Arrived at a place called Longshores, about fifteen miles south of Wilkes-Barre, John found himself faced with a daunting task. “Along the river and into the water, there was to be built with stone an apron eighteen feet wide; and thereupon a wall twenty-two feet high, to constitute the first foundation of the canal. For this end, the side of the mountain had to be pulled down and many other encumbrances removed. Every species of obstacle and labor entered into the stupendous work.”
Though still a mere “stripling” of eighteen, John threw himself into the job with an efficiency and zeal that won the admiration of his far more experienced subordinates. “He was a favorite of every engineer. In less than ten days, his sheds were built, his tools all purchased and delivered, and thirty men at work; and in less than a month, a hundred. The section was universally pronounced the best managed on the line.”
After seven months—at the “very handsome salary” he was earning from his friend Mr. Everett—John was able to repay the fifty dollars he had borrowed from E. B. Stedman while retaining two hundred for himself. By then it was December 1828. “The cold had become unusually bitter,” and John’s “duties required exposure to every kind of weather, from day-break to night-fall.” Having begun to suffer from recurrent bouts of coughing—a precursor, he feared, to the disease that had already claimed his mother and older sister—John decided to leave.
Everett did his best to retain him, offering to raise his already hefty wage, but John would not be dissuaded. His success at overseeing the complex construction job had kindled his desire to acquire “such technical knowledge as might better qualify him either for an engineer or for a teacher; and he resolved to devote the sum he had earned to a winter’s study.” Repairing to Wilbraham, Massachusetts, he enrolled at the Wesleyan Academy, then under the leadership of the prominent Methodist minister Wilbur Fisk.
In a speech delivered shortly after he assumed his position in 1826, the Reverend Mr. Fisk had made plain his low opinion of the typical academic institutions of the day, which, in his stern view, were breeding grounds of sin and impiety. At other schools, he proclaimed, the student “meets the filthy conversation of the wicked and learns to blaspheme. He meets the debauchee and learns incontinency. He meets the jovial companion and indulges the social glass. He meets the caviling infidel and learns to sneer at religion. In short, he leaves school more learned but frequently more corrupted, if not wholly ruined.”
Vowing that, under his stewardship, the Wesleyan Academy would “better guard the habits and morals of scholars than they are usually guarded in our common schools,” Fisk instituted strict “arrangements for good discipline”:
For the most difficult cases they had a prison, and for the worst, the utterly incorrigible, there was a dungeon. The prison was a room furnished only with a hard bed, a single chair, and a naked table; the dungeon was a room with clean straw scattered over the floor. The fare of these prisoners was not such as to tempt them to intemperance. A brief seclusion in these cheerless rooms usually broke the resolution of the most rebellious.
When even these measures failed, there was always the recourse of a public whipping “severe enough to do its work effectively.” The Reverend Mr. Fisk generally “inflicted these whippings himself; for his sincere kindness and strict self-control made it safer not to entrust such disagreeable duties to his subordinates.”19
A few years earlier, it is likely that John himself would have done time in the dungeon or been lashed for his own good by the benevolent-hearted minister. But the intervening time had matured him, and he applied himself diligently to his studies—until disaster once again struck his family.
• • •
Exactly why Sarah Ann Colt chose to end her life is a matter of conjecture. One newspaper reported that she “quarreled with her step-mother, fled to the house of a neighbor, Widow May, and, at the end of two days, procured arsenic and put an end to her life.” According to another account, “The uncomplaining but high-spirited and acutely sensitive girl took a morbid view of her doom to labor and regarded it as humiliating, till at length her fortitude and her mind gave way.” Yet a third source claimed that, like her brother John, Sarah Ann was subjected to unbearable “persecution” at home but, being female, could not, as he did, “fly into the world for refuge.” Instead “she found it in the grave.” Her youngest brother, James, on the other hand, would always believe that Sarah Ann had become “deranged” from excessive immersion in her studies—from applying herself “too closely to her books.”
As a member of that ill-fated sorority that Lydia Sigourney liked to refer to as “my dead,” Sarah Ann was, of course, memorialized in the sugary verse “Sweet Singer.” The tribute, however, offers no clues as to the cause of Sarah Ann’s death. Indeed, Mrs. Sigourney avoids the mention of suicide altogether, remarking only that—by the tenth anniversary of the disbanding of her Hartford school—Sarah Ann had become a “tenant of the narrow tomb,” and comparing the young woman’s “brief span” to a sparkling “drop of morning dew” inhaled by the “noon-day sun.”20
Whatever the reasons for Sarah Ann’s suicide, she must have been in dire emotional straits to subject herself to the torments of arsenic poisoning—to the unbearable nausea and vomiting, the uncontrollable, bloody diarrhea, the muscular convulsions and excruciating cramps. She died on March 26, 1829, at the age of twenty-one.
Of all her siblings, John was most devastated by the death of the sister “around whom twined every tendril of his heart.” In despair, he “flung aside his books. His ambition was quenched. Of the future he felt reckless. The word ‘home’ filled him with bitterness.”
Forsaking his studies, he resolved to leave the country and “pass the rest of his days in some foreign land.”21
Part Two
FORTUNES TRAIL
7
To say that people cope with grief in different ways may be a platitude, but it’s no less true for that. Those who knew Samuel Colt best testify that he cherished the memory of his long-deceased sisters to the very end of his life.1 To be sure, his reaction to Sarah Ann’s suicide was less dramatic than John’s. Indeed, to all outward appearances, her shocking death had little impact on him at all. Certainly it did nothing to deflect him from his immediate pursuits. But his reaction says less about the love he bore for her than about the fierce single-mindedness that (as with other men of genius) was one of Sam Colt’s most salient traits.
• • •
Exactly when Sam became obsessed with the mechanics of undersea warfare is unknown, though his official biographer claims that water mines—“aquatic pyrotechnics,” in the quaint locution of the day—were the great inventor’s “first love,” predating even his fascination with repeating firearms.2 Perhaps, as another authority speculates, Sam’s interest in these weapons was stimulated by accounts of the so-called Battle of the Kegs, a celebrated Revolutionary War episode in which watertight oaken kegs, packed with gunpowder and rigged with flintlock detonators, were floated down the Delaware River in an attempted attack on British vessels moored in the Philadelphia harbor. The incident was immortalized in a ballad that Sam reportedly heard as a young boy from his grandfather Major Caldwell:
Gallants attend, and hear a friend,
Trill forth harmonious ditty,
Strange things I’ll tell which late befell
In Philadelphia city.
’Twas early day, as poets say,
Just when the sun was rising,
A soldier stood on a log of wood,
And saw a thing surprising.
As in amaze he stood to gaze,
The truth can’t be denied, sir,
He spied a score of kegs or more
Come floating down the tide, sir.
A sailor, too, in jerkin blue,
This strange appearance viewing,
First damn’d his eyes in great surprise,
Then said, “Some mischief’s brewing.
“These kegs, I’m told, the rebels bold
,
Pack’d up like pickled herring;
And they’re come down t’attack the town,
In this new way of ferrying.”3
As Sam later testified, he was also aware at an early age of Robert Fulton’s experiments with aquatic explosives. Later renowned as the inventor of the commercial steamboat, Fulton was an early proponent of undersea warfare whose experiments with “submarine bombs” (as he called them) were widely publicized in his book Torpedo War. Published in 1810, this work included illustrated instructions for the manufacture of copper-encased water mines that would (theoretically) detonate upon contact with an enemy ship. The very first engraving in the book—a picture that, by Sam’s own admission, made a deep impression on him as a boy—showed a tall-masted brig being blown out of the water by one of Fulton’s devices.4
Though there’s no way of knowing when Sam himself began to dream about destroying boats with “submarine bombs,” it is clear that by the time he was fifteen, he was already mulling over the possibility of detonating gunpowder underwater by means of an electrical current, transmitted from a simple battery via a tarred copper wire. His first known attempt to put this idea into practice occurred just six months after the death of Sarah Ann, during a summer break from Amherst Academy. Displaying the showman’s flair that would serve him so well throughout his career, Sam evidently distributed a crudely printed handbill trumpeting his intended contribution to the town’s Independence Day festivities:
SAM’L COLT WILL BLOW A RAFT SKY-HIGH
ON WARE POND, JULY 4, 1829
Sam’s advertisement succeeded in drawing a sizable crowd of spectators, including a crew of neighborhood apprentices who “walked some way to see the sight.” Unfortunately, the promised spectacle turned into something of a bust. According to one eyewitness, “an explosion was produced, but the raft was by no means blown sky-high.” Still, however disappointing as a pyrotechnical display, Sam’s experiment did produce one significant result. “Curious regarding the boy’s explosive contrivances,” one of the apprentices, a brilliant twenty-one-year-old machinist named Elisha K. Root, introduced himself to the young inventor. It was the start of a long relationship that would have enormous consequences not only for the two men but for the American industrial system itself.5
• • •
By the following spring, Sam found himself dreaming of a life before the mast—an aspiration cherished, according to the author of Moby-Dick, by countless young men of the time. “Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?” observes Herman Melville, another child of privilege whose family suffered severe financial reversals that ultimately led him to seek a sailor’s life.6
Writing to her stepson at Amherst Academy in June 1830, Mother O. S. Colt (as Olivia signed herself) informed him that a family friend, the Boston textile entrepreneur Samuel Lawrence, had spoken to the owner of a ship named Corvo, which was scheduled to leave shortly for a ten-month cruise to the Orient. “Mr. Lawrence,” Olivia assured Sam, “had no doubt but you could have the Situation desired aboard that Ship … provided you qualify your self.”
With her stepson about to venture forth into the wider world, Olivia took the opportunity to dispense the kind of counsel that parents have been ladling out to young men since at least the days of Polonius:
You see then, Samuel, that self-application is necessary to the gratification of your inclination in your favourite pursuit and a thorough knowledge of Navigation will be a great advantage to you in a voyage upon the Seas. It is an uncertain element and all the information you can get on this subject (Should you continue to follow the seas) will be of immense benefit to you—but life is still more uncertain therefore get Wisdom, that Wisdom which is profitable to direct in the life that is now and that which is to come …
Now, when making choice of your occupation it is time to pause and reflect … Look around—on the one side you see the abodes of Wisdom and Virtue—enter in thru her gates. On the other, that of vice and folly—her habitation looks to misery and wretchedness—pass not by her gates—turn away, pass by on the other side. Give up the low frivolous pursuits of a boy—and determine at once you will pursue the steps of Manhood … above all reverence the Supreme Being, never let your lips be polluted by profaning and taking his name in vain.7
Olivia’s admonition to Sam, urging him to abandon the “frivolous pursuits of a boy,” appears to have fallen on deaf ears. Among the cherished relics of the town of Amherst was an old Revolutionary War cannon, an iron six-pounder, that belonged to General Ebenezer Mattoon, who had brought it home from the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. At daybreak on July 4, 1830—just two weeks after receiving Olivia’s missive—Sam and two schoolmates, Alphonso Taft (who would become United States attorney general under President Ulysses S. Grant) and Robert Purvis (later a famous abolitionist), snuck onto Mattoon’s property. Attaching ropes to the old field piece, they lugged it up to College Hill and proceeded to get a jump on the Independence Day festivities by discharging it.
Awakened from their slumbers, several faculty members, including the Reverend John Fiske, hurried up the hill and ordered the boys “not to fire again.” Ignoring the command, Sam placed himself “near … the cannon, swung his match and cried out, ‘a gun for Prof. Fiske’ and touched it off.” When the outraged teacher demanded that he identify himself, Sam jeered that “his name was Colt and he could kick like Hell.”8
Whether Sam was expelled for this escapade or left school voluntarily is unclear. What’s certain is that a few days later, he left Amherst Academy for good, his formal education having come to an end with a very literal bang.
• • •
Less than one month later, on the morning of August 2, 1830, the brig Corvo set sail from Boston Harbor. Among its passengers were Mr. and Mrs. J. T. Jones of the American Baptist Mission, on their way to Rangoon to convert the heathen Burmese.9 Also on board—not as a passenger but as a novice crewmember—was Samuel Colt.
At a cost of $91.24—slightly more than $2,000 in current funds—Samuel had been outfitted with a sailor’s necessities: seaman’s chest and slop clothes, quadrant and compass, boots and bedding, jackknife and almanac, and more. His supplies included a sheaf of stationery so that he could send an occasional letter to his family, none of whom was there to see him off.10
Standing in for his father was Samuel Lawrence, who, later that day, sent the following report to Christopher Colt:
The last time I saw Sam he was in a tarpaulin, check’d shirt & duck trousers on the fore topsail yard loosing the topsail. This was famous at a first going-off. The Capt & Super cargo will give him good advice if required & instruction in seamanship, he is a manly fellow & I have no doubt will do credit to all concerned, he was in good spirits on departure. There were some thousands present to see the missionaries off. Prayers and singing were performed on board.11
Not long after Mr. and Mrs. Jones’s fellow missionaries completed their farewell services, the anchor was heaved up, the ship got under way, and sixteen-year-old Samuel Colt embarked on what would prove to be the most fateful trip of his life.
8
From his days of boyhood make-believe—when he and his friends formed a troop of play soldiers, with equipment supplied by his mother—to his adolescent dream of enrolling in West Point, John Colt had always been drawn to the military. It is little wonder, then, that after Sarah Ann’s suicide, when he sought to throw off his old life and leave for other parts of the world, he decided to enlist in the marines.1
He appears to have taken this drastic step with a certain degree of naivety. Shortly after fleeing home, he made the acquaintance of a former member of the corps, who—preying on the young man’s gullibility—assured him that the duties of a new recruit were extremely light, “the most irksome of them being to stand guard daily for a prescribed number of hours.” For the grief-addled John, this seemed a small price to pay for the chance to “escape the
native land which had now become so desolate to him.” Making his way to the Gosport marine station at Norfolk, Virginia, he signed up at once, expecting that “after three or four months at the most,” he would be off on a voyage that would take him around the world: “to Constantinople—thence to Alexandria—thence to Calcutta—thence to Canton—crossing the Pacific returning homeward through South America.”2
The reality turned out to be far more disagreeable than he had been led to believe. Though John had endured his share of hardships since his father went bankrupt, he had been raised in genteel circumstances and was unprepared for the rigors of life in the corps: the coarse, barely palatable fare, the even coarser behavior of his comrades, and the harsh, demeaning discipline to which he was routinely subjected. Not long after his first night of sentry duty, he was seized with a “violent fever” and confined to the infirmary. He emerged several weeks later to find that his ship had sailed without him. By then he had awakened to the sobering truth that a military career was “not only a waste of time for him but a waste of his powers and chances.” Though John had committed himself to an extended term of service, he resolved to leave the corps.
When his formal request for a discharge was denied, he briefly considered desertion before resorting to a more cunning expedient: a forged letter addressed to the commanding officer of the marine station. Written (presumably) by a Massachusetts farmer named Hamilton, the letter declared that the young recruit who had enlisted under the name John C. Colt was actually the sender’s underage son, who had run away from home in his boyish eagerness to see the world. The letter begged that the lad be discharged so that he might be reunited with his aged and ailing parents who had been “rendered wretched” by his absence. John mailed this letter to his brother James, asking him to post it from Ware.
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