Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  “Were you able to acquire any coins?” Steed asked.

  “That’s what I really came for,” Turlock said, and he took Steed to a bench beside the creek, and there, when they were alone, he confided, “We took & merchantman. Spanish. Look.” And carefully he unwrapped a large cloth packet which had been secreted in his coat. Loosening the ends, he spread a hoard of gold coins in the sunlight.

  “You have big-joes!” Steed said excitedly, for it had been some time since he had seen these splendid gold coins of Portugal; they had been minted in 1723 during the reign of King Joäo and bore his bewigged portrait and name in Latin, Ioannes, from which the American name derived. A whole coin, heavy and worth about thirty dollars, was called popularly a big-joe; when sawed in half, which was usually the case, it was a half-joe.

  “And these,” Turlock said proudly, sifting the pile to show the Spanish doubloons, the English sovereigns and the mass of livres tournois, the smaller French coin which circulated the world as a standard.

  “It was a worthy trip,” Steed said, and as he retied the packet, returning it to his captain for deposit at headquarters in Patamoke, he reflected on how strange it was that the capture of a merchant ship should be celebrated on Devon: What our family used to condemn as piracy we now praise as patriotism.

  The long voyage that Captain Turlock started in late 1775 was notable for a chaotic chain of events: the vast profits earned on Portuguese salt, the running fight with the English frigate Chancery, the two months in a Lisbon jail for lack of proper papers, the capture of a rich merchantman heading home from Peru, the start of Matt’s education.

  His teacher was the second mate, a Choptank man named Mr. Semmes who had been taught to read by the fat Rector of Wrentham. When Captain Turlock learned that his mate had studied with the rector, there was salty discussion of that churchman’s habits and Mr. Semmes said, “He taught me to read, hoping to acquire thereby a servant for nothing. When I said I was going to sea, he sought to have me arrested as a deserting bondsman.”

  “Did you punch him in the nose?”

  “No.”

  “Pity.”

  Mr. Semmes had a fine sense of the sea, and one day as young Matt was lugging him his breakfast he caught the boy’s arm and asked, “Do you intend being a captain?” and Matt said, “I do,” and Mr. Semmes said, “Then you must learn to read and write,” and the boy said, “Cap’m doesn’t read or write,” and Captain Turlock knocked the lad down and growled as he got up, “I’d be a better captain if I did.”

  So the lessons began. On a flat board Mr. Semmes drew the alphabet and the numbers, and for three days Matt memorized them. Within a brief time he was writing not only his own name but also those of the crew; he would lie on a hatch cover and write down the name of every sailor who passed, and before long he knew the spelling of each.

  But what fascinated him was the ship’s log, for he realized that it recorded facts much more important than names. “The life of the ship is written here,” Mr. Semmes said as he made his entries, and Matt tried to be present whenever the observations were recorded: “Course East-north-east. Day calm. All canvas.” And to understand better what the words meant, he mastered the compass and could box it as well as any sailor, rattling off the hundred and twenty-eight points as if playing a game. “Listen, Mr. Semmes, I’m going to do the Second Quarter.” And he would stand at attention and recite in a monotone, “East, East one-quarter south, East one-half south, East three-quarters south, East by south. And now the hard one! East-south-east three-quarters east.” And as he completed each quarter, Mr. Semmes would applaud.

  The day came when Captain Turlock shot the noonday sun, then walked to where the ship’s log was kept, and instead of barking his data to Mr. Semmes he gave them to Matt and watched with glowing eye as his redheaded son wrote in large childish letters: “Latitude 39° 10’ North. Longitude 29° 15’ West approx.” Teach entered his positions in this form because with the aid of a good sextant captured from a Spanish merchantman he could be sure of his latitude, but lacking a reliable clock, he had to guess his longitude.

  But when he saw the entry completed, as well as Mr. Semmes could have done, he had to turn away lest he betray his emotion, for Matt was the first in his lineage going back five thousand years who could write, and his arrival at learning seemed much like the arrival of the colonies at nationhood: prospects unlimited lay ahead.

  In the spring of 1776 it became apparent that the contentious lawyers of Massachusetts and the philosophical patriots of Virginia were determined to take the thirteen colonies out of the British Empire, and nothing that the more prudent loyalists of Pennsylvania and Maryland might caution was listened to. Echoes of meetings occurring in Philadelphia, in which men as stable as the Marylander Charles Carroll were actually discussing revolution, filtered down to the Eastern Shore, but they were not credited, for most of the citizens in towns like Patamoke or on plantations like Devon wanted to remain attached to England. They saw every reason for doing so; they calculated each advantage.

  Levin Paxmore was typical. As a Quaker he had lived to see his religion accepted without serious restraint; true, he had to pay a fine for not drilling with the militia, and he still had to contribute thirty pounds of tobacco each year to the Church of England, but he viewed these only as irritating impositions. He was free to pray as he wished, to marry whom he liked, to speak his mind in meeting, and to rear his children in his faith, and these were freedoms to be cherished. His business also prospered under English rule; for the past nineteen years he had risen every morning with more work to do than he could complete, and while he often had to wait for payment because no money circulated, he was never defrauded. Right now, things were better than they had been in many years; he had finished two schooners for Simon Steed, and had two more under way, with additional inquiries from officials in Philadelphia. For some time he had known that gunfire with the English was inescapable, but he still trusted that it would be brief and without damaging consequences. But now he began hearing rumors of actual separation, and some of his more apprehensive neighbors were talking about returning to the homeland, England, if the troubles worsened. When two Quakers from the meeting approached him with a sensible plan for repatriation, he assembled his family in that spare room at Peace Cliff in which Ruth Brinton Paxmore had laid down the principles by which her brood would live. “I believe we should stay with the land,” he said. “Our task is to bring God’s commonwealth into being here.”

  “Even if Maryland separates from England?” Ellen asked.

  “There will be no separation,” he said firmly. “I expect trouble, perhaps serious trouble, but we will always be English.” And by holding up his left hand, as if to silence further comment, he forestalled his wife’s question as to why, if they were to be English, he was building ships intended for use against the English.

  For Simon Steed such decisions were more difficult. His whole being was tied to Europe; his business interests focused in England, for which he felt the warmest ties. In London, Fithians held his wealth; in Berkshire, his forefathers had defended the faith; and while his own education had been in France, it was to England that he looked for fundamental leadership. Up and down the Atlantic coast thousands of men like him were casting up their spiritual accounts and deciding to remain loyal to the king. In Simon’s case the impetus to do so was greater, because he was married to an English girl who desperately wanted to go home.

  Steed was distressed that she retained her animosity toward the colonies; she now abhorred the Eastern Shore and what she termed its provincialism. Her husband’s repeated assertion that from here she could keep in touch with the entire world did not satisfy her. The Americans she saw were boors, and were threatening to become traitors as well. The horrible Captain Turlock who brought his big-joes to their countinghouse never confessed what English ships he had robbed to get them, and to think of those miserable idiots that she had seen in Virginia presuming to govern a new nation was
absurd, the height of folly.

  The birth of her daughter had not been easy, and the infant was proving difficult. Jane was convinced that it was Choptank water that irritated the baby, and she grew to loathe the ugly name of that river which surrounded her on all sides. “Thames, Avon, Derwent, those are real rivers. Who ever heard of a river whose water was always salt?”

  “At Edentown it’s fresh,” her husband pleaded.

  “And who ever heard of mosquitoes on the Thames?” she fumed. “Simon, I warn you, if those fools in Philadelphia utter one word against the king, I’m going home.”

  In July the shocking word reached her that men in Philadelphia, including Charles Carroll and Samuel Chase of Maryland, had not only declared their independence of England but had also dared to put in writing the insulting list of charges against the king. “The impudence!” she stormed. “Those pretentious upstarts!” When her rage subsided she said coldly, “You watch, Simon. We’ll punish you the same way we did the Scots.” And from the moment news of the Declaration reached her, she directed all her energy to preparations for flight. She refused to remain in this rebellious colony and relished the prospect of English warships coming up the Chesapeake to discipline it.

  Teach Turlock did not hear of the formal Declaration until late August, but this did not signify, for he had been conducting his private war for more than a year now. In January he had been so bold as to venture into the Thames on the gamble that the Whisper had not yet been identified as a privateer, and he had been right, but trade with the colonies was so depressed that he was unable to pick up any profitable shipments and had left England with empty holds. When he reached St. Ubes he found that merchant ships had loaded all available salt, and it became apparent that the profits for this voyage would be limited to what he might steal from French or Spanish merchantmen.

  He met none, so the Whisper drifted back and forth across the Caribbean, but when it put into Martinique on the chance of picking up even the most trivial cargo, French captains advised him that the thirteen colonies had become the United States of America and were engaged in open warfare against the mother country.

  “United!” Turlock snorted, remembering Maryland’s constant feuding with Virginia. “We’ll never be united.” Then his chin firmed, making his beard bristle, and he told the French with joy, “Now it’s real war!” And he stormed back to his schooner.

  North of Barbados he captured and sank a small English trader, setting her crew adrift in lifeboats. He then cruised northeast to intercept any English ships bound for Martinique or Guadaloupe, and here he caught another small English trader, again setting her crew adrift in sight of land.

  His third capture occurred almost in the shadow of Caracas; it was a Spanish ship well laden, and after it was robbed, it was set loose. And his fourth interception was a substantial English merchantman heading out of Panama for Jamaica. That night young Matt Turlock wrote in the log the words that glorified the privateer: “For each gun, one ship.” The Whisper carried four cannon, and with them it had captured four prizes. No privateer could do better.

  In triumph Turlock sailed home to the Chesapeake, and his feats were trumpeted from shore to shore. He had a small casket of big-joes and livres tournois, but when he spread them on the desk at the countinghouse, his employer came with perplexing news: “Captain, the Council of Safety at Annapolis has requisitioned the Whisper. You’re to carry the families back to England.”

  “Which families?”

  As Steed tried to explain, his voice choked and he turned away to compose himself, but when he turned back to talk with his captain, his face flushed and he hurried from the countinghouse.

  “What’s happened?” Turlock asked the man who came to count the coins.

  “Families loyal to the king are being taken back to England,”

  “Steed going?”

  “No, but his wife is ... and the baby.”

  Turlock could not fathom this. In his world a man told a wife what to do, and she did it unless she wanted a beating from the broad side of a shovel. For a wife to leave her husband for another country and to take a child along was unprecedented. “Not right,” he muttered as the coins were removed.

  But it happened. The Whisper sailed to Baltimore, where two families came aboard; one woman knelt down and kissed the deck, crying, “It’s a blessing to be on an English ship,” but then she saw Captain Turlock and asked tearfully, “Is he taking us to England?”

  At Annapolis nine families joined, and from the tidewater plantations another six; at Patamoke two groups were taken on, with slaves carrying vast amounts of luggage. As the trim schooner moved down the Choptank, a barge moved out from Devon Island containing Jane Fithian Steed, her infant daughter and her husband. A rope ladder was lowered from the Whisper, but before Mrs. Steed could climb up, her husband caught her by the arm and said, “I’ll join you in England. For the present I must tend the plantation.” But she said sternly, “You’ll never come to England, and I’ll never see Maryland again.”

  “But what ...” Before he could frame his question she was clambering aboard the rescue ship, and when she reached the deck her husband lifted their baby in the air and passed it along to sailors leaning down to take it Slaves tossed up the luggage and the Whisper moved on, leaving the barge drifting in midstream.

  But the passenger list was not complete. As the Whisper headed for the bay, a speedy sloop appeared from the direction of Patamoke, firing a small gun to attract attention, and when it drew alongside, passengers saw that the fat Rector of Wrentham was appealing to be taken aboard—“I want no more of these foul colonies. I’m an Englishman.” And ropes were lowered so that twelve men could haul him up, after which some nineteen boxes and parcels followed.

  Only when he was securely on board, with no possibility of retreat, did he discover that the owner of the schooner in which he was fleeing was Simon Steed and her captain Teach Turlock, whom he had defrauded. He hastened below, and was seen no more on deck.

  On the voyage to London young Matt was given the job of caring for the Steed baby, and he quit bringing food and tea to the mess and carried milk and crackers to the child, for whom he acted as nurse and watchman. There were women who could have performed these tasks, but some were stricken with seasickness and others were busy caring for Mrs. Steed, who collapsed in the captain’s cabin as soon as the Whisper cleared the Chesapeake, and none could have cared for the baby better than Matt.

  He fed her, carried her about the deck and kept her amused with little games. She was less than a year old, and when she wanted to crawl toward the bulkheads, he watched her carefully. While she slept in her basket he felt free to pursue his studies with Mr. Semmes, but he had pretty well exhausted what the mate knew, and he now found a gentleman from Annapolis who was returning to a Sussex home he had left fifty years earlier, and this man delighted in teaching him advanced figuring and verb forms.

  On most days, however, Matt and the baby stayed in the bow, riding it up and down as the long swells of the summer Atlantic slid past. These were days he would treasure, when whole new fields of knowledge were opening up, when he had some appreciation of the mournful tragedy which had overtaken these good families, and when he tended the Steed baby, who rarely cried and seemed to enjoy being with him.

  But what Matt would remember most was something that occurred not on deck but below. One morning as he was watching over Penny Steed he noticed that his father was nowhere to be seen, and after a while Mr. Semmes came forward to ask in a low voice, “Will Master Turlock accompany me?” and Matt went belowdecks, where he heard gurgling sounds.

  They came from the cabin occupied by the Rector of Wrentham, and when he went inside he found the fat clergyman in a furious sweat, with his father standing over him. A paper prepared by Mr. Semmes lay on a table before the unhappy man, and Captain Turlock was saying, “Sign it or I’ll throw you to the sharks.”

  “I won’t give up my rightful land,” the fat cleric whi
mpered.

  A sharp blow to the back of his head provoked new groans, and the rector cried, “You’re killing me!” and Turlock said, “The only escape is to sign.” With his left hand he thrust the quill at Wilcok and growled, “Sign it, or feed the sharks.”

  “I’ll sign!” And with the quill he fixed his signature to this paper:

  Aboard the Whisper

  10 August 1776

  Of my own free will and without constraint from anyone, I do hereby confess that I obtained from Captain Teach Turlock of Patamoke 100 acres of his best land through fraud, deceit, malversation and theft, and that I return to the said captain the entirety.

  Jonathan Wilcok

  Rector of Wrentham

  Witness: John Semmes

  Matthew Turlock

  When the company left the cabin and climbed the ladder to the deck, Captain Turlock took his son to the wheel and showed him a box in which the ship’s papers were kept. “This one we guard with our Life,” he told his son.

  For Levin Paxmore the years 1776-1777 were a disaster. Under goading from Simon Steed he finished four copies of the Whisper, but learned with dismay that three of them had been quickly captured by the English and converted into British men-of-war to prey upon the colonists’ shipping. The fourth, the schooner Good Hope, was sent into the Atlantic with an untrained crew of Choptank farmers and was promptly sunk, causing sharp-tongued Ellen Paxmore to tell her husband, “I warned thee not to build ships of war. Thee has sent forth a covey, and all have been lost.”

  “Not Turlock’s,” he said, at which she reminded him caustically, “But that was not built as a ship of war.”

  She pestered him to cease his support of this futile fighting; on all sides the British were victorious, and she interpreted the quick loss of the Paxmore schooners as proof that God looked unfavorably on the rebellion. She predicted that it would soon collapse.

  But her husband worked on. “It’s my job,” he said as he laid down the keel for his sixth schooner, already named by Isham Steed the Victory.