Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072)

by Spencer, Ann

  Excitement stirred when it was announced on April 9 that all Brazilian ports were again open. The Aquidneck prepared to set sail a second time with the cargo of hay. It isn’t clear whether Hettie was aware of the kind of ragtag seamen she was sailing with, but Slocum knew at least some of the seedy details of his new crew: “Crew were picked up here and there, out of brothels that had not been pulled down during the cholera, and out of the street or from the fields. Mixed among them were many that had been let out of the prisons all over the country, so that scourge should not be increased by over-crowded jails.” Slocum learned only later that four of his crew had been imprisoned for murder or highway robbery. Treachery was lurking, but before it surfaced the load of hay that had been sitting in the hold for nearly six months was discharged. Slocum provided his readers with a disturbing dockside image: “A change of rats also was made … fleas, too, skipped about in the hay as happy as larks, and nearly as big.” Only once in his writings does Slocum mention Hettie having any fun on this doomed wedding voyage. In Rio she bought a fashionable tall hat, which caused Slocum concern at night, when while half-asleep he fancied it “looming up like a dreadful stack of hay.”

  Slocum’s next cargo was three pianos. The Aquidneck hit a severe storm, and Slocum wrote that because his bark was thrown on her beam-ends, the pianos arrived “fearfully out of tune.” Slocum shrugged it off, telling himself that the pianos, no doubt, were “suffering, I should say, from the effects of seasickness!” He learned later that the owners of the pianos had prayed fervently for the Aquidneck during the storm.

  Slocum could recount the near calamities of this part of the voyage with levity, but what happened next could not be taken other than seriously, even by the drollest of Yankee wisecrackers. Hettie woke Joshua near midnight on July 23, 1887. She had heard footsteps above on the poop deck and whispers in the forward entry. She was so insistent that she had not been dreaming that Slocum ignored his first impulse to go up on deck by his usual route to investigate. “Arming myself, therefore, with a stout carbine repeater, with eight ball cartridges in the magazine, I stepped on deck abaft instead of forward, where evidently I had been expected.” He surprised the “gang of cut-throats” and warned them he was armed. The traitorous crew members defied his authority and his warning, and one approached to attack him with a knife. Slocum recalled, “I could not speak, or even breathe, but my carbine spoke for me, and the ruffian fell with the knife in his hand which had been raised against me!” Immediately another of the mutinous pack advanced on the captain, and he too was felled with a single shot. That ended the drama. Slocum later concluded, “A man will defend himself and his family to the last, for life is sweet, after all.”

  One man, Thomas Maloney, lay dead; the second crewman, James Aiken, was severely wounded and was sent to hospital in Paranaguá, where he recovered. Slocum himself was arrested. While he was in detention, the Aquidneck was placed under the command of a Spanish master, with Victor remaining on board as mate. Slocum was entangled in the Brazilian legal system for the next month, but the trial itself was swift. He pleaded self-defense and was acquitted and released. He must have decided that Hettie had had enough high sea adventure, for he bade her to stay in Antonina, in Paranaguá Bay, with young Garfield, while he caught a steamer to Montevideo, where he recovered the Aquidneck.

  Hettie may have been taking a breather, but Slocum would have little time for one. He gave his new crew a half-day’s liberty on shore at Paranaguá. When they set sail the next morning they seemed content, except for one sailor, who complained of chills. Slocum dismissed his complaint, but a couple of days later, “his chills turned to something which I knew less about. The next day, three more men went down with rigor in the spine, and at the base of the brain. I knew by this that small-pox was among us!” Slocum found it hard to believe that the distress signals they hoisted for immediate medical attention were not answered until thirty-six hours later. In Maldonado, Uruguayan officials confirmed the diagnosis, then ordered the bark to leave port without further aid. The sick and seriously short-handed crew sailed through a gale that stripped the sails, leaving them with bare poles. Then came torrential rains, lightning and the realization that they were in the clutches of a hurricane. Almost everything was washed away but the virus; only three of the crew were unaffected — Slocum, Victor and the ship’s carpenter. When the weather calmed, Slocum recalled, “wet, and lame and weary, we fell down in our wet clothes, to rest as we might — to sleep, or to listen to groans of our dying shipmates.” They received medical aid along the River Plate, but it came too late for many. Slocum offers a poignant picture of the afflicted sailors. When they buried the first to die, a man called José, Slocum reflected on the sailor’s honest smile, then cast him to the waves. “I listened to the solemn splash,” he wrote, “that told of one life ended.”

  With José’s death, Slocum’s crew became increasingly demoralized. The sick begged Slocum to call for a priest if medical help was not to be given. The captain set the flags, but knew that no one ashore wanted to answer their call for fear of contracting the deadly contagion. He watched the padre, as he put it, “pacing the beach.” Their plea was ignored.

  After burying another sailor, Slocum decided his “drifting pest house” had no choice but to move on for Montevideo. There the sick were taken from the ship and the Aquidneck was disinfected with demijohns of carbolic acid. This cleansing cost the captain over a thousand dollars. For Slocum one of the most anguishing moments occurred when he had to destroy the dead sailors’ property. The small gifts and trinkets they had purchased in Rio for their loved ones all met the fire or were ruined by carbolic acid. The captain later wrote that “what it cost me in health and mental anxiety cannot be estimated by such value.”

  Once again, he shipped with a new crew and headed for Antonina and reunion with his wife and son. Sailing past Santa Catarina, Slocum was transported to a happier time three and a half years earlier. “We came to a stand, as if it were impossible to go further … a spell seemed over us. I recognized the place as one I knew very well; a very dear friend had stood by me on deck, looking at that island, some years before. It was the last land that my friend ever saw.” Gripped with sadness mixed with renewed strength and hope, Slocum sailed on. With Hettie and Garfield back on board, the Aquidneck began another business venture, this time carrying a load of Brazilian wood. The final disaster for the ill-fated Aquidneck came soon after it headed out into Paranaguá Bay. Slocum recalled the final moments: “Currents and wind caught her foul, near a dangerous sandbar, she mis-stayed and went on the strand. The anchor was let go to club her. It wouldn’t hold in the treacherous sands; so she dragged and stranded broadside on, where open to the sea, a strong swell came in that raked her fore and aft, for three days, the waves dashing over her groaning hull the while till at last her back was broke and — why not add ‘heart’ as well!” The Aquidneck was lost. Slocum sold the wrecked ship on the spot and paid off the crew. She was uninsured, and as Garfield later wrote, “Father lost all of his money and our beautiful home.” Slocum struggled with the paradox of this loss: “This was no time to weep, for the lives of all the crew were saved; neither was it a time to laugh, for our loss was great.”

  To let go of his anger over the loss took years of letter writing to the President of the United States, the Department of State, the American consul at Rio and the consul at Pernambuco. Slocum cited the initial refusal of clearance at the quarantine harbor outside Rio as the decisive blow in his loss of fortune. In his view he had become enmeshed in the politics of a change of government in Brazil, and he blamed the competing factions for holding him stuck, which in turn caused him to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the devastating storm struck. He pursued his campaign to right this perceived injustice from October of 1887 to its futile conclusion on December 9, 1893. In January 1888, when the U.S. consulate in Rio offered to do its duty and bring the ship-wrecked family back to the United States, a proud and disgruntl
ed Slocum decided they would find their own passage home.

  Stranded in Brazil, Slocum set his mind to a plan to build a boat to sail his family home. It didn’t have to be a beauty — seaworthiness was all he wanted. He knew it would be primitive at best, made up of salvaged parts of the wrecked Aquidneck plus whatever he could afford or alter or make do with. He worked out a design and tackled it with optimism, deciding that “she should sail well, at least before free winds. We counted on favorable winds.” His boat was certainly an original — a strange blend of Cape Ann dory, Japanese sampan, Chinese junk and native canoe designs. Slocum himself referred to the vessel as a canoe.

  From the Aquidneck Slocum salvaged “a megre kit” of basic tools, his compass and charts, and his chronometer. He was able to use some of Aquidneck’s hardware, and he was ingenious at adapting the rest. For example, he pounded charcoal into a fine powder that, mixed with water, served for chalk. He made boat clamps from guava trees, and melted down ship’s metal for fastenings and cast some of it into nails. He punched holes through the local copper coins, cut them into diamond shapes, and used them as burrs for the nails. This improvisation, together with a rough-and-ready approach to hewing local trees for boat timber, took place during an epidemic of jungle fever, which made its rounds among the Slocums and the workers. They were undaunted, and Slocum reflected on the spirit of the day: “But all that, and all other obstacles vanished at last, or became less, before a new energy which grew apace with the boat, and the building of the craft went rapidly forward.” Victor served as carpenter and ropemaker. Even Hettie got into the spirit of the adventure and sewed the sails. She had been a dressmaker, and Slocum was pleased with the finished product: “Madam had made the sails — and very good sails they were, too!” When finished, the canoe was thirty-five feet in length. Rigged with full-battened sails, which Slocum considered “the most convenient boat rig in the world,” she took on the appearance of a Chinese junk. She was christened Liberdade, as she was launched on the day that Brazilian slaves were given their freedom. All that remained now was the voyage home.

  At the outset of the voyage back to the United States, the captain, who had suffered such grueling misfortunes, felt invigorated: “The old boating trick came back fresh to me … the love of the thing itself gaining on me as the little ship stood out: and my crew with one voice said: ‘Go on.’” They hit a storm immediately, and Hettie’s new sails were completely shredded. They were towed into Rio by a steamer, which Hettie had boarded by this time. Garfield remembered how his father and Victor stayed on the disabled Liberdade and managed to work with the steamer. “Father had a lot of nerve, strength, and will power. He steered all day and all night. Victor sat in the fore-peak under a tarpaulin, an ax in his lap to cut the hawser in case the Liberdade turned over. Father had a lanyard tied to Victor’s wrist. Father would pull on it and Victor responded with a pull.” After they set out again with new sails, there were several further mishaps. On a late July day, just out of Rio, a whale got a little too friendly with the craft and interrupted everyone’s supper with its churning up of the waters beneath and around the Liberdade. There were several close calls coming up the coast of South America, but they continued north with a growing appreciation for and confidence in “the thin cedar planks between the crew and eternity.” Upon arriving back in the United States, he recalled the passage home as “the most exciting boat-ride” of his life, to that point at least.

  The voyage of the Liberdade covered 5,500 miles and took fifty-five days. It had taken them up the coast of South America, through the Caribbean, past the Carolinas, up to Norfolk and then to Washington. When the family arrived on December 27, 1888, Hettie must have wanted to kiss the ground. Asked if she planned to go on another voyage, she quickly answered, “Oh, I hope not. I haven’t been home in over three years, and this was my wedding voyage.” Perhaps Hettie’s reluctance to set sail again with Joshua was due to more than the discomforts and hardships of her voyage. She may have realized by then that her husband’s heart was too often with his “dear friend” Virginia. As the Liberdade came to the equator he said a poignant goodbye. Of his gaze heavenward to the stars, he wrote that he had “left those of the south at last, with the Southern Cross — most beautiful in all the heavens — to watch over a friend.” Virginia haunted him on at least one other occasion on that voyage north. He wrote of a specter that appeared to him one night while on watch. It was of the vessel she had died on: “A phantom of the stately Aquidneck appeared one night, sweeping by with crowning skysails set, that fairly brushed the stars.”

  As Slocum made this final leg of the trip to bring his family back home, he must have felt mixed emotions. There would have been, of course, a sense of triumph and personal satisfaction in pulling off such an adventure, but he must also have felt a certain emptiness. He was closing the book on his youth and his professional career. Adjusting to life on new terms was to be his next challenge.

  Mine was not the sort of life to make one long to coil up one’s ropes on land, the customs and ways of which I had finally almost forgotten. And so when times for freighters got bad, as at last they did, and I tried to quit the sea, what was there for an old sailor to do? I was born in the breezes, and I had studied the sea as perhaps few men have studied it, neglecting all else … Thus the voyage which I am now to narrate was a natural outcome not only of my love of adventure, but of my lifelong experience.

  — J.S., Sailing Alone

  5

  What Was There for an Old Sailor to Do?

  With all its vicissitudes I still love a life on the broad, free ocean, never regretting the choice of my profession.

  — J.S., Voyage of the Liberdade

  When Slocum left the United States over three years before, he had been a gainfully employed captain and the owner of his own command. On his return in a homemade canoe, he was an unemployed drifter. Years later, Joseph Chase Allen recalled the impact the eccentric appearance of the Liberdade made on the people of Martha’s Vineyard. “She was canoe-shaped, sharp at both ends with some sheer. The predominating color on and about her was brown, the brown of plug tobacco, or dried autumn leaves … Her cabin was a hut, of the type seen in pictures of tropical countries, for its rounded ‘crowned’ top was thatched with some variety of broad leaf, lapping and over-lapping to make it weatherproof, although why these leaves did not lift as the wind struck them seemed remarkable.”

  The Liberdade may have looked like an alien craft, but it got the Slocums home, and in doing so it brought them some notoriety. After wintering in Washington, D.C., the Liberdade and her crew sailed down the Potomac and into New York harbor. There the press was waiting, but the New York World reporter did not want to talk to the captain; he was on the waterfront that day to capture his wife’s thoughts on this unique voyage. Hettie was in the spotlight for once, and the article provided a curious yet complimentary portrayal of her as a strong young woman of gentle manner with “full brow, bright hazel eyes, a remarkably well-formed ‘nez’, a frank smiling mouth, and a chin expressing both firmness and tenderness … Here is the face of a woman who would be capable of the most devoted, intrepid deeds, done in the quietest and most matter-of-fact way, and never voluntarily spoken of afterwards.” The interview was conducted in the “wee cabin on a plank running the length and raised about three inches from the deck. A sitting posture was the only attitude possible unless one chose to lie down.” This article showed just how very different the second Mrs. Slocum was from the first. Virginia had brought a sense of aesthetics to a grand ship. Readers of “An American Family Afloat,” about the Slocums’ voyages on the Northern Light, were surely enchanted by the romance of being a captain’s wife; readers of the Liberdade article must have shaken their heads and muttered “that poor Mrs. Slocum.” Virginia was portrayed as a goddess of efficient domesticity and motherhood in a vessel that the reporter compared to a “comfortable apartment ashore.” Hettie gave the World reporter a tour of her domestic setup, and read
ers got the picture: “‘Just there’ — pointing outside the entrance — ‘stood two big water casks. Behind them provisions were stowed. There’s the stove over which we did our cooking.’ It was a small iron pot on three legs, in which a handful of charcoal could be kindled.” When asked how she felt about the voyage, she said, “It is an experience I should not care to repeat.” Asked if she intended to go on another, she answered, “Oh, I hope not,” and added, “I have had enough sailing to last me for a long time.”

  Hettie had reflected on the voyage earlier that winter in a letter to her friend Mrs. Alfred McNutt, dated January 28, 1889. The Slocums had met Captain and Mrs. McNutt in Barbados before their wild canoe excursion. Considering their hair-raising voyage, the letter was a rather bland account. Hettie wrote that Josh thanked her for the stockings and that the voyage was full of interest to them. She cited one pleasurable family moment: “Xmas day was spent in the Chesapeake bay. We ate our Xmas dinner on board the Liberdade. The weather was fine and wind fair. So we enjoyed our sail up the Chesapeake and Potomac very much.” She then shared an adventurous moment: “We had a big storm off the coast of Cuba and some bad weather on this coast. We came through everything nicely. It surprises me more and more when I think of all we have come through.” Slocum seemed oblivious to the anxiety the perilous voyage had caused his young wife. He said she was “brave enough to face the worst storms,” then added that she was not the worse for wear. He even made it sound like a beneficial trip for her, claiming his wife had “enjoyed not only the best of health, but had gained a richer complexion.”