John Quincy Adams (5 page)

Abigail was furious and tried to reverse the appointment with an irate letter to Lovell: “How could you contrive to rob me of all my happiness?” she demanded.

The prospect of another long separation from her husband terrified her. Even if he survived the dangerous transatlantic winter voyage, he faced summary hanging for treason, without trial, if a British ship captured his vessel. Who would support their family if he failed to return, she demanded to know. With their family's finances already in a “very loose condition,” John Quincy and her other children, she wailed, faced “growing up in poverty without ever knowing their father.”
⁴³

Knowing her husband would never refuse his country's call, Abigail decided to ask him to take the entire family with him to France. And when he returned from Portsmouth, he surprised her by agreeing enthusiastically—only to learn a few weeks later that Congress lacked funds for the family's passage and living expenses overseas.

John Adams was no more eager to leave his family than Abigail was to see him go, and to John Quincy's dismay, his parents decided he should accompany his father on the voyage. His presence would not only ease some of his father's loneliness for his family but allow John Adams and his
firstborn to reforge father-son bonds and give John Adams greater influence over his son's development. Foreign travel would also enhance John Quincy's education and accelerate his evolution into the “wise and great man” his parents expected him to become. John Quincy hated the idea at first. Instead of romping with friends at school, he faced possible drowning at sea or capture and impressment in the British navy—or worse, by pirates. Just as dismal were the prospects of endless days of incessant study under constant watch and criticism by his scholar-father, whom he hardly knew and whose impossible success his parents expected him to emulate or surpass.

“My dear son,” Abigail tried to console him, “It is a very difficult task for a tender parent to bring her mind to part with a child of your years going to a distant land nor could I have acquiesced in such a separation under any other care than that of the most excellent parent and guardian who accompanied you.”

Preparations for an eighteenth-century transatlantic voyage were not simple and, indeed, needed all the efforts of John and Abigail Adams and their children. In the absence of passenger ships, travelers usually had to bribe captains of cargo or naval vessels to take them aboard, then pay more bribes to obtain sheltered sleeping quarters. Congress, however, had ordered—and agreed to pay—the captain of the frigate
Boston
to transport John Adams to Europe. Like passengers on other ships, however, Adams still had to bring his own provisions for a voyage of unpredictable
length and hardships. Transatlantic crossings could last thirty to sixty days, depending on prevailing winds and possible detention by enemy naval vessels or privateers. Apart from the clothes they would need at sea and in France, John and John Quincy Adams bought and carried aboard

Not making preparations easier or more pleasant were warnings from well-meaning relatives, friends, and neighbors about everything from seasickness to pirates, privateers, and English gunboats. All knew that if the British captured John Adams, they would hang him and impress young John Quincy.

On the day of departure, family members and friends escorted Adams and his son from their door to water's edge on Quincy Bay, where a barge bobbed about under thickening clouds, waiting to take them to their ship.

On February 13, 1778, John Adams and his son John Quincy ignored the ominous warnings of a hysterical relative who shrieked of “threatening signs” in the sky and sea; with their servant, they climbed aboard the
Boston
and set sail for France. Six days out, John Quincy and his father saw the three British frigates materialize on the horizon, speeding under full sails to capture the
Boston
and its famous passenger. The captain told John Adams that “his orders were to carry me to France . . . to avoid fighting if he could, but if he could not avoid an engagement he would give them
something that should make them remember him. . . . Our powder, cartridges and balls were placed by the guns and everything made ready to begin the action.”
⁴⁶

John Quincy watched his father “encourage the officers and men to fight to the last.” He knew his father intended “to be killed on board the
Boston
or sunk to the bottom in her rather than be taken prisoner.”
⁴⁷

By nightfall on the second day of the chase, the British frigate chasing the
Boston
was no closer, and as the winds picked up and reached hurricane force, John Quincy and his father went to bed. Suddenly, they heard a thunderous crash above as the hurricane's wind rocked the ship. John Adams clasped his boy in his arms and prayed: he was ready to die for his country, but asked God to spare his little son.

From the first, the
Boston
seemed doomed.

“The wind was very high,” John Adams noted as they lost sight of the Massachusetts coastline. “The sea very rough . . . the snow so thick the captain thinks he cannot go to sea. . . . All is yet chaos on board. His men are not disciplined.”
¹
With British gunboats poised on the horizon, the
Boston
rolled almost helplessly and threatened to send Adams sliding across the deck. He kept a tight grip on the rail with one arm and wrapped the other around his ten-year-old son.

“I confess,” he said to himself, “I often regretted that I had brought my son, [but] Mr. Johnny's behavior gave me a satisfaction that I cannot express. Fully sensible of our danger, he was constantly endeavoring to bear it with manly patience, very attentive to me and his thoughts constantly running in a serious strain.”
²

Adams looked at the oncoming gunboats and wondered how they would survive if the British overtook them—until the sting of a crashing wave made him question how they would survive if the British
did not
overtake them. “The constant rocking and rolling of the ship made us all sick. Half the sailors were sick. I was seized with it myself this forenoon.
My servant Joseph Stevens and the captain have both been very bad.” Adams waxed philosophic for a moment and analyzed the causes of “mal de mer” as stemming from “the effect of agitation combined with a variety of odors from coal, stagnant water, and those parts of the ship where sailors slept—often unwashed for days. There is the same inattention to the cleanliness of the ship and the persons and health of the sailors,” Adams complained, “as there is at land of the cleanliness of the camp and the health and cleanliness of the soldiers. The practice of profane cursing and swearing . . . prevails in a most abominable degree.”
³

Adams and his son slept together in a small space in the “'tween decks” on the double mattress he had brought aboard, beneath their own sheets and blankets and using bolsters for pillows.

Although the
Boston
was “overmetalled”—that is, the weight of her guns (five twelve-pounders and nineteen nine-pounders) was too great for her tonnage—the captain ordered her “to sail with the guns out,” Adams explained, “in order to be ready, and this . . . made the ship labor and roll so as to oblige us to keep the chain pumps as well as the hand pumps almost constantly going.” The weight of the gun barrels extending off the sides made the ship “wring and twist in such a manner as to endanger the masts and rigging.”
⁵

Father and son had sought shelter in their bunk, when the storm slammed the ship with explosive wind bursts and they heard the terrifying crash from above. An officer appeared almost immediately “and told us that the ship had been struck with lightening and the noise we had heard was a crash of thunder . . . that the large mainmast was struck. . . . We lost
sight of our enemy, it is true,” John Adams's shaky hand penned his diary the next morning, “but we found ourselves in a dreadful storm. . . .

Just as calm settled over the surrounding sea, a boy about John Quincy's age—the son of Connecticut merchant Silas Deane—approached John Adams with a note that startled Adams by asking him to “take care of the child in his situation as you would wish to have done to a child of your own. It is needless to mention his youth and helplessness.”
⁷
In effect, the note told Adams he was now the boy's guardian. Although taken aback, Adams was well aware of the bonds that tied members of New England's Christian elite to each other—especially their minor children. Even if unrelated and unacquainted, all felt a deep kinship through their common ties to Puritan founders, whose intermarriages left many, if not all, somewhat related—even when they did not know it.

Silas Deane's brother, Barnabas, saw Adams's departure as a good opportunity to divest himself of responsibility for raising his brother's son Jesse, and he simply put the boy on board with a note charging Adams to deliver him to his father in France.

John Adams had no sooner read Deane's presumptuous letter when another boy—eighteen-year-old William Vernon—handed him an even more presumptuous missive from a member of the Continental Navy Board. “I presume it is unnecessary to say one word in order to impress your mind
with the anxiety a parent is under in the education of a son. . . . Therefore I have only to beg the favor of you, Sir, to place my son with such a gentleman whom you would choose for one of yours.” He asked Adams to find a merchant “either at Bordeaux or Nantes, of Protestant principles,” to teach him “general and extensive business,” and he enclosed “a gratuity of one hundred pounds sterling that may be given to a merchant of eminence to take him for two or three years.”
⁸

“Thus,” Adams puzzled in his diary, “I find myself invested with the unexpected trust of a kind of guardianship of two promising young gentlemen, besides my own son.” It was fortunate for all the boys that Adams had started his professional life as a teacher and found “few things that have ever given me greater pleasure than the tuition of youth.”
⁹
As it turned out, Jesse Deane was only a year older than John Quincy, and the two, each grateful to have found someone his own age, became inseparable shipboard companions.

Between storms and other crises at sea, Adams himself read French literature and put his son and Jesse Deane in the hands of the ship's French surgeon, Nicholas Noël, who agreed to teach the boys French. To ease tension among the seamen, the captain allowed them to stage “frolics,” with all the men dousing each other with flour then dancing on the main deck. Adams suspected the captain ordered such “whimsical diversions in order to make the men wash themselves.”
¹⁰

A more prized diversion came a month after they left Massachusetts, when “we spied a sail and gave her chase . . . and came up beside her.” To Adams's shock, “She fired upon us . . . so that the ball went directly over my head.” Adams's ship immediately turned broadside with her big guns aimed squarely at the other ship, which immediately surrendered, yielding a prize Adams estimated at £80,000. Half went to the owner of the
Boston
, 12 percent to the captain, and shares ranging from 1 to 6 percent to the ship's officers and crew, depending on rank.