Disappointment River

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by Brian Castner


  After admonishing me about my paddle, Wick went on. “The other issue right now is your team. Who are you going with?”

  I told him I wasn’t sure yet. That I was having trouble finding a partner; who in their right mind signs up for such a journey?

  Wick frowned and closed his eyes again.

  “I think we’ve found the weak part of your plan,” he said, and drank his whiskey.

  The next morning, before I left, I searched Wick’s shelves for books on Alexander Mackenzie. I didn’t find any, confirming his obscurity even in an expedition scholar’s library. And no wonder. His journals languish out of print, and in the historical record the earliest hints of Mackenzie lie mostly forgotten in a London archive, the story of his first long voyage at age twelve, when he fled Scotland.

  — 3 —

  SCOTLAND, 1774

  If you caught the view from the point at the right moment, when the skies were finally clear and the fog was down, the sunrise over the Minch would silhouette the Scottish Highlands on the far side of the water. The Minch was still twenty-five miles wide there, no narrow strait, but the irregular and ragged ridgeline on the far shore surged thousands of feet into the air, high enough to deceive. The mountains never stood in backlit relief for long, though. Once the perpetual cloud banks re-formed, the Isle of Lewis, Alexander Mackenzie’s boyhood home, might as well be adrift on the ocean.

  He was born in Stornoway, the only village of any size on that grassy island, but he spent most of his childhood on a farm a few miles outside town. That homestead was known as Melbost, a tiny isthmus of land connecting the village to the wider point that dangled into the Minch like an apple off its stem. Looking from Alexander’s family farm, to the north, one saw the sea. To the south, the sea. To the west, past Stornoway, the lochs and hinterlands of the empty Isle of Lewis. To the east, the point and the sea. The Minch.

  Those were dangerous waters, as the blue men of the Minch caused trouble for sailors. They raised storms. Called lightning down with their long gray arms. Swam like fishes but spoke like men, challenging ship captains with verses of rhyme. Fail to complete the couplet, they’d cut your ship in two and drag you to the bottom. But on quiet mornings, when the blue men sleep just below the surface of the water, the skies are crisp, and, oh, those Highlands at sunrise.

  Alexander Mackenzie left Stornoway at the age of twelve, after his mother died. He crossed the whole ocean, not just the Minch, sailing hard west for the New World. He had to escape. Scotland was dying too.

  * * *

  ————

  It’s not exactly that the Mackenzies were poor. It was that all of Scotland was poor, the outer islands only more so. Capitalism, via a tenant culture that turned chieftains into mere landlords, had achieved in a few decades what centuries of medieval English kings never could: the clans were broken, the Scots a shade of their former selves.

  Alexander grew up better than most. He went to school, for one, and was born, in 1762, in a sturdy slate-roofed two-story cottage with windows. His father was Kenneth, known as Corc, and in the Mackenzie clan he was a tacksman, the owner and leaser of land, the binding tissue between laird and peasant. Corc’s chief, the last Earl of Seaforth, spent far more time in London with the Royal Society than tending to his Highland holdings, and in those days Corc Mackenzie was reduced to being the rent collector of Melbost. In times past, though, the tacksman was a military man, a traditional leader in battle. During the 1745 uprising of Bonnie Prince Charles, the Catholic pretender to the throne, Corc had been made an ensign and, in the name of the king, fortified the village of Stornoway against attack from the sea. It never came.

  Corc lived as a gentleman farmer upon the land, peasant clansmen doing the hard labor of tilling the thin stony soil. He dwelled in a house, not a concave leaky hut, and during the long dark rainy winters he heated his home with peat, cut from the bog in heavy wedges. Alexander had one older brother, Murdoch, and two sisters, Sybilla and Margaret. Alexander was sturdy and towheaded. He and Murdoch grew up with as much privilege and culture as was possible in that outpost on the sea. They attended school, were literate in English and French, and read the classics in Latin and Greek. They kept a lively correspondence with their cousins, Alexander especially with Roderic, the son of his mother’s brother. Roderic lived just on the other side of the Minch, in Achiltibuie, as one of the Highland Mackenzies, and the clan stayed as close as letters and the occasional fosterage allowed. Roderic was only one year older than Alexander, and the two grew together in affection.

  When Alexander was still a boy, Murdoch left home and used his schooling to become a surgeon on a ship. But family lore says that ship was lost, pulled to the bottom by the blue men off “the coast of Halifax.” His mother died soon after.

  * * *

  ————

  In 1773, the year before Alexander left home, the famous Samuel Johnson, towering man of letters, toured the Highlands, accompanied as always by his young protégé and biographer James Boswell. Johnson published his travelogue as Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, and of the lands generally he wrote, “It must be confessed, that they have not many allurements, but to the mere lover of naked nature. The inhabitants are thin, provisions are scarce, and desolation and penury give little pleasure.”

  Johnson found the terrain either mountain or fen, the forests “denuded,” the fields fallow, the streams devoid of fish, the churches “unroofed and useless,” the houses mean and, like the roads, made entirely of loose stones. By nature, as mountaineers, the Highlanders, he expected, would be warlike and thievish. Instead, they were “represt,” stripped of their natural personal courage, no longer wearing their tartans or even taking their weapons to Sunday services.

  “An old gentleman, delighting himself with the recollection of better days, related, that forty years ago, a Chieftain walked out attended by ten or twelve followers, with their arms rattling,” Johnson wrote. Now such men as Corc were gelded, and many average Scots whom Johnson encountered considered tacksmen “a useless burden.”

  Johnson blamed it on the introduction of commerce; until recently, both the concept and the reality of money were almost unknown. “Since the islanders, no longer content to live, have learned the desire of growing rich, an ancient dependent is in danger of giving way to a higher bidder, at the expense of domestick dignity and hereditary power.”

  Johnson traveled among the Scots as would an anthropologist sending back to civilization dispatches from a backward land. “The traditions of an ignorant and savage people have been for ages negligently heard, and unskilfully related,” he wrote. He reported that the men had whiskey for breakfast every morning but were never drunk. That the women drove the cattle and harvested the corn. That the native language was coarse and vulgar and only meant for the grossest of thoughts. Johnson made a special point of investigating the Second Sight—“our desire of information was keen, and our inquiry frequent”—because he had heard Scots put great faith in these predictions of good or ill, visions of distant places. He found the belief near universal among those of the Western Isles; only the ministers demurred. Most often the practitioners said they saw Death, which Johnson found appropriate for the clime.

  “The dark months are here a time of great distress,” he wrote, “because the summer can do little more than feed itself, and winter comes with its cold and its scarcity upon families very slenderly provided.”

  * * *

  ————

  Of greatest distress to Johnson, though, was the “epidemick desire of wandering,” especially after 1760. America was an immense land primed for settlement, all potential, rich in speculative “futures” of every kind. Tens of thousands of Scots made the journey in those years, and Alexander’s home was hit particularly hard. Only a few thousand lived on the Isle of Lewis at its peak, but in the twelve months before Alexander’s family fled, one in five inhabitants immigrated to the New World.

  In those years, Stornoway’s major
export was disillusioned Scots; on a single day in June 1773, over eight hundred sailed away. Every spring and fall, the ships would come and siphon more of the destitute and adventurous and desperate. Many left to become indentured servants. In March 1774, after recruiting fifty adults for the domestic work, the captain of the Friendship, of Philadelphia, started picking teenage boys and girls off the beach, without the consent of their parents. Over a hundred ended up on board. Parliament was outraged, but a later investigation would show that the poverty-stricken children were volunteers, not victims of kidnapping.

  Some of the affliction was local. The Earl of Seaforth sharply increased rents, leading to a face-to-face confrontation with tenants. But Johnson saw similar stories throughout the Western Isles. It was a contagion that must be stopped; “an island once depopulated will remain a desert,” he predicted.

  As tacksman, Corc Mackenzie held out longer than most, the tail end of the trend. Johnson saw that it was the tacksman’s job to “impart knowledge” and “impress civility.” But on whom, when whole districts were depopulated, leaving only want and disarray and shame? In its October 1774 issue, Scots Magazine said that Scotland was turning into a grass park, home to nothing but “owls and dragons.”

  The island was a broken shell with the yolk removed. Alexander’s father was a warrior without a war. His mother and brother were dead. Like thousands before them, Alexander, his father, and two aunts made for America.

  They left just in time. In reaction to the crisis, Parliament banned emigration from Scotland less than a year later.

  * * *

  ————

  In November 1774, the Mackenzies booked passage on the Peace & Plenty. A representative of the Crown dutifully annotated each emigrant before he or she boarded. Young Alexander told the customs inspector that he was twelve years old and a schoolboy, the only child so identified on the ship.

  The Peace & Plenty was a well-known merchant vessel, two masts and square sails and a four-hundred-ton burden, retrofitted to carry humans in bulk. Like a massive soup ladle, twice a year the ship dipped into the thin broth of Scotland and Ireland and poured its contents over New York, Philadelphia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Profitably managing the business of the Peace & Plenty was a two-man job: one to entice the emigrants on the boat, the other to ship them out.

  The captain of the Peace & Plenty was Charles McKenzie, no relation to Alexander. His partner was John Wyllie, a native of Stornoway who spent half his time in Belfast, hopping back and forth between Scotland and Ireland to enlist desperate refugees. As a team, they were very adept at recruiting passengers. Wyllie advertised on posters around Belfast: anyone who desired passage to America should meet at a certain place at a certain time. Everyone knew, the placard went on, that the Peace & Plenty was one of the finest in the kingdom, well suited to the “comfortable accommodation” of passengers due to the height of its decks. Plus, passengers would not starve: “As Captain McKenzie’s Character is already so well established, it is sufficient to say, that Care will be taken to send Plenty of the best Provisions and Water.”

  The posters worked. In May 1774, McKenzie dropped a load of Belfast natives in New York and then sailed immediately for the Isle of Lewis, where Wyllie had recruited another ship full. That summer, Alexander watched four hundred of his neighbors load up on the Peace & Plenty.

  It was a bonanza. Wyllie told McKenzie that so many Scots wanted to flee Stornoway he bet they could fill another ship. In October, the two made an official wager, five hundred pounds that Wyllie could find another three hundred emigrants within fifteen days. Alexander and his father and aunts booked passage, but the cupboards were bare otherwise, and Wyllie’s recruitment efforts stalled. McKenzie waited the fifteen days for the promised passengers, and then another week besides, but only one-quarter of the expected three hundred ever showed. Captain McKenzie was finally so irritated at the delay that on November 8, 1774, he fired his gun into the air, signaling his intention to leave, and then suddenly pulled anchor before everyone was on board. Thirty wishful emigrants, all paying customers who had already loaded their worldly possessions in the hold, were stranded onshore. They boarded rowboats and tried to reach the ship, but Captain McKenzie put up his whole sail and left them behind.

  Alexander and his family were fortunate that they were already on board and, with only fifty-eight fellow passengers, saved some of the worst depredations of sea travel. Like other merchant ships, the Peace & Plenty had three decks—the top, tween, and hold—and steerage-rate passengers were crammed into the center. Despite Captain McKenzie’s advertisements to the contrary, emigrants spent the bulk of the voyage hunched over, scuttling about the five feet of space between the hold and the upper deck. Bulkheads sectioned off cargo areas for hogsheads of stores, leaving the dormitories airless cells: six feet by twenty inches the standard planning factor for adults, less for children. Families piled three or four to a bed. Buckets of salt water were available for washing, but only in first class. Decks were cleaned with vinegar when the weather allowed, but normally the hatches were fastened to keep out the spray and storms of a wintry north sea. If the hold were to fill with water, Alexander would join his brother among the blue men.

  The trip across the Atlantic could take up to three months. Weekly rations consisted of a few pounds of oatmeal, the same for bread or biscuit, a pound of molasses, a pound of peas, less of beef or pork or cheese, a little brackish water. Most passengers spent the first week seasick in the dark, candles and lanterns being at a premium.

  But Alexander’s family, having a little bit of money, could at least afford a cabin where they were able to stand up straight.

  Sailors said you could smell America before you saw it, a foreign lushness of forest and soil wafting on the breeze from over the horizon. Mackenzie landed at New York City, at a crowded dock on the East River, and was greeted by other smells. The fishmonger. The oxcart. The collected floating sewage of twenty-five thousand souls. But also gunpowder, and burning tar.

  It was the spring of 1775, and when Alexander Mackenzie arrived in New York, he discovered that he had escaped the rural poverty of Scotland for a war.

  — 4 —

  NEW YORK, 1775

  Up and down the thirteen colonies, New York was known as a cosmopolitan city of whores and merchants and immigrants. Eighteen languages were commonly spoken on the street, five hundred ladies of pleasure welcomed sailors and businessmen alike, and seventeen churches of competing denominations stood intermixed with the coffeehouses, flophouses, and banking houses that made the city hum. “Our chiefest unhappiness here is too great a mixture,” said one resident of the time. One-fifth of the city consisted of African slaves, and another one in ten New Yorkers was a Scottish immigrant who had just arrived in the last two years. The stories of their ocean crossings were great fodder for the many daily newspapers; the most genteel of New York’s citizens—who lived in large fenced-off homes staffed with African footmen, coachmen, butlers, and maids—read with great appetite the sensational accounts of starving passengers, disease, quarantines, and freezing cold.

  The Peace & Plenty, bearing the Mackenzie family under just such conditions, sailed through the narrows, between the wooded islands that enclose New York Bay, and approached the cluster of church spires and crumbling fortifications on the southern tip of hilly Manhattan. Fort George was built by the Dutch in 1626 and, even in its decrepitude, remained the seat of the royal governor, a hundred ancient naval guns in the grand battery guarding one of the world’s finest harbors. Up the slope from the sea, the 175-foot steeple of Trinity Episcopal pinnacled the skyline. And beyond the farthest homes of Chambers Street lay open farms, the heights at Harlem, and then dense forest.

  The piers on the Hudson side of Manhattan often iced up over the winter, so the Peace & Plenty and other passenger ships, often two a day, docked on the busy eastern wharf. Local customs officials were overwhelmed and only recorded immigrants sporadically. The Mackenzies exited t
he ship unnoticed and entered a city unlike Stornoway in almost every way.

  Press gangs prowled along the East River piers. On the Hudson side, churches and brothels served their respective congregations. Common greens and middle-class homes filled the higher center slope. Incredibly dense, the city was only a mile long and half a mile wide; young Alexander’s walk to school from Melbost to Stornoway was longer than the full length of Broadway. This was intentional, as the whole city focused on trade, and distances were measured in the time it took a horse to move a cartload of goods down the cobblestoned streets.

  Mercantilists held all the highest positions in fashionable New York society. They loved French champagne, Canton china, and local oysters. All finished goods, anything of discernment or quality, came from Britain, four or five months between order placement and arrival. April and October were the prime time for British ship viewing, six months the average for a round-trip to London. The incoming holds were filled with perfume, mustard, tea, snuff, gloves, handkerchiefs, ribbons, lace, umbrellas. And on the return voyage, Alexander saw the ships carried white pine lumber and iron bars and furs. Especially furs, floated down the Hudson from the trading post at Albany. A Scottish visitor called America “the best country in the world for people of small fortunes; or in other words, the best poor man’s country.” All that was required to make one’s way up in the world was “courage and resolution in the adventurer.”

 

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