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.
The young bride’s honeymoon was a passage to Montevideo with a crew of ten and a cargo of case oil. The nightmare began with Slocum’s decision to sail despite storm warnings. It’s hard to imagine how Hettie must have felt about her new life with the middle-aged captain. She was not accustomed to life on ships, and she most certainly did not have Virginia’s resilient spirit. The voyage to Uruguay was beset with frequent and terrible storms. A hurricane struck early out of New York and the Aquidneck started leaking. Victor, who was then fifteen, sailed as mate and remembered the heavy seas flooding the main deck and the pumps running continuously for thirty-six hours. Even Slocum, with his years of experience, reckoned it a bad storm, “for out on the Atlantic our bark could carry only a mere rag of a foresail, somewhat larger than a table-cloth … Mountains of seas swept clean over the bark in their mad race, filling her decks full to the top of the bulwarks, and shaking things generally.”
Once the cargo was unloaded, Hettie got a small taste of how rough life could be among sailors, as Slocum had to bar and lock his hold, which was full of wine salvaged from a Spanish ship up river. The Aquidneck’s next cargo was bales of alfalfa hay bound for Rio de Janeiro. The trip began with near shipwreck due to a pilot’s incompetence. In fact, the entire crew was suspect, having been delivered by a “vile crimp,” according to Slocum. Subsequently, the Aquidneck was refused entry into Rio because of a cholera outbreak in Rosario, where the hay had been loaded; the ship was sent instead to a nearby quarantine station at Ilha Grande. Slocum was unable to gain clearance to Rio harbor and was turned away at gunpoint when he questioned the ruling. The Brazilian authorities refused even to allow him to take on provisions. With the gun pointed at his ship, and with his family aboard, Slocum had no alternative but to sail back to Rosario with the hay. There they waited until Rio lifted its quarantine restrictions.
Excitement stirred when it was announced on April 9 that all Brazilian ports were again open. The Aquidneck prepared to set sail a second time with the cargo of hay. It isn’t clear whether Hettie was aware of the kind of ragtag seamen she was sailing with, but Slocum knew at least some of the seedy details of his new crew: “Crew were picked up here and there, out of brothels that had not been pulled down during the cholera, and out of the street or from the fields. Mixed among them were many that had been let out of the prisons all over the country, so that scourge should not be increased by over-crowded jails.” Slocum learned only later that four of his crew had been imprisoned for murder or highway robbery. Treachery was lurking, but before it surfaced the load of hay that had been sitting in the hold for nearly six months was discharged. Slocum provided his readers with a disturbing dockside image: “A change of rats also was made … fleas, too, skipped about in the hay as happy as larks, and nearly as big.” Only once in his writings does Slocum mention Hettie having any fun on this doomed wedding voyage. In Rio she bought a fashionable tall hat, which caused Slocum concern at night, when while half-asleep he fancied it “looming up like a dreadful stack of hay.”
Slocum’s next cargo was three pianos. The Aquidneck hit a severe storm, and Slocum wrote that because his bark was thrown on her beam-ends, the pianos arrived “fearfully out of tune.” Slocum shrugged it off, telling himself that the pianos, no doubt, were “suffering, I should say, from the effects of seasickness!” He learned later that the owners of the pianos had prayed fervently for the Aquidneck during the storm.
Slocum could recount the near calamities of this part of the voyage with levity, but what happened next could not be taken other than seriously, even by the drollest of Yankee wisecrackers. Hettie woke Joshua near midnight on July 23, 1887. She had heard footsteps above on the poop deck and whispers in the forward entry. She was so insistent that she had not been dreaming that Slocum ignored his first impulse to go up on deck by his usual route to investigate. “Arming myself, therefore, with a stout carbine repeater, with eight ball cartridges in the magazine, I stepped on deck abaft instead of forward, where evidently I had been expected.” He surprised the “gang of cut-throats” and warned them he was armed. The traitorous crew members defied his authority and his warning, and one approached to attack him with a knife. Slocum recalled, “I could not speak, or even breathe, but my carbine spoke for me, and the ruffian fell with the knife in his hand which had been raised against me!” Immediately another of the mutinous pack advanced on the captain, and he too was felled with a single shot. That ended the drama. Slocum later concluded, “A man will defend himself and his family to the last, for life is sweet, after all.”
One man, Thomas Maloney, lay dead; the second crewman, James Aiken, was severely wounded and was sent to hospital in Paranaguá, where he recovered. Slocum himself was arrested. While he was in detention, the Aquidneck was placed under the command of a Spanish master, with Victor remaining on board as mate. Slocum was entangled in the Brazilian legal system for the next month, but the trial itself was swift. He pleaded self-defense and was acquitted and released. He must have decided that Hettie had had enough high sea adventure, for he bade her to stay in Antonina, in Paranaguá Bay, with young Garfield, while he caught a steamer to Montevideo, where he recovered the Aquidneck.
Hettie may have been taking a breather, but Slocum would have little time for one. He gave his new crew a half-day’s liberty on shore at Paranaguá. When they set sail the next morning they seemed content, except for one sailor, who complained of chills. Slocum dismissed his complaint, but a couple of days later, “his chills turned to something which I knew less about. The next day, three more men went down with rigor in the spine, and at the base of the brain. I knew by this that small-pox was among us!” Slocum found it hard to believe that the distress signals they hoisted for immediate medical attention were not answered until thirty-six hours later. In Maldonado, Uruguayan officials confirmed the diagnosis, then ordered the bark to leave port without further aid. The sick and seriously short-handed crew sailed through a gale that stripped the sails, leaving them with bare poles. Then came torrential rains, lightning and the realization that they were in the clutches of a hurricane. Almost everything was washed away but the virus; only three of the crew were unaffected — Slocum, Victor and the ship’s carpenter. When the weather calmed, Slocum recalled, “wet, and lame and weary, we fell down in our wet clothes, to rest as we might — to sleep, or to listen to groans of our dying shipmates.” They received medical aid along the River Plate, but it came too late for many. Slocum offers a poignant picture of the afflicted sailors. When they buried the first to die, a man called José, Slocum reflected on the sailor’s honest smile, then cast him to the waves. “I listened to the solemn splash,” he wrote, “that told of one life ended.”
With José’s death, Slocum’s crew became increasingly demoralized. The sick begged Slocum to call for a priest if medical help was not to be given. The captain set the flags, but knew that no one ashore wanted to answer their call for fear of contracting the deadly contagion. He watched the padre, as he put it, “pacing the beach.” Their plea was ignored.
After burying another sailor, Slocum decided his “drifting pest house” had no choice but to move on for Montevideo. There the sick were taken from the ship and the Aquidneck was disinfected with demijohns of carbolic acid. This cleansing cost the captain over a thousand dollars. For Slocum one of the most anguishing moments occurred when he had to destroy the dead sailors’ property. The small gifts and trinkets they had purchased in Rio for their loved ones all met the fire or were ruined by carbolic acid. The captain later wrote that “what it cost me in health and mental anxiety cannot be estimated by such value.”
Once again, he shipped with a new crew and headed for Antonina and reunion with his wife and son. Sailing past Santa Catarina, Slocum was transported to a happier time three and a half years earlier. “We came to a stand, as if it were impossible to go further … a spell seemed over us. I recognized the place as one I knew very well; a very dear friend had stood by me on deck, looking at that island, some years before. It was the last land that my friend ever saw.” Gripped with sadness mixed with renewed strength and hope, Slocum sailed on. With Hettie and Garfield back on board, the Aquidneck began another business venture, this time carrying a load of Brazilian wood. The final disaster for the ill-fated Aquidneck came soon after it headed out into Paranaguá Bay. Slocum recalled the final moments: “Currents and wind caught her foul, near a dangerous sandbar, she mis-stayed and went on the strand. The anchor was let go to club her. It wouldn’t hold in the treacherous sands; so she dragged and stranded broadside on, where open to the sea, a strong swell came in that raked her fore and aft, for three days, the waves dashing over her groaning hull the while till at last her back was broke and — why not add ‘heart’ as well!” The Aquidneck was lost. Slocum sold the wrecked ship on the spot and paid off the crew. She was uninsured, and as Garfield later wrote, “Father lost all of his money and our beautiful home.” Slocum struggled with the paradox of this loss: “This was no time to weep, for the lives of all the crew were saved; neither was it a time to laugh, for our loss was great.”
To let go of his anger over the loss took years of letter writing to the President of the United States, the Department of State, the American consul at Rio and the consul at Pernambuco. Slocum cited the initial refusal of clearance at the quarantine harbor outside Rio as the decisive blow in his loss of fortune. In his view he had become enmeshed in the politics of a change of government in Brazil, and he blamed the competing factions for holding him stuck, which in turn caused him to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the devastating storm struck. He pursued his campaign to right this perceived injustice from October of 1887 to its futile conclusion on December 9, 1893. In January 1888, when the U.S. consulate in Rio offered to do its duty and bring the ship-wrecked family back to the United States, a proud and disgruntled Slocum decided they would find their own passage home.
Stranded in Brazil, Slocum set his mind to a plan to build a boat to sail his family home. It didn’t have to be a beauty — seaworthiness was all he wanted. He knew it would be primitive at best, made up of salvaged parts of the wrecked Aquidneck plus whatever he could afford or alter or make do with. He worked out a design and tackled it with optimism, deciding that “she should sail well, at least before free winds. We counted on favorable winds.” His boat was certainly an original — a strange blend of Cape Ann dory, Japanese sampan, Chinese junk and native canoe designs. Slocum himself referred to the vessel as a canoe.
From the Aquidneck Slocum salvaged “a megre kit” of basic tools, his compass and charts, and his chronometer. He was able to use some of Aquidneck’s hardware, and he was ingenious at adapting the rest. For example, he pounded charcoal into a fine powder that, mixed with water, served for chalk. He made boat clamps from guava trees, and melted down ship’s metal for fastenings and cast some of it into nails. He punched holes through the local copper coins, cut them into diamond shapes, and used them as burrs for the nails. This improvisation, together with a rough-and-ready approach to hewing local trees for boat timber, took place during an epidemic of jungle fever, which made its rounds among the Slocums and the workers. They were undaunted, and Slocum reflected on the spirit of the day: “But all that, and all other obstacles vanished at last, or became less, before a new energy which grew apace with the boat, and the building of the craft went rapidly forward.” Victor served as carpenter and ropemaker. Even Hettie got into the spirit of the adventure and sewed the sails. She had been a dressmaker, and Slocum was pleased with the finished product: “Madam had made the sails — and very good sails they were, too!” When finished, the canoe was thirty-five feet in length. Rigged with full-battened sails, which Slocum considered “the most convenient boat rig in the world,” she took on the appearance of a Chinese junk. She was christened Liberdade, as she was launched on the day that Brazilian slaves were given their freedom. All that remained now was the voyage home.
At the outset of the voyage back to the United States, the captain, who had suffered such grueling misfortunes, felt invigorated: “The old boating trick came back fresh to me … the love of the thing itself gaining on me as the little ship stood out: and my crew with one voice said: ‘Go on.’” They hit a storm immediately, and Hettie’s new sails were completely shredded. They were towed into Rio by a steamer, which Hettie had boarded by this time. Garfield remembered how his father and Victor stayed on the disabled Liberdade and managed to work with the steamer. “Father had a lot of nerve, strength, and will power. He steered all day and all night. Victor sat in the fore-peak under a tarpaulin, an ax in his lap to cut the hawser in case the Liberdade turned over. Father had a lanyard tied to Victor’s wrist. Father would pull on it and Victor responded with a pull.” After they set out again with new sails, there were several further mishaps. On a late July day, just out of Rio, a whale got a little too friendly with the craft and interrupted everyone’s supper with its churning up of the waters beneath and around the Liberdade. There were several close calls coming up the coast of South America, but they continued north with a growing appreciation for and confidence in “the thin cedar planks between the crew and eternity.” Upon arriving back in the United States, he recalled the passage home as “the most exciting boat-ride” of his life, to that point at least.
The voyage of the Liberdade covered 5,500 miles and took fifty-five days. It had taken them up the coast of South America, through the Caribbean, past the Carolinas, up to Norfolk and then to Washington. When the family arrived on December 27, 1888, Hettie must have wanted to kiss the ground. Asked if she planned to go on another voyage, she quickly answered, “Oh, I hope not. I haven’t been home in over three years, and this was my wedding voyage.” Perhaps Hettie’s reluctance to set sail again with Joshua was due to more than the discomforts and hardships of her voyage. She may have realized by then that her husband’s heart was too often with his “dear friend” Virginia. As the Liberdade came to the equator he said a poignant goodbye. Of his gaze heavenward to the stars, he wrote that he had “left those of the south at last, with the Southern Cross — most beautiful in all the heavens — to watch over a friend.” Virginia haunted him on at least one other occasion on that voyage north. He wrote of a specter that appeared to him one night while on watch. It was of the vessel she had died on: “A phantom of the stately Aquidneck appeared one night, sweeping by with crowning skysails set, that fairly brushed the stars.”
As Slocum made this final leg of the trip to bring his family back home, he must have felt mixed emotions. There would have been, of course, a sense of triumph and personal satisfaction in pulling off such an adventure, but he must also have felt a certain emptiness. He was closing the book on his youth and his professional career. Adjusting to life on new terms was to be his next challenge.