Alone at Sea : The Adventures of Joshua Slocum (9780385674072) Read Online Free PDF Page A

officers; foremast hands were relegated to the forecastle near the bow of the ship. In this often dirty area, the mates slept and relaxed during their free time. The fo’c’sle could be crowded, with sailors gathered to smoke, tell stories and do their mending. The captain lived aft, often in luxury, and visited the forecastle only for emergencies.
    The sailors who came “over the bows” were expected to prove their sea worth at every turn. Cheney and Slocum were eager and earnest novices, and for them thesea was a kind of practical university. Slocum had left school at ten, and most of his education thereafter was firsthand, on the ocean. The sea, while a good teacher, could be a harsh one that made no allowances for inexperience. Slocum’s immediate and keenest interest was navigation — a skill he was to develop to such a high level that in later years he seemed always to know intuitively where his boat was sailing. He practiced taking sights with the ship’s sextant and calculating locations according to the positions of celestial bodies. Aboard his first ships, Slocum got to take measurements and to apply the theory he was teaching himself from a British book,
Epitome of Navigation
by J.W. Norie. Victor wrote that his father’s first navigational equipment consisted of the more modern sextant and an ebony pig-yoke with an ivory arc — the old wooden octant that was still in use on ships, but limited in the range of angles it could measure. Slocum was an eager student and learned how to “shoot the sun and the moon” — that is, to measure the height of the sun and make lunar observations. As he became more proficient with celestial navigation, he became assistant to the captain and chief mate in making the daily sightings needed for determining longitude.
    When it came to obeying orders, Slocum and Cheney were reliable workers. Slocum later wrote about some of their stern taskmasters. After his first voyage to Dublin, he sailed to Liverpool, where he joined the crew of the British vessel
Tanjore
, bound for China. Slocum chronicledthe harsh working conditions imposed by Captain Martin. He recalled the crew’s hardships of“working the ice cargo in the cool of the mornings and evenings and then aloft or, worse still, over the ship’s side in the heat of the days, which in Hong Kong in the summer, as it was, was [so] intensely hot several of the crew died.” Slocum and Cheney survived the inhumane treatment, although later Slocum sued and recovered three months’ extra wages. After leaving Hong Kong, Slocum fell ill with fever and had to be left behind in a hospital in the next port, Batavia (now Djakarta). The
Tanjore
sailed on, and Slocum had to find another ship to join after he recuperated. Victor records that in Batavia “he found a good friend in Captain Airy of the steamship
Soushay
, who rescued him from that pest hole of the Dutch East Indies.”
    Slocum soon got his strength back. At 180 pounds he was considered a “husky youth,” according to Victor. He was now eighteen years old, and his two years of sailing blue water had given him enough experience to become second mate. Again he was sailing between Liverpool and the Dutch East Indies. While he still preferred routine deck jobs, much of his work would have involved climbing the rigging to make continuous adjustments. This was often dangerous, especially in an uncertain sea. Slocum almost died when he was twenty, while working aboard the bark
Agra
. A later newspaper account reported, “He was on the upper topsail gathering in sail when a gust of wind pitched him off. He landed first on the main yardand cut a gash over his left eye — and that’s all that happened. He had [the eye] patched.” He was to get rid of the patch shortly after, but the scar was always visible.
    Slocum was moving steadily along toward what he referred to as“the goal of happiness.” Part of the step-by-step climb was a break with his roots; he changed the