by Spencer, Ann
Copyright © 1998 Ann Spencer
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher — or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Reprography Collective — is an infringement of the copyright law.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Spencer, Ann
Alone at sea
eISBN: 978-0-385-67407-2
1. Slocum, Joshua, b. 1844. 2 Sailors — Canada — Biography. 3. Voyages around the world. 4. Spray (Sloop). 5. Sailing, Single-handed. I. Title.
G440.S63S63 1998 910.4′5′092 C98-930071-4
Letters from Henrietta Slocum in Appendix 3 courtesy Nova Scotia
Archives and Records Management/MG100 Vol. 94
Published in Canada by
Doubleday Canada,
a division of
Random House of Canada Limited
v3.1
To Jo and Joe, who helped me understand the intricacies of solo sailing and the courage and skill it requires.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Prologue: On Beam Ends
Chapter 1 - The Call of the Running Tide
Chapter 2 - Learning the Ropes
Chapter 3 - True Love and a Family Afloat
Chapter 4 - Ebb and Flow
Chapter 5 - What Was There for an Old Sailor to Do?
Chapter 6 - All Watches
Chapter 7 - High Seas Adventures
Chapter 8 - Walden at Sea: A Solitude Supreme
Chapter 9 - Ports of Call
Chapter 10 - Booming Along Joyously for Home
Chapter 11 - That Intrepid Water Tramp
Chapter 12 - Swallowing the Anchor?
Chapter 13 - Seaworthy for the Last Time
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Appendix 4
Notes on Sources
Preface
Early in September of 1997 I sat on the edge of a cliff where land ended and the Atlantic Ocean began. I was on Brier Island, Joshua Slocum’s boyhood home in the Bay of Fundy. The smell of salt water was riding the wind, and seabirds were calling. I sat with closed eyes and listened to the rhythms of the island. A constant pattern was all around: waves lapped on the shore directly below me, and the high-pitched sigh of a foghorn punctuated the lull, which startled an island rooster to crowing. The sounds echoed softly, before the sequence started up again. I tried to imagine how this vital environment had shaped the spirit of young Joshua Slocum, how it felt to be a ten-year-old boy running through the wind to the edge of this very cliff. It was Brier Island that had given young Joshua the sense that adventure and escape would always be found on the water, and the belief that a larger world lay just beyond the horizon. The sea coursed through his veins, and it would always beckon him, whatever its mood.
Brier Island inspired me. By the time I boarded the ferry back to the mainland, I had already embarked on a voyage of discovery. I had begun to get a sense of Joshua Slocum’s strength and his complexity. He was a master mariner who had followed his calling with an uncompromising spirit fueled by deep reserves of courage and humor. At the same time, he paid a high price for staying true to his passion: he was both a restless man and a profoundly sad one, and he was forever an outsider on dry land.
From Brier Island I traveled to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the Whaling Museum houses the extensive Teller collection of documents about Slocum, as well as letters, photographs and other Slocum memorabilia. I owe a great debt to Walter Magnes Teller, Slocum’s biographer in the 1950s, and envy him for being the first to undertake this research. In the foreword to his 1956 biography, The Search for Captain Slocum, Teller wrote that his journey started with “a chance reading of his [Slocum’s] book, and a chance discovery, at Martha’s Vineyard, that people who knew him were still alive. For Joshua Slocum had disappeared at sea some forty years before.” Intrigued, Teller began collecting stories and memorabilia relating to Slocum. Sadly, other people’s recollections were all that survived — Slocum’s published books were still available, but his letters, logs and personal diaries and papers had been lost at sea with the Spray. It was also rumored that Slocum’s widow, Hettie, had burned much of the captain’s correspondence. Nevertheless, Teller pieced together a full and vibrant portrait of a determined man “living on the edge of the twentieth century.” It was through Teller’s research that I became fascinated by Slocum the navigator, explorer, lecturer, shipwright, writer, and staunch individualist.
Some forty years after Teller, it was I who was searching for Captain Slocum. I felt certain there was more to be discovered, and new ways to approach what was already known about him. In my preliminary research at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia, I uncovered three letters that Teller had not seen. They were written by Slocum’s second wife, Hettie, to a captain’s wife in the Annapolis Valley, which was Slocum’s birthplace. In a letter dated 1910, Hettie wrote that her husband had been missing since he first set out in November 1908. This intrigued me right away, as this date contradicted every published account of Slocum’s disappearance, allegedly in 1909. It was quite possible that Hettie had her dates mixed up, but documents in the Teller collection almost exclusively mention the date of Slocum’s last sail as November 1908. The captain’s fate was now even more of a mystery than before.
The Teller collection is a feast of folk history. I pored over letters from Slocum’s sons, daughter, and relatives. All had similar memories of their mother, Joshua’s extraordinary first wife, Virginia. By all accounts, Virginia was a woman of tremendous spirit and strength of character as well as beauty and grace. Her strong sense of beauty breathed life into the rugged existence aboard her husband’s commands. Her navigational skills and, perhaps more importantly, her guiding intuition were said to have been Slocum’s mainstays. As Slocum’s son Ben Aymar remembered, “one peep from her would have changed the whole picture.”
The story of Joshua Slocum is of a man’s life lived fully and uncompromisingly. He survived mutinies and shipboard epidemics of smallpox. He was challenged to duels, and shot and killed a member of his crew in self-defense. His wife and three of his children died in foreign ports, and he lost his fortune when he stranded an uninsured vessel. His three-year circumnavigation was, for him, as much a spiritual and emotional voyage as it was a quest to be history’s first solo circumnavigator. His sad decline after the circumnavigation, and his mysterious death, add a mythic element to his life.
I wish to express my gratitude to the following people, who inspired and helped me along this literary voyage of discovery.
Many thanks to the people of Brier Island, especially to Phil Shea, Judy Joys, Nancy and Rolland Swift, and Carol and Bill Welch, who helped me understand what was indelibly etched in a boy’s soul.
Thank you to the following sailors, who helped me understand what calls someone to the sea: Tom Gallant talked seadog lingo to me and answered my many questions about why a sailor does what a sailor does. Tom has the true storyteller’s uncanny ability to find the choice words, explaining not only the mundane realities but the profound philosophy of a sailor’s life. Ed and Lainie Porter shared stories of their experience in gales, becalmings and fine weather along the coast of Maine. Lainie sang me sea songs and Ed answered any and all technical question
s. I spent a Sunday morning around a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, kitchen table with Dean Plager, who told me how he came to pack up his office job and sail alone. His stories of unbroken horizons, phosphorescence and mirages fueled the chapter on solitude. Cam Allbright in Annapolis Royal shared stories of the challenges of sailing the Bay of Fundy, as well as his knowledge of celestial navigation. However, it was Cam’s thoughts on sailing as a spiritual discipline that helped me understand what Slocum meant when he wrote, “Everything in connection with the sea would be eminently respectable and be told in spirituality.”
I am grateful also to Fred Lawrence of Cape Breton, who sails his homemade replica of the Spray, the Double Crow, and shared his thoughts on Slocum’s forgiving old boat; and to Gary Maynard and his wife, Kristie Kinsman, of Martha’s Vineyard, who gave me a tour of the captain’s home in West Tisbury and loaned me videos of the Maynard family’s replica of the Spray, the Scud, in which Gary’s parents took their family around the world.
For historical and nautical information, thanks to Alton Barteaux at the Mount Hanley School Museum; and to Dan Conlin, Curator of Marine History at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The museum’s permanent exhibit “Sailing Alone,” which tells stories of four single-handers, including Slocum, was installed in June 1997. Dan’s research and enthusiastic writing about nautical adventurers, along with the historical photos in the exhibit, gave me a solid footing to start my journey. Thank you to Garry Shutlak, Senior Archivist, Reference Services, at the Provincial Archives of Nova Scotia; to Carlton J. Pinheiro, Curator at the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol, Rhode Island; and to Mike Martel and Phil Shea of the Joshua Slocum Society International Inc.
Judith N. Lund, curator at the Old Dartmouth Historical Society-New Bedford Whaling Museum, was an invaluable source of information and inspiration. Thank you, Judy, for your enthusiasm, thoroughness, detective work and care during the project. Judy drew my attention to new shipping information to be gleaned from the records filed away in the Teller Collection, which disputed all published reports of Slocum’s early commands. Thanks also to Lee Heald and Laura Pereira.
I had the pleasure of talking with Ben Aymar’s granddaughters, Carol Slocum Jimerson and Gale Slocum Hermanet, who told me of Virginia Slocum’s Native American heritage, shared with me family stories of her bravery, and filled in details of the cultured life she left behind in Australia when she married Joshua. Gale Slocum Hermanet also sent me three unpublished photographs of Virginia and two of her sons, Victor and Ben Aymar. I thank them here for their insights into the captain and his wife and for their kind permission to use those three photographs in this book.
I also wish to thank Don Sedgwick for listening to my sea captain stories and encouraging me to turn that interest into a book about Joshua Slocum; and my editor, Anne Holloway, who sat at the helm when my self-steering mechanism took us into strange waters.
There was so much kindness along the way. I am grateful to Gerret Warner and Mimi Gredy, and to Dr. David Glover and Tina Balog, for opening their homes to me. Dr. Glover also shared his knowledge of ocean conditions, williwaws, and the treacheries of the Horn.
Thanks to Dr. Joseph Gabriel for his help in making sense of Slocum’s way of thinking, to Joanna MacIntyre for her boosts to the creative spirit, and to Debbie Young for her insights into the past. Thanks also to Sandra Spencer, Kevin Fitzpatrick, Ray Imai and Klara Fassett for their thoughts on safe passage through storms. Thanks to my mother for all her help; to my sons Sam and Max for their patience and interesting suggestions; to Graham and Alecia Spencer for their computer know-how and for being on twenty-four-hour emergency standby; to Andy Manning for his patience and time teaching me the intricacies of my new computer; to Fred MacDonald for showing me his uncle’s watercolors of ports at the turn of the century; to Chris van den Berg for helping with swift communications; to Gerrie Grevatt for the author photo; and to Uncle Gordon for checking any odd fact at any odd hour.
Thanks to Linda Granfield, Paul McKenzie, and Gail Whiteside for their leads on tackling the initial research.
Thanks to those friends who cheered me on throughout the voyage: Belinda, Audrey, Katherine, Arlene, Dick, Charis, Lorry Anne, George, Lee, Rudi, Trevor, Rigel, Debbie and Chris, and Lynn and Ray; and to Christopher for sharing a parallel technological, artistic and soulful journey.
Ann Spencer
April 1998
Prologue: On Beam Ends
I had been cast up from old ocean.
— Joshua Slocum,
Sailing Alone Around the World
On a winter’s day in 1892, the coastal village of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, was buzzing with speculation. Who was the newcomer, and what had brought him into town? The stranger had a weary look about him. He was surely someone down on his luck. His gaunt frame and balding head heightened the impression of an aging and weather-beaten soul dealt a heavy hand. He was not the approachable sort: one could not just saunter up to him and ask his business. He had a self-contained air, and his eyes were sad. Yet he was also clearly a proud man: his brown beard was neat and close-cropped, and he walked with a spirited step. He seemed to be in town for a purpose.
“Who’s the old-timer?” was probably the question of the day, a puzzle to chew over around the dockyard and main crossroads in Fairhaven. That curious blend of smalltown guesswork, rumor and not always benign gossip would not die down until it had pieced together the identity of this enigmatic fellow making his way toward the shore. Soon they had the answer: the stranger was Captain Joshua Slocum. And their impressions were dead on: times were tough for the captain. He looked older than his forty-eight years and most certainly he was down on his luck. What was missing from the general scuttlebutt was sympathy for his plight. In many ways, Joshua Slocum was just another sea captain wandering jobless around the wharves, one of many captains who had not yet made their fortune or who made and lost it. Such men had established themselves on the sea but had since been left without a command, bypassed in the transition from sail to steam. But Slocum’s career had been colorful, and he stood out from the crowd. Chances were that the Fairhaven villagers knew the old salt by reputation. He had been famous for his sailing exploits, and the most scandalous episodes of his career had been chronicled in newspapers and spiced up in the tales of the men who had sailed with him. Word was that Captain Slocum could be just plain bull-headed, and this trait had no doubt played a large part in his sad reversal of fortune.
The change had been a dramatic one. Three years earlier a very different Slocum would have come into port; eight years earlier Fairhaven folk would have encountered the epitome of nautical success. Back then Slocum had been a dapper skipper, the master and part owner of a full-rigged ship, Northern Light. She was a beauty, and the captain regarded her as “one of the finest American sailing vessels afloat.” With her to command, he had reached the pinnacle of his over twenty-year career as a master merchant mariner. He had sailed around the world five times. His career had been a steady rise with some lucky breaks along the way. Slocum had been made a captain in 1869 when he was just twenty-five years old. He was a spunky young fellow from away, a Canadian turned “naturalized” Yankee. He did most of his shipping in the Pacific trade and called San Francisco his home port. His life seemed charmed. He had even met the perfect life partner: on a stopover in Australia he had married Virginia Walker. Folks recalled her gumption with admiration. She could handle the rough life aboard ships and had traveled everywhere with her husband, raising their growing family. With Virginia at his side, Slocum was respected as a world-class captain with an important command.
Those happy years at sea were not free of shadows. Charges had been laid against Slocum late in 1883 over his harsh treatment of a mutinous crew member. The story was circulating freely that he had kept the man chained in irons for most of the voyage and nearly starved him to death. Virginia had stood by her husband throughout that episode, holding the mutineers at bay by pointing re
volvers at them. People said that Virginia was his anchor, and that everything began to fall apart for him after her death in 1884.
They’d heard he had got married again, to a young woman from Nova Scotia — a cousin, they believed. Hettie and two of his boys, Victor and Garfield, had sailed with Slocum aboard his next command, during which more scandals arose. This time Slocum had been charged in Brazil with killing a crew member. He was acquitted, but it must have all been too much for him. Shortly afterward, he ran his ship aground on a sandbar, and lost his life savings with it. His “elegant bark” carried no insurance, and Slocum had to make his way home not only with a tarnished reputation but also in a state of financial ruin.
Even so, people marveled at the old seadog’s ingenuity. He had sailed his family back all the way from Brazil in a homemade “canoe,” as he called the small boat he had built in the jungle. He had spunk, but among seamen who knew him, the consensus was that he was a proud, sad fool. Didn’t he know he had to change with the times? The age of grand sailing ships was over. To work in freight shipping in the 1890s a captain had to be able to guarantee that goods would arrive at an appointed time. Keeping to a schedule meant not being at the mercy of the wind. But “going steam” went against Slocum’s grain. Most people thought that his resistance to inevitable change was the real reason for his sad decline.
Slocum, of course, would have told it differently. Sailing without Virginia had been a painful transition. Also, to give up what he was best at and surrender to machine-driven shipping was never a choice for him. He hated steamships — it was that simple. His unbending will and the troubles he had encountered on his final voyages had sealed his future in merchant shipping. Slocum was never given another command. His career marked the end of the age of sail.
Few knew how difficult his life had become. His family had no home in Boston, and the children and Hettie were boarding throughout the city with various relatives. The captain had worked for a time as a stevedore at the Boston shipyards, but his stubbornness resurfaced when he refused to pay a fifty-dollar union fee. Slocum later described the moment he decided to leave the humiliating life of the docks: “One day when I was doing a bit of an odd job on a boat and a whole lot of coal and dirt came down all about my face, I stood up, thought of the difference between my state and when I was master of the Northern Light, and quit the job.”