Rough Passage to London: A Sea Captain's Tale

by Robin Lloyd

  “I see you have plenty of human cargo, Captain. The usual motley assortment of villains headed for the promised land of America, or should I say the promised land of disappointment?”

  Morgan restrained himself as he felt a sudden impulsive urge to hit this man. Instead he bit his lip and pulled out one of his cigars. Again he felt a strange sense of foreboding that he had seen this man’s face once before long ago.

  “We’re taking only people who want to leave your country, Captain. If there are thieves aboard, I reckon they’ve learned their trade well here in England. As for deserters, I regret to inform you that we have no British Royal Navy sailor on board.”

  Morgan stood silently by as he watched the armed British sailors scurry off to all corners of the ship, the forecastle, the lower cargo holds, the steerage, the bilge, the anchor chain locker in the bow, all dark, shadowy places where a man could hide. Quietly he was fuming at the insult of having his ship searched and his men questioned, but he took particular delight in his denial of harboring a British Navy sailor. After all, he hadn’t told a lie, he said to himself. Hiram was an American even if he had masqueraded as a British sailor.

  Morgan escorted the English captain to the saloon and sat him down at the long dining table, calling on Lowery to bring in a tray with coffee. He took stock of the man in front of him, proud, arrogant, distrustful, but also clearly concerned. Hiram must be important to him, he thought. Perhaps there is some truth to what he had told him about the Royal Navy’s plans to blockade New York and Boston? Morgan wondered why Stryker seemed so sure that Hiram was on board the Victoria. Perhaps someone in Portsmouth had given him the information. Perhaps it was another sailor. It could have been the waterman who had ferried Hiram out to the Victoria. It could have been one of the wharf rats the British used as informants. He didn’t like to think of the other alternative, but he knew it could have been one of his passengers. They were his friends, but they were English. They would not have refused giving information to a Royal Navy captain, particularly if they were told this was information vital to the queen’s interest.

  As Lowery poured the coffee, Morgan turned to Stryker, speaking with a controlled voice, hiding the contempt he felt for the man.

  “Captain Stryker, I reckon it must be a most unpleasant duty for a British commander to be forced to board an American packet ship and look for a runaway sailor.”

  Stryker’s face was tense and rigid as he took a sip of coffee.

  “I’m sure this doesn’t happen often, Captain, does it?” Morgan asked.

  Stryker angrily dropped his coffee cup on the table, pushed it away, and stood up.

  “Let’s start with your personal quarters, Captain,” Stryker said with a controlled businesslike voice as he glanced at the closed doors of the staterooms on all sides.

  Morgan showed the English captain his own cabin, and then gave him a tour of the staterooms, making sure he mentioned the room that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had visited. He did not hesitate to go over every detail, adopting the tone he used when he was welcoming his first-class passengers. His primary purpose was to avoid too many inquiries.

  “Over there is the sleeping quarters for the cook and the stewards. And now we’ll have a look at the galley,” Morgan said as he walked ahead of Stryker, gesturing with his hands. “This is my steward, Mr. Lowery, his assistant, Mr. Junkett, and the cook, Mr. Scuttles.”

  Stryker nodded with disinterest as he walked by the three colored men and stepped into the ship’s galley area. Lowery seemed to be trying to tell him something, but Morgan couldn’t comprehend his facial gestures. Stryker’s eyes roamed from one door to the next. He looked closely at Lowery with obvious distrust. Morgan invited the captain to have a look around and then walked intentionally with undue heavy steps beside the dark section of the pantry where the potatoes were kept and where Hiram was hidden.

  “Very spacious, don’t you agree?” Morgan continued, reaching over to the storeroom door and opening it with a flourish. There were dozens of barrels inside the storeroom with everything from apples and turnips, carrots and peas, to onions and potatoes. Stryker took another oblique step, lifting up the tops of some of the barrels. He held his nose at the sight and smell of the oily, greasy slush in one barrel. Lowery, who was standing behind Stryker, was now madly jerking his head up and down and rolling his eyes. Morgan looked at him with a puzzled face as he quickly turned back to attend to Stryker, who was opening each and every container.

  The English captain poked his head into the onion barrel, and then unexpectedly withdrew his sword from his belt and began sticking it into the onions with small jabs and then thrusting it downward. He did the same with a barrel of apples and finally he reached the potatoes. Morgan almost called out a warning, but then quickly stifled it. Stryker raised his sword high above his head and thrust it down into the potatoes, all the way to the hilt. Morgan choked back a gasp as he waited for a noise, any noise, coming from inside the barrel, but there was none, just a prolonged silence. He imagined Hiram curled up inside, bleeding, writhing in pain. After a weighty pause, he asked if Stryker was satisfied with his tour of the first-class cabin area and would he now care to tour the more basic second-class area.

  An hour later with the search over, Morgan showed the disappointed English captain out onto the quarterdeck and Stryker turned to him with a stony face, the backs of his hands resting on his hips.

  “It may be we were given bad information, Captain. We were told by a very reliable source that the deserter was seen boarding your ship. If you find the man, Captain Morgan, I would ask you to arrest him and hand him over to the authorities in the nearest English port. I am sure you realize that failure to do so would have serious consequences for yourself and your ship.”

  “Thank you for that sober advice, Commander. It’s been our pleasure to accommodate your search, but remember, when this ship leaves port, the next stop will be New York.”

  Morgan’s boldness had the desired result. Stryker’s face grew red with anger and disgust.

  “Your disrespect for the Crown does not go unnoticed, Captain.”

  At the ladder the disgruntled English captain lingered.

  “We will investigate this matter further, and if we find anything that implicates you or your ship, rest assured we will pursue you.”

  Stryker then turned his back to Morgan and left as quickly as he came without even a farewell. As the British sailors bent their shoulders into pulling the oars of their quarter boat, the Victoria’s cabin passengers were arriving on a small steamer. Soon the quarterdeck of the packet ship was swarming with top hats, swallowtail coats, billowy ankle-length dresses, ruffling petticoats, and brightly colored bonnets.

  Morgan wiped the sweat off his brow. He wasted no time in getting the packet ship underway.

  As the first mate, Mr. Stark yelled, “Anchor aweigh,” Morgan rushed below and confronted Lowery.

  “Is he dead?”

  “No sir. He’s alive.”

  “How is that possible? The man drove his sword to the bottom of the barrel, right to the hilt.”

  “He ain’t in the potatoes, Cap’n. He’s in here.”

  Lowery pointed to another barrel adjacent to the potatoes that was filled with beets.

  “Is that what you were trying to signal me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Morgan heard some banging and pounding. Scuttles opened the barrel, and pulled out a false bottom only two feet from the top, revealing a brown head of hair, the smiling, whiskery face of Hiram Smith quickly emerging amidst the beets.

  “That was a close call, Ely.”

  “A narrow escape indeed, Hiram.”

  “Keep him out of sight, Lowery. He’s our secret passenger.”

  With an ebb tide carrying them swiftly out of the Solent and a steady northwesterly wind, the Victoria’s bow cut through the water with ease. The packet had as much canvas as she could bear and was moving along at about twelve knots. Morgan had Ic
elander set a course for the northwestern tip of France. If they stayed off the wind and hugged the eastern side of the English Channel, passing close to Alderney, he thought to himself, they might be able to stay out of sight and elude any ship that pursued them.

  PART X

  Concerning the manner of your brother’s death, it may be that I have some information to give you; though it may not be, for I am far from sure. Can we have a little talk alone?

  —Charles Dickens, “A Message from the Sea,” All the Year Round

  26

  1850

  From his dimly lit cabin inside the packet ship, a quiet, reflective Morgan paused and listened to the late-night noises on the docks in New York. The hearty, full-throated laughs of drunken sailors returning from the taverns mixed in with the loud, gruff voices of angry ships’ officers. It was well past midnight. The night was balmy for early June. The South Street docks would soon quiet down to the more gentle hum and murmur of a small village. He had been in New York for more than a week due to the pressing needs of the shipping line. He had received a cryptic note from Hiram Smith written a few weeks earlier. He hadn’t heard a word from his old friend since he helped him escape from the clutches of the Royal Navy and dropped him off at Peck’s Slip in New York. That was five years ago. “I have much to tell you, Ely,” he had written. “I have new information about Abraham. I hope to be at the South Street docks before your June departure unless Stryker’s men find me. I know they are looking for me.” That was all he’d written.

  Morgan looked at the short letter in his hand and shook his head in puzzlement. There was no indication where it had been sent from. It sounded like Hiram knew something important. Morgan had waited all week, but there was no sign of Hiram and there had been no new letter. Most of the crew members were now off ship. Only the stewards, Lowery and Junkett, were there with him in the cabin. Old Whipple was in the forecastle. Nearby he could hear the creaking oarlocks of a passing dory and in the distance the forlorn sound of a fiddle trading sorrowful notes with a slow-picked banjo.

  He had tried to sleep but couldn’t. He looked down at his desk at some of the financial correspondence he needed to attend to. His mind drifted to business matters and a wave of confidence and optimism swept over him. The threat of war with England over the Oregon dispute fortunately had been averted. He liked to think that the mutual benefits of transatlantic trade had won the day. Now the wharves of South Street were overflowing with cargo. Shovels, pick axes, pans, and other supplies, all brought from England, were emptied out of the packet ships and loaded onto clipper ships bound for the gold fields of California. Out of those same ships came a human river of hopeful emigrants also headed for the El Dorado. His new ship, the 1,299-ton Southampton, was the biggest of the London liners at 181 feet in length, far bigger than the American Eagle or the Margaret Evans, which had been built for the Black X Line a few years earlier. It was also about seven feet longer than the firm’s speedy Devonshire, which the New York papers had called “almost a steamboat of speed.”

  Morgan felt that the Southampton was the fastest ship he had ever sailed on, capable of sustaining a speed of fourteen knots under full sail, just like the clippers now breaking all records on their way to the goldfields of California. Ironically, even as the sailing packets got bigger and faster, the Cunard steamers continued to steal away more and more travelers. The new larger and more elegant Collins steamships were also attracting the more affluent. Notwithstanding the Herald’s James Gordon Bennett’s estimate a few years earlier that the New York ocean packets were still carrying over half of the cabin passengers, it was clear that the sailing ships were no longer the preferred way to cross the Atlantic. Even Morgan could no longer deny this. His writer friend Caroline Kirkland had written him in October 1848, “As to going home with you, you may be sure going in the steamer is none of my plan.” She would have come, she wrote him, but her traveling companion wanted to try one of the new steamers.

  As he sat there at his desk, he thought of Eliza and how she had been able to join him on the ship these last few years. It had been like old times, the two of them sailing together. She had kept the saloon filled with melodious sonatas of Mozart, Bach, and Chopin. In London, she had happily reacquainted herself with the Leslies and many of the other artists, including old Turner. Eliza also met Thackeray for the first time and was charmed by this witty man with his owl-like spectacles and his melodious voice. They’d traveled by carriage to Hampstead to see Stanfield’s new house, whirling by the rolling green hills and trim hedgerows in that picturesque village. Then they had taken the train to Brighton to meet Morgan’s new friend, Charles Dickens, who was vacationing there with his wife and some of his children. Eliza had been pleased that the author’s eldest son, Charles, and her son, William, had gotten along famously, as he also did with Dickens’s two daughters, who were just a couple of years older than her Ruth and Mary Frances.

  The gentle lap of the water against the ship’s wooden hull made him think of their new home. With four children now, the Morgans had moved out of New York to a house on the Connecticut River in Saybrook on the corner of Main Street and the Boston Road, not too far from the New York ferry landing. It was a gracious two-story home with an expansive rooftop terrace, ideal for views of the river, that was large enough for Eliza’s mother to move in with them. He wondered how much longer he could keep up as a packet shipmaster. He was forty-four years old and he was well aware that his four children were growing up quickly, mostly without a father. Most packet ship captains did not last on the job for even five years. Only a dozen or so had retained command for fifteen years. Yet he had been a packet ship captain now for nearly twenty. He had crossed the Atlantic well over one hundred times. He thought of his old first mate, Dan Stark, who had been lost at sea six months ago on a cold winter voyage aboard the Mediator, his first command. He knew it could easily have been him. In the back of his mind he wondered how long his good fortune would last. Morgan’s late-night reverie was again interrupted by the sound of creaking oarlocks from a small boat. The sound of the water slapping up against the ship’s hull increased in intensity. He wondered to himself who could be rowing around his ship at this time of night.

  The methodical sound of oars splashing the surface of the water soon faded, and Morgan went back to his task of writing letters. Just as he was finishing up sealing and addressing the last of the small letters, he thought he heard the sounds of muffled footsteps and the creaking of deck boards over his head, but then there was silence. He dismissed these noises as his imagination and he retired to his berth and fell asleep.

  A sudden banging on his door jolted him awake. Morgan sat upright as Whipple stumbled into his quarters carrying a lantern. The man’s shirttails were hanging loose, his pants unbuttoned, and he was barefoot. His face was flushed.

  “Lord sakes, what is it, Whipple?”

  “An intruder, Captain! Someone’s inside the ship!”

  “What? Where?”

  “The chain locker. I heard lots of noises. The kind of scurrying and shuffling that could only come from a human crittur, Cap’n.”

  Morgan told Whipple to go rouse the two stewards just forward of the main cabin. Then he quickly put on some clothes and grabbed his two pistols. The four men met up on deck. Lowery and Junkett had thrown on their stewards’ jackets over their bare chests, and each of them had a kitchen cleaver in their hands.

  Whipple led this small group down the stairs from the upper hold into the lower cargo hold, swinging his lantern high in a wide circle and holding his knife out with his other hand. They were now deep in the belly of the ship below the water line. It was like descending underground into some large coffin, cold and damp, the stale air ripe from the heavy anchor hawsers. Morgan clutched his two pistols, keeping them high and ready. They were surrounded by a dark, shadowy maze of crates, bags, and barrels filled with flour and clover seed, as well as bales of tobacco and hogsheads of turpentine. He could hear the tiny cl
aws of rats scurrying around. The big deck timbers below creaked as they tried to walk quietly through the lower hold. Whipple stopped suddenly and motioned for them to listen. The noises were coming from the center of the ship down in the bilge area below them.

  They approached the hatch that led down to the bilge. Morgan could hear a scraping, and a grinding as metal carved through wood. The two stewards clutched their cleavers holding them in front of them. Morgan motioned Whipple to extinguish his lantern and with the sudden blackness now extending over them, they could see a dim light emerging through a hole in the lower deck. There definitely was someone in the bowels of the ship, deep in the bilge.

  Morgan went first, delicately and slowly opening the hatch. The stench of the rank decay from muddy water dredged up from the river bottoms filled his nostrils. He felt his way down the narrow ladder. The reek of the bilges was so strong he had to breathe through his mouth, trying not to cough. The others followed, touching each other in the dark so as not to get disoriented. They could now hear a louder scraping of metal and a man’s labored, heavy breathing. The bilge area had so little headroom they had to crouch. There they remained for a few minutes, not daring to move. Morgan held out his cocked pistols toward a faint hint of light that glimmered behind one of the ship’s knees amidships.

  “Who’s there? Show yourself or I’ll fire!” he yelled out.

  The noise abruptly stopped. The faint light disappeared. There was no answer. For what seemed like an eternity to Morgan there was total silence. He wondered if he should fire. Suddenly, they heard the sound of fleeing footsteps, heavy breathing, and the frantic scratching and banging of someone running on all fours. Whipple lit his lantern and held it up high, straining to see down the narrow gloom of the inner cavity of the ship. Now they could hear crashes and curses as the intruder ran and stumbled to the stern of the ship away from them. The four of them gave pursuit, running and scrambling like hunchbacks as they followed the thudding footsteps ahead of them.