Joshua Slocum and the Spray
Joshua Slocum and Spray; it is impossible, even after 126 years, to approach them separately. You can’t think about, much less mention one of them without bringing up the other. However, I try to keep this space focused more on boats and less on people, so I will do my best to focus on Spray. If you have never heard of either one of them then sit back and swivel your ears forward—its an amazing story and part of our history.
Joshua Slocum was a Bluenose, meaning someone born in Nova Scotia, Canada; in his case in the month of February, 1844, one of eleven children. As an adult he often claimed to be a naturalized American citizen.
His father pulled him out of school at the end of third grade and put him to work making shoes. Poor, and poorly educated, he was a hard worker, a”doer”. He was also ambitious, intelligent and an avid reader. He was, in everything he did, self-taught. Josh loved the sea, was drawn to ships, so he soon found a birth as a ship’s cook. Over the years he worked his way up to being the Captain and part owner of the Northern Light, a ship-rigged “moderate” clipper that “combined good speed with greater carrying capacity”than extreme clippers.
I do not intend to go through Slocum’s entire life story, that has already been done by several others. It’s an impressive CV, filled with professional success as well as several examples of his ability to successfully recover from problems, failures, reverses that would have defeated other men.
In late 1870 Josh sailed his ship, the Constitution, to Sydney, Australia. His schedule allowed him just 26 days in port to discharge his cargo, find and load new cargo, make any necessary repairs and sail away to the next port. While in Sydney he met, courted and married Virginia Albertina Walker and then sailed away with her to the next port—on schedule.
They sailed together for the rest of their married life. They had 7 children, 4 of whom survived to adulthood. Joshua and “Jenny” were soul mates; described as such by one of their children years later. On one occasion Slocum was confronted on the deck of his ship by several disgruntled crewmen who threatened mutiny: until Jenny appeared on deck with a loaded revolve in each hand. What a woman!
Virginia Walker Slocum died in Buenos Aires, Argentina in July, 1844, aged 35 years. Their marriage lasted 13 years.
Stan Grayson, Slocum’s most recent biographer, states “For the rest of Slocum’s life Virginia’s absence would hover over him like a heart-breaking shadow.”
But it wasn’t in Slocum to give up. He continued working, sailing, crossing oceans, as best he could, now a widower with 4 young children, all the responsibilities of a ship’s captain and growing financial problems. Most of his biographers seem to agree that these problems were a reflection of much bigger economic problems in American shipping in the second half of the 19th century. The biggest of these was the growing acceptance of steamships as reliable, low cost bulk carriers. Steam brought an inevitable death to the Age of Sail.
Slocum was hard-nosed, he refused to surrender to steam power and pointedly refused to seek employment in steam ships. It appeared that his career in meaningful sail was over.
His final ship, a bark called the Aqidneck, was lost on a reef off the coast of Brazil in January, 1888, through no fault of Slocum’s. He responded to this “challenge” by building a small boat from scavenged materials. She was an eclectic junk-rigged sampan with bamboo sponsons of his own design. Her name was LIBERDADE, meaning “Liberty” in Portugese. With his second wife, Hattie and two of his sons as crew, they sailed Liberdade 5500 nautical miles home to New England, spending 55 days at sea.
Once back in New England where Hattie had family, Slocum was broke, saddened, disgusted and completely at “loose ends”. He was 44 years old and his life’s work as a sea-going ship captain had come to a halt.
SPRAY
Josh was adrift, with nothing to do and nowhere to go, which must have been especially mortifying fo the ambitious, widely traveled and creative pragmatist that he was. In 1890 Slocum ran across an old acquaintance, a retired whaling captain named Eben Pierce. Learning of Slocum’s plight Pierce offered to give him a”ship”. This turned out to be an elderly oyster sloop that Pierce had rescued after it had been left, abandoned, on the beach at Dartmouth. He had her moved to an empty lot in Fairhaven, MA where she sat, uncovered, on a crude cradle under a cherry tree for 5 more years.
The sloop’s name was Spray, a name now known across the globe to generations of sailors, armchair and otherwise. When Slocum went to see her for the first time he somehow intuited that Spray offered a hopeful solution for his situation, perhaps better described as an existential crisis in todays parlance. His ability to understand Spray as an opportunity rather than a bitterly ironic indicator of how low he had fallen is something that I find to be particularly important; a life lesson.
He accepted Pierce’s gift and in doing so became the owner, master and captain of Spray.
WHAT ONCE WAS OLD IS NEW AGAIN
In the interest of brevity I will outline what Spray was and what Slocum did to make her ready for the next stage in her life.
KEEL—Because she was an oyster sloop she was “designed” (a flexible concept for a vernacular work boat) for hard work in shoal waters, so she had a centerboard. Having decided how he wanted to use her Slocum took out the centerboard and its case, about 10 feet long, replacing them with a shallow exterior keel that deepened as it ran aft, terminating in a skeg below her transom. It was not large in terms of area but it was a wise decision that enabled Spray to “track” in a straight line going downwind, while still providing the lateral resistance previously supplied by the centerboard.It also offered significant protection when grounded or scraping over reefs. Spray was to prove herself as a tough old girl.
SAIL PLAN—Because she was an oyster sloop in Delaware Bay she used a “drudge” i.e., a dredge that was lowered overboard and pulled across the bottom and through the oyster reefs by the tide pulling the sloop. Once loaded up with several tons of oysters, heaped below and on deck as well, the sloops sailed as fast as they could in order to get the oysters to market and then come back for more.
Slocum gradually, during their time together, reduced her sail area, less still being enough for his plans and a lesser area being more easily hoisted, lowered and reefed by him working alone. This reduction in sail area required a variety of tools, handsaw to physically cut off lengths of the mast, boom, gaff and bowsprit. Next, he used a sailmaker’s leather “palm”, needles and waxed linen thread to resew and rope her sails after they had been cut down in size, by Slocum, in order to fit the shorter spars.He also used his experience, his eye, and his sense of proportion along with his brain and gnarled fingers, to get her sails and rigging just how he wanted them. Every finger a marlin spike!
FREEBOARD—Because she was an oyster sloop she had low freeboard; i.e., the height of her sides measured from her waterline vertically up to her deck. Low freeboard required less time and effort to get the dredge up on deck full of oysters, bottom debris and mud, so it could then be dumped onto the culling board and then dropped back overboard for another pass.
Just like the other oyster sloop characteristics mentioned above, what was useful and even necessary for dredging in semi-protected waters such as Delaware Bay was the polar opposite of what Slocum’s plan required. Josh raised her freeboard by installing bulwarks, low “walls” around the edge of her deck, the gunwales. This would be of great help in keeping water off her decks in the event of storm waves. The higher freeboard also, made Spray appear rather slab sided. See photo below.
Nonetheless, Josh was a pragmatist and knew what was required to make her what and how she needed to be for where they going.
You may now ask: What was his plan? What did he have in mind for Spray?
The simple answer is that he was planning to sail Spray around the world, single-handed, by himself, alone! Something that had never been before.
PLANKING—Slocum removed all of Spray’s old, weathered and splintered planks, along with all of their fastenings. He cut out her original keel, the center board version discussed above, but left her garboard planks and all, or most, of her frames. (The garboard planks are the two lowermost planks, one on each side of the keel). He made sure that they were well-fastened to the frames. By leaving the garboards, at least until the frames were secured by new planking, Josh carefully and artfully preserved Spray’s original underwater profile. He commented to a friend that he saw in Spray’s form “a perfect but very ancient model”. His efforts to preserve and restore that model are all the more impressive for having been done under difficult conditions, out in the weather, under the cherry tree.
Spray’s new planks were 1 1/2-inch thick Georgia pine, the thickness of a modern-day 2x4. Each plank was shaped with a plane, steamed in a steam box and then laboriously and carefully attached to each of the frames it crossed using muscle, wedges, and clamps, then fastened to each frame with copper rivets (not a common practice for work boats.) Wherever plank ends met, where they butted up against each other, butt blocks were placed as backing (a common practice). Planks and butt blocks were then secured to each other with bolts, washers and nuts. This level of strong fastening was unusual for a #38 foot long oyster sloop, an identity that Spray was about to leave behind.
BALLAST—Again, because she was an oyster sloop, a type of working sail intended to be loaded up, carry and discharge tons of oyster, Spray had no internal ballast. Because she originally had a center board she could not effectively carry external ballast. Slocum changed all this by adding several tons of cement poured down low, inside her hull, between the frames.
The cement was held in place, in case of a capsize, with upright braces attached to the lower faces of the deck beams.
THE STORY CONTINUES
It took Josh 13 months of hard work, mostly by himself, to get Spray ready for the next chapter in their partnership. He had very little money, a chronic condition in his life.He had been doing day work in a nearby shipyard, manual labor, in order to pay the bills and to buy the materials he needed. I don’t know where he lived but Im pretty sure it was small, cheap and close by to Spray.
The total cost of her restoration/re-build, was $553.62. No itemized list of expenses has ever been found.
Spray was launched on June 21, 1892; Eben Pierce attended the event. Slocum wrote that “ she set on the water like a swan.” The love affair had begun.
Life intervened, as it so often does. Josh needed to recover the money he had spent on the re-build; make some money to provide for Hattie and the children in his absence.He also needs time to gin up the contribution of supplies such as spare parts, cordage and anchors (3 of them), and a dinghy—all necessary to the voyage.
THE VOYAGE AROUND THE WORLD
Josh and Spray left Boston,MA in April, 1895. Josh was 51 years old. Spray’s age was anybody”s guess; I guess that she was at least 70 years old. Try to think of her not as being old, but being “of a certain age”, like a beautiful woman with some age on her, still strong and beautiful.
Slocum’s original plan was to circumnavigate the globe going West to East; Boston to the Mediterranean, down to the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, Australia, Polynesia, Cape Horn, then up to Brazil, the Caribbean and home to New England. This changed abruptly when he arrived at Gibraltar and was strongly advised to avoid the Red Sea due to rampant piracy. So he decided to go East to West, sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar and heading for Brazil, then South to Cape Horn. Big adventures down there in the Straits of Magellan.
Slocum’s decades at sea and especially his years as a captain and navigator are clearly reflected in where he chose to sail and how he sailed in Spray. Josh was a “square rig guy”; he knew all the ports, the currents and the prevailing winds—on a global scale. He had personal experience with the fact that seasons and winds, in the Southern Hemisphere are the reverse of the seasons and many of the winds in the Northern Hemisphere. (Yes, kids, that does mean that Christmas in Chile, South Africa and Australia is in the Summer, called the Austral Summer.)
Crossing the Pacific Ocean Slocum stopped for a few days in Samoa to pay a courtesy call on the widow of Robert Louis Stevenson. When he departed Stevenson’s widow gave him an especially meaningful gift, a bound set of Sailing Directions to the Arafura Sea that had belonged to RLS himself.
On to Australia, then West through the Arafura Sea, present day Indonesia to starboard. It was here that Spray’s sailing performance was once again impressively demonstrated. She was on course for the Keeling Cocos islands a passage of 2700 nautical miles that Spray made in 23 days. In those 23 days Slocum only spent 3 hours at her helm, manually steering with her wheel. Her average daily runs of 117 nautical miles were enabled by a simple self-steering set-up made by Slocum. No moving parts.
The facts of time, distance run and speed-all happily recorded and reported by Slocum provide more proof of Spray’s ability to track like an arrow when sailing off the wind, i.e. with the wind astern. That ability had been recognized by Slocum when he took such great care to not disturb her original garboard planks, thereby preserving her original underwater profile. That profile had been imagined and built by the unknown shipwright who had built Spray,—almost certainly without plans drawn by a naval architect—in the early years of the 19th century.
Spray sailed on from the Keeling Cocos to Cape Town, Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, the up to the Caribbean, through a “tornado”off the coast of Fir Island, New York and finally returned home, picking up a mooring at Newport, Rhode Island on June 27, 1898. Three years and two months after she left.
Slocum sat down and wrote a book, a book that its still being published more than 100 years later—a book I hope all of you—whoever you are—will read. You won’t be sorry
The book is called Sailing Alone Around the World—all of it written by Slocum himself, no ghost writer. His writing style is good reflects his personality—what I know of it. That makes it all the more interesting.
After the book was written printed and distributed Slocum was adrift once again, no longer short of money but lacking purpose. He couldn’t seem to find a comfortable, satisfying life style. Hettie was not a sailor and his children were grown up with lives of their own. He started sailing Spray again. She was, I think—really his home, going down to the Bahamas almost to the coast of Venezuela. As he grew older he had become more sensitive to cold temperatures so the tropics were even more attractive.
In the Fall of 1909 Slocum and Spray sailed away from Martha’s Vineyard. Josh told a few friends that he was going to explore Venezuela by going up the Orinoco River to the Rio Negro, then down the Amazon. This sounds a “bit rich”—pretty “sketchy” today, but exploring tropical jungles was fashionable at the time—just ask Teddy Roosevelt.
There is a little bit more to the story, best told by Stan Grayson in A Man for All Oceans. Please read it there.
My sincere hope is that if you are interested in my brief chronicle of Slocum and Spray you will yourself—read Sailing Alone Around the World and then, hopefully go on to Grayson’s masterful telling of the story.
If you do read Sailing Alone—in Slocum’s own words, and it it piques your interest and your imagination, then I suggest that you talk about it to your kids, your neighbors’ kids, your grandchildren and the kids in your homeschooling group. Consider buying a few copies in paperback and giving them away to deserving kids—who read! And if you do, as I hope, end up sharing the story I suggest that you do it:
at the dinner table by candle light
around a camp fire
while swinging gently in a hammock
or, if on a boat, with the light of a kerosene lamp
Read Grayson and make up your own mind about the last voyage of Slocum and Spray.
Enjoy! Duncan
Joshua Slocum—Sailing Alone Around the World
Stan Grayson—A Man for All Oceans, 2017
R.D. “Pete” Culler—Spray. Pete Culler built his own copy of Spray in the late 1920s
I highly recommend the book for its quietly lyrical description of the 1920s Chesapeake Bay boatyard people, tools, work ethic and culture. The same culture that created Spray 100 years earlier. Culler is a must!