Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072) (7 page)

The spewing ash was visible around the world in the form of intensely brilliant red sunsets. Their seeming glory were an ironic portent for the captain and his beloved Virginia. Although reckoned to be a sailor’s delight, those beautiful sunsets were really an illusion, an omen of an uncertain dawn.

Ebb and Flow

Off the Cape of Good Hope, fierce seas twisted the
Northern Light
’s rudderhead completely off and she started leaking through the seams in the topsides. As water seeped into the lower hold, the cargo of sugar melted. Pumping the bilge was not feasible: it would have been like pumping out corn syrup. In an effort to lower the ship’s center of gravity and prevent her from keeling over, Slocum jettisoned bales of hemp from the middle deck. Slowly, in heavy seas, the vessel righted. Eventually the
Northern Light
made it safely to a South African port, where she spent two months being overhauled.

Once again murderous trouble was brewing for Captain
Slocum. Before the
Northern Light
sailed, one of the crew took ill and the captain had to find a replacement — not an easy task in a foreign port. The new second mate was Henry A. Slater, an ex-convict who, it is believed, signed on after arranging with other crew members to murder Slocum and take over the
Northern Light
. Whatever the truth in this, Slater tried to incite a mutiny shortly after the vessel left port. Slocum could afford no further setbacks. Taking the law into his own hands, he imprisoned Slater. The
Northern Light
sailed for another fifty-three days to New York with the ship’s prisoner in irons. Later, in a newspaper article, Slocum described his approach to matters of discipline at sea. He referred to himself as
“not a martinet, but I have ideas of how to run a ship. The old shipmasters treated their crews like intelligent beings, giving them plenty of leeway, but holding them with a strong hand in an emergency. That’s my style.” Years later, a relative of Slocum’s, Grace Murray Brown, recalled a family story she had heard regarding Slocum’s discipline: “My brother met an old seaman in some Chinese port who had sailed under the captain. He said Captain Slocum was considered a hard man but no one ever felt unsafe under his command.”

Slocum may not have considered himself a martinet, but the Slater affair was not about to blow over. As soon as his ship docked in New York harbor, Slocum was charged with false and cruel imprisonment, convicted on Slater’s evidence and fined five hundred dollars. Slater
was later to make apologies to Slocum. This sudden change of heart came about on January 12, 1884, in the form of a confession of sorts to B.S. Osborn, editor of the
Nautical Gazette
. Slater explained that he had learned later of some of the crew’s manipulations in the whole ordeal:
“I now see that both Captain Slocum and myself have been made the dupes of the very men who ought to have protected us, and the whole affair is made to get money out of Captain Slocum, to be distributed among them.” His story made the Boston
Herald
, which reported, “‘Slater said he came voluntarily,’ said Mr. Osborn. ‘He said he had put Slocum in a bad hole, and was in an equally bad hole himself. He said he did not know what he had been doing. He had signed lots of papers, but did not know what they were.’”

The confession did little to alter Slocum’s image or end his plight. While he was busy defending himself in lawsuits, another captain was employed to take charge of the
Northern Light
. Much more than Slocum’s reputation had been affected; the episode at sea had cost him financially. Early in 1884, Slocum was forced to give up his part ownership in the beloved
Northern Light
. However, selling his shares did little to alleviate his money problems. The ship needed a complete overhaul, and in the 1880s, doing such work on a sail-driven ship was no longer considered economically practical. As sail gave way to steam, Slocum’s career as a sailing master was fading. He would never again be master of a vessel to compare with
“the magnificent ship.” This point must have hit home when he got wind of the
Northern Light
’s fate: she had been reduced in size and put to work as a coal barge. Slocum reflected on the pitiful spectacle of his “best command” as she was
“ignominiously towed by the nose from port to port.” Her fate foreshadowed his own — Slocum’s glory days had ended, and his fortunes had entered a downward spiral.

Slocum’s pride in and love of sailing may have blinded him to his own best interests. Logically, he should have accepted the death of sail, adapted to the new technology of steam, and got on with his life. But the pathetic fate of the
Northern Light
did nothing to shatter his illusions. It would take a more dramatic event to make him recognize that his career as a sailing captain was over, and such an event was not long in coming. Slocum bought his final chance as a sailing master when he handed over the last of the gold pieces he had made from the
Pato
contract to purchase the
Aquidneck
, a bark a fraction of the size of the
Northern Light
. Built in Mystic, Connecticut, in 1865, the
Aquidneck
was only 138 feet long compared with the
Northern Light
’s 220 feet, and it had only one deck, to the previous ship’s three. But Slocum was proud, and boasted that the fast and efficient little bark was “the nearest in perfection to beauty.” While the
Aquidneck
was being made seaworthy, Virginia and the children stayed ashore with Slocum’s sister in the Boston area. Her daughter, Jessie, would later reflect how important
that break was for her mother: the perils of
Northern Light
’s tumultuous eighteen-month circumnavigation had exhausted her. Both Slocum biographer Walter Teller and Slocum’s son Victor concluded that the
“constant alarms” of the sea had undermined her health. Jessie herself wrote, “Her heart was not strong.” Virginia’s in-laws were impressed by the captain’s wife, proclaiming her to be a “handsome woman.” They noticed how in love Virginia and Joshua were and remarked that they “could be completely oblivious of everyone and everything if they could be together.” This was after thirteen years of marriage, and after they had spent every day together in small quarters and under rough conditions.

Although Virginia had rested and relaxed, her health would never again be what it had been before babies, mutinies, strandings and court cases took their toll. Nevertheless, later that spring she sailed with her family aboard the repaired
Aquidneck
. Garfield, only three at the time, would remember the
Aquidneck
vividly and, years later, in a letter to Slocum biographer Walter Teller, he wrote down his impressions: “the stateroom doors painted light blue and gold … a skylight with colored glass, a canary that sang all day — a beautiful singer. Also a square grand piano bolted to the deck.” The domestic arrangements of this floating home easily transcended the mundane. “The deck house was amidships: A fully equipped carpenter shop, galley, staterooms for the bosun, cook and carpenter. On the roof were pens for sheep, pigs
and fowl.” Victor also remembered the
Aquidneck
, and seems to have inherited his father’s knack for embellishment when he proclaimed the bark to be
“as close to a yacht as a merchantman could be.”

The passage south to Pernambuco, on Brazil’s eastern tip, was clear sailing. The young family even stopped to picnic in a coconut grove. But during the sail south along the coast for Buenos Aires, life aboard ship fell apart for the Slocums. Viriginia became ill, stopped all domestic work, and took to her bed. Her last sight of land was Santa Catarina Island. Garfield later remembered that his once vibrant mother had no energy or desire to take up her embroidery or her tapestry: “She left her needle where she stopped.” In Buenos Aires, Slocum hoped to pick up a cargo bound for Australia. Virginia was weak, and she wished to go home to Sydney. Before he left for shore, he and his wife agreed on a signal that would call him back to the ship if the need arose. Ben Aymar later recalled that his mother got up for the first time in weeks and began to salt butter. Her conversation was filled with thoughts of going home. But it was not a call to her earthly home that had given Virginia her last few hours of renewed strength. She became increasingly weak and asked her twelve-year-old son to put up the signal. She knew Joshua would hurry back to the boat at the appearance of the blue-and-white letter “J” as soon as Ben Aymar hoisted it. Slocum returned by noon; Virginia was dead by eight o’clock that evening. It was July 25, 1884,
less than a month before her thirty-fifth birthday. The cause of her death was not recorded, but family members speculated. While Virginia’s brother, George Walker, felt that her early death was related to childbirth or possibly miscarriage, Ben Aymar remembered that
“she often fainted when trouble disturbed her” and agreed with his sister that her death was a result of heart problems. Virginia Albertina Walker Slocum was buried in the English cemetery in Buenos Aires. Slocum recorded the details of her short life and death in Virginia’s family Bible, adding the line, “Thy will be done not ours!”

Slocum was plunged into a state of utter grief. For fourteen years Virginia had been his guiding strength. He trusted her and had come to rely on her perceptive wisdom. Ben Aymar remembered the quiet power his mother’s presence brought to family life: “Mother’s eyes were a brilliant golden color — I have seen such eyes on our Golden Eagles — she knew how to use them, too, but very calmly.” He later reflected that his mother “on many occasions had proved herself to be very psychic,” and that Slocum “learned to understand her powers of intuition and … relied on them fully until she passed on.” The young son and the other children watched helplessly as their father’s “ill fortunes gathered rapidly from the time of her death.”

The first of Slocum’s “ill fortunes” came just a few days later when he ran his ship aground on a sandbar. He paid to clear the
Aquidneck
and quickly returned to
Boston with his little family, which was soon to split up. Ben Aymar vowed never to go to sea again — a decision perhaps fueled by grief and by the allure of a stable home life on land with his aunts, Joshua’s sisters, who had known and liked his mother. He later recalled that his father wept at his young son’s conviction. The youngest three Slocums remained with their aunts, Etta and Alice, in Massachusetts, while Victor stayed with his father on the
Aquidneck
. Slocum was stunned by his losses, and found that fending for himself without his wife’s wisdom was a desperate struggle. He busied himself with fast passages between Baltimore and Pernambuco. On one voyage he was shipping a cargo of pianos and cordwood when the
Aquidneck
suddenly began pitching, which caused the cordwood to start rolling around and bowling into the pianos, causing their strings to snap. The symbolism is inescapable: Slocum, a man rocked by grief and ready to snap, was captaining a ship that was rocking and audibly snapping.

Garfield compared his grieving father to “a ship with a broken rudder.” A ship without a rudder is at the mercy of the waves. If a big sea hits broadside, the ship broaches. A ship that cannot be steered can easily capsize or drift aimlessly. The only way to avoid disaster is to jury-rig some sort of rudder, and that is what Slocum did in the first year after Virginia’s death, in his growing loneliness and melancholy.

In 1885, while he was visiting Ben Aymar, Jessie and
Garfield in Massachusetts, he met his twenty-four-year-old first cousin, Hettie from Nova Scotia. Henrietta Miller Elliott was her real name, and she was from Annapolis County, where Slocum had spent the first eight years of his life. The forty-two-year-old Slocum was attentive to his comely cousin and, as another Slocum relative observed,
“Hettie was no doubt bedazzled by his attentions when he was considered successful.” Joshua married Hettie on February 22, 1886, in Boston. Six days later the newlyweds began their married life together on the
Aquidneck
.