First Around Alone

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On one of those trips, to Sydney, Slocum was in port long enough to meet and marry Virginia Albertina Walker. She, as it turned out, was the square peg in her family's aspirations too. Born to a society family, Virginia's interests lay outdoors. She was a crack shot and an excellent equestrian. On their honeymoon, a trip from Sydney to Alaska to deliver cargo, she hoisted a shotgun to deter a shipboard intruder. It turned out to be her husband. Like many other spouses in her day, she sailed with her husband, raising the children on whatever ship Slocum was commanding and in Australia, San Francisco and the Philippines.

'It was my job,' wrote Ben, one of their sons, 'to get the shark interested in coming close up. I used a new tin can with a string on it to attract the shark close under the stern where mother dispatched it with her .32 caliber revolver. She never needed but one shot.'

The rise of steamships cut down on work for sailing captains, but Slocum continued to garner appointments. Then came the three-masted cargo ship Aquidneck. In 1884, Slocum bought the Aquidneck and essentially became captain and boss, finding his own clients and hiring his own crew. Calling the ship 'the nearest perfection to beauty,' Slocum planned to use it to haul cargo between South America and the U.S.

But on its first voyage to South America, his wife died. In grief, Slocum ran the ship aground. 'Father's days were done with the passing of mother,' said son Garfield. Slocum managed to get the Aquidneck back to Boston, but his streak of bad luck continued. In late 1886, he sailed a cargo of alfalfa from Buenos Aires to Brazil. A cholera epidemic raged at the time, and Brazilian port officials steered the ship into quarantine. Slocum's load of alfalfa rotted.

Meanwhile, the cholera epidemic had led port officials to clear out the jails. Two ex-cons, Bloody Tommy and Dangerous Jack, wound up as Slocum's new crew members. An aborted mutiny attempt ended with Slocum shooting both. A Uruguayan court acquitted him on self-defense, but Slocum was now teetering on bankruptcy. Then he ran the Aquidneck onto a sandbar.This low point in his fortunes, though, turned out to be a rebirth. Marooned and broke in South America, he and his new wife, Henrietta, and sons Victor and Garfield, started to build a new boat from scratch. Based on Slocum's memory of a picture of a Japanese sampan, they constructed a 35-foot vessel that not only floated but sailed them all the way back to the U.S. Made with scrap parts, it cost $100 to build.

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