Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072) (26 page)

He looked like the typical beachcomber — wore a battered old felt hat — originally a black hat bleached out irregularly from sun and rain, a collarless shirt open at the neck, a vest, unbuttoned trousers that would disgrace a clamdigger and a pair of high lace-up shoes badly in need of a polish …
. Spray
was dirty — not just a little dirty but very very dirty
.

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

Seaworthy for the Last Time

The old captain was to have one last moment of glory. He sailed into Oyster Bay, Long Island, early in August 1906 with the one surviving orchid, planning to send the plant ashore to Sagamore Hill with a note attached for the president’s secretary. But the messenger that day on the docks was none other than Archie Roosevelt, the young son of the president, who, recognizing the
Spray
, immediately jumped aboard. Archie shook the captain’s hand and told him his father wanted to meet him. So Slocum, barely cleaned up from over a month in jail, was
on his way to meet the President of the United States. That meeting led to a poignant friendship between a young boy and an old sailor. Roosevelt asked Slocum to take Archie sailing. On August 6, 1906, the president wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge, “
Archie is off for a week’s cruise with Captain Joshua Slocum — that man who takes his little boat, without any crew but himself, all around the world.” Over five days, Slocum and Archie sailed from Oyster Bay to Newport.

That voyage was the start of Archie’s apprenticeship with a master navigator. According to a local newspaper, Slocum complimented the lad, declaring him to be “the best young sailor who had ever stepped aboard his craft.” He added that if the
Spray
ever needed a mate, Archie would be given the berth: “Archie is one of the cleverest boys I have ever known. He has learned to sail the
Spray
almost as well as I can myself. I like him because he always does what I tell him to. You wouldn’t believe, but he knows how to set the sails at their proper balance and to lash the helm so that it skims along by itself. That is a trick which excites admiration wherever I go, and which few sailors understand. Archie learned the trick last year, and he did wonders with the boat.” Archie later recalled their relationship as one of mutual admiration, noting the great skills of the old navigator: “Of course we [Archie and Obie, a sailor on the presidential yacht, the
Sylph]
saw the famous alarm clock, which had to be boiled before it would run. Beyond my
comprehension were his sheets of calculations for the lunar observations he had made single-handedly — a feat, I believe which is supposed to require three people to work out.”

Slocum also showed Archie the finer points of nautical salesmanship. He showed the boy how to file the points off shells to make foghorns. And he showed him how to sell finished goods, be they foghorns, coral or books. The boy was eager to learn, and during their time together Slocum must have gained back the hope and courage to pull himself up after a devastating debacle. His skills were appreciated once more, and by none other than the president himself. That Roosevelt had entrusted his son to the old captain could only have felt like a pardon — a second chance for respectability after disgrace. The president wrote him a note thanking him for the copy of
Sailing Alone Around the World
that Slocum had given him before sailing home to Martha’s Vineyard.

No doubt the Vineyarders had heard about his time in jail. Grace Brown recalled the family whisperings concerning the Riverton incident, and wrote to Walter Teller, “That yellow journalism was so awful at the time and our family’s so shocked over it that they soft pedalled whenever we younger ones were around. As I recall it was something that happened or was reported to have happened … The matter was aired in the papers and there it died out … We who had known the Captain had found him affectionate to a degree with young things just as I know my own dad was. We never heard of any dalliance with the fair sex. When you recall as I do hearing of ministers, doctors, and dentists being nothing but Don Juans in their home town’s estimation, one wonders how this all comes about?”

On his return home, there was no mention of the affair in the press. According to the August 16, 1906, Vineyard
Gazette
, “Captain Joshua Slocum, master of the
Spray
, was in town on Monday.” But all who observed him after that summer noticed his unshakable sadness. Grace Brown speculated about his depression: “I think he was bitter … some folk are born … never being satisfied with half measures. I don’t believe he allowed what certain people thought of him to bother him, only as annoyance and his contempt could be very potent. If any sadness, it was for a career which he felt did not justify his inherent ability.” One islander recalled, “He was lazy and mentally sluggish … the captain suffered from the
disadvantage of not having enough to do.” His three sons were concerned about their father’s emotional health. Garfield remembered a moment of their time sailing together when his father seemed lost in the past: “
Beside the bowsprit the
Spray
was in the sea though father saw a huge wave coming and headed the
Spray
into it. I held on to the bowsprit and when it was recovered from the baptism father laughed heartily. I remember hearing father sing ‘We Shall Meet on That Beautiful Shore’. I think he was thinking of mother.”

Virginia had been dead for over twenty years, but Garfield sensed that her spirit was alive to his father at that moment. Slocum did not have the comfort of a loving partner in Hettie, nor did she find a loving partner in him. Victor reflected, “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 so I stayed far.” On Slocum’s return to Martha’s Vineyard, he and Hettie continued their pattern of spending time apart. He roamed the shores and coastlines, and she spent long spells and her winters away with friends and relatives. Grace Brown recalled one instance when Hettie and Josh were forced to share time under the same roof, in the same bed. Even as a child, she had sensed the awkwardness of the situation: “When he returned sometimes Hettie would be at our house and
one time he came in unheralded and wanted a bed. We had only half the house — eight rooms and Hettie was in a small room with a single or two thirds bed. But where mother wanted to rearrange things, he said, ‘Now Alice I haven’t seen my wife in several months and if I can sleep in a bunk the size of a coffin I guess I can find room with Hettie.’ I don’t know how Hettie stood it but she laughed it off and they stayed several days before going in the
Spray
to the Vineyard.”

The islanders were attuned to this unusual relationship, and the general impression was that Joshua and Hettie had reached an agreement to lead separate lives. One Vineyarder, Alice Longaker, said, “
It was a long time before I became aware that he had a wife and though I have nothing concrete upon which to pin the fact it seemed, for many reasons, to be evident that he carried the relationship buoyantly. He was always the visitor and never seemed aware of ties.” In reporting the comings and goings of the captain and his wife, the Vineyard
Gazette
stopped referring to Hettie as Mrs. Joshua Slocum. In 1906 she was almost always “Mrs. H. M. Slocum.” The West Tisbury “Miscellanies” section may have been having a little fun at the couple’s expense when it noted on July 30, 1908, that “Capt. Joshua Slocum of the sloop
Spray
is on the Island and has been a recent guest of Mrs. Slocum at West Tisbury.” Another islander, H.L. Coggins, remarked, “I don’t think that the Captain and wife were very close and the whole family seemed relieved when he took any of his trips.”

These were Captain Slocum’s twilight years: like the
Spray
, he was falling apart physically, and struggling to remain seaworthy — to be worthy of the waters one more time. He made short daytrips, and then every winter — with the tangible excuse of minding the cold and doing a little business — he escaped boredom in a trip south. The
Spray
would leave with a ballast of cement or stone and return loaded with shells, coconuts and sundry items, which he could peddle as he sailed along the New England coast.

The winter of 1907 found Slocum in Jamaica — the second visit reported by the local newspaper, the
Gleaner
, which referred to him as “
the Lone Navigator.” This was the year of the great earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica, and Slocum was there. He met up with a Philadelphia newspaper reporter named Louise B. Ward. Ward found the old captain to be coping well, but she also sensed his melancholy. As he sat on his boat in the harbor of a city that had almost come to ruin, Slocum may have felt personally shaken. He made an unusual remark: “I can patch up the
Spray
, but who will patch up Captain Slocum?”

That winter and the next, Slocum kept himself “patched up” enough to make safe passage from southern ports to home. These trips still gave him a sense of purpose and achievement. He still had ambitions, and told a local newspaper his latest plan: “The
Spray
shall be the first boat to go through the [Panama] Canal, and thence to
China and Japan.” That adventure never materialized, and January 1908 found him still at work lecturing. He had to keep the old dream alive through stories. His brochure for the Miami audience claimed, “He will tell of his escape from raging storms, from savage cannibals off the Patagonia coast, from dangers of the deep that were met by him alone in mid-ocean. He will tell of trying to enter Havana harbor while the seas were rolling over Morro headland, and of his turning and running to Miami. Some of these things he will show you upon a curtain by a magic lantern.” When he returned north in June, he delivered a piece of green coral weighing nearly two tons to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It was at that time the largest and most valuable piece of coral in any institution in the world.

Oyster Bay on Long Island was one place that still found the old eccentric charming, in a quaint sort of way. On his return in May 1907, a local paper commented, “The captain is as full of yarns as Oyster Bay is of horseshoe crabs. Sitting snugly in his little cabin, he reels them off by the yard to the gaping landsmen, and they have come to look upon him as one of the wonders of the deep.” Likewise, the New York
World
welcomed the captain back: “Once a year sea-battered, kindly old Captain Joshua Slocum puts in the harbor here with his weatherbeaten, snub-nosed, tight little yawl, the
Spray.”
Archie Roosevelt met the captain and took him to the White House. As Slocum told the story, when he shook Roosevelt’s hand
the president said, “
Captain, our adventures have been a little different.” Slocum responded with his usual understated humor: “That is true, Mr. President, but I see you got here first.” The captain had planned to take Archie sailing after this White House meeting, but this second trip never happened. Slocum had been careless with his answer to a theological question posed by a minister from Groton, the strict Episcopalian school that Archie attended. Slocum returned to Martha’s Vineyard without his young apprentice sailor and salesman.

Years later in his memoirs, Archie Roosevelt wrote about Slocum and the
Spray:
“The boat was the most incredibly dirty craft I have ever seen … Obie went ashore, and returned with his own money, and jettisoned the filthy old relic [a stove] that had served the captain, I don’t know how many years … In mild, warm weather, the Captain often cooked on deck, and he had a most ingenious contrivance … He had an old fashioned laundry tub, in the bottom of which he coiled a piece of heavy anchor chain. On top of the chain he built a fire of driftwood. As a diet, he was fond of salt fish, and every so often he would make us enormous pancakes, ‘as thick as your foot’, he would tell us.” Some of Archie’s memories were as vivid as only those linked to smell can be. Remembering the hold of the
Spray
, he wrote, “There was a quantity of miscellaneous equipment, an enormous number of conch shells, which he got when he was down in the West Indies. Some of these had not been too carefully
cleaned, and there was a fine ripe odor permeating the center part of the ship.”

After 1906, Slocum’s neighbours on Martha’s Vineyard began to notice how neglected and run down the
Spray
was looking. Some made note of the inside of Slocum’s cabin, with its jumble of books and badly corroded sextant lying about from his “trip round.” Others pointed out the slack rigging and the fact that
Spray
needed tarring. One visitor described the atmosphere aboard as “
pungent with the odor of tarred ropes and the salty mildew a boat collects while sailing the seven seas.” The boat Slocum had lovingly rebuilt was now languishing uncared for. The
Spray
’s renewal fifteen years before had mirrored Slocum’s; her deterioration now reflected his own. According to Ernest Dean, a Vineyarder who had known both Slocum and the
Spray
for many years, “they both were neat, trim, seaworthy, but as the years rolled along there were signs of wear and exposure.”