Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072) (8 page)

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.