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

by Spencer, Ann

  Having saved the Spray, he turned his mind quickly back to matters of self-defense. He raced below to his cabin and grabbed his loaded Martini-Henry, assuming the pirates were almost ready to board. Back on deck, he watched a frantic spectacle: the pirates were not only much farther off but also completely out of the race. The elements had neutralized their blood-hungry greed. Instead of pillaging, they were scrambling to stay afloat in a dismasted boat: “I perceived [the] thieving crew, some dozen or more of them, struggling to recover their rigging from the sea.” Slocum later noted sardonically, “Needless to say I did not stop to help them.” He found a certain amount of justice in this moment. This first pirate adventure, and the quick repair of his broken boom, left the captain “too fatigued to sleep.”

  Slocum would have other perilous encounters with the wild side of humanity when he sailed through the Strait of Magellan. But before he entered those hazardous waters, he had his share of threatening moments in seas farther to the north. One night he found himself tossing miserably for hours and felt “heartsore of choppy seas.” Slocum may have been a pragmatic sailor, but he maintained an optimism and a clear vision of his goal: “I will not say that I expected all fine sailing on the course for Cape Horn direct, but while I worked at the sails and rigging I thought only of onward and forward.” At the same time, however, he noted that “where the sloop avoided one danger she encountered another.”

  He later confessed that one of the dangers had been avoidable and that it was his own error that had got him into trouble. He misjudged the distance to the Uruguayan coast, and December 11, 1895 found the Spray beached. Slocum surveyed the situation and determined his sloop to be hard and fast ashore. Next he looked out to sea and noted that a strong swell was running. To get his boat back in the water, he devised a plan that involved taking his small auxilliary anchor, the kedge, and attaching a light line to it. With one end of the line made fast to the Spray, he rowed out in his sawed-off dory until the line was taut, and then dropped the kedge anchor. But the tide was falling, and the Spray could not be budged. He resorted to a second strategy, and here is where he really got himself into trouble. This time he went out with his heaviest anchor, which weighed 180 pounds. The weight of the anchor and its cable swamped his little dory immediately, and Slocum quickly jumped out before he reached deep water. He then cut the cable in half and got back in the dory. He rowed out farther, but the dory was leaking and sinking fast, so he raised the anchor over his head and tossed it clear of the boat. At the same moment, the dory rolled over. Slocum could only hold on for his life. As the captain later told the story, it was while he was clinging to the gunwale that he suddenly remembered he could not swim. Three times he tried to right the dory and each time she rolled completely around. Slocum was seized by the determination not to give those who had scoffed at him the opportunity for a posthumous “I told you so.” On the fourth try, he righted the dory and hauled himself back on board, with the help of a well-placed oar.

  Back on the beach, after securing the two parts of his cable, he let himself collapse on the warm sand for a rest while he waited on the tide. At the sound of horse’s hooves on the sand, Slocum opened an eye and saw a young boy looking over the Spray as if he had just found buried treasure. The young fellow attempted to move the sloop by tying it to his horse to haul, but failed as dismally as Slocum had with his kedge. The boy still hadn’t seen the old seadog watching him. The interloper gave up the idea of towing the Spray and instead eyed the dory. At this point, Slocum made his presence known, telling the boy that he and his ship had come from the moon to take back a cargo of boys. His jest was perhaps taken seriously, for the boy whirled his lariat and tried to rope the captain. This made yet another tall tale for Slocum to tell later.

  A great moment of high seas adventure was waiting over the horizon — one that would show off Slocum’s expert seamanship and quick thinking. It came just over a month later, at the end of January 1896. Slocum was sailing cautiously down the treacherous Patagonian coast. In choppy waters, he looked out to sea and saw a huge wave heading toward him. From years of sailing in every kind of sea imaginable, he had learned to read the patterns and intervals between waves. Now and again those rhythms can synchronize to create one horrendous, monumental wave. And that was what was coming straight for the Spray. Slocum knew what he had to do, and fast: “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.” Because the sails were down, the Spray presented no surface for the massive wave to strike. Had it hit canvas, the sloop would probably have rolled over and been lost, for she did not have a self-righting hull. To be able to react perfectly in the moment and arrive at the only workable solution to a serious threat must have been satisfying to Slocum. He still had what it took to survive in tempestuous seas, and sailing south toward the Horn, he would need every ounce of his skill.

  On February 14, 1896, having entered the Strait of Magellan, he arrived at the Chilean port of Punta Arenas. This part of the voyage provided him with a taste of the dangers that he would be facing for the next two months. The seas beyond the southern tip of South America are the only part of the planet where the ocean goes all the way around the earth along a constant line of latitude without running into a land mass. Slocum described the effect: “At this point where the tides from the Atlantic and the Pacific meet, and in the strait, as on the outside coast, their meeting makes a commotion of whirlpools and combers that in a gale of wind is dangerous to canoes and other frail craft.” Slocum was able to wax poetic over the ancient power of the Horn, the place where “the waves rose and fell and bellowed their never-ending-story of the sea.”

  While resupplying himself in port, Slocum got a sense of what other dangers might be lurking in those waters. He observed the Patagonian and Fuegian natives and felt that they were “as squalid as contact with unscrupulous traders could make them.” He blamed their degraded state on the unlawful sale of “fire-water,” which he thought was “poisonous stuff to the natives.” At the customhouse, Slocum learned there was serious trouble brewing. Just before Slocum arrived in Punta Arenas, the governor had ordered an attack on a Fuegian settlement, as a swift sign of retribution for the natives’ massacre of a schooner’s crew. In light of the potentially explosive situation, the port captain strongly advised Slocum to take on a small crew while he sailed through the strait. But the feisty Captain Slocum had pledged himself to a solo voyage and would have none of it — he would not even consider having a watchdog on board. An Austrian captain presented the Yankee sailor with a bag of carpet tacks. Captain Pedro Samblich was a cryptic sort, and when Slocum protested that he had no use for this bizarre gift, Samblich told him bluntly, “You must use them with discretion, that is to say, don’t step on them yourself.” Slocum would later reflect that Samblich’s gift was “worth more than all the fighting men and dogs of Tierro del Fuego.”

  He did, however, sail with loaded guns and rifles, mindful of the port captain’s advice to shoot at the first sign of trouble, but to try not to kill any Fuegians in doing so. Slocum was worried, and later reflected, “It was not without thoughts of strange and stirring adventure beyond all I had yet encountered that I now sailed into the country and very core of the savage Fuegians.” In Fortescue Bay he saw his first signs of trouble: native signal fires burning all around him. He anchored in a bed of kelp for two and a half days to wait out a heavy gale. On sailing out, he noticed he was not alone — canoes manned by “savages” were gaining on the Spray, but this time it was not to terrorize. They yelled out to Slocum the word “yammerschooner,” which, he thought, was their term for begging. His reply to them was negative. What worried Slocum was the opportunity the encounter had given the Fuegians to study his situation. He could not afford to let them know he was sailing alone, and his mercurial mind arrived at an ingenious solution. He ran “into the cabin, and passing through the ho
ld, came out at the forecastle changing my clothes as I went along. That made two men.” He also fashioned a crude marionette from a sawed off piece of bowsprit, dressed it as a seaman, stuffed it on the lookout, and attached lines, so that he could manipulate the puppet as needed. Three on board was the message the Fuegians would get. However, this did not deter them. Slocum fired his first shot when the nearest canoe was about eighty yards from his boat. The incursion ended, but only for a moment. He fired a second shot close enough to one of the paddlers that they would think he had been aiming for him. The Fuegians took off for an island, leaving Slocum to write, “So much for the first day of savages.”

  On those days on the strait when he was forced to take shelter from storms and gales, Slocum was alert: “I reasoned that I had all about me the greatest danger of the whole voyage — the treachery of cunning savages.” When he collected firewood, he carried his rifle, and always chose shores that seemed to be free of natives. He read the signs of the land as he did those at sea. The presence of birds and seals on the rocks gave him some assurance there were no cruel men about, but he was determined never to be surprised.

  Early March found him in the Cockburn Channel, with time to reflect on the nautical excitement of the preceding days. He anchored on March 8 off Thieves Bay, where he was unable to shake the tormenting feeling that he was not alone. Even after a hot and comforting meal, he felt uneasy about giving in to his physical exhaustion. Perhaps it was his stew, made from venison that Captain Samblich had given him, that reminded him of the good Austrian’s other gift. Before allowing himself to fall asleep, Slocum sprinkled the carpet tacks over the Spray’s deck. He minded where he set foot, as the tacks were standing “business end” up. Around midnight, Slocum was jolted from his sleep by a cacophony of wild howls, “like a pack of hounds.” The Fuegians had tried to sneak aboard in the dark; being barefoot, they had gotten the point (literally) that they were unwelcome aboard the Spray. Slocum looked up through the companionway to witness a frantic sight: “They jumped pell-mell, some into their canoes and some into the sea, to cool off, I suppose, and there was a deal of free language over it as they went.” Slocum added to the spectacle by coming up on deck and firing his guns. Another calamity was averted, but the captain knew that unless he moved on, retaliation was only a matter of time.

  Slocum would have yet another round with the Fuegians, just off Port Angosto. Working on the deck, he was spooked by the sound of something zipping through the air. He looked up to see an arrow sticking in the Spray’s mainmast, not far from where he was working. Slocum started firing to smoke the natives out of hiding. There were three of them, and Slocum aimed under their feet as they ran, to encourage their hasty retreat. They would never return, but while Slocum stayed in those waters he never slept without a liberal sprinkling of carpet tacks above him on deck. As for the arrow, he dubbed it “a Fuegian autograph.” Once fairer weather arrived, he sailed away from the treacherous scene, noting that “had I been given to superstitious fears I should not have persisted in sailing on a thirteenth day.”

  Slocum recounted in Sailing Alone Around the World that he survived several other bizarre encounters with the hostile natives of Tierra del Fuego. At one point they appeared in what was obviously a stolen boat. Two of them stood up defiantly, and Slocum noticed that they were wearing sea boots. Quickly he pieced together the murderous story: not only had they attacked and pillaged a ship passing through the strait but they were warning Slocum that his carpet tacks were now useless as a means of defense. The captain was becoming unnerved. When he noticed natives armed with bows and spears hiding among the bushes on shore, he began working furiously to free the Spray from the mass of kelp her anchor had become tangled in. He worked until his fingers bled, in the hope of making a quick getaway from lurking native treachery. All the while he kept “one eye over my shoulders for savages. I watched at the same time, and sent a bullet whistling whenever I saw a limb or a twig move.”

  On another occasion he recognized one of the members of the boat party. It was none other than Black Pedro, the leader of many of the bloody massacres reported and a man, Slocum wrote, who was considered to be “the worst murderer in Tierra del Fuego.” Officials had been hunting him down for over two years. Slocum was to meet the unscrupulous leader face to face during the days he was stuck in the strait. Throughout that encounter Slocum would keep his gun ready in hand.

  Slocum may have embellished his tales of the native Fuegians; but the stories he told of his incredible seamanship through the waters off the tip of South America were, if anything, modest and self-effacing. He was blown back into the Strait of Magellan; for over two months he battled elemental forces. When the Spray first entered the Strait of Magellan on February 11, 1896, her captain would already have known full well that extreme weather was the norm in that desolate region. Squalls, gales and downpours were constant, and any wind not much over thirty knots was considered moderate. Even without a horrendous squall, the days could be tough going, and Slocum had to be ready at any time to shorten sail. He immediately observed the unruly nature of the waters he was about to venture through. He caught sight of two tide races and calculated that the Spray’s best hope was to charge through the channel between, under close-reefed sails. The tactic paid off. On a rare day when the sailing was smoother, he had almost relaxed when he spotted a steamer wrecked on a beach. He took the sight of it as a stern word of warning, and in fact he was not to be let off easy. During an especially bad rain squall, he found that all he could do was reef sail, and sit below in the Spray’s cabin to rest his eyes and wait out the conditions. “I was so strongly impressed with what in all nature I might expect that as I dozed the very air I breathed seemed to warn me of danger. My senses heard ‘Spray, ahoy!’ shouted in warning.”

  What he saw in the pitch-black of night was a white arch, which he gleaned immediately was “the terror of Cape Horn.” What gave the experienced captain such a start was that he was nearing it at alarming speed, driven forward on a strong southwest gale. Without hesitation he downed sail to reduce the chances of catastrophe when the gale struck full force. For Slocum, who had sailed through many a wild gale, the first half-hour of this storm was an almighty blow, one to be long remembered. Diminished but wild winds nonetheless continued blowing for well over a day. Slocum fought to keep the Spray from being blown back, and was relieved when he cleared the narrows three days later.

  But as he left Punta Arenas, he was barely off on his second leg of the trip through the strait when he met up with williwaws, which he described as “compressed gales of wind that Boreas handed down over the hills in chunks.” These fearsome winds arise when cold descending air masses follow the elevated coastal topography and then hurl themselves out to sea. These extremely strong gusts off the land are challenging for even highly experienced seamen, and Slocum knew their awesome power: “A full-blown williwaw will throw a ship, even without sail on, over her beam ends.” He rested from their numbing blows whenever he could. Finally he anchored at Port Tamar and looked out on Cape Pillar. Although he thought of Cape Pillar as “the grim sentinel of the Horn,” he also perceived it as a sign that he would soon be clear of the strait. He mused, “Here I felt the throb of the great ocean that lay before me. I knew now that I had put a world behind me, and that I was opening out another world ahead.” It was only early March, and he was to be in a furious limbo for another six weeks in this hellish four-hundred-mile passage.

  As he neared Cape Pillar in the heavy rains, Slocum remained optimistic. The Spray even got her first “bath” in Pacific Ocean water, from seas tossed up in the building storm. He responded to the moment and fought to keep his boat sailing before the colossal winds. He crowded on sail, but there was a sudden shift from southwest back to northeast. Now the fierce winds demanded that Slocum sail with bare pole — a testimony to their terrifying force. The boat was at the complete mercy of the wind. Simply by pushing on the cabin, the hull and the exposed masts, it was driv
ing the Spray at top speed. For good reason, Slocum was afraid of the waves crashing sideways down on the deck, with their potential to roll the sloop over and break its masts. Far worse even than this was the possibility that he might “pitch pole” — that is, that the Spray might go down the face of a wave so fast that it turned over, stern over bow.

  Slocum resigned himself to turning eastward to keep ahead of the wind. This route was unsettling and unnerving, for he was now sailing in the direction he would take if he were intending to round Cape Horn. Four days of wind found the Spray nearing the pitch of the Horn. By this time the mainsail was so battered and Slocum so tired that he actually welcomed the prospect of re-entering the strait and working his way through again. Even at this distance from the Horn, the exposed coastal sailing was demanding. He went to sleep that night wondering exactly where his sloop was in these dangerous waters. When darkness descended he was still “feeling his way in pitchy darkness.” He was startled and puzzled by the sound of breakers where there shouldn’t have been any. He awoke the next morning to a frightening discovery: the Spray was making its way straight through the dreaded Milky Way of the Sea.

  During this treacherous passage, just to the northeast of Cape Horn, Slocum found himself engulfed by churning, furious seas crashing everywhere over slightly submerged rocks. These rocks have always been navigational hazards, for in the whipped-up foam of the Milky Way, it is unclear to sailors just where the jagged dangers lie. Slocum had read an account of this phenomenon by Charles Darwin, who had observed the fury of these seas from aboard the Beagle. “Any landsman seeing the Milky Way would have nightmares for a week,” Darwin had written. Slocum called his adventure through this maze of rocks and crashing seas “the greatest sea adventure of my life.” He was alone in horrendous weather, terrible visibility and the most treacherous of seas. He had no choice whatsoever except to keep on sailing till he was through the rocks. His face was bleeding from the assault of spray, hail and sleet, but he kept changing sail around the clock. He had set his sights on and steered for Fury Island. He simply kept going, and when he had made it, he could only wonder, “God knows how my vessel escaped.”