52 ancestors in 52 weeks (23): Joshua Slocum – if you look hard enough you can find yourself related to nearly anybody!

While perusing our joint family trees (mine and my husband’s) recently, I decided to look more carefully at the women on the tree instead of just the men, who, of course, are the ones carrying the names we’re most familiar with.  I chose the name of Eliza Jane Slocomb (Fritz), who happens to be the mother of ship captains Jacob Fritz (who went down with his ship, Week 7) and Horatio Fritz (his story is yet to come), as well as grandmother to Clara (Week 11), Madeleine Fritz (Week 12), and, of course, to my husband’s father. I knew the barest of details: she was born in Wilmot, Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia in 1825. So, I took those “facts” and started googling. The first (and second and third, etc.) reference that came up was for Joshua Slocum.

I had never heard of Joshua Slocum before, but he’s easy to find if you’re looking, and his story is fascinating. He was the first person to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe, which he did in a 36’9’ rerigged oyster sloop, leaving Boston and then Halifax in 1895 and returning to nearby Newport, Rhode Island in 1898. He was born in Mount Hanley, Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, which is pretty much the same extended rural area in the Annapolis Valley as Eliza Slocomb Fritz’s birthplace of Wilmot, NS. I asked my husband if he knew about Joshua Slocum and if he was related to his great-grandmother. Yes, he had heard of him, and he thought they were distant relatives. I decided to look further, what the heck.

One thing to remember is that spellings of last names (and first names) were, shall we say, flexible, for a very, very long time, so having the spelling be different didn’t mean anything. By looking back into Joshua Slocum’s family tree (thanks to familysearch.org) and then back into Eliza Slocomb’s family tree, it didn’t take me all that long to find the connection. It turns out that Eliza Slocomb’s great grandfather and Joshua Slocum’s great-great grandfather were one and the same, John Slocum (1722-1817). So, my husband’s grandfather, Howard Douglas Fritz, and Joshua Slocum were 3^rd cousins! See, I told you that you can find connections to nearly anyone if you try hard enough!! What helps is that (1) except for crossing oceans, people didn’t move as frequently as they do now for decades and decades, even centuries. So if you find location as a common denominator, it’s worth exploring. And (2) people had so many kids, all in the same geographical area, that finding connections isn’t as surprising as you may think. As an example of how connections explode over many generations and MANY offspring, they estimate that there are currently about 35 million living descendants of the Mayflower settlers! That’s over 9-10 generations.

Just to give you some snippets of Joshua Slocum’s life, because it really is interesting, here are some takeaways from his Wikipedia entry. You’ll see that there’s yet another Loyalist in our joint family tree. I have very mixed emotions about that, given that they were given land taken from the Acadians and the Indigenous Peoples, but I can’t change that historical reality.

Joshua Slocum was born on February 20, 1844, in Mount Hanley, Annapolis County, Nova Scotia (officially recorded as Wilmot Station), a community on the North Mountain within sight of the Bay of Fundy. The fifth of eleven children of John Slocomb and Sarah Jane Slocombe née Southern, Joshua descended, on his father’s side, from a Quaker known as “John the Exile”, who left the United States shortly after 1780 because of his opposition to the American War for Independence. As part of the Loyalist migration to Nova Scotia, the Slocombes were granted 500 acres (2.0 km²) of farmland in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis County.

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When Joshua was eight years old, the Slocomb family (Joshua changed the spelling of his last name later in his life) moved from Mount Hanley to Brier Island in Digby County, at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. Slocum’s maternal grandfather was the keeper of the lighthouse at Southwest Point there. His father, a stern man and strict disciplinarian, took up making leather boots for the local fishermen, and Joshua helped in the shop. However, the boy found the scent of salt air much more alluring than the smell of shoe leather. He yearned for a life of adventure at sea, away from his demanding father and his increasingly chaotic life at home among so many brothers and sisters.

He made several attempts to run away from home, finally succeeding, at age fourteen, by hiring on as a cabin boy and cook on a fishing schooner, but he soon returned home. In 1860, after the birth of the eleventh Slocombe child and the subsequent death of his kindly mother, Joshua, then sixteen, left home for good. He and a friend signed on at Halifax as ordinary seamen on a merchant ship bound for Dublin, Ireland.

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From Dublin, he crossed to Liverpool to become an ordinary seaman on the British merchant ship Tangier (also recorded as Tanjore), bound for China. During two years as a seaman he rounded Cape Horn twice, landed at Batavia (now Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies, and visited the Maluku Islands, Manila, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, and San Francisco. While at sea, he studied for the Board of Trade examination, and, at the age of eighteen, he received his certificate as a fully qualified Second Mate. Slocum quickly rose through the ranks to become a Chief Mate on British ships transporting coal and grain between the British Isles and San Francisco.

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His story continues, and it’s all full of adventure. When he marries, his wife joins him on his ships, including having and raising their four children. It’s impossible for me to imagine!! When his wife dies at sea, he continued sailing to every imaginable port, leaving his younger kids at home with an obliging (female) relative. He remarried, but his second wife was smart enough to realize pretty quickly that life at sea was not all it was cracked up to be. Many extraordinary adventures of storms, near-shipwrecks, and shipwrecks followed, with some of his sons following suit.

Then, in 1895, when he was 51, he planned his solo voyage circumnavigating the globe. There were many, many adventures and challenges, which he subsequently wrote about in his best-selling book, Sailing Alone Around the World. He made substantial sums of money from his book sales and became a popular speaker.

Joshua Slocum seated on cabin roof of the Spray. (Photo credit: Winfield Scott Clime ca. 1907.)

Joshua Slocum’s circumglobal route, 1895-1898. (Map source: Vandee-Modus)

Again, from Wikipedia:

By 1909, Slocum’s funds were running low; book revenues had tailed off. He prepared to sell his farm on Martha’s Vineyard and began to make plans for a new adventure in South America. He had hopes of another book deal.

On November 14, 1909, Slocum set sail in the Spray from Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, for the West Indies, on one of his usual winter voyages. He had also expressed interest in starting his next adventure, exploring the Orinoco, Rio Negro and Amazon Rivers. Slocum was never heard from again. In July 1910, his wife informed the newspapers that she believed he was lost at sea.

Despite being an experienced mariner, Slocum never learned to swim and considered learning to swim to be useless. Many mariners shared this thought, as swimming would only be useful if land was extremely close by.

In 1924, Joshua Slocum was declared legally dead.

Phew. It dawns on me that just as my husband’s grandfather – the brother who stayed on land by choice – was third cousins with Joshua Slocum, so were his brothers who were sea captains and had their own perilous experiences at sea. Living by the Bay of Fundy in the days of sailing ships, there must have been something in the air, all right!