Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072) (2 page)

Thanks to those friends who cheered me on throughout the voyage: Belinda, Audrey, Katherine, Arlene, Dick, Charis, Lorry Anne, George, Lee, Rudi, Trevor, Rigel, Debbie and Chris, and Lynn and Ray; and to Christopher for sharing a parallel technological, artistic and soulful journey.

Ann Spencer
April 1998

On a winter’s day in 1892, the coastal village of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, was buzzing with speculation. Who was the newcomer, and what had brought him into town? The stranger had a weary look about him. He was surely someone down on his luck. His gaunt frame and balding head heightened the impression of an aging and weather-beaten soul dealt a heavy hand. He was not the approachable sort: one could not just saunter up to him and ask his business. He had a self-contained air, and his eyes were sad. Yet he was also clearly a proud man: his brown beard was neat and close-cropped, and he walked with a spirited step. He seemed to be in town for a purpose.

“Who’s the old-timer?” was probably the question of the day, a puzzle to chew over around the dockyard and main crossroads in Fairhaven. That curious blend of smalltown guesswork, rumor and not always benign gossip would not die down until it had pieced together the identity of this enigmatic fellow making his way toward the shore. Soon they had the answer: the stranger
was Captain Joshua Slocum. And their impressions were dead on: times were tough for the captain. He looked older than his forty-eight years and most certainly he was down on his luck. What was missing from the general scuttlebutt was sympathy for his plight. In many ways, Joshua Slocum was just another sea captain wandering jobless around the wharves, one of many captains who had not yet made their fortune or who made and lost it. Such men had established themselves on the sea but had since been left without a command, bypassed in the transition from sail to steam. But Slocum’s career had been colorful, and he stood out from the crowd. Chances were that the Fairhaven villagers knew the old salt by reputation. He had been famous for his sailing exploits, and the most scandalous episodes of his career had been chronicled in newspapers and spiced up in the tales of the men who had sailed with him. Word was that Captain Slocum could be just plain bull-headed, and this trait had no doubt played a large part in his sad reversal of fortune.

The change had been a dramatic one. Three years earlier a very different Slocum would have come into port; eight years earlier Fairhaven folk would have encountered the epitome of nautical success. Back then Slocum had been a dapper skipper, the master and part owner of a full-rigged ship,
Northern Light
. She was a beauty, and the captain regarded her as
“one of the finest American sailing vessels afloat.” With her to command, he had
reached the pinnacle of his over twenty-year career as a master merchant mariner. He had sailed around the world five times. His career had been a steady rise with some lucky breaks along the way. Slocum had been made a captain in 1869 when he was just twenty-five years old. He was a spunky young fellow from away, a Canadian turned
“naturalized” Yankee. He did most of his shipping in the Pacific trade and called San Francisco his home port. His life seemed charmed. He had even met the perfect life partner: on a stopover in Australia he had married Virginia Walker. Folks recalled her gumption with admiration. She could handle the rough life aboard ships and had traveled everywhere with her husband, raising their growing family. With Virginia at his side, Slocum was respected as a world-class captain with an important command.

Those happy years at sea were not free of shadows. Charges had been laid against Slocum late in 1883 over his harsh treatment of a mutinous crew member. The story was circulating freely that he had kept the man chained in irons for most of the voyage and nearly starved him to death. Virginia had stood by her husband throughout that episode, holding the mutineers at bay by pointing revolvers at them. People said that Virginia was his anchor, and that everything began to fall apart for him after her death in 1884.

They’d heard he had got married again, to a young woman from Nova Scotia — a cousin, they believed. Hettie
and two of his boys, Victor and Garfield, had sailed with Slocum aboard his next command, during which more scandals arose. This time Slocum had been charged in Brazil with killing a crew member. He was acquitted, but it must have all been too much for him. Shortly afterward, he ran his ship aground on a sandbar, and lost his life savings with it. His
“elegant bark” carried no insurance, and Slocum had to make his way home not only with a tarnished reputation but also in a state of financial ruin.

Even so, people marveled at the old seadog’s ingenuity. He had sailed his family back all the way from Brazil in a homemade “canoe,” as he called the small boat he had built in the jungle. He had spunk, but among seamen who knew him, the consensus was that he was a proud, sad fool. Didn’t he know he had to change with the times? The age of grand sailing ships was over. To work in freight shipping in the 1890s a captain had to be able to guarantee that goods would arrive at an appointed time. Keeping to a schedule meant not being at the mercy of the wind. But “going steam” went against Slocum’s grain. Most people thought that his resistance to inevitable change was the real reason for his sad decline.

Slocum, of course, would have told it differently. Sailing without Virginia had been a painful transition. Also, to give up what he was best at and surrender to machine-driven shipping was never a choice for him. He hated steamships — it was that simple. His unbending will and
the troubles he had encountered on his final voyages had sealed his future in merchant shipping. Slocum was never given another command. His career marked the end of the age of sail.

Few knew how difficult his life had become. His family had no home in Boston, and the children and Hettie were boarding throughout the city with various relatives. The captain had worked for a time as a stevedore at the Boston shipyards, but his stubbornness resurfaced when he refused to pay a fifty-dollar union fee. Slocum later described the moment he decided to leave the humiliating life of the docks:
“One day when I was doing a bit of an odd job on a boat and a whole lot of coal and dirt came down all about my face, I stood up, thought of the difference between my state and when I was master of the
Northern Light
, and quit the job.”

His decision to quit left him scrambling for employment in a waterfront world that held few opportunities for a man like himself. But a winter’s walk along the Boston wharves led to a chance encounter with an old sailing acquaintance. Former Captain Eben Pierce from Fairhaven was out for a walk that cold day. He had retired after a successful career in whaling and later designing whaling equipment. Now he saw another opportunity, and made Slocum an interesting proposition: “Come to Fairhaven and I’ll give you a ship, but she wants some repairs.” The very next day, Slocum was in Fairhaven on his way to Captain Pierce’s.

Perhaps it was hope that was adding a bounce to his step as he walked along the Acushnet River shore road. Perhaps he felt that with the gift of this ship he was being given a second chance at life on the water. That she wanted some repairs was a trivial matter to Slocum, who had always loved shipwrighting only a little less than sailing and who had already built three boats. What were a few repairs? One can only imagine what daydreams were halted when Pierce took him to the
“ship.” Was this gift from his supposed friend just a cruel joke? There, hauled up in a pasture on Fairhaven’s Oxford Point, was the derelict hulk of an old oyster sloop. Pierce figured her to be about one hundred years old. No one knew her origins — only that she had been employed along Delaware Bay before being moved to New Bedford and ending up in Captain Pierce’s field. Her name was
Spray
. Obviously, Pierce hoped Slocum would find a way to rid him of this neighborhood eyesore.

Fairhaven people liked to mosey down to see what was happening on Oxford Point. “Poverty Point” is what the locals called that area of town, and the penniless captain and the dilapidated old fishing sloop fit right in. Both had somehow been “cast up from old ocean” to meet on Poverty Point. There was no missing the symbolism, or the sad irony: Slocum and the boat were both on their beam ends.

Slocum was surely confused, angered and desperate to maintain some dignity in his laughable situation. He
had plummeted from owning the grandest of sailing ships to being stuck with an ancient craft sitting abandoned in a cow pasture. His reaction to all this was unexpected and no doubt gave villagers their first intimation of how determined and resourceful the old captain could be in heavy seas. The crowd gathered in the pasture shared the assumption that Slocum would be breaking up the
Spray
for scrap. His reply was quick and to the point:
“No, going to rebuild her.”

To the crowd the plan may have seemed impractical, and even crazy, but from that point on it became Slocum’s mission. He had built the
Liberdade
, his Brazilian canoe, out of salvaged parts and whatever makeshift materials he could lay his hands on. Why not the
Spray?
Others would have thrown up their hands. Slocum couldn’t afford to do that, so he threw himself at the intricate labor of shipbuilding. Rebuilding the
Spray
took Slocum thirteen months, including short interruptions while he raised whatever money he needed to keep working on her. The point was that Slocum
needed
to keep working on her: he had a purpose again, and it buoyed his spirits. The end of Poverty Point rang with the sounds of his determination. He felt reinvigorated by his outlandish dream of resurrecting the miserable old vessel. The entire boat needed overhauling, and Slocum went about it “timber by timber, plank by plank.” In a nearby lot he found an oak tree that was solid and worthy of being the hull. All the wood was hauled in from nearby and seasoned.
Slocum kept his steambox boiling for when the wood needed to be shaped into arcs and hoops.

Winter turned into a spring marked by the ringing echo of the caulking mallet. The boat was taking shape, and it lightened Slocum’s heart to see how
“something tangible appeared every day to show for my labor.” The neighbors, who had been scrutinizing the entire operation, had turned from skeptics into believers. Old whaling captains stopped by to chat as Slocum worked. In Fairhaven, the excitement grew. As the weather turned milder, Slocum claimed an added benefit: working on the deck of the
Spray
, he had only to reach out to pluck cherries from a nearby tree.

The
Spray
was looking good. She had new ribs, bulwarks of white oak, and Georgia and yellow pine for deck planking. He pitched the seams and sewed two sets of canvas sails by hand. He fitted a solid keel to make her more seaworthy than her original centerboarder design. He took pride in claiming that the “much-esteemed stem-piece was from the butt of the smartest kind of a pasture oak.” When she was finished, the change was remarkable, although according to Slocum the metamorphosis was slow: “The
Spray
changed her being so gradually that it was hard to say at what point the old died or the new took birth, and it was no matter.”

Captain Slocum could have been writing those lines about himself. In the thirteen months of putting heart and soul into a beached vessel, he had rejuvenated himself.
Through his commitment to the resurrection of the
Spray
, he had also rebuilt himself — “timber by timber, plank by plank.” He had made the connection with the one part of him that would always ring true, the part that really mattered. His labor had made the old girl and himself seaworthy once again. But for what purpose?

With the
Spray
finished, Slocum once again heard the question:
“What was there for an old sailor to do?” Standing on the shore at Poverty Point, he gazed out to the one place where the answer could be found. As he pondered the waters, his breathing echoed the sea rhythm that was his constant meter, an ancient pulse as primal and familiar as his own mother’s heartbeat. Saltwater winds had always blown over his soul. Surf and sea air were his heartbeat and his life force.

The Call of the Running Tide