship. In this trim she ran before it, shipping never a sea. Even while the storm raged at its worst, my ship was wholesome and noble. My mind as to her seaworthiness was put at ease for aye . . . The first day of the storm gave the Spray her actual test in the worst sea that Cape Horn or its wild regions could afford, and in no part of the world could a rougher sea be found than at this particular point, namely, off Cape Pillar, the grim sentinel of the Horn . . . the Spray rode, now like a bird on the crest of a wave, and now like a waif deep down in the hollow between seas; and so she drove on. Whole days passed, counted as other days, but with always a thrill – yes, of delight.19

  There speaks the true adventurer, the man who could put himself and his lovingly-built ship at risk of instant destruction – just for the hell of it. For him the voyage was a contest. Sometimes he had to give his opponent best, such as now, when he was obliged to steer an easterly course round the Horn, but if he did so it was only to stay in the game. The voyage was a contest – and only
a contest. No other motives diluted the thrill of facing and overcoming challenges. For the first time in history a man sailed round the world with no commercial or imperialist objectives. No national pride was at stake. No scientific discoveries beckoned. He did not even travel to see other lands, for there were few he had not already visited. Every adventurer has something of the gambler in him. Beneath the calculation, the careful preparation, the determination to succeed, lies a love of the game for its own sake.

  On the fourth day of the storm Slocum saw and grasped a chance to escape from the tempest and rescue his plan of a westward crossing of the Pacific. Through cloud, rain and driving spray he caught a glimpse of a mountain thrusting out of the sea. He reckoned that it marked an alternative entrance to Magellan’s Strait. He hoisted a tiny sail (his mainsail had been torn to shreds in the first moments of the storm) put the tiller over and made for land:

  . . . on the outside coast of Tierra del Fuego. It was indeed a mountainous sea. When the sloop was in the fiercest squalls, with only the reefed forestaysail set, even that small sail shook her from keelson to truck when it shivered by the leech . . . Under pressure of the smallest sail I could set she made for the land like a race-horse, and steering her over the crests of the waves so that she might not trip was nice work. I stood at the helm now and made the most of it.

  Night closed in before the sloop reached the land, leaving her feeling the way in pitchy darkness. I saw breakers ahead before long. At this I wore ship and stood offshore, but was immediately startled by the tremendous roaring of breakers again ahead and on the lee bow. This puzzled me, for there should have been no broken water where I supposed myself to be. I kept off a good bit, then wore round, but finding broken water also there, threw her head again offshore. In this way, among dangers, I spent the rest of the night. Hail and sleet in the fierce squalls cut my flesh till the blood trickled over my face; but what of that? It was daylight, and the sloop was in the midst of the Milky Way of the sea, which is northwest of Cape Horn, and it was the white breakers of a huge sea over sunken rocks which had threatened to engulf her through the night. It was Fury Island I had sighted and steered for, and what a panorama was before me now and all around! It was not the time to complain of a broken skin. What could I do but fill away among the breakers and find a channel between them, now that it was day? Since she had escaped the rocks through the night, surely she would find her way by daylight. This was the greatest sea adventure of my life. God knows how my vessel escaped.

  The sloop at last reached inside of small islands that sheltered her in smooth water. Then I climbed the mast to survey the wild scene astern. The great naturalist Darwin looked over this seascape from the deck of the Beagle, and wrote in his journal, ‘Any landsman seeing the Milky Way would have nightmares for a week’. He might have added, ‘or seaman’ as well.20

  Spray was now in the Cockburn Channel which leads back into the main strait. She was able to make her way back to Cape Froward and pick up again her westward course. The next problem Slocum had to contend with was a night attack by Fuegian Indians. Fortunately he had anticipated this emergency by sprinkling the deck with carpet tacks. The screams, shouts and howls which woke him at midnight were gratifying proof of the success of this stratagem. For three more wearying days and nights Spray was tossed around by the unpredictable winds and tidal races which swirl round Tierra de Fuego.

  In Fortescue Bay Slocum had his first sight of civilisation in several weeks. It took the shape of the SS Columbia out of New York bound for San Francisco. Those were the days when the Panama Canal was still a distant and dubious prospect. De Lesseps’ company having gone bankrupt in an attempt to cross the isthmus, other men were not anxious to take up the challenge, so that many big ships were still obliged to use the hazardous Straits of Magellan. The first mate of the Columbia turned out to be an old colleague of Slocum’s and he gave his friend a generous gift of miscellaneous provisions. As he enjoyed a delicious late supper and gazed across the harbour to where the steamer’s rows of electric lights were reflected in the black water Slocum mused on the difference between the two vessels. Ironically, it was the frail little Spray that proved the more durable. SS Columbia was wrecked off California the following year.

  Slocum had much work to do repairing sails and damaged gear before braving the open sea again and took his time along the channel. One day he came upon the wreckage of a vessel that had been less fortunate than Spray in the great gale and salvaged several casks of tallow which he planned to trade during the next leg of the journey. He reached Port Angosto, close to the exit from the strait, at the end of March. Six times he tried to reach the Pacific and six times he was driven back by contrary winds. At last, on 13 April, Spray broke free of the land and Slocum raised his voice in relief and exultation. “‘Hurrah for the Spray!” I shouted to seals, sea-gulls and penguins; for there were no other living creatures about.’21

  He bore away for Juan Fernandez, an island intermittently occupied since Dampier’s visit and now ruled on behalf of the Chilean government by a governor of Swedish extraction. Slocum stayed eight days among the hospitable islanders, who much to his surprise, had read of his exploits in newspapers brought out from Valparaiso. He climbed to the mountain lookout to gaze upon the memorial to Alexander Selkirk placed there twenty-eight years before by the officers of HMS Topaze. And he wondered why the castaway had ever left what seemed to be an idyllic location:

  The hills are well-wooded, the valleys fertile, and pouring down through many ravines are streams of pure water. There are no serpents on the island, and no wild beasts other than pigs and goats . . . The people lived without the use of rum or beer of any sort. There was not a police officer or a lawyer among them. The domestic economy of the island was simplicity itself. The fashions of Paris did not affect the inhabitants; each dressed according to his own taste. Although there was no doctor, the people were all healthy, and the children were all beautiful. There were about forty-five souls on the island all told . . . Blessed island of Juan Fernandez!22

  The Pacific crossing, according to Slocum, was the most relaxed period of the whole voyage. The Spray, well provisioned and recovered from her ordeal, scudded along before the trade winds for seventy-two days. As if to make up for the recent chastening she had administered, the sea now spoiled Slocum:

  I sat and read my books, mended my clothes, or cooked my meals and ate them in peace. I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so I made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else. Nothing could be easier or more restful than my voyage in the trade-winds.23

  Slocum steered by the sun and the stars. He set a course for Samoa, ignoring the Marquesas and the Society Islands, where he could easily have made a landfall, and brought Spray to rest in the port of Apia on 16 July.

  This chain of islands is one of the most beautiful in the world and, for Europeans, perhaps, the most pleasant. Slocum arrived in the middle of the cool season, when the temperature seldom rises above 27°C. The heavy rain which keeps the inland ridges perpetually covered with an aura of cool, hazy green falls mostly at night and in the morning. Samoa today looks much as it did ninety years ago. Sadly, the unaffected life style of the people, which so impressed Slocum has changed with constant exposure to the customs and attitudes of supposedly more sophisticated cultures. When the Spray’s captain visited a village chief he found him cheerfully contemptuous of western materialism: “‘Dollar, dollar,” said he; “white man know only dollar. Never mind dollar. The tapo [village hostess] has prepared ava; let us drink and rejoice”.’24

  The Samoan islands were at that time under a rather uneasy tripartite protectorate administered by Britain, Germany and the USA. Slocum was welcomed and entertained by the American consul-general and his wife but an invitation from another resident was much more exciting to the visitor. Mrs Fanny V. de G. Stevenson cam
e down to the Spray in person to ask Captain Slocum to come to her home.

  Robert Louis Stevenson, after several years of wandering, had settled in Samoa with his American wife, his mother and his stepchildren in 1890. Here he wrote some of his finest works: Catriona, several short stories and the fragmentary Weir of Hermiston. And here he died suddenly, in December 1894, at the age of forty-four. It was his widow who now warmly greeted Slocum as a traveller and adventurer after her husband’s heart. For Joshua Slocum, a devotee of Stevenson’s books, it was an unbelievable experience to be entertained in his hero’s own home, Vailima, and even to be invited to sit and write letters at Stevenson’s own desk. The most emotional moment of the entire voyage came when Mrs Stevenson, whom Slocum describes as a creature with sparkling eyes and an irrepressible spirit, presented him with a set of books from the author’s library bearing the inscription:

  TO CAPTAIN SLOCUM. These volumes have been read and re-read many times by my husband, and I am very sure that he would be pleased that they should be passed on to the sort of seafaring man that he liked above all others.

  Fanny G. de V. Stevenson25

  It is not surprising that, when he left Samoa on 20 August ‘a sense of loneliness seized upon me as the islands faded astern’. Slocum crammed on sail for Sydney ‘but for long days in my dreams Vailima stood before the prow’.26 Samoa had also been kind to Slocum in another way: he had sold the last of his salvaged tallow to a German trader there and was, as a result, well in funds.

  After close on two months in Sydney, largely spent in social engagements with old friends and smart members of the yacht club who made a great fuss of the visiting celebrity, Slocum moved on to Melbourne. Here he found, to his indignation, that the harbour authorities charged him tonnage dues, something that had happened in no other port except Pernambuco. The captain found himself out of pocket to the tune of six shillings and sixpence. He lost no time in recouping this sum from the citizens of Melbourne: