5. The First Solo Circumnavigator: Joshua Slocum
Joshua Slocum was not just another green Ishmael pacing the docks to escape from urban life. The stage had been set in the 1890s for this sort of first, to sail alone around the world, but it is hard to imagine many other people better up for the role, especially with the scant material and financial resources Slocum had at hand. His career of over three decades leading up to his single-handed circumnavigation seems impossibly crammed with saltwater adventure, personal successes and failures at sea, and the building, commanding, and navigating of ships, crews, and boats. All of this equipped Slocum with the skills and perhaps the emotional state needed not only to aspire to the endeavor, but to see it through and then bring his story home.
Slocum was born in 1844 on a farm in Nova Scotia, the fifth of eleven children. He once told an interviewer that when he was a boy he built a raft of fence rails and rigged a sail to drift across his mill pond. When the family’s efforts on the farm failed, they moved into a town, to Westport on tiny Brier Island at the turbid mouth of the Bay of Fundy. Here his father, a stern Bible-thumper, ran a shop beside the harbor to make leather fishermen’s boots, a trade in which Joshua was put to work at age ten. In the shop’s basement when he was twelve, as Slocum told it later, he had built a model ship that his father discovered and smashed to the ground in front of his son, believing this kind of crafting to be a blasphemous waste of time. At fourteen Slocum got a job as a cook on a fishing schooner, a position at which he said he failed miserably. Around the age of sixteen, after his mother died, he ran off to find work in Yarmouth and then Massachusetts, where he likely worked at a shoe factory. A couple of years later he signed aboard a lumber ship bound for Ireland. He would not return to Brier Island or anywhere in Nova Scotia until thirty-five years later on his way outbound for the solo circumnavigation.
On one passage during his years working in the Atlantic, he survived a fall from aloft, hitting a lower yard on the way down and landing on deck with only minor injuries but a lifelong scar over his left eye. Soon he sailed to Asia, where he was part of a poorly treated crew and was eventually disabled with a fever that forced him ashore in Jakarta. As he recovered, young Slocum was taken under the wing of a captain who helped him learn navigation, then recommended him to be second mate for a voyage from San Francisco to Liverpool. That completed, Slocum returned to the Pacific Coast and after some time fishing, hunting sea otters, and building boats for gill-netting salmon at the mouth of the Columbia River, at about twenty-five years old he earned his first command, a schooner along the coast of California.
After the coasting gig, he was given his first ocean-crossing command. On his first major stop in Sydney, Australia, he met a young American expat named Virginia Walker, who was part Native American from the Leni-Lenape tribe. They married after only a couple of weeks of courting. She sailed back to San Francisco in the aft cabin. By the accounts that remain, their marriage seems to have been a loving match. They never had a permanent home on shore, only at sea or in short-term lodging by the water or with Slocum’s extended family. Virginia raised four children at sea and lost in infancy three more: a baby daughter and a set of twins. She taught the children school lessons on the ship, played piano, assisted with navigation, and joined her husband through years of adventures and often excruciating circumstances, including soon after they were married when Slocum commanded a ship that fished for salmon off the coast of Alaska but ran aground in the newly American territory. Slocum led the construction of a smaller boat to get the fish to port while Virginia escaped aboard a US Coast Guard cutter to meet up with him later. At one point years afterwards in the Philippines, Virginia and Joshua with their three young kids lived in a raised nipa hut beside the rainforest where Slocum had been hired to build a coastal steamboat out of local timber. At one point while Slocum was away in Manila, a rival group of Chinese men tried to burn down the hut and the boat, but Virginia and the family were protected by the local Tagalog workers.
Throughout his career Slocum sailed mostly on what were known as tramp freighters, merchant ships that focused on bulk cargoes and moved around the world following supply and demand. Over the course of his professional years, approximately five full times around the world, Slocum carried cargoes such as lumber, sugar, salt, grain, cans of food, and, though he commanded sailing ships exclusively, his holds were often transporting cargoes of coal or containers of mineral and petroleum oils.
Slocum’s professional and filial peak came in 1882 with his command and part-ownership of an enormous ship named the Northern Light. In New York City, as workers were putting the finishing touches on the Brooklyn Bridge, Slocum paid to have his father come to visit and be reconciled with him, to see his success. The New York Tribune wrote a feature on the captain and his family, describing their palatial cabin, replete with a piano, a large library, oil paintings on the bulkheads, and sweetly mannered children cleaning and sketching.
By this point in American history, if you weren’t in the aft cabin as captain, jobs aboard ships in the merchant marine were unappealing. It had become harder and harder for owners to find willing and capable crew. The Northern Light itself was not in the prime of life either. On the way outbound from New York City the ship had rudder problems, requiring a stop in New London, Connecticut, where at anchor a mutiny broke out. Virginia stood behind Slocum with a revolver to protect him. With a knife one mutineer killed the first mate. Once the mutineer was bound for prison, Slocum found a new chief officer and supervised repairs to the rudder. They carried on with their voyage to Asia and around the world. Off South Africa and homeward bound they had rudder problems again. The ship lost steerage in rough seas, which resulted in waves over the decks and seawater leaking into the holds to the point that the crew had to heave some of the cargo overboard to stabilize the vessel. Slocum managed to bring the Northern Light to port for repairs, where he found a new second mate who proved inept and mutinous. Slocum clapped the man in irons, imprisoning him for over fifty days. Once back in New York City, vastly different reports about what had actually happened made the newspapers and into the courtroom, including one claim that the man was kept in an unbearably hot pen the entire time, having to sleep beside his own feces. Slocum was fined. He sold his part ownership of the Northern Light.
After some time staying with his family and licking their wounds, the Slocums bought a smaller ship, the Aquidneck. On the way to trade in Australia, in part to visit with her family, Virginia became ill, perhaps of heart failure. Still in her mid-thirties, she died in Slocum’s arms at anchor off Buenos Aires. Their four children were aboard, aged three to twelve.
A few days after burying her, Slocum accidentally ran his ship aground on the way out of port. He wrote a pained letter to his mother-in-law explaining what had happened. Their youngest son Garfield said later that he understood his father was now like “a ship with a broken rudder.”
A year and a half later, Slocum married a much younger cousin of his from Nova Scotia named Henrietta “Hettie” Elliott. The two middle children stayed home with other family members while Slocum, Hettie, Garfield, and the oldest son Victor, serving as first mate, set sail on the Aquidneck bound back to South America to deliver cargo. After a storm in New England waters with the ship leaking, they made it to South America where Slocum quelled yet another mutiny, this time injuring one man and shooting another dead. Slocum was jailed for a month, but was then pardoned in local courts. After further months of diplomatic issues, quarantines, changes of cargo, and crew illness and death from cholera and smallpox, Slocum with a short-handed crew and bad weather was unable to keep the Aquidneck from running aground off the coast of southern Brazil. As the Aquidneck broke up, shipwrecked and uninsured with a cargo of lumber, he could sell his ship only for salvage.
Slocum was now practically bankrupt. This had been Hettie’s first voyage at sea, her “honeymoon.” Yet instead of taking a loan to book a passage back to Boston, Slocum crafted himself a funky thirty-five-foot wooden boat with sails rigged like a Chinese sampan. They sailed this vessel, the Liberdade, not without incident but with some fame, all the way back to New England.
Once home, the captain, despite his experience and skills, was no longer trusted with a ship to command after so many groundings and crew troubles. There were also not many American vessels under sail by the late 1800s. Nearly all merchant ships by that point had shifted to iron hulls and had installed steam engines. Most had abandoned masts and canvas altogether. Entire populations of wood-and-canvas sailors, if they did not decide to work ashore, were reduced to helping to shovel coal below decks, steering and handling cargo up above, and then getting ready to put the fenders over the side when the ship belched smoke and chugged up to the dock. It was now the engineers who possessed the essential knowledge that made the ships run. Joseph Conrad, who had been a career mariner himself, lamented this transition in his novella Typhoon (1902)—a story in which the ship’s survival in a monster storm is not in the hands of Captain MacWhirr (note the name), who has lost the imagination to read the weather signs of the open ocean, but instead the crew is dependent on Solomon Rout, a slipper-shod engineer who scuffles down below in the hold managing the gauges and coal shovelers. In the same year another mariner-turned-author named John Masefield published nostalgic verse to the days of sail, most famously his poem “Sea-Fever” (1902), which remains popular today: “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.”
In other words, the nostalgia and the specific longing for sailing ships and quiet wind-driven passages out at sea began at the turn of the twentieth century, even before all of the sailing merchant ships were retired.
In Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum regularly contrasts the beauty of the sailing ship to the smoky, linear steamship. “There are no poetry-enshrined freighters on the sea now,” Slocum wrote. Although he had once directed the building of a steamship himself (out of wood) and relied on steamships regularly as a merchant trader, especially going in and out of harbors, and even a few times conceding a short tow during his single-handed circumnavigation, Slocum wanted no part of commanding these vessels or learning to build with iron or steel.
So after returning from South America on the little Liberdade, Slocum, in his late forties, had now lost the love of his life, his ship, and his career. Having been a captain for so long, he surely did not like being ordered around in a boat yard. He didn’t really want these new jobs ashore, anyway. He was apparently offered the command of a White Star Line steam-packet ship at one point, but he told his youngest son Garfield, “I would have to get used to steamships and I do not like steamships.” In Sailing Alone Around the World Slocum explained his why-go in a lighter tone that surely belied his personal and professional desperation before setting off for his circumnavigation: “And so when times for [sailing] freighters got bad, as at last they did, and I tried to quit the sea, what was there for an old sailor to do? I was born in the breezes, and I had studied the sea as perhaps few men have studied it, neglecting all else.”
Slocum continued trying to network for a job that he liked until the winter of 1891, when he caught up with a friend, a retired captain named Eben Pierce, a man who had made his fortune by manufacturing an explosive lance and gun for killing whales. Slocum wrote that Pierce said: “Come to Fairhaven and I’ll give you a ship. But she wants some repairs.”
In Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum probably played up the perfidy of Captain Pierce offering a ship, but Spray was certainly a rotten hulk when he found it. Since he had nothing else on the horizon, Slocum stayed at Pierce’s house and rebuilt the old boat entirely on his own. By the summer of 1891, when William Andrews and Si Lawlor staged their solo trans-Atlantic race, Slocum had moved down to Fairhaven to work on Spray. But maybe he was back in Boston in the crowd the day they left, or he read about it in the newspaper, or he heard it from old salts deriding the stunt in the shipyard? Just maybe it started him thinking? Meanwhile, Hettie and the kids visited him in Fairhaven occasionally, and once Slocum had finished the restoration, with nearly every timber replaced and modified to his liking, he tried doing some charters for tourists and even did some fishing aboard Spray. And at some point the idea to sail alone around the world came to dominate his mind.
Joshua Slocum was an indefatigable trader, an entrepreneur in pursuit of a dollar. He had learned, as one biographer Geoffrey Wolff assessed, to make lemonade whenever and wherever he found lemons. On the back half of his circumnavigation, for example, he emptied about three tons of cement ballast from his hold to load up with some thirty gigantic tridacna clam shells to sell as curios back in New England. At first his writing tracked within this entrepreneurial modus operandi. Although he’d had only a few years of formal education, Slocum had always been a devoted reader and was eager to write his own sea stories. He wrote and self-published Voyage of the “Liberdade” in 1890, his story of their sail home from Brazil in his home-made boat. This did not sell well, but he received at least one major positive review. He self-published a pamphlet titled Voyage of the “Destroyer” in 1894, which was his account of a curious military delivery job he had after rebuilding the Spray. Neither narrative made him much money, but they gave him some experience in writing and provided him with contacts and something to shop around as he appealed to newspapers to pay for the letters he would send home during his world voyage. Slocum hoped the fame of being the first to sail single-handed around the world was a way to make some money and fund the adventure.
In other words, Slocum’s why-go was not primarily to publish a book, but writing down his yarns to help support the expedition was part of his plan from the start. He had an advance agreement with the Boston Globe and a couple of other newspapers. Certainly, too, an element of Slocum’s why-go involved his attempt to escape domestic responsibilities, his financial and professional failures, and as a way to cope with the loss of Virginia and the degradation of his career and self-worth. He told the newspapers that he had asked Hettie and the kids if they wanted to go, but it’s fair to assume this was a half-mumbled invitation. Hettie was clear, anyway, even with journalists, that she wasn’t interested in life at sea after the Liberdade odyssey. Of the kids, Garfield was fourteen at that point and the other three were twenty or older and living their own lives. Slocum wished, needed to get back out to sea, and what better way to do so than by yourself, with no one else to be concerned about? In Sailing Alone Around the World he regularly quipped about the satisfaction of his own company, “There was never a ship’s crew so well agreed.” Aboard Spray at last, Slocum enjoyed a voyage free from mutiny, domestic life, and living under the roof of another family member. At sea he could avoid any interpersonal conflict at all.
Slocum likely did not see his voyage in terms of a Byronic escape from urbanization or from Western civilization. He certainly wanted out of steamship travel and liked the simplicity of his way of life, but he stuck almost entirely to English-speaking ports. In Sailing Alone Around the World he wrote about the Pacific Islanders of Samoa rejecting Western money-chasing materialism, but then, even in his text, Slocum quickly forgot this lesson by the next port of call. Capitalism was too ingrained in his core. In practice, he sought no island paradises away from Western civilization. What Slocum craved foremost was the open sea and time with his boat—and a bit of money, respect for his seamanship, and maybe even some appreciation for his storytelling.
Captain Slocum left Boston alone aboard Spray on 24 April 1895. He stopped first in the fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, then visited for about a month with family in his home town in Nova Scotia before he set off to cross his first ocean. He stopped at the Azores and “discovered Spain” on the way to Gibraltar, where Slocum was toasted by the Royal Navy and the English yachtsmen at the port. His dispatches to American newspapers quickly fizzled out because he could not meet predictable deadlines or write copy engaging enough in the short term. Before continuing, the officials in Gibraltar convinced him that pirates were too dangerous on the eastbound route by way of the Suez Canal, so he changed his plan and aimed to sail around the world westbound, sailing toward Brazil and south to the Strait of Magellan, the craggy storm-ravaged channel above Cape Horn, in order to cross into the South Pacific. The Panama Canal still seemed a failed project at that point.
Joshua Slocum aboard Spray early in the first recorded solo circumnavigation, docked in a port on the east coast of South America (1895).
As Slocum approached the Strait of Magellan from the Atlantic, a rogue wave engulfed him from astern. The single wave was so steep and tall that he had to leap into the rigging to escape being swept overboard. Spray was a wide thirty-seven-foot wooden sloop, originally designed for tonging oysters in shallow water, but it was a reliable fishing boat design that he had beefed up further. In the hands of an expert like Slocum, the boat proved an ideal cruising boat, even in heavy open-ocean seas or when overtopped by a freak wave.
Once in the relative safety of the Strait in the austral summer of 1896, the westerly work was a different kind of sailing. He anchored nearly every night. To keep his boat secure in case of williwaws, the downdraft winds that can reach hurricane force and could blow Spray to shipwreck on the rocks, the captain surely needed his heaviest anchor, which weighed about 180 pounds. Each morning, with no one else to mind the helm, Slocum, in his early fifties, cranked a hand windlass to get the anchor off the bottom. Then with block and tackle he hauled the anchor in place on the rail so that he could lash the stock firmly enough to sail safely again before the next blow. To set sail, though he knew how to use his thin 5' 9" frame, he had to raise the heavy canvas mainsail and the gaff, a stout wooden spar, with two different halyards: first heave down on one, or both at the same time, make one fast, then haul down on the other to finish it up. On his way through the Strait, Slocum regularly checked his depth with some rope and a sounding lead. He had good charts, but no engine and no electricity aboard Spray. When possible, he went ashore with a hatchet to gather wood for his stove. After weaving through the desolate fjords for nearly a month, Slocum succeeded in passing through into the Pacific Ocean. Alone under dark clouds, he tacked out of the frigid passage at Cabo Pilar.
Any feelings of pride and relief were promptly blasted. A severe northwesterly gale charged down so aggressively that Slocum had to spin the wheel to run south ahead of the wind and seas. His mainsail in tatters, he precariously surfed under bare poles for four days down toward Cape Horn itself, until, intensely sleep-deprived and confused as to where he was exactly, he was able—in the dark—to sail back into a channel, threading through a maze of white-water breakers known as the Milky Way, scudding past a terrifying rockpile named Fury Island. In his telling of this in Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum roughly quotes “the great naturalist” Charles Darwin, who when visiting the region in the 1830s aboard HMS Beagle, wrote: “Any landsman seeing the Milky Way would have nightmare [sic] for a week.” Once through, at daybreak, Slocum now had a bitter sail back into the Strait of Magellan, about halfway in, meaning he was forced to loop around to get west again from where he had been weeks ago. Anchorage after anchorage, he cranked and hauled and sounded his way back through the Strait once more, often in danger from night-time raids by small local bands of “Fuegians,” which included people perhaps of the Yaghan or Alacaluf tribes. The groups that Slocum described were led by a foreign outlaw nicknamed Black Pedro. When finally back at the western mouth, Slocum wrote that it took him seven attempts to stick his boat’s nose out and weather this exit and Cabo Pilar again, allowing him to enter, this time for good, into the proper South Pacific. That is, not before he paused to load some cargo: Slocum could not resist salvaging a shipwreck, spending the better part of a day towing and hauling aboard barrels of tallow and wine, thinking—correctly as it turned out—that he would be able to make some money several months later, even if the new cargo weighed down his boat.
Slocum had needed two brutal months to pass through the Strait of Magellan. At last he shouted goodbye to the penguins, gulls, and seals, praised his Spray, and set all sail under a clear sky. One final wave broke over the stern, which seemed to bookend the rogue wave in the Atlantic and wash clean that experience of the passage.
“Then was the time to uncover my head, for I sailed alone with God,” Slocum wrote. “The vast ocean was again around me, and the horizon was unbroken by land.”
The captain now sailed northwesterly to the Juan Fernández Islands, anchoring in Robinson Crusoe Bay, where he “of course made a pilgrimage to [Alexander Selkirk’s] old lookout place.” Slocum then coasted into the ocean world of the trade winds. Here he found his true stride, his satisfaction with life at sea and a personal glory. Slocum occasionally wrote of the marine life and the encounters he had with birds, fish, and whales, but he saw his connections with the ocean more often and more truly in the relationship between his wooden boat and himself and in his ability to navigate celestially in spite of and often in direct opposition to the emerging technologies and materials of his time. Earlier in the voyage when still in the Atlantic, Slocum proudly personified his boat within the wind and seas, one of his ecstasy-so-pure sailing moments: “Her mast now bent under a strong, steady pressure, and her bellying sail swept the sea as she rolled scuppers under, curtseying to the waves. These rolling waves thrilled me as they tossed my ship, passing quickly under her keel. This was grand sailing.”
In the South Pacific trade winds Slocum found affirmation in this voyage alone, with a brand of love for the sea that Ann Davison would come to understand a half-century later: an ocean adoration that was about humble mastery of seamanship and navigation. In other words, Slocum’s what-they-saw was woven primarily into his brotherhood with his boat navigating blue water. He wrote of his westbound passage in the South Pacific trades this way:
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 . . . it was my ship on her course, sailing as no other ship had ever sailed before in the world.
Slocum wrote here of a oneness with the universe, navigating with only the stars and sun, his sextant, and with the method of dead reckoning by feel, compass, and taffrail log. One of his running jokes in Sailing Alone Around the World is his reference to his rickety tin clock, which he said he purchased before leaving instead of fixing his professional chronometer. He could not afford to fix the chronometer, even though it was a piece of technology, like GPS today, that in his era was considered essential for navigation by nearly all Western deep-water sailors. With nineteenth-century tools and a knowledge of the lunar-distance method to calculate longitude regardless of accurate time, Slocum and Spray sailed across the surface of the Pacific with a type of reckoning and celestial navigation that, although Slocum did not mention this if he knew anything at all about it, tilted closer to that of the Pacific Islanders, especially when added to his knowledge of seabirds.
Slocum sailed all the way across the South Pacific to Samoa, after a passage of over seventy-two days. In Samoa he paid a visit to the widow of Robert Louis Stevenson, one of his literary heroes.
Slocum’s love of life at sea, his mastery of navigation, was intertwined with his personal faith, which he held through a philosophy like that of an earlier pre-Darwinian era, notably the theories of Bishop Paley’s clockwork universe designed by the “Great Architect.” Of the trade winds of the South Pacific, Slocum wrote: “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.”
Slocum sailed into Sydney harbor, then down to Tasmania, and back up past the Great Barrier Reef, west through the Torres Strait and across the Timor Sea. After an exceptionally long open-water passage, he arrived at the Cocos Keeling Islands (where he was greeted by fairy terns as he approached). Here Slocum admitted to being moved to tears in his ability to find this tiny atoll in the vast Indian Ocean. In this way his time at sea by himself was deeply spiritual. After he returned to the United States, he wrote to a clergyman cousin: “Old Sailors may have odd ways of showing their religious feeling but there are no infidels at sea.”
This is not to suggest that Slocum observed the Sabbath aboard Spray or delivered religious tracts for the missionaries in the South Pacific like “Rob Roy” MacGregor in France. And though he sailed with a library and read constantly while at sea, there is no indication he sailed with a Bible. It’s just that Slocum, sailing by himself for so many days, felt connected and small before a deep-sea natural environment that he saw as the creation and realm of the Christian God, which included everything from the movement of the stars and planets in the universe and all the way down to the behavior of fish. For example, Slocum wrote that small fish seemed to know they were made to be eaten, as if “they knew they were created for the larger fishes,” schooling tightly as if to render it easier for their predators.
After navigating across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope, stopping in Cape Town, Spray sailed back up the South Atlantic, punctuated by port stops and anchorages in St Helena, Ascension Island, and Grenada, before he returned to the United States and made landfall in Newport, Rhode Island, on 27 June 1898, completing his world voyage in about three years and two months. No one was there to greet him.
News of Slocum’s circumnavigation was overshadowed by the Spanish-American War. He was immediately eager to serve, writing in a public letter about his desire to help the war effort with all his knowledge of the islands in the Pacific: “I burn to be of some use now of all times.”
The US Navy did not take him up on the offer, though, and Joshua Slocum’s life after his world voyage appears on the whole a sad one, in part because he felt he never got the type of credit he deserved, and because he never could quite get a handle on what to do with the rest of his life.
First he worked on Sailing Alone Around the World. As Slocum’s circumnavigation had progressed along friendly harbors, he had begun to earn money for lectures, which he illustrated with lantern slides. Although he never mentioned this in his narrative, he apparently had a camera with him on the voyage. None of this material has survived. Slocum honed his stories and smoothed his delivery in his latter port stops, which prepared him well for when he sat down to write after his return. He often wrote his narrative while at anchor aboard Spray in various New England ports, sending in drafts for editorial help. The articles first appeared serially in Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine with the now famous drawings by Thomas Fogarty and George Varian. The articles did well, as did the book, receiving good reviews in America, and then a British edition, about which the poet and journalist Edwin Arnold extolled the story’s true, plain, salty style, “yet full of touches which show what hidden poetry and passionate love of Nature were in the soul of this ‘blue-nose’ skipper.”
Sailing Alone Around the World made Slocum enough money to buy an old house and some land for Hettie and himself on Martha’s Vineyard, near other retired sea captains and one of his brothers. He tried farming for a couple of seasons, but he did not stick with it. Meanwhile, he and Hettie seemed never to share any real connection. Soon he was barely living there. Instead he sailed alone again on Spray around New England and even seasonally down to the Caribbean collecting shells, selling his books, and giving tours of the boat. His old friend Captain Pierce, who had given him Spray, was run over and killed by an electric trolley. His old ship the Northern Light ended up as a coal barge.
After taking the Spray up the Hudson River with Hettie and Garfield to exhibit it at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and after proposing various endeavors such as starting a university program on a sailing ship and offering himself as a second mate aboard a dirigible, Slocum sailed alone in 1906 aboard Spray back down to the Caribbean where he collected wild orchids and other goods to sell back home. On the way back he stopped to give a lecture in Riverton, New Jersey, where he was thrown in jail for indecency toward a twelve-year-old girl who came aboard with a friend to tour the boat. Historians aren’t certain what happened here exactly. There’s not much information or testimony besides a doctor reporting afterwards that this was not physical assault, because there appeared to be no evidence of physical contact, about which the girl’s parents seem to have agreed. Slocum did not have money for bail and the story made the newspapers. After he was jailed for forty-two days, Slocum was respectfully reprimanded by the judge who told him he was banned from Riverton, by land or sea.
One week later, as if nothing had happened, Slocum delivered his last surviving orchid to the Long Island home of Theodore Roosevelt, whose twelve-year-old son Archibald invited him to dinner with the president, after which the son and a US Navy sailor went cruising with Slocum for a week in Long Island Sound aboard Spray. The president wrote to Slocum about his book: “I entirely sympathize with your feeling of delight in the sheer loneliness and vastness of the ocean. It was just my feeling in the wilderness of the west.” This was perhaps in response to a line that Slocum wrote of his long passage across the South Pacific, which “brings you for many days close on nature, and you realize the vastness of the sea.”
Despite earning the respect of Roosevelt, both Slocum and Spray had been deteriorating. Archibald and others left accounts of how the boat appeared to be in a shambles. In 1907 a reporter visiting Jamaica met Slocum there and reported that he told her: “I can patch up the Spray, but who will patch up Captain Slocum?”
In early 1908, now sixty-four years old, he got a commission to sail a two-ton piece of coral from the Bahamas to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. After he returned, Slocum sailed Spray out of Martha’s Vineyard, perhaps bound for an adventure up the Amazon. He was never heard from again. Some historians speculate that Slocum did not get far and sank in heavy weather due to the state of his boat. Decades later, the historian Edward Rowe Snowe found an account that suggests convincingly that Slocum was run down by a 125-foot inter-island steamship ferry, somewhere near the north coast of Haiti. The officers had been afraid to report the incident. Snowe’s source was a professional mariner traveling on board who noticed damage on the bow and asked the captain of the ferry about what had happened. The captain said that it was a local fishing boat. The second mate who had been on watch, however, told the source that he knew immediately it was not a local boat and that no one was at the wheel. Snowe put events together: Slocum’s boat and the timing would have been exactly along this route.
Slocum’s death at sea, perhaps while he slept, run down by a steamship as Spray steered itself, seems the most probable explanation. It is by far the most poetically fitting: that the first single-handed circumnavigator Joshua Slocum was, as Geoffrey Wolff phrased it, “murdered by modernity.”
Slocum’s first biographer was his oldest son Victor, who became a sailor-writer himself. Victor argued the case, well before the Caribbean steamship account came to light, that his father’s death at the bow of a merchant ship was the only likely scenario.
Since then, Slocum has been the subject of at least five other book-length biographies and hundreds of popular and scholarly articles. The first major scholarly biography, by Walter Teller, was published during the 1950s boom in ocean interest. Teller was able to interview Hettie, Slocum’s children, and others who knew them. Slocum’s boat Spray has been the topic of multiple studies, experiments, two entire books, and the model for more than eight hundred known replicas, several of which have crossed oceans. Sailing Alone Around the World has never gone out of print. It’s been translated into at least nine languages. Excerpts have been anthologized in nearly every nautical compendium, as well as works that commemorate American literature.
In other words, Joshua Slocum is the original gangster. Among modern mariners, he is the furling founding father, and the most daring double-reefed Davey Jones among all solo sailors in history. Slocum’s circumnavigation, his seamanship, his highly readable Twain-like account of the voyage, and the near-mythical self-steering abilities of his Spray have continued to influence and inspire generation after generation, not just on tactics and boat design, but on his view of the sea and the possibilities of an ocean-crossing endeavor for everyone. Although rarely considered as such, and for all of his personal flaws, Slocum’s voyage should appear on the same shelf as accounts of the greatest individual achievements in modern human history. He had no support team and barely a whiff of assistance at any point, before or during his voyages, anywhere.
“The sea has been much maligned,” Slocum concluded in Sailing Alone Around the World, writing directly to each aspiring adventurer: “To young men contemplating a voyage, I would say go. The tales of rough usage are for the most part exaggerations, as also are the stories of sea danger.”