John Adams - SA (26 page)

The color of the ocean changed from blue to green as the Gulf Stream was left behind. “What is this Gulf Stream?” he pondered. “What is the course of it? From what point and to what point does it flow?” Flocks of gulls appeared astern, trailing the ship. “The wind is fresh, the ship sails at a great rate.”

One fine day followed another. Life on board settled into a routine. With the captain's help, John Quincy had undertaken to learn the name of every sail and master the use of a mariner's compass. Father and son both worked on their French, Adams reading a bilingual edition of Moliere's Amphitryon, one of several books he had brought from home.

He discussed medicine with the French surgeon Dr. Noel and encouraged the ship's first lieutenant, William Barron, to talk about his career and all that he had seen of the world. Barron, a Virginian, impressed Adams as exactly the kind of officer “much wanted in our infant navy.”

One spectacular day, with all sails spread, the ship made an average of ten knots. Yet whatever the romance of the sea might be, it eluded Adams. “We see nothing but sky, clouds, and sea, and then seas, clouds and sky.”

“Oh that we might make
[a]
prize today of an English vessel lately from London with all the newspapers and magazines on board,” he mused another morning.

“Nothing very remarkable this day,” Captain Tucker wrote in his log. It had become a familiar entry. Once, after recording that the preceding twenty-four hours had both begun and ended with pleasant weather, he added, “Nothing more remarkable to my sorrow.”

But suddenly life picked up again. “We spied a sail and gave her chase,” a delighted Adams recorded. A ship hull-down on the southeastern horizon was thought to be a British cruiser. Tucker ordered the
Boston
cleared for action. Seeing Adams on the quarterdeck, he quickly explained the situation and, with Adams in agreement on a decision to attack, respectfully suggested that Adams go below, as “hot work” was to ensue.

The ship was a heavily armed merchantman flying the British flag, and in an hour or more they had all but closed on one another. The
Boston
, coming up bow-on, fired one shot, the merchantman fired three, one ball splitting the
Boston
's mizzen yard directly over the head of John Adams, who, as Tucker now saw, had taken a place in the heart of the action, musket in hand. When the
Boston
swung broadside, revealing for the first time her more formidable array of cannon, the British ship struck her colors.

It was a fine prize, the
Martha
, out of London and bound for British-held New York with a cargo valued at 70,000 pounds. The British captain and crew, prisoners now, were brought on board. Tucker assigned a picked crew to sail the prize to
Boston
, ordered a 7-gun salute, and proceeded on course. For Tucker especially, it was a moment of sweet triumph. The
Martha
, however, would soon be retaken by the British and delivered to Halifax.

Of the part Adams had played in the action, Tucker was to speak warmly, and later confirm how, at the height of the fray, he had discovered Adams “among my marines accoutered as one of them and in the act of defense.

I then went unto him and said, “My dear sir, how came you here,” and with a smile he replied, “I ought to do my share of the fighting.” This was sufficient for me to judge of the bravery of my venerable and patriotic Adams.

Days later, approaching a French brig, Tucker ordered a signal shot fired. The gun blew to pieces, felling several sailors and shattering the leg of Lieutenant Barron, the officer Adams so admired. And it was Adams and Tucker who gripped young Barron in their arms as Dr. Noel amputated the limb. Barron died more than a week later, after “enduring the greatest pain,” according to the captain's log, and was committed to the deep from the quarterdeck. “He was put into a chest,” wrote Adams, “and ten or twelve pounds of shot put in with him, and then nailed up. The fragment of the gun which destroyed him was lashed to the chest, and the whole launched overboard through one of the ports in the presence of all the ship's crew.”

*   *   *

ON MARCH 24, in the Bay of Biscay, Adams could see by telescope the snow-capped mountains of Spain. At the week's end, as the
Boston
at last entered the busy thoroughfare of Bordeaux, an Irish passenger from the
Martha
broke out a fiddle and played all afternoon as the sailors danced.

On Monday, March 30, with a French pilot aboard, the
Boston
moved up the Gironde, where the whole landscape struck Adams as extraordinarily beautiful. “Europe, thou great theater of arts, sciences, commerce, war, am I at last permitted to visit thy territories,” he wrote that night in his diary, allowing that the sight of France at last gave him a kind of “pleasing melancholy.”

When the
Boston
anchored at Bordeaux, he and Dr. Noel were invited to dine on a French warship lying close by. It was Adams's first exposure to French hospitality—in effect his first time in France—and he could not have been more pleased or impressed by the gentility of his hosts, the elegant cabin where the meal was served, the white stone plates, napkins, everything “as clean as in any gentleman's house,” and food and wine, which, after the
Boston
, seemed heaven-sent.

His hosts spoke no English. But with the doctor serving as interpreter, Adams learned to his astonishment that as a consequence of the American triumph at Saratoga, France and the United States had already agreed to an alliance.

Thus, before he had even set foot on French soil, he found that the very purpose of his mission, to assist in negotiations for such an alliance, had been accomplished. The agreement, one of the most fateful in history, had been signed on February 6, 1778, or before Adams had even left home.

It was shortly after daybreak the next morning, April 1, All Fools' Day, when Adams, his son, and servant took leave of Captain Tucker and were rowed ashore. The relief felt by Tucker, his mission accomplished, may be imagined.

*   *   *

ADAMS WAS TO CROSS the Atlantic three more times, and John Quincy, too, in years to come would sail several times to and from Europe. But for neither was there ever to be an ocean voyage comparable to this, their first. Both would allude to it frequently—the novelty and high adventure, the savage storm, the battle at sea, the misery and terror and exhilaration of it all.

In a first letter from France to his “Hon
[ore]
d Mamma,” the lines of his pen running up and down in waves, as though he were still on board ship, John Quincy would express what was felt deeply by both father and son: “I hope I shall never forget the goodness of God in preserving us through all the dangers we have been exposed to.”

Years later, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Adams would describe the voyage on the
Boston
as symbolic of his whole life. The raging seas he had passed through, he seemed to be saying, were like the times they lived in, and he was at the mercy of the times no less than the seas. Possibly he saw, too, in the presence of John Quincy, how directly his determination to dare such seas affected his family and how much, with his devotion to the cause of America, he had put at risk beyond his own life. Besides, as he may also have seen, the voyage had demonstrated how better suited he was for action than for smooth sailing with little to do.

*   *   *

1778 April 4, Saturday

About ten o'clock we commenced our journey
[by post chaise]
to Paris and went about 50 miles.

April 5, Sunday

Proceeded on our journey, more than 100 miles.

April 6, Monday

Fields of grain, the vineyards, the castles, the cities, the gardens, everything is beautiful. Yet every place swarms with beggars.

April 8, Wednesday

Rode through Orleans and arrived in Paris about nine o'clock. For thirty miles from Paris or more the road was paved, and the scenes were extremely beautiful.

But for the beggars, France was nearly all beautiful in Adams's eyes, everything greatly to his liking. In Bordeaux he had been welcomed as a hero, cheered by crowds in the streets, embraced, escorted on a tour of the city, taken to his first opera ever, which he hugely enjoyed. With France and America now joined in common cause, he was no longer the envoy of a friendly nation but of an ally. “God save the Congress, Liberty, and Adams,” an illuminated inscription proclaimed.

An American merchant in Bordeaux warned Adams of bad blood within the American commission at Paris, and some of the local citizenry had seemed disappointed to learn he was not Samuel Adams, “le fameux Adams. “At a dinner in his honor a beautiful young woman seated beside him had opened the conversation with a question Adams found shocking. But though initially befuddled—“I believe at first I blushed”—he recovered and came off rather well, he thought.

“Mr. Adams,” she had said, “by your name I conclude you are descended from the first man and woman, and probably in your family may be preserved the tradition which may resolve a difficulty which I could never explain. I never could understand how the first couple found out the art of lying together?”

Assisted by an interpreter, Adams replied that his family resembled the first couple both in name and in their frailties and that no doubt “instinct” was the answer to her question. “For there was a physical quality in us resembling the power of electricity or of the magnet, by which when a pair approached within striking distance they flew together... like two objects in an electrical experiment.”

“Well,” she retorted. “I know not how it was, but this I know, it is a very happy shock.”

Rolling through the tollgates of Paris the night of April 8, crossing the Seine by the Pont Neuf, passing the Palace of the Louvre, Adams was astonished at the crowds, the numbers of carriages in the streets, the “glittering clatter” of Paris he had read of in books. Toward morning, awake in his hotel room on the Rue de Richelieu, he wondered at the stillness of so great a city—until first light when the clamor of bells and street cries and iron-rimmed carriage wheels on cobblestones was such as he had never heard.

The first call of the day was on Benjamin Franklin, and from that point on Adams was kept steadily on the move, with sights to see, social engagements, dinners, teas, the theater. There were important people he must meet, new faces, names to remember—endless, multitudinous French names—and in nearly every setting, awash in the rapid-fire conversation of what were, he was certain, the most polished people on earth, including a great number of exceedingly fashionable and opinionated women, he understood almost nothing.

It was Franklin who orchestrated the social rounds, insisting the first morning that they dine at the usual French hour of two o'clock with Jacques Turgot (Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne), the distinguished economist and, until recently, Minister of Finance. Adams had felt himself unsuitably “accoutered” to appear in such company, he told Franklin, but off they went.

Franklin lived in the gracious splendor of a garden pavilion, part of the magnificent Hôtel de Valentinois, a columned chateau on the heights of the village of Passy, overlooking the Seine, half an hour's ride from the city on the road to Versailles. It was the estate of a wealthy government contractor, former slave trader and generous friend of the American cause, Jacques Donatien Le Ray, the Comte de Chaumont, whose admiration for Franklin appeared boundless and who, with his stout figure and bald head, somewhat resembled him. As the guest of Chaumont, Franklin enjoyed the attention of nine liveried servants, a wine cellar of more than a thousand bottles, and virtually every comfort.

Receiving Adams with all customary cordiality, Franklin insisted that he move in with him to quarters previously occupied by Silas Deane. Arrangements were made for John Quincy to attend a nearby boarding school also attended by one of Franklin's grandsons, eight-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache.

Franklin's friends, the “first people” of Paris as he spoke of them, must become Adams's friends, too, Franklin insisted. In addition to Chaumont and Turgot, there was the stately, white-haired Duchesse d'Enville (Marie-Louise-Elisabeth de La Rochefoucauld), one of the recognized “great ladies” of Paris, whom Adams liked at once, finding her observations, when translated, full of “bold, masculine and original sense.” She was to be their hostess on several occasions. Her son, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, grandson of the great French moralist of the previous century, Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, was a scholar in his own right who, to Adams's relief, spoke perfect English. It was he who had done one of the earliest French translations of the Declaration of Independence.

Particularly appealing to the eye was Madame Brillon (Anne-Louise de Harancourt Brillon de Jouy), who was much spoiled by a wealthy, elderly husband and made an open show of her affection for Franklin, flirtatiously calling him “Cher Papa” while perched on his lap. Adams would later learn that another woman who appeared to be part of the Brillon family, a “very plain” person whom he presumed to be a companion of Madame Brillon, was in fact the mistress of Monsieur Brillon. “I was astonished that these people could live together in such apparent friendship and indeed without cutting each other's throats,” Adams would write. “But I did not know the world.”

There was also Franklin's particular friend and near neighbor at Passy, the flamboyant, once-beautiful Madame Helvetius, widow of the acclaimed philosophe
Claude-Adrien Helvetius, who lived amid a menagerie of chickens, ducks, birds in aviaries, dogs, cats, and pet deer. There was the brilliant mathematician and political theorist Marie-Jean A. N. Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, another of the philosophes
of the French enlightenment, whose strange pallor Adams took to be the result of “hard study.” And of supreme importance was the King's Foreign Minister, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, the most polished of all, a fleshy, majestic career diplomat who, during Adams's initial courtesy call at Versailles, expressed dismay that Adams understood nothing he said, but politely remarked that he hoped Adams would remain long enough in France to learn French perfectly.