Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072) (24 page)

By the end of the exposition, Slocum had squirreled away enough money to buy his first house and some land. The
Spray
was a poignant sight as she headed down the Erie Canal with, as the local paper noted, “an old work horse for a sail.” When asked if he had had the horse sharp shod, a Buffalo newspaper reported Slocum’s answer:
“‘You see’, explained the captain, ‘it don’t make much difference which way the wind blows, we get there just the same. No, I didn’t have the horse sharp shod. The canal don’t go over many hills between here and the Hudson’”

The man who had not had a permanent address since childhood was now going home to a family farm in the Cape Cod village of West Tisbury. And the Buffalo paper didn’t miss the significance of the moment: “
The horse that furnished the motive power to run the sloop down the canal will furnish the power to run a plow on the captain’s farm in Martha’s Vineyard. The hand that steered the tiller of the
Spray
will steer the plow; the hand that refused to allow a woman to accompany him across the Atlantic will say ‘gee-up’ to the horse, when it comes plowin’ time.”

But he was one of that rare breed that is alive only at sea. When we first went aboard, he had been sitting, or perhaps slumped is the better word, by the wheel in an attitude that betokened complete dejection. There was an air about him of abstraction and disinterest that was so deep it was as though he was living in a private dream world
.

But the minute the lines were off and the
Spray
gathered way, he had turned into quite another man. He moved precisely, firmly, quickly but not hastily, about the ship’s business, and he had the
Spray
in hand about as effortlessly as anyone could. There was, I do believe, a sparkle in his eye, and there was little aboard that he didn’t notice. He didn’t say much, but you knew that he was a ship’s captain, if from nothing else, from his confident bearing, and from the quiet preciseness of his commands
.

— H.S. Smith in
The Skipper
, March 1968

Swallowing the Anchor?

On land sailors are square pegs, and it quickly became obvious to the people of Martha’s Vineyard that their famous captain was an eccentric, to put it kindly. Living aboard boats most of his life had made Slocum an outsider to polite society. But he had decided to give this “land living” a try, or so he told the papers on his way home from Buffalo.

Martha’s Vineyard offered Hettie her first home as a married woman. For sixteen years she had been forced to move back and forth between relatives, to make do and live with whoever would have her. In effect, she had been abandoned financially and emotionally by her husband,
left behind to care for his children. But that was about to change, or so it seemed; her husband was on his way home and intending to stay ashore. The small house on Martha’s Vineyard had cost Slocum $305 — money he had made from his world lecturing and book peddling. The June 26, 1902 edition of the Vineyard
Gazette
noted that “
Capt. and Mrs. Slocum arrived Saturday and occupied their newly purchased house on the Sabbath.”

The village of West Tisbury was the agricultural heart of the island. Slocum had decided he would become a farmer; the
Spray
would be moored nearby and taken out only for short business trips. Slocum was “swallowing the anchor” — at least, that was the impression given in an article by Clifton Johnson in the October 1902 issue of
Outing
magazine: “Of late the captain has become a thoroughgoing landsman and has cast anchor on a little Martha’s Vineyard farm, where he lives on the outskirts of a rural village with several old sea captains for neighbors. His house is one of the most ancient on the island — an oak-ribbed ark of a dwelling with warped floors and tiny window panes and open fireplaces. Its aspect is at present rather forlorn and naked, but the captain knows how to wield the hammer and the saw, and will soon make it snug.”

The hammering and sawing resulted in a small boxed porch on the front of the house. Other additions were not quite so conventional. Slocum had designed the
Liberdade
with a mind to dories, sampans and native canoes, and the same eclectic touch was evident in his land home.
He created overhanging eaves, influenced by the houses in the South Pacific, where such eaves were necessary for shade. One of his West Tisbury neighbors complained that Slocum showed no regard for architectural unity when he added a Japanese-style roof over the front of the house. However, a local newspaper was impressed, declaring that “
it was his own taste which transformed it into one of the most attractive places on the island.” In a letter to Walter Teller, Garfield remembered that his father had liked the house because of the large timbers and because the knees put him in mind of a ship’s hold. Another neighbor recalled the house as having a “marine flavor.” Beside the front door the captain arranged shells and coral. Throughout Fag End, as Slocum named the old house, there was more evidence of a seafaring man’s touch: starfish, sea fans, brain coral and some old scallop shells. One relative relieved him of a large clam shell with fluted edges, to use for a birdbath in her garden. Slocum held on to the most enormous shells, as they were perfect for ballasting the
Spray
.

Slocum had plans for making the most of the land at Fag End, or Rudder Ranch as he jokingly referred to his property in a letter to Clifton Johnson. And Johnson in his article for
Outing
was impressed by how quickly the old seadog seemed to be getting his land legs: “In a single season he has become an enthusiastic agriculturist, is proud of his flourishing garden and would like to own and make fruitful all the land about. He delights to point
out the beauties of the sturdy oak woods which overspread much of the region, the promising condition of the abounding huckleberry bushes, the possibilities of the wet hollows for cranberry culture and of the protected slopes for fruit trees.”

What didn’t appear in the article were Johnson’s impressions of Slocum’s character. The journalist’s scribbled notes offer insights that would have annoyed Slocum. He observed that the captain “
has a temper and explodes like a firecracker when he is affronted … Likes to relate his experiences and observations … Wags his head and gestures and sometimes acts out bits.” He summed up Slocum as “lithe, nervous, energetic … He looks 10 years younger than he really is.” Although it is not known what evidence Johnson had for the following remark, he also cited a quality that would have been essential to Slocum at sea: “Never loses his head in an emergency.”

Now that Slocum was landlocked, people were finally getting to know him, warts and all. His temper was something he could no longer hide away and take for a sail. One of Slocum’s cousins, Grace Murray Brown, remembered him as “capable of letting his irascible side show up if sufficient provocation was given or was suspected. One could not hide anything from a mind like his … slights would never be forgotten or forgiven.” She felt that her uncle (as she called Slocum) had a capacity for caring for people of like sympathies, but was also too impatient when he could not “be as independent as his nature
demanded.” Perhaps she summed him up best when she pointed out in a letter to Teller, “
I can not be too emphatic in saying Uncle Josh did not suffer fools gladly … that may be hackneyed but he never bothered with anything or anyone who did not measure up. But was so appreciative when he found them acceptable.”

Slocum was often testy with his brother Ornan, who lived on the island and ran a shoe shop in Vineyard Haven. Ornan did not have his brother’s strong constitution, and Joshua had little patience for him. When the kindly but slower-moving younger brother came to help Joshua plant fruit trees at the West Tisbury farm, the two ended up bickering, as they always did. Slocum was outraged at Ornan, whom he accused of running the cultivator or the horse up against his precious trees. Grace Brown remembers it as “a terrible row … the Captain said Ornan was trying to ruin his beautiful little trees out of pure cussedness.” The family folklore as related by Grace Brown is that after the explosion, they refused to speak to each other “until one day they ran afoul of one another on a narrow path. Ornan, goodhearted soul, thought what two jackasses they were, so as they were about to pass eyes straight ahead, Ornan gave Josh the shoulder spinning him around. Luckily Josh had his sealegs on or this tale might have ended differently. Ornan with a wide grin greeted him with a ‘Good morning Captain’. Josh relented by gripping his brother’s hand in a lusty shake and a cry, ‘How are you Ornan?’ So ended that bit.” Ornan never
did return to work the cultivator. In fact, Joshua’s days with the cultivator were drawing to a close. He was wearying of land life. He tried growing hops the second season on the Vineyard, but was not successful.

It was becoming obvious to the islanders that their famous captain was having trouble adapting to land life. Joseph Chase Allen was a boy of about eight when he knew Slocum on Martha’s Vineyard. He described the captain this way: “
very quick in his movements, spoke rapidly, clipped off his sentences, inclined to be snappy in his speech as men will be who are accustomed to give orders, and not the kind of man one would be tempted to take liberties with.” Islanders long remembered Slocum giving one young man a cutting lecture on the proper way to come up alongside a boat without smashing into it.

Allen also remembered some of Slocum’s eccentricities, which were the outcome of a long, solitary life. On one occasion he and Slocum joined a small coach of travelers coming home from the island ferry. One of the passengers was a well-dressed lady. “I was on the front seat,” Allen recalled, “when I heard a hell of a rustle of paper. The man leans forward and says to the woman, ‘I hope you don’t object to the smell of salt codfish.’ I looked round and he had the biggest jack-knife I ever saw in my life and was hewing chunks off the fish and eating it and he ate a good deal of it the way to West Tisbury. That was Slocum in 1904.”

There was no missing the fact that Slocum was an old
seadog. Even his relatives didn’t know what to expect next. According to Grace Brown, her whole family knew that Slocum had a gift for the dramatic, but he still could surprise them. In everyday conversation, her Uncle Josh would just start shouting poetry by Robert Burns that he had memorized. Another day, “
he burst upon our view by way of the kitchen with an enormous salt cod tucked under his wing with just a paper around its middle but the tail sticking out and part of the other end where the head was happily off. Mother laughed so at the sight that father and the rest of us came in from our share of the jobs. Captain had been up and down Atlantic Avenue renewing friendships along the wharves where one of the old salts gave him the cod.”

Slocum still had his sea captain friends, but wasn’t a popular man with other contemporaries. He made small efforts to contribute to island life with his famous stereopticon lectures. The
West Tisbury News
advertised “an account of his voyage around the world, at Agricultural Hall, Thanksgiving evening, November 27th. Capt. Slocum has kindly offered to donate the proceeds of his lecture to the Congregational Church.” But one islander who heard him lecture about his sea adventures felt that Slocum had become “a little alienated to social joys”; “I daresay the local gossip of West Tisbury had become a little tame to one who had spread tacks on the deck of his boat in Tierra del Fuego,” he speculated. In his short time on land Slocum had gained a reputation for being
opinionated, acerbic and difficult to befriend. As Hettie put it with subtle irony, “
It did not hurt his feelings to let you know what he was thinking.” She joked that she referred to him as “Josh, Joshua, or Captain if I thought he needed the honor.”

Grace Brown expressed some sympathy for Slocum’s growing uneasiness. “A winter would be unthinkable for a man of his volatile nature holed up in a small house in a small village,” she opined. “It might have been manageable if Hettie had had a different makeup but even a siren would have a hard time of it … to keep his wings clipped.” More and more often, Slocum was seen aboard the
Spray
. During some of that time, Garfield sailed around the island with his father. He noticed how Slocum paced the deck, stared out to the horizon, and then simply went below with his books. Garfield was worried about his father’s growing agitation: “Father was a changed man when he returned from his lone voyage. He acted to me like he wanted to be alone. That voyage was a terrible strain on him. Father was so different when he returned from sailing alone, he did not talk to me much. He appeared to be deep in thought.” It was obvious to all who knew him that it was time for him to be alone again — to return to life aboard the only home that made sense to him, the
Spray
.