The Hard Way Around
Page 3
In 1860 Slocum’s merits and steady temperament immediately stood out from the rude cohort with whom he bunked, ate, and slaved. He had shipped aboard because he wished to, with his eyes open. In his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, Samuel Johnson asserted that “no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned … A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.” This chestnut has the sour taste of a last word on the subject, yet young men continued to flock to harbors from inland farms and cities as well as coastal settlements. For all the notoriety of crimps, for all the warnings of misery publicized in Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s runaway best seller, Two Years Before the Mast (1840), North America had not run out of suckers or quixotics. In 1860 much commerce was still done by small coastal schooners run modestly but considerately, like family businesses, so that shipping out on a deal drogher might be said to be akin to volunteering to work on a chain gang, with the supplemental hazards that Johnson specified, and perhaps this argues against the liveliness of Slocum’s wits. But in fact the young sailor soon showed himself to the ship’s officers to be intelligent and ambitious. He was invited to steer the yawing, sluggish vessel, a mark of respect and confidence that freed the nominal helmsman to perform other chores, and was trusted with the wheel as the cumbersome ship picked up Poolbeg Light and entered Dublin harbor.
Determined now to see the world, Slocum signed off the drogher in Dublin and embarked by paid packet to Liverpool, hub of the world’s shipping commerce, crowded with every kind of ship and sailor. He spent two weeks along the River Mersey, sightseeing as far as London, and looking to find a berth aboard an East Indiaman, the ships that traded between England, India, and China, across every ocean that had harbors with people selling or buying, ships routinely doubling Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, well named “Cape Stiff” and “Cape of Storms.”
If it sounded romantic, it was. It also bristled with menace, almost worse ashore than at sea. Slocum, young as he was and so lately without a horizon wider than what could be seen from atop North Mountain, nevertheless knew enough to shun brotherhood in the prevailing society of “packet rats,” those Victor Slocum described as “a degenerate type of seamen who swarmed on the emigrant and clipper ships” of the day. These gathered in Liverpool’s Merseyside singing houses and grog shops, at fandangos and donkey races, patronizing the whorehouses of every major port, each well equipped to skin a fellow seaman of his wages and bleed him white—often literally—into “buckets of blood,” waterfront saloons. To understand the image that this sort meant to project in their self-celebration, it is useful to recall some of the tamer verses of Barnacle Bill’s address to a fair young maiden:
It’s only me from over the sea,
Said Barnacle Bill the Sailor
I’m all lit up like a Christmas tree,
Said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
I’ll sail the seas until I croak
I’ll fight and swear and drink and smoke
But I can’t swim a bloody stroke,
Said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
I’ll come down and let you in!
I’ll come down and let you in!
I’ll come down and let you in!
Cried the fair young maiden.
Well hurry before I bust in the door,
Cried Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
I’ll rip and rave and rant and roar,
Cried Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
I’ll drink your wine and eat your pies,
I’ll spin you yarns and tell you lies,
I’ll kiss your cheeks and black your eyes,
Said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
“Me and my crew, we’re here for a screw; I just got paid and I wanna get laid” is the gist of this bawdy ballad, created in honor of a very ordinary seaman of the 1850s variously believed to have shipped from Liverpool or San Francisco.
It is tempting to deplore the character of sailors in Slocum’s time. But years later, writing the ending of Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum recalled fondly that aboard ship “I did not live among angels, but among men who could be roused. My wish, though, was to please the officers of my ship … and so I got on.” As to the nature of those “men who could be roused,” Alan Villiers, an Australian master mariner who went to sea at fifteen in 1918 and wrote as well as anyone about his calling in The Way of a Ship, lovingly idealized the ones who were happy with their low status and articulate only among their own kind:
Whatever the hardships of the life and regardless of the amount of heartless exploitation they might have suffered, those men were of a type which has now [1953] been destroyed … They asked very little and they were prepared to give a great deal, even their lives. The amount of work they did and the degree of hardship they accepted, in the movement of wind-propelled cargos about the free waters of the world, is now incredible. They responded magnificently to reasonable treatment, and a ship and her officers had to be bad indeed before they thought of giving anything but their best. They were fearless aloft and fearless on deck, indefatigable and splendidly competent … Good ships they swore by, and poor ships they cursed.
A corrective is necessary. While to bring a huge sailing vessel safely around the notorious capes of the extreme latitudes—dodging icebergs and such—inspires awe, Conradian literary conceits too often rise to the extravagant occasions of gales and sixty-foot seas, no less in the literature of experienced seamen than in the bloated rhetoric of adventure romancers, who are left without a treasure store of metaphors when the sea is well behaved.
A hard line is taken against the nature of shipmates by Jan de Hartog, the Dutch fisherman and sailor (and, later, theologian), who ran away to sea five years younger than Slocum. In A Sailor’s Life (1955), looking back at the putative tragedy of steam’s ascendancy as a degrading influence on the culture of the seaman, he rises to a high pitch of invective:
The glory of the square-rigged ship has been immortalized by poets writing sonnets about long tricks at the wheel, and artists with beards singing sea-shanties in a jersey, accompanying themselves on the Spanish guitar. The advent of steam is considered to have been the advent of grime, trade unions, and class hatred between the bridge and foc’sle. It has corrupted the salts of yore from iron men on wooden ships into wireless-operators in flowered dressing-gowns … I sailed under canvas as a boy and in my memory the stalwart salts with the hearts of oak were moronic bipeds dangling in the branches of artificial trees in constant peril of their lives.
One learns from Villiers and de Hartog alike that generalizations are reliable only for their failure to capture the quiddities of human character and experience. Slocum was an ambitious and serious student of seamanship. If not a teetotaler, he was uncommonly restrained in his vices, although he couldn’t have displayed much priggishness or he wouldn’t have survived his two weeks in Liverpool. Rather imagine him as wary and observant, a good listener and quick study.
At nineteen, within three years after going to sea, having risen the year before to second mate, Slocum attained the rank of first mate. This was a position of authority and responsibility exceeded only by that of master, entitling him to be called “Sir” and “Mister” by the crew and to eat his meals aft in what Richard Henry Dana Jr. calls “the world of knives and forks and tea-cups.” Youth was no impediment to his promotion (minimum ages for certification by the British Board of Trade were seventeen for second mate, nineteen for first mate, and twenty-one for master), so performance alone earned respect and the chance of elevation. Many sailors were drunks and reckless brawlers ashore but did well at sea—“able seamen” by rank. To be trusted with authority, Slocum had to be exceptionally and manifestly reliable. His son Victor describes a (lost) photo from the family album showing his father at this time, a “husky youth rigged out in checkered flannel shirt and with trousers tucked into cowhide boots, the very kind used on the Bay of Fund
y to this day.”
It is daunting to study what this unschooled boy was obliged to learn in order to pass the formal and practical tests required even of a second mate, much less a first. His early promotions would have been impossible had he been unable—like most of his shipmates in the forecastle—to read and write. Indeed he read hungrily throughout his life. But that alone wasn’t enough. Learning the ropes—lines, braces and cordage, buntlines, warps, reef points, cringles, lanyards, ratlines, footropes, sheets and halyards, hawsers the circumference of pythons, and guys and shrouds and topping lifts—wasn’t the half of it. Cordage needed to be rove through blocks, belayed, snubbed, knotted appropriately, spliced, downhauled, whipped, hauled and coiled in a Flemish fake. One had better distinguish between the working end and the bitter end. Rigging and its nomenclature were a spider’s web of interacting parts, all titled and ranked: spankers and topgallants and royals and skysails were fixed to masts and yards, to be raised or reefed or furled, and none of it was intuitive. Remembering the names of things and their uses was such a crucial skill that when a novice sailor of Slocum’s era was discharged, his papers either did or did not include this crucial testimony above the shipmaster’s signature: “knows the ropes.” On a full-rigged ship there might be as many as two hundred running lines, as opposed to fixed or “standing” rigging; these had to be manipulated by sailors, and the sailor had to know which was which—they looked much alike—and whether to haul them in or slack them off.4 Setting the main topsail, a principal sail on a square-rigger, required the simultaneous manipulation of eleven lines. Anyone who has struggled—from the comfort of a cozy easy chair in front of a cheering fire—to comprehend the names and purposes of the parts aboard one of Patrick O’Brian’s ships will appreciate the complexity of a novice seaman’s task. Dean King’s A Sea of Words, a four-hundred-page nautical glossary, is a necessary companion to O’Brian’s idiomatic sea stories. Slocum had a more capacious and intricately interconnected maritime lexicon to memorize, much of which he would have taken in growing up on Digby Island: customs to absorb, chains of command to honor, sea legs to be found, seasickness to overcome. A sailor had to climb tall masts on a bucking ship, to tame clouds of flapping wet canvas trying to shake him loose, and he had to do this in all weathers, during Cape Horn howlers and sleet storms. Think of the perils of a high-wire walker 150 feet above the deck, with his wire swaying and its anchoring platforms pitching and rolling. A sailor had to hear orders accurately, then execute them. Any able seaman was expected to perform these tasks, but to rise in rank it helped to have a loud voice and clear enunciation, the better to be heard aloft above the shriek of wind.
The specific regulations—or house rules—had been codified in a handbook titled The Seaman’s Vade Mecum (1707). Much knowledge of the peculiarities of the sea was passed from generation to generation and could be taken on faith. The accepted trade routes—from west to east around the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, “running the easting down” as it was known—were refined and buttressed with historical data and hydrographic theory in 1851 by Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Sailing Directions.
For Slocum, though, practical experience was indispensable. An officer was required to know the most crucial thing of all: Where in the world was his ship? It seems safe to suggest that nobody during Slocum’s lifetime excelled him at the art of navigation. In his writing he’s laconic, sometimes even coy, about the ease with which he found a route to this or that landfall, so much so that a landlubber might write off his successful arrival at destinations sometimes thousands of miles distant across open waters as dead reckoning—from “deduced” rather than “deadly,” the estimation of location by relying on observation of speed, modified by tidal set, current, and leeway—or serial good luck. It wasn’t chance that brought Slocum’s vessels home, but rather his exercise of the art of shooting and reducing solar and lunar sights by sextant and azimuth compass, refined by the complex application of mathematical formulas and nautical tables.
To pass Britain’s Board of Trade examination for certification as a second mate, Slocum had studied problem sets from J. W. Norie’s Epitome of Navigation, which demanded that this teen with a third-grade education master not only Euclidean geometry but also, owing to validation of explorers’ postulates that the earth is not flat, the spherical geometry of curved surfaces. Not to mention trigonometry, advanced algebra, the use of logarithms, and, above all, learning to admit it when he didn’t know what he didn’t know. To navigate “by guess and by God”—as sailors said of blind wandering—or to figure wrongly was not to fail in Latin at a proper declension or conjugation; it was to be shipwrecked.
Slocum became proficient in lunar observation, a particular kind of navigation whose practitioners were known as lunarians, fixing their positions by determining the distance and angle between the moon and a planet or fixed star. The great advantage of lunar navigation is the accuracy—within as little as a quarter of a degree, the distance from which a lighthouse set on a bluff might easily be sighted from offshore—with which it can establish longitude. Because the process required to fix one’s position by observation of the night sky required exceedingly tedious and numerous calculations, three experienced navigators, working together, were generally required to execute it. For this reason the alternative means of fixing longitude—by observation of the noon sun together with a precise knowledge of Greenwich Mean Time—became the default method after the introduction of accurate shipborne chronometers.5
How it happened that Slocum became so proficient at lunar navigation had much to do with his grasp of the science’s theory—all self-taught, his study snatched between watches at sea—and the reliability of his calculations. But his facility with the quadrant and sextant was the master skill on which all this depended, giving him the ability to read angles of arc from the deck of a pitching, rolling platform and have confidence in their outcome. Much of such an art can be learned and refined with practice. Slocum, though, clearly had a gift as arbitrarily bestowed as that of whistling with perfect pitch, or pitching a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball or hitting such a pitch out of the ballpark.
After shipping out from Liverpool, Slocum spent his first two years at sea being educated in social customs, astronomy, biology, physics, geography, the laws of cause and effect, and abnormal psychology. From the polyglot crew he must have learned foreign phrases. He learned carpentry and sewing as naturally as any student at trade school or a home-economics course. Sailors, necessarily subject to the commandments and codicils of maritime justice, became sea lawyers. Slocum also read widely, literature as well as sea texts. Herman Melville’s Ishmael is often quoted as testifying that a whale ship had been his “Yale College and my Harvard,” and no wonder. Consider, too, the commonsense judgment needed to keep a ship on an even keel, the stamina demanded by voyages lasting many months, the bursts of energy necessary to take down sail in the face of a waterspout or typhoon, the patience likewise to slat listlessly in the doldrums with the temperature in triple digits.
In 1861 Slocum shipped aboard the British ship Tanjore (for Tangiers) to China, around the Cape of Good Hope. Thirty-six years later, writing to the editor of Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum vividly recalled the master of the Tanjore as a skilled navigator and a domineering martinet so insistent on asserting his place in the chain of command that he conveyed a letter to Slocum (standing at his side) by first delivering it to the first mate, who then handed it to the second mate, who set it on the capstan from which the ordinary seaman was permitted to remove it.
In Chance, Joseph Conrad describes a master’s Olympian distance and authority: “The captain of a ship at sea is a remote, inaccessible creature, something like a prince of a fairy-tale, alone of his kind, depending on nobody, not to be called to account except by powers practically invisible and so distant that they might be looked upon as supernatural for all that the rest of the crew knows of them …” Though Slocum couldn’t recall the Christian name of the Tanjor
e’s master—he would have had no occasion to speak it—he remembered Captain Martin, “who talked through his nose,” as sadistic, obliging his sailors to work with the ice cargo in the chill of the mornings and evenings and then, in Hong Kong, to work aloft, “or worse still, over the ship’s side,” in the heat of the summer days, so hot that “several of the crew died.” When the Tanjore sailed from Hong Kong for the Dutch East Indies, Slocum, gravely ill, was put ashore “hove down with fever,” as he later remembered, and sent to a hospital in Batavia (now Jakarta), a pestilent hellhole. He recovered from what was probably malaria (“Java Fever”), and in the first of the many disputed torts he would experience as a plaintiff or defendant, he sued Captain Martin for three months’ pay, at fifty dollars per month (an unusually high wage at the time, paid only to crew signed at Liverpool), which he won. The only avenue to redress in a foreign port was through the adjudication of a consular officer, in this case the British consul hearing a complaint against a British master of a British vessel. It was rare that an ordinary seaman’s word would outweigh a master’s, so that Slocum’s victory against Captain Martin must have been persuasively supported by witnesses.6 Slocum was rescued from Batavia by Captain Airy, the merciful British steamship captain of the Soushay, who signed the boy aboard as an able seaman, knowing that Slocum—confined by fever to his berth—would be useless as a member of the crew.