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Slocum, Joshua, 1844-1910?

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Joshua Slocum (February 20, 1844 – on or shortly after 14 November 1909) was a Canadian-American seaman and adventurer, a noted writer, and the first man to sail single-handedly around the world. In 1900 he told the story of this in Sailing Alone Around the World. He disappeared in November 1909 while aboard his sloop-rigged fishing boat that he had named Spray.

Nova Scotian childhood

Joshua Slocum was born on 20 February 1844 in Annapolis County, Nova Scotia, in a village named Mount Hanly, oficially recorded as Wilmot Station, which lies on the North Mountain within sight of the Bay of Fundy. The fifth of eleven children of John Slocum and Sarah Jane (Southern) Slocum, Joshua descended, on his father's side, from a Quaker who left the United States shortly after 1780 because of his opposition to the American War for Independence. Although, as a Quaker, the Slocum ancestor was, in all likelihood, simply a principled pacifist who objected to exposing his family to the violence of war, he was, upon arrival in Nova Scotia, classified as a Loyalist by the British and granted five hundred acres of farmland in Annapolis County.

By the time young Joshua was eight years old, the Slocum family had moved from Wilmot to Brier Island in Digby County, at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, opposite Eastport, Maine. Slocum's maternal grandfather was the keeper of the lighthouse at Southwest Point there. His father, a stern man and strict disciplinarian, took up making leather boots for the local fishermen, and Joshua helped in the shop. However, the boy, quite naturally, found the scent of salt air much more alluring than the smell of shoe leather. He yearned for a life of adventure at sea, away from his demanding father and his increasingly chaotic life at home among so many brothers and sisters.

He made several attempts to run away from home, finally succeeding, at age fourteen, by hiring on as a cabin boy and cook on a fishing schooner, but he soon returned home. In 1860, after the birth of the eleventh Slocum child and the subsequent death of his kindly mother, Joshua, then sixteen, left home for good. He and a friend signed on at Halifax as ordinary seamen on a merchant ship bound for Dublin, Ireland.

Early life at sea

From Dublin, he crossed to Liverpool to become an ordinary seaman on the British merchant ship, Tangier (also recorded as Tanjore), bound for China. During two years as a seaman, he rounded Cape Horn twice, landed at Batavia (now Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies, and visited the Moluccas, Manila, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, and San Francisco. While at sea, he studied for the Board of Trade examination, and, at the age of eighteen, he received his certificate as a fully-qualified Second Mate. Slocum quickly rose through the ranks to become a chief mate on British ships transporting coal and grain between the British Isles and San Francisco.

In 1865, he settled in San Francisco, became an American citizen, and, after a period of salmon fishing and fur trading in the Oregon Territory of the northwest, he returned to the sea to pilot a schooner in the coastwise trade between San Francisco and Seattle. His first blue-water command, in 1869, was the barque Washington, which he took across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Australia, and home via Alaska.

He sailed for thirteen years out of the port of San Francisco, —— to China, Australia, the Spice Islands, and to Japan —— transporting mixed cargoes. Between 1869 and 1889, he was the master of eight vessels, the first four of which (the Washington, the Constitution, the Benjamin Aymar and the Amethyst) he commanded in the employ of others. Later, there would be four others that he himself owned, in whole or in part.

Shortly before Christmas 1870, Slocum and the Washington put in at Sydney, Australia. There, in about a month's time, he met, courted, and married a young woman named Virginia Albertina Walker. Their marriage took place on 31 January 1871. Miss Walker, quite coincidentally, was an American whose New York family had migrated west to California at the time of the 1849 gold rush and eventually continued on, by ship, to settle in Australia. She sailed with Slocum, and, over the next thirteen years, bore him seven children at sea, four of whom, sons Victor, Benjamin Aymar, and Garfield, and daughter Jessie, survived to adulthood.

In Alaska, the Washington was wrecked when she dragged her anchor during a gale, ran ashore, and broke up. Slocum, however, at considerable risk to himself, managed to save his wife, the crew, and much of the cargo, bringing all back to port safely in the ship's open boats. The owners of the shipping company that had employed Slocum were impressed by this feat of ingenuity and leadership, so they gave him the command of the Constitution which he sailed to Hawaii and the west coast of Mexico.

His next command was the Benjamin Aymar, a merchant vessel in the South Seas trade. However, the owner, strapped for cash, sold the vessel out from under Slocum, and he and Virginia found themselves stranded in the Philippines without a ship. There, in 1874, under a commission from a British architect, Slocum organized native workers to build a 150-ton steamer in the shipyard at Subic Bay. In partial payment for the work, he was given the ninety-ton schooner, Pato, the first ship he could call his own.

Ownership of the Pato afforded Slocum the kind of freedom and autonomy he had never experienced before. Hiring a crew, he contracted to deliver a cargo to Vancouver in British Columbia. Thereafter, he used the Pato as a general freight carrier along the west coast of North America and in voyages back and forth between San Francisco and Hawaii. During this period, Slocum also fulfilled a long-held ambition to become a writer; he became a temporary correspondent for the San Francisco Bee.

The ship's master

The Spray

Slocum spent most of his life at sea. When shipwrecked on his way to Montevideo in 1887, he sold the wreckage, paid off his crew and built the Liberdade, an unusual 35-foot junk-rigged boat that he described as a canoe, in which he and his family sailed home to Washington, DC. In 1894 he published Voyage of the Liberdade describing this adventure.

First solo circumnavigation

In Fairhaven, Massachusetts, he rebuilt the 36′ 9″ (11.2 metre) sloop-rigged fishing boat named the Spray (later re-rigged as a yawl after problems he encountered in the Strait of Magellan).

On April 24, 1895, he set sail from Boston, Massachusetts. In his famous book, Sailing Alone Around the World now considered a classic of travel literature, he described his departure in the following manner:

"I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895 was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston, where the Spray had been moored snugly all winter. The twelve o'clock whistles were blowing just as the sloop shot ahead under full sail. A short board was made up the harbor on the port tack, then coming about she stood to seaward, with her boom well off to port, and swung past the ferries with lively heels. A photographer on the outer pier of East Boston got a picture of her as she swept by, her flag at the peak throwing her folds clear. A thrilling pulse beat high in me. My step was light on deck in the crisp air. I felt there could be no turning back, and that I was engaging in an adventure the meaning of which I thoroughly understood."

After an extended visit to his boyhood home at Brier Island and visiting old haunts on the coast of Nova Scotia, Slocum took his departure from North America at Sambro Island Lighthouse near Halifax, Nova Scotia on July 3, 1895.

Slocum tells us that he navigated without a chronometer, using the lunar method of navigation which requires only an approximate knowledge of the time, provided by an old alarm clock with its minute hand missing.

He normally sailed Spray without touching the helm. Due to the length of the sail plan relative to the hull, and the long keel, Spray was inherently capable of self-steering (unlike faster modern craft), being able to be balanced stably on any course relative to the wind by adjusting or reefing the sails and by fixing the helm with a belaying pin. He tells us that he only helmed Spray when manoeuvering or in an emergency.

More than three years later, on June 27, 1898, he returned to Newport, Rhode Island, having circumnavigated the world, a distance of more than 46,000 miles (74,000 km).

In 1899 he published his account of the epic voyage in Sailing Alone Around the World. It is a wonderful adventure story from the Age of Sail and a book about which Arthur Ransome opined, "Boys who do not like this book ought to be drowned at once" [1].

Disappearance

In November 1909 he set sail for the Orinoco River in Spray and disappeared. It was assumed he was run down by a steamer or struck by a whale, the Spray being too sound a craft and Slocum too experienced a mariner for any other cause to be considered likely, and in 1924 he was declared legally dead. Although the disappearance has since often been linked to the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, there is no evidence that the vessel was even in that area of the ocean when it vanished.

A continuing inspiration

Original cover 1900.

In the 1960s long-distance French sailor Bernard Moitessier christened his 39-foot ketch-rigged boat Joshua in honor of Slocum. It was this boat that Moitessier sailed from Tahiti to France, passing through six days and nights of deadly storms near Cape Horn. He sailed Joshua in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race around the world, making great time, only to drop out near the end and sail on to Tahiti.

An underwater glider, a type of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), designed by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, was named after Slocum's ship Spray. It became the first AUV to cross the Gulf Stream, operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. [2].

Ferries named in his honour (Joshua Slocum and Spray [3]) served the two Digby Neck runs between 1973 and 2004. The Joshua Slocum was featured in the film version of Dolores Claiborne.[4]

Slocum's life was given novelistic treatment by author Cameron Royce Jess in the [2004]] book Soul Voyage.

Over the years since Slocum's death a number of attempts at more or less reconstructing the Spray have been undertaken, with various degrees of success.

The name Spray has become a popular choice for cruising yachts since the publication of Slocum's account of his circumnavigation, in fond memory of his achievements.

A monument to Slocum exists in Brier Island, Nova Scotia not far from his family's boot shop which still stands.

Slocum is commemorated in museum exhibits at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia and the Mount Hanley Schoolhouse Museum at his birthplace.

The noted sculptor, Daniel Chester French, created a memorial to Joshua Slocum that stands in Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. (Because Slocum was lost at sea, his remains are not at Forest Hills.)

The Slocum River in Dartmouth, Massachusetts was named for him.

For several years, Dennis Rodman owned a restaurant and nightclub called Josh Slocum's on the water in Newport Beach, California.