by Spencer, Ann
All photographs courtesy Old Dartmouth Historical Society — New Bedford Whaling Museum
Following completion of his world voyage, Slocum wrote the best-seller Sailing Alone Around the World. He is photographed here in East Boston by his son, Ben Aymar. (1898)
A classic “cabinet card” photograph of Slocum dating from 1898. At the time, he was promoting himself as a lecturer and adventurer. Martin H. Frommell (circa 1898)
Slocum photographed in 1902 aboard the Spray. He had returned from his world-wide lecturing and book-peddling junket. Clifton Johnson (1902)
Slocum and Hettie aboard the Spray, which he sailed to the Cayman Islands every winter after his return to America in June 1898. Clifton Johnson (1902)
Slocum and Hettie at their farmhouse in West Tisbury, Massachusetts. He bought the small house on Martha’s Vineyard for $305. Clifton Johnson (1902)
Working in the garden at West Tisbury. Slocum told the newspapers that he was going to give this “land living” a try. Clifton Johnson (1902)
A portrait photograph of Slocum taken at Marion, Massachusetts. His family and neighbors were beginning to see his true eccentricity. Unknown photographer (1903)
Back on the water, Slocum moors the Spray at Port Antonio, Jamaica. Edward Brooks (1907)
Slocum emerges from the companionway of the Spray while moored in Washington. D.C. Winfield Scott Clime (1907)
While in Washington, Slocum regaled school children with stories of his adventures on the high seas. Unknown photographer (1907)
Occasionally lapsing into the lingo of the sea, but often varying his speech with words of sonorous sound and length that seem to argue an earnest and painstaking study of either the chef d’oeuvre of one Webster, or an intimate acquaintance with the best writers of history, the mariner’s flow of language is of a sort to impress, and at the same time affords an admirable vehicle for the tales of solitary ocean travel, which make him an A 1 entertainer, and which give to his lectures on his voyage round the world a unique charm.
— a reporter’s description of Joshua
Slocum after his return
11
That Intrepid Water Tramp
I am longing to be useful.
— J.S. in a letter to the New Bedford
Standard, July 3, 1898
Slocum had been back all of five days when he wrote a ranting letter to the New Bedford Evening Standard expressing a fervent desire to defend and fight for his country: “I want to give your people an earache. I’m not coming to say, ‘Oh! I’ve played the deuce, listen while I tell’; life is too short and there is too much to be done for that. I burn to be of some use now of all times. I spent the best of my life in the Philippine islands, China and Japan, but there is some life still in the old man … I am not fanatically suffering for a fight, but I am longing to be useful. Does Mr. McKinley want pilots for the Philippines and Guam? If more fighting men were wanted I would be nothing loth.”
So he continued for over a dozen more lengthy sentences, before concluding with a gush of patriotism: “But my heart is too full to write. I only blurr the paper. America is all right! After seeing much of the world this choice part of it is good enough for me! I’ll fight for it! But it is peace we want, not war! And peace we’re going to have, if we have to lick all creation to get it!”
Whenever Slocum was at loose ends, he looked to create purpose in his life. After taking on a trip around the world, he tended to think big. Four months later he unveiled the latest Slocum scheme to an audience in Carnegie Hall. His idea was to train young men in the science of navigation aboard a college ship. However, not just any ship would do. He wanted to build a vessel based on the most glorious of American clipper ships, with modifications to accommodate the three hundred students who would be making this two-year study voyage around the world. He hoped to attract educated young men who were already at college, rather than apprentice sailors. Perhaps courses in astronomy and literature could also be given aboard ship. He did not see the trip as all work, and mentioned to the Boston Sun: “the time to be spent in steady, practical work and the desirable recreation that visits to Oceanica [sic] and the Orient would supply.” His goal, he added, was “to equip [his students] as navigators, capable of handling and directing sailing and steam ships, including men of war.” He envisioned a college ship that would “induce people not primarily out for instruction in navigation to go on its cruises.” Slocum felt strongly that women should also be given the opportunity to sail, and made this curious admission, paraphrased by the reporter: “In fact, just as once on his voyage in the Spray he refused to stop at an island he might have made, although then 43 days out, because they wouldn’t have women there [Slocum passed Nukahiva of the Marquesas Islands preferring to stop at Samoa, another twenty-nine days away], so he says, he wouldn’t have anything to do with the scheme he has originated if women could not be included in its benefits.”
Nothing came of this grand dream, and Slocum responded as might be expected — by dreaming harder. He had always been an entrepreneur, and sometimes an outright huckster. And just as often he had nothing financially to show for it. He boldly told audiences everywhere, “I am not ashamed to say that when I started my enterprise [I had] $1.50 to my name …” Anyone who had known him long must have wondered what harebrained scheme the old skipper would come up with next. And they would have remembered him in the early days, as a merchantman hustling codfish. Then he had placed an ad in the Morning Oregonian proclaiming his codfish to be “pure.” Slocum knew how to put a spin on things, and marketed the ugly white fish as a kind of wonder food. It wasn’t technically a hoax, but all the word “pure” really meant was that Slocum hadn’t processed the cod. Without realizing it, he had become one of the first purveyors of natural foods.
The captain had the freelancer’s shrewd knack for turning everything to some good. His son Victor wrote years later that his father’s skill in trading came from acting on intuition and general impressions. But he recalled one unfortunate deal involving ostrich feathers that Slocum had brought from Cape Town to New York City. The captain arrived in the American city to learn that a new law forbade decorating hats with bird feathers, and he was forced to store them. Throughout his career he was a tinker, always ready to fix or trade anything. He salvaged goods from shipwrecks to sell or barter at ports wherever he stopped. Slocum claimed that he had arrived home from his circumnavigation with “several tons of freight on ship’s account, which will pay me ship master’s wages and more for the whole voyage.” In an article of June 12, 1898, a reporter for the New York Herald who boarded the Spray noted the treasures he saw in the sloop’s cabin: “Curiosities of all sorts and from distant parts of the world hung on the walls, books and papers in profusion lay on all sides, besides many other objects, which at once impressed the fact on my mind that Cpt. Slocum is no mere foolhardy adventurer …” Slocum had always had a flexible mind and could readily adapt whatever was at hand to meet the needs of the situation. In the Grand Caymans he saw conch shells that he wanted to add to his collection of well over a thousand. The shells were difficult to collect, and he turned his mind to a solution. Recalling the quahog rakes that were used in New England to harvest clams, he made his own rake from stiff wire from aboard the Spray. Not only did he have the desired shells but he also had a good story.
For Slocum was a brilliant storyteller. He even looked the part. The New York Times summed up his appearance: “Captain Slocum is fifty-four years old and is a perfect type of the weather-beaten, knockabout sailor.” Slocum knew he was on to something that could make him money. He had tested out his storytelling along the way, and summed up his successes in that department in a letter to the Times of London toward the end of the Spray’s circumnavigation: “It is not ‘the greatest-show-on-earth’ sort of scheme, neither am I a dime-museum navigator. If I can stand up and interest intelligent people by speaking to them of the world as I have seen it, I will be satisfied. I have already given many lectur
es in the places I have put into and while I have not made a fortune out of my voyage, I made more money than I did when I was sole owner and commander of a little bark.” He made this same point repeatedly in interviews upon his return. Now back in America, Slocum seemed destined for the role of raconteur cum lecturer.
Slocum had arrived home with an impressive array of clippings from newspapers around the world. He compiled some of the most complimentary and intriguing of these in a publicity flyer, “Press Comments — Captain Slocum’s Lectures.” Slocum must have felt it sounded a bit formal and crossed out the word “lectures,” scribbling instead “Talks — 100 slides of places visited and of peoples met on the voyage, savage and otherwise.” By most accounts, the skipper was an act worth catching: “The Captain has a droll, quaint humor and a characteristic Yankee turn of phrase which will add interest to a story intrinsically entrancing and well worth listening to,” reported the Natal Mercury during his November 1897 stay in South Africa.
The publicity worked. Slocum didn’t stop to rest from the trip before he began lecturing again. He gave his first talk just days after arriving back in Fairhaven, at the New Bedford City Hall. His show was illustrated by some three hundred lantern slides, most probably made from photos people had given him along the way. Slocum stood by his product, saying that his best slides would be “called first class in New York or London.” New Bedford’s Standard must have agreed. It commented on his lecture, “The views were very fine, equal to anything ever before presented in this city.”
By all reports, an evening with the captain was guaranteed to be entertaining. His manner may have been dry, but he knew instinctively how to tell a good yarn and keep an audience laughing: “I soon found that people wanted to help me. They wanted to laugh — not cry. I managed invariably to keep my audiences from falling asleep.” Slocum was being modest — in fact, he knew how to hold them in the palm of his hand. He described the winds in the Strait of Magellan as strong enough to “blow the hair off a dog’s back.” Then, with superb timing, he added as an afterthought, “I left my hat there,” and rubbed his bald head. Audiences loved his tales of adventures, and word of his comedic gifts spread. One newspaper account related what Slocum ingenuously claimed to be the real reason he sailed alone. It was “because ‘her’ [Hettie] he wanted to come wouldn’t come, and those who were willing to come with him he didn’t want,” and also “because he could not get a captain to suit him.”
Slocum had kept logs throughout his voyage, and on arriving back in Massachusetts he began corresponding with an editor at Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. The captain had received a telegram from its editor, Richard Watson Gilder, asking him whether he would consider writing his story for the magazine. Gilder and his brother Joseph had a fast reply from the captain: an enthusiastic letter addressed to “Mr. Editor, Century Magazine.” “I have a fund of matter to be sure,” Slocum wrote, “but have not myself, had experience in writing magazine articles — I have very decided literary tastes and could enter into such parts as I am able to do with a great deal of energy.” He told them he was tired of feeling misunderstood and being misquoted by the newspapers, and added that he was certain his were tales worth telling: “Without say Slocum Slocum all the time — that I do not care for I know the whole story will be hard to beat.” In this same letter Slocum made it clear that he intended to write a book.
While the captain’s letter was still en route to Century, Richard Watson Gilder wrote Slocum a quick note asking which parts of the circumnavigation story had already appeared in print, and whether there was any truth to the rumors that there were diamonds on board the Spray. Slocum replied promptly in a letter dated July 1, 1898. He acknowledged that “one or two short letters” had appeared in New York World, but did not mention his letters home to the Boston Globe. He also glossed over that the syndicate had given up on him as a correspondent. Instead he told Gilder, “These I discontinued for my own reasons long ago.” As for the diamonds, Slocum set the record straight: “If my countrymen have hinted at diamonds coming in on the Spray, it is hardly fare of them to do that I had but $1.50 when I began to build my ship I hadnnt much to trade one or even for luxuries for the cabin for a long time.” He admitted that he had considered bringing one diamond back, but had instead brought home enough gold from Johannesburg to pay his old debts. He assured Gilder that the “vessel has in a cargo, tobesure, but clean open and above board.” One thing would have been clear to Gilder from Slocum’s passionate defense: while the old captain could certainly get his ideas across, spelling and punctuation were not his strong points. Slocum knew his literary limitations, and confided to Gilder, “There were indeed features of my trip striking enough to interest anybody. It would take the pen of a poet to tell some of the voyage — That of course is beyond me!”
Slocum and Hettie had spent most of the autumn in New York, taking rooms on the Lower West Side. With nothing to keep them there, they moved back to East Boston to find cheaper lodging with one of Hettie’s sisters. Over the winter, Slocum began writing for the Century. He was reliving the adventure, and by January 1899 he could inform the assitant editor, C.C. Buel, “My ‘type-writer’ and I are working along around Cape Horn now and will soon have some work ready to submit.” Having long ago survived those tempestuous waters, Slocum was now battling storms of syntax and grammar and trying to stay afloat as a writer. Slocum was taken out of school at age ten and had never learned proper spelling and punctuation. He continued writing while on the move. He sailed back to New York that spring, mooring the Spray in South Brooklyn. After delivering his manuscript to the Century he sailed up to Cape Cod to visit relatives on Martha’s Vineyard, where he marked his letters “Spray, Cottage City, Mass.”
It is obvious from a letter he wrote to an associate at the Century that he found the editing process exacting and the whole project a trifle worrisome: “Mr. Johnson I dare say has slaughtered, judiously and liberally … I am most anxious to see a clear story appear in both Magazine and book with no superfluous matter … I have tried the editors patience, I dare say … Magazine work, as you know is intirely new to me, the great Century being the first I ever tackled … be patient with me still.” His insecurities concerning his writing were echoed in his desire to add enough touches so as to “make it not the worst marine story in the world.”
The magazine editors allayed his fears, encouraging the reluctant captain to supply them with more details. On one occasion, Slocum jotted down the answers to their nautical questions about the Spray’s alterations on their letter as he read it. His notes included these: Yes, he had shortened the mast by seven feet, and the mast by five feet at Buenos Aires. Yes, he also shortened the boom inboard four feet at Pernambuco and the outboard had lost four feet at Port Angosto. His editors wanted him actively involved, and were concerned with accuracy, pointing out to the captain, “When you see an error in a picture we want you to speak up.”
Years later, the publisher’s daughter, Constance Buel Burnett, claimed that her father had taken “a prominent part in the publication of … Joshua Slocum’s own account of his solitary cruise” and recalled that the Spray had spent a good deal of the summer of 1899 moored in front of their summer home. By mid-August, with the pressure mounting, Slocum was on the move. This time he wrote from Woods Hole, Massachusetts: “I write to assure you that I am not neglecting this interest … I can do the work better away where it is quiet.” It must not have been quiet enough, for two days later Slocum wrote his editor from Fairhaven to confess, “I find it rather difficult to condense the variety of experiences while sailing free over the smooth sea from Good Hope. It was all ripple ripple. However the editor will know how to slaughter my pet.”
In September 1899 the Century published the first installment of “Sailing Alone Around the World.” The captain’s story ran through to March 1900, with illustrations by Thomas Fogarty and George Varian. Slocum was moved to write Buel concerning the publication, “I congratulate the Centur
y and myself.” Then he was on to other projects. He had moved out of the lodgings that he and Hettie had been sharing with another of her East Boston sisters and was living quietly by himself in a New York hotel. There he put the finishing touches on the book-length account of his voyage. Sailing Alone Around the World was launched on March 24, 1900; the first edition was attractively bound in heavy navy-blue cloth embossed with two seahorses on either side of an anchor. Inside was the dedication, “To the one who said: ‘The Spray will come back’.” In later years, Hettie told biographer Walter Teller that the dedication was for her, but Mabel Wagnalls’s copy, given to her by Slocum, was inscribed, “To Mabel Wagnalls who said, ‘The Spray will come back’ and who first read the manuscript of the Voyage. With sincere good wishes. Joshua Slocum New York April 8, 1900.”
Slocum was still questioning his worth as an author and worried about how the book would be received. Anxiously, he waited for the reviews. He expressed his insecurities in a letter to Buel: “I have heard nothing from the critics about my ‘fine writing’ and hope to hear nothing … If they’ll only pass me this time I’ll steer clear of like shallows in the future … I was considerably interested in the story at the time of telling it and didn’t see the enormous sunken ledges that I see now.”
The reviews were soon in, and Slocum could breathe a sigh of relief: the critics loved Sailing Alone. Bookseller magazine proclaimed it to be “one of the most remarkable narratives of actual adventure ever penned.” Some compared his account to sea classics like Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island. It was proclaimed “a nautical equivalent of Thoreau’s account of his life in the hut at Walden.” Sir Edwin Arnold was moved by Slocum’s honest accounts: “The tale is true from first to last, written in a style plain as a marlin-spike, and yet full of touches which show what hidden poetry and passionate love of Nature were in the soul of this ‘bluenose’ skipper.” Some suspected that the captain’s poetic style may have been improved considerably by his editors; however, the reviewer for the New York Evening Post acknowledged that the voice of the sailor was clearly audible: “Absence of literary finish and florid word-painting sinks into insignificance compared with the overwhelming impression his story conveys of dominant courage and placid self-reliance.” The reviews were more than a celebration of a book — they were a recognition of a great voyage. The Nautical Gazette considered the captain’s place in history: “There is no question as to his name being handed down to posterity as one of the most intrepid of navigators.”