Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072) (14 page)

An unusual photo of the
Spray
hauled out at Devonport, Tasmania. The bottom was coated with copper paint to protect it from damage by mollusks. Unknown photographer (1897)

Spray
under sail in Australian waters. Slocum was into the second year of his circumnavigation of the globe, having spent Christmas 1896 in Melbourne. Unknown photographer (1897)

But where the sloop avoided one danger she encountered another. For one day, well off the Patagonian coast, while the sloop was reaching under short sail, a tremendous wave, the culmination, it seemed of many waves, rolled down upon her in a storm, roaring as it came. I had only a moment to get all sail down and myself up on the peak halliards, out of danger, when I saw the mighty crest towering masthead-high above me. The mountain of water submerged my vessel. She shook in every timber and reeled under the weight of the sea, but rose quickly out of it, and rode grandly over the rollers that followed. It may have been a minute that from my hold in the rigging I could see no part of the
Spray’s
hull. Perhaps it was even less time than that … Not only did the past, with electric speed, flash before me, but I had time while in my hazardous position for resolutions for the future that would take a long time to fulfil
.

— J.S.,
Sailing Alone

High Seas Adventures

From the moment he set out on his around-the-world voyage, Slocum knew that adventure awaited him over every horizon. “Take warning,
Spray
, and have a care,” he bellowed prophetically as he sailed his sloop out of Massachusetts Bay at the beginning of the voyage. It was not long before the
Spray
encountered her first sea adventure, when she was battered and tossed around in the temperamental tide rips off Brier Island. When Slocum arrived on his childhood island safe and sound, he showed that even an experienced seadog like himself was prone to superstitious thinking in nautical matters, “It was the 13th of the month, and 13 is my lucky number — a fact
registered long before Dr. Nansen sailed in search of the north pole with his crew of thirteen.” Luck may have been with him, but there were to be many more challenging seas in which Slocum’s boat would be “
whirled around like a top.” The old sailor expected and accepted these as an inevitable part of blue water sailing. He may have been less prepared for the adventures that arose not from weather and ocean but from other seafarers, among them pirates, brigands, cannibals and curious natives.

The first unusual predicament came as he sailed west from Gibraltar in late August of 1895 after being forced to backtrack across the Atlantic, owing to the dangers of Mediterranean pirates. The irony of this change in route was evident immediately. Just out of Gibraltar, off the coast of Morocco, Slocum spied a felucca carrying pirates and thieves. It seemed to be in hot pursuit of the
Spray
, so the captain changed direction. The confirmation of his fears came swiftly: the felucca changed direction and remained in pursuit. By Slocum’s calculations, it was gaining on him. He wrote later that the ship came within a whisker of catching up to him: “I now saw the tufts of hair on the heads of the crew, — by which, it is said, Mohammed will pull the villains up into heaven, — and they were coming on like the wind.” They were such a fierce-looking crew that Slocum reckoned them to be “the sons of generations of pirates.” One glance at them and he knew they planned to do him harm. What happened next was like a gift from heaven. Slocum was stunned to
see the felucca, with far too much sail on for the conditions, broach to on a wave. But Slocum had little time for their sudden setback to register: in an instant he was hit by the same wave. With the shudder of impact, one that “
shook her in every timber,” the
Spray’s
mainboom broke at the rigging. Slocum turned his attention from outracing scoundrels to downing jib and mainsail. He later told a newspaper reporter, “You can just imagine that the one-man crew had to skip around pretty brisk to get the jib and mainsail secure.”

Having saved the
Spray
, he turned his mind quickly back to matters of self-defense. He raced below to his cabin and grabbed his loaded Martini-Henry, assuming the pirates were almost ready to board. Back on deck, he watched a frantic spectacle: the pirates were not only much farther off but also completely out of the race. The elements had neutralized their blood-hungry greed. Instead of pillaging, they were scrambling to stay afloat in a dismasted boat: “I perceived [the] thieving crew, some dozen or more of them, struggling to recover their rigging from the sea.” Slocum later noted sardonically, “Needless to say I did not stop to help them.” He found a certain amount of justice in this moment. This first pirate adventure, and the quick repair of his broken boom, left the captain “too fatigued to sleep.”

Slocum would have other perilous encounters with the wild side of humanity when he sailed through the Strait of Magellan. But before he entered those hazardous
waters, he had his share of threatening moments in seas farther to the north. One night he found himself tossing miserably for hours and felt “
heartsore of choppy seas.” Slocum may have been a pragmatic sailor, but he maintained an optimism and a clear vision of his goal: “I will not say that I expected all fine sailing on the course for Cape Horn direct, but while I worked at the sails and rigging I thought only of onward and forward.” At the same time, however, he noted that “where the sloop avoided one danger she encountered another.”

He later confessed that one of the dangers had been avoidable and that it was his own error that had got him into trouble. He misjudged the distance to the Uruguayan coast, and December 11, 1895 found the
Spray
beached. Slocum surveyed the situation and determined his sloop to be hard and fast ashore. Next he looked out to sea and noted that a strong swell was running. To get his boat back in the water, he devised a plan that involved taking his small auxilliary anchor, the kedge, and attaching a light line to it. With one end of the line made fast to the
Spray
, he rowed out in his sawed-off dory until the line was taut, and then dropped the kedge anchor. But the tide was falling, and the
Spray
could not be budged. He resorted to a second strategy, and here is where he really got himself into trouble. This time he went out with his heaviest anchor, which weighed 180 pounds. The weight of the anchor and its cable swamped his little dory immediately, and Slocum quickly jumped out before he reached deep
water. He then cut the cable in half and got back in the dory. He rowed out farther, but the dory was leaking and sinking fast, so he raised the anchor over his head and tossed it clear of the boat. At the same moment, the dory rolled over. Slocum could only hold on for his life. As the captain later told the story, it was while he was clinging to the gunwale that he suddenly remembered he could not swim. Three times he tried to right the dory and each time she rolled completely around. Slocum was seized by the determination not to give those who had scoffed at him the opportunity for a posthumous “I told you so.” On the fourth try, he righted the dory and hauled himself back on board, with the help of a well-placed oar.

Back on the beach, after securing the two parts of his cable, he let himself collapse on the warm sand for a rest while he waited on the tide. At the sound of horse’s hooves on the sand, Slocum opened an eye and saw a young boy looking over the
Spray
as if he had just found buried treasure. The young fellow attempted to move the sloop by tying it to his horse to haul, but failed as dismally as Slocum had with his kedge. The boy still hadn’t seen the old seadog watching him. The interloper gave up the idea of towing the
Spray
and instead eyed the dory. At this point, Slocum made his presence known, telling the boy that he and his ship had come from the moon to take back a cargo of boys. His jest was perhaps taken seriously, for the boy whirled his lariat and tried to rope the captain. This made yet another tall tale for Slocum to tell later.

A great moment of high seas adventure was waiting over the horizon — one that would show off Slocum’s expert seamanship and quick thinking. It came just over a month later, at the end of January 1896. Slocum was sailing cautiously down the treacherous Patagonian coast. In choppy waters, he looked out to sea and saw a huge wave heading toward him. From years of sailing in every kind of sea imaginable, he had learned to read the patterns and intervals between waves. Now and again those rhythms can synchronize to create one horrendous, monumental wave. And that was what was coming straight for the
Spray
. Slocum knew what he had to do, and fast: “
I had only a moment to get all sail down and myself up on the peak halliards, out of danger, when I saw the mighty crest towering masthead-high above me. The mountain of water submerged my vessel.” Because the sails were down, the
Spray
presented no surface for the massive wave to strike. Had it hit canvas, the sloop would probably have rolled over and been lost, for she did not have a self-righting hull. To be able to react perfectly in the moment and arrive at the only workable solution to a serious threat must have been satisfying to Slocum. He still had what it took to survive in tempestuous seas, and sailing south toward the Horn, he would need every ounce of his skill.

On February 14, 1896, having entered the Strait of Magellan, he arrived at the Chilean port of Punta Arenas. This part of the voyage provided him with a taste of the dangers that he would be facing for the next two months.
The seas beyond the southern tip of South America are the only part of the planet where the ocean goes all the way around the earth along a constant line of latitude without running into a land mass. Slocum described the effect: “
At this point where the tides from the Atlantic and the Pacific meet, and in the strait, as on the outside coast, their meeting makes a commotion of whirlpools and combers that in a gale of wind is dangerous to canoes and other frail craft.” Slocum was able to wax poetic over the ancient power of the Horn, the place where “the waves rose and fell and bellowed their never-ending-story of the sea.”

While resupplying himself in port, Slocum got a sense of what other dangers might be lurking in those waters. He observed the Patagonian and Fuegian natives and felt that they were “as squalid as contact with unscrupulous traders could make them.” He blamed their degraded state on the unlawful sale of “fire-water,” which he thought was “poisonous stuff to the natives.” At the customhouse, Slocum learned there was serious trouble brewing. Just before Slocum arrived in Punta Arenas, the governor had ordered an attack on a Fuegian settlement, as a swift sign of retribution for the natives’ massacre of a schooner’s crew. In light of the potentially explosive situation, the port captain strongly advised Slocum to take on a small crew while he sailed through the strait. But the feisty Captain Slocum had pledged himself to a solo voyage and would have none of it — he would not even consider having a watchdog on board. An Austrian captain
presented the Yankee sailor with a bag of carpet tacks. Captain Pedro Samblich was a cryptic sort, and when Slocum protested that he had no use for this bizarre gift, Samblich told him bluntly, “
You must use them with discretion, that is to say, don’t step on them yourself.” Slocum would later reflect that Samblich’s gift was “worth more than all the fighting men and dogs of Tierro del Fuego.”