Sea saga of 1st global solo sailor
By Nathaniel Philbrick |
October 31, 2010, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
I grew up loving Joshua Slocum's "Sailing Alone Around the World." It was "Walden" without the training wheels. In his 50s, pistol-whipped by fate, he set out in a largely self-built 36-foot sailboat, Spray, and somehow managed to circumnavigate the earth, by dead reckoning, completing the three-year journey in 1898. He might have been without a crew, but he was hardly alone; he had the magical Spray for a companion: a vessel that could literally steer herself for hundreds of miles at a time while he reclined contentedly in his book-lined cabin eating salt cod and reading "Quixote."
For a landlocked teenager who had both nautical and literary ambitions, Slocum was almost too good to be true.
Now Geoffrey Wolff ("The Duke of Deception," 1979) has written a biography of Slocam, one of many biographies. But no real person could possibly measure up to the narrator of "Sailing Alone Around the World," or so I thought.
I needn't have worried. "The Hard Way Around" is the best of books: a literary biography that also happens to be an adventure story. As it turns out, Slocum's back story is just as enthralling, if not more so, than anything that happened to him aboard the Spray. Indeed, portions read like a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Wolff does not fall victim to the modern obsession with having to find a new, never-before-glimpsed scrap of useless information about a time-worn topic; he is content, and self-confident enough, to provide his own view of the existing record.
Part of what makes Slocum, born in Nova Scotia in 1844, such a mesmerizing figure was his determination to be a sailor at a time when steam power was clearly where the maritime future lay. Was Slocum, a willful anachronism, being foolhardy or simply true to an imperishable ideal? But was Slocum's golden age of sail all that golden? Yes and no. Many of the crews of these big and beautiful square-riggers were, according to at least one account, filled by "moronic bipeds" - drunken, violent lowlifes with no other options. And yet, Wolff points out, the skills required to work these ships were considerable. "Anyone who has struggled - from the comfort of a cozy easy chair in front of a cheering fire - to comprehend the names and purposes of the parts aboard one of Patrick O'Brian's ships will appreciate the complexity of a novice seaman's task."
In the end, Wolff,cannot contain his enthusiasm for the bygone days when huge commercial sailing vessels paused briefly in the harbors of the world like "greyhounds straining sleekly at their heavy chain leashes, about to weigh anchor and fill the sky with canvas and go to the other side of the earth at speeds more appropriate to a locomotive than a boat."
At the age of 26, during a stop in Sydney, Australia, Slocum fell almost instantly in love with the pretty and determined Virginia Walker. In two weeks' time they were married. Thus began one of the great, ultimately tragic love stories of the sea. Virginia followed her husband from command to command: fishing for salmon in the northern Pacific, building a boat in the boa-infested jungles of the Philippines and standing at his side as he spectacularly shoehorned the 100-foot bark Amethyst into the crowded anchorage at Hong Kong under the very nose of a British admiral.
Not long after, Slocum became part owner and master of one of the largest and most beautiful sailing vessels afloat, the Northern Light. Slocum considered this command to be the highlight of his career, but not Wolff, who rightly points out that "hardheaded prudence often enjoys a holiday when sailboats are being considered." Although big and beautiful, the Northern Light was anything but well built - a fact that Slocum stubbornly ignored. A poisonous combination of breakdowns and crew problems soon ensnared him in legal difficulties that ultimately forced him to sell his share of the vessel.
With prices of large, antiquated square-riggers plummeting, Slocum managed to buy the 138-foot Aquidneck at auction. Soon after, however, while the ship was anchored off Buenos Aires, Virginia succumbed to a likely congenital heart defect and died at the age of 34. Slocum had lost the love of his life. "Father's days were done with the passing of mother," his son Benjamin, one of four children, recalled. "They were pals."
Wolff's account of his hero's subsequent, more familiar career as a solo sailor is adroitly and economically told. Wolff speaks of the "imperviousness of Slocum's emotional bulkheads, tightly sealed against the penetration of despair or complaint." But he also points out that "grief is not date-stamped," and the sadness within Slocum during his globe-girdling voyage is what drives much of the emotional energy of "Sailing Alone Around the World."
After the publication of his narrative, Slocum's sadness got the better of him. He purchased a farm for himself and his second wife, Henrietta, on Martha's Vineyard but spent most of his days continuing to sail alone on the increasingly dilapidated Spray, heading south in the winter and cruising the Cape and islands in the summer. He was last seen departing the Vineyard in November 1908. What happened after that will never be known. One theory holds that he and the Spray were run down and sunk in the shipping lanes by one of the iron-hulled steamers he so despised - "that in effect," Wolff writes, "he was murdered by modernity."
For a landlocked teenager who had both nautical and literary ambitions, Slocum was almost too good to be true.
Now Geoffrey Wolff ("The Duke of Deception," 1979) has written a biography of Slocam, one of many biographies. But no real person could possibly measure up to the narrator of "Sailing Alone Around the World," or so I thought.
I needn't have worried. "The Hard Way Around" is the best of books: a literary biography that also happens to be an adventure story. As it turns out, Slocum's back story is just as enthralling, if not more so, than anything that happened to him aboard the Spray. Indeed, portions read like a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Wolff does not fall victim to the modern obsession with having to find a new, never-before-glimpsed scrap of useless information about a time-worn topic; he is content, and self-confident enough, to provide his own view of the existing record.
Part of what makes Slocum, born in Nova Scotia in 1844, such a mesmerizing figure was his determination to be a sailor at a time when steam power was clearly where the maritime future lay. Was Slocum, a willful anachronism, being foolhardy or simply true to an imperishable ideal? But was Slocum's golden age of sail all that golden? Yes and no. Many of the crews of these big and beautiful square-riggers were, according to at least one account, filled by "moronic bipeds" - drunken, violent lowlifes with no other options. And yet, Wolff points out, the skills required to work these ships were considerable. "Anyone who has struggled - from the comfort of a cozy easy chair in front of a cheering fire - to comprehend the names and purposes of the parts aboard one of Patrick O'Brian's ships will appreciate the complexity of a novice seaman's task."
In the end, Wolff,cannot contain his enthusiasm for the bygone days when huge commercial sailing vessels paused briefly in the harbors of the world like "greyhounds straining sleekly at their heavy chain leashes, about to weigh anchor and fill the sky with canvas and go to the other side of the earth at speeds more appropriate to a locomotive than a boat."
At the age of 26, during a stop in Sydney, Australia, Slocum fell almost instantly in love with the pretty and determined Virginia Walker. In two weeks' time they were married. Thus began one of the great, ultimately tragic love stories of the sea. Virginia followed her husband from command to command: fishing for salmon in the northern Pacific, building a boat in the boa-infested jungles of the Philippines and standing at his side as he spectacularly shoehorned the 100-foot bark Amethyst into the crowded anchorage at Hong Kong under the very nose of a British admiral.
Not long after, Slocum became part owner and master of one of the largest and most beautiful sailing vessels afloat, the Northern Light. Slocum considered this command to be the highlight of his career, but not Wolff, who rightly points out that "hardheaded prudence often enjoys a holiday when sailboats are being considered." Although big and beautiful, the Northern Light was anything but well built - a fact that Slocum stubbornly ignored. A poisonous combination of breakdowns and crew problems soon ensnared him in legal difficulties that ultimately forced him to sell his share of the vessel.
With prices of large, antiquated square-riggers plummeting, Slocum managed to buy the 138-foot Aquidneck at auction. Soon after, however, while the ship was anchored off Buenos Aires, Virginia succumbed to a likely congenital heart defect and died at the age of 34. Slocum had lost the love of his life. "Father's days were done with the passing of mother," his son Benjamin, one of four children, recalled. "They were pals."
Wolff's account of his hero's subsequent, more familiar career as a solo sailor is adroitly and economically told. Wolff speaks of the "imperviousness of Slocum's emotional bulkheads, tightly sealed against the penetration of despair or complaint." But he also points out that "grief is not date-stamped," and the sadness within Slocum during his globe-girdling voyage is what drives much of the emotional energy of "Sailing Alone Around the World."
After the publication of his narrative, Slocum's sadness got the better of him. He purchased a farm for himself and his second wife, Henrietta, on Martha's Vineyard but spent most of his days continuing to sail alone on the increasingly dilapidated Spray, heading south in the winter and cruising the Cape and islands in the summer. He was last seen departing the Vineyard in November 1908. What happened after that will never be known. One theory holds that he and the Spray were run down and sunk in the shipping lanes by one of the iron-hulled steamers he so despised - "that in effect," Wolff writes, "he was murdered by modernity."
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