by Spencer, Ann
Slocum wrote of the strength and peace his hard-earned sailing knowledge gave him: “To know the laws that govern the winds, and to know that you know them, will give you an easy mind on your voyage round the world; otherwise you may tremble at the appearance of every cloud.”
But Slocum knew more than the science of the wind. He could read water and sky — a task that demanded more instinct than skill. On his boyhood island he hadn’t needed a wind to let him know a hurricane was happening out to sea. He even knew how many days out the storm was by the swell that struck the shore. Clouds, winds, smells and currents were his second language, and he thought in their terms all his life. Sailing just off the Keeling (Cocos) Islands, Slocum noted, “I saw antitrade clouds flying up from the southwest very high over the regular winds, which weakened now for a few days, while a swell heavier than usual set in also from the southwest. A winter gale was going on in the direction of the Cape of Good Hope. Accordingly, I steered higher to windward, allowing twenty miles a day while this went on, for change of current; and it was not too much, for on that course I made the Keeling Islands right ahead.”
Slocum knew how to navigate gingerly when he had to. He watched the weather carefully and made decisions as he went concerning what route he had to take to avoid storms and rough waters. Contemplating the Cape of Good Hope, which is notorious for its stormy weather, he wrote, “I wished for no winter gales now. It was not that I feared them more, being in the Spray instead of a large ship, but that I preferred fine weather in any case.”
Above all, Slocum believed in his good ship Spray. She wasn’t a sleek greyhound of a vessel that would slip through the water; instead, she was beamy and broad and comfortable. And in heavy seas a broad, buoyant vessel is ideal for sailors with plenty of time. She didn’t take green water on deck, so Slocum didn’t worry greatly about being washed overboard. And Spray was a forgiving ship. Because she could carry her press of sail in a heavy air, Slocum could not endanger himself by putting on too much sail. She was very stiff, and had a stable platform, so he didn’t face the difficulties that arise from excessive heeling. Spray was also easy on the helm. He was thrilled by one remarkable feature she possessed: she could self-steer. Without a good self-steering setup, Slocum would have had to heave to or just stop sailing when he was tired or needed to attend to other matters. Most vessels will balance to some extent, on certain points of sail, for a certain amount of time; what Slocum was talking about was a boat that he didn’t have to steer. He boasted that while most boats will steer close-hauled on the wind, the Spray could self-steer dead down wind, wind on the quarter, or whatever. She was perfectly balanced, so he claimed.
Self-steering is achieved mostly through sail balance. A sailor steers the boat against the water’s pressure on the rudder, usually countering the wind’s pressure on the sails with the movement of the rudder. With constant wind pressure, a constant angle for the rudder can be found. Self-steering is simply a matter of taking the beckets, or lines, to the spokes of the wheel and tying them to hold the wheel in exactly the position where the rudder is perfectly countering the force on the sail. If the rudder is held over too far, it will start to operate like a brake, so finding the optimum position is key. Slocum explained the secret of working his dependable old sloop: “It never took long to find the amount of helm, or angle of rudder, required to hold her on her course, and when that was found I lashed the wheel with it at that angle.”
Slocum made a fantastic claim concerning his passage from Thursday Island, off the north coast of Queensland, 2,700 miles to the Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean. He arrived in July 1897, just over the two-year mark in his journey. This leg of his trip was one of his finest stretches of sailing: “During those twenty-three days I had not spent altogether more than three hours at the helm, including the time occupied in beating into Keeling harbor. I just lashed the helm and let her go; whether the wind was abeam or dead aft, it was all the same: she always sailed on her course. No part of the voyage up to this point, taking it by and large, had been so finished as this.”
For Slocum, self-steering was not a luxury but rather a necessity, for it freed his hands for other business around the sloop. To other passing boats, the Spray must often have seemed like a ghost ship. While Slocum was below, tending to whatever needed doing, the Spray was able to sail along under full canvas with no sign that anyone was on board.
In fair winds, Slocum looked after routine domestic matters, acting as minion, messmate and chief cook and bottle washer. And because he was the captain, it was also he who called the orders. Slocum had some wry musings over his many hats aboard: “I found no fault with the cook, and it was the rule of the voyage that the cook found no fault with me. There was never a ship’s crew so well agreed.” He cooked on “a contrivance of my own, with a lamp to furnish the heat.” In Montevideo he refitted himself with a stove fashioned out of an oil drum with a chimney on it and a small opening to put in wood. Although he boasted of making curried venison stews, most of his meals were really variations on the theme of boiling water. He boiled water for tea. He made chowder from boiled potatoes and boiled fish. Dried salt cod was a staple of his diet. Occasionally he baked soda bread; otherwise, at least twice a week he ate the sea biscuits he had brought along. He did have his particulars when it came to getting meals on the table. “My way is to cook my victuals as near the meal hour as possible and not allow the food to lose much time between the stove and the table,” he told Good Housekeeping magazine. And he was a connoisseur when it came to making the perfect “at sea” cup of coffee: “Ground coffee isn’t worth as much by a great deal if you’ve let it stand for a day. Add your hot water and serve at once. You mustn’t boil it.” What he didn’t point out was how complicated — in fact dangerous — even a simple operation like pouring a cup of coffee can be on a boat that is rolling and lurching.
His diet varied by happenstance, and he often made a meal out of anything edible that floated by. Spotting a lolling sea turtle, he got out his harpoon and jabbed it in the neck. He had to work hard for his supper that night: “I had much difficulty in landing him on deck, which I finally accomplished by hooking the throat-halyards to one of the flippers, for he was as heavy as my boat … But the turtle-steak was good.” Roasted turtle is said to have the consistency of a good pork chop and a delicious taste more like meat than fish. While stranded in the Strait of Magellan, he found large quantities of mussels. Slocum ate the kind of fish he didn’t have to cast a line for: “The only fresh fish I had while on the open sea was flying fish that came aboard of their own accord. I was in tropical waters most of the time and had flying fish for breakfast pretty constantly — ah! such breakfasts as I used to have! Often I’d get up in the morning and find a dozen of those flying fish on the deck, and sometimes they’d get down the forescuttle right alongside the frying pan.”
Slocum had no worries about scurvy on the trip. At every stop along the way he was certain to find local fresh vegetables and fruit. The captain drank unsweetened condensed milk, and when he had eggs aboard he’d let them sit for a minute in boiling water, claiming that this technique “hermetically sealed the pores.” Slocum kept butter fresh by dipping it in brine and sealing it. He boasted that his pickled variety was “butter that will keep as long as you want.”
When Slocum wasn’t acting as ship’s cook, there was always some chore to command his attention. A boat has a way of letting a sailor know how well he’s doing his job. If the rig is looking tatty, it’s because he’s not keeping up with his work; if the boat is looking down in the heels, it’s because he’s not paying enough attention to her. A ship’s captain is not the master of the vessel, but her servant. Any sailor gains deep satisfaction from being aboard a well-founded vessel in good condition and knowing that he’s responsible for her soundness; and this was certainly true of Slocum.
In order to carry out solo maintenance of a thirty-seven-foot wooden boat with canvas sails, Slocum had to be adept in a wide range
of nautical skills. He had to be able to repair the rigging — to know how to do splicing and reeve off tackles. He had to be able to repair his own sails, and know exactly how strong to make their stress areas. Perhaps most importantly of all when it came to sail repairs, he had to be able to sew a uniform stitch so that the finished sail was smooth and even. His sail-making skills were well tested in the Strait of Magellan, after several weeks of storm damage: “I was determined to rely on my own small resources to repair the damages of the great gale which drove me southward toward the Horn, after I passed from the Strait of Magellan out into the Pacific.” Blown back into the strait, he “set to work with my palm and needle at every opportunity, when at anchor and when sailing. It was slow work; but little by little the squaresail on the boom expanded to the dimensions of a serviceable mainsail with a peak to it and a leech besides.” Slocum showed his satisfaction with a job well enough done, and not without some self-effacing humor concerning his handiwork. “If it was not the best-setting sail afloat, it was at least very strongly made and would stand a hard blow. A ship, meeting the Spray long afterward, reported her as wearing a mainsail of some improved design and patent reefer, but that was not the case.”
As a mechanic, Captain Slocum was on twenty-four-hour call. The situation often required whatever makeshift maneuver he was wily enough to envision at the time. Caught in a blustery snowstorm off Port Angosto, nearing Cape Horn, he put his skills to the test: “Between the storm-bursts I saw the headland of my port, and was steering for it when a flaw of wind caught the mainsail by the lee, jibed it over, and dear! dear! how nearly was this the cause of disaster; for the sheet parted and the boom unshipped, and it was then close upon night. I worked till the perspiration poured from my body to get things adjusted and in working order before dark, and, above all, to get it done before the sloop drove to leeward of the port of refuge. Even then I did not get the boom shipped in its saddle. I was at the entrance of the harbour before I could get this done, and it was time to haul her to or lose the port; but in that condition, like a bird with a broken wing, she made the haven.”
This haven gave Slocum a brief hiatus from wind and weather, and time to catch his breath. He tidied his cabin, lay in wood and water, and made a technical change in the Spray: “I … mended the sloop’s sails and rigging, and fitted a jigger, which changed the rig to a yawl, though I called the boat a sloop just the same, the jigger being merely a temporary affair.”
Slocum’s carpentry and shipwrighting skills came into play more than once on his three-year voyage. The water did its share of wear and tear on his beloved sloop. Besides repairing strategic parts of the rigging and caulking, he had to scrupulously maintain the hull below the water line. That vigilance was especially important in tropical waters, where he had to deal with barnacles, which threatened to coat the underside inches deep. In Tasmania he hauled out the Spray to check her “carefully top and bottom” for teredo, a destructive wood-devouring worm that can grow up to eight inches long. Another coat of copper paint was slapped on to further ensure that the wood would not be eaten away from under him.
Slocum made a number of adaptations on the voyage. At Buenos Aires he “unshipped the sloop’s mast … and shortened it by seven feet. I reduced the length of the bowsprit by about five feet, and even then I found it reaching far enough from home; and more than once when on the end of its reefing the jib, I regretted that I had not shortened it another foot.” Later, in Keeling (Cocos) Islands waters, he changed the boat’s ballast, replacing the three tons of cement ballast with mammoth tridacna shells.
The captain wasn’t always racing around deck. The Spray’s self-steering abilities afforded him the leisure to read in his cabin. “In the days of serene weather,” he later wrote, “there was not much to do but to read and take rest on the Spray, to make up as much as possible for the rough time off Cape Horn, which was not yet forgotten, and to forestall the Cape of Good Hope by a store of ease.”
Three previously unpublished photographs given to the author by Joshua Slocum’s great-granddaughters (Benjamin Aymar Slocum’s granddaughters), Carol Slocum Jimerson and Gale Slocum Hermanet.
Virginia Albertina (Walker) Slocum, taken in Manila, some time between 1875 and 1880
Victor Slocum, taken in China (circa 1875)
Benjamin Aymar Slocum, probably age six (circa 1880)
All other photographs courtesy Old Dartmouth Historical Society — New Bedford Whaling Museum
Captain Slocum and the Gilbert Islanders he rescued in the Pacific Ocean. Unknown Japanese photographer (1882)
The homemade “canoe” Liberdade in which Slocum sailed home from South America with his second wife, Hettie, and their two sons, Garfield and Victor. Unknown photographer (1889)
A watercolor by Charles Henry Gifford of the Spray as a derelict at Poverty Point, Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Informally titled “She wants some repairs” (1889)
A portrait of Slocum taken about the time he had just self-published Voyage of the Liberdade. Unknown photographer (circa 1890)
A rare photograph of the interior of the Spray’s cabin. Note the rudimentary navigational instruments that Slocum used on his voyages. Unknown photographer (circa 1900)
Spray moored at Gibraltar in August 1895. Slocum was on the first leg of his journey, before he decided to sail westward around the world. Ernest Lacy (1895)
Slocum aboard the Spray in South America, after sailing from Gibraltar through the doldrums and arriving in Pernambuco, Brazil. Unknown photographer (circa 1896)
An unusual photo of the Spray hauled out at Devonport, Tasmania. The bottom was coated with copper paint to protect it from damage by mollusks. Unknown photographer (1897)
Spray under sail in Australian waters. Slocum was into the second year of his circumnavigation of the globe, having spent Christmas 1896 in Melbourne. Unknown photographer (1897)
But where the sloop avoided one danger she encountered another. For one day, well off the Patagonian coast, 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 up on 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. Perhaps it was even less time than that … Not only did the past, with electric speed, flash before me, but I had time while in my hazardous position for resolutions for the future that would take a long time to fulfil.
— J.S., Sailing Alone
7
High Seas Adventures
For under great excitement, one lives fast
— J.S., Sailing Alone
From the moment he set out on his around-the-world voyage, Slocum knew that adventure awaited him over every horizon. “Take warning, Spray, and have a care,” he bellowed prophetically as he sailed his sloop out of Massachusetts Bay at the beginning of the voyage. It was not long before the Spray encountered her first sea adventure, when she was battered and tossed around in the temperamental tide rips off Brier Island. When Slocum arrived on his childhood island safe and sound, he showed that even an experienced seadog like himself was prone to superstitious thinking in nautical matters, “It was the 13th of the month, and 13 is my lucky number — a fact registered long before Dr. Nansen sailed in search of the north pole with his crew of thirteen.” Luck may have been with him, but there were to be many more challenging seas in which Slocum’s boat would be “whirled around like a top.” The old sailor expected and accepted these as an inevitable part of blue water sailing. He may have been less prepared for the adventures that arose not from weather and ocean but from other seafarers, among them pirates, brigands, cannibals and curious natives.
The firs
t unusual predicament came as he sailed west from Gibraltar in late August of 1895 after being forced to backtrack across the Atlantic, owing to the dangers of Mediterranean pirates. The irony of this change in route was evident immediately. Just out of Gibraltar, off the coast of Morocco, Slocum spied a felucca carrying pirates and thieves. It seemed to be in hot pursuit of the Spray, so the captain changed direction. The confirmation of his fears came swiftly: the felucca changed direction and remained in pursuit. By Slocum’s calculations, it was gaining on him. He wrote later that the ship came within a whisker of catching up to him: “I now saw the tufts of hair on the heads of the crew, — by which, it is said, Mohammed will pull the villains up into heaven, — and they were coming on like the wind.” They were such a fierce-looking crew that Slocum reckoned them to be “the sons of generations of pirates.” One glance at them and he knew they planned to do him harm. What happened next was like a gift from heaven. Slocum was stunned to see the felucca, with far too much sail on for the conditions, broach to on a wave. But Slocum had little time for their sudden setback to register: in an instant he was hit by the same wave. With the shudder of impact, one that “shook her in every timber,” the Spray’s mainboom broke at the rigging. Slocum turned his attention from outracing scoundrels to downing jib and mainsail. He later told a newspaper reporter, “You can just imagine that the one-man crew had to skip around pretty brisk to get the jib and mainsail secure.”