Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072) (11 page)

It was April of 1895, and Slocum was ready to set sail. Eight days before he departed, the Boston
Daily Globe
announced his plans: “
To Sail Around World / Capt Joshua Slocum Has a Trim Craft Fitted Out.” The reporter who visited the “builder, owner, skipper, crew, cook and cabin boy” aboard the
Spray
when it was docked in East Boston was stunned by the small size of the boat: “There now lies a little sloop which looks about large enough for a longshore fisherman, but which is, nevertheless, booked for a voyage around the world.”

This newspaper article, dated April 16, 1895, illustrates how unsettled the captain’s plans were. The lettering on the
Spray
’s stern at this time said “Spray Fairhaven,” but before leaving on April 24, the captain had decided on a more visible hailing port: “Spray Boston.” Slocum shared his early ideas on how the
Spray
would be rigged: “Her present rig is the ordinary one of the sloop, with mainsail and jib, a short topmast being carried only for signaling. Later, however, her rig may be changed to something like that of
La Liberdate
[sic], with a battened sail in place of the mainsail, and a smaller sail of the same kind on a mizen mast aft.” Slocum indicated that this change would be made at the end of the week before the sloop started
out from New York. Neither the New York departure nor the early change of rig happened as outlined.

As for the route and the time it would take, Slocum was completely off in his estimates. “
From New York I shall sail for Panama,” he predicted. “That is, if I can get the boat taken across the isthmus. If I cannot get transportation for her, I shall sail for the Straits of Magellan and so on into the Pacific. It will be a long way to the straits, so I shall do my best to get the boat across the isthmus. Once in the Pacific I shall make all my longitude in the trade winds, either north or south of the equator as it may happen. Then I shall touch many of the South Sea islands and thence head home across the Atlantic. It is quite a trip but two years ought to see it finished.” In fact, the voyage would take three years and two months to complete.

In another article that ran in the Boston
Herald
at around the same time, Slocum said he hoped to find the Gilbert Islanders he had rescued on the
Northern Light
twelve years earlier. He also insisted that his craft was stable and reliable. The story described him just before the voyage as five feet nine and a half inches tall, 146 pounds and in remarkable health.

When Slocum was asked how he planned to carry out this venture single-handed, he explained that he intended to “sleep in the day time and keep the boat going at night … When it blows too hard I shall get out my sea anchor, batten everything down tight, and go below for a sleep
and let the gale blow itself out.” The Boston
Daily Globe
reporter, who had at first commented that Slocum and the little
Spray
were setting out on “
an adventure from even the prospect of which many handy mariners might be excused from shrinking,” left the interview a believer in the captain: “Capt. Slocum apparently regards it with no feeling of misgiving, and talks about it in a matter-of-fact way which shows confidence not only in his determination, but also in his ability to bring the adventure to a successful conclusion.”

The old seadog received a vote of confidence from another staunch believer. Slocum’s dealings with Funk and Wagnalls had brought him into contact with a young supporter of his voyage, whose enthusiasm perhaps partly made up for Hettie’s coolness. Mabel Wagnalls, the daughter of publisher Adam Willis Wagnalls, was twenty-four and unmarried. She came to see Slocum on the
Spray
just before he sailed, bringing a box of books from her father, as well as a book she had written, “a musical story” titled
Miserere
. Mabel was cultured and had dreams of becoming a writer. She and Slocum quickly forged a close connection. Regarding Mabel’s eagerness to cheer Slocum on, biographer Walter Teller could only conclude, “The enterprise the old knight of action was about to embark on touched her imagination and heart.” Teller’s editor agreed, and wrote back to Teller, “Do you think he ever really focussed on her as a woman — I’m inclined to think not. I think she was simply his writing home in the sense
we’ve discussed.” Whatever their relationship, Slocum was touched by her visit and cherished Mabel’s parting words: “The
Spray
will return.”

On April 24, 1895, with the noon-hour whistles blowing a noisy fanfare, the
Spray
left East Boston under full sail. This was the moment Slocum had long anticipated. In his memoir of the voyage,
Sailing Alone Around the World
, he recalled the beauty of that day: “
Waves dancing joyously across Massachusetts Bay met the sloop coming out, to dash themselves instantly into myriads of sparkling gems that hung about her breast at every surge. The day was perfect, the sunlight clear and strong. Every particle of water thrown into the air became a gem, and the
Spray
, making good her name as she dashed ahead, snatched necklace after necklace from the sea, and as often threw them away. We have all seen miniature rainbows about a ship’s prow, but the
Spray
flung out a bow of her own that day, such as I had never seen before. Her good angel had embarked on the voyage, I so read it in the sea.”

I used to soak my hardtack and make bread pudding of the very nicest kind and it had strength and nourishment, too. It was something that would stand by you. I soaked the bread about six hours to get it thoroughly soft, then added sugar, butter, milk and raisins, put it on my lamp-stove and in a few minutes it was done
.

My stores included coffee, tea, flour, baking powder, salt, pepper and mustard — yes, and curry, I mustn’t forget that. Curry powder is great stuff aboard a vessel. It was just what I needed to give the final touch to my venison stews that I made out of the salt beef and salt pork I carried along. Besides those meats I had ham and dried codfish. Very few persons know how to treat a salt codfish properly. To freshen it they let it stand in water half a day or more, very likely, and it may be, use several waters. That takes all the goodness out. You can get rid of the extra salt just as effectively and without hurting the fish by picking it to pieces and washing it with your hands — just shaking it up and down in the water. Then put it right into the pot and boil for fifteen minutes. When you get it ready for the table, add butter and pepper and chop a hard-boiled egg and put on top. You make codfish that way and I want to sit down prepared to hoist in a meal of it; and all I want besides is potatoes, coffee, and bread and butter
.

— From “The Cook Who Sailed Alone,”
Good Housekeeping
, February 1903

All Watches

The
Spray
and Slocum were off and away, but the route they had embarked on was not even remotely the one the captain had mapped out in newspaper interviews just the week before. From the beginning he sailed as the spirit moved him. Even after the “thrilling pulse” of a send-off fanned by plenty of hype in the local press, Slocum set his own deliberate pace. His first straying from plan, while minor, suggested how important mulling and moseying were to be in the overall scheme of the voyage. Slocum made first for Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he stopped in the cove part of the harbor to “weigh the voyage, and my feelings, and all that.” He also wanted to
check out the
Spray
after her initial run. Here he had his first experience of coming into port alone in a sizeable boat. He stayed in port for close to two weeks, the first of the many delays that were to aggravate his literary agent. But Slocum already had the kind of audience that mattered to him. Old captains gathered to hear his plans and gave him a “
fisherman’s own” lantern as a bon voyage gift. He also took on dry cod, a barrel of oil and a gaff, pugh and dip-net, as well as some copper paint, with which he coated the bottom of his sloop. Before leaving, he made a dinghy of sorts by sawing a dory in half and boarding up the ends. A full-size dory was too big for the
Spray
, but this half-dory would do perfectly, and Slocum, ever resourceful and inventive, planned to put it to good use: “I perceived, moreover, that the newly arranged craft would answer for a washing-machine when placed athwartships, and also for a bath-tub.”

On leaving Gloucester, he sailed up the coast for a nostalgic visit to his childhood home of Brier Island. It had been thirty-five years since he left, and he’d forgotten how to navigate through the passage and “the worst tide-race in the Bay of Fundy.” He asked a fisherman for directions and realized in hindsight that he shouldn’t have paid attention, for the man was clearly not an islander: “He dodged a sea that slopped over the rail, and stopping to brush the water from his face, lost a fine cod which he was about to ship. My islander would not have done that. It is known that a Brier Islander, fish or no fish on
his hook, never flinches from a sea.” Slocum got caught in the “
fierce sou’west rip” and was glad to reach Westport. He felt reconnected to his home almost immediately, and stayed on Brier Island long enough to overhaul the
Spray
.

As he worked, he again reconsidered the route he would take. Soon after, he wrote to Eugene Hardy to let him know where he planned to sail when he left on the next full tides: “I think Pernambuco will be my first landfall, leaving this. Then touching the principal ports on S.A. coast on through Magellan Straits where I hope to be in November. So many courses to be taken after that, I can onlly then go as sircumstance and my feelings dictate. My mind is deffinately fixed on one thing and that is to go round …” Hardy and the newspaper syndicate must have wondered just when his drive to do what his mind had “fixed on” would kick in.

A month later, Slocum was still in his home province. After the Westport overhaul and a test run of the sou’west rip, Slocum made one more stop before sailing for open sea. In Yarmouth, on the southwest tip of Nova Scotia, Slocum loaded up on food and water. He also made an important purchase. He had been sailing without a chronometer, as his old one had been so long in disuse that bringing it up to scratch would have cost him fifteen dollars — an amount he found alarming. But he needed a chronometer aboard, as he explained in his typical tongue-in-cheek fashion: “In our newfangled notions of navigation it is supposed that a mariner cannot find his
way without one; and I had myself drifted into this way of thinking.” Now, in Yarmouth, he found a cheap solution and bought his famous tin clock with the broken face. It was a good deal: “
The price of it was a dollar and a half, but on account of the face being smashed the merchant let me have it for a dollar.” The tin alarm clock was to become a kind of running joke on the trip: to mask his true talents as a celestial navigator, Slocum used the gag of boiling his clock to keep it working.

Before setting out on the Atlantic, Slocum figured he had better let his Boston agents know what he was up to. First he explained the delay, citing “an attack of malaria at Gloucester, from working at the Sloop on the beach there in a sickning ooze.” Then he announced a major change of plans that must have mystified Hardy and the people at Roberts Brothers: “After all deliberations and careful study of rout and the seasons, I think my best way is via the Suez canal, down the Read [sic] Sea and along the Coasts of India, in the winter months, calling at Aden and at Ceylon and Singapore taking the S.W. Monsoon next summer up the China Sea, calling at Hong Kong and other treaty ports in China thence to Japan and on to California From California I believe I shall cross the Isthmus of Panama The freight agent of the Panama road wrote me that I could not get over the isthmus — we’ll see!”

On July 1, to the relief of his agent, Slocum finally “let go of my last hold on America.” After eighteen days’ sailing he reached the Azores. It was three months since
he had set out on his world voyage. From Horta, on the island of Faial, he wrote to Hardy: “[I have] been trying to scribble a few lines for the newspapers but find it almost impossible to do or to think.” In Gibraltar, Slocum was informed that the Mediterranean was unsafe and that he would have to cross the Atlantic again. Forty days’ sailing brought Slocum to Pernambuco, in Brazil, where he wrote an anxious letter to Hardy. The Boston
Globe
had published three of his travel letters, but Slocum was unable to provide the newspapers with the regular, exciting copy they needed. What copy he did send contained dubious grammar and atrocious spelling and wasn’t spectacular enough to entice readers. The
Globe
was his most important customer, and Slocum, now six months into his circumnavigation, could no longer implore them to be patient. He must have realized his syndicate days were numbered: “I send one more letter I dare not look it over If it is not interesting, I can not be interesting stirred up from the bottom of my soul … It was the voyage I thought of and not me. No sailor has ever done what [I] have done. I thank you sincerely for giving my son the money.”