The sloop in a Fairhaven field that carried Joshua Slocum alone around the world

One midwinter day in 1892, a sea captain living in Boston with no ship to command ran into an old acquaintance, a whaling captain, who told him, "Come to Fairhaven and I'll give you a ship." Then, as Joshua Slocum told it, the man added that "she wants some repairs." The ship was an old sloop called the Spray, sitting in a field under canvas, and Slocum rebuilt her by hand and later sailed her alone around the world. He wrote it all down in "Sailing Alone Around the World," published by the Century Co. in New York in 1900, and the Fairhaven chapters of that book are the record this SC360 Special follows. The town's longer whaling story is in our South Coast whaling series.

A captain without a ship

Slocum wrote that he was born on a cold Feb. 20 on North Mountain in Nova Scotia, the ridge above the Bay of Fundy, and the Library of Congress catalogs his birth year as 1844. He went to sea as a boy, worked his way up to command, and called the ship Northern Light, of which he was part owner, his best command. After nearly 20 years as a shipmaster he lost his bark, the Aquidneck, on the coast of Brazil, and brought his family home to New York in a canoe called the Liberdade.

By 1892 he was in Boston, weighing whether to look for another command or go to work in a shipyard. He wrote that he could not get shipyard work without first paying $50 to a society, and that there were not enough ships to go around, since many of the tall sailing vessels had been cut down into coal barges.

The joke in the field

Slocum landed at Fairhaven, "opposite New Bedford," the next day and found that his friend had played a joke on him. The ship was "a very antiquated sloop called the Spray," which the neighbors said had been built "in the year 1." She was propped up in a field some distance from salt water. For seven years, Slocum wrote, the town had wondered what Capt. Eben Pierce was going to do with the old Spray, and once word got around that a newcomer meant to rebuild her instead of breaking her up, the question he heard for a year or more was, "Will it pay?"

In an appendix to the book he set down what was known of her past. Tradition said she had first worked as an oyster boat about 100 years earlier on the coast of Delaware, though the custom house had no record of where she was built. She was later owned in Noank, Connecticut, and then in New Bedford before Pierce gave her to him "at the end of her natural life."

Built from a Fairhaven pasture

Slocum cut down a stout oak nearby for the keel, and a man he called Farmer Howard hauled in that tree and enough timber for the frame, for a small sum. The ribs were straight saplings, steamed in a homemade steam box until they could be bent over a log. He started in earnest "hard upon March," in the cold, and wrote that there were plenty of inspectors to advise him. Whaling captains came from far off to look, some walking over the bridge from New Bedford. They pronounced the new stem "A 1" and "fit to smash ice," and their stories of Arctic whaling persuaded him to put a double set of breast hooks in the bow so the sloop could push through ice.

The planks were Georgia pine an inch and a half thick, and about a thousand bolts held the hull together. As he rebuilt her he raised her sides, adding 12 inches of freeboard amidships, 18 inches forward and 14 inches aft. The ribs were up before the apple trees bloomed. Slocum wrote that the remains of John Cook, "a revered Pilgrim father," rested close by, near enough that he could reach out from the deck and pick cherries from the tree over the little grave.

"It'll crawl"

The caulking drew the most advice. When Slocum began driving cotton into the seams, "a man from Marion, passing with a basket of clams on his back," called out that it would crawl, and a man from West Island said the same. His old captain friend, who had been towed by many a sperm whale, asked, "How fast will it crawl?" Slocum laid a thread of oakum over the cotton, as he had planned from the start, and wrote that the cotton never crawled.

With two coats of copper paint on the bottom and white lead on the sides, the Spray was launched, and Slocum wrote that she "sat on the water like a swan." Finished, she was 36 feet 9 inches long overall, 14 feet 2 inches wide and 4 feet 2 inches deep in the hold, at 9 tons net. A New Hampshire spruce became her mast, and he and Pierce took her across Buzzards Bay on a trial trip. The cost, he wrote, "was $553.62 for materials, and thirteen months of my own labor." He stayed in Fairhaven several months longer, picking up work now and then on whale ships being fitted out farther down the harbor.

Around the world and back to the stake

Slocum spent a season fishing the coast in the Spray and wrote that he never got the knack of baiting a hook. He settled instead on a voyage around the world, and at noon on April 24, 1895, he weighed anchor in Boston, where the sloop had wintered. His book follows him across the Atlantic to Gibraltar, back southwest to Brazil, through the Strait of Magellan, across the Pacific to Samoa and Australia, and on to the Keeling Islands and Cape Town.

The South Coast kept turning up along the way. On Juan Fernandez, the man the islanders called king, Manuel Carroza, was a native of the Azores who had sailed in New Bedford whale ships, and Slocum, who called him "this Portuguese from the Azores by way of New Bedford," wrote that Carroza got the better of him in a trade for potatoes. Passing Booby Island in the Torres Strait, Slocum recalled an earlier trip when a boat brought back letters left in a cave there for the next ship home, most of them by whalemen, some addressed to New Bedford and some to Fairhaven.

Coming home, the Spray rode out the tornado that hit New York on June 25, 1898, catching it off Fire Island under bare poles. At 1 a.m. on June 27 she anchored at Newport, Rhode Island, after "more than forty-six thousand miles round the world, during an absence of three years and two months." Slocum wrote that he had gained a pound on the voyage and that the sloop did not leak a drop.

"The Spray was not quite satisfied till I sailed her around to her birthplace, Fairhaven, Massachusetts," he wrote. On July 3 she sailed up the Acushnet River, and he tied her to "the cedar spile driven in the bank to hold her when she was launched." The book's last illustration shows her there, under the caption "Again tied to the old stake at Fairhaven."

The last voyage

In July 1910, a dispatch from New Bedford printed in the Daily Kennebec Journal of Augusta, Maine, and in The Washington Times reported that Slocum was missing. He had sailed alone from Vineyard Haven for the West Indies to escape the winter and had not been heard from since. His wife, living at Vineyard Haven, had given him up as lost. "I believe beyond all doubt that Capt. Slocum is lost," Mrs. Slocum said in the Kennebec Journal's report, which quoted her as saying she was convinced the Spray "was run down by a steamer at night." The Bridgeport Evening Farmer reported three days later that no word had come from the Spray or the man who sailed her.

Read it yourself

• "Sailing Alone Around the World" is in the public domain and free to read on Project Gutenberg, and the Library of Congress copy of the 1900 Century Co. edition is on the Internet Archive. The Fairhaven rebuilding is Chapter I, and the return to the old stake closes Chapter XXI.
• The 1899 portrait of Slocum at the top of this story, made by Hollinger and Co. and printed in Century Magazine, is in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
• The July 1910 newspaper reports can be read in the Library of Congress Chronicling America collection.

Label: Reported by us, from the town's posted records.