by Jane Cook
9
Caricature vs. Character
“I HAVE FRIENDS WHO WOULD DOUBTLESS DRAW A FLATTERING likeness of my character, and enemies who would perhaps be ready enough to show me in caricature,” John wrote to a family acquaintance before leaving Boston in 1809.
What sketch would his enemies have drawn as the English lieutenant questioned Adams’s credentials while threatening to kidnap a crew member from the Horace? In that moment of extreme urgency under the threat of impressment, would they have better understood why an Adams supported Jefferson’s embargo? Would they have painted him as a man who stood by and did nothing, a cowardly actor? Or would they have seen the fire in his brown eyes and the stern look of his eagle-like face?
Adams was all too aware of the gloating of his enemies, particularly from Timothy Pickering, his former fellow senator from Massachusetts.
John Quincy’s confirmation to St. Petersburg was not unanimous. The Senate voted in favor nineteen to seven. Pickering and four others voted against the man. Two voted against the nomination because they opposed the mission, not Adams.
The dynamics between Pickering and the Adams family were complicated. Before serving in the Senate, Pickering was secretary of state for President Adams. Because John Quincy was a diplomat in Berlin at the time, Pickering was his boss, and his father was Pickering’s boss. As a result John sent official correspondence to Pickering and then wrote openly and personally about the same matters to his father. Pickering ultimately parted ways with President Adams over his policies toward England and France. Siding with the Federalists and England, Pickering refused to resign, as Adams requested. Hence the president dismissed him. Pickering had resented anyone named Adams ever since.
By the time of Jefferson’s embargo, Pickering and John were no longer boss and employee but colleagues. As the senior senator from Massachusetts, Pickering publicly opposed junior Senator Adams’s support of Jefferson’s embargo. Sending a letter to the Massachusetts governor, Pickering claimed that not only did Adams support the embargo, but he also abandoned Senate deliberation on the matter.
Pickering was correct. The US Senate met behind closed doors, where they debated fewer than four hours before passing the embargo to the House of Representatives. John Quincy opposed a long deliberation in the Senate but not to kiss up to Jefferson. Hardly. He simply thought a prolonged debate would put more sailors at risk. As soon as news of the embargo leaked to the public, ships would flee the wharfs of Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York to make one final outward-bound voyage to British and French ports before the embargo went into effect. Adams believed a long Senate deliberation would have put more American sailors in jeopardy of impressment by English captains.
“For the instant it should be known in the commercial cities that an embargo was impending, the spirit of desperate adventure would have rushed to sea, with every plank that could have been made to float,” he later reflected.
“And the delay of a week in deliberation, instead of sheltering the property of our merchants from depredation, would only have cast it forth upon the waters to be intercepted by the cruisers of both the combating nations [France and England].”
John could not overcome Pickering’s public distortion of him. Though no moral scandal led to his departure, Adams’s stand on the embargo cost him his job. Failing in the US Senate killed his political career. At the time his prospects for returning to public service appeared as dead as the cod on his dinner plate.
The rivalry took a personally vindictive turn on June 27, 1809. After the US Senate voted on Adams’s appointment to Russia, Pickering quipped, “[T]he best thing that could be done” was to send him “out of the country.” Pickering hated John so much that he was willing to deny him the honor of a unanimous confirmation. The political bee sting was potent compared to the sweetness of Adams’s first confirmation. In 1794 the Senate unanimously confirmed his appointment by President Washington as a special envoy to the Netherlands. Much had changed since then—too much.
Louisa may have felt that a succession of miseries had fallen on her since leaving her older boys in Boston, but she was not the only one struggling with this so-called exile. The truth was as fixed as the stars above them. John had been living in a political exile at Harvard, sent there by the likes of political enemies, especially Timothy Pickering.
While Adams faced the English lieutenant on the planks of the Horace that September day in 1809, the question facing him was more complex than his wife’s. She was clearly going into exile from her children and country. But was he journeying farther into exile, or was he coming out of one? Would success in Russia resurrect his political career? Or would an undertaker merely inscribe his epitaph with the words: Harvard professor and local lawyer? Though respectable, these were failed labels for a man named Adams.
The English lieutenant continued nit-picking John Quincy’s commission. The anxiety level of the captain and passengers increased with each skeptical glance from the British officer. Suddenly John had enough. Standing up to this English bully, he explained his appointment. The pair went back and forth. Neither yielded. The lieutenant punted.
“The officer not understanding Mr. Adams’s commission told him he had better go on board the admiral’s ship and see him himself,” Louisa exclaimed.
John and Beckford left the Horace and rowed three miles to the admiral’s ship, the Stately.
“We were left under the protection of the officer,” she fearfully added.
When Adams and Beckford boarded the Stately, they visited Admiral Bertie in his stateroom. Without offering them a seat, Bertie began his interrogation.
Why would the US government send an envoy on a ship laden with coffee, sugar, and cotton? Shouldn’t a diplomat be carried by a military vessel? Or at least, travel in a merchant ship under ballast with no cargo at all? And where is your passport?
Bertie bombarded them with such questions. Invoking his lawyerly instincts, Adams unemotionally explained that he did not have time to procure a passport or military vessel from his government. His commission papers should suffice.
Bertie would not bend. Passport aside, he simply couldn’t allow the Horace to pass. The British were blockading Denmark. His instructions were as firm as the bars of a prison cell: no one was to pass. Not even a supposed neutral vessel. His directive came from Britain’s Orders in Council. At first the Orders in Council banned trade with ships coming from ports controlled by France or France’s allies. Then the orders required ships, including neutral ships not allied with France or Britain, to first call at British ports to receive a license to trade. The instructions also allowed British authorities to search ships.
The problem for the passengers of the Horace was timing. Months earlier Parliament rejected President Madison’s peace agreement with a British negotiator, who exceeded his instructions and promised too much to Madison. Instead of revoking the restrictive Orders in Council as Madison expected, British authorities imposed new orders, which included a paper blockade throughout European ports. This allowed them to capture any of the hundreds of American merchant vessels that left US shores in June 1809 under the mistaken understanding that Britain had revoked its policies against America. This was one reason John did not believe war would threaten their voyage to St. Petersburg. In mid-July Madison received “thunder clap news . . . London had repudiated the . . . agreement and thus restored the discriminatory Orders against American trade.” Unknown to Adams, just days after the Horace left Boston, a fuming President Madison reinstated the embargo against England.
Instead of seizing the Horace, Admiral Bertie offered another solution. He said they should go around the island and take the belt.
The Danish straits connect the North Sea southward to the Baltic Sea. These alternating bodies of water and land resemble uneven blue-and-green diagonal bands on a map. Each island sits between two stripes of water. The broader stripe is called the belt; the narrower stripe is called the sound. John didn’t ha
ve time to backtrack around to the belt, which would have taken him farther away from advocating for the Americans in Copenhagen and put him in greater jeopardy of failing to reach St. Petersburg before winter froze the water.
The date was September 25, 1809. They had sailed nearly four thousand miles in seven weeks. However, in the past seven days, they had traveled fewer than two hundred miles. The nights were starting to get longer. Winter would not wait.
Lacking the reserve of Adams, a passionate Beckford explained that he didn’t have maps of the belt or a pilot on board who knew how to maneuver through it. Bertie didn’t budge. They should hire an additional pilot who knew the belt, no matter the cost.
John was getting worried. In that moment this diplomat found himself serving as his own defense attorney. He called upon the usages of nations, customary standards followed by civilized countries. He became more and more desperate to find something to soften Bertie’s iron heart.
The anchored admiral asked Adams another question. Did you have prior knowledge of the English blockade in Denmark?
“No,” he answered, “but if I had, as our only object was passage [not trading and making money] I should still have relied on the usages of nations, that I should not be obstructed.”
Back and forth they went. John made an interesting observation. The admiral had failed to offer him or Beckford a place to sit. They stood like attorneys in a courtroom; the admiral sat behind his desk like a judge. Refusing to bow to Bertie’s power play, Adams continued to argue his position and circumstances.
“And you say, sir, you have your family on board?” Bertie asked.
“Yes, sir. My wife, her sister, and an infant child.”
Finally Adams found the soft spot. Family. Louisa and Charles’s presence made all the difference.
Calling it an exception to the blockade, Bertie permitted the Horace to pursue its voyage through the Kattegat because Louisa and Charles were aboard. He issued a pass on one condition: Adams must give his word that his ship would not violate the blockade by going into Copenhagen.
John said he would not voluntarily violate their agreement. Because Adams was willing to go forward in the face of such risks, Bertie issued the pass.
They returned to the Horace. Upon hearing of the admiral’s acquiescence, the lieutenant left the ship without taking the sailor from Charlestown. It was so late in the day that Beckford decided to spend the night where they were, anchored three miles from the admiral’s ship.
Instead, they became even cozier with the cruiser.
10
All the World’s a Stage
LOUISA NOTICED THE PROBLEM ABOUT ELEVEN O’CLOCK THAT NIGHT. Likely while wearing a nightgown, with her hair long and loose about her long neck and shoulders, she probably heard the whistling and rustling in her cabin. Although the wind was fair, it was also freshly blowing, strengthening with every gust. The Horace was drifting, a movement caused by tide flows, wind, and other currents. By morning the Horace had floated within a mile of the Stately.
“We put down another small anchor which, however, did not arrest the drift,” Louisa noted.
Small anchors were poor men’s tugs. A ship could sometimes stop its drifting by dragging an anchor on the leeway, the side away from the wind. The crew dropped their third and final anchor—their heaviest elephant—on the leeway.
“We had drifted within the ship’s length of a large brig whose bowsprit was threatening our cabin windows and we were within a mile of the shore,” Louisa observed with fright. The bowsprit was a long piece of wood extending from the bow of the ship, where it held ropes leading to the foremast.
Louisa became concerned about Charles, Kitty, and Martha: “I was anxious to send the ladies and child ashore for which purpose a signal was made at the masthead—but none came out.”
Although they were within a mile of land, their distress signal went unanswered. With no one willing to take them to shore, Louisa probably did what only a prudent mother would do with a bowsprit so close to her cabin window. She moved her child to the other side of the ship.
“[A] boat from the British man-of-war came out to us and gave some advice to the captain—He told him that one good anchor would be better than three.”
Sailors used wooden devices such as sea anchors or drag anchors to keep the ship’s head to the wind and diminish drifting. Three anchors can cause many problems, such as fouling each other, striking another ship’s anchor, or getting caught in rocks. If any anchor fouled in any way, the crew would have to cut the anchor’s line, thus losing it forever.
The Horace’s heaviest anchor proved a fouler as the weather worsened. The wind and rain hovered, pounding for hours. With dawn came a new order from Beckford: all hands on deck—passengers too.
“All the morning was employed in weighing [retrieving] the anchors; two of them were successfully got on board,” Louisa said, indicating they lost the third anchor.
As they tried to sail again, the wind changed direction. The Horace’s stern would not turn through the strong wind. Three times Beckford ordered his crew to move the ship, but they couldn’t do it. Then he “lashed down the helm” and tied the steering wheel toward the wind so the stern would go through the airstream.
Finally they sailed. As they voyaged through the Kattegat toward Elsinore, they understood why ancient captains called it a cat hole. The channel was quickly narrowing.
“We were between the shores in a narrow sea and expecting every instant to be dashed on Kohl Point, a fearful spot in the history of wrecks,” Louisa noted.
The Sunday before their departure from Boston, Louisa and Kitty attended church while John visited his mother and sons in Quincy. The ladies heard a sermon by Pastor Emerson, a longtime friend, who preached about guardian angels.
John later reflected that his wife and sister-in-law were very affected by the message and the “pleasing and not improbable doctrine of a guardian angel, which Christians have often supposed to be assigned to every individual to watch over him, and as far as is consistent with the general designs of Providence, to guide his conduct, and to preserve him from extraordinary dangers.”
As they headed toward one of the deadliest places in the Kattegat, they needed an angel more than ever.
The weather calmed. The temperature wasn’t too cold, and they still had enough daylight to aid them. No waves or crosscurrents troubled them, at least for now. Making progress, they passed the dangerous point without incident. Soon, however, their good fortune changed.
“The light in the binnacle went out and there was not a light to be had in the ship,” Louisa explained of the candle that lit the ship’s compass.
Facing the nineteenth-century version of a power failure, the crew urgently searched for a substitute. No luck. John then sorted through his tinderbox and found another candle. The delay came with a price. The blackout cost them their course. They had drifted, going backward by as many as five miles and passing Bertie’s ship again.
“To go through the horrors of this most terrible and tedious voyage is beyond my strength,” she recorded.
Where had their guardian angel gone?
Passengers often feel like prisoners. Indeed. That is the confining nature of ship travel. Such Noah-like venturing is enough to strangle the humanity in anyone. Mrs. Noah was more than ready for a new dove to take them to land.
Louisa carried with her deep ache something intensely personal, writing that the “long voyage [was] to me painful in every possible shape for many more reasons than I can mention.”
Something drove her to reach for her medicine chest tonics. What was too painful that she could not mention it in her diary? She did not hide her sorrow over leaving behind her boys. What backstory did she choose to conceal, even from her own pen? She did not withhold her anger over her father-in-law’s and husband’s decision to keep her from George and John. She did not hide her fears of chaperoning her unmarried younger sister. What was so personal that not even her journal co
uld absorb the blow?
Prudence was passport in this era of extreme manners, so acutely observed by novelist Jane Austen. Discretion dictated Louisa’s pen, which freely flowed about common health problems such as seasickness. Nevertheless she struggled with something too delicate for a lady to put into print. Unlike today, describing female health matters back then was considered unladylike and vulgar.
Although miscarriage and infant death were very common in this era, Louisa had experienced more than her share of maternal woes. She had lost more pregnancies than she had successfully delivered. Between the births of John and Charles, she delivered a son who soon died. Such heartache only made leaving George and John more traumatic. Most mothers would have felt extreme anguish over abandoning their children, but Louisa’s struggle just to become a mother was so seismic that leaving her children behind was a much greater earthquake as a result.
On top of her guilt and private pain, she was enduring the physical toll of a ship tossed about by powers beyond her control. She expected to see a few waves. She anticipated the literal headaches that accompany sea travel. What she didn’t expect was to be chased by both Danish and English sharks.
Louisa also knew that something else tugged on her husband as the boat drifted back toward Bertie’s boat. His mind was adrift. The plight of the Americans detained at Kristiansand weighed on his heart like a thousand anchors, fouling his need to get to St. Petersburg. Their youth reminded him of his own boys. Their exile reminded him of his duty to serve his country, and of his previous voyages.
Adams had endured separation from his closest loved ones at other times in his life. This was the fourth time he left family members behind and sailed for Europe.
“The separation from my family and friends has always been painful; but never to the degree which I feel it now,” he wrote of this voyage. The mathematics of life expectancy made this trip more difficult than his previous adventures. His parents were older. John Adams was nearly seventy-four; Abigail, nearly sixty-five. Would he ever see them again?
