Remembering Joshua Slocum, sailor par excellence
TUESDAY, February 20, was the 180th birth anniversary of Joshua Slocum, the first man ever to sail alone around the world after completing a 46,000-mile voyage.
Joshua Slocum’s ancestors were from Massachusetts. When he was 8, his family moved to Nova Scotia. He had very little formal education. With seamen on both sides of his family, it was almost pre-ordained that Slocum would become one too. He began as a cook on a local fishing boat for a while. In 1860, shortly after his mother died, he went to sea, where he would spend most of his life for 23 years. He became an accomplished sailor and navigator and became an American citizen in 1869.
He began his voyage around the world on April 24, 1895, setting sail from Boston, Massachusetts. He described his feelings on that day in his book: “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.”
In 1898, he began a memoir about his single-handed global circumnavigation aboard the sloop Spray. The memoir first appeared in monthly installments in Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (New York and London) and was later published as a book (New York, 1900). “Sailing Alone Around the World” has had numerous reprintings and editions since then and has been translated into several languages. The book had an immediate and enduring success. It is now considered a classic of maritime literature. On Feb. 19, 2020, “The Illustrated Sailing Alone Around the World: 125th Anniversary Edition” was published by SeaWolf Press.
Those of us in the maritime field will certainly have heard of him. But how many know that this man, considered a hero by many, acquired his first ship in the Philippines?
It was in 1874 that Slocum and his wife Virginia found themselves stranded in the Philippines without a ship. Under a commission from a British architect, Slocum gathered Filipino workers to build a 150-ton steamer at Subic Bay. In partial payment for the work, he was given a 90-ton schooner. He named it Pato (the Filipino word for duck), the first ship he could call his own.
Ownership of the Pato gave Slocum the degree of freedom he had never had before. He gathered a crew and, with his family, a pregnant Virginia and their three children, went to fish off Siberia. Slocum moved to larger ships twice, recalling the second, the Northern Light, as the “finest American sailing vessel afloat.” He used the Pato as a general freight carrier on voyages between San Francisco and Hawaii. At the same time, Slocum also began a fledgling career as a writer and became a temporary correspondent for the San Francisco Bee. Years later, Slocum looked back on his time in Manila with fondness, memorialized in his book “Sailing Alone Around the World”:
“Under the cover of darkness that night I went to the steamer, which I found to be Colombia, Captain Henderson, from New York, bound for San Francisco... In the chief mate of Colombia, Mr. Hannibal, I found an old friend, and he referred affectionately to days in Manila when we were there together, he in the Southern Cross and I in the Northern Light, both ships as beautiful as their names.”
But the age of sail was ending. In 1884, the Northern Light, needing repairs that were financially untenable, became a coal barge. Slocum’s career began to decline.
In November 1909, Slocum set sail for the West Indies in the Spray from Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts. He was never seen or heard from again.
But Slocum’s legacy remains alive around the world. His renown has not only endured but grown steadily through the years. Historian and writer Myra Lopes said, “He was, in my opinion, someone who should be put up there with the greatest heroes of the world.”
His life and work are studied and emulated on training ships. Filmmaker Peter Rowe made a documentary on Slocum titled “Around Alone” in 2000. He hailed Slocum as a “huge influence on people because what he did changed people’s ideas of freedom and independence.”
His love for the sea was boundless. To young men contemplating a voyage, he would say go. “It is not that life ashore is distasteful to me, but life at sea is better.”
But his encouragement always came with the reminder of the need for full knowledge of the challenges that must be faced. It is exhilarating, he said, to experience “the great palpitations of sea winds and of the sea itself, the effect of far-off gales. To know the laws that govern the winds, and to know that you know them, will give you an easy mind on your voyage around the world; otherwise, you may tremble at the appearance of every cloud.”
It is a reminder that everyone, seafarer or not, must bear in mind.