It was the first gleam of that bright point with which Benjamin Franklin dreamt of ending his life. But he, of course, did not see it that way. It was something else, a chance to enjoy a world even more compelling than the wilderness beyond the mountains, the great metropolis of London, pinnacle of imperial power. Best of all, he would take William with him. Together, they would “go home” and cement the already strong bond between father and son, beyond the range of Deborah Franklin’s jealous tongue.
The timing was particularly advantageous as far as William was concerned. He had recently contracted a consuming passion for poetess Elizabeth Graeme, daughter of one of the first families of Philadelphia. Elizabeth’s father was Dr. Thomas Graeme, owner of Graeme Park, a lavish country estate twenty miles outside Philadelphia which his wife had inherited from her father, former Governor Sir William Keith. The house and grounds, complete with gardens, lakes, and a 300-acre deer park were the showplace of the colony. Obviously, William thought big. But Elizabeth’s parents took an exceedingly dim view of an alliance with the Franklins They were among the premier members of the Proprietary Establishment, and could not think of Benjamin Franklin without visualizing a pair of horns sprouting from his head. It was clear to Franklin that William was heading for humiliation at the bands of these snobs. So the father was doubly pleased to dangle before his son an invitation that was superior to Elizabeth’s poetic charms.
It is easy to imagine the two Franklins walking home that night through the winter twilight, the father holding back the invitation until they reached the door of William’s lodging. Then with a sly smile, Benjamin wondered aloud if William could detach himself from Philadelphia’s belles for a few years in London.
Almost certainly there was no dispute, once the word London was spoken. No matter how sophisticated Philadelphia might see itself, with its talk of being the second city of the empire, London was still a magic name, evoking dreams of power and pleasure that no young man could resist. William rushed upstairs and began packing.
Deborah Franklin was hardly as enthusiastic. Although Franklin urged her to come with them, he knew in advance that she feared ocean voyages, and nothing in the world, not even his powers of persuasion, could get her aboard a ship. But her husband had long since become adept at wearing out her temper tantrums with a smile. Poor Richard for the year 1757 may have reflected, in two of his epigrams for January, thoughts that were often on their author’s mind.
Nothing dries sooner than a tear.
He that would rise at court must begin by creeping.”
The General Wall - one of a half-dozen small, swift packet ships that carried mail, newspapers, dispatches, and other official matters between the British Isles and the American dominions of his Majesty King George - bounded across the placid waters of the Atlantic at a staggering thirteen knots. The ship was named for an Irishman, Richard Wall, who had entered the diplomatic service of Spain and played a peacemaker’s role as his adopted country’s ambassador to London. In one of the sleek ship’s comfortable cabins - with a generous supply of good books and good wine - sat a man on his way to London to become an equally unlikely ambassador. Benjamin Franklin, of course, did not think of himself as wearing that illustrious title in the summer of 1757. He was just the representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly, en route to London to do legal battle with the descendants of William Penn, the “Proprietors,” as they were known in Pennsylvania. But if the near 2,000,000 citizens of the thirteen American colonies on the continent of North America had by some miracle become united enough to dispatch a single individual to represent them in the capital of the British Empire, this fifty-one-year-old retired printer from Philadelphia would have been the obvious candidate.
In the summer of 1757, the idea of an ambassador from America to England would have struck Benjamin Franklin as ridiculous. In his mind, England and America were one country, the mighty British Empire in which he gloried to be a somewhat respected citizen. He was, in fact, sailing to England on a flood tide of patriotism, hoping to convince Parliament to replace the venal government of the Penns with a royal charter, putting the province directly under the government of the King and Parliament.
The other passengers aboard the ship added weight to this sense of Anglo-American unity. Captain Archibald Kennedy Jr., of the Royal Navy, was the son of Franklin’s good friend, the wealthy Collector of Customs of the Port of New York. Boston-born John Temple was traveling to England to seek a government job with the help of his influential relatives, Lord Temple and George Grenville. William Franklin enjoyed Temple’s dropping of the names of England’s great and near-great, and the two quickly developed a friendship.
But the favorite topic of conversation aboard the General Wall was not the intricacies of English high society. Every time a lookout bawled, “Sail ho,” a shiver of apprehension ran through the ship. The chances were all too good that the sail was a French privateer, roaming the seas in search of British ships as part of the global war that was now raging between France and England in India, North America, Europe, and on all the seas and oceans. Every time the warning was bawled, Walter Lutwidge, the profane, salty skipper of the General Wall, piled on every piece of canvas aboard, and left his pursuers lagging far behind. The captain liked to boast that his little packet was the fastest ship under sail on the Atlantic, and he had won money from Captain Kennedy earlier in the voyage when the naval officer had refused to believe they could reach thirteen knots.
In spite of this constant tension, Ben Franklin spent much of the passage in his cabin hard at work on a new edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack. With more time than he usually had at his disposal he paged through earlier editions, now numbering twenty-five, and decided to make this one special. Beginning with his usual salutation to the courteous reader, Poor Richard observed, “Nothing gives an author so great pleasure as to find his works respectfully quoted by other learned authors.” Alas, this was a pleasure which Poor Richard had “seldom enjoyed.” Just a little peevishly, he pointed out that he was “an eminent Author of almanacks” now for a full quarter of a century, but his brother “authors” for some reason had been “very sparing in their applauses.” If his writings hadn’t produced some “solid pudding,” their humble profit in the way of praise would have discouraged him. His only compensation had been, in his “rambles,” to hear people repeating one of his adages with “as Poor Richard says” at the end of it. “I own,” he added, “that to encourage the practice of remembering and repeating those wise sentences, I have sometimes quoted myself with great gravity.”
But now Richard had something truly joyous to report. He had stopped his horse to watch a crowd milling impatiently around a marketplace, waiting for merchants to open their shops for a special sale. Everyone was conversing on the “badness of the times,” and finally someone called to “a plain, clean old man with white locks.”
“Pray, Father Abraham, what think you of the times? Won’t these heavy taxes quite ruin the country? How shall we ever be able to pay them? What would you advise us to?”
Father Abraham proceeded to preach a sermon on making and saving money, quoting Poor Richard every second line. It wasn’t just the government that was taxing them, he told his listeners. Even if the government taxed the people one-tenth of their earnings, “Idleness taxes many of us much more and . . . sloth like rust consumes faster than labor wears while the used key is always bright, as Poor Richard says. But doth thou love life then do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of, as Poor Richard says. How much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep! Forgetting that the sleeping fox catches no poultry and that there will be sleeping enough in the grave, as Poor Richard says. If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be, as Poor Richard says, the greatest prodigality, since, as he elsewhere tells us, lost time is never found again; and what we call time enough always proves little enough: let us then be up and be doing, and doing to the purpose; so by diligence shall we do more
with less perplexity. Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy, as Poor Richard says; and he that rises late, must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night. While laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him, as we read Poor Richard, who adds, drive thy business, let not that drive thee . . . .”
Before Father Abraham was through, Richard was the most quoted writer in history. How seriously Franklin took the whole idea is clear from the words Poor Richard added to the old man’s tirade. “People heard it and approved the doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary, just as if it had been a common sermon; for the vendue [sale] opened and they began to buy extravagantly, notwithstanding all his cautions and their own fear of taxes.” Richard admitted “that the frequent mention he made of me must have tired anyone else, but my vanity was wonderfully delighted with it, though I was conscious that not a tenth part of the wisdom was my own which he ascribed to me, but rather the gleanings I had made of the sense of all ages and nations.” But Father Abraham made one convert, at least. “Though I had at first determined to buy stuff for a new coat,” Richard said, “I went away resolved to wear my old one a little longer. Reader, if thy will do the same, thy profit will be as great as mine.”
To Franklin this was one more piece of Poor Richard’s ironic fooling and a pleasant literary exercise to while away the days at sea. But others, with more literal minds, for whom the name Franklin was already synonymous with wisdom and science, seized on this collection of adages as a master plan by which every person could become rich. One of the first was Franklin’s nephew, Benjamin Mecom, son of his sister Jane, who was working as a printer in Boston. He published Father Abraham’s “speech” on March 30, 1758, and a variety of other writings, including Franklin’s song, “I Sing My Plain Country Joan.” Before the end of the eighteenth century, the discourse was reprinted 145 times, and for millions of people, Benjamin Franklin became synonymous with industry and thrift, an entirely false impression that quickly degenerated into the pursuit of money above all other values.
Meanwhile, the General Wall continued her cat and mouse game with French privateers. Finally, came that happiest of calls from a seaman in the bow of the packet: “And bottom at seventy fathoms, sir.” The news, gained from the ship’s 240-foot deep-sea lead line, told Captain Lutwidge he was about sixty miles west of the Scilly Islands, twenty-five miles off the southwest tip of England. A strong wind was blowing, and the ship was leaping from swell to swell. Captain Lutwidge made a questionable, daring decision. Night was falling, but instead of remaining in deep water until dawn, he decided to race hard for their destination, the port of Falmouth, in spite of the risks of the rocks and shoals of the Scilly Islands. Fifty years before, a full British squadron commanded by an admiral with a remarkable name, Sir Cloudsley Shovel, had blundered to disaster on those night-shrouded rocks, and more than one sailor had done likewise, in more recent years. But there was a lighthouse on the rocks now. That considerably lowered the risk and made the nighttime run a better bet than a daytime run through the Channel, which was teeming with French privateers.
Everyone went to bed. But no one, except Captain Lutwidge, seems to have gone to sleep. With its canvas spread, the General Wall’s studding sails, set outboard of the traditional square sails to increase speed, obscured the view of the helmsman and the rest of the watch. They depended for their safety on a lookout in the bow. Again and again the passengers heard the helmsman call, “Look well out before, there.”
“Aye, aye,” answered the watchman.
But after five or six hours, the call and the answer became automatic. The rise and fall of the ship in the heaving sea, the hiss of the water past the prow became a lullaby for the lookout. Meanwhile, the tricky currents at the mouth of the Channel pushed the boat closer and closer to the Scilly rocks. About midnight, a heavy swell hit the General Wall at a slight angle, causing her to yaw. A moment later, as she crested the surging hump of sea, a cry of terror burst from the lips of the crew. There, almost dead ahead, was the Scilly lighthouse, blazing at them like a demon’s eye. Onto the deck the two Franklins and the other passengers rushed to stare at what looked like certain doom. They were so close; to Franklin the light looked “as big as a cart wheel.”
Frantic shouts. Where was Captain Lutwidge? Still snoring below. It was a crisis that demanded a man of action, and Archibald Kennedy, Jr., proved that he was not wearing the epaulets of a Royal Navy captain by chance. “Wear ship,” he roared to the helmsman. The heart of every sailor skipped a beat. In the brisk night wind, this maneuver, turning the ship to leeward, where she would get the full impact of the gale, could easily send the masts overboard like broken toothpicks. Then it would be the rocks for sure. But there was neither room nor time for the much safer maneuver of coming about into the wind. With a gulp, the helmsman threw the wheel over.
The rigging whined and the masts groaned like living things, but they survived, and in a moment the General Wall was racing away from destruction into the deep waters of the Channel once more. Morning found them shrouded in a thick fog. But the leadsman at work in the bow reported soundings that convinced Captain Lutwidge he was extremely close to Falmouth. The passengers paced the deck impatiently until about nine o’clock. Then “like the curtain at a playhouse,” Franklin wrote, the fog magically lifted, and there was Falmouth, “the vessels in its harbor and the fields that surrounded it.”
It was Sunday, July 17, 1757, and as they went ashore, they heard church bells ringing. “We went thither immediately,” Franklin told his wife in the letter he wrote that day, “and with hearts full of gratitude, returned sincere thanks to God for the mercies we had received.” Anyone who had experienced such a narrow escape from death might have written those words. But the following sentence was pure Franklin. “Were I a Roman: Catholic, perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint; but as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a lighthouse.”
William Franklin was more literal and earnest in his account of their narrow escape. He had, it was true, an excuse. Behind him in Philadelphia, he had left Elizabeth Graeme, sighing soulfully over his departure. Her parents still grumpily refused William’s proposal of marriage. Nevertheless, the young couple had parted with pledges of undying love, and William hastened to assure his “dearest Betsy” that he had survived the perilous passage. “Let the pleasures of this country be ever so great, they are dearly earn’d by a voyage across the Atlantick. Few are the inducements that will tempt me to pass the ocean again if ever I am so happy as to return to my native country.”
Nevertheless, at twenty-six, William was looking forward with considerable eagerness to a sojourn in the mother country. Not a little of this anticipation could be traced to his father, who had visited England himself as a young man of eighteen. But that first visit by a youthful Benjamin was different than this one. Benjamin had arrived with barely a penny in his pockets, a victim of an older man’s cruel trick. William Keith - the bombastic, debt-ridden governor of Pennsylvania - had conned young Franklin into going to England to purchase equipment for a print shop on Keith’s nonexistent credit and a weak promise of his assistance in Philadelphia. The stranded youngster had fortunately been able to make a living as a journeyman printer. He stayed in London for eighteen months, reading everything he could lay his bands on, during a decade when Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Daniel Defoe were writing some of their best books. The experience became a major influence in expanding Franklin’s mind and especially in refining his literary style.
With Benjamin’s reminiscences to whet their appetites for London, the two Franklins happily rode through beautiful, southwest England at the height of summer. They stopped on Salisbury Plain to see the massive monuments of Stonehenge and ponder for a moment the mystery of these relics of a forgotten era, when men worshipped strange, unknown gods. At the village of Wilton, they paused again to see the ruins of yet another time, the crumbling monastery an
d chapel that had once dominated the small village, when England paid allegiance to the Pope of Rome. Nearby was Wilton House, the seat of the Herbert family, the Earls of Pembroke, one of those whose fortunes were built high on the wreckage of medieval England. The Franklins paid a visit to their elegant mansion and gardens, crowded with paintings and Roman statuary.
As they drew nearer to London, the famed city seemed to act as a sort of magnet on the philosopher of electricity and his son. They covered no less than seventy miles in a single day of fierce riding, and “only a little fatigued,” clattered into London town on the night of July 26, 1757. At the Bear Inn, on the Southwark side of old London Bridge, they found dinner and rooms.
Even in this first evening’s glimpse, Franklin must have been staggered by the tremendous growth London had experienced since his stay in 1725. For more than three miles the city spread along the north bank of the Thames, wrapped in clouds of sooty smoke that gave it on gloomy days an almost infernal aspect. On the south side of the river, the town of Southwark - eventually incorporated into greater London - was growing just as fast.
Franklin Page 8