The Last Witchfinder

by James Morrow

  Franklin scholars will note that I have en passant cleared up a second mystery. Thanks to my memoirs, historians need no longer marvel at Ben’s famous enthusiasm for older women, as it traces unequivocally to his conjugal education at my Jennet’s lovely hands. He made his appreciation explicit in an essay called “Advice on the Choice of a Mistress,” the body of which comprises eight reasons a man would do better selecting an older paramour over a nubile one. (“Because they have more Knowledge of the World,” runs the first reason. “Because they are so grateful!” runs the last.) I heartily recommend this amusing piece, which you will find in any substantive Franklin omnibus.

  You have perchance noticed that my reminiscences illuminate a third mystery regarding Ben. How did he come to advocate the abolition of the slave trade in an era when the average intellectual wholly endorsed that institution? To answer the question we need look no further than his 1726 interview with Ebinose-Mbemba (an episode Ben omitted from his Autobiography lest he inspire the slave-catchers to go looking for Amakye). Now, I cannot say that he left that fateful meeting prepared to join the first abolitionist society he happened upon; indeed, all during his years as editor of The Pennsylvania Gazette he rarely declined to list an upcoming slave auction or post notice of a runaway. But the seed was sown on that Caribbean isle, and eventually the tree took root.

  Ben’s abolitionism is a story to make any book proud of its author, though Poor Richard’s Almanack can be positively insufferable on the subject. In 1758 he wrote a last will and testament providing manumission for the two slaves in his possession, then freed them outright in 1766. Among the earliest of his abolitionist writings is his reaction to a highly publicized 1772 British legal case that culminated in the emancipation of a fugitive slave named Somerset. In a letter to The London Chronicle, he reprimanded his fellow Englishmen for celebrating the court’s decision while simultaneously ignoring the plight of “eight hundred and fifty thousand Negroes in the English Islands and the Colonies.” This evil would never be rectified by freeing the occasional fugitive, he insisted, but only by making African slavery itself illegal, whether its victims harvested Virginia tobacco, Carolina rice, or Jamaica sugarcane. “Can sweetening our Tea with Sugar be a Circumstance of such absolute Necessity? Can the petty Pleasure thence arising from the Taste compensate for so much Misery produc’d amongst our fellow Creatures, and such a constant Butchery of the human Species by this pestilential detestable Traffic in the Bodies and Souls of Men?”

  I should also note, lest Poor Richard chastise me for neglecting the fact, that Ben’s last public essay, a letter to The Federal Gazette published on March 23, 1790, was a withering riposte to a pro-slavery speech recently given in Congress by James Jackson, a Georgia senator. Ben’s counterblast took the form of a similar address supposedly delivered one hundred years earlier by a Muslim legislator, Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, explaining why the Islamic nations must never free their Christian chattels. By turning Jackson’s argument on its head, Ben produced a satire commensurate with Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” Voltaire’s Candide, or—a work that will soon enter this story—the Baron de Montesquieu’s Persian Letters.

  If we cease our Cruises against the Christians, how shall we be furnish’d with the Commodities their Countries produce, and which are so necessary for us? If we forbear to make Slaves of their People, who in this hot Climate are to cultivate our Lands? Who are to perform the common Labors of our City, and in our Families? Must we not then be our own Slaves? And is there not more Compassion and more Favor due to us as Mussel-men, than to these Christian dogs? We have now above 150,000 Slaves in and near Algiers. This Number, if not kept up by fresh Supplies, will

  fsoon diminish, and be gradually annihilat’d. If we then cease taking

  and plundering the Infidel Ships, and making Slaves of the Seamen and

  Passengers, our Lands will become of no Value for want of Cultivation;

  the Rents of Houses in the City will sink to one Half; and the

  Revenues of Government arising from its

  Shares of Prizes be

  totally

  j

  Destroyed

  by a sudden gale,

  the wigwam in which Jennet,

  Ben, and William pursued their uneventful

  lives was not initially missed by the castaways. It had

  been a forlorn and uninviting structure, “homely but not homey” in

  Ben’s words. For the first two nights following their loss, they slept contentedly under the stars, William snugged betwixt them like the fleshy band fusing congenitally joined twins. On the third night another storm broke over New-Atlantis. Huddled beneath a sailcloth borrowed from the Bini, the wind driving pellets of rain against their faces as the cold seeped into their bones, the Philadelphians soon concluded that a new wigwam was essential.

  Ben set the acacia-wood framework in place, then went off to check his agouti traps, leaving Jennet to fashion the walls from bark and fronds. Although the task seemed at first the paragon of monotony, its wearisome rhythms gradually combined with the pounding sun and the booming surf to put her in a rarefied state of mind.

  How mysterious it all was, this planet Earth, this glittering sea, this unknown island: especially the island—Amakye, the fugitive slaves called it—not merely the queerest of places but also the most pristine, a world whose objects were as yet unnamed, and now it was her job to put a word to everything that met her gaze. She cast her eyes across Amakye’s multifarious substances, solid and fluid, grainy and slick, wondering what to call them.

  William lay prone on the beach, amusing himself by poking his fingers into the saturated sand. A fiddler-crab lurked near his left foot. She approached the animal and lifted its clawed and wriggling body from gravity’s embrace, fully intending to throw it into the sea before it could scratch her son. But instead something moved her to place the fiddler-crab on her palm, as she might set a locust’s wing on a microscope stage.

  What manner of creature was this? To a Cartesian, of course, the crab was a machine, insensible to pain, incapable of thought, its rowing legs powered by some unseen entity. The crab in turn belonged to a larger machine, the world, its motions supplied by those nebulous presences that Descartes variously called genies, spirits, and vortices. Complementing the world-machine was an entirely different domain—the mind—hooked to the bodily realm via the divine pineal gland, or so the Frenchman had taught.

  But today this whole system struck Jennet as woefully flawed, an affront to both fiddler-crabs and common sense. Just as Newton’s apocryphal apple had inspired him to discern the continuity betwixt heavenly and earthly motion, so did the creature twitching in her hand proclaim to Jennet an equally momentous link, a tie binding the thinking brains of men to the sentient flesh of beasts. She restored the crab to its native sand, picked up her son, and kissed him on each plump cheek.

  In the days that followed her disenchantment with Descartes, she grew convinced that the key to the demon disproof lay right here on New-Atlantis—not concealed like the pirates’ gold, but plainly displayed. For to inhabit a Caribbean isle was to know Nature in a fashion not available to a Sorbonne professor or a Royal Society fellow. Standing on a high limestone bluff and observing a violent storm break over the sea, Jennet decided that a lightning-stroke was surely something other than a theatrical prop hurled by a meteorological goblin. Walking the midnight shores beneath a sky unpierced by any church steeple or bell tower, she came to see the wheeling moon and the wandering stars as phenomena quite different from dead matter in thrall to Cartesian vortices. Picking her way along a narrow coral spit whilst contemplating the majestic rollers as they exploded against the rocks, she concluded that the tides could never be fruitfully understood as the toys of invisible genies. Experimenting with the Bini’s magnetite block, she apprehended that a lodestone obeyed a principle of its own, oblivious to the commands of supposed spirits.

  “The world is alive!” she told Ben. “Pole t
o pole, this swirling planet’s alive!”

  They were wading through the shallows of Copernicus Cove, Ben clutching William to his breast, Jennet inspecting the fish weirs.

  “Aye, I suppose that’s the case,” he said.

  “The Cartesians say ’tis dead, but ’tis alive!”

  “A reasonable hypothesis, though wanting in precision.”

  “The details will come in time. For the nonce we must irrigate the Earth with all the blood Descartes hath drained away, that a demon disproof might flower on its breast.”

  Ben shifted William from his left arm to his right. He frowned. “I believe I hear Waequashim of the Nimacook talking.”

  “But for my years as a savage Indian,” she replied, nodding, “I would ne’er have hit upon this proposition.”

  “Alas, darling, you’ll not convince Parliament to strike down the Witchcraft Act merely because the Nimacook religion argues against it.”

  “In the Nimacook religion lies but half of my idea,” she retorted, netting a grouper. “Oh, Ben, how do I make myself clear? ’Tis an insult to the tides to say they cannot turn without some genie’s gesture, for in the tug of moon and sun lies explanation enough.”

  His frown remained in place, though it now acquired a pensive cast. “An insult to the tides—well spoken, Mrs. Crompton.”

  “’Tis an aspersion on the lodestone to ascribe its power to spirits, for Mr. Gilbert’s magnetism is fully equal to the riddle.”

  “And ’tis likewise a slur against the lightning to say that demons make it flash,” he noted, “for in truth such strokes are Von Guericke sparks writ large.”

  “To wit, we need no unseen agents, fair or foul, to explain the world. We need only the world itself—its ways and principles and manifest sensibleness.”

  “This planet’s a place of great abundance.”

  “If not abundance then certainly sufficiency. Aye, Ben! The sufficiency of the world, that’s the demon disproof lies hidden in the bowels of the Principia Mathematica, whether Mr. Newton knows it be there or not. When Aunt Isobel cried out from the pyre, screaming of Aristotle’s elements, she meant only that I must look closely, so very closely, at everything my senses embraced. She was instructing me to scrutinize the universe, Nature with her winds and tides and lodestones and sunbeams—her air and water and earth and fire.”

  He brushed his lips across their son’s brow. “You have wrought an ingenious conjecture, dearest. Though I fear your enemies will say that in making Creation sufficient, you have rendered the Creator superfluous.”

  “If I must murder God to save a Marblehead hag, then that is what I shall do.”

  Ben massaged his unimpressive beard. “Mrs. Crompton, you shock me—a pleasurable sensation, I daresay, though the English legislature is unlikely to be similarly amused.”

  “I frame no theologies, sir, merely an argumentum grande. So long as we make our purpose clear, we shan’t be accused of impiety.”

  The more they discussed her sufficiency hypothesis, the deeper their affection for it grew. If this idea took hold in Europe, the Continental Cartesians as well as the Cambridge Platonists would be obliged to see Nature anew. These philosophers would stop slandering the lightning, libeling the tides, traducing the comets, and depriving fiddler-crabs of their wondrous little minds. Inevitably Jennet recalled Newton’s claim to be but a boy playing on the seashore, diverting himself occasionally with “a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary.” What a splendid event was a pretty shell, and an average shell too. An oyster’s abode required no genie for its warrant. A shell was a thing complete unto itself.

  Two weeks later, as Jennet and Ben sat down to Sunday dinner at the royal palace—roasted candelabra nuts, acacia-thorn bread, boiled snails, agouti stew—she unfurled the new argumentum grande for Ebinose-Mbemba and his queen.

  “According to many Christian thinkers, Satan contrives to control the spirits that make possible all actions and movements,” Jennet explained, dandling William on her knee. “Nothing pleases the Dark One so much as to deploy the worst of these spirits, the demons, on behalf of his disciples.”

  “In Europe and America,” Ben said, “many magistrates believe ’tis their religious duty to exterminate such disciples—the witches—ere Satan’s hordes spread wrack and ruin everywhere.”

  Ebinose-Mbemba devoured a handful of snails. “We Bini have our devils too, but none so strong that they could cause such a caliber of havoc. I do not much like this Satan of yours.”

  Now Ossalume spoke up. She was a stately woman, dark and comely as the sun-scorched Shulamite toward whom Solomon had directed his affections in the Song of Songs. “Our mightiest sorcerer might command a million spirits, and still the world would come to its own defense, using the soul of every beast and tree to crush the maleficent host.”

  “Ah, but here’s the rub,” Jennet said. “In recent days I have fallen upon an argument whereby the universe operates without benefit of any spirits whatsoever.”

  “No spirits?” said Ebinose-Mbemba.

  “No spirits.”

  “Then what is it makes one thing happen rather than another?” Ossalume asked.

  “The sufficiency of the world,” Jennet said.

  “The laws of Nature,” Ben added.

  “The laws of Nature?” the Queen said. “Nature’s a kind of parliament then?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Ben replied.

  “If Nature’s a parliament, this makes God the monarch?” asked the King.

  “You might look at it that way, aye,” Jennet said.

  “I believe my Philadelphians confuse the divine order with the philosophy of John Locke,” Ebinose-Mbemba said.

  “Mayhap,” Jennet said, taking a swallow of candelabra-root tea. But better the philosophy of John Locke, she thought, than the demonology of Exodus 22:18.

  j

  TO MAINTAIN THEIR SANITY in the months that followed the birth of the argumentum grande, the castaways took to devising improbable and reckless schemes for getting themselves off the island. Initially Jennet imagined building a raft, though neither she nor Ben had the skills necessary to navigate it to Jamaica. Ben meanwhile envisioned a flying machine consisting of a lightweight acacia coach slung beneath an immense candelabra-leaf balloon that, filled with hot air, would ascend into the clouds and ultimately carry its passengers to civilization. After ten days of experimentation he forsook the idea, all nine of his scale-model airships having remained stubbornly earthbound.

  As the third summer of their Caribbean exile ended, an interval not appreciably different from autumn, winter, or spring in this unseasoned latitude, Jennet came to believe that the key to their deliverance lay with the pirates. When the buccaneers returned for the treasure, she and Ben must be prepared to offer them a unique artifact, something so manifestly useful in freebooting that to obtain it they would gladly give the philosophers and their child safe passage to Jamaica.

  “Beyond gold, silver, and pearls, what doth a pirate captain most desire?” she asked Ben.

  “Mayhap a kind of artificial skin, that he might change his face and thereby elude capture,” he ventured.

  “Alas, we lack the resources to produce such masks,” she said.

  “Or a superior variety of prosthesis, for I’ve heard dismemberment’s a common side-effect of freebooting.”

  “’Tis unlikely our local trees yield a better grade of wooden leg than ordinary.”

  “Or an iron helix mounted on his ship’s prow,” he said, “poised to puncture any vessel dispatched by His Majesty’s Navy.”

  “Your cleverest suggestion so far, and the least practical.” She was about to abandon this entire line of speculation when a luminous notion flashed through her brain. “Bless me, Ben—I see the answer!”

  “Aye?”

  “A buccaneer wants a machine that will tell him whether the galleon he’s just spotted carries gold!”

  Ben offered her a grin of approbation. “Such a d
evice would spare his crew many a needless skirmish.”

  “And here’s the pretty part. We can fashion this detector ourselves—by which I mean we can turn the Africans’ magnetite into a facsimile, fraudulent at its heart but persuasive enough to hoodwink a pirate.”

  “I’faith, Jenny, you’ve wrought a passing bold plan. Methinks ’twill either take us to Port Royal or send us o’er the plank.”

  Ebinose-Mbemba required but an instant to grasp the scheme, whereupon he willingly donated the necessary salvage from the Sapodilla—door-nail, wine cork, clay bowl. Next he used his ax to cleave from Orishanla a fist-size piece, delivering it to Jennet. At the Philadelphians’ insistence the Grand Oba instructed his subjects to dig an immense pit on the windward side of the island, bear Orishanla thither, and secure her deep within the earth, lest the mother rock cancel the coming hoax with her own Gilbertian force. Jennet now magnetized the door-nail, stroking it repeatedly across the chunk of Orishanla, after which Ben carried the ore fragment to the sea-chest and buried it beneath the gold.

  It was time for the vital trial. She filled the clay bowl with saltwater, pushed the nail through the wine cork, and set the contrivance a-float.

  The nail pivoted in its miniature lagoon and, true to Mr. Gilbert’s principle, pointed toward the chest.

  “Most impressive,” the Grand Oba said.

  “Most lawful,” Ben said.

  “I can smell the stench of Port Royal already,” Jennet said.

  j

  AS DAME FORTUNE arranged the matter, however, a full seven months would elapse ere Jennet again dared to imagine any Jamaican fragrances on the wind. The pirates returned to Amakye on a balmy March afternoon. Peering through the Bini telescope, she watched their two-masted shallop emerge from a fog bank along the western horizon, sails luffing, banners snapping, and drop anchor near Huygens Reef.