The Hard Way Around

by Geoffrey Wolff

  With great difficulty, the healthy crewmen—down now to three, including Victor—got up their anchor and headed downwind back toward Montevideo. The gale stripped off their sails “like autumn leaves,” as Slocum wrote, and following what he remembered to have been “the most dismal of all my nights at sea” they managed to hook an anchor to an underground cable under the lee of Flores Island. At dawn, distress signals were again raised, this time answered with the command to sail into the port, which was not possible. Finally a doctor, drunk, was rowed out with some carbolic acid for disinfectant and the suggestion to dump the victims into the sea, though not into his harbor.

  And bury them at sea they did, weighed down with stones from the ballast in the hold. Soon another half dozen were added to the three already dead. Such sorrows draw attention to unexpected details, and later, remembering the experience, Slocum recalled that his most painful task was the “gathering up” and destruction of the “trinkets” the crew members had bought a few days earlier in Montevideo for their wives and children: “A hat for the little boy here, a pair of boots for his mamma there.” Then another sailor went over the side, and Slocum and his skeleton crew decided that, whatever the difficulty or cost, they “would remain no longer at this terrible place … The wind blowing away from the shore, as may it always blow when friend of mine nears that coast.” The Aquidneck, that “drifting pest house,” as Slocum remembered it, made for Montevideo, where the few survivors were hospitalized, all to carry lifelong the awful facial scars left by smallpox. It cost Slocum a thousand dollars to have the Aquidneck disinfected, and so—continuing his first voyage after being released from a month in prison on a charge of murder—the shipmaster set sail again with a new crew for Antonina, where Hettie and Garfield, knowing who knows what of Victor and Joshua’s fate, awaited. Not far from the mouth of the Plata River, the Aquidneck sailed into a dead calm and “we came to a stand.” They were at a spot on the ocean that Slocum remembered well: “A spell seemed to hang over us … I recognized the place” as being where “a very dear friend had stood by me on deck, looking at this island, some years before. It was the last land that my friend ever saw.”

  Haunted by the ghost of Virginia, fresh from death and jail and mutiny—what could that have been like for them? How could this continue?

  It didn’t. Making one last effort, Slocum entered the timber trade again, shipping huge logs from gigantic ironwood trees. During Christmas of 1887, the Aquidneck was loaded with lumber at an arm extending into Paranaguá Bay and soon after, with Hettie and the boys aboard, set forth to the Atlantic to deliver her freight. Almost immediately, while still in the bay, “currents and wind caught her foul,” as Slocum wrote, and she “stranded broadside on, where open to the sea, a strong swell came in that raked her fore and aft, for three days, the waves dashing over her groaning hull … till at last her back was broke—and why not add ‘heart’ as well!”

  Virginia Slocum’s grave in Buenos Aires (Photo credit 8.1)

  Joshua Slocum (Photo credit 8.2)

  The Spray (Photo credit 8.3)

  1 What Slocum meant by “crazy”—despite the seeming transparency of his rare outburst of candor—is unclear but provocative. He might have been confessing that driving the Aquidneck aground was a kind of furious suicide, or he might simply have meant that a master and navigator distracted by grief cannot safely navigate a river bristling with snags, shoals, and shifting sandbars.

  2 For his part, Victor also made a lifetime choice at this moment by joining his father’s calling, “a decision I have never since regretted, for I would rather be a sailor than anything else.” Closing this paragraph, perhaps catching a high-flown tone in his phrasing, the son did as his father would have done and brings himself down to sea level with a flat declaration: “Anyway, that is how I became a sailor.”

  3 Walter Teller writes in The Search for Captain Slocum that “in [Slocum’s] search for guidance, he even went to a spiritualist.” He is scrupulous to note that this was not “an unusual move in that more credulous age.” But on the same page is Teller’s report of his own “analysis of Slocum’s handwriting,” which the biographer had commissioned in hopes of determining the psychological contours of his subject’s most private life, such as his excessive “masculine protest,” the “frustration” of his “longing for feminine warmth.” Specifically, Teller’s graphologist, Dr. Meta Steiner, addresses with unintentionally hilarious effrontery the “strong sensuousness” and “extraordinary desire to prove his masculinity” revealed by “the determined pressure of the down stroke of letters” in Slocum’s agonized letter to his mother-in-law following Virginia’s death.

  4 The officious official who blustered this high-handed order was Admiral Custodio de Mello, a notable foe of Slocum later in these pages.

  5 This in turn provoked Slocum’s bitter description of the American as “one of these small officials … better adapted to home life; one of those knowing, perhaps, more than need a cow-boy, but not enough for consul.” Given Slocum’s obsessive pursuit of what he took to be justice in his many, many complaints about his treatment by government officials at home and abroad, his sarcasm sounds a warning bell.

  6 In fairness, it should be noted that American ship captains sailing these waters had been known to hoodwink quarantine officers by applying pink tooth powder to the lips and cheeks of deathly pallid crew members.

  TWO

  Sailing Around It

  The Liberdade (Photo credit p2.1)

  Joshua, Hettie, Garfield, and Victor aboard the Liberdade (Photo credit p2.2)

  NINE

  Salvage

  Shipwrecks are apropos of nothing.

  —STEPHEN CRANE, “The Open Boat”

  I had myself carried load on load, but alas! I could not carry a mountain; and was now at the end where my best skill and energy could not avail. What was to be done? What could be done? We had indeed the appearance of shipwrecked people, away, too, from home.

  —JOSHUA SLOCUM, The Voyage of the “Liberdade”

  THE STRANDING AND SEA BATTERING of the uninsured Aquidneck cost the Slocums not only all their money but what son Garfield described as “our beautiful home.” For the remains of the wreck they were paid $1,000, of which—after the crew was paid off—only a “moiety” remained. Once again Slocum found exactly the right word, “moiety” meaning a portion of a molecule to chemists. The U.S. consul at Antonina offered to return the family to Baltimore or Boston by steamer, but Slocum—at the bitter end of his rope with government officials—refused the offer out of hand and commenced his interminable demand for redress from the government of Brazil for all his woes, using as the instrument of his complaint the offices of the government—yes, the government!—of the United States. How a man so delicately calibrated to recognize irony could have failed to register this instance of it is hard to understand. But it’s ever thus with torts, fabricated as they are to confront caricatures of deviltry with caricatures of innocence. Slocum’s story will show his appeal for recompense—for the loss of the Aquidneck, together with the cost to him in commissions and time due to high-handed Brazilian and Argentine port regulations—slithering along, via diplomatic pouches carrying his elaborate and increasingly theatrical grievances, from the week of the shipwreck until the case was finally dismissed in late 1893, killed by the U.S. Department of State.

  Complaining, suing, and writing unsubtle letters was not all that occupied Slocum’s passion during these six years. By a grand exercise of imagination that was informed by his shipbuilding experience and energized by his craftiness and defiance, Joshua Slocum performed an extraordinary feat of self-salvage with his five-thousand-mile journey in a homemade thirty-five-foot sailing canoe—his only crew a young wife, a child, and a teenaged boy—from Paranaguá to Washington, D.C.

  The provenance of this boat is complicated by inconsistent accounts given by Victor and Joshua, down to whether it was begun after the Aquidneck foundered, or before, as a means to
transport the heavy timber felled at the edge of Paranaguá’s beachfront forests. Father and son both refer to their admiration of the crudely built local native canoes, brightly painted and seaworthy, that were used as lighters to bring rough-sawn ironwood alongside the Aquidneck. But the Slocums’ rescue vessel was a bigger boat than those and owed more to the shape of a Gloucester fishermen’s Cape Ann dory—if it had mated with a Japanese sampan, that had itself mated with a Chinese junk, that had in its bloodline a Puget Sound Makah canoe—than to a coastal workboat.

  The sailing canoe was named Liberdade, in honor of her launch on May 13, 1888, the day Brazil’s Golden Law, freeing her slaves, was passed.1 Portuguese for “liberty,” Liberdade is a resonant name for a boat completed within six months of the Aquidneck’s wreck, mostly from scraps and planks and instruments scrounged from the remains. At first Slocum might not have realized fully the Thoreauvian experiment that circumstances had enforced on him. “Simplify, simplify!” What other choice was he given? Here he was, shipwrecked, marooned, and with a jack-knife.

  They worked near Antonina—at a primitive shipyard whose facilities were donated by a sympathetic owner who had modified the Aquidneck—with tools more refined than a pocketknife, but not by much. Joshua and Victor had salvaged from the wreckage jackplanes to smooth the forty-foot rough planks bought from native sawyers. The bottom was built of ironwood, tough and heavy, providing natural ballast for stability. For the deck and topsides, lapstrake cedar was used. Metal fastenings were scrounged from the Aquidneck or cast anew from melted pieces of copper and brass scrap. Humans have built ships from wood for a long time, and as laborious as the process is, it is also forgiving. This tolerance of error, assuming the error is recognized, inspired confidence in father—who profited from his endeavors as a shipwright on the Columbia River and in the Philippines—and son, his apprentice roustabout, carpenter, and rope maker. Garfield, seven, kibitzed, and Hettie, new to sail making but not to emergencies, sewed canvas.

  When they were finished, the Slocums had spent $110 to build the Liberdade, and they sailed her around Paranaguá Bay to get a feel for her “and shake things into place,” as Joshua wrote. He liked what he felt. On June 24, 1888, they crossed the bar and into the Atlantic: “The old boating trick came back fresh to me, the love of the thing itself gaining on me as the little ship stood out; and my crew with one voice said, ‘Go on.’ ”

  Among other admirers of Slocum’s prose, Van Wyck Brooks yoked the author of Sailing Alone Around the World to Thoreau, describing that book as the “nautical equivalent” of Walden. In circumstance and temperament the two writers were at least as dissimilar as they were akin, but from Slocum’s phrase “the love of the thing itself” flows an irreducible, nut-hard recognition and radiant sentiment. In his conclusion to Walden, Thoreau exhorts his reader to “be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade but of thought.” If a wash of boosterism and the power of positive thinking sometimes overviolin Thoreau’s music, this particular appeal is inspiring, and in much the same way that Slocum invokes his deceptively homely “old boating trick” to rouse his little congregation, only to be answered by the hallelujah chorus of “Go on.”

  The adventure’s first hours were exhilarating. The Liberdade clocked 150 miles heading out to sea before turning up the coast to Rio and then sailed into a squall, one of the coast’s notorious pamperos. Hettie’s laboriously stitched suit of sails was shredded, and Slocum turned toward shore under bare poles, managing somehow to reach the safety of Santos, a coffee port depressingly near to where this leg of the journey had begun. What must Hettie have imagined? And considering the situation of Victor and Garfield, it is impossible not to recall Joshua’s virtual enslavement to the will of his father back on Brier Island, laboring at boot making even as he longed to be elsewhere.

  Slocum doesn’t write about his family’s state of mind, except to be mindful in his later account of their stoicism and hardiness.2 Nor does he mention whether Hettie then repaired the Liberdade’s sails, or started over from scratch. But he tells in detail of meeting in Santos with an old friend, one Captain Baker, master of the mail and passenger steamer Finance, who was setting out to Rio and offered them not only a tow but also sanctuary aboard his vessel for Hettie and Garfield. Joshua and Victor remained on the Liberdade, the former at the helm and the latter huddled in the bow with an ax in his hand ready to cut the tow rope in the event of a catastrophe. And one of those was not unlikely, given that the voyage up to Rio was through high and cresting seas, the Finance steaming at an astonishing thirteen knots. The Liberdade—on a mechanized Nantucket sleigh ride—was at the exciting end of a hawser ninety fathoms long, almost the length of two football fields. The passage lasted twenty hours, with Joshua at the helm connected with his shivering son in the bow by a length of line tied to his ankle so his father could jerk him awake if the boy dozed off, which he did not. So troubled became the seas that Captain Baker spread oil astern to calm them, having a negligible effect on the safety and comfort of the crew of the Liberdade but so liberally befouling the new vessel—“I was smothering in grease and our boat was oiled from keel to truck”—that Captain Slocum protested that he had never intended to be a blubberhunter. On they went—“Away, Rio!” as the chantey goes—on what Slocum called “the most exciting boat-ride of my life.” Safe in harbor, with the luxury to muse, he added that he was “bound not to cut the line that towed us so well; and I knew that [Captain] Baker wouldn’t let it go, for it was his rope.”

  The Liberdade remained in Rio until July 23, 1888, her crew recovering and preparing for the voyage home. Let’s hope that Hettie and her stepsons found pleasure ashore, because Joshua was busy petitioning the U.S. consul to intervene on his behalf as he sought compensation for the injuries he had suffered at Brazil’s hands, those wounds he felt so exquisitely. He also required appropriate papers from Brazil to permit him to sail their waters, and this proved complicated. It was suggested that bribes might be useful, but Slocum pretended not to understand, at length wearing down the officials, or more likely charming them, until finally “His Excellency, the Minister of Marine” presented him with “a ‘Passe Especial’ [that] had on it a seal as big as a soup plate.”

  Apart from a substantial brush with a whale—“giving us a toss and a great scare”—the Slocums enjoyed the kind of cruise, three weeks to Pernambuco and another nineteen days to Barbados, that gives sailing a good name. They were beset by high seas, rain squalls, headwinds, contrary tides, calms, fog, near misses, and close calls. But from the captain’s vantage this passage home was removing the shrouds from a work of art that had been hidden in plain sight ever since he first went to sea. He could do this! He could! Emancipated from absentee employers, shipping schedules, the unfathomable impulses and malignancies of mutinous crews, the perils of cargoes that couldn’t be safely stowed to be carried to ports that teemed with disease … if he could sail free of these hazards, finding what sailors name and treasure as an “offing,” he had reason to believe that necessity had shown him how to navigate safely and happily through the rest of his days.

  From Rio onward the music of Slocum’s prose in The Voyage of the “Liberdade” brightens, conveying a freshening of spirit and a sense of wonder as his attention focused exclusively on the matter at hand: keeping the Liberdade on course, properly trimmed, and dry. Aboard the Northern Light or even the Aquidneck he would be consumed with paperwork, double-entry bookkeeping, the vicissitudes of the wheat or cured cod markets, the mandates of getting and spending. Here and now he contemplated the whales keeping his family company: “I realized very often the startling sensation alone of a night at the helm, of having a painful stillness broken by these leviathans bursting the surface of the water with a noise like the roar of a great sea, uncomfortably near … One night in particular; dark and foggy I remember; Victor called me excitedly, saying that something dreadful ahead and drawing rapidly near had frightened him.”
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  This dark and fog and even dread animated Slocum, reminding him of the not unwelcome reality that, whatever his familiarity with the skills a land creature turned seaman may have brought with him offshore, he remained a stranger in a strange land. Some of these whales were twice the Liberdade’s length, and to hear them spouting and snuffling, breaching and sounding—to smell them!—was as bracing as it was alarming. Anthropomorphism was not a fallacy of logic in his belief system, or a fanciful translation from one language to another; it was an interpretation as vital as celestial navigation. Thus the roar of surf breaking over coral incites the exclamation “how intensely lonely [the coral] were! No sign of any living thing in sight, except, perhaps, the phosphorescent streaks of a hungry shark, which told of bad company in our wake.” A suggestion of the respect Slocum paid as a tribute to big sea creatures was his awe of the destructive power of an “infuriated swordfish,” which he—like most sailors of his age—believed was capable of stabbing a hole in the bottom of his boat and skewering its crew from below.