Joshua Slocum in Google Earth: Devonport to South Solitary Island

Follow Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World at: http://www.hazelhurst.net/Slocum

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By 18Apr1897, Joshua Slocum judges that the southern summer is over and it is time to head north away from the winter which is “rolling up from the south”. He sails from Devonport in bracing winds that carry him quickly around Cape Howe at the south-east corner of mainland Australia. He exchanges signals again with the residents of Cape Bundooro and then has a fine sail with clear skies to Port Jackson, Sydney, where he anchors in Watson’s Bay, close to the entrance to Sydney Harbour. He is impressed by the number of boats of all shapes and sizes working and having fun in the harbour:

The harbor from the heads to Parramatta, up the river, was more than ever alive with boats and yachts of every class. It was, indeed, a scene of animation hardly equalled in any other part of the world.

A few days later the weather is much rougher and a steamship, struggling into harbour from the heads, while Slocum is ashore, collides with the Spray and rips away her anchor and chain. The captain of the steamship takes the Spray in tow to pull her out of further danger and she is returned later by some of his crew¹:

But what yawing about she made of it when she came with a stranger at the helm! Her old friend the pilot of the Pinta would not have been guilty of such lubberly work. But to my great delight they got her into a berth…

Slocum sails from Sydney on 09May1897 in fair weather and with strong winds from the south-west. He falls into an easy routine, reading day and night, and occasionally trimming the sails. He remembers the struggle, several months earlier, when he had to fight southwards past these headlands, to Newcastle; he compares his life now with that of the old circumnavigators. He feels that he’s having rather an easy time of it².

Ten miles short of Port Macquarie, Slocum comes upon a yacht in distress. She is manned by the three most incompetent crew he has ever encountered; their appreciation of the perilous situation they are in is scant and their ineptitude has resulted in the loss of their sounding lead and their dinghy. They refuse his offers of help; he wants to tow them to Port Macquarie but they are not interested. He reads later, in a Cooktown newspaper, that the yacht was lost off Crescent Head but the crew was saved.

Pressing on, Slocum comes up to South Solitary Island, a “dreary stone heap in the ocean just off the coast of New South Wales”, and exchanges signals with the people on it. By way of identification, he raises the Stars and Stripes and assumes that the people ashore know all about his voyage for their next message is simply: “Wishing you a pleasant voyage”, and Slocum writes: “…which at that moment I was having.”

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The section of Joshua Slocum’s journey reported here continues Chapter XIV of Sailing Alone Around the World, and this post is a trailer for the adventure that I am retelling in Google Earth at:  http://www.hazelhurst.net/Slocum

Notes

1. To get the Spray to yaw as she was sailed back to Watson’s Bay by her lubberly crew, I needed to implement an ‘AnimatedYaw’ directive in TourMaker. This function oscillates the heading of the model, by the number of degrees in the ‘angle’ parameter, to either side of the calculated bearing between the two Placemarks that define the model’s movement over the ground.
2. Slocum had on board “a full set of admiralty sheet-charts of the coast and Barrier Reef”. It’s worth taking a look at the journal of the man who first surveyed the eastern coastline of Australia and created the first version of the charts that enabled Slocum to have a relatively carefree voyage in these waters: Captain Cook’s Journal During the First Voyage Round the World.

Copyright © Colin Hazlehurst, 2012