Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072) (3 page)

Racing swift as lightning a young boy runs wild and free along the one narrow footpath beaten down through the grassy meadow. He stops only because the land ends. At the foot of the cliff the sea begins. Rushing headfirst into the seawinds is one of the glories of childhood on Brier Island, off the westernmost tip of Nova Scotia. Like generations of Westport children before him, ten-year-old Joshua Slocum probably made that mad-dash pilgrimage every day, at least in gentler weather. At almost every point of their four-mile-long, half-mile-wide island home, land’s end was marked and definite, a dramatic drop to the sea, straight into the Bay of Fundy. The children of
Brier Island knew instinctively the boundaries of their coastal playground.

Perhaps Josh, as he was called by his school friends, would have wanted to stretch those boundaries a little, the abrupt halt to his breathless run filling him with an ache to go on. Perhaps he was bold enough to sit near the cliff’s edge and let his legs dangle over, a posture assumed not in defiance but out of youth’s remarkable combination of pluck, naiveté and sense of indestructibility. The jagged rocks formed a steep stairway to the rocky shore 120 feet down, the steps made of crumbling basalt columns. The long, deep grooves and cracks etched and beaten into the black cliff were testimonies to the sea’s fury. The rocks on which he sat had been shifted and sculpted over aeons by the elemental forces of wind and water.

The sea’s imprint was in evidence all around him. Directly below, visible from half ebb to low water, were rocks strewn with seaweed tossed by the turn of the tide. Rockweed and kelp torn free by gales clung to the shoreline. The rocks jutting from the meadow grass all around were covered in a brilliant yellow lichen that thrived in the salt air. The shingles on the village houses and the moose racks and deer antlers nailed proudly to porchways wore spreads of this yellow growth from years of facing the ocean. In all things animate and inanimate, the island answered to the sea and bore its harshness. On the cliff across from Josh, trees stood weathered and squat. Older islanders told tales of gnarled trees that hadn’t changed
one bit in sixty years. You could cut through a trunk of two and a half inches in diameter and discover the tree to be a hundred or more years old.

Even with his eyes closed, Josh could feel the sea’s hold on the island. The air he breathed smelled of salt and tar and fish from the wharves. He heard the lapping waves and the high-pitched crying of gulls, all part of the constant drone underlying the melody of island life. On stormy days the usual sounds reached a more furious pitch and tempo. The surf pounded and the wind howled. He could hear the sea beyond the wall of white fog that now and again blanketed the island and hid the mainland across St. Marys Bay — fog that often lasted for six weeks at a time.

Josh’s mother, Sarah Jane Southern, grew up an island girl. She was aware early in her life of the dangers of a thick fog. She would have known the anxiety in her father’s voice and his fast actions whenever summer fog thickened or winter snow squalled. As keeper of the Southwest Point Light, he knew that when Brier Island was wrapped in darkness, ships were wrecked. Even in the best conditions, navigation is tricky between Brier Island and Long Island, off Digby. The sea passage is narrow and rough. It boasts colossal Bay of Fundy tides that completely empty out, only to rush back thirteen hours later with seemingly renewed strength.
“There’s all tide rips around here, right straight around the island everywhere” is how the islanders put it. “Rough water with a tide behind it driving it up over shoal water. When
it goes down it makes the tide rip.” This small island has seen scores of schooners and small boats washed up in pieces on its shore, their cargoes spilled out for beachcombers to find.

John Slocombe was one who brought in his ship to the island port safely. There he met, courted and married the lighthouse keeper’s daughter, and together they sailed across to the mainland to live on his family farm. A son, Joshua, was born — the fifth of eleven children — on February 20, 1844, in Mount Hanley, Nova Scotia. Their homestead in this small Annapolis Valley community was exposed to the ocean winds blowing up their side of North Mountain. Later in life, Joshua would recall his beginnings:
“I was born in a cold spot, on coldest North Mountain.” The people of Mount Hanley still talk of snow often being on the ground “on the cold side” while the lee remains bare. On this harsh hillside the family tried to wrest a living from the land. Josh undoubtedly joined in as one of the farmhands helping with the chicken feeding, berry picking and small daily chores. From the Slocombe field he had a clear view down the steep hill to where the road was swallowed by the Bay of Fundy, whence he heard the pounding roar of the highest tides in the world.

Sarah Slocombe was caught up in the demanding life of farm wife and mother. After her eighth child she yearned to go home to Brier Island. One of her relatives described her as a “lovely, gentle soul” and added that her need to return to Westport stemmed from “too many children
coming too closely.” Her husband struggled stubbornly to make a living from farming, but the soil was poor and he could see commercial merit in the move to Brier Island. John Slocombe knew about tanning and boot making, so in 1852 he sold the family farm to set up a dockside shop on the island, specializing in fishermen’s boots. Fishing and freighting were booming industries, and Westport, Brier Island, was an important stop for boats bound for distant ports. When Josh was eight, he and his family sailed across the Bay of Fundy to chart an easier life on what he later nostalgically recalled as
“the island of plenty.”

Their new home was on the southern tip of the island in a section dubbed Irishtown. A swampy meadow separated this part of the village from the Loyalist settlement the Irishtowners called Snobtown. So the bridge over the swamp spanned a social as well as a geographical divide. It was while defending the dignity of Irishtowners against the Snobtowners that Joshua Slocum first learned to scrap. His son Victor wrote years later that Westport taught his father “howling and fighting” — skills that one day would come in handy.

From his house, young Joshua could look out over Sweetcake Cove into the village harbor. Westport was bustling with fishermen’s business. On sunny days Josh could probably have counted sixty dories at the moorings, with the bigger boats out fishing; on stormy days the waterfront would be full. The most common fishing schooners, the seakindly, double-ended “pinkies,” sailed
out of harbor to fish at the back of the island. Less prosperous fishermen went out in large dories that rode out with the tide and returned from the sou’west ledge with the tide whenever possible. Otherwise it was a long and tedious row home. There was a saying around Westport:
“You sail by the Grace of God and the seat of your pants.”

At age ten, Joshua’s daily routine suddenly changed when he was taken out of school to help his father. The boy now spent long days cooped up in the boot shop, an unpleasant prospect for even the most passionately landlubber soul. Making fishermen’s boots was not only a laborious task, but a smelly one. The cowhide first had to be softened by soaking. Every day, strips of leather were added to the vat to “marinate” until done. A terrible, sickening stench hung constantly in the air. On hot summer days the overpowering odor rivaled the other island stench, that of herring set out to rot in barrels for lobster bait. Josh’s job of pegging the boots his father had fashioned was boring and physically demanding. He sat in the shop ten hours a day, tapping and hammering square pegs around the sole of each boot form.

The boot shop was a converted fish shack built on a wharf. Its windows looked out on the harbor, which was both the boy’s salvation and his torment. From his window, Josh could watch his old school chums going out to fish in smacks on St. Mary’s Bay. Until Josh began working for his father, he had been one of the boys patching up beat-up boats and sailing or rowing in and out of
the bay on whatever might float. None of the island boys was a swimmer. “Can’t swim a stroke” would surely have been their matter-of-fact way of putting it. There was a fatalism in their reasoning: “No difference around here. Water’s so cold you wouldn’t last five minutes anyway.”

Aside from the dinghies and the makeshift boats that only boyhood dreaming could transform to clipper ships, Joshua had a taste of the real thing. Coming and going every day were tern schooners, the old name for a three-masted vessel, as well as full-rigged ships and lumber vessels bound for faraway foreign ports. Westport was their logical stopover. The Indies and European trading ships were part of the seasonal rhythm of the island. Every March the salt vessel arrived from Turks Island, and for a week islanders shoveled out its coarse glistening cargo into ox carts for delivery to each fish shop. But not too late in the spring, or the winding shore road would be “mud up to a fella’s ankles.” Early in the fall a vessel arrived with a cargo of coal, and boys and young men would be hired to dig into its filthy black hold, this time to load coal into horse carts to take door to door. Coal also fueled the steam-driven foghorn that guided ships safely on their way into the world.

Josh could only dream of being aboard. His fingers ached to do more than peg boots, and whenever the elder Slocombe left the shop, the younger took out his whittling knife to add more touches to his ship model. John Slocombe did not condone idle play and no doubt saw any
straying as restless hands doing Beelzebub’s work, so Joshua kept his “idling” a private matter. So secretive was he that he dared to work on the fine touches only in the cellar. And that was where John found his boy touching up rigging and masts instead of fitting square pegs. In his fury the bootmaker grabbed the twelve-year-old’s creation from his hands and smashed it to the ground. Dreams were dashed in that instant, but they would resurface later with unbending strength and intent, like the Fundy tides.

Perhaps this incident aroused Josh’s defiance and strengthened his urge to break free from the boot shop, his overzealous father and the confines of the island. He may have found some solace on the spectacular Green Head cliffs. Who knows what he dreamed? From his lofty vantage point he could slip effortlessly into the island’s hypnotic spell. Below was the roaring gully where the tide flooded in, and beyond that the low blast of the foghorn. Ravens and seagulls flew by at eye level, and beyond them was only the sea, the sea with its ships he longed to sail away on.

Brier Island had attuned him to life on the water. He grew up governed by the tide, always aware of the time of day by the sound of rushing waters and the smell of seaweed-covered rocks in “a dead low.” He knew how much time he had to scoot across the bay and get back before the currents swept his boat away. He knew the weather out to sea by the way the waves were breaking and by the hollow roar to be heard on calm days. The “rote” is what islanders called that roar, and it meant a
storm happening somewhere out there. He reckoned hurricanes by the heavy swell and knew how many days out at sea they were. Joshua read those signs like a second language. He’d grown up hearing the local weather omens: “A solely sou’westerly wind drives the big ocean swell up the bay.” “An easterly wind can blow a screaming gale, but when the wind is down, the sea is over.”

Joshua longed to be at sea in whatever kind of weather, but for the next few years the sea came to him. He would learn its mysteries from his island. In many ways his island
was
his boat — but a boat that had gone hard aground.

Learning the Ropes