Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  They were much encouraged by a talk with a principal at Gordon and Talbot, an outfit involved in the China trade. The man informed them that the Ronaldson, a ship operated by his firm, would be leaving within a matter of days. Some additional hands were needed, he suspected, and he urged Fred and his friend to go meet with the captain at once.

  On meeting Captain Warren Fox, Jim Goodwin was immediately hired. The captain wasn’t so sure about Fred. He expressed concern about taking on a “green boy,” someone who had never before been to sea. Now pushing twenty-one, Fred was hardly the typical green boy. In response, Fred pulled out all the stops. He explained that although he lacked experience, he came by his yen to sail honestly, as one of the seafaring Olmsteds of Hartford. And he promised to work hard and to follow orders. Presently, he wore down Captain Fox and was hired as an apprentice sailor. Salary: roughly $5 a month.

  During their interview, Captain Fox impressed Fred as immensely capable. He seemed to have thought of everything. The Ronaldson was a bark, a medium-size vessel with three masts, and for the voyage to China it would have a crew of about twenty men. Captain Fox explained that he did not like the seasoned sailors to mix with the younger, less experienced hands. They could be a corrupting influence. In fact, one of his primary rules was that no cursing was allowed on his ship. He planned to set aside separate sleeping quarters for the voyage’s four youngest sailors. To Fred, Captain Fox gave the appearance of a deeply honorable man.

  Fred was elated. After being hired, he remained on the dock on Manhattan’s East River where the Ronaldson was anchored to get a good, long look at the ship that would be conveying him to China. Standing there, he dashed off a letter to John, who was back from his Europe trip and enrolled at Yale. At last, Fred had some news of himself to share with his brother: “Now’s the time, as I have a sailor with me, to describe the ship. Bark, I should say. She is of about 330 plus tons, pretty good form, but nothing clipper. Rakish rigging, long black yards (main royal up).” Fred carried on for several more paragraphs, breathlessly cataloging the features of the Ronaldson: “[The ship] has a long boat, quarter boat & whale boat. Carries two bulldogs (6 lb. carronades or so), wheel of the best construction under cover (when wanted) & is about two years old, having been but two voyages to Valparaiso or thereabouts. Mr. Coghlin [the first mate] says she is the best calculated for Canton of any ship he ever saw except the ‘Morrison.’”

  The Ronaldson was scheduled to depart in two weeks for a journey that would last eight months, minimum. Fred made a whirlwind visit back to Hartford to say good-bye to his family and prepare for his voyage. He bought an almanac, a sea chest, cloth pants, and three flannel shirts. From a Hartford doctor, he obtained a homeopathic remedy for seasickness. His spinster aunt Maria voiced concern that Fred might be “drowndered,” as she termed it. So he also bought a life preserver. As a final touch, a local artist was hired to sketch Fred in his sailor’s uniform.

  On April 24, 1843, the Ronaldson set sail from New York. Fred’s father and brother, who had accompanied him down from Hartford to see him off, stood on the Pike Street wharf, waving.

  It was a perfect day for sailing, sunny with a light breeze. As a result, nearly thirty other ships departed at the same time as the Ronaldson. It was like a flotilla, heading out of New York Harbor. For a while, the Ronaldson sailed alongside a packet called the Albany. The crews yelled back and forth, and Fred learned that the other boat was sailing to Havre. When they pulled up beside another ship, the Pilot, he learned that this one was bound for Batavia. All these ships, sailing to all these different destinations—it seemed very glamorous. Fred noticed a spout in the distance. It turned out to be a whale.

  The Ronaldson was packed with fur pelts, machine-spun cloth, and other “Yankee notions,” as Fred termed them. These were to be sold in China, though specific buyers had not been lined up. Rather, the Ronaldson planned to anchor in China and open up for business to whomever came onboard. That was the standard practice. Fred’s ship was like an amphibious Wal-Mart.

  Of course, the fuller the ship, the more goods one could hawk. Prior to embarking, Captain Fox had stuffed every available spot, even sleeping quarters, with saleable wares. The Ronaldson was almost comically overloaded. Once the ship hit open water, when it was safely away from the prying eyes of the captains and crews of ships such as the Albany and Pilot, a kind of rejiggering of the cargo took place under the direction of Captain Fox. To shed some weight, he ordered the men to toss overboard barrel after barrel of salt beef and other rations. Food was getting jettisoned in preference for saleable merchandise. Never mind that U.S. maritime law prescribed that a ship must carry a certain allotment of rations to feed the crew.

  As for the separate quarters Captain Fox had promised Fred, meant to keep impressionable young sailors away from morally suspect veterans, this proved quite a comedown. Even following the food toss, the Ronaldson remained incredibly overloaded. Many of the cabins, while designed for human habitation, were actually filled up with China-bound wares. Fred and three other young hands were crammed into a tiny, foulsmelling space deep belowdecks.

  Fred was put to work on a head pump. Hours before dawn, he was out on the ship’s undulating deck, squatting low to open a spigot, filling a bucket with bilge water, closing the spigot, walking a few teetering steps to dump the water into a tub, where it was used to clean the decks. Repeat. By 8:00 a.m., he was already exhausted. The ship’s carpenter was working nearby, and Fred asked if any kind of break was in sight. The carpenter simply laughed.

  Fred kept going. His hands grew raw and blistered from opening the spigot and carrying the bucket. His clothes were soaked through with spray. And then the nausea began to set in. Now, he really was a green boy. His discomfort grew over the next couple days, until it got so bad that he was ordered to leave off work and go below deck.

  But he couldn’t get to his sea chest. During the cargo shuffle, his chest—containing his seasickness remedy, changes of clothes, everything—had gotten wedged somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship, completely inaccessible.

  Fred staggered into his tiny quarters and vomited. Then he lay down and tried to shut out the ship’s agonizing pitch and yaw. Fortunately, Fred’s Hartford friend Jim Goodwin was there to look after him. When Fred was well enough to eat again, Jim brought a tin pot of food, specially prepared by the ship’s cook.

  Fred took a bite. “Bah!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Fred explained that the food tasted really sour. But Jim assured him that the bad taste was in his own mouth from being sick.

  “It will taste better in a minute,” Jim said. “You must get it down. It will do you a great deal of good.”

  So Fred tried again. But the food still tasted awful. Had it maybe been prepared with saltwater? No, said Jim, the cook had most certainly used fresh rainwater collected in the ship’s scuttlebutt. Fred tried one more time. But it was so repulsive that he couldn’t choke down a single bite. So Jim decided to give it a try. The moment the spoon reached his mouth, he made a horrible grimace.

  “Why, there is something wrong,” he said.

  “I knew there was,” said Fred, and then he joked: “Try a little more; perhaps it will taste better.”

  Turns out, the cook had viewed Fred’s “special” dinner as an opportunity to unload some old meal that had gone sour. In fact, it was left over from the Ronaldson’s previous voyage.

  While he recouped, Fred was put on light duty, filing rust off the ship’s cutlasses and blunderbusses. Encountering pirates was always a possibility; the ship’s crew might have to use these weapons. Meanwhile, Jim separated out the palatable parts of meals—things like beans—and brought them to Fred. When Fred could keep down scouse, a thin stew made with cod and chunks of hard biscuit, the worst was finally behind him.

  Fred had gotten his sea legs—or sea stomach, rather. He began to get into the flow of life on a ship. Water was forever collecting in the hull, and this bilge water ha
d to be pumped. The decks were forever getting dirty and had to be swabbed. Fred took his turns on watch and was initiated into one of the great sailor’s arts, learning to tie and splice various knots.

  Fred soon gleaned that the crew of the Ronaldson worked hard, harder than crews aboard other ships. The weather had been calm so far, and Captain Fox was keen to take advantage by quickly covering as much distance as possible. As a result, the men were placed on extralong shifts, putting in eighteen-hour days, six days a week.

  As the days bled one into another, Fred found that the thing he craved most, more even than a decent meal, was sleep. The vast unbroken sky, the sea stretching endlessly in all directions, the ceaseless rocking motion—it was like the ultimate soporific. As he worked, Fred constantly caught himself nodding off. But the lure of sleep was balanced by a powerful disincentive. He’d snap to instantly. Two of the younger sailors dozed off while on duty and had been “rope’s ended” as in: flogged.

  A month into the journey, the Ronaldson crossed the equator. By now, Fred was growing comfortable going aloft, shimmying up ropes and edging out along narrow wooden spars, squaring the sails to catch the wind. Sometimes he’d climb more than one hundred feet above the deck. He was learning the lingo—“set the lee foretopmast stud’n sail” and “clew up main-royal” and “haul down flying jib,” directions for positioning the ship’s twenty or so sails.

  Part of the flow of life on a ship is sudden change. As the Ronaldson rounded the tip of Africa, it encountered a stretch of dreaded “Cape weather.” There was driving rain and wind so fierce that the main topsail was ripped to ribbons. This gave way to a blinding snowstorm. Because weather in the Southern Hemisphere is the reverse of weather in the Northern, the crew spent the day of July 4, 1843, battling a blizzard at sea.

  The sleep-deprived men soon grew woozy. A sailor lost his purchase on a spar and pitched to the deck. It wasn’t such a long fall, and his trajectory was fortunate. Had the sailor fallen a few feet farther over, he would have plunged directly into the roiling, frigid sea—and certain death.

  Then Fred fell. He lost his grip on an icy rope and tumbled to the deck. He actually fell farther than the other sailor; he, too, could easily have been killed, had it not been for a piece of luck. His impact was cushioned when he landed on a coil of manila rope. Fred got right up, sustaining only an injury to his hand. In the biting cold, the hand soon stiffened and was useless.

  This was the worst storm that anyone onboard had ever seen. Every man was needed; Fred was placed on watch, duty that could be performed by a one-handed sailor. Because the Ronaldson was so grossly overloaded, with each swell, huge volumes of frigid saltwater washed across the deck. Wind pelted the sailors with snow. When even the most hardened crewman began to show anxiety, Fred became alarmed. It looked like the Ronaldson might sink.

  Captain Fox gave the order to furl the sails. The Ronaldson was nearly impossible to control at this point anyway. The sails had become useless, a detriment even, simply catching the wild winds and driving the ship this way and that. For several terrifying days, the crew huddled below deck and waited while the naked-masted Ronaldson contended with the elements without any human guidance whatsoever. The ship was like a tiny cork bobbing on an infinite turbulent sea.

  Then the storm lifted as suddenly as it had come on. The Ronaldson completed its turn around the Cape of Good Hope and started north through the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

  Traveling through the Sunda Strait, between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra, Fred was thrilled to spot land. It was literally the first time he had seen land since leaving New York. The Ronaldson anchored at Anjer, but Fred and most of the crew were required to stay onboard. It was to be the briefest of port calls, as Captain Fox was in a hurry to reach China.

  The sailors pooled some money from their small wages and chose a couple of their number to go ashore on a supply run. One sailor came back with rum. But Fred was more interested in food. For weeks now, the crew had been subsisting on wormy bread and the odd scrap of meat. Fresh vegetables and fruit had run out long ago. In fact, much of the supply of such items had been tossed overboard at the beginning of the voyage to make room for saleable merchandise. When the sailors returned to the Ronaldson bearing rice, fowl, coconuts, plantains, and tamarinds, Fred prepared for a feast. The centerpiece was to be two live green turtles.

  But Fox seized the best of these items, claiming captain’s-table prerogative. He and his top lieutenants ate the coconuts, leaving the husks for the lowly crewmen to pick over. And they ate one of the turtles. The other, they tossed overboard, claiming it was sickly. Fred watched in famished horror as the supposedly ailing turtle swam away at a very healthy clip.

  By now, Fred had spent enough time with Captain Fox to form an opinion of the man. In the close confines of the Ronaldson, he’d learned to fear and despise him. Not only was the captain cruel, but he was a hypocrite to boot. During their first meeting in New York, Fox had taken pains to convey to Fred that he was deeply involved in the welfare of his crewmen, even down to their moral health. Clearly, he didn’t care a whit.

  About the only thing that had remained consistent was Captain Fox’s aversion to swearing. Even this practice he tolerated among the seasoned hands. They swore like, well, sailors. Among the younger hands, however, it was wholly unacceptable and drew immediate and severe punishment. Strangely, Captain Fox did not swear himself. He perceived himself as a very pious man, and even aboard a ship in the middle of the sea, he knelt down every Sunday to utter a lengthy prayer. The rest of the week, Fred noted, appeared devoted to lunging at his men, striking them, flogging them, and, in casually sadistic moments, Fox seemed to delight in heaping on the verbal abuse.

  Yet through it all, he never uttered a profanity. He was capable of acts of intense brutality while saying nothing saltier than “blast ye,” “old granny,” “oh, you marine,” and “want your petticoats?” His gravest insult was “infernal soger”—soger being slang for someone who is shirking duty. “Well, he’s a most incomprehensible man, truly,” Fred concluded in a letter to his brother. Letters, by the way, were handed off to ships the Ronaldson encountered that were sailing west, headed for America. Such correspondence had to survive a treacherous ocean passage, followed by dispatch over land, to reach their intended recipients.

  The Ronaldson passed through the Sunda Strait and continued on to the South China Sea. The ship had now entered some of the world’s most pirate-infested waters, a legendary and terrifying stretch for sailors. Given everything that had happened so far on the voyage, it would have been only fitting if those well-burnished blunderbusses were needed to fend off an attack.

  Instead, the crew had to contend with the other thing the South China Sea was known for during the maritime era: some of the world’s most treacherous and confounding wind patterns. The Ronaldson’s voyage had been timed to avoid the worst of the monsoons, but what the crew encountered was challenge enough. The wind would whip one way. Then it would abruptly change course, blowing from the complete opposite direction. Navigating in such conditions—making any kind of forward progress—required skill and endurance. Fred and the other sailors scampered over the rigging, setting and resetting sails to take advantage of whatever winds prevailed at the moment. Balanced high on a spar, way in the distance, Fred could see waterspouts, deadly seafaring tornadoes. Fortunately, none came too close to the ship.

  The Ronaldson spent nearly a month crossing the South China Sea. Then it left the ocean and headed up the Pearl River, weighing anchor at a place called Whampoa Reach. Beyond this point, the river was too shallow to accommodate a large seagoing vessel. The Ronaldson was now roughly a dozen miles south of the city of Canton (now known as Guangzhou). Captain Fox hired a translator, who in turn helped hire a team of local laborers. The laborers unloaded goods purchased from the ship onto smaller boats, which transported the merchandise up to Canton.

  The Ronaldson had arrived in China at a time of heighte
ned suspicion toward the West. The first opium war between China and Britain had only just ended in 1842, the year before. The opium wars—another would start in 1856—were clashes with Britain, which was using its colony in India as a base to ship opium into China. This trade continued, despite China’s prohibition against the drug. Captain Fox had to hire a comprador to help navigate the maze of bureaucratic and customs issues that confronted a foreign ship in China at this most delicate time.

  Fred was itching to go ashore. But he soon discovered that Captain Fox expected a green boy, such as he, to continue working onboard even while the ship was anchored. Fred had been cooped up in the ship for months, had sailed thousands of miles enduring much hardship, and the only possible compensation was the opportunity to visit an exotic land. Now he found himself patching the sails and slushing the masts—that is, coating the wooden poles in goopy pine tar to prevent rot from setting in.

  All the while, China was in plain view. Anchored at Whampoa Reach, he could see people working in a rice paddy, tantalizingly close. But all he got of China was mosquitoes, which swarmed onto the ship and ate him alive. “My opportunities of observation & investigation are very similar to those enjoyed by Mr. Pickwick while a resident in his Majesty’s Fleet Prison,” he wrote his father.

  The reference is to the Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s first novel. For now, Fred had to content himself with trying to learn something about China from the many natives who came aboard the Ronaldson. In a letter to his brother John, he wrote: “I’ve heard much more than I’ve seen, to be sure.”