The Hard Way Around Read online

  ALSO BY GEOFFREY WOLFF

  NONFICTION

  The Edge of Maine

  The Art of Burning Bridges

  A Day at the Beach

  The Duke of Deception

  Black Sun

  FICTION

  The Age of Consent

  The Final Club

  Providence

  Inklings

  The Sightseer

  Bad Debts

  (Photo credit fm1.1)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2010 by Geoffrey Wolff

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wolff, Geoffrey, [date]

  The hard way around : the passages of Joshua Slocum / by Geoffrey Wolff.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59463-1

  1. Slocum, Johsua, b. 1844. 2. Sailors—United States—Biography.

  3. Ship captains—United States—Biography. 4. Voyages around the world—History. 5. Single-handed sailing—History. 6. Liberdade (Ship) 7. Destroyer (Ship) 8. Spray (Sloop) I. Title.

  VK140.S6W65 2010 910.4′1092—dc22 [B] 2010018344

  v3.1

  FOR TOBY—BROTHER, STORY-ENABLER, FACT-CHECKER

  “IN BUCKRAM?”

  Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out.

  —“The Pulpit,” Moby-Dick

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART ONE Sailing into the World

  PROLOGUE The Tales He Could Have Told

  CHAPTER ONE Unafraid of a Capful of Wind

  CHAPTER TWO Coming Aboard Through the Hawse-Hole

  CHAPTER THREE Master Slocum

  CHAPTER FOUR Love Stories

  CHAPTER FIVE Enterprises

  CHAPTER SIX Northern Light

  CHAPTER SEVEN Mutiny

  CHAPTER EIGHT Stranding 113

  PART TWO Sailing Around It

  CHAPTER NINE Salvage

  CHAPTER TEN Destroyer and Poverty Point

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The Great Adventure

  CHAPTER TWELVE What Came After

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography of Sources Cited

  Photographic Credits

  About the Author

  Joshua Slocum (Photo credit fm1.2)

  The Washington at Cook Inlet (Photo credit fm1.3)

  ONE

  Sailing into the World

  Shipwreck at Tierra del Fuego (Photo credit p1.1)

  PROLOGUE

  The Tales He Could Have Told

  JOSHUA SLOCUM’S Sailing Alone Around the World (1900), his account of his audacious achievement as the first to complete a solo circumnavigation, is a tour de force of descriptive and narrative power. His two previous accounts of his voyages—The Voyage of the “Liberdade” (1890) and The Voyage of the “Destroyer” (1893)—are less remarkable only for the huge shadow cast by his masterwork. To know what he achieved is to understand why the National Geographic Society, learning about Charles Lindbergh’s solo transatlantic flight in 1927, elevated Lucky Lindy to a small pantheon that included such notable voyagers as Dr. David Livingstone, Sir Galahad, and Joshua Slocum. To read Slocum is to understand why George Plimpton, in a charming personal essay about the most intriguing men and women known to history, wrote that Slocum would be one of the few he’d bring back from the grave to share a dinner and conversation. And what Plimpton knew of him didn’t include the books that he’d been too busy to write.

  Slocum might have made a grand adventure story of daring, catastrophe, and self-salvage from the facts of his honeymoon voyage as master of the Washington. Following his wedding in Sydney, Australia, to Virginia—the American daughter of a gold prospector—the couple sailed to Cook Inlet a couple of years after the United States bought Alaska from the Russians. Seward’s Icebox (aka Seward’s Folly) teemed with salmon that Slocum and his crew meant to catch, and did, but the Washington was driven aground and destroyed during a gale. Slocum rescued his crew and their haul by building small boats from the wreckage, then daring to make the difficult passage to Kodiak Island and thence to Seattle and San Francisco, where the fish were sold at a pretty price.

  And it would be a thrilling study of enterprise and exotic geography to read Slocum’s account of his adventures with the Pato, a small packet that he and his family came by in Subic Bay as recompense for the year they spent on a crocodile-infested beach, searching the branches above for boa constrictors and shaking centipedes and scorpions from their boots. Slocum had been hired to build a steamship hull, but instead of his promised payment he was given the Pato, without a deck or cabin. Never mind: he built what he needed to float his family and to trade in the Pacific, and soon they sailed the schooner from Manila to Hong Kong and the Okhotsk Sea to fish for cod. Four days before the fishing began, Virginia gave birth to twin girls, but she then stood undaunted at the Pato’s rail with her infant son, Victor, hand-lining the huge fish aboard. It was a great catch, and once the Pato was so loaded she barely floated, Slocum sailed to Portland, where he sold the fish door-to-door. The twins died. The Pato next sailed for Honolulu, where his boat was shown off in an informal race against the fastest packet in Hawaiian waters, and won, whereupon Slocum sold her for a small fortune in gold pieces.

  And it should be wished that Slocum had written the serial tragedy of his voyages with his family aboard the Northern Light, the apogee of his merchant-shipping career. At Hong Kong in 1881, aged thirty-seven, he became one-third owner and master of “this magnificent ship, my best command,” as he uncharacteristically boasted. The medium clipper Northern Light, built eight years before and after the age of clipper ships had passed, had a length of 233 feet, a beam of 44, and three decks. It was not only huge, spreading acres of canvas, but also built to demand attention: “I had a right to be proud of her,” Slocum wrote, “for at that time she was the finest ship afloat.”

  Students of tragedy will recognize these words as a foreshadowing prologue, the pride that cometh before the proverbial sad headline. Slocum’s hubris at first seemed justified as the Northern Light sailed to Manila, Liverpool, and New York, where her progress up the East River was blocked by the Brooklyn Bridge. She had to have her topmasts dismantled to pass under this monumental connection in the web of land routes and steam-powered conveyances that were rushing together to end Slocum’s calling.

  Having refurbished his ship, Slocum began his voyage to the Pacific with a crew that makes of “motley” an encomium. They got as far as New London, Connecticut, before the Northern Light exhibited a character flaw, the failure of her rudder. The crew mutinied. The Coast Guard intervened, but not before a mutineer stabbed the first mate to death.

  Slocum wrote about none of this, nor about forging ahead with the same awful crew, seeing the prophetic Great Comet of 1882, and passing near Krakatoa after its initial eruptions in May 1883 and before its final cataclysm in August but in time to sail into a sea of boiling pumice. He did commit to paper his rescue of Gilbert Island missionaries adrift for more than forty days in an open boat, and his transport of these grateful castaways to Yokohama, where he attempted unsuccessfully to have members of his restive crew removed. He sailed on for the Cape of Good Hope, where the ship’s rudderhead—the same mechanism that had brou
ght such dismay near New London—twisted off. Huge seas then opened other weaknesses of hull structure, and only furious pumping kept the ship afloat, till the pumps’ slowing discharge was noticed, a trickling brown syrup as thick as molasses, which in fact was what they were pumping—a gummy slurry of the hold’s cargo of sugar and seawater.

  In newspaper interviews and court depositions, Slocum did record what befell him next. He reached a lucky haven in Port Elizabeth, where the Northern Light was patched up and he hired as a mate an ex-convict, Henry Slater, who was traveling under forged papers. Sailing for New York, the crew again mutinied, and Slater was put in irons and confined to the hold on a diet of bread and water for fifty-three days. Upon arrival, Slater was freed and Slocum arrested, charged with excessive and unjust punishment of his prisoner. The trial was theatrical, with reversals of fortune and conflicting testimony, and the New York Times editorial page, rushing to misjudgment, vilified Slocum as a barbarian unfit to command a ship. He was fined and lost his ownership of the Northern Light, which was worth less in any case than repairs to her hull and rigging would cost. She was dismasted, sold as a coal barge, and tugged port to port by a steamboat, sooty as the dust clouds from Krakatoa.

  It’s no wonder Slocum didn’t wish to tell this sad tale, which nevertheless deserves telling. What he did write was more than enough to secure his standing as a great writer, navigator, and adventurer, our American Sinbad. The historian Bruce Catton wrote of him in 1959 that it was fitting to “mention Slocum on the same page with Columbus, because all true voyages of discovery are basically alike.” And what makes a voyage “true”? Above all, it must be inward, “concerned first of all with something in himself, if it be nothing more than the conviction that if he searches long enough he can make the world give him something he has not yet had.”1

  Brier Island Bootery (Photo credit 1.2)

  1 Bruce Catton, “Mariner’s Quest,” American Heritage (April 1959).

  ONE

  Unafraid of a Capful of Wind

  In the fair land of Nova Scotia, a maritime province, there is a ridge called North Mountain, overlooking the Bay of Fundy on one side and the fertile Annapolis valley on the other. On the northern slope of the range grows the hardy spruce-tree, well adapted for ship-timbers, of which many vessels of all classes have been built. The people of this coast, hardy, robust, and strong, are disposed to compete in the world’s commerce, and it is nothing against the master mariner if the birthplace mentioned on his certificate be Nova Scotia. I was born in a cold spot, on coldest North Mountain, on a cold February 20, though I am a citizen of the United States—a naturalized Yankee, if it may be said that Nova Scotians are not Yankees in the truest sense of the word. On both sides my family were sailors; and if any Slocum should be found not seafaring, he will show at least an inclination to whittle models of boats and contemplate voyages. My father was the sort of man who, if wrecked on a desolate island, would find his way home, if he had a jack-knife and could find a tree. He was a good judge of a boat, but the old clay farm which some calamity made his was an anchor to him. He was not afraid of a capful of wind, and he never took a back seat at a camp-meeting or a good, old-fashioned revival.

  —JOSHUA SLOCUM

  THUS BEGINS Sailing Alone Around the World, and who could stow more tightly the essentials of his origins? Insistently laconic and instinctively musical, Joshua Slocum’s sly prose exposes the writer’s history and circumstances even as it casually hides emotional turbulence. His narrative art, in harmony with his temperament, profits from a wholesome tension between candor and reticence. It is not incidental that the greatest memoirs—The Education of Henry Adams, say, or Nabokov’s Speak, Memory—share this friction between warring impulses. The wary but exuberant course of Slocum’s exposition (from the subtle boast of “nothing against the master mariner if the birthplace mentioned” into the flat declarative sentence that follows, “I was born in a cold spot”) effortlessly slips character into the skin of style. Slocum kept faith in the surface integrity of such available data as time, latitude and longitude, wind strength, wave height, and the mathematically measurable relation between celestial objects. This confidence was never undermined but always complicated by his acceptance of the consequence of the unseen—shoals, submerged hazards, confused seas, tidal rips—and the latent power of the unsaid.

  Foremost among the missing from Slocum’s capsule account of his earliest history is his mother, whom he adored and who died in 1860 when he was sixteen, causing him to run off to sea and stay there. Fine features, notably alert eyes, and an aura of tenderness and encouragement commend the little that is known of Sarah Jane Southern, who was eighteen when she married John Slocombe (the family name before Joshua hitched a reef in its spelling). She was remembered by a family member as delicate and frail, with too many babies coming too frequently; Joshua was the fourth of her eleven children, born between 1834 and 1860. Her father was the keeper of the Southwest Point Light on Brier Island, at Westport, the treacherous Atlantic Ocean entrance to the Bay of Fundy, and it was to Westport that the family moved when John Slocombe’s fruitless labors to plow a living from that wind-blasted clay farm finally became an anchor that he cut loose.

  This was no casual figure of speech, inasmuch as Joshua himself failed—less with resentment than with resignation—at farming on Martha’s Vineyard after his solo circumnavigation, thereby spitting up the anchor he had tried to swallow. He knew how to farm: his father had put him behind the harrow when he was six, steering a gray horse that was blind in one eye. “Advanced in usefulness,” as his own son would remark, the child could shoe a horse before he could read. He just didn’t want to shoe a horse, no more at age sixty than at six. His happy memories of the North Mountain farm, if seldom voiced, were ungrudging. Slocum fondly remembered being able on clear days to see from this altitude as far as New Brunswick, with a spectacular view of the Bay of Fundy two and a half miles distant. An enterprising reporter, David T. Hugo, traveled during the 1960s from Martha’s Vineyard to Slocum’s childhood farm with a view to interviewing someone who might have known the legendary mariner, and was put in touch with Charles Barteaux, at that time ninety-three. With Barteaux at his side, Hugo marveled at the view. “Yes, but you can’t eat it,” responded his guide. Overhearing the exchange, the current owner of the farm, plowing his field, said he’d gladly trade the view for better soil.1

  Nostalgia had an uphill climb in such a place. It was a rare eruption of ecstatic recollection that in 1902 caused Slocum to invoke with such pleasure a homestead not much superior to a pioneer’s rough cabin. He told a magazine interviewer of the huge fireplace that provided heat. “And what good things to eat came from those old fireplaces—oh! Those barley cakes and those buckwheat flapjacks—oh!” Thus his only tribute—forty-two years after her death—to his mother.

  His father—six feet tall and two hundred pounds—was severe, embittered, self-righteous, and self-pitying. He was brutal, too, without tolerance for the inclinations of others. A deacon of the Brier Island Methodist Church, this evangelist’s zeal did much to animate Slocum’s contempt for cocksure missionaries and blustering preachments of all kinds.

  More immediately, his father’s retreat to Westport ended Slocum’s formal schooling in the third grade. The one-room school at Mount Hanley, almost contiguous with the Slocombe farm, is now a museum. It was a happy place to have studied, run by a superintendent locally celebrated for his innovation. But now the child, ten, commenced (at his father’s command) full-time Dickensian labor. John Slocombe, like many coastal farmers, had spent winter months cobbling shoes, tedious piecework. Not exactly a blacking factory, his boot shop, a converted fish shack perched on a wharf, was if anything worse than the shoe-polish warehouse where Dickens was sent to work writing and affixing labels at the age of twelve. Situated harborside, the better to torment young Slocum with a tempting view of coastal cargo carriers and fishing smacks, the sweatshop fabricated knee-high cowhide boots for loc
al fishermen. Slocum worked ten hours a day, paid only room and board. He soaked stinking hides in stinking vats. “Pickling” this was called, the skins drenched in an odious mixture that frequently included urine, offal, brains, chrome, and noxious acids. This stew softened the hides, but before the leather could be stretched over lasts it needed “scudding,” the removal with a dull blade of bits of hair and flesh. It was then the boy’s duty to stitch the boot, each stitch individually knotted with waxed thread. He would then fasten the boot’s thick soles with hand-whittled wooden pegs driven one by one—many, many—into awl bores by his cobbler’s hammer as he sat bent-backed, squinting and pounding.

  Young Slocum became handy with an awl, and with a jackknife. An unacknowledged catastrophe is hidden in the charming reference above to his father’s ingenuity, that he could make it home from a desolate island if given only a knife and a tree. With something like his own castaway’s incentive to escape, at twelve or so the boy stole time from his sweatshop grind to whittle and construct a ship model, an elaborate likeness of a finely rigged clipper. The Slocombe house near the boot shop had a cellar, and there he built the model on the sly and there his father caught him at it. Victor, the eldest of Joshua’s four children who survived infancy, describes this appalling scene in his 1950 biography of his father,2 who was “putting the finishing touches on [the] ship model which had taken many furtive moments to make.” John Slocombe thrashed the boy for his devil’s work, for wasting time on useless fancies, mere vice, vanity. “John was of the old-fashioned Methodist type … a powerful exhorter of the sinful, as though there was any temptation on Brier Island to worry about.” He raged at his son, tearing the delicate ship from his hands, and hurling it on the floor and crushing it under his sturdy hand-lasted boots.