SH03_Sparrowhawk: Caxton

by Edward Cline

  Flatboats, pontoons, cutters, and yawls, weighed down with barrels of tobacco and other crops, hugged the waters close to the banks, their farmer or planter crews rowing cautiously and warily between shoals and hidden sand banks, intent on safely reaching a waterfront and the ships and warehouses that awaited them. At both Yorktown and Caxton, new and old vessels, near completion or under repair, sat in stocks, and the air was filled with the sounds of hammers, saws, and axes at work. Some larger sea-draft vessels lay careened on their sides; workmen trod over the exposed keels with pots of fire and smoke to burn out worms and dislodge barnacles. Beyond the waterfronts, in the brown crop fields, smoke and fire could be seen, too, as slaves and field-hands cleared the land of stumps, weeds, and chaff, the residue of the last harvest.

  The manual labor was moved by the mental. Outside Caxton’s tobacco warehouse, hogsheads were being pried open, their contents inspected and weighed, then reprized, weighed again, and branded. Richard Ivy and his clerks rushed hectically on these chores between the warehouse, scales, and office, with planters, factors, and agents in tow, filling in crop notes, arguing with men whose crops were condemned as trash, issuing transfer notes to the more numerous small planters who brought in loose, unprized tobacco in bundles or “hands,” and giving hasty instructions to the overseer who commanded the slaves who took apart, then rehooped and renailed the hogsheads of the bigger planters.

  Jack Frake stepped outside of Ivy’s office and tucked his crop notes securely inside a pocket of his coat. All twelve of his hogsheads had passed inspection, and were branded beneath his diving sparrowhawk device with the town name, tare, and net weight, then rolled to another part of the brick warehouse.

  Quite by chance, they were put next to the eleven that bore the device of an ascending sparrowhawk, the mark of Meum Hall. For some reason, this pleased him. His own hogsheads would be taken on by John Ramshaw’s Sparrowhawk, due to arrive any day now, once it came back downriver from loading crops and pig-iron at De la Ware Town, or West Point, as the place at the head of the York River was beginning to be called. He would give Captain Ramshaw his crop notes in exchange for a sack or chest of coins. These would be mostly silver, with some gold and copper, most of them Spanish, some of them Portuguese, few of them English. Ramshaw in turn would exchange the notes for other commodities, either here or at Yorktown or Hampton downriver.

  He had been here since sunrise. Half of his hogsheads were brought down from Morland by wagon and oxen team, half by cutter from his own pier. With him were William Hurry, his overlooker and steward, and John Proudlocks, a tenant, and six men from the plantation. He had sent them back with those conveyances, for he wanted to relax and have a late dinner at the King’s Arms Tavern up on Queen Anne Street above the waterfront.

  As he strode through the noisy, bustling port, several small planters he knew looked hopefully at him on their way to Ivy’s office. They carried sacks of cured tobacco, which, if they passed Ivy’s scrutiny, would net these planters “transfer” notes, which in turn they could use as money or sell to other planters for cash or par value. Their tobacco, “dull leaf” oronoco or stemmed sweetscented, would be added to a common, unprized stockpile, for it was prohibited from exportation, first by Parliament in 1698, then by the House of Burgesses in 1730, to reduce the smuggling that cut into Crown revenues. Reece Vishonn and other “bashaw” planters here made a business of buying those transfer notes, then used them to draw from the common stockpile to either complete the prizing of their own hogsheads, or to prize new ones. By law, tobacco could be exported only in those hogsheads or casks. The product was as much a captive as were its producers.

  Jack merely nodded to the men, or exchanged brief greetings with them. He might have done business with them, except that he had no use for the tobacco they grew. “Dull leaf” was favored in the French market and bought in London by agents of the Farmers-General, the French government tobacco monopoly, and constituted most of the colonial crop. He himself grew “bright oronoco,” or “bright leaf,” which was favored by Dutch, Spanish, German, and Scandinavian buyers. Morland was one of the few York River plantations that grew bright leaf. Much more of it was grown on the James River. Richard Ivy, the inspector, had grown it on the James as a plantation manager, and swore that Morland leaf was “every bit as good as the best” bright leaf he had seen on that other great river’s plantations. But neither Ivy nor Reece Vishonn nor any other Caxton planters voiced their curiosity about how Jack was able to find regular buyers for his bright leaf and profit from its sale, when the prices they got for their own dull leaf and stemmed sweetscented were so dependent on the capricious shrewdness of French agents, economic conditions in the British Isles, and the whims of the Board of Trade.

  The “how” was something neither Jack nor Captain Ramshaw was ever going to divulge. Ramshaw was able to dispose of the bright leaf on the isle of Guernsey, on Dutch and Scandinavian vessels. The redoubtable captain kept in his employ a man, listed in his crew as a shipwright, who was an expert forger of cockets, dockets, manifests, and bills of lading, in addition to the handwriting and signatures of virtually every customs man in any colonial or British port, including Richard Ivy. His concealed cabin on the Sparrowhawk contained a small printing press and was stocked with all the grades and types of commercial and official paper needed. The paperwork and documents that detailed the vessel’s cargoes, and whether or not their duties had been paid or exempted, after the Sparrowhawk set sail for England, or cleared London or one of the outports, were as impeccably correct and in order as those inspected by naval officers in colonial ports and by customsmen at the destinations, but rarely were they the same original paperwork and documents.

  The practice dated from the days of the Skelly gang in Cornwall, when the gang rendezvoused in galley boats with the Sparrowhawk offshore on moonless nights, or sailed its own vessel, the Hasty Hart, to Guernsey to pick up a cargo Ramshaw left there. Neither Jack nor Ramshaw nor any of the captain’s other “customers” saw any reason to change the forgery practice. It helped them to keep more of what they had earned, to profit from their efforts while others moaned about the Crown’s impositions.

  Jack had never even confided it to Hugh Kenrick, who he knew suspected him of some smuggling ruse but had never presumed to inquire about it. His friend’s own dull leaf hogsheads were reserved for the Busy or the Ariadne, whichever merchantman arrived first in Caxton. These, he knew, would go to the Pool of London, or to one of the outports, Bristol or Liverpool, where Worley & Sons had corresponding agents. Jack in turn presumed that Hugh’s wealthy family and loyal agent had established their own devious arrangements to reduce the burden of the duties on their imports from the colonies and Europe, and to flout the strictures of the navigation laws and foil the Crown’s mandate to collect a levy on, as Hugh himself had once put it, “every bead of sweat, every ounce of effort, every grain of value” that rode on British vessels.

  Jack reached the top of the rise. He paused to take a seegar from inside his coat, struck a match, and lit it. He preferred the pipe, but at moments of celebration like this one, he would smoke a rolled, compact leaf of his own crop. Mouse, his chief field-hand and expert “prizer,” rolled them himself by the dozen. Jack allowed him to roll the seegars for sale to his other tenants and in town.

  He turned to survey the waterfront. This was his favorite time of the year to enjoy the little port, when it was most alive, as it concluded one year’s work and prepared for the next. Two merchantmen were moored to the larger earthen piers, both frigate-sized, the Atlantic Conveyor and the Peregrine, out of Jamaica and Boston respectively, taking on grain, pork, and beef, besides dozens of manufactured wares that came from Queen Anne county, including barrel staves, shingles, tallow, and finished candles. A third vessel, the Pericles, out of Halifax, rode at anchor in the river, waiting to berth once one of the others pushed off back down the York. It was already laden with pelts and hemp, and had stopped here to take on whatever else wou
ld fill the empty space in her hold. A dozen smaller vessels, belonging to farmers and small planters, were tied to a shorter pier — ketches, yawls, and even converted jolly boats — and men were occupied unloading their cargoes or loading supplies they had purchased in town with their crop or transfer notes.

  In the King’s Arms Tavern, crowded now with planters, crewmen from the merchantmen, and visitors from Williamsburg and Yorktown, Jack ordered his dinner, and sat down with a tankard of ale, and while he waited, talked with William Settle, Meum Hall’s overlooker. They spoke for a while about a growing season that had given them balanced spells of rain and sunshine, enough of each so that all their crops had flourished without needing extra care. Settle had erected his employer’s conduit in the spring, per Hugh Kenrick’s instructions, but took it back down when the false start of a dry season was washed away by the second of the season’s weekly rains.

  “You know,” said Settle to Jack Frake, “I was thinking of leaving Brougham Hall, even before Mr. Kenrick bought the place, and building up my own land. But Mr. Kenrick’s made a difference. I like him, he’s a bookish man, you know, but not afraid of getting dirt under his nails, and now I won’t think of leaving. With Mr. Swart all we had was just so much glop and grief, but since Mr. Kenrick came, we’re growing gold, gold you can hear rustle when it’s hanging in the barns when the breezes cure it and it’s being prized into a hogshead, and everyone’s proud of it. We’re just like your place, Mr. Frake, and I can’t think how it could be run better.”

  Jack smiled. “Mr. Kenrick has made a great difference here, Mr. Settle. And he will continue to make one.”

  Settle frowned, bemused. “I used to think you would, Mr. Frake.”

  Jack shook his head. “I have, sir, and I’m not finished yet.”

  Just as Jack was finishing his dinner, John Proudlocks returned with a saddled horse from the Morland stables for his employer to ride back on, and also with the news that a merchantman was on the river, headed for Caxton.

  The trio left the tavern, mounted their horses, and rode to the rise over the waterfront. They could see a vessel about a mile away, beating slowly up the York, the pilot’s skiff trailing behind on a line beneath the red ensign, bobbing in the wake. Both Jack and Settle could recognize from a distance most of the merchantmen that called on Caxton. They glanced at each other.

  “It’s the Busy,” said Settle. “Mr. Kenrick may be on it.”

  “It’s the Busy, all right,” agreed Jack. “If he is, I wonder what news he’ll bring.”

  Chapter 24: The News

  “The British colonies are to be regarded in no other light but as subservient to the commerce of their mother country. Colonists are merely factors for the purposes of trade, and in all considerations concerning the colonies, this must always be the prevailing idea. The Crown, through its appointed Governors and officers, should, in conformance with this idea, exert every act of sovereignty in each province, with the summary effect of rendering the colonies relative and subservient to the commerce of Great Britain, which was the end of their establishment.”

  Thomas Reisdale scoffed and dropped the page. He had read the words out loud, as if by doing so, the meaning of the words would acquire more reality. He already believed them, but voicing them seemed to add to them acertain potency. “They were not, sirs!” he exclaimed to the unseen author. “They were established as refuges from this brand of callidity!” The attorney glanced at Jack Frake, who had already read the pages. “Well, sir, you were remarkably prescient. He even uses your own language! ‘Merely factors,’ indeed!”

  Jack Frake, seated at a table used by Hugh Kenrick as a worktable when his study desk was too cluttered, puffed on his pipe. He said, “I could not have penned the notion better myself.”

  Reisdale picked up another page. “Listen to this, sirs! What audacity! ‘Under the pretence of regulating the Indian trade, a very straight line should be drawn on the back of the provinces and the country behind that line thrown, for the present, under the dominion of the Indians and the Indians be everywhere encouraged to support their own sovereignty.’” The attorney scoffed again, and tossed down the page. “Why, if Parliament weaves laws around this gentleman’s ‘prevailing idea,’ one couldn’t even escape west from His Majesty’s clutches! This fellow proposes granting the savages leave to ‘support their sovereignty,’ which means, in effect, that settlers could be butchered by them at will, and could not appeal to the army for protection — not unless they wished to be fined and punished by the Crown!”

  Reisdale was as angry as anyone had ever seen him. “Think of it, sirs! Astring of army posts, all down the Mississippi, from Montreal to New Orleans, just as he proposes, each post a link in a chain that would imprison us all! To the north, Canada, and an army! To the south, the Floridas, and an army! To the west, protected barbarism!”

  Jack sat forward, tapped out his pipe in a copper bowl, then wrapped his hands around a tankard of ale. “That could not be the end of it, sir. That chain of iron and steel and warclubs can only be meant to better dress us in the paper and ink chains of more regulation and taxation. To keep us close at hand.”

  “Those,” Hugh Kenrick said, pointing from his desk to the pile of pages on a table near Reisdale’s elbow, “are very damning documents.”

  The three men were in his study at Meum Hall. It had taken him some days to recover from the voyage, and then to deal with the greetings of the planters, and to distribute the things he had brought back from England. The first thing he did, after setting foot on the pier of the Caxton waterfront, was to visit the tobacco warehouse, knowing that his hogsheads should have been prized, inspected, and cleared by now. And seeing them there calmed his mind. At Meum Hall, he inspected the fields, the house, the account books, and listened to Mr. Settle, Mr. Beecroft, and the rest of the staff report on the course and climax of Meum Hall’s growing season.

  Sitting in the back of his mind all the while, however, was the knowledge he had gained from Dogmael Jones’s documents, and the problem of how best to share that knowledge with those he thought should have it.

  He said now, “These documents, sirs, must be kept in confidence. Their contents must not be revealed to anyone else. You have read his note to me. It is imperative that you do not communicate any of this to friends, and especially not to our burgesses. Our friends and burgesses have already heard what these documents say. You, Mr. Frake, have said it. And I have suspected it.”

  He paused. “Now, Virginia has two agents in London, Mr. Edward Montagu, who acts for the Assembly, and Mr. James Abercromby, who acts for the Council. I do not know how active these men are in their capacities, nor whether or not they would be friends or enemies of the sentiments expressed in these documents.”

  Reisdale said, “Any objections or agreements they might have would be put before the Privy Council, or the Treasury, or the Board of Trade. I don’t believe their mandate extends to venturing to influence Parliament, except through members they happen to know. It may need to, in future.”

  “True,” said Hugh. “In any event, these documents constitute something they should have acquired on their own initiative. And, perhaps they have. But I should not rely on them. Mr. Jones can give us advance warning of the Crown’s intentions, but only if his ability to do so is not jeopardized. That is why I ask that you keep this information to yourselves.” He smiled in memory of Dogmael Jones’s question aboard the Busy. “Have I your concession on this point, sirs?”

  Jack Frake and Thomas Reisdale nodded. Jack said, “Your Mr. Jones sounds like a man who ought to settle here, Hugh. You wrote to me about him from London in such glowing terms, but these,” he said, pointing with his pipe stem at the pages, “are proof that he is a man of substance.”

  Hugh shook his head. “He loves his country, Jack. But, more than that, he is obsessed with the justice that may be had in it, and, from our own perspective, from it.”

  Jack studied his host for a moment. He smiled and s
aid, “You have just uttered a troubling distinction, my friend.”

  Reisdale cautiously remarked, “Yes, sir. To argue the point, are Virginia and Massachusetts to be regarded as England, within its natural pale? Or does more separate these states from England than a mere ocean?”

  Hugh grinned in good-natured defeat. “Yes, I own I made the distinction. And it is a distinction that we must all thresh out.”

  Jack rose and paced for a while in thought. Then he turned to his companions and said, “You must understand that, ultimately, it can end in but one way. Mr. Jones’s documents here prove it. It may take years. It will require a slow, and costly, and difficult lesson. But, it can have but one consequence.” When he saw agreement in his companions’ faces, he glanced out the study window at the trees that were beginning to sport color. “The long autumn of this empire is now upon us. I am certain of it.”

  Hugh shook his head and sat back in his chair. “No, sir. I do not think that is true. If the worst happened, it could not last. There would be reconciliation. An epergne of empire is not impossible. It is not naturally doomed.” He paused to regard the pile of pages at Reisdale’s elbow, then said, “As you are, my friend, I am confident in the power of reason. I do not believe that, faced with the sole alternatives of a peaceful, just empire, on the one hand, and disaster and war, on the other, the most foolish minister would not choose the former.”