Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  He outlined the steps of this thinking: that if the ancient river had indeed been drowned, the resulting bay would be determined partly by the river and partly by the ocean, rather than entirely by the latter. This would mean that there ought to be an orderly progression from entirely fresh water at the mouth of the Susquehanna, where it debouched into the bay, to entirely salt water at the spot where the bay debouched into the sea. “And that’s what I find,” he concluded. “Most interesting.”

  “Thomas Applegarth has been talking about making an expedition to the headwaters of the Susquehanna,” she said. “I think we ought to help him.”

  “We could give him time off. Find some other handyman.”

  “I mean with money.”

  George Paxmore formed his hands into a little cathedral and contemplated them for some time. Money wasn’t wasted on the Eastern Shore, least of all by a Quaker. His wife was making a serious proposal, but it was sensible. Knowledge must always be pursued. “I think we could let him have twenty-five dollars,” he said.

  “Does thee want to tell him?”

  “I think thee should. It’s been thee who has encouraged him.”

  Elizabeth decided that they should both inform their handyman that their family would like to support his scientific investigations to the extent of twenty-five dollars. He was unprepared for this bonanza and for some moments could not respond. Then he said, “I have fifteen of my own, and I can save at least twenty more by the end of February. I’d like to see the upper river before the snow has melted.”

  So on the first of March, 1811, Thomas Applegarth, a farmer of Patamoke on the Eastern Shore, took off in a small sloop and headed for the present mouth of the Susquehanna River. The winds were not propitious, and he required three days to reach Havre de Grace. There he deposited his boat with the owner of a shipyard, and with sixty-three dollars in his pocket, started his exploration of the river.

  For fifty cents he employed a man with a canoe to take him as far north as the turbulent rapids at Conowingo. At this point he allowed the canoeist to return home, while he struck out on foot along the left bank of the river, that is, the one to the east. Frequently he was forced to leave the river, for the going was too rough, and on some nights he slept quite a few miles inland from the banks.

  But whenever he was able to walk alongside the river itself, or plunge into its icy waters for a cleansing bath, he felt himself to be in some mysterious way purified and closer to the secrets of the past. At the infrequent ferries he would ask to help the rowers, spending whole days moving from shore to shore, so that by the time he reached the first important ferry at Columbia he was a practiced riverman.

  But it was not until he had hiked past Harrisburg and got into the mountainous section of Pennsylvania that he began to see the evidences he sought. It was clear to him that in times past this mighty river had been ten or fifteen times as wide as it now was; proof existed in the flat, smooth benchlands stretching east and west from its banks. Surely they had once been the bed of that mighty, long-vanished stream which had carried away the waters of the melting ice. Each day was a revelation, a proof.

  When he reached Sunbury, 215 miles from Patamoke, he faced a difficult decision, for north of that settlement were two Susquehanna Rivers. One would take him west to Williamsport, the other east to Wilkes-Barre, and no one whom he consulted could tell him definitely which was the senior river. To his amazement, no settler in Sunbury had explored to the headwaters of either.

  “Which throws the bigger body of water?” he asked.

  “Come a flood, either does right smart,” the most knowledgeable man replied.

  “If you were going to the headwaters, which branch would you take?”

  “I ain’t goin’.”

  “But which would you guess?”

  “It don’t concern me.”

  He located a woman who said, “In times of freshet, the east branch seems to bring down the biggest trees—liken as if it had come the longest distance.”

  “Or it came through the most wooded land.”

  “I was takin’ that into my calculations,” she said.

  Since this was the only substantial evidence he had uncovered, he said, “That sounds sensible. I’ll go east.”

  So on the last day of March, Applegarth started the long, difficult journey to Wilkes-Barre, and from there, north to the Indian settlement at Tunkhannock. The going was extremely rough; no boats were able to move upstream, and for long distances there was no road beside the river. For three days he struggled through uncut forests, determined to stay with the river, but in the end he had to abandon this resolve and move onto established roads, regardless of how far adrift they led him.

  He felt as if he were exploring virgin land, and sometimes when he had been distant from the river for several days, he would come upon it rushing southward, and he would cry aloud with joy at having discovered an old friend: “There you are! Beautiful river, holder of secrets!”

  He would take off his coat and shoes and step into the waters, and sometimes they would feel so enticing that he would plunge in, forgetful of his clothes, then march along the riverbank until his pants and shirt dried on him. Occasionally he would ride with some farmer going to market; more often he walked alone, for days on end, always probing farther toward the source of his river.

  On the long and winding stretch from Tunkhannock to Towanda, a distance of nearly forty miles as he wandered, he met no one, at times splashing his way right up the margins of the river in lieu of roads. He ate sparingly, an end of bread and some cheese, and lost seven pounds doing so. It was in this time of loneliness that he conceived his plan for putting on paper his reflections about the Susquehanna and its relation to the body of water he loved so strongly, the Chesapeake. He would spend whole days formulating a single passage, trying to make it sound important, like the reading he had done that winter. He sensed that there was a proper way to report an expedition: he must never claim too much; he must present his conclusions tentatively, so that others who came later could refute him if the facts they discovered were better than his. He was especially aware that he was dealing with conjecture, and he sensed that responsible men identify conjecture and differentiate it from fact.

  Kicking at the river, and splashing its cool water over himself even to his hair, he cried to the forest, “I am searching for the soul of this river,” and he covered the last miles in Pennsylvania as if enveloped in a kind of glory, the splendor a man sometimes experiences when he is engaged in seeking for a source.

  He was some miles into New York before he met anyone who could give him advice, and this man had no idea as to where the little stream known as the Susquehanna might begin. “Somebody who hunts deer might know,” a farmer told him, and the man’s wife suggested Old Grizzer. Applegarth found him on a shabby farm, a man in his late sixties with no teeth and no hair on his head but a massive lot over his face.

  “By God, sonny! I’ve always wanted to know where that danged stream began myself. For two dollars I’ll take you as far as I know, and for two more dollars we’ll go plumb to the beginning, even if’n it’s up in Canady.”

  So they set out on a twenty-eight-mile journey, an old man who knew the terrain and a young man who knew the river. They went along cornfields which had not yet been plowed for spring planting and through woods which only the deer and crazy coots like Old Grizzer had penetrated. And always the Susquehanna was tantalizingly ahead of them, growing narrower until it was no more than a creek, but persisting in a fiendish determination to survive.

  “By God, sonny, this is a damn stubborn trickle,” the old man said. And on the fourth day he said, “Sonny, I made a bad bargain. This damned river has no beginnin’ and I’m tuckered out.” But when it dawned on him that he must hand back the two dollars he had collected as guide, he found new resolve. “I’ll go a little farther. There’s simply got to be a spring up here somewheres.”

  So they continued for another day, until
they found what might in an emergency have been considered a spring. “Would you call that the source?” the old man asked.

  “I might,” Applegarth said, “except for that stream leading into it.”

  “Goddamn,” the old man said. “I was hopin’ you wouldn’t see it.”

  “I’d like to follow it a little, farther,” Applegarth said.

  “You do that, sonny. As for me, I’m announcin’ here and now that this is where the Susquehanny begins. Right here.”

  “You wait. We’ll go back together.”

  So the old man made himself comfortable beside the bogus source while young Applegarth strode north, following the trickle of water. He slept that night under an oak tree, and before noon on the next day, May 4, 1811, he came to the ultimate source of the river. It was a kind of meadow in which nothing happened: no cattle, no mysteriously gushing water, merely the slow accumulation of moisture from many unseen and unimportant sources, the gathering of dew, so to speak, the beginning, the unspectacular congregation of nothingness, the origin of purpose.

  Bright sunlight fell on the meadow, and where the moisture stood, sharp rays were reflected back until the whole area seemed golden, and hallowed, as if here life itself were beginning. Thomas Applegarth, looking at this moist and pregnant land, thought: This is how everything begins—the mountains, the oceans, life itself. A slow accumulation—the gathering together of meaning.

  There is no need to remember the name Thomas Applegarth. Neither he nor any of his descendants figure in this story again. He was merely one of a thousand Americans of his time who were trying to fathom the significance of things: the explorers, the machinists, the agriculturists, the boatbuilders, the men and women who were starting universities, the newspaper editors, the ministers. They had one thing in common: somewhere, somehow, they had learned to read, and the demands of frontier life had encouraged them to think. From this yeasty combination would spring all the developments that would make America great, all the inventions and the radical new ways of doing things and the germinal ideas which would remake the world.

  (Of course, this encouragement of creativity never applied to blacks. They were seldom allowed to read, or pursue mathematics, or discharge their inventive skills. The social loss incurred by our nation because of this arbitrary deprivation would be incalculable.)

  In 1976, when a congregation of Bicentennial scholars sought to assess the contribution of that little band of unknown philosophers like Thomas Applegarth, they wrote:

  A minor classic is that book which occasions little notice when published, and no stir among the buying public. It appears in one small edition, or maybe two if members of the author’s family buy a few extra copies, and it dies a quick and natural death. But as the decades pass we find that everyone in the world who ought to have read this book has done so. It enjoys a subterranean life, as it were, kept alive by scholars and affectionate laymen of all nations. They whisper to one another, “You ought to read this little book by So-and-so. It’s a gem.” And after a hundred years we find that more people have read this little book by So-and-so than have read the popular success which was such a sensation in its day. What is more important, the people who do read the little book will be those who do the work of the world: who educate the young, or make national decisions, or endeavor to reach generalizations of their own.

  A perfect example of the minor classic is Thomas Applegarth’s To the Ice Age, published in an edition of three hundred copies at Patamoke in 1813. Applegarth had no formal education, so far as we can ascertain. He was taught to read by Elizabeth Paxmore, a Quaker lady living near Patamoke. It was she who awakened his interest in scientific matters.

  At the age of twenty-seven this Maryland farmer set out with some sixty dollars to explore the Susquehanna River, with a view to proving to his own satisfaction whether northern Pennsylvania could at one time have existed under a sheet of ice. His general observations were extraordinary for his age. He seems to have anticipated theories far in advance of his time and to have foreseen quite accurately what later exploration would prove. His specific conclusions, of course, have long since been superseded, a development which he predicted in a remarkable passage on the nature of discovery:

  The speculative mind of man moves forward in great revolutions, like a point on the rim of a turning wheel, and if now the point is forward, it cannot remain so for long because the wheel, and the cart which it carries, must move ahead, and as they do so the point on the rim moves backward. This oscillating movement whose temporary position we can rarely discern, is what we call the process of civilization.

  What Applegarth did do which has never been superseded was to view the Susquehanna riverine system, past and present, as an ecological whole. In this day this word had not been invented, but he invented the concept, and no team of contemporary engineers and environmentalists has ever had a clearer picture of the Susquehanna and its interrelationships. He has been an inspiration to generations of American scientists, and no one who has followed his sixty-dollar exploration to that final day when he stood at the veritable headwaters of the Susquehanna can forget his description of that moment:

  I stood in that meadow with the sun reflecting back from the isolated drops of water and realized that for a river like the Susquehanna there could be no beginning. It was simply there, the indefinable river, now broad, now narrow, in this age turbulent, in that asleep, becoming a formidable stream and then a spacious bay and then the ocean itself, an unbroken chain with all parts so interrelated that it will exist forever, even during the next age of ice.

  THE DUEL

  IN THE WAS OF 1812 AMERICAN FORCES WON exhilarating victories on the open ocean, in Canada, on Lake Erie and at New Orleans, but on the Chesapeake Bay they were nearly annihilated. A group of brave and cunning British sea captains roamed the bay, making it an English lake populated at times by as many as a thousand ships, small and great, eager to “discipline the Americans and teach Jonathan his manners.”

  Among the more impetuous leaders of the British effort in 1813 was a young man of twenty-eight, totally contemptuous of the former colonials and determined to avenge their victory over his father at the Battle of the Chesapeake in 1781. He was Sir Trevor Gatch, son, grandson and great-grandson of admirals.

  His promotions had been meteoric, as might be expected of a young man with such a heritage. At the age of eleven he had gone to sea in his father’s flagship. At fifteen he was a full-fledged lieutenant in command of a patrol boat, and at nineteen was awarded the rank of captain, an august one in the British navy. He was a slight man, not much over five feet three and considerably under nine stone. He had watery blond hair, somewhat feminine features and a high-pitched voice, but despite his trivial appearance, he had acquired by virtue of a ramrod posture and love of command a formidable military presence. He had a passion for discipline and his inclination to flog was notorious, but men were proud to serve with him because he was known to be a lucky captain whose bag of tricks rescued ships that would otherwise have been lost. His men said of him, “I’d sail to hell with Clever Trevor,” and his promotion to admiral was assured.

  His fiery temperament could best be explained by family tradition. The Gatches had come originally from Cornwall, “the peninsula that wishes it were the sea,” and generations had sailed from Plymouth, attracting the favorable attention of kings. In the late 1500s Queen Elizabeth had wanted to establish in northern Ireland a congregation of families loyal to her Protestant cause, and first among her choice were the contentious Gatches. Secure in an Irish castle, honored by King James I with a baronetcy which would subsequently produce two lords, the Gatches had continued at sea, fighting in support of Marlborough off Flanders, at the capture of Jamaica and against Admiral de Grasse at the Battle of the Chesapeake.

  In 1805 it had been expected that Sir Trevor would serve beside Nelson at Trafalgar, and he did, a twenty-year-old captain in charge of a ship-of-the-line with seventy-two guns. When his forem
ast and spars were shot away, he responded by grappling his ship to a wounded French battleship and pounding it to pieces from a range of inches. Now he was in the Chesapeake, thirsting for the sight of any American vessel, determined to be an admiral and a lord.

  In late August 1813 he was anchored near what had once been Jamestown, Virginia, when a spy slipped across the bay with intelligence which caused him to leap in the air with excitement: “The Whisper was badly damaged in its last running battle and is now at the Paxmore Boatyard in Patamoke, seeking repairs.”

  “The Whisper!” Gatch cried when he gained control of his enthusiasm. “We’ll find her and destroy her.”

  Urging his rowers, he sped in his longboat to the admiral’s flagship and there sought permission to raid the Choptank, destroy the Whisper and hang her captain. The British command, having kept watch on this swift schooner for two generations, gave enthusiastic consent, and the admiral, fresh from having burned plantations throughout the tidewater, added his benediction: “God speed you, Gatch, and have the band play when he dances on air.”

  So Captain Gatch in the Dartmoor, eight guns, accompanied by seven small craft, set out to chastise the Americans and sink the Whisper.

  The spy who had informed the British of the Whisper’s plight left tracks as he set out to cross the bay, and a clever waterman from the Wicomico River south of Patamoke deduced what he was about, and this second man came north to alert the Americans along the Choptank: “The British fleet is being informed that the Whisper is in the boatyard.”

  This worrisome information was of vital importance to two quite different men. Captain Matthew Turlock, owner of the Whisper, was a redheaded, red-bearded waterman of grizzled appearance and conduct. Forty-five years old, he had been fighting at sea since the age of seven, and with the passage of those years had developed a conviction that the principal responsibility of a sea captain was to save his ship; cargo, profit, schedules, even the lives of his men were subsidiary to the great command: “Save your ship.” And he had done so under difficult circumstances and in varied weather. He had seen many ships lost, but never one under his command. Now, trapped on shore for overhauling, the Whisper was in peril, and he intended saving her.