SLOCUM IN THE AZORES
FACTS AND FICTION
It has long been a truism that those who know the sea and sailors thereon, take with the proverbial pinch of salt many sailor’s tales and yarns. Indeed, these are often embroidered with daring and fantastical elements, such as undersea kingdoms inhabited by mermaids and the like. Many tales however, contain an admixture of partial truth, partial exaggeration and partial fictional background. One such account, which contains all these elements, is Captain Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone around the World (Boston, 1900). In his introduction to a reprinted edition of 1949, Arthur Ransome, a writer who knew the sea, thought highly of Slocum, not only as a navigator but also as a narrator whose self-taught written style of English was direct but contained an imaginative turn of phrase. In other words, Ransome acknowledged that Slocum produced one of the best sailor’s yarns ever written, whilst noting however, that ‘…Slocum’s place in history is as secure as Adam’s’, as the first man to sail single-handed around the world. [1] Moreover, no one has contradicted the log of his voyage.
Indeed, as well as being compared with Adam,
Slocum’s achievement has been eulogised by the creation of an International
Joshua Slocum Society who sum up his voyage and its ramifications thus:
Nova Scotia born, with family
roots in New England, Captain Slocum commanded some of the finest tall ships
that ever sailed the seas. On April 24, 1895, at the age of 51, he departed
Boston in his tiny sloop Spray and
sailed around the world single-handed, a passage of 46,000 miles, returning to
Newport, Rhode Island on June 27, 1898. This historic achievement made him the
patron saint of small-boat voyagers, navigators and adventurers all over the
world.
This note will concentrate on one area of
Slocum’s circumnavigation-his time in the Azores. Slocum’s account of at least
part of his admirable exploit in the Azores seems to veer towards fiction, and
has many inconsistencies, and it is my intention to highlight these by using
archival records of the Portuguese Navy, Observatory Meteorological records of
the Azores, and records of ship entries to the port of Horta from 1887 to 1897.
Slocum was no slouch in adding imaginative
detail, sometimes with a touch of humour, to highlight his story. Any
intelligent reader will know that Neptune did not appear and speak to him, nor
did the ghost of the Captain of the Pinta steer
the Spray
after he set sail from
Horta bound for Gibraltar. It is nevertheless, a worthwhile exercise for
historians to check source material for accuracy in the light of official
historical records, and it is this rationale only, which occasioned this case
study of Slocum’s visit to the Azores.
SLOCUM IN THE AZORES
Early on the morning of July 20 I saw Pico looming
above the clouds on the starboard bow. Lower lands burst forth as the sun
burned away the morning fog and island after island came into view. As I
approached nearer, cultivated fields appeared, and oh, how green the corn’!
Only those who have seen the Azores from the deck of a vessel realize the
beauty of the mid-ocean picture.
At 4.30 p.m. I cast anchor at Fayal, exactly eighteen
days from Cape Sable. The American consul, in a smart boat, came alongside
before the Spray reached the breakwater, and a young naval officer, who
feared for the safety of my vessel, boarded, and offered his services as pilot.
The youngster, I have no good reason to doubt, could have handled a man-of-war,
but the Spray was too small for the amount of uniform he wore. However,
after fouling all the craft in port and sinking a lighter, she was moored
without much damage to herself. This wonderful pilot expected a
‘gratification,’ I understand, but whether for the reason that his government,
and not I, would have to pay the cost of raising the lighter, or because he did
not sink the Spray I could never make out. But I forgive him.
Spray might indeed have fouled all the craft in port and sunk a lighter and not have suffered considerable damage, but Slocum was curiously the only person to mention such incidents.
The official numbered and signed register of ‘Ship Entries from 1887 to 1897’[2] for the Port of Horta only reveals that the navigator ‘J. Slocume’s sloop Spray’ moored at the man-made harbour on Saturday, 20 July 1895, ‘at six in the afternoon’.
Moreover, the local Açoriano newspaper published a very detailed report on Slocum’s arrival at Horta, but omitted the incidents described by the sailor:
Last
Saturday, at six p.m., a sloop with the American flag hoisted at the top of the
main gaff moored at the Port of Horta. We could
see aboard, unexpectedly, one single man taking care of everything in order to
moor; he went to the prow, he struck the jib, he went back to the stern, and at
the end he lowered the sails. After the pilot went aboard he moored at the dock
basin where the pilot’s boat was waiting for him. The arrival of that peculiar
little ship with only one seaman visible attracted to the wharf a large number
of people, most of whom went immediately aboard, on various boats. Açoriano (22 July 1895).
On the other hand, another local newspaper, A Folha Diária, mentioned the participation of a prático (and not of ‘a young naval officer’ as Slocum says) in the manoeuvres. In the nineteenth century a prático, according to Portuguese Dicionário da Linguagem da Marinha Antiga e Actual (Dictionary of Ancient and Current Naval Terminology),[3] was the harbour pilot operating under the responsibility of the Harbour Authority (Navy). Official records from the Historical Archive of the Central Naval Library in Lisbon indicate that the officer responsible for the ‘Second Class Artificial Port Captaincy of Horta’,[4] part of the Western Maritime Department at the time, was Frigate Captain Carlos Maria Pereira Vianna.
The Portuguese Navy Register [5] states that Captain Vianna was born on 30 April 1845 and was therefore 50 years old when Slocum landed at the Azores. Hardly the ‘young naval officer’ mentioned by Slocum, but of course he may have looked younger than his age. On the other hand a frigate captain would not expect a ‘gratification’ since his salary (67,000 reis, plus Naval Subsidy, etc.), according to the ‘Tabella dos Soldos Mensaes dos Officiaes das Diversas Classes da Armada e dos Aspirantes’ (List of salaries of officers from different ranks and midshipmen),[6] was quite substantial.
Another hypothesis might be that he requested payment for being present in the harbour, however, according to ‘Tabella nº 2’ (Tariff number 2) of ‘Regulamento do Porto Artificial da Horta’ (Regulations for the Man-made Harbour at Horta)[7] long cruise vessels were supposed to pay five reis per day and per ton for any halt lasting from one to three days (Spray was expected to stay only two days in Faial): ‘The halt is counted for long cruise and coasting ships at the very moment they pass south of the sea-marks that indicate the entrance to the man-made harbour, any fraction of a day is charged as one full day’.
Again, there is not a single file in the archives of the Port of Horta to substantiate Slocum’s claims. In any case 10 reis (two days in the port) are insignificant. The explanation for the ‘gratification’ could be the price of the operation (pilot and boat), but in the Captaincy’s ‘Registo das Guias Expedidas’ (Registry of Payments, that is, the records of piloting operations, etc.),[8] there is no trace of Slocum or even the Spray. From the 18th day to the end of July the Captaincy did not receive any money.
The mysterious ‘young naval officer’ could not be Vianna’s clerk, Arsénio Porphirio de Almeida Pinto[9], or the harbour master’s assistant, José de Paiva, and could not be the ‘guarda de lastro’ [10], because the post was vacant. [11] These persons represented the Navy Staff available in Horta, despite a Decree (18 April 1895)[12] stating the existence of ‘one berthing master’, ‘two pilots’, ‘two coxswain’ and ‘10 oarsmen’.
The alternative is the seaman Francisco Ignacio, but he was not an officer, and apparently he did not go to the Port often.
It would be convenient if the seamen could show up more often at the wharfs of this city in order to prevent Pico’s ships from occupying the quays and to make it more difficult for small boats to gather around the quays. Even today officers and crewmembers of Melpomène had to jump over Pico’s boats to disembark. The seamen have to do something.
The
above was noted in Açoriano precisely
the same week Slocum arrived at Horta.
There
are thus no factual sources to confirm the successive incidents, the identity
of the ‘young naval officer’ or the request for a ‘gratification’.
NEWSPAPER ACCOUNTS OF SLOCUM’S ARRIVAL
Slocum’s arrival at Faial
made the front page of local papers – essentially Açoriano and Telegrapho,
both published in the town of Horta.
According to Açoriano, dated 22 July 1895:
The
sloop, effectively crewed single-handedly by Joshua Slocum, is making a voyage
around the world, and left Cape Sable, 500 miles from Boston, eighteen days
ago. The white-painted sloop called Spray
is forty feet long in all by fourteen wide, and five deep in the hold; her
tonnage being thirteen tons gross. Captain Slocum says he himself rebuilt his
tiny ship two years ago. Spray,
despite her small dimensions, seems to be a powerful vessel capable of
resisting storms.’
Spray, a 36 feet
6 inch long sloop (later transformed into a yawl), ‘needs 3 foot under the
deck’, ‘has no engine’, but a rectangular sail, was the sixth vessel registered
at the Horta harbour since the beginning of the month. It was essentially the
first sailing boat. Most vessels visiting the Azores at the end of the
nineteenth century were commercial (or passenger) and whale steamers.
INTREPID
SAILOR – Saturday afternoon the American sloop Spray Boston entered our
harbour after 21 days at sea. She as built and commanded by her owner,
Captain Joshua Slocum, from Boston. He left Nova Scotia, his departure point in
America, and has spent 18 days at sea since his last port’. Telegrapho 22 July 1895.
In fact, the best period to cross the North Atlantic Ocean, according to the National Imagery & Mapping Agency (NIMA) of the USA, is between May and July. The most clement route passes through the Azores (or slightly to the north of the archipelago) – an important piece of information that ships at that time, mostly sailing vessels, were aware of despite the fact that there were no pilot charts.
Since
her arrival, Spray has been visited
by a large number of persons of all social classes and Captain Slocum accepts
all of them without any restrictions. This is so true that they go right into
the small cabin, they go the fore peak, and they observe and re-observe
everything, including the food on the fire; they climb to the bowsprit; they
walk on the skylight; they examine the ropes and the steering-wheel; they drink
his water from the barrel that is on the deck; and he, completely impassibly,
sometimes smiles a little, answers their questions about the voyage without
reluctance. There are even occasions when he goes to the cabin to rest; and he
lets them invade the ship to watch him sleeping, just as the Liliputians
watched Gulliver sleeping. On the afternoon of his arrival they sent him fruit
from the shore. Captain Slocum thanked them and appreciated it a lot-Fine!
Fine! He said’ Thus wrote Açoriano.
Slocum
confirmed this: ‘It was the season for fruit when I arrived at the Azores, and
there was soon more of all kinds of it put on board than I knew what to do
with’.
However, the newspapers of
the Azores mentioned a shortage of fruit in Faial. It is probable the sailor
was possibly referring to plums and to cucumbers, which were both ‘plentiful’
in the summer of 1895. ‘Hawkers offer a pack of six for 20 reis’,
announced regional daily newspaper Açoriano
Oriental, the so-called ‘Dean of Portuguese Journalism’, in its 27 July
1895 edition.
The only thing for sure is that Manning, the U.S. consul, and above all the firm of Silveira Edwards (who donated all the provisions), helped the navigator. This is understandable:
Like those students who not long ago passed through Lisbon claiming to intend to travel around the world on foot, Captain Slocum travels light-he does not have a penny or at least he does not want to spend his money. Besides the provisions he has aboard (codfish, meat, flour, canned food, etc.) he believes it will not be difficult to get a little extra at no cost, anywhere he goes. (sic) This is what happened in Horta. Mr. Manning, the worthy United States consul, sent him what the captain said he needed: — fresh bread, fruit, etc. (…) Captain Slocum had with him a number of photographs of the Liberty; (…) a pamphlet where he describes Destroyer’s passage; and one little beautifully printed bound volume (…) where he relates (…) the Liberty’s voyage and which contains fine prints; and he sells them all for a dollar, which must increase his resources.
21 July 1895: Slocum did not leave the sloop:
The day after my arrival at Horta was the feast of a great saint. Boats loaded with people came from other islands to celebrate at Horta, the capital, or Jerusalem of the Azores. The deck of the Spray was crowded from morning till night with men, women, and children.
22 July 1895:
On the day after the feast a kind-hearted native harnessed a team and drove me a day over the beautiful roads all about Fayal, "because," said he, in broken English, "when I was in America and couldn't speak a word of English, I found it hard till I met someone who seemed to have time to listen to my story, and I promised my good saint then that if ever a stranger came to my country, I would try to make him happy." Unfortunately, this gentleman brought along an interpreter, that I might "learn more of the country." The fellow was nearly the death of me, talking of ships and voyages, and of the boats he had steered, the last thing in the world I wished to hear. He had sailed out of New Bedford, so he said, for "that Joe Wing they call 'John.'" My friend and host found hardly a chance to edge in a word. Before we parted my host dined me with a cheer that would have gladdened the heart of a prince, but he was quite alone in his house. "My wife and children all rest there," said he, pointing to the churchyard across the way. "I moved to this house from far off," he added, "to be near the spot, where I pray every morning.’
There is no record of what
Slocum did on July 23 — even in Spray’s
logbook.
He left Horta on July 24:
I remained four days at Fayal, and that was two days more than I had intended to stay. It was the kindness of the islanders and their touching simplicity which detained me.
Thus wrote Slocum before
confiding that:
A damsel, as innocent as an angel, came alongside one day, and said she would embark on the Spray if I would land her at Lisbon. She could cook flying-fish, she thought, but her forte was dressing bacalhao (codfish).
It would have been just another curious and innocuous episode if the seaman had not occasionally suffered ‘mental visions’ and had a somewhat problematic relationship with sex. This is perhaps the mysterious (and politically incorrect) side of the hero. ‘It seems Slocum had been detained in the Old Burlington County prison’, recounted the author-archivist April Kane, from Newark Public Library, USA. This prison is a museum today, and the references to Slocum’s dark past are necessarily short. US West Coast newspapers and his unauthorized biography, The Search For Captain Slocum, written by Walter Magnes Teller, and published in 1956 (Scribner, New York) give some clues. ‘Captain’s lawyer argued non vult contendere for his client’, said Teller. The expression ‘non vult contendere’ (literally, he does not oppose) represented in Newark the legal equivalent of an admission of guilt. Judge Gaskill made the old sailor pay court costs, and order him never to return ‘neither by train nor by sea’ to Riverton. Slocum was accused in 1906 of the attempted rape of 12 year-old girl aboard the Spray. It is hard to believe a young Azorean damsel ‘as innocent as an angel’ in 1895 would ask a lone foreign sailor to take her to Lisbon.
Slocum’s departure was
marked by 14 lines in Telegrapho’s
‘Events’ section:
The American sloop Spray left our port today, continuing the round-the-world voyage that Captain Slocum thinks will take two years. There were lots of spectators who watched the manoeuvres from the walls surrounding the city’.
According to the Port
Authority’s register the sailor left Horta at 7.30 a.m.
Spray set out
before the wind, striking the jib, followed by the eyes of all. They were
wondering what Destiny held for such little boat, and for that intrepid and
courageous man who ventured, without any companion-not even a friendly dog-into
the dangers, the hazards, and possible happenings of a trip around the world’,
reported Açoriano the same day.
The next stop was the Strait of Gibraltar, 1,127 miles away from Horta. Slocum wrote:
The southwest wind at the time was light, but squalls came up with the sun, and I was glad enough to get reefs in my sails before I had gone a mile. I had hardly set the mainsail, double-reefed, when a squall of wind down the mountains struck the sloop with such violence that I thought her mast would go. However, a quick helm brought her to the wind. As it was, one of the weather lanyards was carried away and the other was stranded. My tin basin, caught up by the wind, went flying across a French school ship to leeward. It was more or less squally all day, sailing along under high land; but rounding close under a bluff, I found an opportunity to mend the lanyards broken in the squall. No sooner had I lowered my sails when a four-oared boat shot out from some gully in the rocks, with a customs officer on board, who thought he had come upon a smuggler. I had some difficulty in making him comprehend the true case However, one of his crew, a sailorly chap, who understood how matters were, while we palavered jumped on board and rove off the new lanyards I had already prepared, and with a friendly hand helped me "set up the rigging." This incident gave the turn in my favour. My story was then clear to all. I have found this the way of the world. Let one be without a friend, and see what will happen!
Slocum mentioned a ‘customs
officer’ and ‘one of his crew’, but Portuguese Navy records mention only two
‘customs employees’ in the island: naval agent José Maria de Mello and ship’s
corporal Manuel Garcia da Rosa.
Passing the island of Pico, after the rigging was mended, the Spray stretched across to leeward of the island of St. Michael's, which she was up with early on the morning of July 26, the wind blowing hard. Later in the day she passed the Prince of Monaco's fine steam-yacht bound to Fayal, where, on a previous voyage, the prince had slipped his cables to "escape a reception" which the padres of the island wished to give him. Why he so dreaded the "ovation" I could not make out. At Horta they did not know’, said Slocum.
This account is palpably
untrue. Spray could not have ‘passed
the Prince of Monaco's fine steam-yacht bound to Fayal’ on 26 July. According
to the Horta harbour register,[13]
the Prince of Monaco’s steam-yacht Princesse Alice, commanded by C.
Carr, had been anchored at Horta from July 25 to 27. The log book of the ship
confirms the Horta harbour register: ‘Thursday 25 July 1895-1 hour: anchored
with two anchors in Horta; Friday 26 July 1895-Port of Horta-2.30 pm: visit of
the commander of the French Navy training vessel Le Melpomène.’
Jacqueline Carpine-Lancre, Secretary of the Commission of Oceanography of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science, told the author ‘Prince Albert I never mentioned Slocum’s name, either in published documents or in his manuscripts’.
In the rest of chapter IV of his book Slocum again hugely exaggerates, but this may or may not be explicable in that he seemed to been suffering from a form of food-poisoning and delusions thereon, stating that a member of Columbus’s crew steered the Spray during his incapacitation:
Columbus himself could not have held her more exactly on her course. The sloop had made ninety miles in the night through a rough sea. I felt grateful to the old pilot, but I marvelled some that he had not taken in the jib. The gale was moderating, and by noon the sun was shining. A meridian altitude and the distance on the patent log, which I always kept towing, told me that she had made a true course throughout the twenty-four hours. I was getting much better now, but was very weak, and did not turn out reefs that day or the night following, although the wind fell light; but I just put my wet clothes out in the sun when it was shining, and, lying down there myself, fell asleep.
July 28 was exceptionally
fine’, wrote the sailor.
Slocum’s July 26-27 storm account is again palpably exaggerated, as is his rest on July 27:
Saturday
27: a small boat passed near Port of Capelas, a sloop, with a single seaman. He
approached the whalers moored there, and said he had come from Boston and was
heading to China! He said he had made a stop in Faial in order to get some
provisions and water’, reports Commercio
Michaelense, dated 30 July 1895.
The Ponta Delgada
Meteorological Observatory records[14]
(written in French) are peremptory: There was not a single observation of
Strong Breeze (‘frais’), Near Gale (‘grand frais’) or Gale (‘coup de vent’) or
any Storm that summer in the area.
The atmospheric pressure
minimum altitude occurred on 26 July with 760 (with the barometer at 0º), corresponding
to 1013 hectopascals. It is a pressure that does not necessarily mean a storm,
and the vicinity of Capelas (North of Ponta Delgada) does not permit
substantial variations of pressure. Moreover, Nima’s Pilot Chart for the Azores
region indicates force 3 winds (Beaufort scale) as a maximum in July.
Nevertheless, Slocum could have been faced by high waves (brought about by far winds) and there could have been ‘perfectly stable weather, even a clear sky and slight winds’, explained Idália da Luz Mendonça, of the Portuguese Meteorological Institute. The problem is there is not a single reference to the storm from other sources, including from ships navigating in the Azores.
The only storm confirmed that summer occurred on 20 August 1895, almost one month after Slocum’s departure. ‘In Freguesia dos Altares, lightning struck and killed Manuel Martins Alves, a child called Paulo, another one called Manuel, and one woman’, reported the regional press.
‘The audacious Slovum (sic)
has continued his voyage on his sloop Spray.
May God protect him’, reported Atlântico
on 28 July 1895.
Slocum
was certainly audacious, particularly in his account of his time in the Azores
as the historical record shows. Nevertheless, he did not let historical
accuracy get in the way of a good story. What is not in doubt however, was his
courage in undertaking and successfully completing a single-handed
circumnavigation of the world.
Rui Araújo
THE
MARINER’S MIRROR – Vol. 94 – No. 2 – May 2008
“The
Mariner’s Mirror is the international journal of the Society for Nautical
Research. It has been published since 1911 and is recognized as the world’s
leading journal of naval and maritime history.“
LINK:
https://snr.org.uk/the-mariners-mirror/
Acknowledgements
A number of people and
institutions offered considerable help and assistance to me in the research for
this Note. These include Jacqueline Carpine-Lancres, historian, Vice President
of the Commission d’ Océanographie de l’Union Internationale d’Histoire et de
Philosophie des Sciences, Monaco; Isabel Beato, historian, Arquivo Histórico da
Biblioteca Central da Marinha, Lisbon, Commander Idália da Luz Mendonca,
meteorologist, Instituto de Meteorologia de Portugal, Lisbon, The staff at
Newark Public Library, New Jersey and at the Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon.
Special thanks are due
Rosemary Hilhorst OBE, Director of the British Council, Lisbon, and Nigel
Thomas for helping me to translate the paper. I am grateful for the comments
and suggestions of anonymous referees.
References
[1] A. Ransome introduction to Captain Joshua Slocum, Sailing alone
around the World and Voyage of the Liberdade (London, 1949), 17.
[2] Biblioteca Central de Marinha herafter BCM, (Lisbon, Portugal) – Arquivo
Histórico – Fonds 208 - “Capitania do Porto da Horta”.
[3] Humberto Leitão, José Vicente Lopes, Ediçoes
Culturais da Marinha, Lisbon, 1990.
[4] BCM – Arquivo Histórico – “Documentação Avulsa” –
“Oficiais da Armada” – Proc. Carlos Maria Pereira Vianna, Box 785; and “Lista
da Armada”, dated 1895.
[5] Idem, Ibidem
[6] BCM – Arquivo Histórico – “Carta de Lei de
26/2/1892” on the reorganization of “Serviços da Armada”, Chapter X, art. 141,
page 473; and “Ordem da Armada” Number XVI, dated 1893; and “Documentação
Avulsa”: “Soldos, Vencimentos, Ordenados e Prets”, boxes 1299/1302; and
“Decreto de 1/12/1892”, Chapter IV (regulation on the salaries of “Pessoal
Civil e Militar dos Departamentos, Capitanias e Delegações”) – in “Ordem da
Armada” Number VIII, dated 1892, page 316 and further.
[7] BCM – Arquivo Histórico – “Decreto de
24/12/1893”, 39.
[8] BCM – Arquivo Histórico – Fonds 208 – “Capitania
do Porto da Horta”, Reference Number 53, pages 40/41.
[9] In “Lista da Armada”, dated 1893, and in the
notes (“Documentaçao Avulsa”) concerning the personnel available at “Capitania
do Porto da Horta”, dated 12/1/1895, the officer is described as ARSENIO
POMPILIO DE ALMEIDA PINTO.
[10] The person
in charge of the store room where they usually kept the ballast of careened
ships.
[11]BCM – Arquivo Histórico – “Lista da Armada” dated
1895, Reference Number 2014, page 217.
[12] BCM – Arquivo Histórico – “Decreto de 18 de Abril
de 1895”, in “Ordem da Armada” Number VIII, dated 1895, page 302.
[13] BCM – Arquivo Histórico – Fonds 208 –
“Capitania do Porto da Horta”, Reference Number 50, page 39; and Reference
Number 51, page 19.
[14] BCM – Arquivo Histórico – “Documentação Avulsa” –
Observatório Meteorológico de Ponta Delgada, Box 713.