Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival

by Dean King

  To the north, through fifteen miles of wide floodplains, the river was regularly dredged to Hartford for sloop navigation—vessels drawing eight feet of water or less. Larger vessels drawing up to ten feet of water could reach only as far inland as Middletown, where the federal government, in 1784, had established one of the state’s four customs houses to track the profitable sea trade. While Valley ships often ventured across the Atlantic, as the Commerce was about to do, trade with the West Indies prevailed.

  The Valley’s merchants, shipbuilders, and farmers worked together in a lucrative partnership, the farmers raising livestock on fields of clover, timothy, and other grasses and shipping to the West Indies butter, cheese, beef, and pork, along with such crops as corn, rye, oats, and potatoes. They also sent horses, which were tethered on the decks of vessels nicknamed “horse jockeys,” and lumber, especially oak barrel staves, which were essential for transporting the islands’ sugar. Their ships returned from the islands carrying sugar, salt, coffee, indigo, and rum, as well as manufactured and luxury items from Europe. Until 1790, when it was outlawed, some Connecticut vessels also came home with slaves, who in this part of the country mostly worked as domestic servants.

  All of this trade fueled the shipbuilding and maritime industries, and made the lower Connecticut a busy stream. Blessed not only with productive farms but with hardwoods that in colonial days had made Royal Navy shipbuilders drool, it was the most important commercial shipbuilding center between New York and Boston. Over the decades, thousands of small craft and large merchant vessels had rolled off the stocks here. Often painted dark with a single red, white, or blue stripe on the side, the sloops and square-riggers tended to be somewhat rounded in the bow and were admired more for their sturdiness than their speed. By 1815, the wooded banks and hillsides along the lower Connecticut had been largely clear-cut by farmers and shipbuilders. Loggers floated timber for shipbuilding downriver from ever-northerly stands. The demand for new vessels grew steadily, and builders tried to keep up.

  Aspiring seamen rose just as quickly to fill the vessels. The Commerce had a choice crew, commensurate with its reputable owners and well-regarded captain. Bill Porter, a powerful and friendly man of thirty-one, hailed from Windsor, the inland-most port of the Lower Valley. James Clark of Hartford was a veteran of war-hero Daniel Ketchum’s company of the Twenty-fifth Regiment of U.S. Infantry, which had distinguished itself in the 1814 campaign on the Niagara Peninsula. The five-foot-ten-inch Clark, who had enlisted as a private and been appointed sergeant, had dark hair, pale eyes, and a cross tattooed on his arm. The Commerce’s cook, Dick Deslisle, a free black man, was Ketchum’s former servant.

  Tommy Burns, who at forty-one was one of the elders of the crew, came from Hadlyme downriver. Burns had served as a fifer in the Sixth Company of the Thirty-third Regiment of Connecticut militia under Captain Calvin Comstock in New London in 1813. Afterward, he had returned to his work on his in-laws’ Mount Parnassus farm. In the spring of 1814, his wife, Lillis, had become ill and died suddenly. Grieving, Burns soon left the farm and moved to Hadlyme. He was called up again by the militia in August. At the war’s end, he had decided that rather than return to the farm and its painful memories, he would go to sea.

  Ordinary seamen Francis Bliss and James Carrington rounded out the regulars, the men who stand a watch. Able seamen such as Porter, Clark, Robbins, and Burns could hand, reef, and steer and could scurry out on the yards in a pitching sea to set or shorten sail as easily as most people walk down a sidewalk. Ordinary seamen, still learning their trade or incapable of advancing, looked after the less technically demanding tasks, mostly on deck or below, heaving, hauling, and swabbing as needed.

  They all knew every foot of this last pitch of New England’s longest river. Rock ledges, islands, eddies, sediment banks, submerged trees, and creek mouths, as well as wooden posts marking the channel, were the sailors’ road signs. The spring freshet always brought changes, sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic. The officers and seamen kept a keen eye out for these as well as for the river’s complex traffic. Fishermen, loggers, brownstoners from the quarries, and merchantmen—mostly sloops and schooners smaller than the Commerce—plied the navigable channels. Ferrymen’s flat-bottomed scows, each powered by a sweeping oar, crossed from bank to bank carrying horses and wagons, as they had been doing for nearly two centuries.

  That evening, spring showers arrived in the Lower Valley. Rain fell all the next day, May 3. One of the sailors, twenty-four-year-old James Clark, who had been released from the military and reunited with his wife, Ruth, and their two young children just six weeks earlier, celebrated his fourth wedding anniversary that day. Back in Upper Houses, Phoebe Riley gave birth to a boy, whom she and the captain had previously agreed to call Asher, after James’s father. Barring any unforeseen delays, the captain would meet his son before he was six months old.

  From Middle Haddam, where they steered hard astarboard at the end of the Middletown Gorge, the river tugged them south and then steadily southeast. Salt water reached sixteen miles up the river, as far as East Haddam. Here the Salmon River joined in, broadening the Connecticut, at no place more magnificent than in its estuary, where the life of the river commingled with that of the sea. Hardly a Valley mariner could hit this stretch of the river without his heart quickening at the sound of seabirds squawking overhead and the smell of salt air filling his lungs. The Commerces, as the sailors of the Commerce would have been called—as if they were simply the living parts of their vessel—were no exception.

  In rising high spirits, they chattered and hummed ditties. Yet departing the Lower Valley was always bittersweet. To them, no landscape was as green and salubrious, or as filled with friendly faces, as this one. Some were leaving behind young belles, others would return to a new child in the family. Or, like Horace’s father, they might not return at all. Few seafaring families in the Valley had not been touched in this way. Fever took many in the West Indies. All too often a vessel found an unmarked shoal or a sudden squall and was never heard from again. Hostile tribes, cutthroat “salvagers,” and pirates held sway in secluded pockets around the globe.

  Still, right now departure was more sweet than bitter. Over the years, the sailors had grown used to making two or three round-trips a year to the West Indies. This voyage and the bracing damp chill of the North Atlantic—not to mention a turn of good luck—were long overdue. Activity, conversation, and fresh sights kept their minds in the present while the familiar blue tang of burning Connecticut hardwood still reached out from the riverbanks.

  Though young, Archie Robbins, whose father, Jason, was a Wethersfield sea captain, had known almost nothing but hard times at sea and had plenty of stories to tell. In six years, Robbins had been detained or imprisoned by the British three times. In February 1813, the frigate Surprise had swooped down and captured the merchant craft in which he was bound for St. Bartholomew, a Swedish territory in the Leeward Islands of the West Indies. He returned on board a cartel ship to New York. In the fall of that year, again in a merchantman bound for St. Bartholomew, he was taken by the blockade off New London. This time he was sent to Halifax, where he was detained for two months. On a third attempt to reach St. Bartholomew, Robbins, who was charged with business from a New York merchant, wisely boarded a neutral Swedish vessel and succeeded, but returning north on board an American vessel, he was taken by the brig Borer.

  By any standard, Robbins had suffered an impressive run of bad luck, culminating in eighteen months spent in a British prison on Melville Island, Halifax. Now he felt sure that blue skies lay ahead. He called the Commerce “a fine stout-built new vessel” and the owners the most respectable merchants. He knew Captain Riley to be an experienced and well-liked commander, and Robbins, whose mother, Honor, was a Riley, also had family ties to the first mate, whose aunts had married Robbins’s uncles.

  Captain Riley, too, was on the rebound. He had fallen afoul of the international political maneuvering that had oppresse
d merchant vessels of neutral nations during the Napoleonic Wars. On Christmas Day, he had sailed from New York in the merchantman the Two Marys bound for Nantes, at the mouth of the Loire River in France, a port from which he had recently returned. While Riley was at sea, Napoleon had issued the infamous Milan Decree, giving the French any number of pretenses for seizing neutral ships.

  On the high seas, Riley had been stopped by two British cruisers. The first was the Agincourt, which chased and fired at the Two Marys on January 14, 1808. A condescending Royal Navy captain had boarded the merchant ship, admonished Riley not to enter any French or French-controlled port, and recorded the warning in the Two Marys’ register. Indignant, Riley had demanded to know by what right the captain had barged onto the quarterdeck of a vessel from a neutral nation and made such a rebuke, but he received no answer. Five days later, the schooner Pilchard played out a similar scene in the Bay of Biscay. When a third British warship opened fire, Riley sailed into the French port of Belle-Ile. There, officials examined his register, which showed that he had allowed a British officer to board his vessel. They used this excuse to seize the brig and her cargo as a prize of war while Riley watched in impotent fury. He spent the better part of two years traveling around the Continent trying to straighten out his affairs, but in the end the labyrinthine bureaucracy for which the French even then were famous defeated him. When he returned home to his wife and two children in 1809, he was broke.

  As Riley later stated in a petition to Congress, he found his nation’s commerce “languishing and restricted; many of her mercantile establishments ruined; and individual capital, credit, and resources quite exhausted or paralyzed by the continual hostility of the powers at war, and by measures resorted to by the United States to counteract the English and French policy.”2 Legitimate trade was impossible.

  As Riley’s debts piled up, Josiah Savage lent him $500 against his Prospect Hill property and house. Riley owed New York merchants N & D Talcott $2,200 and Middletown merchants Eells Child Co. and other creditors hundreds of dollars more. All took him to court and had judgments passed against him. He was under constant threat of having his house foreclosed on. The sheriff of Middlesex County delivered the judgments to his door and threatened to take him to debtors’ jail in Hartford.

  Riley scrambled to find a way to make money and to keep his prized home. Having sent mineral water from a spring at the base of his property to the renowned Yale chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman to gauge its restorative qualities, he had laid out on paper his vision of a grand spa with a bathhouse. He had confidently planted forty-two poplar trees to adorn his future establishment, which he imagined would rival the famous Stafford Springs Hotel on the Willimantic. But it was not to be. He could not get ahead of his debts. He leveraged his home and his property until he lost them. Riley had since rebuilt some of his credibility, but he remained haunted by his earlier failure.

  On Wednesday, May 4, the rain let up and the clouds lifted, but the wind came from the south, heading the Commerce’s square-rigged sails. They were near Potapaug, a shipbuilding center that was still reeling from the so-called Good Friday blaze set by the British in 1814. Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of vessels had incinerated, by some estimates the worst financial loss of the war. The charred spine and ribs of the massive 344-ton Osage still jutted out of the mud at Williams Shipyard in North Cove, a grim reminder of the night.

  As they passed the renowned Hayden Yard and a slew of smaller yards, it was obvious that the business of building ships from raw materials carried on. Fortified against the spring chill by the customary daily tot of shipyard rum, men worked crosscut pit saws, turning timbers into long planks. They hewed pins with broadaxes and hammered spikes that had been forged by smiths on site. Others stitched canvas in sail lofts and made cordage at ropewalks.

  On May 5, the breeze shifted favorably to the northwest, and the next day, the Commerce reached the last stretch of the river with the wind gusting over her starboard beam.

  At Lyme, the men watched out for the Tilleye’s Point ferry as they prepared to pass through the Connecticut’s shallow mile-wide mouth. Choked by sandbars, this was the trickiest passage on the river. The Commerce, like all deep-bottomed traffic, stuck to the navigable channel on the western side by Saybrook until she passed the wooden lighthouse at Lynde Point, which marked the beginning of the Sound. Once she was clear of the sandbars and in deep water, the brig jogged some forty miles east across the Long Island Sound and rounded Montauk Point into the Atlantic.

  Riley was at sea again. He was back in his element, where, like many Rileys before him, he had made his name, where he had garnered a small though temporary fortune, and where he would die.

  Riley had made his maiden voyage in the role Horace Savage now filled, cabin boy, on board a West Indies-bound sloop. Since then, few things had been more meaningful to him than the fraternity of seamen and merchants on the Connecticut River. He was pleased that he could stand in for his old friend William Savage and looked forward to giving his son a start in the life his father had loved.

  chapter 2

  Omens

  The year 1815 marked a historical watershed for the burgeoning United States. With the end of the War of 1812, the country entered a phase of transformation fueled by revolutions in transportation and industry. Robert Fulton’s steamboat had debuted on the Hudson in 1807. In 1811, the New Orleans had steamed from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. Steam would power a new generation of commercial vessels on America’s rivers, and industrial workshops would spring up throughout the Connecticut River Valley.

  Still, the change would be gradual, and sailing ships would remain in commercial use throughout the century. For the Commerces, whose plight would in many ways symbolize the beginning of the end of the age of the sailing ship, this looming obsolescence was not apparent.

  To Riley, sailing on the open sea would always mean freedom and opportunity. As a boy, he had watched his father scratch out a living for his thirteen children on the farm and had helped him and later his neighbor plant and harvest when he should have been in school like other children his age. He would never go back to farming if he could help it. Neither the recent return of Napoleon from his brief exile on the island of Elba, which the newspapers had announced just before the brig’s departure, nor the threat of attack by Barbary corsairs off the coast of North Africa would dampen his enthusiasm to voyage across the sea again.

  While the Treaty of Ghent had brought the War of 1812 to a close, it had not resolved many of its root issues. American merchant mariners remained wary. The result of the “expensive and bloody” war, complained a February 1815 editorial in the Connecticut Courant, the Lower Valley’s chief voice, was the loss of trading rights to the British colonies in the East and West Indies, which had never been a sure thing anyway since independence. “An American vessel going within a marine league of the coast of any British colony,” it warned, “will be liable to be fired on and captured.”

  Yet during the war, Britain’s indisputable rule of the waves had been shaken. Although the United States had had no answer for the blockade that locked up its shores, the heavy frigates of its underdog navy had won battles that stunned the Royal Navy, and the world. As novelist and naval historian James Fenimore Cooper saw it, “The ablest and bravest captains of the English fleet were ready to admit that a new power was about to appear on the ocean.”

  The war had given the young nation “a confidence in itself that had been greatly wanted,” Cooper allowed, “but which, in the end, perhaps, degenerated to a feeling of self-esteem and security that were not without danger.” Britain had built its mercantile empire on the strength of the mightiest navy ever known. What U.S. merchants lacked in infrastructure and experience, they made up for by taking advantage of America’s wealth of fertile soil, raw materials, and enterprising spirit. But to compete around the world, American commerce had to be protected.

  During the War of 1812, the navies of the Barbary state
s of North Africa—encouraged by the British, who had promised to destroy the fledgling American Navy—had attacked and plundered Yankee merchantmen, enslaving their crews. A few weeks after the Commerce set sail, Congress dispatched Captain Stephen Decatur at the head of a squadron of warships to subdue the Barbary States: Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. Before the war, the Americans had reluctantly accepted the Old World system of tributes for peace. Now they were out to change the system.

  Two weeks after leaving the mouth of the Connecticut, the Commerce reached the Bahamas, sighting Great Abaco Island and passing Hole in the Wall, a “remarkable perforated rock” at the island’s south end, the next day. The blue-water sailing in the Atlantic had been uneventful, the men content to be at peace and at sea again.

  The brig now entered the pellucid waters of the Great Bahama Bank, which in places is no deeper than twenty feet. Disarmed by the beautiful view of the bottom, many a ship had run afoul of the area’s dangerous crosscurrents and hazardous shoals. As the 1819 Colombian Navigator warned mariners, the principal occupations of the region’s small craft were coastal trading, fishing, turtling, and searching for wrecks. The locals were licensed by the governor to salvage. They received a percentage of anything they recovered, and quite a few made a living this way.

  Riley, who had sailed to New Orleans many times before, crossed the swift-flowing Northwest Providence Channel to the Berry Islands, passing to the leeward of Great Stirrup Cay, the northernmost of this cluster of cays and small islands, and steering west southwest for 36 miles, then south southwest for 120 miles. According to the authoritative Navigator, this was more or less a standard route as laid down by a Captain Ferrer in 1800 and appropriate for small vessels. On May 22 the Commerce sighted the next landmark, the Orange Cays—a collection of four small bush-covered islands along with two bald rocks—to starboard.