Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072) (20 page)

The ravenous goat ate the captain’s sea charts and his straw hat. According to Slocum, it was the latter misdemeanor that decided the creature’s fate. On the volcanic rock formed island of Ascension, he marooned the hapless creature to fend for itself.

Besides the goat, he brought the people of Ascension their mail from St. Helena. Slocum had neglected his own
correspondence. He had lost touch with his home port and with the lives of his wife and four children. For Hettie, Ben, Victor, Garfield and Jessie, a long time between letters was not taken as a good sign. On August 24, 1897, the following report ran in the Providence
Journal
. It read like a death notice, even though the captain’s first name was given incorrectly.

The story then advanced the idea that Captain Slocum was drowned during one of the terrible storms “for which the Southern seas are noted.”

At the time of this report, Slocum was moseying carefully around the South Seas, where he was charmed by the idyllic lifestyle and mused, “If there was a moment in my voyage when I could have given it up, it was there
and then; but no vacancies for a better post being open, I weighed anchor April 16, 1897 and again put out to sea.”

Slocum had no idea he had been presumed dead and felt no homesickness for New England. His home was the
Spray
and he changed his course and his mind with the winds. As he told one newspaper reporter near the end of his voyage, “
I have not yet decided whether to go west round Cape Leeuwin, or east through Torres Straits. In any case the course will probably be laid round the Cape of Good Hope, and home to Boston.”

Differing in many respects from the average deep-water sailor, the master of the
Spray
has an individuality all his own, born, perhaps of silent communion with nature, in the vast solitudes of the sea …

Tall, slight of build, with a deep-blue eye, so often characteristic of those who go down to the sea in ships; crisscross wrinkles encompassing them, as though decades of steady gazing into the faces of [the] suns had puckered the skin about the deep-set eye-sockets like well-tanned alligator hide; thin of face, with high brow rounding off into a head unencumbered by any burden of hair beyond a thin fringe about the edge of the dome, like a growth of sparse underbrush on the edge of the snow line of some lofty pinnacle; grayish brown beard, kept tolerably close cropped — for the captain is something of a stickler for his personal appearance under all conditions — these are physical characteristics that strike one at first glance
.

— A reporter’s description of Captain
Slocum after his return

Booming Along Joyously for Home

Christmas of 1897 found the
Spray
rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Slocum now had his mind set on the final leg of the voyage. He had been at sea for close to three years. There had been drama and adventure at many turns, and the six months of this final passage were to be every bit as eventful. In many ways this homeward leg was like the last movement of a symphony. Composer Igor Stravinsky described a symphonic finale as “a succession of impulses that converge toward a definite point of repose.” Slocum’s world voyage was moving steadily toward that point.

After returning from the Transvaal in mid-December,
Slocum caught “
a morning land-wind,” cleared the bar and headed straight for the next salient point of land, the Cape of Good Hope. Anticipating a rough sea, he reflected on the early Portuguese navigators who had faced the “Cape of Storms” before him, and who had struggled for sixty-nine years to sail around it. Slocum was philosophical about the conditions on that part of the ocean: “One gale was much the same as another, with no more serious result than to blow the
Spray
along on her course, when it was fair, or to blow her back somewhat when it was ahead.” It was in this same reticent tone that he related what happened to the
Spray
in those waters on Christmas Day: “The
Spray
was trying to stand on her head, and she gave me every reason to believe she might accomplish the feat before night.” Slocum had something of a baptism in these waters, being dunked three times while standing at the end of the bowsprit. He wasn’t pleased with his Christmas soaking. He kept company along part of the coastline with a steamer ship. He sailed past Cape Agulhas, into Simons Bay and around the Cape. Again his mind turned to sea lore, and he remembered that the Flying Dutchman was still thought to be sailing somewhere off the rugged coasts of the Cape.

Having rounded the Cape, Slocum was feeling optimistic: “The voyage then seemed as good as finished; from this time on I knew that all, or nearly all, would be plain sailing.” Slocum also saw this point as “the dividing-line of the weather”: “clear and settled” to the north,
“humid and squally” below to the south. He rested in the calm under Table Mountain and waited for a breeze. Once into Cape Town, just round the bend of the cape, he decided to put the
Spray
into dry dock for a three-month rest; this allowed him a lengthy interval for traveling in the African countryside. This detour — with a free railroad pass — gave the captain a last taste of international fame, and he spent much of his time lecturing and hobnobbing with the governmental and scientific elite. After returning from Pretoria through hundreds of miles of barren African plains, Slocum found his sloop ready for the thousands of miles of ocean still ahead. On March 26 he set off from “
the land of distances and pure air,” and soon he was in swelling seas off the peaks of the Cape. Once again he was reminded of the history connected with this grand passage, and of the awe this sight had inspired in other navigators. He believed it was Sir Francis Drake who had observed, “’Tis the fairest thing and the grandest cape I’ve seen in the whole circumference of the earth.” Somewhere in the power of the moment, Slocum felt a shift in his own voyage occur: “The
Spray
soon sailed the highest peaks of the mountains out of sight, and the world changed from a mere panoramic view to the light of a homeward-bound voyage.”

Away from the boisterous gales off the Cape, the
Spray
“ran along steadily at her best speed,” the tempo of the voyage picking up to a light-hearted
vivace
. Slocum’s mood seemed to take off with the wind, and he plunged
into the new books he had received in South Africa. He was remarkably light of heart, musing about the flying fish he saw, which he likened to arrows shooting from the sea. The play of the waves captivated him, and he noted how the
Spray
was “
just leaping along among the white horses, a thousand gamboling porpoises keeping her company on all sides.” Before he made landfall at St. Helena, he drank some port wine in a toast to the health of his invisible friend and guardian, the pilot of the
Pinta
, with whose spirit Slocum had been conversing since early in the voyage. The jaunty passage had been a delight to the old sailor, who was moved to reflect, “One could not be lonely in a sea like this.”

On St. Helena, Slocum was again welcomed cordially, and was asked to give two of his now famous lectures. The audience was delighted by the wry captain, who was jokingly introduced as a Yankee sea serpent. He was treated royally and was invited to stay at the governor’s mansion, Plantation House. The mansion was said to be haunted, and on hearing this, he stayed awake in the hope of communing with another spirit from the pages of history, that of the exiled Napoleon Buonaparte. Wherever he had sailed during his circumnavigation, Slocum was alert to his place in the historical scheme of things. Here, his mind turned not only to the Corsican emperor, who ended his days on the island, but to stories of witch burnings on this “island of tragedies.” When he left, he took a fruitcake aboard the
Spray
, a gift from the governor’s wife.
He had begun the voyage with his sister’s fruitcake, which had lasted him forty-two days out of Brier Island. It seemed somehow fitting to near the end with another cake, “a great high-decker” that would last him into early June.

Just off the island of Ascension, where he marooned the rambunctious goat, Slocum invited a mid-ocean inspection of the
Spray
. He asked that the sloop be thoroughly investigated and fumigated, and certified to be commanded by a one-man crew. This would turn out to be a wise request. As he made sail, he declared confidently, “
Let what will happen, the voyage is now on record.”

On May 8, 1898, the
Spray
crossed the sea path she had first sailed on October 2, 1895, en route to Brazil. In doing so, she had completed a circle. However, Slocum still had four thousand miles to go before he could claim to be back to his starting point, and those miles were not to be easy ones. Soon after, the
Spray
entered the zone of the trade winds, where “strange and forgotten current ripples pattered against the sloop’s sides in grateful music.” Slocum found this sound enchanting, but he still made good time, sailing “the handsome day’s work of one hundred and eighty miles on several consecutive days.”

Then he heard some startling news. He had had no idea, until he moved north of the equator in mid-May, that America had declared war on Spain. He met up with the U.S. battleship
Oregon
flying the signal flags C B T, which Slocum knew to mean, “Are there any men-of-war about?” He hoisted an immediate reply: NO. (He hadn’t,
of course, thought to watch for any.) He then sent another signal to the
Oregon:
“
Let us keep together for mutual protection.” While he waited for a reply, the
Oregon
— which was roughly one thousand times
Spray’s
size — sailed on. Slocum assumed that her captain didn’t regard his proposal as worthwhile. As the
Oregon
sailed out of sight, Slocum was left to consider the consequences of the war for him alone in his small boat. He could have been taken prisoner at any point in the weeks before, not even knowing that a war had been declared (although he had been warned in Cape Town that the conflict was escalating). The idea of war unsettled Slocum, who “pondered long that night over the probability of a war risk now coming upon the
Spray
after she had cleared all, or nearly all, the dangers of the sea.”

Slocum continued sailing peacefully along. On May 18, he felt ecstatic when Polaris appeared in the heavens: for close to three years he had been sailing without its guidance. Sighting Tobago on May 20, the captain reflected on how near to home he was; but that night he “was startled by the sudden flash of breakers” and decided there had to be a coral reef ahead — and a dangerous one. He worried about other lurking reefs and where the current might take him. He considered how likely shipwreck was in such waters, especially without a chart. “I taxed my memory of sea lore, of wrecks on sunken reefs, and of pirates harbored among coral reefs where other ships might not come, but nothing that I could think of applied to the island of
Tobago …” He turned his mind to descriptions in
Robinson Crusoe
, but could conjure up no more information about reefs. He held firm in his memory, though, the dangers lurking below the water’s surface, and tacked off and on until morning light, trying to stay clear of what he called “imaginary reefs.” He missed his charts badly, and his only satisfaction came in contemplating revenge: “I could have nailed the St. Helena goat’s pelt to the deck.”