Rough Passage to London: A Sea Captain's Tale (31 page)

PART X

Concerning the manner of your brother’s death, it may be that I have some information to give you; though it may not be, for I am far from sure. Can we have a little talk alone?

—Charles Dickens, “A Message from the Sea,”
All the Year Round

26

1850

From his dimly lit cabin inside the packet ship, a quiet, reflective Morgan paused and listened to the late-night noises on the docks in New York. The hearty, full-throated laughs of drunken sailors returning from the taverns mixed in with the loud, gruff voices of angry ships’ officers. It was well past midnight. The night was balmy for early June. The South Street docks would soon quiet down to the more gentle hum and murmur of a small village. He had been in New York for more than a week due to the pressing needs of the shipping line. He had received a cryptic note from Hiram Smith written a few weeks earlier. He hadn’t heard a word from his old friend since he helped him escape from the clutches of the Royal Navy and dropped him off at Peck’s Slip in New York. That was five years ago. “I have much to tell you, Ely,” he had written. “I have new information about Abraham. I hope to be at the South Street docks before your June departure unless Stryker’s men find me. I know they are looking for me.” That was all he’d written.

Morgan looked at the short letter in his hand and shook his head in puzzlement. There was no indication where it had been sent from. It sounded like Hiram knew something important. Morgan had waited all week, but there was no sign of Hiram and there had been no new letter. Most of the crew members were now off ship. Only the stewards, Lowery and Junkett, were there with him in the cabin. Old Whipple was in the forecastle. Nearby he could hear the creaking oarlocks of a passing dory and in the distance the forlorn sound of a fiddle trading sorrowful notes with a slow-picked banjo.

He had tried to sleep but couldn’t. He looked down at his desk at some of the financial correspondence he needed to attend to. His mind drifted to business matters and a wave of confidence and optimism swept over him. The threat of war with England over the Oregon dispute fortunately had been averted. He liked to think that the mutual benefits of transatlantic trade had won the day. Now the wharves of South Street were overflowing with cargo. Shovels, pick axes, pans, and other supplies, all brought from England, were emptied out of the packet ships and loaded onto clipper ships bound for the gold fields of California. Out of those same ships came a human river of hopeful emigrants also headed for the El Dorado. His new ship, the 1,299-ton
Southampton
, was the biggest of the London liners at 181 feet in length, far bigger than the
American Eagle
or the
Margaret Evans
, which had been built for the Black X Line a few years earlier. It was also about seven feet longer than the firm’s speedy
Devonshire
, which the New York papers had called “almost a steamboat of speed.”

Morgan felt that the
Southampton
was the fastest ship he had ever sailed on, capable of sustaining a speed of fourteen knots under full sail, just like the clippers now breaking all records on their way to the goldfields of California. Ironically, even as the sailing packets got bigger and faster, the Cunard steamers continued to steal away more and more travelers. The new larger and more elegant Collins steamships were also attracting the more affluent. Notwithstanding the
Herald
’s James Gordon Bennett’s estimate a few years earlier that the New York ocean packets were still carrying over half of the cabin passengers, it was clear that the sailing ships were no longer the preferred way to cross the Atlantic. Even Morgan could no longer deny this. His writer friend Caroline Kirkland had written him in October 1848, “As to going home with you, you may be sure going in the steamer is none of my plan.” She would have come, she wrote him, but her traveling companion wanted to try one of the new steamers.

As he sat there at his desk, he thought of Eliza and how she had been able to join him on the ship these last few years. It had been like old times, the two of them sailing together. She had kept the saloon filled with melodious sonatas of Mozart, Bach, and Chopin. In London, she had happily reacquainted herself with the Leslies and many of the other artists, including old Turner. Eliza also met Thackeray for the first time and was charmed by this witty man with his owl-like spectacles and his melodious voice. They’d traveled by carriage to Hampstead to see Stanfield’s new house, whirling by the rolling green hills and trim hedgerows in that picturesque village. Then they had taken the train to Brighton to meet Morgan’s new friend, Charles Dickens, who was vacationing there with his wife and some of his children. Eliza had been pleased that the author’s eldest son, Charles, and her son, William, had gotten along famously, as he also did with Dickens’s two daughters, who were just a couple of years older than her Ruth and Mary Frances.

The gentle lap of the water against the ship’s wooden hull made him think of their new home. With four children now, the Morgans had moved out of New York to a house on the Connecticut River in Saybrook on the corner of Main Street and the Boston Road, not too far from the New York ferry landing. It was a gracious two-story home with an expansive rooftop terrace, ideal for views of the river, that was large enough for Eliza’s mother to move in with them. He wondered how much longer he could keep up as a packet shipmaster. He was forty-four years old and he was well aware that his four children were growing up quickly, mostly without a father. Most packet ship captains did not last on the job for even five years. Only a dozen or so had retained command for fifteen years. Yet he had been a packet ship captain now for nearly twenty. He had crossed the Atlantic well over one hundred times. He thought of his old first mate, Dan Stark, who had been lost at sea six months ago on a cold winter voyage aboard the
Mediator
, his first command. He knew it could easily have been him. In the back of his mind he wondered how long his good fortune would last. Morgan’s late-night reverie was again interrupted by the sound of creaking oarlocks from a small boat. The sound of the water slapping up against the ship’s hull increased in intensity. He wondered to himself who could be rowing around his ship at this time of night.

The methodical sound of oars splashing the surface of the water soon faded, and Morgan went back to his task of writing letters. Just as he was finishing up sealing and addressing the last of the small letters, he thought he heard the sounds of muffled footsteps and the creaking of deck boards over his head, but then there was silence. He dismissed these noises as his imagination and he retired to his berth and fell asleep.

A sudden banging on his door jolted him awake. Morgan sat upright as Whipple stumbled into his quarters carrying a lantern. The man’s shirttails were hanging loose, his pants unbuttoned, and he was barefoot. His face was flushed.

“Lord sakes, what is it, Whipple?”

“An intruder, Captain! Someone’s inside the ship!”

“What? Where?”

“The chain locker. I heard lots of noises. The kind of scurrying and shuffling that could only come from a human crittur, Cap’n.”

Morgan told Whipple to go rouse the two stewards just forward of the main cabin. Then he quickly put on some clothes and grabbed his two pistols. The four men met up on deck. Lowery and Junkett had thrown on their stewards’ jackets over their bare chests, and each of them had a kitchen cleaver in their hands.

Whipple led this small group down the stairs from the upper hold into the lower cargo hold, swinging his lantern high in a wide circle and holding his knife out with his other hand. They were now deep in the belly of the ship below the water line. It was like descending underground into some large coffin, cold and damp, the stale air ripe from the heavy anchor hawsers. Morgan clutched his two pistols, keeping them high and ready. They were surrounded by a dark, shadowy maze of crates, bags, and barrels filled with flour and clover seed, as well as bales of tobacco and hogsheads of turpentine. He could hear the tiny claws of rats scurrying around. The big deck timbers below creaked as they tried to walk quietly through the lower hold. Whipple stopped suddenly and motioned for them to listen. The noises were coming from the center of the ship down in the bilge area below them.

They approached the hatch that led down to the bilge. Morgan could hear a scraping, and a grinding as metal carved through wood. The two stewards clutched their cleavers holding them in front of them. Morgan motioned Whipple to extinguish his lantern and with the sudden blackness now extending over them, they could see a dim light emerging through a hole in the lower deck. There definitely was someone in the bowels of the ship, deep in the bilge.

Morgan went first, delicately and slowly opening the hatch. The stench of the rank decay from muddy water dredged up from the river bottoms filled his nostrils. He felt his way down the narrow ladder. The reek of the bilges was so strong he had to breathe through his mouth, trying not to cough. The others followed, touching each other in the dark so as not to get disoriented. They could now hear a louder scraping of metal and a man’s labored, heavy breathing. The bilge area had so little headroom they had to crouch. There they remained for a few minutes, not daring to move. Morgan held out his cocked pistols toward a faint hint of light that glimmered behind one of the ship’s knees amidships.

“Who’s there? Show yourself or I’ll fire!” he yelled out.

The noise abruptly stopped. The faint light disappeared. There was no answer. For what seemed like an eternity to Morgan there was total silence. He wondered if he should fire. Suddenly, they heard the sound of fleeing footsteps, heavy breathing, and the frantic scratching and banging of someone running on all fours. Whipple lit his lantern and held it up high, straining to see down the narrow gloom of the inner cavity of the ship. Now they could hear crashes and curses as the intruder ran and stumbled to the stern of the ship away from them. The four of them gave pursuit, running and scrambling like hunchbacks as they followed the thudding footsteps ahead of them.

They stopped to catch their breath and Morgan yelled out again, “Stop or I will fire! There is nowhere for you to run!”

Suddenly out of the darkness came a scream. A black figure ran toward them. Morgan fired and then fired again. The others shouted in confusion. The figure continued hurtling toward them. He was carrying something like a spear extended out in front of him. He was screaming like a madman. Morgan prepared for the end when the unknown assailant fell to the ground with a crash.

“I got his foot, Cap’n!” yelled Lowery.

The man was growling and struggling like a wild animal caught in a trap as Whipple held the lantern up high and put a knife to the intruder’s throat. Morgan put his pistols away and rolled the man over so he could see his face.

“Who are you? What are you doing on my ship?”

Whipple brought the light closer so they could now see who it was. The man’s eyes were deeply sunk into his hollow, gaunt face. His hair was wild and ragged. Whiskers sprouted from his chin like bristles on a hog’s back.

Morgan was shocked as he suddenly realized who he was looking at.

“Do you recognize him, Cap’n?” asked Whipple, who hadn’t removed his knife from the man’s throat.

“It’s John Taylor,” gasped Morgan as he looked intently at the fearful eyes now staring back at him. He turned to his stewards and told them to tie him up with some of the hawse lines that were scattered around the bilge area.

Whipple began swinging his lantern in a circle until he found the man’s weapon.

“Here’s what he was trying to kill you with, Cap’n. Looks to be an augur, a big one at that.” Whipple held out a large unwieldy tool into the light with a nearly two-foot-long metal drilling bit some two inches in diameter. Morgan had an awful feeling as he tried to imagine what Taylor would be doing in the bottom of his ship with a deadly weapon.

“What were you doing here, Taylor?”

Morgan reached for the man’s throat.

“Tell me!”

Morgan wasn’t waiting for an answer.

“Quick Whipple, check the area he was in. I think he must have been trying to scuttle us.”

The old ship’s carpenter ran back to the center of the bilge near the keel area and began crawling around on all fours, keeping the lantern on the planking.

“There are about a dozen two-inch-wide holes in the thick outer planking of the ship about eight feet from the keel, Cap’n.”

“Is water coming in?”

“There is some weeping, but I don’t see no leaks.”

“Check them through and through, Whipple.”

“Looks like he may have gotten close, Cap’n, but he didn’t get all the way through the copper sheathing.”

Morgan told the two stewards to take the man up above into the lower cargo area. He then examined the holes closely. It looked as if Taylor had drilled a hole all the way through the outer planking and pricked the copper sheathing. With that little protection, the first heavy beating they encountered during the Atlantic crossing would have caused the ship to spring several major leaks.

“He was trying to sink us, Cap’n,” Whipple said matter-of-factly.

“Plug up the holes with trenails and caulking, Mr. Whipple. I will be asking our visitor some questions.”

Morgan found Taylor tied up in a chair, a lantern swinging over his head. He ran a critical eye over the man. Taylor was a pitiful sight. His thin, pointed face, covered with sweat and grime from the bilge, was unshaven and his hair was dirty. His eyes were sunk into their sockets with dark shadow underneath them. His mouth and teeth were black from smoking an opium pipe. Taylor looked up at him with dull, dead eyes.