Bound for Gold--A Peter Fallon Novel of the California Gold Rush

by William Martin

  “I think Seaman Flynn is a slow learner,” said Hodges. “I would have punished him a second time for his cross looks.”

  “Flynn served his purpose. And you, sir, are to have nothing to do with him. I recruited him at the Bell-in-Hand. I took the measure of him and gave him the quill. Whatever went on between you two in Boston is of no matter to me.”

  Hodges said, “May I remind you, Captain, that I am the president of the company that has hired you, and so long as we are contracted, we expect certain—”

  The captain’s cutlery clanked onto his plate. “Certain what?”

  Wherever his next remark was to have taken us, Samuel Hodges showed the good sense to reconsider. “We expect a smooth voyage to San Francisco, sir.”

  “Where some of us”—Collins spoke for the first time, taking an opportunity to change the subject—“would like to enter into a business arrangement with you, Captain.”

  “Business arrangement?” The captain shifted his eyes to the other side of the table.

  Hodges said, “They would start a trading house in San Francisco, sir.”

  “A more traditional means of money-making than the gold pan,” answered Trask.

  “So it is,” said Willis. “The William Winter would make a fine vessel for ferrying goods from the East.” He had conducted himself with icy disdain for Hodges ever since the immersion of his library. It surprised me that he would even dine at the same table. And now, he pressed the captain, “We may be sailing in the real gold mine, sir.”

  “I have told you,” said Hodges, “we seek more than gold. We seek timber, fur, hides, tallow. We seek to clear land. We seek, in short, to conquer California. But an empire needs a cornerstone. And the cornerstone is gold.”

  Empire … a word to reckon with. Hodges had not used it before in my presence. But I suppose that any man who had seen as much and dreamed as grandly might use such words.

  The ship rocked, and the timbers groaned. We had become familiar with the motion and the sound, but at times, the sea would assert itself, as if to provide a rhythm for our talk or a punctuation for the uncomfortable silence that settled now upon us.

  At length, the captain lifted his decanter and refilled our glasses. He did not smile, though he seemed amused. “I’ll not worry about conflicts between the Sagamores and crew, when such fundamental conflicts exist among the Sagamores themselves.”

  Hodges lay his gaze on Willis and Collins for a few moments, then he said to the captain, “There will be no conflict between the Sagamores and your men, sir. You have my word. And none within our group.”

  I was not so certain. While Hodges dreamed grand dreams, Willis and his compatriots were sons of New England, men from the measure-twice-cut-once school, who sought their advantage in the simple arithmetic of wholesale over retail, who pursued their wildest dreams by electing directors and hiring lawyers. And around the edges of the company lurked the loners who would happily pursue their dreams on their own … charters be damned.

  February 7, 1849

  A New Season

  Near four bells of the larboard watch—two in the afternoon—the sun emerged as if from hibernation. The temperature leapt up and with it our spirits. We were another week closer to the equator and also to the equinox. The ocean, slate-colored for so long, appeared suddenly as blue as Boston Harbor in July. Flecks of golden sunlight danced on its surface, and warmth seemed to radiate into every soul.

  Around six bells we fell in with a school of dolphins that announced by their presence that we had reached happier seas. They circled back, swept around the hull, and sped along in the bow wake, leaving white wakes of their own as they went. But when Pompey produced a harpooner’s lance and began muttering about fresh fish for dinner, the dolphins disappeared, as if by some magic they had heard the conversation.

  There was magic in the glorious southern sunset, too. Like a painter I studied the layers of red, pink, purple, and amazingly, green, that shimmered on the horizon.

  After dark, the off-watch sailors gathered for a “sing” on the foredeck and filled the air with the scratchy jauntings of fiddle and hornpipe.

  I listened to their tunes and stared up into a sky so thick with stars that they appeared as a fog of light in the blackness. And it crept into my mind that I would have loved to show Janiva this marvelous sight, but I banished thoughts of her as quickly as I could, so as not to dwell on feelings that often asserted themselves in physical ways, no matter how hard I tried to ignore them.

  I stopped beside Willis, who was likewise staring into the dark, perhaps thinking of his own loyal wife. How much more difficult must it have been for him on such a romantic evening as this, given his knowledge of intimacy? Once a man has enjoyed nightly connubial pleasure, it must be even harder to ignore the need.

  “A fine evening,” I said.

  “I would be reading, but my library is edifying the crabs in Boston Harbor.”

  “You can borrow my books or perhaps the captain’s. I think he favors you.”

  “The captain favors efficiency.” Willis leaned close to me. “He is a close-hauling man, Spencer, the perfect partner for a long-range trading company.”

  Just then, a roar rose from the sailors. The music had stopped because someone was telling a story. I glanced toward the noise, wanting to slip away from this conversation and join that, because I knew where Willis was headed.

  But he gripped my elbow. “If it comes to it, are you with us?”

  “If it comes to what?”

  “If we take the company away from Hodges. If we recast the charter. Your brother would leap at the chance to invest.”

  That was not the thing to say to me, and surely not when Hodges was watching from the starboard rail, worried perhaps that “the most important man on the ship” was conspiring against him. I removed Willis’s hand and said in a loud voice, “You are forgetting one thing.”

  “What?”

  “I am not my brother.” And letting on not at all that I had noticed Hodges, I ambled toward the crowd of sailors near the bow.

  Michael Flynn was standing on the raised forecastle deck, like Reverend Stone on the quarterdeck three and a half weeks before. But here was no holy solemnity. Uproarious laughter answered the Irishman’s scatological preachments:

  “So I find meself on a window ledge three stories above Broadway. Barefooted and damned near bare-assed, I am, whilst in the bedroom, the delectable Delia Dunphy is tellin’ her husband there ain’t no one else there. But her husband’s a disbelievin’ man. He’s tearin’ the room apart, sayin’, ‘Where is he? I can smell him!’ And he goes lookin’ in the closet and under the bed and even between her legs—”

  The crew roared at that. These were young, virile men, cooped up for six months on a ship where randy stories were as close as they would get to the amorous adventures that all of them craved. Whatever they were thinking—or longing for in their private moments—the best reaction was to laugh.

  And Flynn had the gift, punctuating his story with swooping arms, pivots, pirouettes, voice changes, and accent changes, too. “All the while, her husband’s mutterin’, ‘I’ll find that Irish bastard and fix it so’s he never fucks another man’s wife again.’ Now, below me, a crowd’s gatherin’. And someone shouts, ‘Jump! Jump!’ Nice folks, them New Yorkers. Anyways, that’s when the husband sticks his head out the window and says, ‘Aha! I found you!’ And he points a big old flintlock right at me nut sack and says, ‘Stand still, ’cause I’m gonna shoot your pecker off, you black Mick bastard!’”

  “Black!” shouted Pompey. “You ain’t black. I’se black!”

  “He meant it metaphorically, me African friend. But”—Michael Flynn’s eye fell on me—“there’s times when the high mucky-mucks and their minions make us all feel like the sons of slaves. I’m lookin’ at one of them now.”

  I do not remember if I took a step into the shadows. Perhaps I did.

  Flynn leaped from the forecastle and pushed through the
crowd of sailors to stand in front of me. “A few weeks ago, I promised this Sagamore swell that I’d let him take a swing at me once I was feelin’ better. Well, sir, me back’s healin’ up nice, and here I be.”

  The Irishman was challenging me, directly, publicly, tauntingly.

  He offered his chin. “Go ahead. I ain’t got this far in life with a glass jaw.” Then he closed his eyes and let his mouth go slack, like a man who knew how to take a punch.

  Every sailor was watching now, to see what I would do. If I walked away, I would be marked. If I took the taunting and struck, that would lead to other difficulties.

  But on a crowded ship, a man needed to hold his head high. Momentary conflict was preferable to months of ignominy. Those thoughts, however, did not come to me in an orderly fashion. I simply decided that the best thing to do was to punch this smart-aleck Mick, but slack or not, his Irish jaw might break my fist.

  So I pulled back my right, prepared to deliver my knuckles to his nose, and someone grabbed my elbow. Then a voice growled into my ear, “None of that.”

  Flynn’s eyes popped open and brightened at the sight of Samuel Hodges, who had me by the arm. “Well … speakin’ of glass jaws.”

  Hodges ignored him and kept his mouth close to my ear. “Remember my promise to the captain. No conflicts with the crew.”

  “A good idea,” Flynn said. “No conflict. Besides, I ain’t after givin’ free punches to every fancy-pants Yank aboard. Just one. And it ain’t you, Mr. Sam the Glass Jaw.”

  Like any man finding himself in a fight he doesn’t want, I was happy to let Hodges pull me away.

  “Don’t dirty yourself,” Hodges told me, “or hurt your writing hand.”

  “Oooh, your writing hand.” Flynn made a gesture with his own right hand, mimicking one that men on a long voyage might be tempted to use in the middle of the night. “Mustn’t hurt that.”

  The sailors roared.

  Hodges said to Flynn, “Keep it up, Mick, and if there’s trouble, it’ll be on your head. I might have the captain cut your grog rations.”

  This caused the laughter to stop as suddenly as if someone had dropped a boulder from the crow’s nest.

  But Flynn hopped back into the lantern light atop the forecastle and got back to his story. “As I was sayin’, the richest man in New York wanted to shoot off me manhood, so I did me best to protect the jewels”—Flynn clapped both hands over his groin—“while the crowd kept callin’ for me to jump.”

  The sailors were laughing again.

  “I asks him, ‘How can you shoot me pecker off when I ain’t got one?’ The feller’s eyes go wide, and he says, ‘Ain’t got a pecker? Where’d you lose it?’ I says, ‘I got it shot off in the war.’ ‘War? What war? There ain’t no war.’ He had me there, so I had to think fast, so—”

  A part of me was curious to hear the rest of the story, but Hodges was leading me toward the gangway. “I know you’d love to wallop him, James, but—”

  Hodges stopped in mid-sentence and looked to the larboard side, near the mizzen shrouds, where Willis was now in deep discussion with Collins, two former schoolmasters, Selwin Gore of Brookline and Hiram Wilson of Dorchester, and Tom Lyons, who styled himself the company attorney.

  Hodges released his grip on me and strode across the deck. “May I join you?”

  “Why, of course,” said Willis with false sincerity. “We’re just discussing early Renaissance sketching.”

  “Indeed,” added Collins. “So many nights to talk between here and California.”

  I wanted no part of this, lest I be drawn into choosing a side, so I descended the gangway and bumped into Matt Dooling, coming up.

  “Evenin’, Mr. Spencer. I’m for a bit of air. Gettin’ stuffy down there.”

  “There’s plenty of hot air above, too,” I said.

  “Whatever there is of it, there’s more belowdecks.”

  “Put a hundred men on a ship for long, hot air and hot talk become the currency.”

  “Aye. But hot talk is just paper money. There’s plenty aboard who believe in nothin’ but specie. Hard coin. And the hardest money is gold, to be got however we can get it. That’s what the men are sayin’ down there.”

  So, above and below, mutiny was in the air. And we still had months to go.

  February 10, 1849

  Target Practice

  We now went about the deck in shirtsleeves, enjoying summer in February. All the hatches and skylights lay open, admitting fresh air deep into the ship and alleviating for a time the growing tension.

  About six bells, eleven in the morning, the lookout sighted a whale carcass to larboard. Someone said that it would make a fine target, and within minutes, a dozen Argonauts had produced pistols, many boxed since the beginning of the voyage. I considered bringing out my Colt Dragoons but decided that this was an event worthy of description rather than participation.

  The deck quickly became a dangerous place with so many excited young men waving weapons about. Some were shooting for the first time and had so little clue as to the proper handling of a pistol that muzzles were flashing and bullets flying about like a swarm of lethal insects. Most of the sailors went scrambling up into the rigging. But I concluded that the safest place was behind something, not above. So I put myself behind the longboat stowed amidships, took out my notebook, and watched.

  Christopher Harding accidentally fired a round into the deck. It ricocheted back and blew a hole right through the brim of his hat. He shrieked and jumped a foot into the air.

  Second Mate Kearns hurried from the quarterdeck and warned the shooters to point the guns overboard or target practice would be prohibited.

  Deering Sloate answered by aiming his big Walker Colt over the side and haphazardly discharging it. “Like that?”

  “If you want to waste bullets,” said Kearns. “But no more shootin’ into the deck.”

  “If I’m so careless as to waste bullets, take care that none of them hit you.” Sloate sneered, so that his features, enhanced now by a goatee, made him resemble ever more closely the rats reproducing down in the hold.

  I had done my best to avoid Sloate, but as he was also firmly with Hodges in the dispute over our stores, Hodges considered us both allies.

  He turned back to the men at the rail and shouted, “A contest, lads. Who’s first?”

  Even the poorest marksman thought he had the chance to hit that great mass of wallowing blubber. So they all crowded the rail, and as each man squeezed off his shots, the others responded with shouting, joshing, laughter, and a few groans, too. From a distance, we must have made a strange sight on that bright, blue sea, with the little white puffs of pistol smoke blowing off into the wind and the gray, shark-chewed carcass floating by.

  I took notes, filling three pages before a pair of polished boots appeared on the deck beside mine. I looked up to see the smoking barrel of that huge Walker Colt and Sloate smiling behind it.

  He said, “Write this: ‘In the first shooting contest aboard the William Winter, Deering Sloate of Dorchester has won with five hits on a dead humpback at fifty yards.’”

  “I’m sure your friends back home will be very happy.”

  “You are an insincere little scribbler, James Spencer.” Sloate took the cylinder out of the pistol to dump the spent percussion caps on the deck.

  But a voice dropped from above: “Belay that!” And Michael Flynn dropped from the ratlines. “Dump your trash over the side, mister. Me and the lads holystone these boards every day. We’ll have no little pieces of metal stickin’ in our knees when we do.”

  “Certainly not.” Sloate flicked his wrist, so that the metal caps dropped into the sea. “Don’t want to hurt the knees of a man who spends so much time on them.”

  I could see anger in Flynn’s stiffening posture and in the half-step he took toward Sloate. Then the memory of his flogging seemed to temper him.

  Sloate laughed, goading with the skill he had been honing since grammar school.
r />   I said, “You’d best reload, Sloate. This fellow’s got a short fuse.”

  “His fuse was cut the first day.” Sloate looked at Flynn. “Just stay on your knees, Irish, and the captain will stay off your back.”

  Flynn watched Sloate saunter back to the shooters on the lee side. Then he said to me, “A fine lot of friends you’re travelin’ with.”

  “They’re not all friends.”

  “Then you shouldn’t be travelin’ with ’em. Travelin’ is for friends.”

  After six weeks, I was sifting carefully to determine who my friends were.

  February 24, 1849

  Crossing the Line

  We had now reached S 0′1″ W 45′4″, which meant that the sun at noon was directly over us. I sat on an empty hogshead, basked in the warmth, spread my papers on my knee, and prepared another dispatch for the readers of Boston. It began thus:

  “And now, we are sons of Neptune. In keeping with seafaring tradition, we enjoyed a raucous ceremony last night. Second Mate Kearns, who has crossed the line more often than any man aboard, played the King of the Sea, complete with false beard and long hair fashioned from a deck mop. Dressed in a breechclout, armed with a harpoon, attended by two Negro sailors, he sat on his “throne”—the winch capstan on the forecastle deck—from whence he announced that he would choose one crewman and one Sagamore to represent all aboard who had never before breached the equator. ‘They will be shaved with a dull razor, usin’ tar for soap and oakum for towel. By their sacrifice they’ll earn for all—’”

  A shadow appeared above me as I wrote: Michael Flynn, off watch. “An easy way to make a livin’, that, sittin’ down all day stringin’ words together.”

  I said, “Sometimes, I’d rather be working in the rigging.”

  “Not in a big wind, you wouldn’t.” Flynn’s face showed the cuts and scratches of a dull shave, for he had represented the crew in Neptune’s barber chair and had taken it all in great good humor, though clumps of tar still clung to the hair on the sides of his face.

  I suspected our King Neptune knew that Flynn would do well when he selected him, just as he knew that Christopher Harding, the representative—or victim—elected by the Sagamores, would provide fine entertainment when he squirmed and squeaked as Pompey scraped the peach fuzz from his face and the sailors roared.