To have endured these trials and be honored for mastering them must have been heady for a young man still in his teens when he was elevated to first mate. He was lucky to reach twenty-one. Before he did he had twice doubled Cape Horn and sailed around the world. The so-called Clipper Way (route of the wool and grain clippers) might commence in Liverpool, progress south well offshore of the western coast of Africa to round the Cape of Good Hope, and carry on to Australia, where cargo would be discharged and new materials loaded for delivery around the tip of South America to Liverpool. Sir Francis Chichester, in his book Along the Clipper Way (1967), describes the passage:
Like a broad path curving down through the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic, passing between 300 and 800 miles south of Cape Town and then running down the Easting for 6,600 miles to Bass Strait either keeping within the Roaring Forties or south of them … After leaving Sydney, the clippers either passed between, or south of, the New Zealand islands, then again they ran their Easting down in the Forties or the Fifties. The next landmark was Cape Horn, 5,000 miles on from New Zealand, and once they had doubled the Horn the sailors reckoned they were as good as home, though in fact they had another 8,000 miles to sail through both Atlantics.
The Tanjore’s Captain Martin was a benevolent despot compared with many hard-driving and pitiless masters who pressed on despite the looming ascendancy in merchant shipping of steam power. By the time Slocum went to sea in 1860 the glorious days of clipper ships like the Oriental and the Cutty Sark were soon to pass. Racing around Cape Horn to deliver gold prospectors to the California frenzy of 1849,7 or later to Australian gold fields in 1861, fast and nimble ships—“hell ships” and “murder ships” and “blood ships,” their crews driven by the infamous “bucko mates” of lurid sea yarns8—had been displaced by beamy and overladen and overcanvased behemoths carrying coal and coffee and wool and lumber. While it lasted, the gold-driven golden age of sail had been gorgeous to behold, particularly from ashore at Boston or San Francisco or Sydney, as sightseers regarded with awe the greyhounds straining sleekly at their heavy chain leashes, about to weigh anchor and fill the sky with canvas and go to the other side of the earth at speeds more appropriate to a locomotive than a boat.
The clichés summoned by the sea—from the security of a beach, say—are wholesome: fresh, salty air, cleansing water, the play of sun on sea, perhaps some vigorous exercise among gentle waves. The reality was often almost too grim to be endured: sixty-foot seas pounding over the deck and washing everything not secured, including sailors, overboard. “Breaking” seas are well named, for that’s what they do to human bones and crucial gear. Some captains lashed helmsmen to the wheel to keep them aboard, and others rigged canvas blinds (think of a horse’s blinders) behind the helmsman so that he couldn’t see and be terrified silly by the massive waves gathering astern and about to overtake them, thereby jumping into the rigging (if his legs hadn’t been broken) and abandoning the wheel.
During the 1850s, when a dozen eggs brought round from Baltimore to San Francisco might fetch ten dollars, clipper captains were extravagantly rewarded. The master of a British ship, sailing from Liverpool to China or India, might command as much as £10,000, a fortune; a Cape Horn clipper master during the gold rush might be paid $3,000 for sailing from New York to San Francisco, and $5,000 if he reached the Golden Gate in fewer than a hundred days. Let’s call it $100,000 in today’s money. Fifty years later a captain would be lucky to be paid one-tenth as much, and pinching pennies was all the cry, with skinflint masters “keeping the Sabbath,” as the saying went, “and everything else they could lay their hands on.” (It was common practice for them to mistreat their crews so awfully that the sailors deserted as soon as they reached port, forgoing the balance of their wages.)
But cultures change more slowly than markets, and the slave-driving masters—“blasted boy-killers,” one sailor named them—measuring their time and distance around the Horn with the reckless fanaticism of modern ocean racers, trained the next generation of martinets too well. One such instructor was the notorious “Bully” Forbes, whom Robert Foulke describes as “the prototype of the swaggering, hard-driving captain.” He was said to have locked his sails’ sheets (the equivalent of welding the pedal to the metal of a race car) and carried a pair of revolvers, one in each hand, to prevent the crew of the Marco Polo from shortening “tremendous presses of sail through heavy gales.” He is quoted as having announced to his passengers at the outset of a voyage: “Ladies and gentlemen, last trip I astonished the world with the sailing of this ship. This trip I intend to astonish God Almighty!”
One of the most deadly offenses charged against abusive shipmasters was their custom of punishing sailors for minor infractions by ordering them aloft, needlessly, in harsh weather. Think of scurrying up the ratlines, spray-lashed and deafened by the howling din, with cold-numbed hands, chapped and bloody, fingernails mashed (gloves weren’t used: too clumsy), during a thunderstorm, to serve as a lightning rod. It was rare that a deepwater passage did not take the life of at least one sailor.
Slocum did not complain when, in 1864, as a mate on the Agra, strong and nimble at 180 pounds, he was sent aloft in mid-Atlantic to the upper topsail yard to tame a sail.9 The words “upper topsail” should convey the impression of perilous altitude. An ordinary seaman of the era recalled being sent aloft for the first time with the second mate shouting at his back, “Never ye looks down, sonny!” Herman Melville’s narrator in Redburn describes the sensation: “I could but just perceive the ship below me, like a long narrow plank in the water … Though there was a pretty smooth sea, and little wind; yet, at this extreme elevation, the ship’s motion was very great; so that when the ship rolled one way, I felt something as a fly must feel, walking the ceiling …” Aboard the Agra, a gust set Slocum’s sail flapping like an untethered circus tent, and he was hurled off the yard. According to Alan Villiers, an eyewitness to what generally happened next: “Men who fell from aloft had little chance, whether they fell on deck or into the sea. The only chance for them was if they struck lines on the way down to break the fall.” In White-Jacket, Melville writes that “a seaman fell from the main-royal-yard of an English line-of-battle ship near us, and buried his ankle-bones in the deck, leaving two indentations there, as if scooped out by a carpenter’s gouge.” Slocum’s head struck the main yard (a horizontal member attached to the mast) as he fell, cutting a gash over his left eye but slowing him. The vivid scar was noted—as was his survival—by a Boston newspaper reporter in 1895, as he sailed alone from Gloucester around the globe.
Virginia Albertina Walker (Photo credit 2.3)
1 Up on North Mountain, local tradition holds that Slocum made an even earlier voyage across the millpond paddling a washtub.
2 See Joseph E. Garland’s Lone Voyager, his account of the remarkable solo sailing feats of Howard Blackburn, for detailed descriptions of conditions in the Maritime Provinces during Slocum’s boyhood.
3 Herman Melville wrote a five-line cautionary poem—“Old Counsel of the Young Master of a Wrecked California Clipper”—addressed to young sea-struck romantics:
4 As Spencer Apollonio, editor of The Last of the Cape Horners (2000), notes, “The order ‘lee fore clew-garnet’ … while meaningless, perhaps, to landsmen, tells a sailor precisely where to go and what to do (and always with an implication to be quick about it).” Remember that such an order would often be shouted into the teeth of a nor’easter screaming through the rigging, canvas thundering, waves crashing aboard.
5 An apprentice learning the lunar method might require as many as four hours to complete his calculation. With practice, this could be reduced to thirty minutes, but a high-quality sextant (or, before the common use of sextants, an octant, which was itself actually a quadrant) was necessary. In Sailing Ships of New England, John Robinson and George Francis Dow quote the navigator of a square-rigger, presented in 1897 with such a pig’s-yoke quadrant as Slocum used: “I have no idea how to use it and
I do not believe that there is a shipmaster sailing out of Boston today who does.”
6 It is characteristic of Slocum—in keeping with his clemency toward his father’s violence—that years later, himself having been a shipmaster charged with cruelty, he wrote to the editor of Sailing Alone Around the World that “I may have been a little severe on Captain M of the old ‘Tanjore’ but it is my only revenge for years of broken health brought on by the Captain …”
7 It was a shaggy-haired native of Saco, Maine, who arrived excited in the spring of 1848 in the Plaza of San Francisco shaking in his hand a horseradish bottle enclosing several yellow lumps. “Gold! Gold! Gold! From the American River,” announced Sam Brennan, the manager of Captain John Sutter’s store near Sacramento. News traveled east, disbelief waned, and in 1849 there sailed from East Coast ports 775 ships bound around Cape Horn for the Golden Gate. A year later believers motivated the building—from 1850 until 1856—of the Yankee clippers, a glorious intersection of greed and speed that created beautiful ships and ugly behavior.
8 Samuel Eliot Morison, warming to his work in his essay “The Clipper Ships of Massachusetts,” remarks that “we have all been entertained by yarns of Yankee mates who struck men dead for a little cheekiness, and of captains who shot members of their crew off the yardarms for mere sport …”
9 A full-rigged ship might also fly skysails, known as cloud-rakers, or even a moonsail, higher still.
THREE
Master Slocum
To face the elements is, to be sure, no light matter when the sea is in its grandest mood. You must then know the sea, and know that you know it, and not forget that it was made to be sailed over.
—Sailing Alone Around the World
CERTIFIED AS A SHIP’S OFFICER, he became Mister Slocombe, and in 1865, electing San Francisco as his hailing port, he became a United States citizen. During the following decade most of his cousins and siblings would return from exile in Nova Scotia to Massachusetts, but Slocum’s decision to anchor at the edge of the Wild West was in keeping with his restless avidity for chance. He had visited San Francisco a couple of times, carrying coal from Liverpool and Cardiff and wool from Australia, returning to the British Isles with grain and sometimes gold.
The most pedestrian-seeming cargo concealed hazards. Coal, with its danger of spontaneous combustion if tightly packed and damp, was one of the riskiest of freights, and a coal fire at sea, resulting in the loss of all hands, was not uncommon. (In 1891, during the single month of November, six vessels that loaded coal at Birkenhead, across the Mersey from Liverpool, burned at sea instead of delivering their cargo to San Francisco.) Wheat, which Slocum would frequently carry, was also subject to spontaneous combustion, and for this reason it was often carried on deck, where great vigilance was required to keep it dry. Manganese ore from Chile was heavy and dangerous. Railroad tracks, shipped to San Francisco while the transcontinental railroad was being completed, were prone to shift in the hold during heavy seas, upsetting the trim of the carrying vessel. In brief, merchant shipping—whether the cargo was coal, ice, gunpowder, iron rails, live cattle on the hoof, lumber, guano, jute, copra, or immigrants—was risky business.
Sailing as a whaler had always been an option for Slocum, but unlike conversion to steam shipping, a sea change he emphatically rejected, whaling seems never to have crept even hazily into his field of vision. His repudiation of whaling certainly owed nothing to his scruples as a lover of nature’s creatures, which he happily slaughtered until one day late in his career when he decided abruptly to be done with killing fish and fowl, let alone mammals—but always excepting sharks, which like most sailors he loathed with fervor.1
Blubbering was awful, brutal work. The manners and temperament of Ahab would have made him recognizable as a type to those gullible unfortunates who shipped aboard whalers out of New Bedford or Nantucket or San Francisco under the illusion that they would come home rich from their share of sperm oil and whalebone. Many whalers went to sea straight from the farm, having been tempted by allotments advertised by recruiting agents on behalf of rapacious shipowners. A notorious instance—not possibly apocryphal—has a young hayseed offered 1/250th of the net profits earned by his ship during its voyage of undetermined hardship and duration. (Three years constituted an easy trip; four was more usual.) Balking at such a paltry share, the recruit leaped at the agent’s counteroffer of 1/500th: Now, that’s more like it!
Samuel Eliot Morison writes stirringly of the outrageous situation of American whalers in Slocum’s time, how resourcefully they were cheated by the machinations of outfitters (who kicked money back to the whaling masters) and by sales of tobacco and such from the masters’ slop chests. He reports cases of sailors returning to port so deeply indentured to their masters that they had to pay in order to disembark. Morison’s special contempt, as a lover of fine ships, is reserved for the whaling vessels themselves, their voyages prolonged by greed until at last “the old hooker crawled around the Horn with a yard of weed on her bottom and a crew that looked like shipwrecked mariners.”2
No: whaling was not for Joshua Slocum. But the dominant constant in his many changes of career and circumstance was his steady connection to the sea; another was his relish of enterprise. At various times Slocum sold fish, seashells, self-published books and pamphlets, autographed photos, lecture performances, pieces of coral, ships, and furs. He was at one time or another a trader, gillnet fisherman, shipwright, carpenter, lumberman, charter captain, and trapper. And San Francisco, in the decade following the gold rush, was as good a place as any—with the possible exception of Sydney in the years immediately following Australia’s own gold rush—to grab at chance or be crushed by hazard.
Not every idea hatched in a boomtown was a good one. If those eggs brought round Cape Horn to gold diggers hungry for an omelet fetched ten dollars per dozen in March 1852, a shipper might be lucky to get a dollar a dozen nine months later, when the hungry prospector might not be hungry anymore, or might be broke, or might have decided to take time to raise his own chickens. Passengers from America’s East Coast typically paid $150 to $200 to come around the Horn, but the really big money was to be made from the unpredictable yearnings of suddenly and hugely wealthy prospectors. The market was capricious: the bark Suliot, sailing from Belfast, Maine, to San Francisco in 1849, carried such varied merchandise that her manifest, or inventory, was entered on a roll fifteen feet long. Dry goods, prefab shacks, groceries, medicine, and—as a last-minute addition to fill the holds—a lot of hemlock boards. By the time the ship entered the Golden Gate 117 days later, only the hemlock proved profitable, bought for ten dollars per thousand board feet and sold for three hundred. Yet a year later the bottom dropped out of the lumber market. Joshua Slocum, having by now sailed for five years aboard ships trading in wool, lumber, coffee, and coal, knew the vagaries and perils of long-distance trade, as well as some of the dramatic rewards. The sure bet in a port like San Francisco, its Barbary Coast already legendary for outlaw excess, was vice, but that—like so-called blackbirding, bearing Rudyard Kipling’s “taint of a musky ship, the reek of the slavers’ dhow”—was never his calling.
Slocum at first used San Francisco as a home base from which to hug the shore. Following the Civil War, during the glory days of the wheat trade, San Francisco was the red-hot center of world shipping, surpassing even Liverpool in comings and goings. Hundreds of great ships lay alongside its wharfs and crowded its ample anchorage. Here was the social as well as commercial hub of maritime trade, masters showing off their ships and judging the lines of their rivals’ vessels, approving this captain’s Bristol-fashion spit and polish, condemning that one’s laundry-sack harbor furl. A gaudy figurehead would surely invite disdain.
Slocum wasn’t ready to join such an exalted fraternity. As soon as he became a citizen he designed and with a partner built a gillnet boat up north on the Columbia River and used it to fish for salmon. The boat was double-ended, twenty-five feet long, and to provide shelt
er partly decked. It had a small spritsail attached to a stubby sixteen-foot mast, which doubled as the pole of a tent used during inclement weather. Again and again, when Slocum found himself in a fix he would boat-build his escape. His ungrudging praise of his father’s ability to fashion a vessel with only a jackknife and a tree must have been offered, given his sensitivity to idiom, with the knowledge that “jackknife carpenter” was a dismissive description of a handyman indifferent to finish work. Indeed, excepting a period in the 1870s when he was in the business of selling ornamental Philippine hardwood to Chinese boat builders, and using his trading vessel the Amethyst as a floating display case of inlaid brightwork, he took no interest in joinery as an art.
Now, with his partner in their rough vessel, he gillnetted salmon on the Columbia in a process known as “shooting twine,” stringing fixed nets from the river’s surface almost to its bottom in the path of fish heading upriver to spawn, and sold them to a cannery in Astoria, which then bought their boat at season’s end.3 Having returned to San Francisco with only a modest profit, the partners next ventured farther north to hunt seals and sea otters in the waters along the Pacific coast of the Oregon Territory and around Vancouver Island. Fur trading was potentially very lucrative: a sealskin would fetch $10 on the market in Hong Kong, and an otter hide from $50 to as much as $350. Fortunes were made in what sailors termed the “Nor’west Coast and Chiny” trade, the pelts sailed from the Pacific Northwest to Canton (closed by local trade restrictions to the importation of American goods other than furs and hides) and bartered for nankeen fabric, tea, silk, and porcelain, the lovely Canton ware so cherished in New England.
The sea otters, already remorselessly thinned by Russians during the early settlement of Alaska, weren’t lolling around in the waves begging to be translated into coats and hats. Having been hunted in the surf, otters were wary of the scent of humans along the beach. Slocum and his partner needed sharpshooting skills to kill them at a distance from the water’s edge.
The Hard Way Around Page 4