“Remember, Lord, my ship is small and thy sea is so wide!” – Joshua Slocum, sailing through a storm south of Tierra del Fuego.
When Joshua Slocum (author of Sailing Alone Around the World, first published in Great Britain by Sampson Law in 1900) arrived in Apia, Samoa at the house of Robert Louis Stevenson on July 16, 1896, he was a third of the way to becoming first person to sail single-handedly around the world. He had just spent over a month in the williwas off Cape Horn – the sails of his sloop had been ripped from the mast by northwest winds off Tierra del Fuego, and he had regularly been at the helm for thirty or forty hours without sleep. He writes one morning, “Hail and sleet in fierce squalls cut my flesh till the blood trickled over my face. It was daylight, and the sloop was in the midst of the Milky Way of the sea, which is northwest of Cape Horn, and it was the white breakers of a huge sea over sunken rocks which had threatened to engulf her through the night.”
To be in Apia, to have made through the gates of the Horn and arrived in the calm South Pacific meant that the chance of circumnavigating the world was becoming a focused reality; he was met in harbor by canoes-full of singing women – exultation.
When Slocum sailed from the port of Fairhaven, Massachusetts nine months earlier, the United States was turned in on itself in a frenzied westward expansion: the forty-four stars on the flag flying on Slocum’s sloop were being added to yearly. It was entirely unexpected that greatest US explorer of the time was actually going the other way, slipping quietly out the back door from a sleepy New England port.
He hadn’t intended to go around the world. He had sailed north for the summer to escape the unpleasant home-life with his wife and first cousin, Hettie. Surrounded by fog off Sable Island, Nova Scotia, watching the lighthouse disappear on the eastern horizon, he decided that, perhaps, he’d simply keep going.
From Morocco to Brazil to the Marquesas, Slocum recounts his travels in poetic understatements. His sentences are trim as his sails, pared down and clipped off fat. There is a haunting lack of modifiers. Where there should be reflection in the face of death, there’s mostly a review of technicalities; sustaining injury and spending dark nights strapped to the helm is just part the gig. In brief, he says this: here is the sea, and look how full of life and death it is; here is a storm gathering, and now, so quickly, it passes; here I am, nothing, compared to the oceans; I owe my life to my boat, she is my savior.
He arrived back in the US a hero.
I found an old painting of Slocum building the Spray before he takes her around the world. There’s no mast, the rudder that he had hewn from an oak tree growing in his back yard is in place but without any hardware to secure it. It must be summer: the grass is green; the sky is gray and wet; there are white flowers growing around the chocks. He looks at the painter. He is far from the storms of Cape Horn and the women of Samoa – there is nothing but possibility, potential here. His life would be defined by everything after this.
After writing Sailing Alone, Slocum, at sixty-eight, decided to explore the Amazon and Orinoco rivers, and never returned. I like to think that he pushed into the muddy headwaters of the Amazon, wedged his boat as far into land as the rivers would take him simply to erase that which his circumnavigation forced upon him: return.
I hope he sank his boat, stripped off his heavy clothes, and found tribe of linguistic phenomenon; that, much older, he chased away anthropologist and drank hallucinogens to effectively imagine the sea again, the dead calm, flying fishing gliding into his sails, the Spray sailing captainless over the jungle’s canopy, the singing Samoans paddling up to his boat.
That he told stories to children about what it feels like to bury the prow of your ship in the belly of a fifty-foot wave and taste the salt from its spray.
That he died slowly in the sticky warmth of the Amazon, surrounded by howling monkeys, showy birds, and the smoke of nearby fire. That, after a long time away, he finally felt at home.
