by Robin Lloyd
2
1822
A lone figure carrying a canvas bag walked down the dark wharf toward a small schooner tied up at the pier. His wide-brimmed hat was pulled down tightly over his head, his step, deliberate. It was six o’clock in the morning, and the air was cold for October. Roosters were already crowing, telling the Lyme townspeople it was time to wake up. Some wharf rats clad in dark overcoats were loading the small sailing ship with barrels of newly picked golden sweets and crates filled with the famed Connecticut peaches and pipes of freshly squeezed cider.
The captain was a Block Island man with a loud voice, a thick head of silver curly hair, deep-set eyes, and a bony, whiskery face. He was telling them to hurry up as the tide was falling. He turned to face the young man who had walked up to the boat’s gangway and stood beside him. He sized him up quickly like a farmer does a hog. He was younger than he’d thought, a good-looking boy, medium size in stature but athletic in build, with light hazel green eyes under dark eyebrows, a smooth and square forehead, a well-rounded chin. His reddish hair hung uncombed from a broad-brimmed canvas hat. He wore stitched and patched overalls and a dark woolen jacket. Definitely a farm boy, he thought to himself.
“What did you say your name was, boy?”
“Ely, Ely Morgan.”
“Pleased to have you aboard, Morgan. The name is Captain Foster.”
The man extended a large, calloused hand to help Morgan aboard and with the other took the three dimes that Ely gave him for the fare. He then turned back to the men loading the boat.
“Hurry up, you villains, or I’ll put the boot to you! The tide’s ebbin’ now and the current is strong.”
So it was on that cool October day, with the first taste of fall in the air, that Ely Morgan left home on a coastal schooner to take up his new life as an ocean sailor. He was sixteen years old. It had taken him months of working at a nearby farm on Sunday afternoons to save the money for the fare. He reached into his pocket and rubbed the remaining quarter. That was all he had. Captain Henry Champlin, a well-known ship captain from the Connecticut River, who worked with the John Griswold firm out of New York, had promised him a berth on his new ship being built on the East River. Champlin told him to come to the firm’s offices at 68 South Street on the corner of Pine and ask for him once he got there.
To avoid anyone recognizing him, Ely had picked a small, unknown schooner named the Angelita that worked the Connecticut coastline bringing fresh produce and vegetables to New York. Moments after he arrived, the lines were cast off, the sails hoisted, and the heavily laden schooner, riding low in the water, began to run down the swiftly moving Connecticut River. The dark gray sky over the river was decorated with several formations of Canada geese moving in tandem, honking their warning that winter was coming as they flew south from Middletown over old Potapoug. The small river town that the British had attacked years ago was now known as Essex. The townspeople had only recently changed its name as a way to forget the painful memories of that fateful raid.
Ely looked out at the swirls and ripples in the river. He thought back to that night of the Good Friday Blaze, and the danger that he and Abraham had faced. The charred remains of some of the American ships that were burned by the British were still visible at low tide. Twenty-seven American ships were torched, vessels capable of carrying more than 130 cannons. The town of Potapoug was spared because the surprised villagers agreed not to resist if the British would not burn their homes. Many on the river were embarrassed by this defeat at the hands of the British. Even worse, the raiding party escaped with few casualties, only two dead and two wounded. The whole incident was a major blow to the pride of the Connecticut River militia, but for Abraham and Ely, it was their special bond, their secret adventure that was never discovered by their father.
Six years had gone by since his brother Abraham had left home to become a sailor, following in the footsteps of their older brother, William. They both had left shortly after the war ended. For a restless younger generation, not content with the ways of the past, a berth on an ocean-bound brig was like a siren call. Their departure had made life difficult at home, but it was the arrival of that fateful letter during the summer of 1816 that had changed the Morgan family forever. Like a cold winter’s wind, it had swept away hopes and dreams. A dark cloud had settled over the family, leaving his mother with no trace of her once familiar warm smile.
Ely’s mind drifted back to that day when he and his brother Josiah had raced home with the letter. The entire family had gathered around Sally Morgan as she broke the wax seal and unfolded the small letter. It was from New York and the date July 12, 1816, was stamped on it. Ely was squirming with anticipation at what he was sure would be exciting news from one of his brothers. The older girls—Asenath, Sarah, and Nancy—each picked up the two younger children, Maria Louisa and Jesse, so they could see what was happening. Abraham Morgan looked over his wife’s shoulder as she unfolded the letter written on a plain sheet of paper. The older man’s gaunt face was glowering. In his mind, his two older sons had abandoned their obligations by going off to sea. They are “the Devil’s own,” he would say. “No doubt they do their worshiping in a grogshop.”
“It’s from a John Taylor,” Sally Morgan said slowly with surprise and a sudden note of doubt and hesitation in her voice. “Do we know a John Taylor?” No one answered. Ely watched his mother mouth the words as she slowly read the letter to herself. It was her face and the way it suddenly aged before his eyes that told the story. He watched as the letter fell from her hands onto the floor like a leaf from a tree. Her shoulders went limp and she began trembling and shuddering like an injured bird with broken wings.
“What is it, mother?” one of the girls asked.
In a weak voice that cracked into a faint whisper, she said, “They’re gone. Dear God, they’re gone.” With that she left the room, her head down and her body shaking. It was the older sister, Asenath, who picked up the letter from the floor and began reading it to all her siblings. Like a chiseled carving on a granite boulder, those words remained etched in Ely’s memory. Each time he recited them he felt a burning inside.
Dear Madam,
This is to inform you of all that I can concerning your sons. William sailed on the second day of June bound to Canton in the ship John S. Williams. Captain Depyster and I have not heard of her since.
And as for Abraham, my Bosom friend and Brother, I am much afraid that we cannot meet in this troublesome World. But Let us Still Cherish the hope that we will all meet in that country where Sorrow and Sighing is done away. Where the wicked cease from troubling and Where the Weary be at Rest. So my Dear Madam, all the News of your Sons I Will send to you. I have Nothing Worth adding at present.
Despite the promise in the letter of more news, none came. Nothing was ever heard from John Taylor again. Several weeks after receiving the letter, the family knew that William had died because the sinking of the John S. Williams was reported in one of the New York shipping papers, but Abraham’s fate remained a mystery. The dimly lit dinner table at the Morgan house was often filled with awkward silences. The crackling of the fire in the kitchen and the flickering of the candles in the drafty house only accentuated the long gaps in conversation. His mother, whose face had grown drawn and tired, had refused to acknowledge his death. “He’s out there somewhere,” she said. She even refused to give away his clothes and some of his treasured pennywhistles.
Ely watched as an osprey lifted off into the air with its morning catch squirming in its curved beak. The memory of that letter never failed to make him teary-eyed. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand as he looked up the river and thought about its long journey. The Connecticut traveled all the way from Canada to the Long Island Sound. It was open ocean after that. The Algonquian Indians called it the “long tidal river.” For years Ely thought that its name should be “the river with no escape” because he felt that it held him prisoner. When he was younger, he had stood on the high ground a
nd gazed longingly down at the river. Occasionally he would see the tall masts of an oceangoing brig coasting downriver with the outgoing tide, the sailors’ songs filling the air as the men aloft set the ship’s square sails. Even as he hitched up a makeshift dragging cart to one of the plough horses, Ely used to imagine himself on one of those big ships.
He now watched as the first orange rays of sunlight shone through the trees on the banks of the river. Small sloops and schooners carrying freight and passengers tacked back and forth. A flat-bottomed scow powered by long sweeping oars was carrying a full load of Jersey cows across the river. He looked off to the left and saw the rooftop of the Morgan barn framed by the first tint of red and yellow leaves on the oak trees. His family would be getting up soon to start picking the last of the delicious Golden Sweets and the first of the Greenings and Russets. His brother Josiah would be carting the apples over to the neighbor’s cider mill where they would be thrown into a circular trough, crushed into a pomace, and then squeezed in a heavy screw press.
He would miss that family ritual, the first cup of cider. He would miss Josiah. His brother was the one who had made the arrangement with the schooner’s captain. He was the only one in the family he had confided in. Josiah had tried to dissuade him, but he had shook his head. The whippings that his father used to give him were now replaced with fists and slaps and shouting. It seemed like old Abraham had donned the sackcloth of the prophet Jeremiah, even as he saw his willful son as a sinner who needed to repent.
A freshening northwesterly breeze filled out the sails, and within an hour, the small schooner was clearing the Saybrook Bar headed into Long Island Sound toward the entrance to the East River at Throgs Neck. Ely looked back at the low-lying coastline, barren and empty of trees. The sun was now shining brightly over the leeward side of the boat. He felt a knot in his throat and a tightening in his stomach as he thought about what he was doing. He felt nervous, guilty, anxious, and excited, all at the same time. It was a confusing mix of emotions and sensations that overwhelmed him as he looked back at the fading entrance to the Connecticut River.
His mother would be heartbroken when she read the letter he’d left behind, but there was nothing to be done. He could no longer work under his father’s thumb. The old man’s anger and rage had only intensified after the tragic news about William and Abraham. Josiah got along with his father, and so did the girls, at least those who remained at home. Asenath had married a church deacon named Talcott from the small inland town of Gilead, but neither Sarah nor Nancy showed any signs of leaving Lyme. Then there were the two younger girls, Maria Louisa and Jesse. They would all find a way to keep the farm working, he told himself. Then again, he knew the pain he would cause his mother, and he felt the knot in his throat return.
After William and Abraham had left home, Sally Morgan was determined that her younger son get a good education. She was friendly with Margaret Carpenter, one of the local deacons’ wives, who was well read and had a small library and a piano. She persuaded her that Ely was the scholarly one in her family and asked if she could teach her young son about the Bible’s lessons and also introduce him to some of the classics like Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Part of Ely’s mother’s hopes was that her religious friend would instill in her young son an ambition to become a deacon or even a pastor at the Lyme Congregationalist Church. Margaret Carpenter’s father had been a ship merchant, and she had traveled with him when she was younger to Paris and London. France had left a strong impression on her. At church meetings, she’d described the Parisians as poor, misguided heathens who worshiped statues of naked men and women and who cared about nothing but gratifying the carnal mind and feasting their lowest senses. In England, she said, the food was awful and the people boring.
Sally Morgan had thought these negative views of the ways of the Old World might persuade her son to give up his wayward dreams of going to sea. Paradoxically, the reverse happened. Young Ely Morgan found Margaret Carpenter’s descriptions of her early life at sea to be the most interesting part of their Sunday-afternoon reading sessions. She had spoken to him of the beauty of the sea at dawn, and showed him one of her sketchbooks with watercolors and drawings of the ship’s deck with ocean birds flying alongside. All of these stories only served to fire up the boy’s imagination.
Ely again thought of the note he had left for his mother in the kitchen. He had simply written that he had to leave home to find Abraham and he did not know when he would return. He thought back to the words he had used, and wondered if his letter would give his mother any comfort.
“You must kiss all my sisters, Mother. I am sorry I had to leave without saying good-bye. I hope you will understand my decision one day. With love and respect, I remain your son, Ely.”
With the wind picking up and the choppy seas splashing on the deck, the captain could see he was shorthanded. He only had two sailors and a cook on board. The winds were piping up sharply now. The headsails were thrashing about wildly, the lines all tangled together. The two men on the foredeck, inexperienced and dim-witted, were having a hard time wrestling with the halyards. Something must have gotten snagged. With no one else available, he turned to Morgan and looked down at him with a hawkish stare.
“Can you steer, son?”
Morgan nodded, gulping slightly. He was already feeling a little uncertain about what he was doing.
“That’s good, ’cause we’re headed into a blow,” said the captain as he stroked his thinning whiskers. “You just hold the tiller on this course and don’t let go.”
Captain Foster pointed at the black thunderclouds moving in from the west, indicating with his other hand the course he wanted Ely to steer. He handed the tiller over to Morgan and clambered out on top of the cabin house to help two other sailors trying to lower the flapping main gaff topsail. Morgan grabbed the tiller, his fingers wrapping around a well-worn, twisted, rope-covered grip. At first, he was thrilled that he was steering a ship, but then he began to be frightened. He couldn’t believe how much the four-foot-long tiller pulled at his arms. It was like trying to rein in a team of horses on the run. He braced himself with his feet against a wooden block on the deck, and pulled with all his might. Like most farm boys, the only boats he was familiar with were scows, small gaff-rigged sloops, and rowing skiffs. For that matter, he had never been in rough weather before, and as the ship began to pitch and heave, a strange feeling started to come over him.
The seas had started to build and the water was swashing over the decks. He was feeling dizzy and suddenly sick to his stomach. His head was spinning. He’d never been sick like this before. The ship was heeled over at an alarming angle, and pretty soon Ely let go of the tiller as he threw his upper body over the side in a reckless effort to rid himself of this sudden misery. It felt like the whole upper portion of his body was turning inside out. The acrid taste of bile filled his mouth. He paused for breath, and then the whole paralyzing process began all over again.
Free of a steadying hand at the tiller, the schooner swung into the wind, sails flapping wildly, thrashing about, the masts and rigging shaking and trembling. Ely was too far gone to even care, and with no one to tend it, the tiller now swung wildly back and forth, causing the boat to lose momentum. The captain rushed back to take the helm even as the schooner now swung through the wind onto a different tack and headed for the dangerous Long Island shoals. As he passed the prostrate form of the boy he’d left in command of his ship, he landed a kick in Ely’s backside and cursed him loudly.
“Hoist up the centerboard!” yelled the captain to one of the other men, panicked that his heavily loaded ship would run aground with a small fortune of cargo lost. One of the sailors down below in the cabin frantically pulled on the tackle to lift the centerboard. The captain looked over the side and cursed some more as he realized how shallow the water was. The boat scraped bottom, the bow leaping upward and then crashing down again. The next instant waves lifted up the stern, propelling the boat for
ward, and then with a fearful thud she struck bottom again. The bow was lifted up by waves, once again falling and scraping the bottom. By this time, the storm had struck with high winds and pelting rain. Waves hit the boat broadside and water started filling the cabin. The flashes of lightning and the roaring of the wind only made Morgan feel more like he was facing the end of the world.
Fortunately, the schooner soon plowed and scraped through the narrow Long Island shoals, making its way safely into deep water. The crew immediately set about to pump and bail, and by the early afternoon, the water was out of the hold. That night they threw the anchor down just off Throgs Neck at a pretty little anchorage in full view of an old farmhouse. After a pannikin of rum and the assurance that his cargo was safe, the captain soon regained his composure, and turned his attention to his quiet, sickly passenger.
“Have you ever been to sea before?” he asked with a knowing smile on his face as he gave each member of the crew a stiff glass of rum.
Morgan didn’t say anything. The captain handed him a plate of hard sea bread and salty codfish. Morgan’s face turned green as he felt he would have to vomit again. He turned away and looked down at his feet.
“Guess I know the answer to that,” the captain said. “We already guessed that you were a runaway. Might as well tell us your true story.”