Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072) (5 page)

True Love and a Family Afloat

Virginia Albertina Walker Slocum was as perfect a partner for Joshua Slocum as he could ever have imagined. She was beautiful and courageous, cultured and practical, strong-willed and gentle, and she was his strength. She was also adventurous enough to abandon big-city comforts and diversions for a rugged shipboard life as wife and mother. For as long as she lived, Virginia sailed the seas with her husband and stood loyally and inspirationally by his side through storms, mutinies, sorrows, blessings, losses and triumphs.

Virginia was an exceptional sea mate — and an able
navigator — but she was only one of scores of captain’s wives who spent their lives at sea with their husbands. This trend was dictated in large part by the fact that the age of sail was dying. With steamers taking over the merchant trade, sailing vessels had to abandon their most common routes. Just to survive, captains had to take on freight wherever a cargo could be found and carry it to whichever out-of-the-way port it was bound. Captains and their crews were thankful for the work, but often it meant years sailing unpredictable routes, to ports too small and isolated to enjoy regular steamer service. Many captains had to spend years at a stretch at sea, and for them it made financial and emotional sense to take their wives along. Also, keeping a house on land was often an unaffordable luxury. Thus, many families had only the vessel to call their home.

Virginia was a willing traveling companion, even after the fiasco of her salmon-fishing honeymoon and her temporary separation from Joshua after the
Washington
was stranded in Alaskan waters. Contrary to all other published material regarding the newlyweds’ life aboard the barkentine
Constitution
, the shipping records show clearly that after losing the
Washington
, Slocum never sailed for Bichard again. A listing of September 2, 1871, names a Captain Robertson as commanding the
Constitution
. However, in January 1872 the company must have allowed the Slocums to live aboard his old command at dock, as the city directory for that year gives their address
as
Constitution
, Hathaway’s Wharf, in San Francisco. There, the couple became new parents when Virginia gave birth to a son, Victor Joshua. The next nine years saw annual changes in the way of family additions and new commands.

It isn’t until November 14, 1872, that Slocum surfaces as a captain on the Shipping Intelligence page in the
Daily Alta
in California. The small family moved aboard the
B. Aymar
, a slightly larger vessel than Slocum’s previous commands, being 128 feet in length. That November the
B. Aymar
sailed for Burrard Inlet carrying coal and oil. During 1873 the Slocums made several Pacific crossings from San Francisco to the Orient. Again, the
Daily Alta
records the
B. Aymar’s
business and whereabouts: on June 17, 1873, she was bound for Swatow on the Chinese coast between Hong Kong and Amoy. Slocum reported strong winds in the South China Sea as his vessel began the sixty-four-day crossing back to home port. The
B. Aymar
arrived in San Francisco on August 21 with a cargo of 8,800 bags of sugar. The family stayed in port until September 24, when the vessel set sail for Melbourne carrying canned goods, lumber, salmon, broom corn and a pregnant Virginia. It was common for captains’ wives to make a passage when they were pregnant, knowing they would probably give birth at sea. They accepted the possibility that their labour might be difficult and dangerous, and might begin in extremely rough conditions on a stormy sea. Depending on how threatening the sea was
at the time, they would be lucky to have the help of even one of the mates. Such hardships were part and parcel of being a captain’s wife. Virginia made it to Australia, where the Slocums enjoyed a stopover in Sydney with Virginia’s parents. Here their second child, another son, was born on December 21, 1873; he was promptly named Benjamin Aymar in honor of their ocean home.

Victor’s early impressions of family life aboard that ship were probably based on his mother’s stories as she told them much later, as Victor would have been only two at the time. He recalled how his mother and father would stroll the deck during the second dogwatch before retiring below. It was on the
B. Aymar
that Victor got his toddler sealegs. His childhood memories included Christmas celebrations afloat. Santa Claus even came to Amoy (now known as Xiamen), where he found the children’s stockings hanging around the cabin’s mizzenmast. Victor recalled that Santa
“
never missed, no matter what the sea or the country.” The child probably was not in the least surprised to find that the kindly old man had brought him Chinese toys and other Oriental goodies.

Victor was unaware of the many dangers of sailing in the early 1880s. There were still cannibals in the New Hebrides and on the Solomon Islands. In Sydney, locals still told the horrendous and tragic tale of John Williams, the missionary who was killed by cannibals in the New Hebrides in 1839. The sailing life on Chinese and Malaysian seas was rife with danger. Besides cannibal
attacks, there were sudden typhoons to fear. On top of this, crews were always on the lookout for pirates, who preyed on boats that were in trouble — perhaps becalmed, or aground on a sandbar. Having found one, they would swoop down, vulturelike, and kill all on board. Pirate ships figured in many stories told on those waters. One was of the clipper ship the
Living Age
, bound for New York from Shanghai with a rich cargo of silks and teas. She ran aground on a reef in the East China Sea for almost two months, during which time a Chinese junk came into view. The crew’s panic, while extreme, was justified by past accounts of the pirates’ savagery. The second mate of the
Living Age
later recalled,
“The cry arose at once: ‘The pirates are waiting for daylight to come aboard and murder us.’ … The crew gave way to despair … and one old sailor went raving crazy. The poor old man, with white hair streaming in the wind, stood up on a spar singing and shrieking at the top of his voice, adding to the terror of the rest.” The sighting proved to be a false one, but such was the fear that pirates inspired. Slocum and Virginia well knew the treacheries found in those waters. Slocum met up with one renowned ruffian, Bully Hayes, who regaled the captain and his wife with tales of his unscrupulous deeds and pitiless acts. Hayes bragged about the part he played in South Sea slavery, which he called “black-birding.” At one point he lured an entire congregation aboard his ship in the name of fellowship, then immediately shackled them and boarded them up in the hold.

A third child was born to the Slocums in June 1875. Jessie Lena arrived while the boat was lying at anchor in a Philippine harbor. In Manila, shortly after the birth, the company sold the
B. Aymar
and asked Slocum to stay in the Philippines long enough to build a ship for inter-island trading. For the third time in his career, Slocum was happily employed as a shipwright. Since the best timber was most plentiful outside Manila, Slocum and his young family made a sixty-mile trek to the seaside village of Olongapo. Slocum’s first task was to construct a safe and livable jungle hut. He built an elevated
nipa-
thatched house with a floor seven feet above the ground. There was ample room beneath it for pigs and fowl to roam, and its height gave some measure of security. Even so, Victor recalled their modest domain as creeping with venomous creatures: “Up through the cracks in the split bamboo flooring could crawl centipedes, scorpions, and even a small boa if it took a notion to come in at night and hang down from the rafters, tail first. We found that both centipedes and scorpions had a habit of crawling into our clothes and getting into our shoes while they were not in use, so it was routine to shake and search everything while dressing in the morning.” The air was stifling, and everyone, especially the children, was cranky from the heavy, damp heat. Virginia not only had her everyday motherly duties but also had to keep her inquisitive little pack from touching or eating poisonous plants and tangling with boas and other reptiles. Victor remembered thick
forest noises rising up from the crocodile-filled swamps, which only fueled his normal childhood fantasies and fears. He later recalled,
“Only in forests like those in the Philippines can one hear such a nocturnal roar.”

How Virginia survived such conditions with an infant, a toddler and a six-year-old is hard to fathom. Perhaps what saved her was her love of the wilderness. As a new bride she had been enthusiastic at the prospect of seeing Alaska, and she seemed to continue to welcome new and rugged experiences. She was part Native American on her mother’s side, and her son Ben Aymar recalled her being proud of her “Indian blood.” Virginia was a horsewoman and loved to be in the outdoors. Ben Aymar described horses as his mother’s passion, one that began during her childhood in Australia, where she “was trained to ride horses and on weekends, she rode with associates into the Blue Mountains, exploring and sleeping on the ground much as the natives did. She told of cooking eggs in a piece of cloth held in a boiling hot spring.”

In the oppressive Philippine jungle with her three small charges she was every bit as resilient. She was ever resourceful and alert to dangers, and her instincts were usually dead on. Some of the Chinese workers in the area resented Captain Slocum’s shipbuilding commission and plotted to murder his family in their sleep while he was away in Manila. Virginia awoke to shouting and the light of torches all around the hut. To her relief, it was a group of friendly Tagals come to protect her and the children.
They had gotten wind of the plot and rallied to the family’s defense.

The next target for the angry Chinese faction was the launching of Slocum’s vessel. They blocked the launch by shifting the ways out of line. Again the Tagals came to the Slocums’ rescue, this time with their teams of water buffalo, which they lined up to drag the ship down to the water. As payment for the steamer, Slocum was given a seventy-two-foot schooner, the
Pato
, which is Spanish for duck. The
Pato
had neither deck nor cabin, but the family agreed that life aboard a much smaller boat than they had been used to was preferable to life on shore in Olongapo. Virginia, pregnant with twins, boarded the
Pato
. Slocum picked up work immediately, and over the next months they made numerous inter-island trips. After salvaging a cargo of tea, camphor and silks from a British bark stranded on a reef, the
Pato
continued to Hong Kong, where Slocum decided to take the small boat and his family into the codfishing waters of the Sea of Okhotsk. During the fishing trip Virginia gave birth to her twins. In a letter to a business associate, Slocum betrayed little fatherly sentiment in his recollection of the event:
“Two of my children were born on this voyage while at Petropolanska; they were two months old when we arrived at Oregon — four days old when we began to take in fish … Yes Sir, we had a stirring voyage and altogether a delightful time on the fishing grounds for every codfish that came in over the rail was a quarter of a dollar
— clear.” Slocum pronounced the fishing trip
“a great success”; the
Daily Astorian
for September 21, 1877, listed the
Pato’s
catch as 23,000 fine cod. But the rough fishing life had a price for Slocum’s family — the twins died in infancy. Years later Ben Aymar could only reflect that “the ocean is no place to raise a family.”

Slocum made life a little more livable aboard the
Pato
. With the fishing money he bought a small cargo of wood and built a good cabin for the vessel. He wrote that he also “made all comfortable outfits necessary.” The
Pato
sailed from Oregon on March 30, 1878 bound for Honolulu. The Hawaii Public Archives place the schooner
Pato
on three runs between Honolulu and Kohala though May and early June. On one arrival in Honolulu, Slocum impressed a crowd on the docks. He raced to catch a departing mail boat that had left behind a bag of mail. She was sailing at a fast clip, but the
Pato
easily caught up to her. The small triumph brought this fast little schooner a moment of glory, and Slocum accepted an offer of five thousand dollars for her. He wrote to a friend that the payment was “all in twenty dollar gold pieces, ugh! if I had them now.”

With their family home sold, the Slocums returned by steamer to their home port of San Francisco, where the captain bought his next command, the 109-foot bark
Amethyst
. For the next three years they travelled the Pacific with timber, coal, and even a hold full of gunpowder out of Shanghai. This voyaging was over many rough seas, and Slocum was well aware of the
Amethyst
’s age.
Built in 1822, she would have been one of the oldest American vessels still sailing those seas. These were difficult passages for Virginia, who was again pregnant. Slocum engaged his brother Ingram as the ship’s cook and his sister Ella to be with Virginia. Virginia had a second daughter in 1879. The baby lived only a short time, her death coming in a small Philippine port where the
Amethyst
was loading a cargo of timber. The death of her child in this squalid foreign port hit Virginia hard. Her grief was excruciating and she made a slow recovery. She poured out her sorrow to the only person who might understand its depths — her own mother. On July 17, 1879, from Laguemanac in the Philippines, a frail and distraught Virginia wrote: