Rough Passage to London: A Sea Captain's Tale (39 page)

As for Morgan’s meetings with the Sketching Club, the year when he became a member is accurate, but there are no other details. J. M. W. Turner did visit the
Philadelphia
, according to Robert Leslie, but there is no record of what he did on board ship or how often he traveled with Captain Morgan. The family letters I perused contained one letter to Morgan from Turner written in August of 1846. In it, Turner describes that a storm has damaged his Queen Anne studio: “Have the goodness to ask Mrs. Morgan to allow all the time available before you sail for America for the said broken lights to be repaired by the glaziers.” Turner goes on to thank Morgan for the “kind offer of a trip to Portsmouth.” This was typical of many of the short letters contained in the scrapbook.

As part of my research on the ships, I read journals and letters, published and nonpublished, of the cabin passengers describing their long journeys across the Atlantic. Naturally, the famous authors were some of the more interesting; Longfellow, Emerson, Washington Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville were just some of the American writers who crossed the Atlantic. Basil Hall, Martineau, Fanny Trollope, Marryat, Dickens, and later Thackeray were some of the English authors who wrote about their transatlantic passages, as well as their impressions about America either through fiction or in travelogues. Fanny Trollope’s book
Domestic Manners of the Americans
, along with Frederick Marryat’s
A Diary in America
and Charles Dickens’s
American Notes
, are all important reading to understanding the British mindset about America.

It was in reading these observations about early America by these English writers and others that I realized how central the issue of slavery was in the cultural debate between England and America at that time. The harrowing tale of the slave ship
Le Rodeur
came from a little-known book by Isidor Paiewonsky titled
Eyewitness Accounts of Slavery in the Danish West Indies
. Some of the grim details about the world of African slavers came from a memoir by a former slave ship captain by the name of Theodore Canot,
Captain Canot, Twenty Years of an African Slaver
. The background information about slavery in the West Indies and the British emancipation of the slaves came from a book by Elizabeth Abbott titled
Sugar: A Bittersweet History
. The idea for the entirely fictional Lord Nanvers character also came from reading the descriptions in this book of the great West Indian fortunes, and their gradual decline in London society after the emancipation of the slaves.

The inspiration for the slaving syndicate partially came from an account of a Liverpool ship called the
Douro
, allegedly wrecked and sunk at Round Rock in the Scilly Islands in 1843. It was said to be carrying textiles and munitions, but divers who searched the wreck site reportedly discovered a cargo of glass beads, manillas, and bronze trading tokens, which were items used to trade for slaves in West Africa. This raised questions about whether or not the
Douro
was involved in illegal slaving decades after English ships were banned from the trade. Other historical accounts I read about the evolution of slave trading in the second quarter of the nineteenth century suggested the possibility that British investment money was used in financing some slave voyages long after the Emancipation Act was passed. However, the entire depiction of the slaving syndicate, Ophion Trading Partners, Lord Nanvers, and his ties with the Royal Navy captain Stryker are not based on any real life historical figures or events.

From the Morgan family records I read, one startling fact stood out about Morgan’s early life. His two older brothers had gone off to sea, and in 1816 the family received a letter from a sailor that related the death of William Morgan, and then a few more cryptic sentences about Abraham’s fate. The original handwritten letter was not part of these records, but a typewritten copy was provided to me. On the page was the date, place, and the name of the writer, John Taylor. The verbatim of that letter, including the unusual erratic lettering with randomly capitalized letters, has been reproduced in this novel. Anecdotal information gleaned from an old family letter indicates that Elisha Ely Morgan ran away from home to go to sea around the age of fifteen, some six years after his parents learned of the probable death at sea of their two eldest sons. The novel evolved from there.

Robin Lloyd

January 13, 2013