by Derek Wilson
At Johore the Brasseys were the guests of the maharaja, who gave a state banquet in their honour and, when they left, showered them with expensive presents – tropical plants, silk sarongs, elephant tusks and a pet lizard. It was at this point that one of the crew was discovered to be suffering from smallpox. Tom Brassey changed course for Malacca, where a British doctor was found who came to the Sunbeam with vaccine for everyone aboard. But some of the crewmen were reluctant to submit to being treated and, after long argument, two stubbornly held out, one insisting that he had made a promise to his grandfather that he would never be vaccinated. The Brasseys could not go ashore in Malacca but this did not prevent them buying more souvenirs from the throng of sampans that came alongside. Thus were added to the cargo seven monkeys, about fifty birds and bundles of malacca canes. (Later in the journal Annie casually referred to several birds and animals dying in their stuffy, cramped quarters.)
A run in sultry heat across the northern Indian Ocean brought the party to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) where the Brasseys spent several days in Kandy and the central uplands, visiting friends and seeing the sights. Ceylon is one of the most beautiful islands in the world and as such has always attracted discernmg expatriates who have settled to grow tea or rubber or simply to live in peace and harmony with nature (the most celebrated in recent times being Arthur C. Clarke). In 1877 it had the double attraction for the Brasseys of being beautiful and ruled by the British. The high point of their stay was a visit to an army friend at Neuera-ellia who took them to see the regimental sports, followed by a full-dress ball. The gardens at that altitude (7,000 ft) were aglow with roses and other English flowers. Gentlemen played cricket on immaculate, rolled lawns. Even the venomous snakes that abound in the island, Annie was assured, had a proper respect for their imperial masters – they never attacked Europeans. Her importunate host urged her and her husband to stay for some hunting with the two packs of hounds kept in the area. But by now the Brasseys were ‘homeward bound and must hurry on’. Annie does not tell us why their return to England was so urgent but she does lament the fact that their stay could not be prolonged from a week to a month.
It was 5 April when the Brasseys left Colombo and they wasted no time making for the Mediterranean by the new canal. They made a very brief stop at Aden and reached Suez on the 25th. Here, like many passengers, Tom and Annie disembarked and travelled overland to Alexandria, via Cairo. They had both been in Egypt in 1869 for the elaborate ceremonies inaugurating Khedive Ismail’s engineering miracle. Now they were interested to see the changes brought about by Egypt’s over-ambitious ruler. They noted the fresh fields of corn near the capital on land recovered from the desert, the new canal linking Cairo to the sea at Ismailia, the skilfully laid-out gardens and parks, and the much-improved Shepherd’s Hotel. But not everything met with Annie’s approval; she did not like the western areas of the city, laid out by Ismail in imitation of Second Empire Paris:
. . . alas! Cairo is being rapidly Haussmanised*. For the capitalist or resident Cairo may be improved, but for the traveller, the artist, the lover of the picturesque, the quaint, and the beautiful, the place is ruined. Cairo as a beautiful and ancient oriental city has ceased to exist and is being rapidly transformed into a bad imitation of modern Paris . . . Only a few narrow streets and old houses are still left, with carved wooden lattices, where you can yet dream that the Arabian Nights are true.22
The Brasseys left Alexandria on 2 May and reached Cowes on the 26th, having stopped very briefly at Valletta, Gibraltar and Lisbon.
Thus ended the first circumnavigation-for-pleasure. By the end of the century scores of other yachtsmen had repeated the Brasseys’ exploits but they could not reproduce their unique accomplishment. Not only was the voyage of the Sunbeam a pioneer voyage it was an expression of British imperial and commercial confidence. Everywhere the Brasseys went they found their fellow countrymen. Even where the Union Jack was not flying, British merchants and planters were well ensconced. The world was open to Victoria’s subjects. Annie was occasionally conscious of growing foreign competition and even confided a slight misgiving to her journal: ‘It will be a bad day when the confidence in England’s honesty as a nation throughout the world, and consequently her well-earned supremacy in commerce, have passed away.’23 But it was a passing shadow. The more substantial reality was theatrically represented in the spontaneous tableau created to celebrate Muriel Brassey’s fifth birthday:
Mabelle and the Doctor and the men have been arranging a surprise for her all day, and none of us were allowed to go on the port side of the deck, but after dinner we were taken to a hastily fitted-up theatre, very prettily decorated with flags and Japanese lanterns. On a throne covered with the Union Jack, Muriel was seated, the two pugs being on footstools on either side of her to represent lions couchant. Some of the men had blackened their faces, and gave us a really very excellent Christy Minstrel entertainment.24
* Georges-Eugène, Baron Haussmann (1809–91), the minister largely responsible for turning Paris into a city of wide boulevards and spacious squares, had, according to his critics, a finer eye for security than taste.
10
THE ANCIENT MARINER
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.1
If ever a man had a love affair with the ocean that man was Captain Joshua Slocum who, at the age of fifty-four, became the first man to sail around the world single-handed. He had learned his craft in four decades on the clippers, and had become one of the finest mariners afloat. Yet he also possessed another talent, rare among nautical men: he could translate experience into rugged but tender prose. His two published works, The Voyage of the Liberdade and Sailing Alone Around the World, are like extended love sonnets but crammed with keen observation and fine detail about the handling of small sailing craft. They are the sort of books that Coleridge’s ancient mariner might have written if the poet had left him to his own devices. Sailing Alone is both a practical and a moving account of circumnavigation; it is not surprising that it has become the deep-sea yachtsman’s bible.
In true romantic fashion, Joshua Slocum ran away to sea at the age of twelve. That was in 1856 when, because ‘the wonderful sea charmed me from the first’,2 he could no longer endure life on his father’s Nova Scotia farm. Over the next thirty years he worked his way up from cabin boy to owner-master, achieving promotion to command, as he put it ‘over the bows and not in through the cabin windows’.3
Slocum’s career thus coincided with the last, glorious days of commercial sail. He served on several of the magnificent tall ships plying to China and Australia out of London and San Francisco. By 1890 the triumph of steam was established but Slocum stuck defiantly to the life that he knew. He was by this time sailing his own vessel, the Aquidneck, ‘a little bark which of all man’s handiwork seemed to me the nearest to perfection of beauty, and which in speed, when the wind blew, asked no favours of steamers.’4 Sadly, his pride and joy was wrecked on the coast of Brazil. Immediately, he set to, with such local materials as lay to hand, to build himself a replacement. The result was a unique twenty-five-foot, sampan-rigged craft which he referred to as a ‘canoe’ and christened the Liberdade. (The appropriate name was compounded from two words ‘liber’ meaning free and an archaic verb ‘dade’ which the dictionary defines as ‘to move slowly, totteringly’.)
Sailing the Liberdade back to Boston (Slocum had become a naturalised American) with his family was a remarkable achievement and one which attracted considerable publicity. The middle-aged mariner was not slow to cash in on this. He wrote an account of the building and the voyage of his little vessel. The book was well received and Slocum’s earnings from it went some way towards compensating him for the loss of the Aquidneck.
Now followed two years of frustration and hardship. Sailing-ship masters looking for a command were ten a penny on the New
England coast and even a celebrated mariner like Slocum could not get a ship and earn his keep. It was not just his own plight that depressed him; he pined for the passing of an age. ‘Nearly all our tall vessels had been cut down for coal-barges, and were being ignominiously towed by the nose from port to port.’5 Slocum, ‘cast up from old ocean’, felt as helpless as the fine ships humiliatingly downgraded or rotting away in their muddy berths.
It was when he was offered one of these old craft that life took on a new meaning and purpose. A certain Captain Eben Pierce gave him a decrepit old sloop called the Spray which he had acquired seven years before and which had, ever since, lain on her side in a field, becoming something of a local joke. Pierce’s comment that ‘she wants some repairs’ was a historic understatement. If she was ever to see salt water again the Spray needed to be completely rebuilt. Slocum looked at the sad old ship and made an incredible decision: not only would he restore her to her former glory; he would sail her round the world.
What motives lay behind the formulating of this remarkable vision? On this Slocum was strangely reticent. He passed off his intention to rescue a decaying vessel and attempt to achieve in her something that had never been done before as though it were the most unremarkable thing in the world: ‘the voyage . . . was a natural outcome not only of my love of adventure, but of my lifelong experience.’6 Is it fanciful, I wonder, to see the voyage of the Spray as a gigantic gesture of defiance? Was Slocum, on the very threshold of a new century, with its throbbing steam engines and turbines, making a statement in vindication of old ships, old shipmen, old ways, and the old understanding between mariner and ocean? Once, in mid-Atlantic, Spray was hailed by the liner Olympia. Slocum noted, with scant approval, that her captain was young, and he expressed the hope that man and ship were a match for the sea. ‘There were no porpoises skipping along with the Olympia,’ he observed. ‘Porpoises always prefer sailing ships.’7
Slocum rebuilt his sloop from the keel up. It took him thirteen months and cost $553.62, some of which money he earned doing occasional work in a whaleship fitting yard. As the result of his labours the owner-shipwright-captain had a vessel thirty-six feet nine inches overall and fourteen feet, two inches in the beam. She carried a yawl-rigged mainsail, a jib and flying jib, in addition to which an aft sail could be hoisted on a removable jigger mast. She was designed for solidity and ease of handling rather than for grace; for reliability rather than speed. She bore more resemblance to a North Sea trawler than to any of the fashionable yachts of the day, and she caused many raised eyebrows among the smart pleasure-boat fraternity in the various harbours where she berthed. Slocum was no yachtsman, as he freely admitted, and his ship bore all the hallmarks of a vessel designed by a practical, no-nonsense professional sailor, who had experienced the ocean’s every whim. Seventy years later Francis Chichester, a true yachtsman, paid this tribute to the Spray’s design:
Joshua Slocum’s Spray in the 1890s could attain a speed of 8 or 9 knots, though her hull shape would give modern yacht-designers the horrors. Her stem and stern were nearly up and down, so that her waterline length and overall length were nearly the same. Whatever the modern designer’s views on Spray, the fact remains that she not only made fast passages – the 1,200 miles Slocum sailed in eight days in 1897 stood as a single-handed record for seventy years . . . – but she was also a splendid, seaworthy boat.8
After the building of Spray Slocum spent more than a year in trials, fitting and adjustments. On 7 May 1895 he put out of Gloucester, Massachusetts and made a leisurely progress back up the familiar coastline to Nova Scotia. It was on 2 July that he said goodbye to the American mainland and put out into the Atlantic – alone.
No man knows, until the experience is embraced or thrust upon him, how he will react to complete solitude. You can do little to prepare for it. You can do nothing to stave it off. When the mind is alert and there is plenty to occupy it you are scarcely aware of the problem. It is in moments of boredom and fatigue that it makes itself felt, sometimes in the most bizarre ways. If Slocum had wondered how he would respond he soon found out. Three days out he ran into fog:
. . . in the dismal fog I felt myself drifting into loneliness, an insect on a straw in the midst of the elements . .
During these days a feeling of awe crept over me. My memory worked with startling power. The ominous, the insignificant, the great, the small, the wonderful, the commonplace – all appeared before my mental vision in magical succession. Pages of my history were recalled which had been so long forgotten that they seemed to belong to a previous existence. I heard all the voices of the past laughing, crying, telling what I had heard them tell in many corners of the earth.
The loneliness of my state wore off when the gale was high and I found much work to do. When fine weather returned, then came the sense of solitude, which I could not shake off. I used my voice often, at first giving some order about the affairs of a ship, for I had been told that from disuse I should lose my speech. At the meridian altitude of the sun I called aloud, ‘Eight bells,’ after the custom on a ship at sea. Again from my cabin I cried to an imaginary man at the helm, ‘How does she head, there?’ and again, ‘Is she on her course?’ But getting no reply, I was reminded the more palpably of my condition. My voice sounded hollow on the empty air, and I dropped the practice. However, it was not long before the thought came to me that when I was a lad I used to sing; why not try that now, where it would disturb no one?. . . You should have seen the porpoises leap when I pitched my voice for the waves and the sea and all that was in it. Old turtles, with large eyes, poked their heads up out of the sea as I sang ‘Johnny Boker’, and ‘We’ll Pay Darby Doyl for his Boots’, and the like. But the porpoises were, on the whole, vastly more appreciative than the turtles.9
A few days later Slocum was suffering from hallucinations – or was he? He had partaken rather too freely of plums and cheese and, as a result, was smitten with the most violent indigestion. Then, just when he was at his lowest ebb with exhaustion and pain, the Spray ran into a storm. Slocum should have taken in sail and laid to but he was too weary. Instead, he went below and collapsed on the cabin floor. The sloop was left to run wild before the wind, out of control:
How long I lay there I could not tell, for I became delirious. When I came to, as I thought, from my swoon, I realized that the sloop was plunging into a heavy sea, and looking out of the companionway, to my amazement I saw a tall man at the helm. His rigid hand, grasping the spokes of the wheel, held them as in a vise . . . His rig was that of a foreign sailor, and the large red cap he wore was cockbilled over his left ear, and all was set off with shaggy black whiskers . . . While I gazed upon his threatening aspect I forgot the storm, and wondered if he had come to cut my throat. This he seemed to divine. ‘Señor,’ said he, doffing his cap, ‘I have come to do you no harm.’ And a smile, the faintest in the world, but still a smile, played on his face, which seemed not unkind when he spoke . . . ‘I am one of Columbus’s crew,’ he continued. ‘I am the pilot of the Pinta come to aid you. Lie quiet, señor captain,’ he added, ‘and I will guide your ship tonight . . .’ I was still in agony. Great seas were boarding the Spray, but in my fevered brain I thought they were boats falling on deck, that careless draymen were throwing from wagons on the pier to which I imagined the Spray was now moored, and without fenders to breast her off. ‘You’ll smash your boats!’ I called out again and again, as the seas crashed on the cabin over my head. ‘You’ll smash your boats, but you can’t hurt the Spray. She is strong!’ I cried.
I found, when my pains and calentura had gone, that the deck, now as white as a shark’s tooth from seas washing over it, had been swept of everything movable. To my astonishment, I saw now at broad day that the Spray was still heading as I had left her, and was going like a race-horse. Columbus himself could not have held her more exactly on her course. The sloop had made ninety miles in the night through a rough sea.
The gale eased off and Slocum slept. In his dreams the ol
d pilot reappeared:
‘You did well last night to take my advice,’ said he, ‘and if you would, I should like to be with you often on the voyage, for the love of adventure alone.’ Finishing what he had to say, he again doffed his cap and disappeared as mysteriously as he came, returning, I suppose, to the phantom Pinta. I awoke much refreshed, and with the feeling that I had been in the presence of a friend and a seaman of vast experience. I gathered up my clothes, which by this time were dry, then, by inspiration, I threw overboard all the plums in the vessel.’10
A sceptic might be disposed to dismiss all this talk of a phantom helmsman as a sailor’s yarn. Only in works of imagination do dead crewmen work ships:
I woke, and we were sailing on
As in a gentle weather:
’Twas night, calm night, the moon was high;
The dead men stood together.
All stood together on the deck,
For a charnel-dungeon fitter:
All fixed on me their stony eyes,
That in the Moon did glitter.
The pang, the curse, with which they died,
Had never passed away:
I could not draw my eyes from theirs,
Nor turn them up to pray.
And now this spell was snapt: once more
I viewed the ocean green,
And looked far forth, yet little saw
Of what had else been seen –
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.11
But there are many yachtsmen, mountaineers and explorers who would not dismiss Slocum’s story so readily. The strong sense of another presence is one of the most familiar experiences of people who undergo long periods of loneliness and hardship. Ann Davison, solo yachtswoman, tells how, exhausted at the end of a transatlantic crossing, she met with such a phenomenon off Gibraltar: