by Robin Lloyd
Four days later, a drizzle was falling on the deck. The Hudson had completed the journey up the Channel and into the Thames. A pilot boarded the ship near Sheerness and a small steamer threw them a line. As the ship rounded Cuckold’s Point and passed the busy London Docks, the sailors spotted the buoys and the lock chamber that marked the entrance into their new destination, St. Katherine’s Docks, nestled underneath the Tower of London. The ancient fortress’s reputation for torture and death seemed dark and imposing from the vantage point of the river. The old turrets and towers stood in sharp contrast to the newly built St. Katherine’s with its mortared walls and long, massive brick warehouses that lined the quays. These smaller docks were designed to handle as many as 120 ships. As the packet pulled into the sheltered waters, the dockmaster was there waiting to review the ship’s manifest. Once they were tied up and the ship secured, he stood by overseeing the unloading of the cargo, a process that usually took one to two days.
On one of the first evenings ashore after that cold November voyage, Morgan met Laura at a tavern in Change Alley. It was in the middle of a busy commercial section of London bounded by Lombard Street, Cornhill, and Birchin Lane. This narrow alleyway was filled with lively coffee shops, fine-quality ship chandlers, and goldsmiths from Lombardy. It was a perfect place for a sailor to take a young woman he wanted to impress. On their way there, he had been surprised when a well-dressed stranger, some English dandy from the fashionable West End, tipped his top hat to Laura, saying something in French he didn’t understand. “Mon plaisir, mademoiselle. I trust I will see you on Thursday, comme d’habitude.” Morgan had asked who he was. She had looked flustered and said that she didn’t know. Morgan wanted to believe her, but all his instincts told him she was lying. He kept his doubts to himself. He knew it was best for him not to rush to any sudden judgments.
“I ’ave something to tell ye, Ely, that I know will interest ye,” she told him coyly that evening as they walked down one of the shadowy alleyways adjacent to Lombard Street.
Morgan looked at her inquiringly, wondering if she was going to reveal something personal about herself.
“The man ye were asking about, William Blackwood, ’e’s here in London.”
“How do you know that?” he asked incredulously.
“’E’s been seeing a girl I know named Mary. She works upstairs in the tavern my sister runs. You know, the White Bull Tavern. She says ’is ship is tied up in the West India Docks. It ’as just been repaired at a nearby yard.”
“The Charon is here in London?” Morgan was taken aback by this startling news.
“Yes, but Mary says ’e won’t be ’ere long. His ship ’as been replanked and caulked and is ready to set sail. That’s why I was so anxious for yer ship to arrive. I thought ye would never get here. Blackwood told Mary ’e’s leaving to go to India and China for several years. He says he’s exporting Bengali opium to Whampoa.”
“An opium trader,” Morgan mumbled to himself. He smiled at Laura. Any nagging doubts about her had disappeared. All suspicions about her character and activities were now completely forgotten.
The next day Morgan told Hiram the news. They both decided that the best thing to do was to find Blackwood’s ship, the Charon. If by some chance they found it, perhaps he could find Blackwood and confront him. He didn’t know what they would discover. Between St. Katherine’s Docks and the West India Docks were several miles of dangerous roads through London’s East End, certainly not walking distance, so they took a hackney cab along Ratcliffe Highway and Commercial Road.
To gain access to the West India Docks, they pretended they were drunk, although in Hiram’s case, this role was more real than Morgan would have liked. The guards laughed at them and let them pass. This was a far bigger dock area than the new docks at St. Katherine’s. There were hundreds of ships inside the walls, loading and unloading. Morgan stared at the long rows of brick warehouses. Some of them were five stories high and filled with stacked hogsheads of sugar above ground. The vaults for rum below ground were more than a half-mile long, separated by brick firewalls to minimize the risk of fire. Like the other enclosed dock areas on the Thames, the quays were alive with men unloading hogsheads of West Indian sugar and barrels of rum. Morgan inquired where the ships being rigged up for departure were and soon they were walking briskly along the north quay.
In the distance, all the way at the end of the docks, they could see men high up in the masts of one ship that had recently been caulked and painted. She was sleek and low in the water with the looks of a raked-back brigantine. Morgan could tell that this ship was built for speed. Her hull was too low in the water to be a merchant ship or a frigate, but it was sharp in the bow with an attractive sheer back to the stern. Morgan thought that she had the look of a Baltimore-built topsail schooner. A rush of adrenalin swept over him as he realized that this ship might be the Charon. He and Hiram tried to get closer by telling the guards who stopped them that they were returning sailors, but this time they were turned back.
They might have given up at this point, but Morgan spotted a small gaff-rigged sailing boat tied up at the edge of the quay. They quickly pushed it off and jumped in. The oarlocks wiggled and creaked as Morgan and Hiram rowed toward the ship. It was near dusk now and the four o’clock winter sun, low on the horizon, was shining directly onto the ship they were trying to approach. When they were one hundred yards away, they raised the two small sails and tacked in close to the bow. The sun shone directly onto a sea serpent carved under the bowsprit. They let out the sail and began coasting toward the stern of the ship. That’s when they were noticed.
“’Eah down there. Ye river scum in the wherry. What are yer doin’ ’ere?”
A sailor with a raised pistol was looking down from high up above them.
“Just making deliveries,” Morgan quickly replied.
“This ’ere ship is not taking deliveries. Clear off ye river rats or I’ll fill ye full of lead.”
“’Oo’s thar?” another voice cried out.
“A couple of filching thieves that’s all. I chased ’em off.”
Any plan to board the ship or ask any more questions was quickly aborted. Hiram sheeted in the sails, Morgan looked back quickly at the stern where he could plainly see the name of the ship, the Charon. He felt a moment of sudden exhilaration, but then he heard a man calling out for the police. “Mudlarks!” the man cried. “Mudlarks! Police! Thar they are!” The man was running now and pointing in their direction. “They filched me boat!”
“Ely,” Hiram cried out. “We better pull out of here fast. If not, we’re going to end up like those scuffle hunters, being carted off to some English dungeon.”
In the fading light, they headed out through the small channel leading to the wide-bodied Thames. They could hear voices muttering and feet trampling on the quays as they were now clearly being pursued. The Marine Police kept a high-profile presence there on the West India Docks. Looking back through the night gloom, Morgan could see the faint lights from a small vessel. Hiram sheeted in the sails on the leeward side as Morgan hung out over the windward rail, his left hand on the tiller. He was steering by the feel of the wind, nudging the little boat to windward as much as it would tolerate. They could hear men shouting in the distance. He couldn’t tell who they were, but given the extreme darkness on the river and the cold temperatures, it was a good guess that they were not friendly. No working boat would be on this frigid river at this time of night. He guessed it was a police boat. Morgan bundled his dark, heavy peacoat around him to ward off the bone-numbing cold. Spray from the polluted Thames splattered on his face as the lee rail on the small boat tilted into the dark river water. They used the lights from some of the bulky Thames river barges to gauge where the shallows were on either side. His bare hands had lost any sense of feeling. It was no wonder, he thought, that the English referred to this time of the year as the “suicide month.”
They waited for the sound of gunshots, but none came. The
y listened for the noise of muffled oars or the shouts of men, but the river was silent and dark. It took them most of the night to zigzag their way up the Thames, battling against the current in their small sailboat. At one point when they were close to shore, they thought they heard their pursuers, but the putrid smell told them it was just some men shoveling sewage into the river. Their boat bumped into something heavy, jarring the hull. Morgan thought it might be a piece of driftwood.
“Hiram, what the devil is that?” he cried out in a whisper.
He reached down with his right hand to clear the debris away, and jumped back in horror. There was something long and pale floating alongside the boat.
“Lawd sakes alive! It’s a body, Hiram!”
The two of them looked over the side. There was just enough light to see the ghostly white, oval face of a man looking up at them. His round eyes were open and bulging like a dead fish, staring off into the darkness, his open hands clutching outward.
“Push it away, Ely!” Hiram cried out. “Push that tarnal floater away. This river is the Devil’s own.”
As the darkness of night receded, they hauled their stolen boat at the next convenient stop, Union Stairs, just off the London Docks. They pulled it ashore, turned it over on its side, and ran into an alleyway, hoping that no one had seen them. Morgan looked back briefly to see the oarsmen of a pinnace rowing frantically in their direction, the blades of their oars splashing in the water like a school of fish in a feeding frenzy. Without waiting any longer, he turned to follow Hiram as they both ran toward the Ratcliffe Highway on their way back to the ship and the safety of St. Katherine’s Docks.
11
Morgan was half expecting a squadron of the London Marine Police to show up shipside to arrest him and Hiram the next morning, but nothing happened to break up the tedium of the day. They had walked through the opening gates at St. Katherine’s that morning along with hundreds of dockworkers and scores of drunken sailors. No one knew that they had stolen a boat and been pursued on the Thames River. Morgan was already making plans to go back to the West India Docks as soon as he could.
After the decks had been thoroughly scrubbed, Morgan’s stomach turned when one of the dock constables came on board ship asking to see him. It was Constable Pinkleton. The police officer was English to the core, stout-chested with ruddy cheeks and a muttonchop beard. He was a stubby man with large ears sprouting so much hair it was a wonder that he didn’t try to keep them better groomed. He was usually in search of someone who had forged a signature, stolen money outright, or run off with somebody else’s wife. But in many cases, he simply wanted to eyeball the ship and see if he saw something suspicious. It was Pinkleton who had told Morgan that in England they had a special name for every type of criminal. A dipper or a flimp was a pickpocket. A duffer was someone who sold stolen goods. A mughunter, a street robber. A dragsman, a highway robber. A screever, a forger. A snakesman, a specialized house burglar. A snoozer, a thief specializing in robbing hotel rooms. As far as Pinkleton was concerned, all of the above were potentially trying to flee English justice on board American packet ships. Morgan kept his disdain for British authority as well as his own personal concerns to himself as he walked up to the officer.
“Mr. Morgan?”
“Yes, officer.”
“A young lady dropped this off at this gate and said it was important.”
Morgan breathed a sigh of relief when the officer had disappeared out of sight. It was a letter from Laura. She had sent him a note that she would meet him at her sister’s tavern. She said Blackwood was still holed up with Mary upstairs above the bar. Her sister Molly, who ran the tavern with her husband, would help him get upstairs to see Blackwood.
It was a noisy din that evening as Morgan and the five other Hudson sailors walked into the White Bull Tavern. Morgan should have known something was amiss as the entire tavern of rowdy sailors went silent as soon as they walked through the door. Each of the Hudson’s sailors had a knife or a belaying pin tucked into the outside pocket of their woolen pea jackets. Morgan had taken the ship’s pistols in case there was serious trouble. With his hands in his coat pockets, he fingered the wooden handles of the two pistols for reassurance. He looked around and spotted Molly passing drinks. She looked like an older Laura, which is how he recognized her. She was a well-built, buxom woman, about thirty he guessed, wearing an airy cotton blouse. Her hair was black, her eyes blue. She wasn’t as good looking as Laura, but attractive nonetheless. The way she walked, with her feet and shoulders squared, clearly demonstrated that she wasn’t afraid of anybody. He waved his hand at her, expecting that she would signal him by waving back. Instead she turned away. There wasn’t even a greeting, not even a subtle acknowledgment. Maybe she didn’t know who they were?
After the first few minutes of awkward silence that greeted their entrance, the small tavern slowly resumed its noisy hum. The sailors returned to their drinks and their conversations. Morgan quickly scanned the dimly lit room with its low-timbered ceiling and its chipped walls. There was only one window and a small side door leading into a narrow alleyway. He looked out the window and noticed a ladder lying on the cobblestones. He wondered what it had been used for. Inside, every bench, chair, and table was occupied by about two dozen men scattered about in various dark corners and alcoves. Morgan could feel the cold, hostile stare of eyes following them as they walked further inside toward the bar. He could see that the sailors were a particularly rough bunch even for the lowly East End, where ignorance and cruelty were close relatives.
“I don’t like the looks of this, Ely,” Hiram murmured under his breath. “There’s an abundance of vermin and land sharks in this room.”
Morgan continued to take in his noisy surroundings. Two servant girls were running about with tankards of swipes. There was no sign of Laura. Hiram walked up to the bar. Morgan could see that he was talking with a man who was serving grog and swilling down swipes. He guessed that this was Molly’s husband from the description Laura had given him. Bull Bailey was his name, she had said. He was a portly man of medium size, with an oily red face and hawk eyes peering out of a balding head. Morgan could just overhear Hiram introducing himself as a friend of Laura’s. Bailey nodded and then shouted a greeting so the whole tavern could hear.
“From America, are ye? Well drink up hearty, my beautiful sailors. Thar’s plenty ’ere even for ye Yanks.”
Ochoa and Icelander started walking toward the bar, smiling at the prospect of getting a drink. Morgan and the two other sailors looked around for chairs. Before too long there was trouble brewing. It started with a steady stream of hushed whispering that swept from table to table, but that soon led to shouting.
“Yankee dogs!” one of the drunken English sailors yelled out. His nose was squashed against his face as if it had been broken. “Too good for the king, are ye? Why don’t ye go home and take all the thieving poor beggars from here that you want? They’ll make good Americans!”
The insult was greeted with cruel laughter.
“Yeh, ye Yanks can ’ave all the dippers, dragsmen, and mughunters ye want!”
The two barmaids, who were making their rounds with the sailors, quickly put their trays down on the bar and left the room. To their credit, Morgan’s sailors kept quiet, but the baiting continued. Morgan looked for Molly, but she was nowhere to be seen. One barrel-chested man with arms like a bear strode up to the bar where Hiram was now standing.
“Will ye be swearin’ allegiance to the crown now that yer drinkin’ with proper Englishmen?” asked the man.
Out of the corner of his eye, Morgan spotted the glint of a knife blade under a table, and then another glimmer of metal emerging from a man’s pocket.
Bedlam broke loose. Pistols came out in the open and shots were fired. The few women who remained in the room began screaming as the British sailors charged toward the American sailors, clutching their weapons. The White Bull Tavern became a dizzying whirl of clubs and cutlasses, shaggy heads,
bristly beards, and muscular tattooed arms. Morgan yelled for the Hudson’s sailors to head for the alley and pointed at the side door he’d spotted earlier. He could see Icelander’s white head of hair moving in his direction. He was swinging his heavy capstan bar with two hands, knocking down two sailors with one blow and then hitting another in the head with a thundering crack. Morgan watched in horror as an English sailor raised his pistol to fire at Icelander, but then the man dropped face first to the floor like a tree falling in a forest. The Spaniard retrieved his knife, and smiled at Morgan as he and the others passed him and reached the door to the alleyway. To slow the onrush of their attackers, Icelander picked up one man he had just clobbered and hurled him onto the heads of his closest pursuers.
Once outside, Morgan told Ochoa and Icelander to quickly close the alley door with the wooden latch and hold it shut.
“Don’t let them out!” he cried. “Hold ’em in there!”
He found the ladder he’d seen earlier. It had clearly been left there by some painters who must have been scraping and painting the façade of the building earlier that day. The dark alleyway was surrounded by a high brick wall with broken bottles stuck into the mortar. He took the ladder and propped it up on the wall. He clambered up to the top rung and pulled out his pistols. He told the rest of the sailors to run for it, and he would hold off the English. Morgan aimed his pistols, loaded with one-ounce lead balls, at the tavern’s alley door. When the first sailors broke the door down, he fired at their legs. Two sailors cursed loudly, clutching their legs while the others retreated back into the tavern. Morgan pulled the ladder over the wall and jumped to the other side, making a clean escape. From the courtyard where he had landed, he could hear the angry shouts of confusion as his assailants tried to deal with their wounded and figure out which direction the Americans had gone. This commotion was followed by the pounding of feet on the cobblestones as they ran off.