“Do you believe that your uncle Rufus has been visited by this premonition of mortality?”
Benjamin rested his head back on his pillow, his eyes merry. “Haaa! That old fossil! He has made older bones than I ever shall, that cannot be denied. Have you read his letter?”
“I have. Truly he is a wonder of the age.” In fact, Rufus Putnam was Benjamin’s distant cousin, but he was addressed as “Uncle” because he was of the previous generation, a contemporary of his cousin General Israel Putnam who had been dead many years since. In the Revolution, Uncle Rufus had fought under both Horatio Gates and Mad Anthony Wayne, and when he might have retired to his comfortable home in Rutland, he led an expedition instead of other old soldiers to begin settlement of the Northwest Territories. Across the Ohio River he had founded a town called Marietta, spent years fighting local Indians for those lands, and now at the age of eighty was a senior statesman of those western lands. He had lately written to the Connecticut Putnams to urge upon them the bounteous future and wealth to be had if they would remove to the West.
“Oh, my son.” Benjamin squeezed Bliven’s arm. “I am content that I have not caught this fever to pick up and go tame some wilderness. Would you rather that we had done?”
Bliven shook his head slowly. “Never.”
“We have not done badly, your mother and you and I.”
Bliven felt tears rise and issued the most terse command to himself that they should not spill.
“And yet”—Benjamin lifted his hand again—“there is something of your uncle Rufus about you. He is a fighter, an explorer, a man who cannot stand seeing a blank spot on a map. You are not unlike him.”
“He reads history also, I believe.”
“Indeed. And now you must to Hawaii, and China, and the Indies. I wish I could live to hear those stories.”
“Perhaps you shall.”
“Perhaps, but likely not. Now, when you read—if you read—that I have gone, you will likely be in some far corner of nowhere. It will be all right for you to mourn me.” He raised a finger. “A little, for every man wants to be missed. But no terrible grief. I have lived long, and well, and I am content to answer the great God any time he shall call.”
Bliven could hardly speak. “I am glad to hear it.”
“And then I shall find out whether that too-loud Reverend Beecher was right about his little church being the only portal to heaven.”
“Reverend Beecher takes a great deal upon himself.” Suddenly, Bliven remembered saying good-bye to Dr. Cutbush back on the Constitution—Cutbush, who was now nearing fifty and only last year was promoted to senior surgeon of the Navy; Cutbush who had shown him the importance of making a good end with someone. “But I will tell you this, that wherever I go in this wide world, I will always be your son, and proud to be so. And have no fear, I will never alienate our home and our farm. At the end of all things, this is where I will return, and we will all be together.”
“I am content.”
Bliven stood to his full height, posing, gripping the handle of his saber.
“I thank you, my son. Go on now, or your mother will think we are planning some mischief.”
Bliven exited, crossed the parlor and hall into the keeping room, with the intention to steal by without speaking into his room to change, but his mother heard him coming. “Did you pass inspection?”
“Yes, I believe I did.”
“Bliv, my dear, forgive my saying this, I believe that your father is dying—things, differences of degree that only a wife would notice. I have not spoken of it—I do not wish to distress him—yet, I believe that he will leave us before many more months have passed.”
How perfectly sympathetic they were, he thought, each knowing the reality but unwilling to cause the other pain. “Well, Mother, being born and dying—those are God’s province, are they not?”
“They are, to be sure.”
He patted her shoulder. “Let us not preempt His work from Him, then, hm?”
* * *
* * *
THE MORNING BROUGHT to him another pressing aspect of his pending deployment: What in hell do I know of China, or Malaya, or the Sandwich Islands, or any of these damned places? The prospect of sailing into such a multitude of unknowns, hazarding not just his ship but bearing the responsibility of his country’s standing while knowing nothing of the people and their customs and how best to represent the United States, was beyond daunting.
He was the first to rise, and in the kitchen rekindled the fire from the previous evening’s embers and prepared coffee—thinking as he did so that he must write Sam and perhaps find a way to put in at Charleston, for he had not seen him now in many years.
At midmorning he removed a key from a ring, donned his cloak against the chill, and ambled the distance to the Marsh house. Such an early call would not disturb his mother-in-law, for she almost never ventured downstairs but was content to dwell on what had become her piano nobile, rather enjoying it that both servants and visitors must come up to her, as though she were in heaven already.
It was Becky who answered his knock, the same maid he had known since his first hopeful visit in his salad days, during his first flush of ardor for Clarity. “Captain Putnam, good morning! Come in this house!” She held the door wide. “Let me take your wrap.”
“Good morning, Becky. How are you? How is your mistress?”
“We are all well, thank you. Mrs. Marsh is awake and having her tea. What brings you out on this fine crisp morning?”
“I need to search out a book, if I may.”
“I will let Mrs. Marsh know that you are here, but customarily she does not receive callers before afternoon.”
He was already entering the library. “Thank you. I won’t disturb her unless she wishes to see me.”
Some people were content to place a cabinet or two of books in a room and call it a library, but old Marsh had been assiduous in amassing his four walls of knowledge and enlightenment, studious and organized. When he and Clarity should finally come to sell the house, there would be no help for it but to retain this closed wonderful world that Marsh had built with his books, and that would require adding a library to his own home. Mrs. Marsh might yet live a long time, so that would not be imminent. Besides, the times indeed were souring, and even if the house was theirs to sell, they could not get a good price for such a large place until business improved. All was transpiring as Clarity’s business manager had foretold; Bliven had seen signs of it himself in their family drayage and Captain Bull’s Tavern, hearing men complain that banks had extended too much credit to people, largely to help them speculate on the empty Western lands. Banks that had encouraged clients to take out loans, and then willingly renewed them, now unexpectedly called in the notes. Their customers, now rich in land but bereft of gold, defaulted and were now ruined, and the banks along with them. What a pity that their former Secretary of the Treasury Mr. Hamilton had been killed, for it might be instructive to see how that champion of liberal banking in furtherance of unfettered enterprise might figure a way out of his system’s collapse.
Clarity, God bless her, had written him that she had navigated the shoal with minimal loss. Acting on her manager’s advice, she had disposed of Marsh’s Western investments for gold before the trend of the times became apparent to all. She had sold at a loss, although a slight one, at a price that made the prospect of Ohio land worth a risk. Besides, she had reasoned, if her buyer actually moved west and improved the land, it could surely make him wealthy indeed. The only loss would fall on one who calculated upon reselling the land for a profit within a short time. Such a one, then, would be an even greater hoopoe than her father had been, and would deserve his fate. And beyond that, forewarned that the banks—local ones as well as the Bank of the United States—might dissolve, Clarity kept the coins, now well hidden on Putnam Farm in a location known only to herself, Bl
iven, and his parents.
Alone in the library, Bliven found Marsh’s shelf of explorations and travelogues. He went first to the large book of geography in which, in his youth, he had pointed out for Clarity the sites of his battles against the Berber pirates. For that sentimental reason alone he would not have wished to risk taking it with him to the Orient, but the question was quickly resolved when he found it so out of date and lacking in textual discussion that it was better left behind anyway. When he returned to Boston he would visit Carter and Hendee’s bookshop on School Street and procure a newer one.
The most absorbing discussions he had ever had with Marsh had been on travel and geography, and in his youth it was from Marsh that he first learned the true story of Captain Cook, who had discovered the Sandwich Islands, where he would soon be bound. After Cook’s death at the hand of Hawaiian warriors in 1779, at least twenty of his officers wrote memoirs that had the effect of lionizing him, and eventually of canonizing him. Those officers were hoping merely to earn some remuneration from Cook’s fame, since their Royal Navy pay would give them no comfort in their old age, but ultimately they transformed Cook into a seminal myth of empire. Bliven had known of a couple of these books and acquired them to satisfy his own curiosity. It was Marsh who told him that of all those books, only one told the truth with no rouge and no powder, and that one was written by the only American who had sailed with him.
Bliven quickly laid his finger upon it and pulled it from the shelf. He sought out Becky to reclaim his cloak and, sending his compliments up to Mrs. Marsh, took his leave. Back in the quiet of his own study he opened it: A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean. John Ledyard was the scion of a wealthy Connecticut family who possessed youth, looks, money, and a curiosity to see the world before he must settle into some mode of living. Bliven found himself instinctively drawn to the story of this young man with whom, except on the point of wealth, he felt much in common. Ledyard’s travels took him only as far as England, however, before he was snared by a press gang and forced into the Royal Navy. Any other man would have regarded this as a calamity, but given his lack of alternatives in the matter, the equable young Ledyard decided that it might serve his purpose of traveling the world and having adventure while at the same time saving him the expense of travel. Thus, when given the opportunity, he volunteered for Cook’s third voyage of exploration and joined the contingent of marines on Cook’s ship, a homely but rock-solid collier renamed H.M. Brig Endeavour, from which he would have a chance to see as much of the world as even he could desire.
What was now known, but that almost no one knew in Cook’s time, for it was a deeply held secret, was that his new voyage had a dark purpose, to finally discover the mythical Northwest Passage, but to attempt it from the west where all others had tried to find it from the Atlantic via Greenland. Great trouble was taken to mask the true purpose of his errand; the story was put out that their intention was to return to his homeland a native of Tahiti who had been brought to England on Cook’s first voyage and become a great celebrity. This Cook accomplished, and from Tahiti he sailed north unbeknownst to the world, with no thought of anything but open water between him and the northern polar latitudes. After crossing the equator, his stumbling across the verdant, volcanic islands that he named to honor his patron, the Earl of Sandwich, was the most improbable of accidents. He tarried only long enough to victual and water his ships before continuing his race northward, where he spent months trying to punch through the strait between Russia and North America into the polar sea.
According to Ledyard, Cook’s failure to do this turned him hard and brittle and cruel. The smallest infractions among his crew were punished with the lash; when they complained of spoiled rations, he forced them to eat the foul-tasting meat of walruses. After months of frustration, and a growing pain in his own belly that gave every sign of cancer, he sailed south again, reaching the Sandwich Islands almost exactly one year after he left.
The women of these islands, like those of Tahiti and the other islands farther south, proved unstoppable in their determination to mate with this new race of what seemed to them godlike white men. During his northern run Cook, despite his greatest vigilance, had been unable to prevent such congresses from taking place, and upon his return in a year discovered that the venereal afflictions that his men had sown in their wake had spread like a wildfire through the entire chain of islands. Cook spent months mapping the islands, slowly circling each even as he had Labrador and New Zealand before—but denying his men, who were famished for the unashamed lust of a woman, any shore leave whatever.
This, wrote Ledyard, occasioned fierce grumbling among the men and nearly brought a mutiny down upon the captain’s head. Cook’s greatest faults, however, with which none of his officers tasked him and which Ledyard alone laid to his charge, were hubris and blasphemy. The natives of these islands, while possessing a complex culture and a stratified society, had never seen white men nor huge Western ships before, and naturally enough ascribed to them some divine origin. Cook inexplicably allowed them, king and chiefs and commoners together, to worship him. He suffered them to fall down before him, to heap gifts upon him, even permitting the priests to chew his food for him before placing it in his mouth to swallow. After weeks of this the Endeavour departed, but in a week returned to repair a mast broken in a storm, and at this the spell was broken utterly.
The natives taunted and stole from the English, especially any implements made of or containing parts of iron, for iron was unknown in these islands. At length they ventured to steal one of Cook’s launches, to burn it down and salvage the nails. When Cook moved to seize the Hawaiian king and hold him for the return of his boat, the natives resisted and attacked Cook and his contingent of marines. When Cook was wounded and groaned, they realized beyond doubt that he was no god, and they fell upon him with knives of obsidian glass as keen as razors, and war clubs studded with sharks’ teeth.
With Cook’s gruesome end Bliven laid the book down to reflect on what lessons were to be gained. These events had happened forty years before, at which time the islanders were primitive but not stupid. They had doubtless become much more accustomed to Western people and ways, and certainly Clarity’s native friends whom he had come to know somewhat showed none of this ferocity, although they allowed that it still existed. The missionary effort would not be without danger, yet piety, humility, helpfulness, and the intercession of the Christian natives would go far to ensure their safety. But as for himself, he must take care not to repeat Cook’s arrogance and be sure to mark the boundary between upholding the dignity of his country and indulging his personal conceit.
5
Seasick
The Thaddeus stood out from Boston on October 23, 1819, with the passengers gathered in the well deck, clutching the last parcels of their belongings, sitting on the last-minute trunks they had not previously consigned aboard. They heard the pilot order the topsails and fore staysail set, and felt a surge of excitement, that electricity of adventure begun, as she edged away from the wharf.
Clarity had not considered how one settled aboard a vessel to get accustomed to months at sea. She spied a young man with curly auburn hair, healthy and vigorous in every respect, in an officer’s uniform who seemed to be more or less in charge of the embarking, and she walked over to him, conscious of the ship’s first gentle roll in the harbor swell, thrilled to feel for herself for the first time what Bliven had called finding her sea legs. “How do you do?” she asked, and held out her hand.
He saluted in that easy merchant-sailor manner and then took her hand. “James Hunwell, first officer. You are Mrs. Putnam, I believe?”
“Yes.”
“Your trunks arrived earlier and we placed them in your cabin. You are aware that you will be sharing accommodation with Mrs. Albright?”
“Could you take me there, please?”
They walked aft, and he passed first up the
ladder to the poop deck, not in rudeness but to take her hand and help her up the last few steps, then held open the door to a main cabin that held a large dining table, the compartment lined with doors every few feet down either side, much as Bliven had described to her the officers’ berths on a warship. He had told her in years past how spare those accommodations were, but she was not prepared for the cell that she entered. It was scarcely wide enough to accommodate her lying down. Her trunks were lined down one bulkhead, two holding her own clothes and belongings, and three with assorted bolts of cloth, a disassembled spinning wheel, carefully nested cookware—everything she could think of to demonstrate American methods of home keeping to the natives, even as she admitted to herself that somehow those people had, evidently, managed to feed and shelter themselves for unknown centuries quite without American assistance. Her trunks were arranged so as to make a smooth platform on top, on which was laid a thin mattress and bedding.
“Forgive me, my dear, I did not hear you coming. I was resting.” Clarity had not thought to turn and regard the opposite bulkhead, which was arranged similarly, with Muriel Albright stretched atop that mattress, her stockings just protruding from beneath her black dress.
“Oh! You are Mrs. Albright. We have been aware of each other only distantly up to now. I am Clarity Putnam. How do you do?” She extended her hand and Muriel took it.
“Not yet seasick, thank the Lord, although I am somewhat apprehensive of what is to come. Pray, sit with me.” Muriel raised herself to recline on one arm as she edged herself the remaining inches against the confining bulkhead, and Clarity seated herself on the edge of the mattress. “You must be the young lady who wrote the book I have heard of. You are becoming rather famous.”
“Truly? I wonder at it, for my name is not on the book.”
“No, but Captain Blanchard has taken much amusement in telling others that you seem to have written more history than your husband would have wished.”
The Devil in Paradise--Captain Putnam in Hawaii Page 10