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

by Spencer, Ann

  Just as the captain was starting to breathe easy, he found himself back in the Cockburn Channel, whose waters would lead him back into the Strait of Magellan. It is no surprise he had gotten confused. Because of all the yawing and pitching, his measurements with the sextant had gone awry. He was determined not to return to Punta Arenas for repairs, and at the first small stretch of quiet, he set to work mending his ripped sail with scavenged bits of canvas.

  Moving through the Cockburn Channel meant few anchorages, plenty of opportunities to get trapped, and tacking through narrow passages with adverse currents. Perhaps the most taxing aspect of this passage was that it offered little in the way of rest or sleeping time. His only relief came in the lee of a mountain or in a snug cove or inlet. He had to stay alert for hours on end and retain the stamina and the smarts to react wisely. He sailed through a gale and a snowstorm en route to Port Angosto. Having reached it, he had great difficulty leaving it. Finally, on April 13, 1896, on his seventh try, he put to sea and was able to sail free of Tierra del Fuego. He stayed at the helm the whole time, “humoring my vessel.” A final wave broke over the sloop; it would be the last of the treacherous Cape Horn waters to hit the Spray’s deck. Slocum speculated optimistically, “All my troubles were now astern; summer was ahead; all the world was again before me.”

  Still in dismal fog I felt myself drifting into loneliness, an insect on a straw in the midst of the elements. I lashed the helm, and my vessel held her course, and while she sailed I slept.

  During these days a feeling of awe crept over me. My memory worked with startling power. The ominous, the insignificant, the great, the small, the wonderful, the commonplace — all appeared before my mental vision in magical succession. Pages of my history were recalled which had been so long forgotten that they seemed to belong to a previous existence. I heard all the voices of the past laughing, crying, telling what I had heard them tell in many corners of the earth.

  The loneliness of my state wore off when the gale was high and I found much work to do. When fine weather returned, then came the sense of solitude, which I could not shake off.

  — J.S., Sailing Alone

  8

  Walden at Sea: A Solitude Supreme

  Even when I slept I dreamed that I was alone.

  J.S., Sailing Alone

  For all the exhilarating moments fed by the sheer adrenalin rush of adventure and life-threatening danger, there was a constant and more grueling aspect to Joshua Slocum’s voyage: the stark reality of solitude. For more than three years Slocum sailed over the earth’s waters by himself. The paradox of a sailor’s life is that he lives out his freedom within the confines of a very small space. Slocum’s world was thirty-seven feet long and held no form of companionship. His circumnavigation was a journey into unimaginable solitude and was filled with the psychological perils that arise from such an experience. Early on in the voyage Slocum got a stiff glimpse of the intense loneliness of his undertaking and of the personal demons that surface during prolonged solitude.

  Although Slocum eventually came to embrace what he called his “solitude supreme,” he had first to sail through the fearful isolation that came soon after he left Nova Scotia behind and entered the Atlantic. Slocum wrote of his final farewell to the land, “I watched light after light sink astern as I sailed into the unbounded sea, till Sambro, the last of [the beacons] was below the horizon.” On his first solo day, Slocum found himself enveloped by fog so thick “one could almost ‘stand on it.’” It was as if his loneliness had been made visible as the thick fog “lowered over the sea like a pall. I was in a world of fog, shut off from the universe.” He knew the whole sea was ahead of him, but for the time being he could only hear and imagine the ocean beyond. He and the Spray were one small speck on an all-encompassing sea, invisible to the rest of the world. Slocum pondered his invisibility with a growing awareness of his insignificance in the universe: “In the dismal fog I felt myself drifting into loneliness, an insect on a straw in the midst of the elements.”

  He triumphed on this voyage’s first test of emotional stamina, and later reflected, “The acute pain of solitude experienced at first never returned. I had penetrated a mystery, and, by the way, I had sailed through a fog. I had met Neptune in his wrath, but he found that I had not treated him with contempt, and so he suffered me to go on and explore.” Although his loneliness lifted with the fog during that first week on the water, it would return later at intervals throughout the voyage. Often when he had left good company in port, he faced a small battle to readjust to his solitary life. Samoa was one of his most pleasant stopovers, and on leaving the island he was brought face to face with his isolation. During his stay he had been lulled into that island’s tropical rhythms and ease of life: “While the days go thus in these Southern islands we at the North are struggling for the bare necessities of life.” He had enjoyed a camaraderie with the Samoans, and of that departure he wrote that a “sense of loneliness seized upon me as the islands faded astern.” Although he may have felt a twinge of homesickness for this island paradise, the truth was that Slocum had no place to call home. No strong ties pulled him anywhere or hurried him on his way. His only home was on his boat, wherever it sailed and whatever conditions it faced.

  Slocum was also reminded of his solitude by the isolated and barren spots he sailed past. On seeing a light beaming from a hill in Port Tamar on the Strait of Magellan, he mused on what that remote island beacon signified. Speculating that someone had actually lived on that godforsaken spot, he asked, “How could one tell but that he had died of loneliness and grief? In a bleak land is not the place to enjoy solitude.” In moments of profound isolation, a sailor fears that everyone has forgotten about him, and that if anything were to happen to him out on the water, no one would ever know. The possibility of becoming ill or being injured far out to sea arouses anxiety in any sailor. But once the fog lifted, Slocum would begin to exult in his solitude. “All distracting uneasiness and excitement being now over, I was once more alone with myself in the realization that I was on the mighty sea and in the hands of the elements. But I was happy, and was becoming more and more interested in the voyage.”

  Having confronted his insignificance, Slocum was free to appreciate, without self-pity, the marvels that surrounded him. For great stretches of time, Slocum saw only water and sky. His world for the most part was a palette of blues with touches of white and grey. In every direction at all times, he was exposed to the horizon. He had his cabin for relief, but spent most of his time in the open air. “Then was the time to uncover my head, for I sailed alone with God. The vast ocean was again around me, and the horizon was unbroken by land.”

  Slocum sailed through a world in which the potential for wonder was constant. At every turn he was exposed to the elements. His senses were finely attuned to the clouds, the waves and whatever might move through the water. Astronomical and meteorological events that most people would not notice were played out before him. The sky encircled him. Nights could bring light shows: shooting stars trailing through the sky, mirrored in and then vanishing into the water. A lightning bolt would be hurled into the distant sea, and he could only imagine what besides his small boat could be its target. A light rain might bring with it a vaulting rainbow, giving the Spray a prism to sail through until it came to the rainbow’s end.

  On the open sea, sailors often encounter strange phenomena. It is these sightings that fuel tales of the supernatural — of burning phantom ships and mystical green flashes. The phosphorescence created by microscopic phytoplankton, which begin to glow when the water is agitated, resembles a fire in the crashing waves. To sailors, a porpoise swimming through this fire often looks like an alien being, like a glowing apparition trailing streaks of sparks. Slocum came upon this spectacular sight and was moved to write, “For days she sailed in water milky white and green and purple. It was my good fortune to enter the sea on the last quarter of the moon, the advantage being that in the dark nights I witnessed the phos
phorescent light effect at night in its greatest splendor. The sea, where the sloop disturbed it, seemed all ablaze, so that by its light I could see the smallest articles on deck, and her wake was a path of fire.”

  After weeks in this world of wonders, a sailor’s grip on reality can start to loosen. Size becomes difficult to judge, and weird optical illusions abound. Slocum wrote about his frequent problems with seeing things: “The weather became fine and the sea smooth and life tranquil. The phenomenon of mirage frequently occurred. An albatross sitting on the water one day loomed up like a large ship; two fur-seals asleep on the surface of the sea appeared like great whales, and a bank of haze I could have sworn was high land. The kaleidoscope then changed, and on the following day I sailed in a world peopled by dwarfs.”

  Slocum came to realize that he could not trust his eyes in this world, where whales could look like steep breakers, and where real waves rising up in a fog could look like huge steamers making straight for his boat. When Slocum ran the Spray ashore on a Uruguayan beach, the accident was an abrupt and humbling reminder not to trust his eyes: “The false appearance of the sand-hills under a bright moon had deceived me, and I lamented now that I had trusted to appearances at all.”

  As he sailed alone through nights as black as hell, Slocum communed with those who had sailed the same seas centuries before him. His mind turned to Columbus on the Santa Maria. He looked on these ghosts from the past as fellow sailors traveling with him in spirit. At one point he came to the head of a cove, which appeared to him as “a sort of Calvary … where navigators, carrying their cross, had each set one up as a beacon to others coming after. They had anchored here and gone on … I read the other names of many other vessels; some of them I copied in my journal, others were illegible. Many of the crosses had decayed and fallen, and many a hand now still. The air of depression was about the place, and I hurried back to the sloop to forget myself again in the voyage.”

  His reading Washington Irving’s Life of Columbus may have led to one ghostly encounter on the Spray. It happened early, as he crossed the Atlantic heading to Gibraltar. Slocum had just left the island of Faial in the Azores, and made a supper from the Pico cheese and plums he had been given as gifts. That night found him sick and wretched in his cabin, bent over with painful cramps and delirious with fever. At one point he looked out the companionway, concerned about how the Spray was managing on her own. To his amazement, he saw a tall, ethereal form at the helm. Slocum thought the apparition was a pirate, as he was dressed like a foreign sailor with a “large red cap … cockbilled over his left ear, all was set off with shaggy black whiskers.” Slocum feared for his life, and the stranger seemed to sense it. The man told him he was “never worse than a contrabandista,” and identified himself as Martin Alonso Pinzòn, the pilot of Columbus’s ship the Pinta. As he steered, he yelled into the wind, “Yonder is the Pinta ahead; we must overtake her. Give her sail! Vale, vale, muy vale!” He chanted a wild sea ditty about roaring tempests, fierce waves and screaming seabirds, and didn’t vanish until he gave Slocum a word of advice to prevent future “pains and calentura,” as he diagnosed the seadog’s stomach cramps. He told Slocum, “You did wrong, captain, to mix cheese with plums. White cheese is never safe unless you know whence it comes.” When he regained consciousness, Slocum dumped the plums into the sea.

  The Pinta’s commander, or whoever or whatever had steered the Spray that night, was just one of Slocum’s fellow travelers. Slocum looked for companions wherever they might appear. Early in the voyage he welcomed into his circle of friends the “smiling full moon” sitting at the end of his bowsprit. He confided that “many long talks since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage.” Throughout, he took delight in these interactions with nature. Making his way to Samoa, he reveled that “there was no end of companionship; the very coral reefs kept me company, or gave me no time to feel lonely, which is the same thing.” Sometimes his encounters were startling. A great whale swam directly underneath the Spray as the boat sailed from Juan Fernández to Samoa, and Slocum bolted up on deck. He was greeted by a snort, great turbulence and a thorough drenching as the whale spouted.

  Visitors from the animal kingdom also lived for a time aboard the Spray. Along with a cantankerous goat, which he marooned after one thousand miles of tedious travel, Slocum sheltered smaller, more cooperative stowaways. From the voyage’s beginning there had been, as Slocum dubbed them, “the spider and his wife, from Boston.” He observed later that their offspring had become part of the cruise. Slocum brought a Tierra del Fuego spider on board for the family to meet. The consequences for this visitor were disastrous: “In my cabin it met, oddly enough, a spider of its own size and species that had come all the way from Boston — a very civil little chap, too, but mighty spry. Well, the Fuegian threw up its antennae for a fight; but my little Bostonian downed it at once, then broke its legs, and pulled them off, one by one, so dexterously that in less than three minutes from the time the battle began the Fuegian spider didn’t know itself from a fly.”

  But Slocum’s closest and most constant companion throughout his voyage was the Spray herself. He had given her shape and made her a thing of beauty, at least to his eyes. At times he seemed to treat the Spray as a living, breathing entity. He respected her part in his grand undertaking and considered her needs along the way. At Mauritius he paused and found a moment, “where I drew a long breath, the Spray rested her wings, it being the season of fine weather.” To him, the Spray had a unique personality, and he knew her every eccentricity. He wrote about his boat as if she had a mind of her own. And always he captured Spray’s spirited moments with fondness and humor. “When I found myself, for instance, disentangling the sloop’s mast from the branches of a tree after she had drifted three times around a small island, against my will, it seemed more than one’s nerves could bear, and I had to speak about it, so I thought, or die of lockjaw, and I apostrophized the Spray as an impatient farmer might his horse or ox. ‘Didn’t you know,’ cried I — ‘didn’t you know that you couldn’t climb a tree?’” Then he reflected on what she had just come through making her way in the Strait of Magellan, and compassion overcame him: “Moreover, she had discovered an island. On the charts this one that she had sailed around was traced as a point of land.”

  Besides conversing with the Spray, the man in the moon, Neptune and various ghosts and sea creatures, Slocum shouted orders to imaginary crew and belted shanties and hymns into the salt winds. He had been warned before leaving that he could lose his voice from misuse. At first he talked incessantly, crying out “Eight bells,” but that grew wearisome, and he probably saw the threat to his sanity in this approach to preserving his vocal cords. He also noted that his speaking voice “sounded hollow in the empty air, and I dropped the practice. However, it was not long before the thought came to me that when I was a lad I used to sing; why not try that now, where it would disturb no one? My musical talent had never bred envy in others, but out on the Atlantic, to realize what it meant, you should have heard me sing.” Slocum fancied that porpoises leaped when “[I] pitched my voice for the waves and the sea and all that was in it.” Choruses of old music hall tunes charmed old turtles out of their shells. “The porpoises were, on the whole, vastly more appreciative than the turtles; they jumped a deal higher. One day when I was humming a favorite chant, I think it was ‘Babylon’s a Fallin’,’ a porpoise jumped higher than the bowsprit. Had the Spray been going a little faster she would have scooped him in. The sea-birds sailed around rather shy.”

  Slocum’s accounts of many of his solitary experiences show a strong gift for whimsy. He mixed his adventurous pioneering spirit with a good dose of lighthearted play. He had some fun in his role as explorer of new territories. He named the Spray’s newly discovered island in the Strait of Magellan Alan Erric Island, “after a worthy literary friend whom I had met in strange by-places, and I put up a sign, ‘Keep off the grass’, which, as discoverer, was within my r
ights.” Earlier in his adventures near the storm-lashed Horn he had sought shelter at midnight in the lee of an island. There he prepared a well-deserved cup of coffee — a birthday present to himself on the day he turned fifty-two. The drink was such a boost to his spirits after a day of beating heavy squalls and sailing against the current that he named the soulful shelter Coffee Island.

  Though a practical man, Slocum heard poetry in the waves that lapped around his boat, referring to them whimsically as “gossiping waves,” and he fancied that they “doffed their white caps beautifully.” He yearned for the romantic, unhurried era of sailing. He recalled the good old days when ships stopped in ports for a “gam,” or chat, with the locals, and fired their guns as a salute upon parting, and he bemoaned the changes in sea etiquette: “There are no poetry-enshrined freighters on the sea now; it is a prosy life when we have no time to bid one another good morning.”

  Passing boats and storms brought home the practical realities and quickly tamed his solitary flights of fancy. He had only to feel the salt spray smart in his eyes after hours of sailing through screaming gales. With no one on board to relieve him during stormy spells, Slocum knew all about the strange states of mind that come after uninterrupted hours at the helm. He had a rare stamina, and during one storm off the Horn, he stayed at the helm for thirty hours. Sometimes he continued sailing hours after his body and mind had been driven to a state beyond tiredness. His body worked automatically, registering and responding to the hiss of each wave: Was this the one that would break over the boat? He knew what extremes of exertion were required for solo sailing, and what it was like to deprive himself of sleep. He fought to stay awake by any means he could find: a reviving splash of water, a mouthful of pilot bread, a song to belt out. No doubt he often entered the next level of exhaustion, the moment when fatigue lifts and a sailor feels as if he could continue sailing for days. At this point he is functioning like a machine, and it often takes a sudden emergency to shake off any illusions of invincibility. He must then take stock and find a way to master his exhaustion. He must keep sailing.