Along the Brazilian coast, en route to Pernambuco, they put ashore at a tiny beachfront village and here, as seldom noted before in his recollections, Slocum began to exploit his leisure to mix socially and talk, often playfully, with the coastal dwellers, who heretofore had been of interest chiefly as crew members or stevedores or shipwrights or shipping agents or consular and customs officers. Not that his new world order would be populated exclusively by benign Swiftian Houyhnhnms; Yahoos aplenty crossed his path. At the Liberdade’s next port of call, seeking shelter at the Bay of All Saints, Slocum found the best of Todos Santos’s citizens “shiftless” and unholy fishermen “living in wretched poverty, spending their time between waiting for the tide to go out, when it was in, and waiting for it to come in, when it was out.” The worst of their neighbors were “rough, half-drunken fellows, who rudely came on board, jostling about, and jabbering.” To escape their unwanted attentions, Slocum put immediately to sea, “the character of which I knew better, and could trust to more confidently than a harbor among treacherous natives.”
As the Liberdade sailed near the equator, “we saw the constellations of both hemispheres, but heading north, we left those of the south at last, with the Southern Cross—most beautiful in all the heavens—to watch over a friend.” Joshua’s homage to Virginia, intentionally elliptical to a reader unfamiliar with his family’s personal history, was also emotionally direct. When Slocum disguises his candor he is sometimes coy about it—think of Melville’s so-called “sinister dexterity,” with which he hid the subversive motions of his left hand by distractingly unguarded gestures with his right—but when Virginia is the subject, his language is veiled for decorum rather than masked for mischief. And a few sentences later, continuing to memorialize his great loss, he senses himself passed closely at hand one night by “the stately Aquidneck… sweeping by with crowning staysails set, that fairly brushed the stars.” This ghost “left a pang of lonesomeness for a while.”
The final sentence of Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”—his remarkable meditation on the blank indifference of the natural world to human beings—sounds as though he had been reading Slocum (though his short story was published in 1897, while the Spray was halfway around the world, somewhere in the Indian Ocean). After four shipwrecked men have endured huge seas and injuries, adrift in a lifeboat that they try to row toward Florida’s Atlantic shore, they are driven onto the beach, and the most resilient of them drowns in the surf. The narrator’s last sentence provides a moral, such as it is: “When it came night, the waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.”
As the Liberdade neared Barbados, pushed by the trade winds, flying fish launched themselves onto the Slocums’ deck, so eager were they to be fried in butter for breakfast. And then the island appeared right where it was meant to be, its fertile hills sloping down to white sandy beaches and the coral reefs offshore showing pale green and brown. So pleasing was the prospect from the sea that the Slocums sailed along the island farther than they needed to before entering Carlisle Bay and anchoring in the harbor at Bridgetown, having averaged better than a hundred miles per day since leaving Pernambuco.
Slocum’s sociability cheered him in Barbados, where the family lingered from the end of August until early October 1888. There were reunions with many shipmasters he had met going to and fro on the earth, some encountered recently, including the captain of the steamer Finance. Hettie made special friends with Captain Alfred McNutt and wife, Nova Scotians commanding the Condor. Her letters to this couple, the last mailed in 1910 and bringing news of her husband’s disappearance at sea, reveal a young woman warm and good-tempered, plain-speaking and hungry for friends.3
Five easy days after leaving Bridgetown the Slocums sailed into Mayagüez, along Puerto Rico’s west coast, and began to accustom themselves to the good publicity that had been following them at least from Rio de Janeiro. Now officials entertained them and newspapers sought to interview them. A photographer made an unscheduled appearance at the dock alongside the Liberdade while the family was being entertained on a carriage ride into the country nearby. Thinking that a shot of a rough-hewn sailing canoe while unpopulated lacked sufficient human interest, he hired a black man to stand at the vessel’s helm, dressing him in an excessively formal costume. The resulting photo, as Slocum tells in The Voyage of the “Liberdade,” appeared in journals as far-flung as Paris and Madrid. Word came back that the master was “a fine-looking fellow, but awfully tanned … and rigged all ataunto” (a sailor’s word for a high-masted and tautly rigged ship, making a fine show).
Perhaps incited by jingoism, Slocum snarled at the Spanish popinjays and their troops whose heels pressed against the necks of the Puerto Rican natives: “the atmosphere of the soldier hung over all,” he wrote, “pervading the whole air like a pestilence. Musketed and sabered and uniformed in their bed-ticking suits; hated by the residents and despised by themselves, they doggedly marched, countermarched and wheeled, knowing that they are loathsome in the island, and that their days in the New World are numbered.” Could a tenured postcolonial theorist have expressed more energetic disdain?
Mid-October saw them bear away for the Bahamas, sailing to the east of Hispaniola and along the north coast of Cuba, hastening now to discover the North Star high overhead. The weather could be dramatic—waterspouts and electric storms, “peal on peal of nature’s artillery … accompanied by vivid lightning,” Slocum remembered—but it was most often gorgeous. Now they were sailing the waters that keep boat charter businesses in high clover. Giving Nassau a pass—always a good idea, though one that he would neglect to honor, to his distress, years later aboard the Spray—the Liberdade tucked up under the lee of a reef near a beach at one of the hundreds of cays dotting the Great Bahama Banks en route to Bimini. From there it was a short passage to Florida, but as anyone who has intersected the Gulf Stream in a small vessel knows, this is no casual venture. So the Liberdade entered the Gulf Stream and rode it, letting that mighty current push her north and west: “The motion … was then far from poetical or pleasant,” Slocum writes, but it was fast. With the Gulf Stream’s assistance the Liberdade recorded 220 nautical miles in twenty-four hours, an average speed greater than nine knots; her captain should be allowed to brag that “this was some getting along for a small canoe.”
On October 28, fifty-three days after clearing Paranaguá, the Slocums discovered, in the welcome phrase of explorers, the South Carolina hills behind Cape Roman Light, near the Santee River north of Charleston and south of Georgetown, to which port they took a tow from the steamer Planter,4 but not before going up the Santee to replenish their stores. The Voyage of the “Liberdade” retails these and many other meetings with an unfortunate indulgence of rural dialect, Mark Twain being on Slocum’s bookshelf next to Swift and Richard Hakluyt. “Said the farmer, ‘And you came all the way from Brazil in that boat! Wife, she won’t go to Georgetown in the batto that I built because it rares too much.” His prose after he enters American waters exudes a sense of relief, even renewal. He’s now alert to the lives of others, sitting with his family around campfires ashore and listening to good-natured lies and no doubt telling of encounters with sharks, swordfish, and mighty leviathans.
Ever a pioneer, Slocum—having entered North Carolina’s New River—decided to proceed north along what is now the Atlantic Intra-coastal Waterway, more familiarly the Inland Waterway or, descriptive of the route in Slocum’s day, “the Ditch,” a “maze of sloughs and creeks.” To navigate it, he relied daily on local knowledge, encouraging more storytelling and food sharing. He hired as a pilot a man whose grandfather had dug a portion of the waterway, who promised only that “if any man kin take y’thro that ditch, why, I kin … I have not hearn tell befo’ of a vessel from Brazil sailing through these parts; but then you mout get through, and again you moutent. Well, it’s jist here; you mout and you mouten
t.” Given what Slocum had done and had done to him, had suffered and endured, these were dead-cinch odds.
And so they made it through to Beaufort, North Carolina, among the shoals and reeds with shovels at the ready, raising ducks and alarming livestock. This experience was jolly: one night thirty fishermen joined them around the campfire, talking over “the adventures of their lives. My pilot, the best speaker, kept the camp in roars. As for myself, always fond of mirth, I got up from the fire sore from laughing.” Then it was on to Norfolk, Virginia, where they entered Chesapeake Bay and, on December 27, 1888, sailing before a south wind up the Potomac River, docked in Washington, D.C.
Joshua Slocum was able to boast that he and his family were in tip-top tune, as they had been throughout the voyage. “With all its vicissitudes I still love a life on the broad, free ocean, never regretting the choice of my profession.” This avowal by now went without saying. What catches a reader’s attention on the final page of The Voyage of the “Liberdade” is his more hesitant testimony—in its entirety—on Hettie’s behalf: “My wife, brave enough to face the worst storms, as women are sometimes known to do on sea and on land, enjoyed not only the best of health, but had gained a richer complexion.”
1 As Victor Slocum details in his first book, Castaway Boats (1938), their vessel’s name drew the generosity of “red-hot” abolitionists all along their route. Whether this useful outcome was calculated by the shrewd captain is not recorded. (Anti-abolitionists, let’s assume, didn’t know Portuguese, or how to read what was written on a boat’s transom, or anything else.)
2 In Castaway Boats, Victor writes that at Cape Frio his young stepmother considered the storm clouds overhead and the rough seas all around “with misgivings and suddenly burst into a fit of hysterical weeping.”
3 Three of these chatty and candid letters appear as an appendix in Ann Spencer’s Alone at Sea: The Adventures of Joshua Slocum.
4 News of the Liberdade’s feat was afoot soon after the New York Times, datelined November 3 from Charleston, reported that the Planter had given the Slocums a tow to Georgetown. The steamer’s master, identified as Captain Hubbard, told of such cordial exchanges with the Slocums that he had received a photo of the Liberdade and a note of thanks from her captain, who added that he had “pledged to be home in time to vote (God willing) for the man I esteem most and whom I have found to be so esteemed in foreign lands. I send my hurrah for the man of the day, the hand of a sea-tossed mariner, Grover Cleveland.” This enthusiasm may be taken with a dram of salt water, inasmuch as Slocum would soon be on the government’s doorstep, begging its patronage, or at least its intervention in his complaint against Brazil.
TEN
Destroyer and Poverty Point
The sea—this truth must be confessed—has no generosity. No display of … courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.
—JOSEPH CONRAD, The Mirror of the Sea
WHILE THE LIBERDADE WINTERED over in Washington, Mathew Brady took a photograph (lost) of the Slocums, affirming their celebrity. Joshua haunted the State Department, filing claims “in relation to the case of the Aquidneck,” according to one low-level assistant secretary asked to consider the plaintiff’s grievance. This began a predictable cycle of dispatches between Washington and Brazil: to American consular officers in Rio and Antonina, as well as Brazilian customs and quarantine officers, who needed to have the inquiries and their responses translated into and from Portuguese. Slocum was obliged to refine the specifications of his losses—the value of his cargo, of the Aquidneck, and of his time—and to articulate the logic of his determination to hold Brazil accountable for them. Revisions were required. Documents were misplaced or misdirected. It was Bleak House without the fog.
Come spring, Joshua, Hettie, Garfield, and Victor sailed the Liberdade to New York, where the captain’s wife was interviewed by the New York World on May 19, 1889:
Tales of Capt. Slocum and his wonderful small boat, La Libertad [sic], have been told far and wide. The World wanted to know what the “Captain’s Captain,” Mrs. Slocum, had to say about it, and sent a reporter down to the small boat, bobbing and rolling with every ripple of the tide that flowed around the gray stone walls of the Barge Office, close to which La Liberdad [different sic] was anchored.
“Can you get in?”
Joshua Slocum (in white suit) with the crew of the Destroyer (Photo credit 10.1)
The Destroyer (Photo credit 10.2)
This question was Mrs. Slocum’s greeting when her husband introduced the reporter, whom he had just handed on board, and who stood at the entrance to the low, canvas-covered deck house, the only shelter afforded by the limited accommodations of the boat. The hostess sat in the wee cabin on a plank running the length and raised about three inches from the deck. A sitting posture was the only attitude possible unless one chose to lie down.1
It is impossible not to recollect an interview by the same port city’s Tribune less than seven years earlier, conducted with another “captain” of this particular captain, then aboard the Northern Light. Virginia’s circumstances, doing needlepoint while seated in a paneled and pianoed stateroom, had been in conspicuous contrast to Hettie’s. The wives had in common that they made favorable impressions on their interviewers:
[Hettie] Slocum is young and strong with a full brow; bright hazel eyes, a remarkably well-formed “nez,” a frank smiling mouth, and a chin expressing both firmness and tenderness… [Her] oval face has acquired a rich bronze tint from months of exposure to tropical suns and ocean breezes. Here is the face of a woman who would be capable of the most devoted, intrepid deeds, done in the quietest and most matter-of-fact way, and never voluntarily spoken of afterwards.
She wore yesterday a dark blue serge yachting dress, with short skirt and blouse waist trimmed with rows of white braid, and a blue straw sailor hat, which she had taken off and was holding in her slender brown hand.
Mrs. Slocum’s voice is low and full-toned, although she says she is from Boston—that region of thin, high-pitched feminine utterance. Her manner is gentle, and she spoke with some reluctance of her voyage.
“It is an experience I should not care to repeat, although now that it is mine I feel a certain satisfaction in having gone through it.”
“Didn’t you grow weary and lonely during the long voyage?”
“… Yes. When we left Rio … crowds of people assembled on the quays to send us off and they cheered us wildly. It was very exciting. Then, as the land grew dim in the distance and finally faded from sight, it seemed very desolate on the sea.”
“Are you going on another voyage, Mrs. Slocum?”
“Oh, I hope not. I haven’t been home in over three years, and this was my wedding journey.”
Mrs. Slocum said she was going from here to Boston for a visit, adding:
“I shall travel by rail. I have had enough sailing to last me for a long time.”
Victor departed New York’s Battery Basin aboard the steamship Finance to take responsibility for his own career as a seaman. The tally thus far for Joshua Slocum at the age of forty-five: He had lost to death three infant children and his first wife. He had lost to shipwreck two clippers, been charged with cruel imprisonment of one crew member and the murder of another. His second wife, Hettie, in sympathy with that seasick sailor of the Odyssey, wished to flee so far inland that local citizens wouldn’t recognize the purpose of an oar. He was broke. The age of sail had ended. The captain was, that is, entirely at sea.
He traveled to East Boston to live with his father’s sister and tried from there to rescue himself from poverty and dependence on the generosity of kin, difficult for anyone to accept and especially bitter for such a proud man recently at the pinnacle of his career. He hectored the State Department to redress his misadventures in Brazil and wrote The Voyage of the “Liberdade,” which he printed at his own expense. Where the funds came from isn’t known, nor how many copies wer
e printed, nor how many were sold and by what means. It is certain that his first book brims with virtues, and moreover served as voice training for Sailing Alone Around the World. Walter Teller justly describes Slocum’s voice as “entirely his own,” belonging to “a Yankee skipper and trader accustomed to an exact and pungent use of words … He saw a connection between navigation and writing.” This is helpful as far as it goes, but fails to account for Slocum’s jocularity, his slyness and cunning, the indirect course by which he steers through emotionally perilous waters.
The Voyage of the “Liberdade,” subtitled by Slocum Descriptions of a Voyage “Down to the Sea,” was reviewed by Joseph B. Gilder, coeditor of The Critic, an influential literary magazine, on July 5, 1890. He liked what he read, and that it was self-published and self-edited. No one else seemed to notice the book, leaving Slocum to cover the Boston waterfront looking for work. There were no posts for sailing masters. Garfield Slocum believed that his father was offered a berth as captain by the White Star line, which he rejected, and when Garfield asked why, “He told me, ‘I followed the sea in sailing ships since I was fourteen years old. If I accepted this offer, I would have to get used to steamships, and I do not like steamships.’ ”2
That certainly sounds like the Joshua Slocum we know, and so does his account of quitting a job as carpenter at the McKay shipyard in Boston. He was asked to pay fifty dollars to join a union, an unlikely alliance made unlikelier by its element of compulsion. He remembered that bleak period in an interview years later with a Rhode Island newspaper: “One day, when I was doing a bit of an odd job on a boat and a whole lot of coal and dirt mixed—Cape Horn berries they call the stuff—came down all about my face and neck, I stood up, thought of the difference between my state and when I was master of the Northern Light, and quit the job.”
The Hard Way Around Page 17