The First American

by H. W. Brands

  In the garret of this same house lived another old woman, of seventy years and never married. A Roman Catholic, she had been sent abroad to become a nun—there being no nunneries in England since the time of Henry VIII. But her destination did not agree with her, and she returned home, resolved to be a conventless nun. She donated her inherited estate to the poor and learned to subsist on the scantest pension. Her diet consisted of gruel; the only fire she allowed herself in her chilly attic was that required to cook the gruel. Despite the deprivation, she was healthy and by all appearances quite content. Franklin found her a most pleasing conversationalist. He also found her an object lesson in the virtues of frugality—“another instance on how small an income life and health may be supported.”

  Frugality was more on Franklin’s mind than ever as the months passed. London’s undeniable excitements lost their appeal upon continued exposure, and America beckoned. “I was grown tired of London, remembered with pleasure the happy months I had spent in Pennsylvania, and wished again to see it.” He began saving every farthing and seeking other means of speeding his return. One of his shipmates from the eastward passage, Thomas Denham, the Quaker merchant, explained that he was about to head back with a cargo of merchandise. Knowing Franklin to be an enterprising fellow with a good head, he offered to employ him as a clerk and potential partner. Initially Franklin would keep the books; later he might venture forth and earn commissions of his own. The prospect appealed to Franklin, both for the future profits and for the sooner arrival home. He quit his printing job at Watts’s and helped Denham gather his goods for export.

  They shipped out in late July 1726, aboard the Berkshire, a vessel in which Denham had a half share. Riding down the Thames, they anchored overnight at Gravesend, where Franklin took the opportunity to go ashore and inspect the countryside, which was agreeable and open, and meet the people, who were neither. “This Gravesend is a cursed biting place,” he recorded in his journal of the voyage, “the chief dependence of the people being the advantage they make of imposing upon strangers. If you buy any thing of them, and give half what they ask, you pay twice as much as the thing is worth. Thank God we shall leave it tomorrow.”

  The Gravesenders presumably would have disputed Franklin’s characterization; its significance lies less in its accuracy (or inaccuracy) than in the sharpness of its tone. This in turn follows from the fact that the journal of this voyage affords the student of Franklin’s life the first unedited, unfiltered rendition of Franklin’s voice. Save a couple of inconsequential notes, the journal is the oldest surviving work of Franklin’s hand written not for publication but for himself. Most of what is known of Franklin’s early years comes from his autobiography, which, like all memoirs, bears the imprint of subsequent experience, reflection, and reconsideration. Franklin the mature memoirist would have found cause to excuse the Gravesenders’ inhospitability; Franklin the twenty-year-old traveler did not even try.

  Franklin’s opinions were not all as harsh as his view of Gravesend. From the Thames the ship turned south through the Strait of Dover.

  Whilst I write this, sitting on the quarter-deck, I have methinks one of the pleasantest scenes in the world before me. ’tis a fine clear day, and we are going away before the wind with an easy pleasant gale. We have near fifteen sail of ships in sight, and I may say in company. On the left hand appears the coast of France at a distance, and on the right is the town and castle of Dover, with the green hills and chalky cliffs of England, to which we must now bid farewell. Albion, farewell!

  Yet Albion would not release them so readily. For nearly a fortnight the wind blew hard from the west, forcing them to take refuge at various anchorages along England’s southern coast. The delay allowed Franklin the chance to examine the harbor and fortifications at Portsmouth, and to reflect on the nature of military leadership. A recently departed lieutenant governor of Portsmouth had fairly earned a reputation for severity in enforcing military discipline; for the slightest misdemeanor soldiers were thrown into the dungeon, called “Johnny Gibson’s Hole” when said martinet was beyond earshot. Franklin—with the self-assurance of his twenty years and utterly innocent of military life, beyond what he had read—pronounced that fear might indeed be required by lesser commanders to govern such rabble as commonly filled barracks. “But Alexander and Caesar, those renowned generals, received more faithful service, and performed greater actions by means of the love their soldiers bore them, than they could possibly have done, if instead of being beloved and respected they had been hated and feared by those they commanded.”

  Another delay allowed a tour of the Isle of Wight; here Franklin heard the tale of a local governor who had been esteemed a saint in most of his lifetime by nearly all men, but who turned out to have been a great villain. What struck Franklin was that the man’s true character had been discerned by a “silly old fellow” Franklin met, who currently kept the castle and otherwise had little sense about life. The moral? No man, though he possessed the cunning of a devil, could live and die a rogue yet maintain the reputation of an honest man; some slip, some accident, would give him away. “Truth and sincerity have a certain distinguishing native lustre about them which cannot be perfectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame that cannot be painted.” While on the subject of reputation, Franklin noted a statue of Sir Robert Holmes, formerly governor of Wight, who built a monument to himself, with an autobiographical, and highly flattering, inscription. Franklin observed wryly, “One would think either that he had no defect at all, or had a very ill opinion of the world, seeing he was so careful to make sure of a monument to record his good actions and transmit them to posterity.”

  On this same excursion Franklin and two others took a walk inland, then returned to the coast at nightfall, only to find themselves across a creek from their starting point. A boy operated a ferryboat during the day but now was in bed and refused to get up to put Franklin and his companions across. Franklin thereupon determined to commandeer the boy’s boat and do the job the “lazy whelp” should have done himself. Despite Franklin’s experience with watercraft, he and the others bungled the crossing, breaking an oar and thoroughly soaking and chilling themselves. As a belated gesture to the owner, they tied up the boat on the opposite shore, less the ruined oar.

  Not till the twentieth day out from London did the Berkshire leave the Lizard—the promontory that marks England’s southmost point—and enter the open ocean. The Atlantic treated the vessel hardly better than the Channel had; the winds of August held stubbornly out of the west, making every league toward America a struggle. Franklin was in too much of a hurry, too much the improver, at this stage of his life to waste time playing games while ashore, but aboard the slow-moving vessel he joined the other passengers in whatever diversions came to hand. He developed a theory of draughts (checkers) that in turn revealed more of his thinking on human nature. “The persons playing, if they would play well, ought not much to regard the consequence of the game, for that diverts and withdraws the attention of the mind from the game itself…. I will venture to lay it down for an infallible rule, that if two persons equal in judgment play for a considerable sum, he that loves money most shall lose; his anxiety for the success of the game confounds him.”

  One of Franklin’s shipmates accused another of cheating at cards. The accused was English, the accuser Dutch; Franklin accounted the national difference partly responsible for the fraud. “We are apt to fancy the person that cannot speak intelligibly to us, proportionately stupid in understanding…. Something like this I imagine might be the case of Mr. G—n; he fancied the Dutchman could not see what he was about because he could not understand English, and therefore boldly did it before his face.” An ad hoc court of justice heard the matter; the accused was convicted and sentenced to pay a fine of two bottles of brandy and to be placed in the round top for three hours, there to be subject to public ridicule. The prisoner resisted his punishment, prompting one of the sailors to lower a rope from aloft, which
was forcibly fastened about the prisoner’s waist and used to hoist him off his feet. Suspended above the deck, the man kicked and pitched wildly, cursing in a loud voice. After about fifteen minutes he began to turn black in the face. Murder! he cried. Concerned that death, if not murder precisely, might indeed be the consequence, the others relented and lowered him. Yet they excommunicated him from their company till he consented to pay his fine. He held out for a few days, then gave in and was received back into the group.

  This outcome elicited another Franklin reflection on human nature:

  Man is a sociable being, and it is for aught I know one of the worst of punishments to be excluded from society. I have read abundance of fine things on the subject of solitude, and I know ’tis a common boast in the mouths of those that affect to be thought wise, that they are never less alone than when alone. I acknowledge solitude an agreeable refreshment to a busy mind; but were these thinking people obliged to be always alone, I am apt to think they would quickly find their very being insupportable to them.

  He contradicted another bit of conventional wisdom, one he placed in the mouths of “the ladies,” that alcohol provided the best test of men’s true nature and disposition. “I, who have known many instances to the contrary, will teach them a more effectual method…. Let the ladies make one long sea voyage with them, and if they have the least spark of ill nature in them and conceal it to the end of the voyage, I will forfeit all my pretensions to their favor.”

  Franklin did not confine his observations of nature to the human species. On this voyage he commenced his study of the natural sciences, discovering an interest that would make him famous in middle age. Now, as in some of his other early intellectual endeavors, his inexperience showed beneath his analytical power. When a storm stirred up some seaweed, he employed a boat hook to pull samples aboard; among the tangled branches (in some cases attached to the branches) he found tiny crabs. No one in that era knew much about the life cycle of crabs, and Franklin guessed—incorrectly—that the crabs were in fact the progeny (“a fruit of the animal kind”) of the seaweed. He attempted to test his hypothesis by taking some seaweed without crabs and placing it in a bucket of seawater on board the ship. He watched to see whether new crabs emerged. Unfortunately, the seaweed died, terminating the experiment.

  He made numerous observations of the finned fish of the Atlantic. Most striking were the flying fish and the dolphins (the gilled kind, not the mammals). The reason the flying fish took to the air was to escape the dolphins, which raced beneath them, ready to gobble them up as soon as they touched down. Franklin confirmed this by noting that whenever dolphins were caught by persons on the ship—for food, and tasty food at that—they invariably had flying fish in their bellies. Moreover, the dolphins responded to no other bait the shipboard fishermen had to offer.

  Franklin observed the heavens as well. A night with a full moon and intermittent rain showers yielded the first rainbow-by-moonlight he had ever seen. He witnessed two eclipses: a nearly complete one (“at least ten parts out of twelve”) of the sun, and a half-eclipse of the moon. Not till late in Franklin’s life would precise chronometers allow regularly accurate measurements of longitude at sea; in 1726 eclipses furnished one of the few methods by which a ship’s east-west position might be charted. Franklin sat up the night of September 30 to time the eclipse. A calendar informed him that the eclipse would reach its maximum extent at 5 A.M. London time; his own measurement indicated the maximum at half-past midnight local time. From this he deduced that the ship was four and a half hours, or 67 degrees 30 minutes, west of London. By subtraction, landfall lay little more than one hundred leagues to the west.

  This news prompted all aboard to scan the western horizon for any sign of shore. “I cannot help fancying the water is changed a little, as is usual when a ship comes within soundings,” Franklin wrote on October 2, before adding a disclaimer: “But ’tis probable I am mistaken, for there is but one besides myself of my opinion, and we are very apt to believe what we wish to be true.” When five more days brought no sight of land, Franklin employed irony to alleviate the anticipation: “Sure the American continent is not all sunk under water since we left it.”

  Finally, on October 9, the call “Land! Land!” came from the lookout. “In less than an hour we could descry it from the deck, appearing like tufts of trees. I could not discern it so soon as the rest; my eyes were dimmed with the suffusion of two small drops of joy.” Even calculating latitude, while in principle far easier than longitude, was imprecise enough that the captain could not initially tell just what part of the coast the ship had reached; soon, however, someone suggested that the promontory in view was Cape Henlopen at the mouth of Delaware Bay, a judgment confirmed by a pilot-boat that came out to greet them. The pilot brought aboard a peck of apples. “They seemed the most delicious I ever tasted in my life,” wrote Franklin, weary of a diet of salt meat, biscuit, and dolphin.

  The Berkshire ran up the Delaware toward Philadelphia. Most of the passengers, eager to end their confinement as soon as possible—it was now nearly twelve weeks since they had left London—jumped ship at Chester to finish the journey on land. Franklin, reckoning that the long voyage had weakened him, preferred to stay with the vessel. But even he changed his mind at Redbank, where the ship anchored just six miles out from Philadelphia. A pleasure boat bound for the city offered him and the three other remaining passengers a ride. “We accepted of their kind proposal, and about ten o’clock landed at Philadelphia, heartily congratulating each other upon our having happily completed so tedious and dangerous a voyage. Thank God!”

  4

  An Imprint of His Own

  1726–30

  Ben Franklin had left Philadelphia a journeyman printer intent on opening a shop of his own; he returned a budding merchant, engaged for £50 a year and with every prospect of earning more, perhaps much more. Franklin’s London stay had not diminished his ambition; if anything, his experience with Governor Keith afforded a reminder that a young man who had chosen to strike his own way in the world could count on nothing but his own efforts and abilities. The promises of others, however pleasing to the ear, were trusted at peril.

  Franklin took up his new job with customary industry. Thomas Denham opened a store on Water Street with his cargo of merchandise; Franklin served in the store as clerk, accountant (an aspect of the job he quickly mastered), and salesman. As in all branches of the retail trade, the key to success was skill at sales. Franklin possessed the tools of the salesman: he was intelligent, well spoken, a student of human behavior, and determined to get ahead. By his own entirely credible account—an account corroborated by the persuasiveness he demonstrated during the rest of his life—he quickly became “expert at selling.” Denham, himself an astute salesman and a proven success in the business, doubtless congratulated himself on acquiring such a promising assistant, one who would rapidly make the transition to partner.

  Nor was this the end of Denham’s plans for Franklin. With no obvious successor in the business, the elder man took the younger as not merely a protégé but a surrogate son. Franklin, needless to say, had a father of his own, but Josiah remained in Boston, had numerous other children, and had nothing to offer in career terms that approached what Denham was making available to Ben. Future prospects apart, Denham had a hold over Franklin from the (recent) past: the cost of Franklin’s passage from London, which the young man was working off in the store.

  For his part, Franklin warmed to Denham in a way he found difficult with his own father. “I respected and loved him,” Franklin wrote. He certainly might have written similar words about Josiah, if only because he felt he ought to. But Denham was a man of the world, a man of substance, a man who understood success in terms with which Franklin increasingly identified. As Franklin had outgrown Boston, so he had outgrown his father. There was nothing unusual about this; it is a fundamental task of growing up. But the precocious Franklin, having grown up sooner than most sons, still felt t
he need for a father figure. Thomas Denham filled the need.

  From this mix of emotional and pecuniary motives, the two developed a close relationship. Franklin lodged and boarded with Denham; Denham instructed him as a father tutored his son. In the store, over dinner, before bed the two spoke of how Franklin might advance in the business by taking a cargo of foodstuffs to the West Indies to be traded for cash or molasses, or by leveraging his time and contacts by accepting goods on commission from other merchants. Thoughts of the printing trade, which offered no such straightforward path to financial success, dimmed with each passing week. Franklin came to see himself as a merchant.

  Fate saw things differently. The winter of 1726–27 brought its usual coughs, colds, and fevers to the Delaware Valley; amid the general ill feeling, Franklin developed a case of what he identified as pleurisy. Pleurisy is characterized by an inflammation of the pleura, the membrane that covers the lungs and lines the chest cavity, and it comes in two forms: dry pleurisy and pleurisy with effusion. The latter involves a fluid (the effusion) that fills the chest cavity outside the lungs and makes breathing difficult; it typically accompanies chronic lung conditions, such as tuberculosis. Franklin had no such chronic condition; consequently his pleurisy was probably the dry kind, which is usually a response to a bacterial infection. In an otherwise healthy person it is rarely life-threatening; this was true even in the days before antibiotics. Yet it can be quite uncomfortable, as it was with Franklin. “I suffered a good deal,” he recalled. In fact, he felt as though he might die. The illness “very nearly carried me off,” he wrote. He added that he “gave up the point in my own mind, and was rather disappointed when I found myself recovering, regretting in some degree that I must now some time or other have all that disagreeable work to do over again.” In this passage, even more than was usual in his autobiography, the sexagenarian author was speaking rather than the twenty-one-year-old subject. Possibly the young Franklin, who had never been badly sick before, mistook his malady for something fatal; but no young man making a full recovery, which Franklin quickly did, ever regretted missing an early opportunity to exit this life.