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

by Spencer, Ann

  Whatever the Spray’s virtues and shortcomings, no one has ever questioned Slocum’s exceptional seamanship.

  Slocum considered the Spray his home, so he valued her function, safety and comfort and wanted things snug aboard. The Spray had two cabins. The fore cabin, which measured six feet square, was the galley; aft was the larger cabin, roughly ten feet by twelve, which was the main living quarters. Here he had his meals, did his mending and passed his time reading. Both cabins rose more than three feet above deck, so the captain had adequate headroom. A hatch between the two let Slocum crawl between them. Under the deck, along the side of the cabin, the captain fitted his berth and storage shelves. Around the base of a stanchion in the middle of the cabin was a circular table, within reaching distance of the bunk. Between this main cabin and the galley was the midship hold, which provided ample storage room for several months’ supplies. The wheel was handy to the companionway, which had a pine rail leading down into the cabin.

  For provisions, Slocum laid in a large supply of staples. In a later article about his cooking aboard the Spray, Slocum noted what he started out with: “I laid in two barrels of ship’s bread, or pilot bread, as some call it. In appearance this bread is like a large thick cracker of rather coarse quality. There’s no nonsense about it, though. It was made for keeps. It isn’t fine and white like the crackers most people like to buy. You could eat a bushel full of those and get no substance. But this old-fashioned hard bread is a kind of whole wheat. There’s good stuff in it and you couldn’t do better than to take some of it if you were going into the woods camping. My two barrels full lasted me the voyage through. I put them up in tin cans while they were dry and crisp, and I sealed the cans with solder so the bread was as good three years old as it was new.” Slocum also laid in a good quantity of flour, codfish, potatoes, butter, tea and coffee. Aware that he would need to guard his possessions and his personal safety in waters still traveled by cannibals and pirates, Slocum armed himself with a Martini-Henry rifle and a revolver.

  It was April of 1895, and Slocum was ready to set sail. Eight days before he departed, the Boston Daily Globe announced his plans: “To Sail Around World / Capt Joshua Slocum Has a Trim Craft Fitted Out.” The reporter who visited the “builder, owner, skipper, crew, cook and cabin boy” aboard the Spray when it was docked in East Boston was stunned by the small size of the boat: “There now lies a little sloop which looks about large enough for a longshore fisherman, but which is, nevertheless, booked for a voyage around the world.”

  This newspaper article, dated April 16, 1895, illustrates how unsettled the captain’s plans were. The lettering on the Spray’s stern at this time said “Spray Fairhaven,” but before leaving on April 24, the captain had decided on a more visible hailing port: “Spray Boston.” Slocum shared his early ideas on how the Spray would be rigged: “Her present rig is the ordinary one of the sloop, with mainsail and jib, a short topmast being carried only for signaling. Later, however, her rig may be changed to something like that of La Liberdate [sic], with a battened sail in place of the mainsail, and a smaller sail of the same kind on a mizen mast aft.” Slocum indicated that this change would be made at the end of the week before the sloop started out from New York. Neither the New York departure nor the early change of rig happened as outlined.

  As for the route and the time it would take, Slocum was completely off in his estimates. “From New York I shall sail for Panama,” he predicted. “That is, if I can get the boat taken across the isthmus. If I cannot get transportation for her, I shall sail for the Straits of Magellan and so on into the Pacific. It will be a long way to the straits, so I shall do my best to get the boat across the isthmus. Once in the Pacific I shall make all my longitude in the trade winds, either north or south of the equator as it may happen. Then I shall touch many of the South Sea islands and thence head home across the Atlantic. It is quite a trip but two years ought to see it finished.” In fact, the voyage would take three years and two months to complete.

  In another article that ran in the Boston Herald at around the same time, Slocum said he hoped to find the Gilbert Islanders he had rescued on the Northern Light twelve years earlier. He also insisted that his craft was stable and reliable. The story described him just before the voyage as five feet nine and a half inches tall, 146 pounds and in remarkable health.

  When Slocum was asked how he planned to carry out this venture single-handed, he explained that he intended to “sleep in the day time and keep the boat going at night … When it blows too hard I shall get out my sea anchor, batten everything down tight, and go below for a sleep and let the gale blow itself out.” The Boston Daily Globe reporter, who had at first commented that Slocum and the little Spray were setting out on “an adventure from even the prospect of which many handy mariners might be excused from shrinking,” left the interview a believer in the captain: “Capt. Slocum apparently regards it with no feeling of misgiving, and talks about it in a matter-of-fact way which shows confidence not only in his determination, but also in his ability to bring the adventure to a successful conclusion.”

  The old seadog received a vote of confidence from another staunch believer. Slocum’s dealings with Funk and Wagnalls had brought him into contact with a young supporter of his voyage, whose enthusiasm perhaps partly made up for Hettie’s coolness. Mabel Wagnalls, the daughter of publisher Adam Willis Wagnalls, was twenty-four and unmarried. She came to see Slocum on the Spray just before he sailed, bringing a box of books from her father, as well as a book she had written, “a musical story” titled Miserere. Mabel was cultured and had dreams of becoming a writer. She and Slocum quickly forged a close connection. Regarding Mabel’s eagerness to cheer Slocum on, biographer Walter Teller could only conclude, “The enterprise the old knight of action was about to embark on touched her imagination and heart.” Teller’s editor agreed, and wrote back to Teller, “Do you think he ever really focussed on her as a woman — I’m inclined to think not. I think she was simply his writing home in the sense we’ve discussed.” Whatever their relationship, Slocum was touched by her visit and cherished Mabel’s parting words: “The Spray will return.”

  On April 24, 1895, with the noon-hour whistles blowing a noisy fanfare, the Spray left East Boston under full sail. This was the moment Slocum had long anticipated. In his memoir of the voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World, he recalled the beauty of that day: “Waves dancing joyously across Massachusetts Bay met the sloop coming out, to dash themselves instantly into myriads of sparkling gems that hung about her breast at every surge. The day was perfect, the sunlight clear and strong. Every particle of water thrown into the air became a gem, and the Spray, making good her name as she dashed ahead, snatched necklace after necklace from the sea, and as often threw them away. We have all seen miniature rainbows about a ship’s prow, but the Spray flung out a bow of her own that day, such as I had never seen before. Her good angel had embarked on the voyage, I so read it in the sea.”

  I used to soak my hardtack and make bread pudding of the very nicest kind and it had strength and nourishment, too. It was something that would stand by you. I soaked the bread about six hours to get it thoroughly soft, then added sugar, butter, milk and raisins, put it on my lamp-stove and in a few minutes it was done.

  My stores included coffee, tea, flour, baking powder, salt, pepper and mustard — yes, and curry, I mustn’t forget that. Curry powder is great stuff aboard a vessel. It was just what I needed to give the final touch to my venison stews that I made out of the salt beef and salt pork I carried along. Besides those meats I had ham and dried codfish. Very few persons know how to treat a salt codfish properly. To freshen it they let it stand in water half a day or more, very likely, and it may be, use several waters. That takes all the goodness out. You can get rid of the extra salt just as effectively and without hurting the fish by picking it to pieces and washing it with your hands — just shaking it up and down in the water. Then put it right into the pot and boil for fifteen minutes. Wh
en you get it ready for the table, add butter and pepper and chop a hard-boiled egg and put on top. You make codfish that way and I want to sit down prepared to hoist in a meal of it; and all I want besides is potatoes, coffee, and bread and butter.

  — From “The Cook Who Sailed Alone,”

  Good Housekeeping, February 1903

  6

  All Watches

  Sleeping or waking, I seemed always to know the position of the sloop.

  — J.S., Sailing Alone

  The Spray and Slocum were off and away, but the route they had embarked on was not even remotely the one the captain had mapped out in newspaper interviews just the week before. From the beginning he sailed as the spirit moved him. Even after the “thrilling pulse” of a send-off fanned by plenty of hype in the local press, Slocum set his own deliberate pace. His first straying from plan, while minor, suggested how important mulling and moseying were to be in the overall scheme of the voyage. Slocum made first for Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he stopped in the cove part of the harbor to “weigh the voyage, and my feelings, and all that.” He also wanted to check out the Spray after her initial run. Here he had his first experience of coming into port alone in a sizeable boat. He stayed in port for close to two weeks, the first of the many delays that were to aggravate his literary agent. But Slocum already had the kind of audience that mattered to him. Old captains gathered to hear his plans and gave him a “fisherman’s own” lantern as a bon voyage gift. He also took on dry cod, a barrel of oil and a gaff, pugh and dip-net, as well as some copper paint, with which he coated the bottom of his sloop. Before leaving, he made a dinghy of sorts by sawing a dory in half and boarding up the ends. A full-size dory was too big for the Spray, but this half-dory would do perfectly, and Slocum, ever resourceful and inventive, planned to put it to good use: “I perceived, moreover, that the newly arranged craft would answer for a washing-machine when placed athwartships, and also for a bath-tub.”

  On leaving Gloucester, he sailed up the coast for a nostalgic visit to his childhood home of Brier Island. It had been thirty-five years since he left, and he’d forgotten how to navigate through the passage and “the worst tide-race in the Bay of Fundy.” He asked a fisherman for directions and realized in hindsight that he shouldn’t have paid attention, for the man was clearly not an islander: “He dodged a sea that slopped over the rail, and stopping to brush the water from his face, lost a fine cod which he was about to ship. My islander would not have done that. It is known that a Brier Islander, fish or no fish on his hook, never flinches from a sea.” Slocum got caught in the “fierce sou’west rip” and was glad to reach Westport. He felt reconnected to his home almost immediately, and stayed on Brier Island long enough to overhaul the Spray.

  As he worked, he again reconsidered the route he would take. Soon after, he wrote to Eugene Hardy to let him know where he planned to sail when he left on the next full tides: “I think Pernambuco will be my first landfall, leaving this. Then touching the principal ports on S.A. coast on through Magellan Straits where I hope to be in November. So many courses to be taken after that, I can onlly then go as sircumstance and my feelings dictate. My mind is deffinately fixed on one thing and that is to go round …” Hardy and the newspaper syndicate must have wondered just when his drive to do what his mind had “fixed on” would kick in.

  A month later, Slocum was still in his home province. After the Westport overhaul and a test run of the sou’west rip, Slocum made one more stop before sailing for open sea. In Yarmouth, on the southwest tip of Nova Scotia, Slocum loaded up on food and water. He also made an important purchase. He had been sailing without a chronometer, as his old one had been so long in disuse that bringing it up to scratch would have cost him fifteen dollars — an amount he found alarming. But he needed a chronometer aboard, as he explained in his typical tongue-in-cheek fashion: “In our newfangled notions of navigation it is supposed that a mariner cannot find his way without one; and I had myself drifted into this way of thinking.” Now, in Yarmouth, he found a cheap solution and bought his famous tin clock with the broken face. It was a good deal: “The price of it was a dollar and a half, but on account of the face being smashed the merchant let me have it for a dollar.” The tin alarm clock was to become a kind of running joke on the trip: to mask his true talents as a celestial navigator, Slocum used the gag of boiling his clock to keep it working.

  Before setting out on the Atlantic, Slocum figured he had better let his Boston agents know what he was up to. First he explained the delay, citing “an attack of malaria at Gloucester, from working at the Sloop on the beach there in a sickning ooze.” Then he announced a major change of plans that must have mystified Hardy and the people at Roberts Brothers: “After all deliberations and careful study of rout and the seasons, I think my best way is via the Suez canal, down the Read [sic] Sea and along the Coasts of India, in the winter months, calling at Aden and at Ceylon and Singapore taking the S.W. Monsoon next summer up the China Sea, calling at Hong Kong and other treaty ports in China thence to Japan and on to California From California I believe I shall cross the Isthmus of Panama The freight agent of the Panama road wrote me that I could not get over the isthmus — we’ll see!”

  On July 1, to the relief of his agent, Slocum finally “let go of my last hold on America.” After eighteen days’ sailing he reached the Azores. It was three months since he had set out on his world voyage. From Horta, on the island of Faial, he wrote to Hardy: “[I have] been trying to scribble a few lines for the newspapers but find it almost impossible to do or to think.” In Gibraltar, Slocum was informed that the Mediterranean was unsafe and that he would have to cross the Atlantic again. Forty days’ sailing brought Slocum to Pernambuco, in Brazil, where he wrote an anxious letter to Hardy. The Boston Globe had published three of his travel letters, but Slocum was unable to provide the newspapers with the regular, exciting copy they needed. What copy he did send contained dubious grammar and atrocious spelling and wasn’t spectacular enough to entice readers. The Globe was his most important customer, and Slocum, now six months into his circumnavigation, could no longer implore them to be patient. He must have realized his syndicate days were numbered: “I send one more letter I dare not look it over If it is not interesting, I can not be interesting stirred up from the bottom of my soul … It was the voyage I thought of and not me. No sailor has ever done what [I] have done. I thank you sincerely for giving my son the money.”

  The journalistic venture was to founder quickly. In the fall he wrote Hardy another letter in which he said he had been obliged to sell some of the library he had been given simply to keep himself solvent. It was the last letter Hardy would receive from him. Giving up the syndicate gave Slocum back a sailor’s freedom to simply roam — to live each day in the rhythm of the voyage.

  In many ways a sailor is like an actor: if he’s been in the business a long time, he can improvise just about anything. He makes it look easy, but there are years of solid training and practical experience behind his moves. He works with few props, knowing for each given scene what will spell success or disaster. The sailor’s stage is ever changing, and he learns how to conduct himself against sunny, tranquil and stormy backgrounds. He learns to hear the cues, to trust his gut, to respond to each moment as it is given. His work on the ocean captures the joy, the tragedy, the humor, and the ordinary and the extraordinary experiences of life as it is lived in the moment.

  Slocum’s mind had been formed by years of ocean living. He was astute at reading the winds and currents. He could anticipate what would happen if the wind should fail or the current went against him. With his quick mind and sharp instincts, he was able to maintain a safe position while anticipating all eventualities. He understood that sailing was a free-form dance of boat, sail, wind and water. “A navigator husbands the wind” was how Slocum saw it.

  The old captain went about his nautical tasks with grace, certainty and accuracy. He knew every inch of his boat. She was part of the internal cal
culations he made with every move on deck or up the rigging. He had the gift of being able to gauge which way to jump to grab the right rope, and of knowing precisely what to do at the right moment.

  Slocum knew that the sea is completely impartial. It doesn’t care who or what sails over it. It makes no distinctions, and there is nothing personal in its actions. If it wants to make steep, thirty-foot waves and break them down on a boat, it will do just that. All a sailor can do is react with what he knows. He reefs his sails and keeps his hatches tight. He sails as hard as he can. Once he makes his pact with the sea, there is no negotiation. Off the coast of Samoa, Slocum put his skills to work with an uncompromising sea: “The Spray had barely cleared the island when a sudden burst of the trades brought her down to close reefs, and she reeled off one hundred and eighty-four miles the first day, of which I counted forty miles of current in her favor. Finding a rough sea, I swung her off free and sailed north of the Horn Islands, also north of Fiji instead of south, as I had intended, and coasted down the west side of the archipelago.”

  There was hardly any buffer between Slocum, his vessel and the elements. He absorbed all her movements. At every moment he knew whether she was on course. He always listened to how the Spray “talked” to him; she spoke to him in creaks and flapping sails, and he was always listening, and acting on what she was telling him. Early on in the voyage, he had had to poke about in her workings to discover her problems, but later on he probably just knew what needed greasing or tightening up, and what needed to be repaired or replaced. She let him know when she was overtaxed and tired, and he knew enough to respect her limits.