Caxton (27 page)

T
he crew and passengers of any vessel making its way up the York
River in late October could see, on either bank, tentative slashes of
brilliant orange, red, and yellow in the leaves of the trees, or little
bursts of flame in the green that would spread and engulf everything by the
end of November.

The wide river was busier now than at any other time of the year, for
this was the apex of the planters’ season, a time when harvested crops were
prepared for shipment across the ocean and along the seaboard to other
colonies. Merchantmen, brigs, and sloops plied up and down the waterway,
on their way back to Chesapeake Bay’s ports, or upriver to load, by derrick,
lighter, and sling cargoes of tobacco, corn, lumber, and iron. Vessels sat
anchored at wooden and earthen piers and docks, sails furled and rigging
slack, their gang-boards springing and straining under the hustle of slaves
and crews who descended into cargo holds as they labored to take on casks,
hogsheads, sacks, crates, and bundles, or reappeared with them to pile them
on the piers.

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 would 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.”

“T
he 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 said, “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.”
Jack faced his host. “That would depend on the nature of his foolishness,” he said. “Mr. Morgann and his ilk and their superiors in London
have proofs of the efficacy and practicality of foolishness. Recall all the
statutes and laws that already regulate us, here in Virginia, and in every
colony. Our salaried wards in London have had no convincing evidence
that there is a limit to their own foolishness, and to that of their predecessors.
We
have certainly not given them any. So, they would not be moved
to submit to reason. Oh, I admit that there are men like your father, and
Mr. Jones, and some others, who see the compounding foolishness and will
attempt to warn others of it.”
Jack took a step near Reisdale and tapped the top page of the documents with a finger. “But I doubt that those others — the ministers and
lords who will read and reflect on the sentiments expressed here, then
write a proclamation for the king, and draft new laws to be introduced and
passed in Parliament — I doubt they can even distinguish the differences
between reason, illogic, folly, and whim. If reason were as persuasive as you
believe, my friend, there would be no need for jails. Footpads, highwaymen,
murderers, thieves — they would not exist. Nor would taxes and Hat Acts
and navigation laws and the necessity of proving one’s honesty to dishonest or indifferent drones in the customs service.
They
would not exist,
either.”
He turned away for a moment, as though to collect himself, but then
faced Hugh again. His expression had become grim and unyielding. He
took a step forward, and with a violence neither Hugh nor Reisdale had
ever seen in him before, slammed a fist down on the pages on the table. “Let
no one tell
me
there is an opacity of motive in these, sir! Any man claiming
a mere dram of self-respect would be wounded, offended, and angered by
what is said here!
I
am, I needn’t tell you
that
!” His face became a mask of
terrifying, stony defiance. “I am not now, nor will I ever be, except on
my
own
terms, anyone’s mere
factor
! I’ll see Morland burned to the ground
first, and I’ll rot in prison, or perish in the wilds, or go under a royal bayonet, before
that
is likely to happen!”
Reisdale, startled by Jack’s emotion, at that moment knew that his
friend was right. Far down the course of the coming years, the conflict must
end in but one way: the inevitable clash of unmutual purposes, in a contest
of imperial wills. The motives, Jack’s and those of the authors and ministerial auditors of the proposals, were not opaque, and must take some form
of action. Reisdale, the scholar and lawyer, looked up at Jack Frake from his
armchair with an awe that was braced with a twinge of admiring fear.
Hugh, also, was disturbed by Jack’s outburst, and by it was convinced
of the inevitability of a conflict. Too, he was convinced of the nature and
strength of Jack’s character, and that it was something he could count on.
But he did not see the conflict as a mortal contest in which one or the other
party must perish. He was as certain of this as was Jack that one or the
other must.
Hugh and Jack held each other’s glances for a moment, and seeing the
certitude in the other, each broke off his defiance, knowing that a resolution was not yet possible. Jack sat down again. Hugh, at his desk, toyed
with his brass top.
In the silence, Reisdale picked up the pages and jogged them into a neat
rectangle. He cleared his throat and asked, “There is the question now of
what we should tell our friends in the Attic Society. It meets in a week at
Mr. Safford’s place.”
“Nothing,” Hugh said, “but what I can report from my own observations in London, or from the blameless correspondence of my parents.”
“I agree,” Jack said. “Our friends will learn soon enough the Crown’s
intentions.”
“This is true,” Reisdale said. He put a hand on top of the pile of pages
on his lap. “If a royal proclamation is the final expression of these recommendations, it will be read at the opening of Parliament next month. Governor Fauquier will receive a copy of it in December or January, and the
Courier
and
Gazette
will print it shortly thereafter. Then we shall all see
what the Crown intends.” He paused to glance at Hugh and Jack. He sensed
that the tension between them had abated. He smiled and asked, “Mr. Kenrick, will you enlighten us about Mr. Wilkes and his cause? I cannot but
help think that he will be Parliament’s first order of business.”
“You are right to think that, Mr. Reisdale,” Hugh said.