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

by Spencer, Ann

  On his return home, there was no mention of the affair in the press. According to the August 16, 1906, Vineyard Gazette, “Captain Joshua Slocum, master of the Spray, was in town on Monday.” But all who observed him after that summer noticed his unshakable sadness. Grace Brown speculated about his depression: “I think he was bitter … some folk are born … never being satisfied with half measures. I don’t believe he allowed what certain people thought of him to bother him, only as annoyance and his contempt could be very potent. If any sadness, it was for a career which he felt did not justify his inherent ability.” One islander recalled, “He was lazy and mentally sluggish … the captain suffered from the disadvantage of not having enough to do.” His three sons were concerned about their father’s emotional health. Garfield remembered a moment of their time sailing together when his father seemed lost in the past: “Beside the bowsprit the Spray was in the sea though father saw a huge wave coming and headed the Spray into it. I held on to the bowsprit and when it was recovered from the baptism father laughed heartily. I remember hearing father sing ‘We Shall Meet on That Beautiful Shore’. I think he was thinking of mother.”

  Virginia had been dead for over twenty years, but Garfield sensed that her spirit was alive to his father at that moment. Slocum did not have the comfort of a loving partner in Hettie, nor did she find a loving partner in him. Victor reflected, “Father was a changed man when he returned from his lone voyage — he acted to me like he wanted to be alone. That voyage was a terrible strain on him. Father was so different when he returned from sailing alone, he did not talk to me much. He appeared to be deep in thought so I stayed far.” On Slocum’s return to Martha’s Vineyard, he and Hettie continued their pattern of spending time apart. He roamed the shores and coastlines, and she spent long spells and her winters away with friends and relatives. Grace Brown recalled one instance when Hettie and Josh were forced to share time under the same roof, in the same bed. Even as a child, she had sensed the awkwardness of the situation: “When he returned sometimes Hettie would be at our house and one time he came in unheralded and wanted a bed. We had only half the house — eight rooms and Hettie was in a small room with a single or two thirds bed. But where mother wanted to rearrange things, he said, ‘Now Alice I haven’t seen my wife in several months and if I can sleep in a bunk the size of a coffin I guess I can find room with Hettie.’ I don’t know how Hettie stood it but she laughed it off and they stayed several days before going in the Spray to the Vineyard.”

  The islanders were attuned to this unusual relationship, and the general impression was that Joshua and Hettie had reached an agreement to lead separate lives. One Vineyarder, Alice Longaker, said, “It was a long time before I became aware that he had a wife and though I have nothing concrete upon which to pin the fact it seemed, for many reasons, to be evident that he carried the relationship buoyantly. He was always the visitor and never seemed aware of ties.” In reporting the comings and goings of the captain and his wife, the Vineyard Gazette stopped referring to Hettie as Mrs. Joshua Slocum. In 1906 she was almost always “Mrs. H. M. Slocum.” The West Tisbury “Miscellanies” section may have been having a little fun at the couple’s expense when it noted on July 30, 1908, that “Capt. Joshua Slocum of the sloop Spray is on the Island and has been a recent guest of Mrs. Slocum at West Tisbury.” Another islander, H.L. Coggins, remarked, “I don’t think that the Captain and wife were very close and the whole family seemed relieved when he took any of his trips.”

  These were Captain Slocum’s twilight years: like the Spray, he was falling apart physically, and struggling to remain seaworthy — to be worthy of the waters one more time. He made short daytrips, and then every winter — with the tangible excuse of minding the cold and doing a little business — he escaped boredom in a trip south. The Spray would leave with a ballast of cement or stone and return loaded with shells, coconuts and sundry items, which he could peddle as he sailed along the New England coast.

  The winter of 1907 found Slocum in Jamaica — the second visit reported by the local newspaper, the Gleaner, which referred to him as “the Lone Navigator.” This was the year of the great earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica, and Slocum was there. He met up with a Philadelphia newspaper reporter named Louise B. Ward. Ward found the old captain to be coping well, but she also sensed his melancholy. As he sat on his boat in the harbor of a city that had almost come to ruin, Slocum may have felt personally shaken. He made an unusual remark: “I can patch up the Spray, but who will patch up Captain Slocum?”

  That winter and the next, Slocum kept himself “patched up” enough to make safe passage from southern ports to home. These trips still gave him a sense of purpose and achievement. He still had ambitions, and told a local newspaper his latest plan: “The Spray shall be the first boat to go through the [Panama] Canal, and thence to China and Japan.” That adventure never materialized, and January 1908 found him still at work lecturing. He had to keep the old dream alive through stories. His brochure for the Miami audience claimed, “He will tell of his escape from raging storms, from savage cannibals off the Patagonia coast, from dangers of the deep that were met by him alone in mid-ocean. He will tell of trying to enter Havana harbor while the seas were rolling over Morro headland, and of his turning and running to Miami. Some of these things he will show you upon a curtain by a magic lantern.” When he returned north in June, he delivered a piece of green coral weighing nearly two tons to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It was at that time the largest and most valuable piece of coral in any institution in the world.

  Oyster Bay on Long Island was one place that still found the old eccentric charming, in a quaint sort of way. On his return in May 1907, a local paper commented, “The captain is as full of yarns as Oyster Bay is of horseshoe crabs. Sitting snugly in his little cabin, he reels them off by the yard to the gaping landsmen, and they have come to look upon him as one of the wonders of the deep.” Likewise, the New York World welcomed the captain back: “Once a year sea-battered, kindly old Captain Joshua Slocum puts in the harbor here with his weatherbeaten, snub-nosed, tight little yawl, the Spray.” Archie Roosevelt met the captain and took him to the White House. As Slocum told the story, when he shook Roosevelt’s hand the president said, “Captain, our adventures have been a little different.” Slocum responded with his usual understated humor: “That is true, Mr. President, but I see you got here first.” The captain had planned to take Archie sailing after this White House meeting, but this second trip never happened. Slocum had been careless with his answer to a theological question posed by a minister from Groton, the strict Episcopalian school that Archie attended. Slocum returned to Martha’s Vineyard without his young apprentice sailor and salesman.

  Years later in his memoirs, Archie Roosevelt wrote about Slocum and the Spray: “The boat was the most incredibly dirty craft I have ever seen … Obie went ashore, and returned with his own money, and jettisoned the filthy old relic [a stove] that had served the captain, I don’t know how many years … In mild, warm weather, the Captain often cooked on deck, and he had a most ingenious contrivance … He had an old fashioned laundry tub, in the bottom of which he coiled a piece of heavy anchor chain. On top of the chain he built a fire of driftwood. As a diet, he was fond of salt fish, and every so often he would make us enormous pancakes, ‘as thick as your foot’, he would tell us.” Some of Archie’s memories were as vivid as only those linked to smell can be. Remembering the hold of the Spray, he wrote, “There was a quantity of miscellaneous equipment, an enormous number of conch shells, which he got when he was down in the West Indies. Some of these had not been too carefully cleaned, and there was a fine ripe odor permeating the center part of the ship.”

  After 1906, Slocum’s neighbours on Martha’s Vineyard began to notice how neglected and run down the Spray was looking. Some made note of the inside of Slocum’s cabin, with its jumble of books and badly corroded sextant lying about from his “trip round.” Others pointed out the slack
rigging and the fact that Spray needed tarring. One visitor described the atmosphere aboard as “pungent with the odor of tarred ropes and the salty mildew a boat collects while sailing the seven seas.” The boat Slocum had lovingly rebuilt was now languishing uncared for. The Spray’s renewal fifteen years before had mirrored Slocum’s; her deterioration now reflected his own. According to Ernest Dean, a Vineyarder who had known both Slocum and the Spray for many years, “they both were neat, trim, seaworthy, but as the years rolled along there were signs of wear and exposure.”

  Decades of nomadic wanderlust had worn Slocum down. He was now suffering from prolonged headaches. One neighbor noted, “Slocum was much run down physically and perhaps mentally — exceedingly lazy and indifferent to his surroundings.” Author and sailor Vincent Gilpin was struck by Slocum’s appearance in 1908: “He was thrifty and usually hard up — which didn’t bother him, for his wants were few. Spray … was simply fitted out, rather bare, and very damp, from many soakings with salt water, and Slocum kept a little wood-stove going to help dry her out. I remember seeing him lunching one day on what looked like a half-baked potato, from which he sliced pieces with his jack-knife. He was rather shabbily dressed in civilian clothes, with a ragged black felt hat.”

  Slocum had once said that even the worst sea is not so terrible to a well-appointed ship, but by 1907 neither he nor his ship were well appointed. He was distracted and disheveled-looking in his shabby clothes; she was ramshackled, badly in need of paint, leaking at the deckline, cracked and full of rust stains. But there is an understanding a sailor has of his boat after years of sailing together. It’s a feeling that somehow the boat is lucky, and has to have been so to survive the many dangers she has sailed through. Sailors believe that a boat’s luck rubs off on the people involved with her — that if a sailor gives his best to a vessel, she will reciprocate.

  Whether the Spray was seaworthy or not, Slocum had faith in her abilities and his own. He was still filled with wanderlust. Grace Brown had this view of his melancholy and his need to be constantly on the move: “I do not ascribe any sadness to anything less than for more worlds to conquer, as it were. You know that divine discontent we have heard about, that urge that would not let him give over.” Slocum told family, friends, neighbors and the newspapers that he was planning a final adventure: he was planning a voyage of exploration to Venezuela, up the Orinoco River to the Rio Negro, and then into the Amazon. He joked that he intended to take his Victrola so that if he was mistaken for a god, he would not disappoint the natives.

  As his neighbors watched the old salt prepare for this adventure, they must have shaken their heads. Horace Athearn, a trap fisherman at Menemsha at the time, watched the Spray sail off on what he thought would be her last voyage. He and others had remarked on the sad condition of the Spray; the general consensus was that everything looked worn, especially the standing rigging. They thought the captain was slipping, that in his best days he never would have started out in such a sorry state. Vincent Gilpin remembered that “her sails and rigging would have been renewed more than once, and would have always had weak spots.” Thomas Fleming Day, editor of The Rudder, thought the Spray was “considerably dozy … certainly seaworthy, though slow.” Captain Nat Herreshoff cast the captain’s last line aboard and later remarked on the Spray’s worn sails and frayed lines. And Vineyarder Reginald Norton remembered people’s dire predictions before Slocum set sail: “Folks used to say he would plant his bones in that boat.” Those words were prophetic: Captain Joshua Slocum and the Spray left Vineyard Haven for the Orinoco River and were never heard from again.

  Two mysteries surround Slocum’s fate: What happened to him? and When did it happen? There is even some confusion regarding the year he left Vineyard Haven. By all legal and historical accounts the date was November 14, 1909. That was the date Hettie put on a petition to the Probate Court of Dukes County. The petition stated that Joshua Slocum “disappeared, absconded and absented himself” on that day and further stated, “He sailed from Tisbury, Massachusetts in the Sloop ‘Spray’ … encountered a very severe gale shortly afterwards and has never been heard from since.” And Slocum’s son Victor claimed to have received a letter from his father dated September 4, 1909, wherein the captain wrote, “I am on the Spray hustling for a dollar.” However, that date conflicts with a news item from the Fairhaven Star dated September 30, 1909, which referred to a mysterious piece of mail:

  FEARED THAT CAPTAIN SLOCUM IS LOST

  It is feared that Captain Joshua Slocum of West Tisbury, formerly of Fairhaven, owner of the famous yawl Spray, in which the noted lecturer and sailor has circumnavigated the globe, has been lost at sea in the little 33 foot craft, the smallest boat that ever sailed around the world.

  The return of Captain Slocum’s mail unopened from a foreign port to which he directed it to be sent when he sailed from this port last November on one of his long cruises on the Spray, and the fact that no word has been received from him since he sailed, has led his wife and relatives to believe that he has been lost.

  It must be pointed out that Victor’s accounts of his father’s travels, while spirited and informative, are full of inaccuracies and undocumented anecdotes. He even gave his mother’s date of death incorrectly. In his book Capt. Joshua Slocum, Victor wrote of his mother’s death, “that was on July 25, 1885. There is no need of my looking at a calendar for the date, which sixty-five years ago was written on my heart, never in this life to be effaced.” In fact, Virginia died on July 25, 1884.

  Victor also wrote about the condition of the Spray before his father headed out on that final voyage: “In 1909 the Spray was fitted out at the Herreshoff works in Bristol, Rhode Island, for her Customary winter Voyage to Grand Cayman. Mr. Herreshoff (the great ‘Nat’) admired his visitor and said she was a good boat. While the Spray was in his yard he spent considerable time looking her over and also much time in conversation with her skipper, though Nat was known to be a man who wasted neither time nor words. When the Spray left Bristol in the fall of 1909, she was well fitted and provided for, and my father was in the best of physical health.” But L. Francis Herreshoff, Nat Herreshoff’s son, remembered quite differently in a letter to Walter Teller dated December 30, 1952: “The Spray did not have any work done on her at the Herreshoff Company but simply lay at one of the wharves in what is called Walker’s Cove. She may have been given some old ropes, but the captain did everything himself in the refit. I shouldn’t be surprised if I were the last one to speak to him for I saw him off on the morning that he departed.” Herreshoff does not give a year, and Carlton J. Pinheiro, the present curator of the Herreshoff Marine Museum, in Bristol, Rhode Island, finds no record of Slocum’s visit either in Nat Herreshoff’s journal or in the company records.

  A 1953 Vineyard Gazette account of Captain Slocum and his disappearance inspired Francis Mead to remember that he had been out fishing late in the summer of 1909 in Muskeget Channel and that he had heard Captain John Randolphe wondering where the Spray could be headed. Mead speculated that they were the last to see Slocum and the Spray, as “the water was pretty rough around Skiffs Island.” Teller notes that another man, B.H. Kidder, wrote to the Vineyard Gazette claiming to have seen Slocum in Bridgeport, Connecticut. When he asked the captain where he was headed, Slocum told him, “Some faraway places.” Teller concluded that it did not seem likely the year of that sighting was 1909.

  Yet the evidence is overwhelming that in fact Slocum departed on his final voyage in 1908. Newspaper accounts for 1909 have no news reports concerning the captain except for ones that mention his disappearance, and these all confirm a 1908 departure. The Vineyard Gazette reported on July 24, 1909, “Captain Slocum sailed from Vineyard Haven for the West Indies more than a year and a half ago to escape the severity of the approaching winter and has not since been heard from. He sailed alone and was last seen by a passing steamship, which reported the Spray as making heavy weather.” Hettie is quoted in another Gazette article from 1909: “
I believe beyond all doubt that Capt. Slocum is lost … He sailed Nov. 12, 1908, going south for the sake of his health … We expected to hear from him when he reached the Bahamas and always made a point of keeping his publishers informed.” Hettie again writes 1908, although with a change in the November date, in a letter to her friend Mrs. McNutt dated August 28, 1910. “I am sorry to say that there seem but little or no doubt but that something serious has happened Captain Slocum and the ‘Spray’. He sailed from Vineyard Haven the Spray’s home port on Nov. 14th, 1908 bound to the West Indies, and to my knowledge nothing has ever been heard from him since that date.”

  William A. Nickerson wrote to the editor of Maine Coast Fisherman that he saw Slocum in Cotuit, Cape Cod, in the summer of 1908. He sent a picture of the Spray with 1908 on the back. He added that he had heard the rumor later that same summer that Slocum was making an exploring trip in the Orinoco River. When nothing was heard, it was presumed by the Cape Cod fisherman that Slocum was lost in the vicinity of Cape Hatteras.

  What makes the task of verifying Slocum’s date of disappearance all the more confusing is that in many of the reports of a 1908 departure received by biographer Walter Teller, Teller has changed and scribbled 1909 in the margins, or made corrections. Kenneth E. Slack, author of In the Wake of the Spray, wrote to Teller about Nickerson’s photograph and story in Maine Coast Fisherman: “The letter says 1908, but I wrote Mr. Nickerson, as he said the Spray disappeared the same year when it was really the next year, and he said that he had been mistaken and on reflection, feels sure it was 1909.”