by Spencer, Ann
I soon found that my sailing-companion, this sort of dog with horns, had to be tied up entirely. The mistake I made was that I did not chain him to the mast instead of tying him with grass ropes less securely, and this I learned to my cost. Except for the first day, before the beast got his sea-legs on, I had no peace of mind. After that, actuated by a spirit born, maybe, of his pasturage, this incarnation of evil threatened to devour everything from flying-jib to stern-davits. He was the worst pirate I met on the whole voyage. He began depredations by eating my chart of the West Indies, in the cabin, one day, while I was about my work for’ard, thinking that the critter was securely tied on deck by the pumps. Alas! there was not a rope in the sloop proof against that goat’s awful teeth.
The ravenous goat ate the captain’s sea charts and his straw hat. According to Slocum, it was the latter misdemeanor that decided the creature’s fate. On the volcanic rock formed island of Ascension, he marooned the hapless creature to fend for itself.
Besides the goat, he brought the people of Ascension their mail from St. Helena. Slocum had neglected his own correspondence. He had lost touch with his home port and with the lives of his wife and four children. For Hettie, Ben, Victor, Garfield and Jessie, a long time between letters was not taken as a good sign. On August 24, 1897, the following report ran in the Providence Journal. It read like a death notice, even though the captain’s first name was given incorrectly.
PROBABLY LOST
Family of Capt. Josiah Slocum Relinquish all Hope
Captain Josiah Slocum, who sailed from Boston April 24, 1895, with the intent of circumnavigating the globe in a cockle-shell, is probably lost. His daughter, who lives in Attleboro, has heard nothing from him for some time, and it is believed that his little boat Spray has been overcome in an ocean storm. Captain Slocum kept those at home posted as to his movements and when the weeks and then months passed without word of any kind from him the fear became the belief that he was no more.
The story then advanced the idea that Captain Slocum was drowned during one of the terrible storms “for which the Southern seas are noted.”
At the time of this report, Slocum was moseying carefully around the South Seas, where he was charmed by the idyllic lifestyle and mused, “If there was a moment in my voyage when I could have given it up, it was there and then; but no vacancies for a better post being open, I weighed anchor April 16, 1897 and again put out to sea.”
Slocum had no idea he had been presumed dead and felt no homesickness for New England. His home was the Spray and he changed his course and his mind with the winds. As he told one newspaper reporter near the end of his voyage, “I have not yet decided whether to go west round Cape Leeuwin, or east through Torres Straits. In any case the course will probably be laid round the Cape of Good Hope, and home to Boston.”
Differing in many respects from the average deep-water sailor, the master of the Spray has an individuality all his own, born, perhaps of silent communion with nature, in the vast solitudes of the sea …
Tall, slight of build, with a deep-blue eye, so often characteristic of those who go down to the sea in ships; crisscross wrinkles encompassing them, as though decades of steady gazing into the faces of [the] suns had puckered the skin about the deep-set eye-sockets like well-tanned alligator hide; thin of face, with high brow rounding off into a head unencumbered by any burden of hair beyond a thin fringe about the edge of the dome, like a growth of sparse underbrush on the edge of the snow line of some lofty pinnacle; grayish brown beard, kept tolerably close cropped — for the captain is something of a stickler for his personal appearance under all conditions — these are physical characteristics that strike one at first glance.
— A reporter’s description of Captain
Slocum after his return
10
Booming Along Joyously for Home
I had a desire to return to the place of the very beginning.
— J.S., Sailing Alone
Christmas of 1897 found the Spray rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Slocum now had his mind set on the final leg of the voyage. He had been at sea for close to three years. There had been drama and adventure at many turns, and the six months of this final passage were to be every bit as eventful. In many ways this homeward leg was like the last movement of a symphony. Composer Igor Stravinsky described a symphonic finale as “a succession of impulses that converge toward a definite point of repose.” Slocum’s world voyage was moving steadily toward that point.
After returning from the Transvaal in mid-December, Slocum caught “a morning land-wind,” cleared the bar and headed straight for the next salient point of land, the Cape of Good Hope. Anticipating a rough sea, he reflected on the early Portuguese navigators who had faced the “Cape of Storms” before him, and who had struggled for sixty-nine years to sail around it. Slocum was philosophical about the conditions on that part of the ocean: “One gale was much the same as another, with no more serious result than to blow the Spray along on her course, when it was fair, or to blow her back somewhat when it was ahead.” It was in this same reticent tone that he related what happened to the Spray in those waters on Christmas Day: “The Spray was trying to stand on her head, and she gave me every reason to believe she might accomplish the feat before night.” Slocum had something of a baptism in these waters, being dunked three times while standing at the end of the bowsprit. He wasn’t pleased with his Christmas soaking. He kept company along part of the coastline with a steamer ship. He sailed past Cape Agulhas, into Simons Bay and around the Cape. Again his mind turned to sea lore, and he remembered that the Flying Dutchman was still thought to be sailing somewhere off the rugged coasts of the Cape.
Having rounded the Cape, Slocum was feeling optimistic: “The voyage then seemed as good as finished; from this time on I knew that all, or nearly all, would be plain sailing.” Slocum also saw this point as “the dividing-line of the weather”: “clear and settled” to the north, “humid and squally” below to the south. He rested in the calm under Table Mountain and waited for a breeze. Once into Cape Town, just round the bend of the cape, he decided to put the Spray into dry dock for a three-month rest; this allowed him a lengthy interval for traveling in the African countryside. This detour — with a free railroad pass — gave the captain a last taste of international fame, and he spent much of his time lecturing and hobnobbing with the governmental and scientific elite. After returning from Pretoria through hundreds of miles of barren African plains, Slocum found his sloop ready for the thousands of miles of ocean still ahead. On March 26 he set off from “the land of distances and pure air,” and soon he was in swelling seas off the peaks of the Cape. Once again he was reminded of the history connected with this grand passage, and of the awe this sight had inspired in other navigators. He believed it was Sir Francis Drake who had observed, “’Tis the fairest thing and the grandest cape I’ve seen in the whole circumference of the earth.” Somewhere in the power of the moment, Slocum felt a shift in his own voyage occur: “The Spray soon sailed the highest peaks of the mountains out of sight, and the world changed from a mere panoramic view to the light of a homeward-bound voyage.”
Away from the boisterous gales off the Cape, the Spray “ran along steadily at her best speed,” the tempo of the voyage picking up to a light-hearted vivace. Slocum’s mood seemed to take off with the wind, and he plunged into the new books he had received in South Africa. He was remarkably light of heart, musing about the flying fish he saw, which he likened to arrows shooting from the sea. The play of the waves captivated him, and he noted how the Spray was “just leaping along among the white horses, a thousand gamboling porpoises keeping her company on all sides.” Before he made landfall at St. Helena, he drank some port wine in a toast to the health of his invisible friend and guardian, the pilot of the Pinta, with whose spirit Slocum had been conversing since early in the voyage. The jaunty passage had been a delight to the old sailor, who was moved to reflect, “One could not be lonely in a sea like this.�
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On St. Helena, Slocum was again welcomed cordially, and was asked to give two of his now famous lectures. The audience was delighted by the wry captain, who was jokingly introduced as a Yankee sea serpent. He was treated royally and was invited to stay at the governor’s mansion, Plantation House. The mansion was said to be haunted, and on hearing this, he stayed awake in the hope of communing with another spirit from the pages of history, that of the exiled Napoleon Buonaparte. Wherever he had sailed during his circumnavigation, Slocum was alert to his place in the historical scheme of things. Here, his mind turned not only to the Corsican emperor, who ended his days on the island, but to stories of witch burnings on this “island of tragedies.” When he left, he took a fruitcake aboard the Spray, a gift from the governor’s wife. He had begun the voyage with his sister’s fruitcake, which had lasted him forty-two days out of Brier Island. It seemed somehow fitting to near the end with another cake, “a great high-decker” that would last him into early June.
Just off the island of Ascension, where he marooned the rambunctious goat, Slocum invited a mid-ocean inspection of the Spray. He asked that the sloop be thoroughly investigated and fumigated, and certified to be commanded by a one-man crew. This would turn out to be a wise request. As he made sail, he declared confidently, “Let what will happen, the voyage is now on record.”
On May 8, 1898, the Spray crossed the sea path she had first sailed on October 2, 1895, en route to Brazil. In doing so, she had completed a circle. However, Slocum still had four thousand miles to go before he could claim to be back to his starting point, and those miles were not to be easy ones. Soon after, the Spray entered the zone of the trade winds, where “strange and forgotten current ripples pattered against the sloop’s sides in grateful music.” Slocum found this sound enchanting, but he still made good time, sailing “the handsome day’s work of one hundred and eighty miles on several consecutive days.”
Then he heard some startling news. He had had no idea, until he moved north of the equator in mid-May, that America had declared war on Spain. He met up with the U.S. battleship Oregon flying the signal flags C B T, which Slocum knew to mean, “Are there any men-of-war about?” He hoisted an immediate reply: NO. (He hadn’t, of course, thought to watch for any.) He then sent another signal to the Oregon: “Let us keep together for mutual protection.” While he waited for a reply, the Oregon — which was roughly one thousand times Spray’s size — sailed on. Slocum assumed that her captain didn’t regard his proposal as worthwhile. As the Oregon sailed out of sight, Slocum was left to consider the consequences of the war for him alone in his small boat. He could have been taken prisoner at any point in the weeks before, not even knowing that a war had been declared (although he had been warned in Cape Town that the conflict was escalating). The idea of war unsettled Slocum, who “pondered long that night over the probability of a war risk now coming upon the Spray after she had cleared all, or nearly all, the dangers of the sea.”
Slocum continued sailing peacefully along. On May 18, he felt ecstatic when Polaris appeared in the heavens: for close to three years he had been sailing without its guidance. Sighting Tobago on May 20, the captain reflected on how near to home he was; but that night he “was startled by the sudden flash of breakers” and decided there had to be a coral reef ahead — and a dangerous one. He worried about other lurking reefs and where the current might take him. He considered how likely shipwreck was in such waters, especially without a chart. “I taxed my memory of sea lore, of wrecks on sunken reefs, and of pirates harbored among coral reefs where other ships might not come, but nothing that I could think of applied to the island of Tobago …” He turned his mind to descriptions in Robinson Crusoe, but could conjure up no more information about reefs. He held firm in his memory, though, the dangers lurking below the water’s surface, and tacked off and on until morning light, trying to stay clear of what he called “imaginary reefs.” He missed his charts badly, and his only satisfaction came in contemplating revenge: “I could have nailed the St. Helena goat’s pelt to the deck.”
Still in uncertain waters, he made his way north for Grenada. He gave a public lecture and then sailed north again, for Antigua. Another lecture and Slocum was on his way back home. He set sail on June 5 from the West Indies. His next landfall would be the United States. Excitement was mounting, and Slocum wrote of the climactic spirit of this final stretch, “The Spray was booming along joyously for home.” His reverie was brought to an abrupt halt: he had sailed smack into the horse latitudes and a dead calm. After an eight-day spell of becalming, the Spray made headway once again, and sailed into the Gulf Stream on June 18. Slocum described the scene as turbulent, noting that the Spray “was jumping like a porpoise over the uneasy waves.” This was merely a hint of what was blowing Slocum’s way. By June 20 there was not only another gale but a great cross-sea that made for treacherous sailing. For the second time in two days he had to repair the rigging. This time the Spray’s jibstay had broken right at the masthead, and jib and all had fallen into the ocean. Slocum, now fifty-four years old, once more resorted to pure seamanship: “The great King Neptune tested me severely at this time, for the stay being gone, the mast itself switched about like a reed.” Nevertheless, he succeeded in climbing the mast and making the necessary repairs. This feat required agility and stamina, and although he still had plenty of both, Slocum was ready to bring the voyage to its conclusion. By June 23 he had lost the psychological edge he had maintained for more than three years and was ready to put down anchor: “I was tired, tired of baffling squalls and fretful cobble-seas.” This last leg was marked by the constant eerie whistling of wind through the Spray’s rigging, and by the sound of seawater slopping up against the boat’s sides.
Slocum was now sailing triumphantly for New York harbor, but on June 25, just off Fire Island, he sailed into the “climax storm of the voyage.” The Spray found itself caught in the clutches of a tornado that had pummeled New York City only an hour earlier. Again Slocum displayed his remarkable skills and foresight. He knew all the signs of treacherous weather ahead and had already prepared Spray to receive it. Its impact still shook the Spray hard, and Slocum abandoned his plans to sail into New York, choosing instead to pull into a quiet harbor where he could mull things over. He headed into Newport, Rhode Island, never considering that the harbor would be mined as a defense against wartime attack. It was, and his little sloop “hugged the rocks along where neither friend nor foe could come if drawing much water.” The guardship Dexter called “Ahoy,” and at one o’clock in the morning of June 27, the Spray anchored. It was a quiet return “after the cruise of more than forty-six thousand miles round the world, during an absence of three years and two months, with two days over coming out.”
Applause was slow to come, and when it did it was a reserved trickle. Slocum’s sailing feats had been hailed in foreign ports all along the way; in his own land he had to explain the significance of his voyage. His homecoming was poorly timed, in that so much attention was being paid to the war. There was little newspaper coverage of the old sailor and his gallant little boat. The local Newport Herald did cover his return, but ran it on page 3, reporting that “early yesterday morning a staunch-looking little craft swung lazily into the harbor … She was a stranger in these waters and her rig … attracted the attention of the early risers.” Slocum was portrayed as not appearing overly concerned with the impression he was making: “The solitary occupant of the boat busied himself in making everything neat and tidy aboard ship and appeared to be totally oblivious of the curiosity he was arousing. When the master of the craft had prepared everything to his satisfaction he jumped into a dory and sculled ashore.”
For three years Slocum had been welcomed around the world as a seafaring celebrity, but in this American port he was listened to skeptically. Many thought the old seadog could spin a pretty convincing tall tale, and Slocum was glad to have a stamped yacht license to prove his amazing achievement. To make matters worse, some peopl
e thought it was all a ruse to cover his real reason for sailing foreign waters: diamond smuggling. But there was one who had always considered Slocum a gallant captain, and she headed straight for Newport on news of his return. It wasn’t Slocum’s wife, Hettie, but rather Mabel Wagnalls whose welcome home touched the captain: “The first name on the Spray’s visitors’ book in the home port was written by the one who always said, ‘The Spray will come back.’” Slocum returned the “musical story” she had given him with an inscription about the wild adventures the book had had on the Spray: “A thousand thanks! Good wishes are prayers, heard by the angels. And so on June 28 1898 the little book, after making the circuit of the earth in the single handed Spray returns in good order and condition.”
Recognition of Slocum’s unique achievement gradually spread, and the Spray began to attract attention and visitors. As for Slocum, he was feeling chipper and pleased with himself. The voyage had changed him, and he made it known that he had returned a new man: “Was the crew well? Was I not? I had profited in many ways by the voyage, I had even gained flesh, and actually weighed a pound more than when I sailed from Boston. As for aging, why, the dial of my life was turned back till my friends all said, ‘Slocum is young again.’ And so I was, at least ten years younger than the day I felled the first tree for the construction of the Spray.”
In buoyant spirits, Slocum set out to bring his voyage to a symbolic end. He decided he must “return to the very beginning,” where he had given the Spray new life. On July 3 the Spray sailed into Fairhaven on a fair wind and there Slocum brought her to her point of repose, and his voyage to full circle: “I secured her to the cedar spile driven in the bank to hold her when she was launched. I could bring her no nearer home.”