Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072) (17 page)

Besides conversing with the
Spray
, the man in the moon, Neptune and various ghosts and sea creatures, Slocum shouted orders to imaginary crew and belted shanties and hymns into the salt winds. He had been warned before leaving that he could lose his voice from misuse. At first he talked incessantly, crying out “
Eight bells,” but that grew wearisome, and he probably saw the threat to his sanity in this approach to preserving his vocal cords. He also noted that his speaking voice “sounded hollow in the empty air, and I dropped the practice. However, it was not long before the thought came to me that when I was a lad I used to sing; why not try that now, where it would disturb no one? My musical talent had never bred envy in others, but out on the Atlantic, to realize what it meant, you should have heard me sing.” Slocum fancied that porpoises leaped when “[I] pitched my voice for the waves and the sea and all that was in it.” Choruses of old music hall tunes charmed old turtles out of their shells. “The porpoises were, on the whole, vastly more appreciative than the turtles; they jumped a deal higher. One day when I was humming a favorite chant, I think it was ‘Babylon’s a Fallin’,’ a porpoise jumped higher than the bowsprit. Had the
Spray
been going a little faster she would have scooped him in. The sea-birds sailed around rather shy.”

Slocum’s accounts of many of his solitary experiences show a strong gift for whimsy. He mixed his adventurous pioneering spirit with a good dose of lighthearted play.
He had some fun in his role as explorer of new territories. He named the
Spray
’s newly discovered island in the Strait of Magellan Alan Erric Island, “
after a worthy literary friend whom I had met in strange by-places, and I put up a sign, ‘Keep off the grass’, which, as discoverer, was within my rights.” Earlier in his adventures near the storm-lashed Horn he had sought shelter at midnight in the lee of an island. There he prepared a well-deserved cup of coffee — a birthday present to himself on the day he turned fifty-two. The drink was such a boost to his spirits after a day of beating heavy squalls and sailing against the current that he named the soulful shelter Coffee Island.

Though a practical man, Slocum heard poetry in the waves that lapped around his boat, referring to them whimsically as “gossiping waves,” and he fancied that they “doffed their white caps beautifully.” He yearned for the romantic, unhurried era of sailing. He recalled the good old days when ships stopped in ports for a “gam,” or chat, with the locals, and fired their guns as a salute upon parting, and he bemoaned the changes in sea etiquette: “There are no poetry-enshrined freighters on the sea now; it is a prosy life when we have no time to bid one another good morning.”

Passing boats and storms brought home the practical realities and quickly tamed his solitary flights of fancy. He had only to feel the salt spray smart in his eyes after hours of sailing through screaming gales. With no one on board to relieve him during stormy spells, Slocum
knew all about the strange states of mind that come after uninterrupted hours at the helm. He had a rare stamina, and during one storm off the Horn, he stayed at the helm for thirty hours. Sometimes he continued sailing hours after his body and mind had been driven to a state beyond tiredness. His body worked automatically, registering and responding to the hiss of each wave: Was this the one that would break over the boat? He knew what extremes of exertion were required for solo sailing, and what it was like to deprive himself of sleep. He fought to stay awake by any means he could find: a reviving splash of water, a mouthful of pilot bread, a song to belt out. No doubt he often entered the next level of exhaustion, the moment when fatigue lifts and a sailor feels as if he could continue sailing for days. At this point he is functioning like a machine, and it often takes a sudden emergency to shake off any illusions of invincibility. He must then take stock and find a way to master his exhaustion. He must keep sailing.

Slocum thrived on the challenge of rough sailing; it was spells of becalming that tried his temper and patience to the limit. He hit one such spell in the horse latitudes. When sailing through a storm, sailors sense they are at the mercy of wind and water, but they also feel that it is within their power to affect the situation. A sailor who is becalmed quite literally has the wind taken out of his sails. He must sit helplessly on the spot where the sails went slat. A boat that is becalmed doesn’t enjoy the regular
patterns or predictability of a boat that is moving through the water. For days on end the boat may never sit level. With no wind to keep the sails filled, the booms, gaffs and sails slam about aimlessly; this puts an incredible strain on the canvas, which in turn strikes the halyard, which gives a shock to the mast. That shock is transmitted down the mast and the standing rigging to the hull; thus, with each blow a shock is registered throughout the hull.

A spell of becalming is even harder on the nerves. Bang! every four or five seconds when all the sails go slat. Clunk! because the waves are still rocking the boat but there’s not enough wind to fill the sails and keep the pressure on them. This destructive and infuriating inertia can bring out the “Type A” personality traits that lurk in many sailors. Some react by frantically trying to tighten sails and looking for ways to keep them from slatting. Then after a time the frustrated sailor realizes that he can’t make the wind blow. He just has to make the best of it and manage his boat properly while he waits for conditions to change. And waiting in a flat calm on a hot humid day under a blazing sun feels like slow torture.

Slocum knew the kind of attitude that becalming required, and he found a certain amount of pleasure in the surrender. Of his enforced stay, he waxed philosophical, comparing this trial to earlier ones he had suffered: “I had almost forgotten this calm belt, or had come to regard it as a myth. I now found it real, however, and difficult to cross. This was as it should have been, for, after all of the
dangers of the sea, the duststorm on the coast of Africa, the ‘rain of blood’ in Australia, and the war risk when nearing home, a natural experience would have been missing had the calm of the horse latitudes been left out. Anyhow, a philosophical turn of thought now was not amiss, else one’s patience would have given out almost at the harbor entrance. The term of her probation was eight days. Evening after evening during this time I read by the light of a candle on deck. There was no wind at all, and the sea became smooth and monotonous. For three days I saw a full-rigged ship on the horizon, also becalmed.”

During moments of clear sailing the captain found a deep peace, and a connection with a greater power. On fine days he sailed by the positions of the stars, the sun and the moon. He had his sextant for taking early morning, noon and twilight sightings. Slocum was well versed in the subtleties of celestial navigation. Along with his skillful readings, he trusted his intuition to guide him with accuracy: “
I sailed with a free wind day after day, marking the position of my ship on the chart with considerable precision; but this was done by intuition, I think, more than by slavish calculations. For one whole month my vessel held her course true: I had not, the while, so much as a light in the binnacle. The Southern Cross I saw every night abeam. The sun every morning came up astern; every evening it went down ahead. I wished for no other compass to guide me, for these were true. If I doubted my reckoning after a long time at sea I verified
it by reading the clock aloft made by the Great Architect, and it was right.”

Slocum’s accuracy was astonishing. When he first sighted the Marquesas group of Polynesian islands, he was confused by a reading that told him the
Spray
was hundreds of miles west of where he knew she was. He took a second set of readings an hour later that confirmed the first. Frustrated by information that clashed with his intuition, Slocum consulted the logarithm table and there found the error that had thrown off his calculations. He corrected the tables and felt he could continue to sail with his “
self-reliance unshaken, and with my tin clock fast asleep.” He was delighted with his skill and couldn’t help but boast: “I found from the result of three observations, after long wrestling with lunar tables, that her longitude by observation agreed within five miles of that by dead-reckoning.”

Slocum gloried in the precision of the universe and marveled at man’s ability to read its signs. Of the skills of the lunarian — the old-fashioned navigator who without a chronometer could ascertain the longitude of his ship by calculating the angle between the moon and certain fixed stars — Slocum wrote simple words of praise: “There is nothing in the realm of navigation that lifts one’s heart up more in adoration.” Out in the middle of the Pacific, the connection to nature was heightened, and Slocum came to a deep understanding of how things were and had always been for sailors who really knew the
ocean and the sky. And this feeling of perfect knowledge filled him with satisfaction: “
I was en rapport now with my surroundings, and was carried on a vast stream where I felt the buoyancy of His hand who made all the worlds, I realized the mathematical truth of their motions, so well known that astronomers compile tables of their positions through the years and the day, and the minutes of a day, with such precision that one coming along over the sea even five years later may, by their aid, find the standard time of any given meridian on the earth.”

Slocum’s deepening connection with nature affected his view of the creatures he encountered. In the Strait of Magellan, as he watched ducks flying past the
Spray
, he contemplated the joy of a good stew. But even this mouthwatering thought was not enough to make him pull the trigger: he simply did not have the mind to take a life in such a desolate landscape. He countered a native Samoan’s suggestion that he carry caged chickens on board for slaughtering when desired: “To kill the companions of my voyage and eat them would be indeed next to murder and cannibalism.” His dietary code of ethics had its limits, however; he drew the line when hungry-looking sharks circled the
Spray
as she traveled close to islands and coral reefs. His justification for killing them was self-defense and a kind of unspoken creed that he adhered to as a member of the nautical brotherhood: “Nothing is more dreadful to the mind of a sailor, I think, than a possible encounter with [these] ‘tigers of the sea’ … In the
loneliness of the dreary country about Cape Horn I found myself in no mood to make one life less in the world, except in self-defense.”

Slocum’s long journey was as much an inner voyage through the psyche as an outward voyage over ocean waters. Pondering both depths brought him face to face with his own strengths and shortcomings. Alone at sea, he had to know who he was. Surviving such a plunge into solitude required courage and honesty. As he stripped away the sea’s layers and penetrated its mysteries, a deep spirituality awakened that had always been part of him. By the end of the voyage, he was embracing each descent into solitude as an opportunity for spiritual growth: “
I was destined to sail once more into the depths of solitude, but these experiences had no bad effect upon me; on the contrary, a spirit of charity and even benevolence grew stronger in my nature through the meditations of these supreme hours on the sea.” Later Slocum expressed to Clifton Johnson, a magazine writer, how these shifts affected his written account of his solo voyage. His bouts of solitude had distilled for him the essence of his story: “Everything in connection with the sea would be eminantly respectable and be told in spirituality. No man ever lived to see more of the solemnity of the depths than I have seen and I resent, quickly the hint that a real sea story might be other than religeous. I cannot down my sensitiveness on this point.” Throughout
Sailing Alone Around the World
he recounted moments of epiphany and
awakening. He wrote to his cousin Joel Slocum about the spiritual connection that is felt on the waters: “
Old sailors may have odd ways of showing their religious feeling but there are no infidels at sea.”

Any great journey, no matter what instigated it, becomes a journey of the soul. Slocum could not have sailed around the world by himself without being transformed. At every solitary turn, whether battling loneliness, stormy sea or daily routine, he was discovering what made sense to him in the world and what was beautiful and important. He had the skills to meet the challenging power of nature. He tested and stretched his abilities, which were considerable, and in doing so discovered where his limits were to be found. With no one to witness his astonishing feats of seamanship, Slocum took comfort in the knowledge that he had one constant companion at all times, besides the
Spray
. As Slocum told it, “I sailed alone with God.”

Captain Slocum was what we may call an uncommon man. He was extremely intelligent, and in his love of roaming and adventure reminded me of the celebrated Moorish traveler, Ibn Batuta, who wandered from Cape Spartel to the Yellow Sea, making friends with white, black and yellow; always observing, making men and manners his study, and living by the gifts of those whose ears he tickled with his tales of travel and adventure. Slocum, like Batuta, was a friend-maker, and everywhere he went the best of the land welcomed him, bid him to the board, and gave attention, while in his inimitable way he spun yarns of his voyages. At Gibraltar he was the guest of the Admiral; at Montevideo the Royal Mail Company repaired his sloop without a charge; in Australia and New Zealand they gave him sails and stores; at Cape Town the Government passed him over its railway lines; and even old Kruger handed him a cup of coffee. From port to port he voyaged everywhere welcomed and entertained …