The following night, after gorging on fresh plums and goat cheese given him in Horta, Slocum was overtaken during high seas by agonizing stomach cramps, doubled up in his cabin, writhing on its sole. Through the Spray’s companionway, “to my amazement I saw a tall man at the helm.” The fellow wore a large red cap, at a rakish angle. With “shaggy black whiskers … he would have been taken for a pirate in any part of the world.” The sailor declared, “I am the pilot of [Columbus’s] Pinta come to aid you.” (Slocum had recently been reading Washington Irving’s 1828 Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.) The apparition then diagnoses Slocum’s disease as calentura—tropical heat sickness—and scolds him for his diet. Slocum replies with characteristic irascibility: “ ‘Avast, there, I have no mind for moralizing!’ ”
This synthesis of the spiritual and the rational is always available to Slocum when he distinguishes between penetrable mysteries, such as fog, and impenetrable ones, such as hearing, alone at sea, the voice of a stranger. In most respects his belief in a higher power was in sync with eighteenth-century rationalism, faith in the Great Clockmaker. He invokes the deity much further along in Sailing Alone Around the World, as he charts his route across the vastness of the Pacific: “For one whole month my vessel held her course true … The Southern Cross I saw every night abeam. The sun every morning came up astern; every evening it went down ahead. I wished for no other compass to guide me, for these were true. If I doubted my reckoning after a long time at sea I verified it by reading the clock aloft made by the Great Architect, and it was right.” But during his encounter with the churlish pilot of the Pinta, the supernatural seems almost Greek in its very human and quarrelsome manifestation.
Recovering nicely from the gale, and food poisoning, if that was what he suffered, he welcomed his solitude. The reader, recalling Slocum’s troubles with the help, will appreciate the conviction with which he reports, “I found no fault with the cook, and it was the rule of the voyage that the cook found no fault with me. There was never a ship’s crew so well agreed.” And in this happy spirit he passed through the Pillars of Hercules on August 4, 1895, 102 days from Fairhaven and 29 from Cape Sable. At Gibraltar the Royal Navy entertained him like a visiting monarch, paying his port fees, tuning the Spray’s rig, celebrating his venture. His welcome was in contrast to the Boston Globe’s sour response to his early dispatches, which they found old-fashioned and slow-paced, as prose and as adventure. In the end, they printed only three of his travel letters, his first from Gibraltar (August 21) headlined: “Spook on Spray. Ghost of Columbus’s Man Steered the Boat … With Frolic Welcome the Brave Tar Greeted the Tempests.”
This would not do. Sailing alone around the world was a cakewalk put beside freelancing. Soon Slocum would write Eugene Hardy a bitter letter, complaining that the Boston newspapers, with their pinchfist paydays, had broken their word to him about their interest in his writing. “I suspect that a case of murder or rape would find space for all the particulars, in all the papers.” With $1.50 to his name, he accepted a loan of fifty dollars from Gibraltar’s captain of the port and repaid it, a year later, with the first money he earned as a lecturer. This, after his warm welcome in Horta, set the pattern for the remainder of his voyage: he was greeted as a hero in foreign ports and ignored or disbelieved at home.
Officers of the Royal Navy warned him strenuously against proceeding through the Mediterranean, owing to the near certainty that pirates would beset him along the coast of North Africa. Trusting their wisdom, Slocum, towed from Gibraltar into the wind, set out on the Spray’s newly amended course, back across the Atlantic to Brazil and thence around Cape Horn “the wrong way,” east to west.2 Dropping tow and picking up a stiff breeze, Slocum was no sooner under way than he saw astern and closing on him fast a little Moroccan craft called a felucca, which he took to be crewed by the very pirates he was being put at such inconvenience to evade. The pages describing the chase make for lively adventure reading, concluding with a great sea overtaking both vessels at the last possible moment and dismasting the bad guys, thus sparing Slocum and the Spray.
Following a three-day squall, and within sight of the Canary Islands, he sailed into a dust storm blowing offshore from Africa. Then the Spray was in trade winds and sailing pretty past the Cape Verde Islands. During this period, once more suffering the ache of loneliness, he crossed to leeward under the stern of a drogher carrying bullocks from Argentina. “She was, indeed a stale one! And the poor cattle, how they bellowed!” This was the second cattle ship he had passed in these waters; the first didn’t answer Slocum’s signal, so this time he didn’t bother raising a flag:
The time was when ships passing one another at sea backed their topsails and had a “gam,” and on parting fired guns; but those good old days have gone. People have hardly time nowadays to speak even on the broad ocean, where news is news, and as for a salute of guns, they cannot afford the powder. There are no poetry-enshrined freighters on the sea now; it is a prosy life when we have no time to bid one another good morning.
This lament is earned and even-keeled, revealing the sane balance Slocum maintained on this voyage between solitude and society. When he confesses to a sense of alienation it is almost always owing to circumstance rather than to imaginary deprivation. Slocum makes much of how crucial it was that he had rigged the Spray to sail herself, leaving him free to rest below in his cabin, to cook filling meals, and to immerse himself in books that kept him alert to the world’s characters and business. Standing unnaturally long watches at the helm staring at the compass binnacle will make any sailor drowsy and eventually hallucinatory. Recent studies of the psychological and physical effects of prolonged solitary confinement have cited long-distance solo sailors as being prey to what one researcher, Emma Richards, described as “soul-destroying loneliness.”3 Bernard Moitessier, a later solo circumnavigator, became so addicted to self-reliance and privacy that, on the point of completing and winning his solo race around the world, he kept on going around again the other way.
If Slocum were ever to become a misanthropic recluse, his next port of call, Pernambuco, should have given adequate provocation. It’s tempting to imagine that the governors of Brazil, even more than the pirates of the Mediterranean, had influenced Slocum’s revised itinerary. As he tells his readers:
I had made many voyages to this and other ports in Brazil. In 1893 I was employed as master to take the famous Ericsson ship Destroyer from New York to Brazil to go against the rebel Mello and his party. The Destroyer, by the way, carried a submarine cannon of enormous length … The Brazilians in their curious war sank her themselves at Bahia. With her sank my hope of recovering wages due me; still, I could but try to recover, for to me it meant a great deal. But now within two years the whirligig of time had brought the Mello party into power, and although it was the legal government which had employed me, the so-called “rebels” felt under less obligation to me than I could have wished.
Slocum’s final at-bat in this game of donkey baseball came on November 5, 1895, in Rio, where, “having bestirred myself to meet the highest lord of the admiralty and [various] ministers,” to press his case for unpaid wages due him, he was told: “Captain, so far as we are concerned you may have the ship.” They even offered to show him where she had been sunk and burrowed into mud, her smokestack barely visible.
At last he quit Brazil’s field, forever. On November 28 he had been at sea 218 days, was 5,000 miles from Boston, and had traveled 8,500 miles. But sailing south toward Buenos Aires he ran the Spray aground on a beach in Uruguay, the result of the classic error of perception that confuses a slight elevation near at hand for a high elevation far away: “The false appearance of the sand-hills under a bright moon had deceived me, and I lamented now that I had trusted to appearances at all.” Consider: having sailed alone around the world, this stranding, plus a sharp bump against a coral head in the Indian Ocean, were the only instances when Slocum and his Spray “took the ground,” as sailors say. This time, a
young gaucho approached the Spray on horseback, thinking to lasso, corral, and rebrand her, but the captain frightened him away and kedged off his stranded vessel at high tide by using a dory he had shipped aboard to row an anchor through the surf, very nearly drowning when it was overturned, and out to deep water.
He spent Christmas in Montevideo, where agents of the Royal Mail Steamship Company docked and repaired the Spray without charge, installed as a gift a fine stove, and added twenty pounds sterling as a lagniappe. If Slocum despised steamships, they in turn seemed to love the Spray.4 At Montevideo, on one of the rare occasions that Slocum invited company aboard to sail with him, he ventured up the River Plata to Buenos Aires in the company of one “Captain Howard of Cape Cod,” described as an “old friend” but not supplied with a first name. Walter Teller believes that Slocum was “surely not” bringing this fellow along “to demonstrate the Spray’s self-steering qualities,” but I’m not so sure. Witnesses to this controversial virtue would become essential to Slocum’s credibility after he completed his voyage.
Or it could be that he sailed in company on this short leg of his odyssey because he realized how painful it would be to sail past that spot in Buenos Aires’s outer roads where Virginia had died, or to visit the English Cemetery where she was buried. Neither the name Virginia nor any reference to his first wife appears in Sailing Alone Around the World. Instead Slocum marks his trail by a passage heartbreaking in its cautious navigation around profound emotional obstacles:
I had not for many years been [in] these regions. I will not say that I expected all fine sailing on the course for Cape Horn direct, but while I worked at the sails and rigging I thought only of onward and forward. It was when I anchored in the lonely places that a feeling of awe crept over me. At the last anchorage on the monotonous and muddy [Plata] river, weak as it may seem, I gave way to my feelings. I resolved then that I would anchor no more north of the Strait of Magellan.
Ah, the Strait of Magellan! Here begins the great adventure within the great adventure of the Spray’s circumnavigation within the great adventure of Joshua Slocum’s life. He had decided against doubling Cape Stiff the wrong way around, into prevailing winds so powerful that they could have knocked the sticks out of her. Even so, approaching his entrance to the strait off the coast of Patagonia, he was overtaken by a stupendous wave, a monster offspring of some distant hurricane or earthquake. It had been climbing on the backs of other great waves to make a “mighty crest, towering masthead-high above me,” roaring as it rolled down on the Spray from astern. This was, indeed, what Slocum termed a “culmination,” the kind of freak most seamen live a lifetime without meeting. It would have been natural to look back at such a thing bearing down like a locomotive, and freeze, but Slocum jumped up his mast and into the high rigging, freeing sails by the miracle of reflexes conditioned by accumulated years upon great oceans that had translated panic into focused competence. The results of this experience—the Spray whole and safe after having been submerged by the wave, shaking “in every timber” and reeling “under the weight of the sea”—was to confirm Slocum’s faith in the fundamental wholesomeness of his vessel.
On Valentine’s Day, 1896, Slocum came ashore at Sandy Point in the eastern reach of the Strait of Magellan, leaving a bit more than three hundred miles of awful sailing to Cape Pillar, at the Pacific end. Belonging to Chile, Punta Arenas is the world’s southernmost city, infamous for its miserable climate and general hostility. European settlers of this coaling station for steamers, with sheep farms along its forbidding coast, managed to pry a living out of the place. But the natives—Patagonian and Fuegian—were another breed, as Slocum advises:
[They] were as squalid as contact with unscrupulous traders could make them. A large percentage of the business there was traffic in “fire-water.” If there was a law against selling the poisonous stuff to the natives, it was not enforced. Fine specimens of the Patagonian race, looking smart in the morning when they came into town, had repented before night of ever having seen a white man, so beastly drunk were they, to say nothing about the peltry of which they had been robbed.
The reputation of these coastal natives was well established long before Slocum arrived among them. Charles Darwin wrote in The Voyage of the “Beagle” (1839) with excited contempt about the savages’ pathetic helplessness in the face of European powder and shot:
During our stay at Port Famine, the Fuegians twice came and plagued us. As there were many instruments, clothes, and men on shore, it was thought necessary to frighten them away. The first time a few great guns were fired, when they were far distant. It was most ludicrous to watch through a glass the Indians, as often as the shot struck the water, take up stones, and, as a bold defiance, throw them towards the ship, though about a mile and a half distant! A boat was sent with orders to fire a few musket-shots wide of them. The Fuegians hid themselves behind the trees, and for every discharge of the muskets they fired their arrows; all, however, fell short of the boat, and the officer as he pointed at them laughed. This made the Fuegians frantic with passion, and they shook their mantles in vain rage.5
Slocum had read that book and was using as his principal sailing guide to these waters the U.S. Department of the Navy’s second edition of The West Coast of South America, Including Magellan Strait, Tierra del Fuego and The Outlying Islands, printed by the Hydrographic Office as a precursor to what seamen today know as The Coastal Pilot. Slocum’s edition, arranged according to the sequence of typical passages, alerted sailors to circumstances and conditions to expect in traversing the most dangerous stretch of water on earth.6 (“Westward of Cape Froward the weather is undeniably very bad, and it is probable that no portion of the globe frequented by man experiences, the whole year round, worse weather.”) In deliberately dispassionate prose, the coastal guide warns of riptides, fog, sleet, snow, hail, treacherous holding ground for an anchor, and the frequent occurrence of the dread williwaws, furious and unpredictable blasts of wind that sweep down on the mountainous fjords of the Magellan Strait, hurling sturdy vessels over on their beams, uprooting anchors, and howling like fiends. This was the wind that caused Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s single-engine plane to fly backward. Bruce Chatwin tells of a sixteenth-century British sailor caught in the strait during its winter season: his “frostbitten nose fell off when he blew it.”
But the otherwise stick-to-the-facts Hydrographic Office reserved some high-voltage prose for the native Fuegians, who generally kept themselves hidden, “but it is extraordinary how rapidly a hundred or more will get together if they see an opportunity for attacking boats, small vessels, or a wrecked party.” (In fact, their means of sharing bad news for European and American sailors gave their land and tribe its name, fuego, or fire: they used smoke signals.) Summoned—in a frenzy to loot—they swarmed. And that’s not all:
There is none of the graceful gliding of the North American, or of the New Zealand, canoe in these miserable boats. Instead of being propelled by paddles, they are rowed by oars, rudely made of some pieces of board tied on to the end of a pole … [The Fuegians] are generally almost naked, the women appearing to care less about clothing than the men.
Or shall we give Charles Darwin the last word? These observations, written by a celebrated man of science and reason, an evangelist of direct observation, would have been familiar to Slocum:
While going one day on shore near Wollaston Island, we pulled alongside a canoe with six Fuegians. These were the most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld, … quite naked, and even one full-grown woman was absolutely so … In another harbor not far distant, a woman, who was suckling a recently-born child, came one day alongside the vessel, and remained there out of mere curiosity, whilst the sleet fell and thawed on her naked bosom, and on the skin of her naked baby! These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, and their gestures violent. Viewing such men, on
e can hardly make one’s self believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world. It is a common subject of conjecture what pleasure in life some of the lower animals can enjoy: how much more reasonably the same question may be asked with respect to these barbarians! At night, five or six human beings, naked and scarcely protected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate, sleep on the wet ground coiled up like animals … The different tribes when at war are cannibals … When pressed in winter by hunger, they kill and devour their old women before they kill their dogs: the boy, being asked by Mr. Low why they did this, answered, “Doggies catch otters, old women no.” This boy described the manner in which they are killed by being held over smoke and thus choked; he imitated their screams as a joke, and described the parts of their bodies which are considered best to eat.
While the Spray was moored at Punta Arenas, the port captain, a Chilean naval officer, attempted to persuade Slocum to ship bodyguards to protect him against the treachery of the Fuegians in the strait, where they were said to have recently massacred the crew of a vaguely referenced schooner, in retaliation for which the governor of the region had sent a “party of young bloods”—a lynch mob—“to foray a Fuegian settlement and wipe out what they could of it.” Despite Slocum’s skepticism about the distribution of rights and wrongs between the natives and their Chilean masters, he was pleased to have on board a Martini-Henry .577/450 lever-action carbine, with an effective range of six hundred yards. And before he set out alone, he received as a gift from Captain Pedro Samblich7 a sack of carpet tacks, with the caution, “You must use them discreetly.” (The reader’s patience will be rewarded.) He was also urged, as his son Victor reports, “to shoot straight and to begin shooting in time.”8
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