Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072) (28 page)

Garfield Slocum said his father had always wanted to be buried at sea. Garfield’s older brother, Ben Aymar, mused awkwardly about this in a letter to Teller: “
Have been picturing the last hours of Capt JS and the
Spray
this way: Captain J was a quick striker, practical to the core as he sailed southward alone, he may have had a deep thinking spell on his trip only a few hours out from Martha’s Vineyard. He could visualize correctly. In a vision he could see the
Spray
as his final answer to all attempts he had made to regain his forever hard earned reputation as a sailor … I pictured him on first studying on how to completely rob the sharks of any chances to profit from his proposed [illegible]. He decides to clean deck, no drifting telltales … heavy etching on deck … he sails on awaiting a final answer to his contemplated exit — the coast is clear, beautiful weather report — that perfect mystery and he was equal to perfecting his final act on earth. He heard this courtly still voice and obeyed.”

For years afterward there were unconfirmed sightings of Slocum in the Caribbean and South America. The New Bedford
Standard
ran this story on May 27, 1911: “
Lone mariner reported: White man seen on the Orinoco River, maybe Captain Slocum, commander of the famous sloop
Spray
[who] planned to explore the headwaters of the South American River when he landed here in November 1908. When he left here in November, 1908, Captain Slocum never reported at West Indies where he intended to stop.” In a 1913 journal entry, Alice C. Longaker’s mother noted, “Mr. O.J. Slocum stopped in to see us a while on Labor Day … He says he had heard that his brother, the Captain was alive and down in the Orionoco Country. He says that if he is alive he will ‘turn up’ at the celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal.”

Because Slocum had been such a larger-than-life seadog, there were bound to be unbelievable accounts. Years later a tall tale emerged that someone had seen a man who looked exactly like Slocum in Washington, D.C., the only difference being that the Slocum look-alike had a wooden leg. Others felt that a showman like Slocum would just turn up one day with another wild tale of adventure to tell. Reports in a New York paper told of an explorer sighted along the Amazon River who people were positive was Captain Slocum. The explorer said that he was living with the natives. When the rumors reached Hettie, all she could say was, “No one can make me
believe that because first of all Josh would not go native, he just would not mix with them in any sense expecially living among them … If it were so he must have lost his mind and is really lost.” Another strange rumor was that Slocum was living like French painter Paul Gauguin — on a tropical island with three or more wives.

Over the years, no authenticated claims developed, and it was accepted that Captain Slocum had gone down in the
Spray
. Hettie filed the Absentee petition concerning Slocum’s disappearance to the Dukes County Court on April 22, 1912. On January 15, 1924, he was declared legally dead on the day he supposedly had last set sail — November 14, 1909.

Since then, another theory has surfaced that, if valid, would solve the mystery of Slocum’s disappearance once and for all. In a 1959 article in the Quincy, Massachusetts,
Patriot Ledger
, “Capt. Slocum Story: Solution of Sea Mystery Indicated in New Facts,” Edward Rowe Snow declared, “
One of the world’s greatest sea mysteries, the loss of the
Spray
… may have been solved yesterday at the offices of the
Quincy Patriot Ledger
by the disclosure that Capt. Joshua Slocum, who vanished at sea in 1909, may have been run down by a steamer off one of the Lesser Antilles within a relatively few hours after he had left the home of a farmer of the vicinity.” The source of the revelation was Captain Charles H. Bond, whom Snow considered unimpeachable, having checked into his background and references. Bond had heard the story from
Felix Meinickheim, a planter on the islands. According to Meinickheim, Slocum arrived on Turtle Island, Lesser Antilles, and visited with him for a few days. Then he left to explore the Orinoco River as he had planned. Captain Bond continued his story to Snow: “
But Captain Slocum was destined never to complete his plans, and here is how it happened. Two nights after Captain Slocum left, Felix Meinickheim was sailing on the little mail steamer which took passengers and freight island to island.” Meinickheim observed something not quite right about the mail boat: just above the waterline there was a deep cut in the stem. The captain of the mail boat told him they had run down a native boat the night before. Meinickheim asked how he could be sure it was a native boat. The answer “Who else could it be?” left the planter uneasy. On further questioning, he learned that the boat had been run down between midnight and four a.m. As Bond told the story to Snow, the second mate on that graveyard watch admitted to Meinickheim that “it had been a terribly dark night, overcast, and at the moment of contact with the other craft, there definitely was no one at the wheel of the other vessel … In the few seconds when I saw the other craft, I made out that she was not a native of this area.”

Meinickheim pieced the puzzle together. The
Spray
was the only non-native boat cruising the waters, and the timing of the accident coincided with where Slocum would most probably have been. The planter and the steamer’s officers decided to keep the story quiet. It came out fifty
years later because, as Bond explained, “There is no one now alive today who will suffer from my revelation of what really took place to send Captain Slocum to his death aboard the
Spray.”
This story can never be proven, but it has the ring of truth, or at least probability, to it.

Thomas Fleming Day’s tribute to the lost captain in
The Rudder
’s January 1911 edition ended on a meditative note: “Peace to Captain Slocum wherever he may sleep, for he deserves at least one whispered tribute of prayer from every sailorman for what he did to rob the sea of its bad name; and for such a man, who loved every cranny of her dear old blue heart, who for years made her windswept stretches his home and highway, what is more fitting than an ocean burial?”

Joshua Slocum’s life story has adventure, passion, tragedy, loss, scandal and a mysterious end. Its hero was part poet, philosopher, dreamer, hustler and adventurer. He was a pioneer, an explorer and a wonderful spinner of tales. But not far beneath his surface was a troubled, misunderstood and desperately insecure man. Hard-headed, irascible and eccentric as he was, Captain Slocum lived his life the only way it made sense to him, and in so doing accomplished a transcendent feat of seamanship. Slocum lived his life with little compromise, and where he knew he could live it best — on the sea. And in the end, the sea claimed him as her own.

On Brier Island, where Slocum as a child was lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the waves, in Westport Baptist
Church, there is a verse inscribed on a bronze plaque on Pew 13. The verse is from an ancient psalmody that was found in a Westport home, and seems a fitting requiem for an old sailor who had always listened to and could never ignore the sea’s calling.

A “Log” of Joshua Slocum’s Circumnavigation aboard the Spray, 1895—98