Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072) (27 page)

Decades of nomadic wanderlust had worn Slocum down. He was now suffering from prolonged headaches. One neighbor noted, “Slocum was much run down physically and perhaps mentally — exceedingly lazy and indifferent to his surroundings.” Author and sailor Vincent Gilpin was struck by Slocum’s appearance in 1908: “He was thrifty and usually hard up — which didn’t bother him, for his wants were few. Spray … was simply fitted out, rather bare, and very damp, from many soakings with salt water, and Slocum kept a little wood-stove going
to help dry her out. I remember seeing him lunching one day on what looked like a half-baked potato, from which he sliced pieces with his jack-knife. He was rather shabbily dressed in civilian clothes, with a ragged black felt hat.”

Slocum had once said that even the worst sea is not so terrible to a well-appointed ship, but by 1907 neither he nor his ship were well appointed. He was distracted and disheveled-looking in his shabby clothes; she was ramshackled, badly in need of paint, leaking at the deckline, cracked and full of rust stains. But there is an understanding a sailor has of his boat after years of sailing together. It’s a feeling that somehow the boat is lucky, and has to have been so to survive the many dangers she has sailed through. Sailors believe that a boat’s luck rubs off on the people involved with her — that if a sailor gives his best to a vessel, she will reciprocate.

Whether the
Spray
was seaworthy or not, Slocum had faith in her abilities and his own. He was still filled with wanderlust. Grace Brown had this view of his melancholy and his need to be constantly on the move: “
I do not ascribe any sadness to anything less than for more worlds to conquer, as it were. You know that divine discontent we have heard about, that urge that would not let him give over.” Slocum told family, friends, neighbors and the newspapers that he was planning a final adventure: he was planning a voyage of exploration to Venezuela, up the Orinoco River to the Rio Negro, and then into the Amazon. He joked that he intended to take his Victrola so
that if he was mistaken for a god, he would not disappoint the natives.

As his neighbors watched the old salt prepare for this adventure, they must have shaken their heads. Horace Athearn, a trap fisherman at Menemsha at the time, watched the
Spray
sail off on what he thought would be her last voyage. He and others had remarked on the sad condition of the
Spray;
the general consensus was that everything looked worn, especially the standing rigging. They thought the captain was slipping, that in his best days he never would have started out in such a sorry state. Vincent Gilpin remembered that “
her sails and rigging would have been renewed more than once, and would have always had weak spots.” Thomas Fleming Day, editor of
The Rudder
, thought the
Spray
was “considerably dozy … certainly seaworthy, though slow.” Captain Nat Herreshoff cast the captain’s last line aboard and later remarked on the
Spray
’s worn sails and frayed lines. And Vineyarder Reginald Norton remembered people’s dire predictions before Slocum set sail: “Folks used to say he would plant his bones in that boat.” Those words were prophetic: Captain Joshua Slocum and the
Spray
left Vineyard Haven for the Orinoco River and were never heard from again.

Two mysteries surround Slocum’s fate: What happened to him? and When did it happen? There is even some confusion regarding the year he left Vineyard Haven. By all legal and historical accounts the date was November 14, 1909. That was the date Hettie put on a petition to the
Probate Court of Dukes County. The petition stated that Joshua Slocum “
disappeared, absconded and absented himself” on that day and further stated, “He sailed from Tisbury, Massachusetts in the Sloop ‘Spray’ … encountered a very severe gale shortly afterwards and has never been heard from since.” And Slocum’s son Victor claimed to have received a letter from his father dated September 4, 1909, wherein the captain wrote, “I am on the
Spray
hustling for a dollar.” However, that date conflicts with a news item from the Fairhaven
Star
dated September 30, 1909, which referred to a mysterious piece of mail:

It must be pointed out that Victor’s accounts of his father’s travels, while spirited and informative, are full of
inaccuracies and undocumented anecdotes. He even gave his mother’s date of death incorrectly. In his book
Capt. Joshua Slocum
, Victor wrote of his mother’s death, “
that was on July 25, 1885. There is no need of my looking at a calendar for the date, which sixty-five years ago was written on my heart, never in this life to be effaced.” In fact, Virginia died on July 25, 1884.

Victor also wrote about the condition of the
Spray
before his father headed out on that final voyage: “In 1909 the
Spray
was fitted out at the Herreshoff works in Bristol, Rhode Island, for her Customary winter Voyage to Grand Cayman. Mr. Herreshoff (the great ‘Nat’) admired his visitor and said she was a good boat. While the
Spray
was in his yard he spent considerable time looking her over and also much time in conversation with her skipper, though Nat was known to be a man who wasted neither time nor words. When the
Spray
left Bristol in the fall of 1909, she was well fitted and provided for, and my father was in the best of physical health.” But L. Francis Herreshoff, Nat Herreshoff’s son, remembered quite differently in a letter to Walter Teller dated December 30, 1952: “The
Spray
did not have any work done on her at the Herreshoff Company but simply lay at one of the wharves in what is called Walker’s Cove. She may have been given some old ropes, but the captain did everything himself in the refit. I shouldn’t be surprised if I were the last one to speak to him for I saw him off on the morning that he departed.” Herreshoff does not give a year,
and Carlton J. Pinheiro, the present curator of the Herreshoff Marine Museum, in Bristol, Rhode Island, finds no record of Slocum’s visit either in Nat Herreshoff’s journal or in the company records.

A 1953 Vineyard
Gazette
account of Captain Slocum and his disappearance inspired Francis Mead to remember that he had been out fishing late in the summer of 1909 in Muskeget Channel and that he had heard Captain John Randolphe wondering where the
Spray
could be headed. Mead speculated that they were the last to see Slocum and the
Spray
, as “
the water was pretty rough around Skiffs Island.” Teller notes that another man, B.H. Kidder, wrote to the Vineyard
Gazette
claiming to have seen Slocum in Bridgeport, Connecticut. When he asked the captain where he was headed, Slocum told him, “Some faraway places.” Teller concluded that it did not seem likely the year of that sighting was 1909.

Yet the evidence is overwhelming that in fact Slocum departed on his final voyage in 1908. Newspaper accounts for 1909 have no news reports concerning the captain except for ones that mention his disappearance, and these all confirm a 1908 departure. The Vineyard
Gazette
reported on July 24, 1909, “Captain Slocum sailed from Vineyard Haven for the West Indies more than a year and a half ago to escape the severity of the approaching winter and has not since been heard from. He sailed alone and was last seen by a passing steamship, which reported the
Spray
as making heavy weather.” Hettie is quoted in
another
Gazette
article from 1909: “I believe beyond all doubt that Capt. Slocum is lost … He sailed Nov. 12, 1908, going south for the sake of his health … We expected to hear from him when he reached the Bahamas and always made a point of keeping his publishers informed.” Hettie again writes 1908, although with a change in the November date, in a letter to her friend Mrs. McNutt dated August 28, 1910. “I am sorry to say that there seem but little or no doubt but that something serious has happened Captain Slocum and the ‘Spray’. He sailed from Vineyard Haven the Spray’s home port on Nov. 14th, 1908 bound to the West Indies, and to my knowledge nothing has ever been heard from him since that date.”

William A. Nickerson wrote to the editor of
Maine Coast Fisherman
that he saw Slocum in Cotuit, Cape Cod, in the summer of 1908. He sent a picture of the
Spray
with 1908 on the back. He added that he had heard the rumor later that same summer that Slocum was making an exploring trip in the Orinoco River. When nothing was heard, it was presumed by the Cape Cod fisherman that Slocum was lost in the vicinity of Cape Hatteras.

What makes the task of verifying Slocum’s date of disappearance all the more confusing is that in many of the reports of a 1908 departure received by biographer Walter Teller, Teller has changed and scribbled 1909 in the margins, or made corrections. Kenneth E. Slack, author of
In the Wake of the Spray
, wrote to Teller about Nickerson’s photograph and story in
Maine Coast
Fisherman:
“
The letter says 1908, but I wrote Mr. Nickerson, as he said the
Spray
disappeared the same year when it was really the next year, and he said that he had been mistaken and on reflection, feels sure it was 1909.”

Two other sources lend credence to a 1908 departure. Alice C. Longaker, whose family spent their summers at Lagoon Heights on Martha’s Vineyard, sent Teller an excerpt from her father’s record book chronicling those vacations. His entry for August 13, 1910, reads: “Capt. Joshua Slocum left Vineyard Haven on the day before Thanksgiving (1908) in the
Spray
for some southern port (Probably the Bahamas) and was never heard from to this date. Am not certain that the above is correct. He may have sailed from New Bedford.” Teller wrote “1909” in the margin of her letter. Thomas Fleming Day, editor of
The Rudder
, wrote of Slocum’s departure in the magazine’s January 1911 edition: “I’m afraid we must give up all hope of ever seeing the old skipper again; it is
now over two years
[my emphasis] since he departed on his last voyage. He told me that he was going up the Orinoco River, and through the Rio Negro into the Amazon and home that way, and there is no news that he ever made the river or any port, and surely some of my correspondents would have seen
Spray
and sent word.”
Over two years
from the publication date would establish the beginning of Slocum’s final voyage as November 1908.

So, most of the evidence, including Hettie’s obituary, points to November 12, 1908, as the date Slocum set sail.
That would have made him sixty-four years old. The second and more mysterious question concerns what happened to him. No evidence has ever been found. His jumble of books, newspaper clippings, curios, notebooks and charts, along with his sextant and his framed letter from President Roosevelt, all went down with the
Spray
.

Of course, everybody had a theory at the time. In his article “Quite Another Matter,” which appeared in
The Rudder
in March 1968, H.S. Smith reflected, “
Captain Slocum probably was the worst ship’s husband I have encountered, and I wasn’t a bit surprised when the
Spray
went missing about four years later. To me, this always has been something of an anomaly even though I have seen my share of craft that seemed well handled but poorly kept.” He reflected on the boat’s construction:
“Spray
’s planking was in poor shape. No two planks appeared to be of the same shape, size, or thickness, or even of the same kind of wood … the shape she was in would give the horrors to anyone who went to sea. It could be the captain took care of some of the neglect as soon as he quit the land, but there was nothing in the world he could have done for the way she had been roughly cobbled together in the first place.”

Captain Levi Jackson was one of those who contended for last man to see the
Spray
. He was fishing for cod off the Muskeget Channel shoals when he spotted Slocum’s boat. He considered it an unwise time for a sailing boat to be heading southeast, as there was a heavy wind coming
from that direction. Jackson could only assume that Slocum was lost on the shoals, where many ships had been wrecked. A local paper reported, “
The last person known to have seen the
Spray
is Captain Levi Jackson of Edgartown, Massachusetts on November 12th, 1908 when the
Spray
sailed for the West Indies. On that night a severe gale sprang up from the southeast hauling to the southwest, making a heavy cross sea and the sloop is thought to have been caught in a tide rip and tripped foundering before an offing was made. No wreckage was ever found.”

The theory that the
Spray
had gone down suddenly near landfall was supported by a Vineyarder, Captain Donald Lemar Poole, who became a close confidant of Walter Teller. It was a speculation that Slocum would have appreciated, as he knew how real a possibility such an outcome was. After his return from the circumnavigation voyage, Slocum had written, “I had sailed over oceans. I have since completed a course over them all and sailed around the whole world without so nearly meeting a fatality as on that trip on the lagoon through a squall which sent us drifting helplessly to sea where we should have been incontinently lost.”

Victor Slocum considered it most likely that his father was run down in the shipping lanes by a steamer. Hettie had her own theory, which she expressed in her letter to Mrs. McNutt: “I am always deeply impressed that some thing serious has happened. Nor do I consider it strange
if the ‘Spray’ has not met her fate at sea … Captain Slocum’s love for adventure I have always believed led him beyond all reason, for his own good, and the well being of his family … I really think that the voyage to West Indies was more than he was physically able to stand.” Indeed, Slocum’s physical condition was far from peak. It is possible that he collapsed or blacked out and fell overboard, or became despondent and allowed the sea to take him. He might also have died in a remote port or settlement.