September 2, 2020 • 36 mins
Joshua Slocum was the first person known to sail around the world alone. Unlike lighthouse keeper Ida Lewis, he didn’t always enjoy that solitude – and unlike cyclist Annie Londonderry, he actually made the journey he became famous for.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Bee Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I think
some themes have developed in our podcast over the last
few months, including travel and solitude because it's and we're
(00:25):
still in the middle of this pandemic that's keeping a
lot of us home and away from most other people.
So today we're continuing on with that theme. We have
Joshua Slocum, who was the first person known to sail
around the world alone, so you know, he has some
some things in common with some other folks we've talked
about recently. Unlike lighthouse keeper Ida Lewis, he did not
(00:47):
always enjoy that solitude, and also, unlike cyclist Annie Londonderry,
he probably did actually do the thing that he became
famous for. To be clear, he may. Entity has a
long history of taking ocean voyages in small vessels, and
the biggest example is Polynesian wayfinding, which goes back thousands
(01:09):
of years and uses celestial bodies, ocean swells, birds and
sea life, and other observations to navigate just immense distances
without instruments. The Polynesian Voyaging Society has been reviving and
preserving those methods since the nineteen seventies, including taking sea
voyages and canoes that are between sixty and seventy feet
(01:30):
or eighteen to twenty one long. Those have a crew
of twelve to sixteen people, so they are not very
big today. Of course, there are also round the world
yacht races, and single handed sailing has just become its
own whole thing. But when Joshua's locum was living the
idea that a person would or even could sail around
(01:52):
the world in a small boat alone, basically for fun,
it was just baffling. I did want to note up
at the top that towards the end of this episode
will have a brief discussion of a sexual assault allegation,
so for background. Joshua Slocum was born on February four
to Sarah and John Slocum. John was a farmer and
(02:13):
Sarah was the daughter of a lighthousekeeper. Joshua was their
fifth child of eleven, nine of whom survived childhood for
reasons that are not entirely clear. At several points during
his life, Slocum claimed to have been born in various
places in Massachusetts. This was simply not true. He was
actually born in Nova Scotia. For the first few years
(02:36):
of Joshua's life, the family lived on a farm in
Mount Hanley, and then when he was eight, they moved
out to Briar Island and John opened a boot shop there.
When Joshua was about twelve, John pulled him out of
school to put him to work pegging boots. This was
really not an unusual age for a working class boy
to leave school, but Joshua did not want to peg boots.
(02:59):
He was just fascinated by the sea. The reason for
the move to Briar Island was probably to be closer
to Sarah Slocum's family. Her health is generally described as frail,
As is so often the case, we don't really have
much detail beyond that several people did describe her as
being worn out from having so many children so close together,
(03:21):
something that people also said about her own mother. Sarah
died in eighteen sixty at the age of forty six,
less than two weeks after giving birth to her last child.
Joshua was sixteen years old when she died. Joshua's relationship
with his father had never been particularly smooth, He told
his friends a story about making a model ship in secret,
(03:44):
which his father destroyed when he found it, and then
gave Joshua what was, in his words, a thrashing. At
the age of fourteen, Joshua ran away from home to
be a cook on a ship, but in his words,
the crew quote mutinied at the appearance of my first
stuff and chucked me out before I had a chance
to shine as a culinary artist. Although this first attempt
(04:05):
to leave home didn't really last. After his mother's death,
Joshua left again. He did odd jobs before joining the
crew of a merchant vessel. Slocum worked his way up
through the ranks on various ships. On April eighteen sixty four,
he was issued a Seaman's Protection certificate. This was a
document that had been created in the eighteenth century to
(04:26):
try to protect American sailors from being pressed into service
for the British. It contained a sailor's vital information and
also served as proof of citizenship. It's not entirely clear
whether Slocum claimed to have been born in the United
States in order to get one of these certificates, or
if he had actually become a citizen the process was
(04:46):
just a lot less formal and involved then than it
is today. As all of this was going on, he
also changed the spelling of his last name from Slocum,
ending in b e two Slocum s l O c
U M. Slocum reached the rank of captain by the
age of five. Had he sent most of his money
back home to try to help his family. He actually
(05:08):
sent so much of his pay that sometimes he had
to go borrow money to outfit himself for his next voyage.
On one of these voyages, he became seriously ill with
something that he described as a fever. This might have
been malaria, and it seemed to recur at several points
during his life. Slocum's career as a captain took him
all over the world, particularly around the Pacific Ocean, on merchant,
(05:31):
cargo and fishing vessels. On January eighteen seventy one, he
married Virginia Albertina Walker known as Jenny, in Sydney, Australia.
Jenny was an American from New York, and it seems
as though her family had moved to Australia during the
gold rushes. It's not clear exactly when or how Joshua
and Jenny met, but less than a month after he
(05:53):
arrived in Australia, they were married. She had not turned
twenty one yet, so she had to have a certificate
that gave her father's consent for her to marry. Even
though one of these certificates was issued, it seems like
the couple were so eager to get married that their
wedding wound up looking almost like an elopement. Her father
only saw the end of the ceremony because he heard
(06:15):
what was happening and he ran to the church and
got there just before it was over. Joshua and Jenny's
relationship seems to have been one of love at first sight,
and biographers have described them as soul mates. She went
to see with him, which was an incredibly rough environment.
His accounts describe her backing him up against mutineers armed
(06:36):
with pistols or revolvers, also using those same weapons to
kill sharks. Jinny sounds amazing he does. Aside from all that,
in general, a ship could be a violent place. As
we've talked about on the show before, social systems and
prejudices that were entrenched on land were often a lot
(06:56):
more relaxed at sea, So for example, crews were often
racially integrated, and people of color could rise to a
higher rank than they might have been able to do
in other settings. At the same time, it was inherently
dangerous work, and sailors had very few rights and protections.
Corporal punishment was accepted as a way to discipline the crew.
(07:17):
In the nineteenth century. Many sailors had been coerced or
forced into the job, or they just had no other choice,
and once they became sailors, they got into a cycle
of spending a stretch of time at sea, then returning
to port, where unscrupulous landlords and tavern owners robbed them
of their money, leaving them no other choice but to
go to sea again. Slocum's reputation within this system is
(07:41):
described as somewhere on a spectrum between tough but fair
and abusive and tyrannical, depending on whose account you read.
Stan Grayson, who's the author of the biography A Man
for All Oceans, suggest that Slocum's biggest issue and all
of this, might have been not doing more to rein
in his ship its cruelest mates. The mates were the
(08:02):
ones who were actually tasked with maintaining discipline, but tempering
a mate's behavior could also be really challenging, since anything
a captain might do on that front ran the risk
of undermining the mates authority with the crew. Regardless, Slocum
face charges on several occasions for alleged mistreatment of his crew.
(08:22):
One of these incidents happened upon arriving in San Francisco
after his very first voyage with his wife on board.
He was accused of beating a stowaway and convicted at
a trial that he did not attend because it was
held after he had already set sail again bound for Alaska.
These kinds of trials were quite common, though, and sometimes
they stemmed from totally unfounded charges. During his career at See,
(08:46):
Slocum was convicted in some cases and acquitted in others.
We should also note that as I was researching this,
the account that came down farthest on the cruel and
tyrannical end of the spectrum cited ocams having left a
man in irons for fifty three days as an example,
But that account omitted the part where the man in
(09:08):
question had forged documents to cover up his criminal path
so that he could come on as the ship second mate.
And then he had planned a mutiny. He had been
left in irons to restrain him until they could get
to a port. Nevertheless, this also went to court, and
the court found for the mate, who was named Henry Slater,
and they ordered Slocum to pay a fine of five dollars.
(09:31):
Joshua and Jenny actually raised a family in the middle
of all this, and we're going to talk more about
that after we have a quick sponsor break. For several years,
whether he was working on someone else's ship or one
of his own, Joshua Slocum sailed with his whole family
(09:52):
on board with him, and that was something that attracted
some attention, and the Boston Journal in one Captain John
You recounted an earlier encounter with them. Quote, one day
a bark was seen sailing up the bay, a queer
old craft for modern sailors to look at. And what
was stranger still, she flew the American flag. Curiosity was
(10:14):
at work at once to find what she could be for.
As she glided by, there might also be seen a
lady's son hat and children's curly hair just above the
old fashioned bulwarks. The captain and his bark hailed from
San Francisco. He carried his wife and three children. He
was a roving genius in every respect. The bark in
(10:36):
this story was the amethyst which Slocum bought in eighteen
seventy eight. Um and Drew saw them when they were
arriving in Manila. The Slocum family ultimately included seven children,
four of whom survived infancy. They were Victor born in
eighteen seventy two, Benjamin Amar born in eighteen seventy three,
Jesse Helena born in eighteen seventy five, and James Garfield
(11:00):
old and known just as Garfield, born in eighty one.
Although she did have her sister on board as a
companion at some points, for many of these deliveries, Jenny
gave birth on a ship full of men without a midwife,
a doctor, or even another woman on board as an attendant.
Jenny was both mother and teacher to the children. This
(11:21):
included having Joshua nailing upright piano to the ship's deck
so she could teach the music, and on Sundays she
saw to it that they had Sunday school Once again.
Jenny sounds amazing like I wish I had her fortitude.
By the eighteen eighties, though it was becoming harder for
(11:41):
Slocum to find work. He had developed a reputation for
being an exceptional navigator and trader, but his experience and
his passion were specifically in sailing ships, and steamships were
starting to take over. In eighteen eighty one, Slocum bought
a share in the Northern Light, which was powered by
sale but also had a small steam engine on board
(12:04):
that could be used for things like lifting cargo and
pumping water. Slocum liked the labor saving aspects of this engine,
but he stridently resisted the idea of becoming the captain
of a full on steamship. In eighteen eighty three, aboard
the Northern Light, the family saw the volcano Krakatoa on
what they thought was a full eruption, but they were
(12:25):
a few days away by the time the eruption really peaked.
Although they were crossing the Indian Ocean at that point,
they weren't affected by the tsunamis that followed. They did
face a major storm as they arrived at the Cape
of Good Hope, but it wasn't until they reached port
that they realized that they had narrowly avoided being killed
by the volcano. In eighteen eighty four, Joshua Slocum sold
(12:47):
his share in the Northern Light and bought a hundred
and eighty three ft or forty two meter vessel called
the Aquidneck. He wanted to have a boat of his
own and to use it to provide both a home
and an income for him self and the family. But
this is really where things started to just go wrong
for him. It seems like he bought this boat and
then he just could not catch a break for a
(13:08):
long time afterward. On July twenty five of that year,
Jenny died suddenly while they were docked at Buenos Aires.
The cause of her death is unclear, but her children
described her as having had a weak heart. Joshua arranged
to have Jenny's body buried in an English cemetery in
Buenos Aires. He also bought a headstone, which he had
(13:28):
engraved with Virginia, wife of Captain Joshua Slocum, died July four,
age thirty five years. Based on the timeline of when
they got married, she was probably actually thirty four, But
I'm I'm not gonna disagreeving man for his engraving choices.
Her children said that her pet canary Pete, did not
(13:50):
sing for a long time after her death, and they
described their father as being like a boat with a
broken rudder. He never really recovered, and he turned to
the spirit Toualism movement to try to reconnect with his
late wife, but that did not really bring him any peace.
Before they set sail again, Slocum decorated Jenny's grave with
flowers and arranged to have a photographer take a picture
(14:12):
for her family. Then he and the children made their
way to Baltimore. The three youngest children stayed there with family,
while Victor stayed with his father aboard the ship when
he set sail again. Victor was actually the only one
of the Slocum children who went on to pursue a
career at sea. On February twenty eight six, Slocum got
married again, this time to his cousin Henrietta Elliott, who
(14:35):
was known as Hetty. He was forty two and she
was twenty four. This really seems to have been more
of a practical match than his marriage to Jenny, at
least from Slocum's point of view. She was a pretty
young seamstress from Boston, and he had four children, who
now ranged in age from four to fourteen. Slocum hope
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that in addition to being a mother to his children,
that Hetty could also be his companion at sea. This, however,
was not to be. When they set sail again, ben
Amar begged to be left behind. Jesse, who was the
only girls, stayed behind with the family on land, as
well as for Joshua, Hetty, Victor Garfield, and the crew.
(15:17):
The trips started with them sailing through an enormous gale
which damaged the ship, including the galley, and then for
some time afterward they could only eat cold food. This
voyage included being quarantined in Brazil, unable to deliver the
cargo they had with them because of a cholera outbreak there.
On top of all that, this crew included men who
(15:38):
had served their time in prison for everything from theft
to murder, and some of them hatched a plot to
kill the whole family and take over the ship. That
plot was foiled only because Hetty had been too anxious
to sleep the night they were going to carry it out,
and this led to a violent confrontation in which Joshua
killed one of the perpetrators. He was tried for murder
(16:01):
and acquitted because it had clearly been a case of
self defense. While Joshua was on trial, the Aquidneck went
on with its voyage under a temporary captain, and Hetty
and Garfield stayed on shore. When Slocum caught up with
the ship after his acquittal, port officials wanted to treat
the change in command like the sale of the ship,
and that would involve the crew all being paid, dismissed,
(16:23):
and replaced. Although they ultimately worked it out, the crew
had to spend an extra night in port. One of
them contracted smallpox and started showing symptoms after they had
set sail. This of course started an outbreak on board,
and while they tried to get back to shore to
seek medical help, they ran into a hurricane. Some of
(16:44):
the crew died, and the whole ship had to be
disinfected afterward. Hetty and Garfield rejoined the party after all
of this, and then in December of eight seven, the
Aquidneck hit a sand bar off the coast of Brazil
and was wrecked. Slow Him had never ensured the vessel,
possibly because insurance was just too expensive and it was
(17:05):
almost a total loss. They were rescued by a passing vessel,
and Joshua built a sort of lean too hut for
the family to live in while he built a new
boat from local materials and what he could salvage from
the aquid nick. The result was a vessel that he
described as a canoe, which was designed sort of like
a Chinese junk, and he christened it the Liberdad because
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they set sail for home on which was the day
the law went into effect that abolished slavery in Brazil.
That voyage home took fifty five days. They spent the
winter in Washington, d c. And got back to Massachusetts
in the spring of eighteen eighty nine. This wreck nearly
ruined Slocum financially. He sold the Liberdade to somebody to
(17:49):
donate to the Smithsonian, just to try to make a
little money, and then he did odd jobs around the
docks to try to make ends meet. He also wrote
his account of the whole journey, called The Age of
the liber Dodge, to try to make some money. Petty,
who was pretty much done with long distance sea voyages
after this, suggested that maybe he might become a farmer.
(18:11):
But all Slocum really wanted to do was captain a
sailing ship. In one Captain Ebenezer Pierce offered Slocum a
boat which, in his words quote, wants some repairs. That
boat was an old oyster sloop called the Spray, which
was sitting derelict in an empty lot. It was in
such poor condition that when Slocum started rebuilding it, passers
(18:34):
by asked if he was breaking it up. His work
on this project took thirteen months, and in the end
he had a thirty six ft nine inch that's about
eleven point one meters sloop that was entirely his own.
Making money with it continued to be a challenge, though,
especially considering that the Panic of eighteen three started shortly
(18:54):
after he was finished. Late that year, he accepted the
command of a warship called the Destroyer, which was part
of a US mercenary fleet that was sent to Brazil
to deal with the mutiny within the Brazilian navy. This
voyage did not go very well. The ship leaked and
was beset by all kinds of other problems, and then
when they got there, Brazilian President Floriano Pachoto, who had
(19:18):
asked for the aid in the first place, did not
want to pay for it. The destroyer was later sunk,
and in Slocum wrote Voyage of the Destroyer about this
whole not amazing experience. It was around this time that
Slocum started thinking maybe he could make money by taking
a solo voyage around the world and writing about it.
(19:39):
No one had ever done that before, at least that
we know of, and we're gonna talk more about this
idea after we first pause for a sponsor break. Joshua
Slocum's solo voyage around the world started from East Boston
in April of five. Hetty came to the dock to
(20:02):
say goodbye. She brought Joshua's son Garfield and daughter Jesse
with her. We really don't know Hetty's feelings on all
of this, or about her husband in general at this point,
but it was clear that she did not want to
join Joshua on any kind of long sea voyage ever. Again.
Garfield was the youngest of Joshua's children at this point.
(20:23):
He was fourteen, and by that age his oldest brother, Victor,
had been working alongside their father at sea, So it's
likely that Joshua just didn't think his children really needed
them around that much. Anymore. At first, Slocum turned northward,
heading to Nova Scotia, checking the seams and repairing some
damage along the way. He also bought a tin clock
(20:44):
to use in place of a chronometer. He did have
a chronometer, but it hadn't been used in a while,
and it was going to cost fifteen fifteen dollars to
have it cleaned and rated. As we've talked about on
our previous episode called the Discovery of Longitude, regular clocks
tended to lose their accuracy at sea, but Slocum was
(21:05):
using this little tin clock in conjunction with other navigational methods,
including lunar navigation. But he was very good at um.
He he was deeply annoyed by multiple small, small in
quotation marks. I mean it's in a long time ago.
That was worth a lot more money. But like he
was very annoyed by like various expenses that it was
going to take, but that fifteen dollars for the chronometer,
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fifteen fifteen dollars. Slocum crossed the Atlantic, and then after
setting sail again from Whorta, Portugal, he was stricken with
what might have been food poisoning. He mentioned eating some
plums and white cheese that had been given to him
by the American consul general. While he was there, he
had terrible cramps, and he's he hallucinated one of Christopher
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Columbus's crew, the pilot of the Pinta, who assured Slocum
that he would keep the spray on a steady course.
I love that story. Slocum did recover, but not long
afterward he learned that the Mediterranean Sea was having a
problem with pirates, so rather than risking it, he turned
around and he went back across the Atlantic to circle
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the world in the other direction instead. I also love
the idea that like just going back across an entire
ocean was gonna be safer than going through the Mediterranean
and its pirate problem. Although he made stops along the way,
some of them quite lengthy, Slocum's time at sea was
really lonely, and that loneliness often wore on him. To
(22:37):
keep himself company, he had conversations with the moon, and
he gave orders to an imaginary crew that then he
would carry out himself. He also sang, and he read
a lot. He brought a sizeable library with him on board,
including works by Longfellow, Shakespeare, and Darwin. Suddenly his life
sounds like a Tom Waits song. To me, it's the
(23:00):
conversations with the Moon. After crossing the Atlantic, Slocum turned
south down the coast of South America, stopping in Buenos
Aires to visit Jenny's grave before making his way through
the Magellan Straits. That was, even in the best of circumstances,
a treacherous route, but he was in a very small
boat powered only by sale, which meant there was a
(23:20):
real risk of being blown backward, something that caused him
to have to sail back through the same territory. He
also had several encounters with the indigenous Fuegian people, who
he describes repeatedly in his writing as savages. They were
known to attack and plunder ships, and Slocum had been
advised to take somebody with him through the Straits. For
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this reason, he did not really want to do that, though,
since the whole point was to be able to say
he had done the whole journey alone. He did talk
to some potential shipmates, but he ultimately did go by himself.
So when he was in Fuegian territory, he made a
dummy out of his clothes so that it would look
from a distance like someone else was aboard. He also
(24:03):
scattered carpet tax across the deck, which had been given
to him by another captain for that purpose while he
was sleeping. In the end, he thwarted at least two
attempted invasions of the ship, and he made it through
the Magellan straight. It took him sixty two days. It's
when you look at a map, it's easy to imagine
that you would just sort of zips it through there. Nope,
(24:26):
it was like, did you go two ft per day? Yeah,
when he got blown backward, he got blown a significant
distance like that. You can read his whole account of
it is in the public domain at this point, so
like you can read it in his first person account.
But yeah, I did not imagine it taking that long
to get through there until I read this once he
was in the Pacific. Slocum's adventures included visiting the island
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that likely served as the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, and
in Samoa. In April of eight he spent several days
with Robert Louis Stevenson's widow, Fanny. She gave him her
late husband's sailing directories. He also spent ten months in
Australia giving lectures and doing some repair work on the spray.
(25:09):
Once he was back in the Atlantic Ocean, he visited
the island of St. Helena, where someone gave him a goat.
That's a goat with a g He didn't really want
to have animals on board, but he also didn't want
to be rude. But then the goat eight not only
Slocum's hat but also one of his nautical charts, so
he gave it away. At his next opportunity, on May
(25:31):
eighth of eight, Slocum crossed his previous path across the Atlantic.
At that point he had technically become the first person
known to circumnavigate the globe alone, but he didn't think
that he was really done until he was back in
the United States. He got to Newport, Rhode Island, on
June eighteen ninety eight, and then back to fair Haven,
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Massachusetts on July three. He had traveled forty six thousand
miles or seventy four thousand kilometers in US over three
years two months, and at first people did not really
believe that he had done it. The whole idea was
still considered to be absurd and impossible, but he had
meticulously kept logs, and he had papers stamped by port
(26:15):
officials and other authorities all over the world. Unlike some
of the other stories we talked about in the show,
his story and the evidence he had all matched up. Yeah.
He used those logs to write Sailing Alone Around the World,
which was published serially in Century Illustrated monthly starting in
September of eight Then it came out as a book
(26:39):
in March of nineteen hundred. Critic Van Wyck Brooks called
it quote a nautical equivalent of Throw's account of his
life in the hut at Walden, and it became very popular.
You can read several papers of people analyzing whether they
actually think it's fair to compare this book to Walden,
(26:59):
but that was Fanwick Books's opinion. Because of the success
of this book, Slocum got to meet Mark Twain, who's
writing he greatly admired in e He also met President
Theodore Roosevelt, who said of the book, quote, I entirely
sympathize with your feeling of delight in the sheer, loneliness
and vastness of the ocean. It was just my feeling
(27:21):
in the wilderness of the West, Slocum started delivering lectures
about his voyage, and along with his book sales, he
was able to get on pretty good financial footing. He
tried to launch a venture that he called the College Ship,
which was a proposed two year voyage around the world
where students would learn seamanship and engineering while also getting
a liberal arts education. That sounds amazing, but there were
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not enough interested students and professors to get that off
the ground though. In nine o one, Slocum took the
Spray up the Erie Canal for the Pan American Exposition
in Buffalo. He sold his books from on board, along
with the more inexpanded of publication called Sloop Spray Souvenir,
which Hetty had compiled. Stan Grayson, whose biography we mentioned earlier,
(28:07):
suggests that this was a little come upance for Hetty,
whose sisters had been really down on Joshua for their
entire relationship. Right under her name, it had three favorable
statements about her husband, the last being from Sir Edwin Arnold,
who said, quote the adventure is by far the most courageous, sustained,
and successful enterprise of the kind ever undertaken by mortal man.
(28:32):
All of this success allowed Slocum to buy a home
on land for the first time in nineteen o two.
That was a little farm on Martha's vineyard. The idea
that he might be a farmer, as Hetty suggested so
many years before, did not really last, though. In nineteen
o five Slocum started sailing to the Caribbean for the winter. Hetty,
(28:52):
having already made her thoughts clear on sea voyages, spent
the winters in East Boston. As someone who lives in Massachusetts,
This to me is so indicative of how much she was, like, No,
I am never getting on a boat of that sort again,
because she would rather have Boston winter than Caribbean winter.
(29:12):
Give me that boat, Give me that boat, baby. So
by this point Slocum was in his sixties, and he
seems to have been starting to decline. People who visited
him aboard the spray noticed that it wasn't as clean
or well maintained anymore. Slocum himself seemed to be increasingly
eccentric and unkempt. People were describing him with words like
(29:35):
dippy and cracked. More than one person who visited the
spray noticed that he had neglected to button his pants
after returning from the Caribbean in nineteen o six, Slocum
stopped in Riverton, New Jersey. A twelve year old girl
visited the spray with a friend and then told her
father she had, in the words of a newspaper quote,
(29:56):
suffered indignities there. The girl's father told the author at ease,
and Slocum was charged with rape. However, a doctor examined
this girl and found no evidence that she had been
physically harmed, and soon her father was walking back the accusation.
He wrote a letter describing the news coverage that was
calling it an assault as quote appearing to misstate the facts.
(30:20):
The letter went on to say that, to his and
his wife's extreme relief, in his words, after talking to
their daughter and having her examined by a doctor, she
was agitated, but not physically harmed. Slocum spent forty two
days in jail, after which he had a hearing before
a judge. The charge was reduced to indecent assault, and
(30:41):
the judge told him quote upon the request of the family,
I can deal leniently with you. Slocum said he had
no memory of the incident and that if anything had happened,
it must have been during some kind of quote mental lapse.
He entered a plea of no contest and was released
without further penalty, forbidden from ever coming to Riverton again. Yeah,
(31:03):
my read on all of this is that he did
not intentionally do anything, but simultaneously she was genuinely traumatized,
just like based on his pattern of behavior at the time.
Um he left aboard the spray the next day, and
then he continued on with his planned itinerary from before
he had been arrested, and that involved delivering rare orchids
(31:26):
to President Teddy Roosevelt. The president's son Archibald described the
spray as decrepit and quote the most incredibly dirty craft
I have ever seen. In November of nineteen o eight,
or possibly nineteen o nine, Slocum left Martha's Vineyard bound
for the Caribbean. He was never seen again. There were, however,
(31:48):
some unconfirmed sightings of him around the Caribbean, including one
sea captain who reportedly described a collision with a small
vessel off the coast of Venezuela. But what happened to
him is really a mystery. He was legally declared dead
in ninety four for all practical purposes. Joshua and Hetty
had been separated for a few years by the time
(32:09):
of his disappearance. She remarried in Her next husband died
in ninety nine, and then she died in nineteen fifty two.
Sailing Alone around the World has remained in print for
decades since it was first published, and today it is,
as Tracy mentioned, in the public domain. In addition to
its popularity at the time, it also inspired other writers,
(32:31):
including Jack London, who bought his own thirty eight foot
sloop in nineteen o three and named it the Spray.
He wrote part of The Sea Wolf while aboard the Spray,
and later on went on a longer voyage that he
documented in The Cruise of the Snark. And we will
end the episode with a quote from Slocum quote, I
once knew a writer who, after saying beautiful things about
(32:53):
the sea, passed through a Pacific hurricane and became a
changed man. But where after all would be the poetry
of the sea were there no wild waves? That's Joshua Slocum.
I love his story. Obviously it's not all fun. It's
not all fun, but it's a really engaging story. Even
(33:14):
the difficult parts are really interesting and make you think, Yeah,
but mostly I love his first wife. Yeah, Jenny. Jenny
is where it's at. Man. Jenny seems great. UM. And
it's like from all the accounts that we have, it
really does seem like that they were just deeply in
love with each other immediately. She was on board with being,
(33:36):
you know, on on the boat with him all the time. UM.
And that he just he never really totally recovered after
her death. UM. I have a listener mail from Marcus.
Bring it on. It's about Canning. Marcus says, Hi, Tracy
and Holly. I'm hoping this was the right way to
contact you both to give a shout out to your podcasts.
(33:58):
I discovered stuff you mis in history class at the
beginning of the of last year, and it's been wonderful
to hear you both talk about one of my favorite
subjects on my morning commutes. I recently listened to the
Canning episode and it made me remember your previous episode
on home economics, which are two episodes I could really
relate to. You both had mentioned the cooperative extension programs,
which I work for. I'm gonna skip some of the
(34:21):
detail there because privacy, family and consumer science agents are
the successors to what was called the home demonstration or
home economics agents use extension agents. A majority of amazing
women would educate families on canning and preserving grown produce
and meats, how to keep an organized home, canning, the
(34:41):
weaving of furniture, and other cool things. Today, FCS agents
mostly focused on health and wellness, food and nutrition, financial
resource management, and food safety, although programs may differ upon
states and counties to meet community needs. My focus has
been on teaching good food safety courses to food service employees,
doing fun cooking classes with adults and kids, and still
(35:02):
preserving an important legacy of canning and teaching the prevention
of spoilage, micro organisms and harmful pathogens occurring in unsafe
canning methods like Custridian bodulinum or batuli is um. Canning
was also a skill my grandma passed down to me
and now I use in my job and I enjoy
getting too teach folks all this amazing material within family
(35:22):
and consumer sciences. Thank you for the wonderful podcast as always,
and shout out to Cooperative Extension. Looking forward to future episodes.
And I also attached some photos of canning peach pickles
for a video our county website this summer did, which
we're absolutely amazing. Take care, Tracy and Holly Marcus. Thank
you Marcus for this email and these pictures. Those do
(35:44):
look like some delicious peach pickles. UM, I am. I
don't know what. I think. I talked in the behind
the scenes on one of those episodes about taking classes
that are like agricultural extension service, UM. And the funny
thing is, I'm sure they offered classes that we're cooking related,
but the ones that I remember the most were things
(36:05):
that were about craft and sewing and stuff. So anyway,
thank you again Marcus for that email. If you would
like to write to us, which yes Marcus did by
the correct way, it's too email History Podcast at i
heeart radio dot com. That is the best way to
reach us. UM. We are on Facebook and Twitter and
Pinterest and Instagram. Our name there is all missed in History,
(36:28):
but email is the thing we're most likely to actually see.
And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast
and I heart radio app and anywhere else to get
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, from I
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
(36:51):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Bee Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I think
some themes have developed in our podcast over the last
few months, including travel and solitude because it's and we're
(00:25):
still in the middle of this pandemic that's keeping a
lot of us home and away from most other people.
So today we're continuing on with that theme. We have
Joshua Slocum, who was the first person known to sail
around the world alone, so you know, he has some
some things in common with some other folks we've talked
about recently. Unlike lighthouse keeper Ida Lewis, he did not
(00:47):
always enjoy that solitude, and also, unlike cyclist Annie Londonderry,
he probably did actually do the thing that he became
famous for. To be clear, he may. Entity has a
long history of taking ocean voyages in small vessels, and
the biggest example is Polynesian wayfinding, which goes back thousands
(01:09):
of years and uses celestial bodies, ocean swells, birds and
sea life, and other observations to navigate just immense distances
without instruments. The Polynesian Voyaging Society has been reviving and
preserving those methods since the nineteen seventies, including taking sea
voyages and canoes that are between sixty and seventy feet
(01:30):
or eighteen to twenty one long. Those have a crew
of twelve to sixteen people, so they are not very
big today. Of course, there are also round the world
yacht races, and single handed sailing has just become its
own whole thing. But when Joshua's locum was living the
idea that a person would or even could sail around
(01:52):
the world in a small boat alone, basically for fun,
it was just baffling. I did want to note up
at the top that towards the end of this episode
will have a brief discussion of a sexual assault allegation,
so for background. Joshua Slocum was born on February four
to Sarah and John Slocum. John was a farmer and
(02:13):
Sarah was the daughter of a lighthousekeeper. Joshua was their
fifth child of eleven, nine of whom survived childhood for
reasons that are not entirely clear. At several points during
his life, Slocum claimed to have been born in various
places in Massachusetts. This was simply not true. He was
actually born in Nova Scotia. For the first few years
(02:36):
of Joshua's life, the family lived on a farm in
Mount Hanley, and then when he was eight, they moved
out to Briar Island and John opened a boot shop there.
When Joshua was about twelve, John pulled him out of
school to put him to work pegging boots. This was
really not an unusual age for a working class boy
to leave school, but Joshua did not want to peg boots.
(02:59):
He was just fascinated by the sea. The reason for
the move to Briar Island was probably to be closer
to Sarah Slocum's family. Her health is generally described as frail,
As is so often the case, we don't really have
much detail beyond that several people did describe her as
being worn out from having so many children so close together,
(03:21):
something that people also said about her own mother. Sarah
died in eighteen sixty at the age of forty six,
less than two weeks after giving birth to her last child.
Joshua was sixteen years old when she died. Joshua's relationship
with his father had never been particularly smooth, He told
his friends a story about making a model ship in secret,
(03:44):
which his father destroyed when he found it, and then
gave Joshua what was, in his words, a thrashing. At
the age of fourteen, Joshua ran away from home to
be a cook on a ship, but in his words,
the crew quote mutinied at the appearance of my first
stuff and chucked me out before I had a chance
to shine as a culinary artist. Although this first attempt
(04:05):
to leave home didn't really last. After his mother's death,
Joshua left again. He did odd jobs before joining the
crew of a merchant vessel. Slocum worked his way up
through the ranks on various ships. On April eighteen sixty four,
he was issued a Seaman's Protection certificate. This was a
document that had been created in the eighteenth century to
(04:26):
try to protect American sailors from being pressed into service
for the British. It contained a sailor's vital information and
also served as proof of citizenship. It's not entirely clear
whether Slocum claimed to have been born in the United
States in order to get one of these certificates, or
if he had actually become a citizen the process was
(04:46):
just a lot less formal and involved then than it
is today. As all of this was going on, he
also changed the spelling of his last name from Slocum,
ending in b e two Slocum s l O c
U M. Slocum reached the rank of captain by the
age of five. Had he sent most of his money
back home to try to help his family. He actually
(05:08):
sent so much of his pay that sometimes he had
to go borrow money to outfit himself for his next voyage.
On one of these voyages, he became seriously ill with
something that he described as a fever. This might have
been malaria, and it seemed to recur at several points
during his life. Slocum's career as a captain took him
all over the world, particularly around the Pacific Ocean, on merchant,
(05:31):
cargo and fishing vessels. On January eighteen seventy one, he
married Virginia Albertina Walker known as Jenny, in Sydney, Australia.
Jenny was an American from New York, and it seems
as though her family had moved to Australia during the
gold rushes. It's not clear exactly when or how Joshua
and Jenny met, but less than a month after he
(05:53):
arrived in Australia, they were married. She had not turned
twenty one yet, so she had to have a certificate
that gave her father's consent for her to marry. Even
though one of these certificates was issued, it seems like
the couple were so eager to get married that their
wedding wound up looking almost like an elopement. Her father
only saw the end of the ceremony because he heard
(06:15):
what was happening and he ran to the church and
got there just before it was over. Joshua and Jenny's
relationship seems to have been one of love at first sight,
and biographers have described them as soul mates. She went
to see with him, which was an incredibly rough environment.
His accounts describe her backing him up against mutineers armed
(06:36):
with pistols or revolvers, also using those same weapons to
kill sharks. Jinny sounds amazing he does. Aside from all that,
in general, a ship could be a violent place. As
we've talked about on the show before, social systems and
prejudices that were entrenched on land were often a lot
(06:56):
more relaxed at sea, So for example, crews were often
racially integrated, and people of color could rise to a
higher rank than they might have been able to do
in other settings. At the same time, it was inherently
dangerous work, and sailors had very few rights and protections.
Corporal punishment was accepted as a way to discipline the crew.
(07:17):
In the nineteenth century. Many sailors had been coerced or
forced into the job, or they just had no other choice,
and once they became sailors, they got into a cycle
of spending a stretch of time at sea, then returning
to port, where unscrupulous landlords and tavern owners robbed them
of their money, leaving them no other choice but to
go to sea again. Slocum's reputation within this system is
(07:41):
described as somewhere on a spectrum between tough but fair
and abusive and tyrannical, depending on whose account you read.
Stan Grayson, who's the author of the biography A Man
for All Oceans, suggest that Slocum's biggest issue and all
of this, might have been not doing more to rein
in his ship its cruelest mates. The mates were the
(08:02):
ones who were actually tasked with maintaining discipline, but tempering
a mate's behavior could also be really challenging, since anything
a captain might do on that front ran the risk
of undermining the mates authority with the crew. Regardless, Slocum
face charges on several occasions for alleged mistreatment of his crew.
(08:22):
One of these incidents happened upon arriving in San Francisco
after his very first voyage with his wife on board.
He was accused of beating a stowaway and convicted at
a trial that he did not attend because it was
held after he had already set sail again bound for Alaska.
These kinds of trials were quite common, though, and sometimes
they stemmed from totally unfounded charges. During his career at See,
(08:46):
Slocum was convicted in some cases and acquitted in others.
We should also note that as I was researching this,
the account that came down farthest on the cruel and
tyrannical end of the spectrum cited ocams having left a
man in irons for fifty three days as an example,
But that account omitted the part where the man in
(09:08):
question had forged documents to cover up his criminal path
so that he could come on as the ship second mate.
And then he had planned a mutiny. He had been
left in irons to restrain him until they could get
to a port. Nevertheless, this also went to court, and
the court found for the mate, who was named Henry Slater,
and they ordered Slocum to pay a fine of five dollars.
(09:31):
Joshua and Jenny actually raised a family in the middle
of all this, and we're going to talk more about
that after we have a quick sponsor break. For several years,
whether he was working on someone else's ship or one
of his own, Joshua Slocum sailed with his whole family
(09:52):
on board with him, and that was something that attracted
some attention, and the Boston Journal in one Captain John
You recounted an earlier encounter with them. Quote, one day
a bark was seen sailing up the bay, a queer
old craft for modern sailors to look at. And what
was stranger still, she flew the American flag. Curiosity was
(10:14):
at work at once to find what she could be for.
As she glided by, there might also be seen a
lady's son hat and children's curly hair just above the
old fashioned bulwarks. The captain and his bark hailed from
San Francisco. He carried his wife and three children. He
was a roving genius in every respect. The bark in
(10:36):
this story was the amethyst which Slocum bought in eighteen
seventy eight. Um and Drew saw them when they were
arriving in Manila. The Slocum family ultimately included seven children,
four of whom survived infancy. They were Victor born in
eighteen seventy two, Benjamin Amar born in eighteen seventy three,
Jesse Helena born in eighteen seventy five, and James Garfield
(11:00):
old and known just as Garfield, born in eighty one.
Although she did have her sister on board as a
companion at some points, for many of these deliveries, Jenny
gave birth on a ship full of men without a midwife,
a doctor, or even another woman on board as an attendant.
Jenny was both mother and teacher to the children. This
(11:21):
included having Joshua nailing upright piano to the ship's deck
so she could teach the music, and on Sundays she
saw to it that they had Sunday school Once again.
Jenny sounds amazing like I wish I had her fortitude.
By the eighteen eighties, though it was becoming harder for
(11:41):
Slocum to find work. He had developed a reputation for
being an exceptional navigator and trader, but his experience and
his passion were specifically in sailing ships, and steamships were
starting to take over. In eighteen eighty one, Slocum bought
a share in the Northern Light, which was powered by
sale but also had a small steam engine on board
(12:04):
that could be used for things like lifting cargo and
pumping water. Slocum liked the labor saving aspects of this engine,
but he stridently resisted the idea of becoming the captain
of a full on steamship. In eighteen eighty three, aboard
the Northern Light, the family saw the volcano Krakatoa on
what they thought was a full eruption, but they were
(12:25):
a few days away by the time the eruption really peaked.
Although they were crossing the Indian Ocean at that point,
they weren't affected by the tsunamis that followed. They did
face a major storm as they arrived at the Cape
of Good Hope, but it wasn't until they reached port
that they realized that they had narrowly avoided being killed
by the volcano. In eighteen eighty four, Joshua Slocum sold
(12:47):
his share in the Northern Light and bought a hundred
and eighty three ft or forty two meter vessel called
the Aquidneck. He wanted to have a boat of his
own and to use it to provide both a home
and an income for him self and the family. But
this is really where things started to just go wrong
for him. It seems like he bought this boat and
then he just could not catch a break for a
(13:08):
long time afterward. On July twenty five of that year,
Jenny died suddenly while they were docked at Buenos Aires.
The cause of her death is unclear, but her children
described her as having had a weak heart. Joshua arranged
to have Jenny's body buried in an English cemetery in
Buenos Aires. He also bought a headstone, which he had
(13:28):
engraved with Virginia, wife of Captain Joshua Slocum, died July four,
age thirty five years. Based on the timeline of when
they got married, she was probably actually thirty four, But
I'm I'm not gonna disagreeving man for his engraving choices.
Her children said that her pet canary Pete, did not
(13:50):
sing for a long time after her death, and they
described their father as being like a boat with a
broken rudder. He never really recovered, and he turned to
the spirit Toualism movement to try to reconnect with his
late wife, but that did not really bring him any peace.
Before they set sail again, Slocum decorated Jenny's grave with
flowers and arranged to have a photographer take a picture
(14:12):
for her family. Then he and the children made their
way to Baltimore. The three youngest children stayed there with family,
while Victor stayed with his father aboard the ship when
he set sail again. Victor was actually the only one
of the Slocum children who went on to pursue a
career at sea. On February twenty eight six, Slocum got
married again, this time to his cousin Henrietta Elliott, who
(14:35):
was known as Hetty. He was forty two and she
was twenty four. This really seems to have been more
of a practical match than his marriage to Jenny, at
least from Slocum's point of view. She was a pretty
young seamstress from Boston, and he had four children, who
now ranged in age from four to fourteen. Slocum hope
(14:55):
that in addition to being a mother to his children,
that Hetty could also be his companion at sea. This, however,
was not to be. When they set sail again, ben
Amar begged to be left behind. Jesse, who was the
only girls, stayed behind with the family on land, as
well as for Joshua, Hetty, Victor Garfield, and the crew.
(15:17):
The trips started with them sailing through an enormous gale
which damaged the ship, including the galley, and then for
some time afterward they could only eat cold food. This
voyage included being quarantined in Brazil, unable to deliver the
cargo they had with them because of a cholera outbreak there.
On top of all that, this crew included men who
(15:38):
had served their time in prison for everything from theft
to murder, and some of them hatched a plot to
kill the whole family and take over the ship. That
plot was foiled only because Hetty had been too anxious
to sleep the night they were going to carry it out,
and this led to a violent confrontation in which Joshua
killed one of the perpetrators. He was tried for murder
(16:01):
and acquitted because it had clearly been a case of
self defense. While Joshua was on trial, the Aquidneck went
on with its voyage under a temporary captain, and Hetty
and Garfield stayed on shore. When Slocum caught up with
the ship after his acquittal, port officials wanted to treat
the change in command like the sale of the ship,
and that would involve the crew all being paid, dismissed,
(16:23):
and replaced. Although they ultimately worked it out, the crew
had to spend an extra night in port. One of
them contracted smallpox and started showing symptoms after they had
set sail. This of course started an outbreak on board,
and while they tried to get back to shore to
seek medical help, they ran into a hurricane. Some of
(16:44):
the crew died, and the whole ship had to be
disinfected afterward. Hetty and Garfield rejoined the party after all
of this, and then in December of eight seven, the
Aquidneck hit a sand bar off the coast of Brazil
and was wrecked. Slow Him had never ensured the vessel,
possibly because insurance was just too expensive and it was
(17:05):
almost a total loss. They were rescued by a passing vessel,
and Joshua built a sort of lean too hut for
the family to live in while he built a new
boat from local materials and what he could salvage from
the aquid nick. The result was a vessel that he
described as a canoe, which was designed sort of like
a Chinese junk, and he christened it the Liberdad because
(17:26):
they set sail for home on which was the day
the law went into effect that abolished slavery in Brazil.
That voyage home took fifty five days. They spent the
winter in Washington, d c. And got back to Massachusetts
in the spring of eighteen eighty nine. This wreck nearly
ruined Slocum financially. He sold the Liberdade to somebody to
(17:49):
donate to the Smithsonian, just to try to make a
little money, and then he did odd jobs around the
docks to try to make ends meet. He also wrote
his account of the whole journey, called The Age of
the liber Dodge, to try to make some money. Petty,
who was pretty much done with long distance sea voyages
after this, suggested that maybe he might become a farmer.
(18:11):
But all Slocum really wanted to do was captain a
sailing ship. In one Captain Ebenezer Pierce offered Slocum a
boat which, in his words quote, wants some repairs. That
boat was an old oyster sloop called the Spray, which
was sitting derelict in an empty lot. It was in
such poor condition that when Slocum started rebuilding it, passers
(18:34):
by asked if he was breaking it up. His work
on this project took thirteen months, and in the end
he had a thirty six ft nine inch that's about
eleven point one meters sloop that was entirely his own.
Making money with it continued to be a challenge, though,
especially considering that the Panic of eighteen three started shortly
(18:54):
after he was finished. Late that year, he accepted the
command of a warship called the Destroyer, which was part
of a US mercenary fleet that was sent to Brazil
to deal with the mutiny within the Brazilian navy. This
voyage did not go very well. The ship leaked and
was beset by all kinds of other problems, and then
when they got there, Brazilian President Floriano Pachoto, who had
(19:18):
asked for the aid in the first place, did not
want to pay for it. The destroyer was later sunk,
and in Slocum wrote Voyage of the Destroyer about this
whole not amazing experience. It was around this time that
Slocum started thinking maybe he could make money by taking
a solo voyage around the world and writing about it.
(19:39):
No one had ever done that before, at least that
we know of, and we're gonna talk more about this
idea after we first pause for a sponsor break. Joshua
Slocum's solo voyage around the world started from East Boston
in April of five. Hetty came to the dock to
(20:02):
say goodbye. She brought Joshua's son Garfield and daughter Jesse
with her. We really don't know Hetty's feelings on all
of this, or about her husband in general at this point,
but it was clear that she did not want to
join Joshua on any kind of long sea voyage ever. Again.
Garfield was the youngest of Joshua's children at this point.
(20:23):
He was fourteen, and by that age his oldest brother, Victor,
had been working alongside their father at sea, So it's
likely that Joshua just didn't think his children really needed
them around that much. Anymore. At first, Slocum turned northward,
heading to Nova Scotia, checking the seams and repairing some
damage along the way. He also bought a tin clock
(20:44):
to use in place of a chronometer. He did have
a chronometer, but it hadn't been used in a while,
and it was going to cost fifteen fifteen dollars to
have it cleaned and rated. As we've talked about on
our previous episode called the Discovery of Longitude, regular clocks
tended to lose their accuracy at sea, but Slocum was
(21:05):
using this little tin clock in conjunction with other navigational methods,
including lunar navigation. But he was very good at um.
He he was deeply annoyed by multiple small, small in
quotation marks. I mean it's in a long time ago.
That was worth a lot more money. But like he
was very annoyed by like various expenses that it was
going to take, but that fifteen dollars for the chronometer,
(21:28):
fifteen fifteen dollars. Slocum crossed the Atlantic, and then after
setting sail again from Whorta, Portugal, he was stricken with
what might have been food poisoning. He mentioned eating some
plums and white cheese that had been given to him
by the American consul general. While he was there, he
had terrible cramps, and he's he hallucinated one of Christopher
(21:51):
Columbus's crew, the pilot of the Pinta, who assured Slocum
that he would keep the spray on a steady course.
I love that story. Slocum did recover, but not long
afterward he learned that the Mediterranean Sea was having a
problem with pirates, so rather than risking it, he turned
around and he went back across the Atlantic to circle
(22:14):
the world in the other direction instead. I also love
the idea that like just going back across an entire
ocean was gonna be safer than going through the Mediterranean
and its pirate problem. Although he made stops along the way,
some of them quite lengthy, Slocum's time at sea was
really lonely, and that loneliness often wore on him. To
(22:37):
keep himself company, he had conversations with the moon, and
he gave orders to an imaginary crew that then he
would carry out himself. He also sang, and he read
a lot. He brought a sizeable library with him on board,
including works by Longfellow, Shakespeare, and Darwin. Suddenly his life
sounds like a Tom Waits song. To me, it's the
(23:00):
conversations with the Moon. After crossing the Atlantic, Slocum turned
south down the coast of South America, stopping in Buenos
Aires to visit Jenny's grave before making his way through
the Magellan Straits. That was, even in the best of circumstances,
a treacherous route, but he was in a very small
boat powered only by sale, which meant there was a
(23:20):
real risk of being blown backward, something that caused him
to have to sail back through the same territory. He
also had several encounters with the indigenous Fuegian people, who
he describes repeatedly in his writing as savages. They were
known to attack and plunder ships, and Slocum had been
advised to take somebody with him through the Straits. For
(23:41):
this reason, he did not really want to do that, though,
since the whole point was to be able to say
he had done the whole journey alone. He did talk
to some potential shipmates, but he ultimately did go by himself.
So when he was in Fuegian territory, he made a
dummy out of his clothes so that it would look
from a distance like someone else was aboard. He also
(24:03):
scattered carpet tax across the deck, which had been given
to him by another captain for that purpose while he
was sleeping. In the end, he thwarted at least two
attempted invasions of the ship, and he made it through
the Magellan straight. It took him sixty two days. It's
when you look at a map, it's easy to imagine
that you would just sort of zips it through there. Nope,
(24:26):
it was like, did you go two ft per day? Yeah,
when he got blown backward, he got blown a significant
distance like that. You can read his whole account of
it is in the public domain at this point, so
like you can read it in his first person account.
But yeah, I did not imagine it taking that long
to get through there until I read this once he
was in the Pacific. Slocum's adventures included visiting the island
(24:49):
that likely served as the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, and
in Samoa. In April of eight he spent several days
with Robert Louis Stevenson's widow, Fanny. She gave him her
late husband's sailing directories. He also spent ten months in
Australia giving lectures and doing some repair work on the spray.
(25:09):
Once he was back in the Atlantic Ocean, he visited
the island of St. Helena, where someone gave him a goat.
That's a goat with a g He didn't really want
to have animals on board, but he also didn't want
to be rude. But then the goat eight not only
Slocum's hat but also one of his nautical charts, so
he gave it away. At his next opportunity, on May
(25:31):
eighth of eight, Slocum crossed his previous path across the Atlantic.
At that point he had technically become the first person
known to circumnavigate the globe alone, but he didn't think
that he was really done until he was back in
the United States. He got to Newport, Rhode Island, on
June eighteen ninety eight, and then back to fair Haven,
(25:52):
Massachusetts on July three. He had traveled forty six thousand
miles or seventy four thousand kilometers in US over three
years two months, and at first people did not really
believe that he had done it. The whole idea was
still considered to be absurd and impossible, but he had
meticulously kept logs, and he had papers stamped by port
(26:15):
officials and other authorities all over the world. Unlike some
of the other stories we talked about in the show,
his story and the evidence he had all matched up. Yeah.
He used those logs to write Sailing Alone Around the World,
which was published serially in Century Illustrated monthly starting in
September of eight Then it came out as a book
(26:39):
in March of nineteen hundred. Critic Van Wyck Brooks called
it quote a nautical equivalent of Throw's account of his
life in the hut at Walden, and it became very popular.
You can read several papers of people analyzing whether they
actually think it's fair to compare this book to Walden,
(26:59):
but that was Fanwick Books's opinion. Because of the success
of this book, Slocum got to meet Mark Twain, who's
writing he greatly admired in e He also met President
Theodore Roosevelt, who said of the book, quote, I entirely
sympathize with your feeling of delight in the sheer, loneliness
and vastness of the ocean. It was just my feeling
(27:21):
in the wilderness of the West, Slocum started delivering lectures
about his voyage, and along with his book sales, he
was able to get on pretty good financial footing. He
tried to launch a venture that he called the College Ship,
which was a proposed two year voyage around the world
where students would learn seamanship and engineering while also getting
a liberal arts education. That sounds amazing, but there were
(27:45):
not enough interested students and professors to get that off
the ground though. In nine o one, Slocum took the
Spray up the Erie Canal for the Pan American Exposition
in Buffalo. He sold his books from on board, along
with the more inexpanded of publication called Sloop Spray Souvenir,
which Hetty had compiled. Stan Grayson, whose biography we mentioned earlier,
(28:07):
suggests that this was a little come upance for Hetty,
whose sisters had been really down on Joshua for their
entire relationship. Right under her name, it had three favorable
statements about her husband, the last being from Sir Edwin Arnold,
who said, quote the adventure is by far the most courageous, sustained,
and successful enterprise of the kind ever undertaken by mortal man.
(28:32):
All of this success allowed Slocum to buy a home
on land for the first time in nineteen o two.
That was a little farm on Martha's vineyard. The idea
that he might be a farmer, as Hetty suggested so
many years before, did not really last, though. In nineteen
o five Slocum started sailing to the Caribbean for the winter. Hetty,
(28:52):
having already made her thoughts clear on sea voyages, spent
the winters in East Boston. As someone who lives in Massachusetts,
This to me is so indicative of how much she was, like, No,
I am never getting on a boat of that sort again,
because she would rather have Boston winter than Caribbean winter.
(29:12):
Give me that boat, Give me that boat, baby. So
by this point Slocum was in his sixties, and he
seems to have been starting to decline. People who visited
him aboard the spray noticed that it wasn't as clean
or well maintained anymore. Slocum himself seemed to be increasingly
eccentric and unkempt. People were describing him with words like
(29:35):
dippy and cracked. More than one person who visited the
spray noticed that he had neglected to button his pants
after returning from the Caribbean in nineteen o six, Slocum
stopped in Riverton, New Jersey. A twelve year old girl
visited the spray with a friend and then told her
father she had, in the words of a newspaper quote,
(29:56):
suffered indignities there. The girl's father told the author at ease,
and Slocum was charged with rape. However, a doctor examined
this girl and found no evidence that she had been
physically harmed, and soon her father was walking back the accusation.
He wrote a letter describing the news coverage that was
calling it an assault as quote appearing to misstate the facts.
(30:20):
The letter went on to say that, to his and
his wife's extreme relief, in his words, after talking to
their daughter and having her examined by a doctor, she
was agitated, but not physically harmed. Slocum spent forty two
days in jail, after which he had a hearing before
a judge. The charge was reduced to indecent assault, and
(30:41):
the judge told him quote upon the request of the family,
I can deal leniently with you. Slocum said he had
no memory of the incident and that if anything had happened,
it must have been during some kind of quote mental lapse.
He entered a plea of no contest and was released
without further penalty, forbidden from ever coming to Riverton again. Yeah,
(31:03):
my read on all of this is that he did
not intentionally do anything, but simultaneously she was genuinely traumatized,
just like based on his pattern of behavior at the time.
Um he left aboard the spray the next day, and
then he continued on with his planned itinerary from before
he had been arrested, and that involved delivering rare orchids
(31:26):
to President Teddy Roosevelt. The president's son Archibald described the
spray as decrepit and quote the most incredibly dirty craft
I have ever seen. In November of nineteen o eight,
or possibly nineteen o nine, Slocum left Martha's Vineyard bound
for the Caribbean. He was never seen again. There were, however,
(31:48):
some unconfirmed sightings of him around the Caribbean, including one
sea captain who reportedly described a collision with a small
vessel off the coast of Venezuela. But what happened to
him is really a mystery. He was legally declared dead
in ninety four for all practical purposes. Joshua and Hetty
had been separated for a few years by the time
(32:09):
of his disappearance. She remarried in Her next husband died
in ninety nine, and then she died in nineteen fifty two.
Sailing Alone around the World has remained in print for
decades since it was first published, and today it is,
as Tracy mentioned, in the public domain. In addition to
its popularity at the time, it also inspired other writers,
(32:31):
including Jack London, who bought his own thirty eight foot
sloop in nineteen o three and named it the Spray.
He wrote part of The Sea Wolf while aboard the Spray,
and later on went on a longer voyage that he
documented in The Cruise of the Snark. And we will
end the episode with a quote from Slocum quote, I
once knew a writer who, after saying beautiful things about
(32:53):
the sea, passed through a Pacific hurricane and became a
changed man. But where after all would be the poetry
of the sea were there no wild waves? That's Joshua Slocum.
I love his story. Obviously it's not all fun. It's
not all fun, but it's a really engaging story. Even
(33:14):
the difficult parts are really interesting and make you think, Yeah,
but mostly I love his first wife. Yeah, Jenny. Jenny
is where it's at. Man. Jenny seems great. UM. And
it's like from all the accounts that we have, it
really does seem like that they were just deeply in
love with each other immediately. She was on board with being,
(33:36):
you know, on on the boat with him all the time. UM.
And that he just he never really totally recovered after
her death. UM. I have a listener mail from Marcus.
Bring it on. It's about Canning. Marcus says, Hi, Tracy
and Holly. I'm hoping this was the right way to
contact you both to give a shout out to your podcasts.
(33:58):
I discovered stuff you mis in history class at the
beginning of the of last year, and it's been wonderful
to hear you both talk about one of my favorite
subjects on my morning commutes. I recently listened to the
Canning episode and it made me remember your previous episode
on home economics, which are two episodes I could really
relate to. You both had mentioned the cooperative extension programs,
which I work for. I'm gonna skip some of the
(34:21):
detail there because privacy, family and consumer science agents are
the successors to what was called the home demonstration or
home economics agents use extension agents. A majority of amazing
women would educate families on canning and preserving grown produce
and meats, how to keep an organized home, canning, the
(34:41):
weaving of furniture, and other cool things. Today, FCS agents
mostly focused on health and wellness, food and nutrition, financial
resource management, and food safety, although programs may differ upon
states and counties to meet community needs. My focus has
been on teaching good food safety courses to food service employees,
doing fun cooking classes with adults and kids, and still
(35:02):
preserving an important legacy of canning and teaching the prevention
of spoilage, micro organisms and harmful pathogens occurring in unsafe
canning methods like Custridian bodulinum or batuli is um. Canning
was also a skill my grandma passed down to me
and now I use in my job and I enjoy
getting too teach folks all this amazing material within family
(35:22):
and consumer sciences. Thank you for the wonderful podcast as always,
and shout out to Cooperative Extension. Looking forward to future episodes.
And I also attached some photos of canning peach pickles
for a video our county website this summer did, which
we're absolutely amazing. Take care, Tracy and Holly Marcus. Thank
you Marcus for this email and these pictures. Those do
(35:44):
look like some delicious peach pickles. UM, I am. I
don't know what. I think. I talked in the behind
the scenes on one of those episodes about taking classes
that are like agricultural extension service, UM. And the funny
thing is, I'm sure they offered classes that we're cooking related,
but the ones that I remember the most were things
(36:05):
that were about craft and sewing and stuff. So anyway,
thank you again Marcus for that email. If you would
like to write to us, which yes Marcus did by
the correct way, it's too email History Podcast at i
heeart radio dot com. That is the best way to
reach us. UM. We are on Facebook and Twitter and
Pinterest and Instagram. Our name there is all missed in History,
(36:28):
but email is the thing we're most likely to actually see.
And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast
and I heart radio app and anywhere else to get
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, from I
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
(36:51):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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