The Hard Way Around by Geoffrey Wolff

Author:Geoffrey Wolff [Wolff, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59463-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

The Aquidneck (Photo credit 7.1)

1 In his Maritime History of Maine, William Hutchinson Rowe notes, “Very queer specimens were often brought aboard by the crimps. Three of the crew furnished to the St. Stephen at San Francisco in 1877 were cowboys who had never seen salt water until the week before.”

2 Sheath knives were overwhelmingly the weapons of choice in episodes of grave shipboard violence, so much so that, as Bunting writes, it had been illegal since 1868 to wear such a knife aboard an American ship. Captains were required to “enforce the statute or face a fifty-dollar fine for every omission. But despite this severe penalty it is unlikely that any shipboard regulation has been more flagrantly ignored,” since the sheath knife was considered an all but essential appendage to a sailor’s hands while he worked aloft, not to mention its utility in his mess kit. In New London, after persuading the crew to continue on the voyage to Yokohama, Slocum had every sheath knife aboard confiscated and then returned to its owner with the tip struck off. As Victor argues, “The point of a sheath knife adds nothing to its proper use, and the best intentioned in the crew saw no injustice in an order which placed every man on an equal footing as far as suspicion went.”

3 Shortly before, in Manila, aboard the William H. Besse, under the command of Captain B. C. Baker, Slocum had responded to a call for help from Mrs. Baker, whose husband was ashore. A member of the crew had fallen gravely ill, and Slocum went below to the forecastle to nurse the sailor. Removing his coat, he cradled the dying man’s head in his lap. Later that night, two more sailors from the William H. Besse died of cholera. The vessel—together with her sister ship, the Bourne, and the Northern Light—fled Manila at the tail end of a monsoon storm.

4 Krakatoa’s “paroxysmal explosions,” the final destructive blasts of August 26 and 27, have been estimated to have been two hundred megatons in force, a factor of 13,000 greater than the Hiroshima Little Boy and four times that of the largest nuclear test explosion ever recorded. It caused tidal waves, killed at least thirty-six thousand, and two years later was the cause of the so-called Yellow Days that blanketed much of the earth in dust, creating sunsets of heart-stopping beauty. Writing to Walter Teller, Benjamin Slocum believed that “had we been three days in that region we would have been suffocated by the fumes.”

5 Dimmock testifies: “He would make all the noise possible, and sing obscene songs that the captain’s wife must hear.”

6 Sydney Daily Telegraph, October 9, 1896 (Australian National Library).

7 Dimmock’s testimony—given to a New York Telegram reporter—appeared during the course of Slocum’s trial. Slocum kept the undated clipping, and printed it in the chapbook he produced in his defense, more than a decade later, in Sydney.

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