Slocum a well travelled sailor
We had no Sydney-Hobart yacht race this year, and we had no Melbourne to Hobart, via the wild west coast of Tasmania.
We did have the Melbourne-Devonport race, but we were a little short of yacht races and the sailing of the fleet out of Sydney Heads before they turn south is one of the world’s great sporting spectacles.
Never mind. I have two or three yachting stories to fill the gap.
First, though, I have to admit that I made the greatest and most common mistake of all those who write about history. I thought I knew something when I didn’t I thought Joshua Slocum was the famous sailor who landed in Shallow Inlet, off Waratah Bay, in 1902 but it was really John Voss.
I struggled to remember the name of Slocum’s boat (Spray) and the name “Tilicum” found its way to the front of my rather untidy mind and suddenly the penny dropped. Hence the next couple of stories, at least, are based on research rather than memory.
Joshua Slocum was born in 1844 in Nova Scotia. He was a seaman through and through, though he was on a farm. As a youth he was working on small local trading ships and then he embarked on a life of such adventure that it could, and has, filled several books. Ironically, he was first married here in Australia, to a girl whose American family had migrated to Sydney.
Virginia Walker married Slocum in 1871 and had seven children, most of whom were born aboard ships, adventure enough in itself. One was named Benjamin Aymar Slocum, a strange choice given that Slocum had captained the Benjamin Aymar as a South Seas trader until the owner sold it out from under him and left him stranded in the Philippines.
In 1884 Virginia died in Buenos Aires. Slocum remarried in 1886 and the family took to the sea again aboard his ship Aquidneck. On this ship his new wife, in little more than a year, survived a hurricane, an attack by pirates, cholera, smallpox and then a shipwreck in Brazil. In the space of about five months Slocum built another ship to his own design, including many parts salvaged from the Aquidneck. They sailed back to America but Henrietta never went to sea again.
What gives Slocum some relevance to us, though, is that he made the first solo circumnavigation of the world, and he sailed the Gippsland coast in doing so.
On 24 April 1895 he sailed out of Boaton on an old oyster boat, a gaff-rigged sloop just Earthworks over eleven metres long. “Gaff-rigged” means that it had a small boom or gaff along the top of the mainsail. The 41-year-old had restored the semi-derelict “Spray” himself, and he’d
projects? tuned the rigging to the size and length of the boat so well that on one occasion he covered more than 3000 kilometres in the Pacific with using the tiller.
He made the Australian coastline somewhere near Brisbane but sailed south and went ashore at Newcastle about 6 October 1896. He sailed the Spray in through Sydney Heads on 10 October 1896.
He was made very welcome. The newspapers had carried account of his voyage so far and he was a celebrity in the yachting. However, he still had a long way to go, and on 6 December he headed out of the harbour and turned south toward Bass Strait, intending to head due west past Cep Leeuwin and into the Indian Ocean.
On the 12th he passed Twofold Bay and Cape Bundooro (Green Cape), where the lighthouse keeper dipped his flag in salute. He was close enough inshore to be able to exchange greetings by voice.
He turned the corner into Bass Strait and passed “Cliff Island”. The lighthouse keeper on Southeast Cape came aboard and exchanged news, advising Slocum of a good anchorage in Waterloo Bay.
He moved the Spray there and met up with the “Secret”, a fishing boat, and the “Mary”, a Sydney Harbour steamboat ferry, converted to hunt whales, of all things.
He spent three days lying in Waterloo and visited the “miners’ pits”, even prospecting for gold himself. I’d like to know more about that.
Firm but kindly winds saw him entering The Heads on 22 December, and the steam-tug “Racer” towed him into the “Yarrow” River, and then changed moorings to St Kilda.
In Melbourne, for the first time, he was charged customs dues. Spray weighed 12.7 tons but there was no allowance for the fraction. He was charged the full six shillings and sixpence. Looking for a way to make this up he caught a four-metre shark off St Kilda. It had 26 young, each about two feet long, and when he opened up the shark he put the babies in a small canoe alongside the Spray, filled with water, then charged people sixpence to see the shark and the babies.
He soon made up the customs duties and quite a bit more besides, and then it was time to leave. The “Racer” towed him back down from Hobson’s Bay and, I gather, through The Heads. Here he had to make a tough decision.
The prevailing westerlies that run through Bass Strait would allow him, with only a few shallow tacks to keep him just off the wind, to sail clear to Mauritius. There were, however, large amounts of ice that had broken free from Antarctica and were drifting north, cooling the weather and changing the winds.
He decided instead to sail to Tasmania and he sailed up the Tamar to Launceston, entering on a high tide after a Bass Strait crossing of “only a few hours”, but I suppose that depends on what one means by a “few”.
He left Devonport on 16 April 1897 and crossed the Strait again having decided that it would be wise to head up the east coast and around the north of Australia instead. The Spray had been hauled from the water and Devonport and thoroughly checked over.
On 27 June 1898 Joshua Slocum tied up in Newport, USA, completing a journey of more than 73,000 kilometres, over three years and two months. This was the first single-handed voyage around the world – but I did note that his notes make no mention of Henrietta and the children, while they heap praise on this little oyster sloop. So be it.
Next week I’ll tell you about Captain Voss, who sailed into Shallow Inlet after coming all the way from British Columbia in a converted Indian canoe. That is the story I was looking for when I found that Slocum, too, had sailed our local water.