“That was a close call, Ely.”
“A narrow escape indeed, Hiram.”
“Keep him out of sight, Lowery. He’s our secret passenger.”
With an ebb tide carrying them swiftly out of the Solent and a steady northwesterly wind, the Victoria’s bow cut through the water with ease. The packet had as much canvas as she could bear and was moving along at about twelve knots. Morgan had Icelander set a course for the northwestern tip of France. If they stayed off the wind and hugged the eastern side of the English Channel, passing close to Alderney, he thought to himself, they might be able to stay out of sight and elude any ship that pursued them.
PART X
Concerning the manner of your brother’s death, it may be that I have some information to give you; though it may not be, for I am far from sure. Can we have a little talk alone?
—Charles Dickens, “A Message from the Sea,” All the Year Round
26
1850
From his dimly lit cabin inside the packet ship, a quiet, reflective Morgan paused and listened to the late-night noises on the docks in New York. The hearty, full-throated laughs of drunken sailors returning from the taverns mixed in with the loud, gruff voices of angry ships’ officers. It was well past midnight. The night was balmy for early June. The South Street docks would soon quiet down to the more gentle hum and murmur of a small village. He had been in New York for more than a week due to the pressing needs of the shipping line. He had received a cryptic note from Hiram Smith written a few weeks earlier. He hadn’t heard a word from his old friend since he helped him escape from the clutches of the Royal Navy and dropped him off at Peck’s Slip in New York. That was five years ago. “I have much to tell you, Ely,” he had written. “I have new information about Abraham. I hope to be at the South Street docks before your June departure unless Stryker’s men find me. I know they are looking for me.” That was all he’d written.
Morgan looked at the short letter in his hand and shook his head in puzzlement. There was no indication where it had been sent from. It sounded like Hiram knew something important. Morgan had waited all week, but there was no sign of Hiram and there had been no new letter. Most of the crew members were now off ship. Only the stewards, Lowery and Junkett, were there with him in the cabin. Old Whipple was in the forecastle. Nearby he could hear the creaking oarlocks of a passing dory and in the distance the forlorn sound of a fiddle trading sorrowful notes with a slow-picked banjo.
He had tried to sleep but couldn’t. He looked down at his desk at some of the financial correspondence he needed to attend to. His mind drifted to business matters and a wave of confidence and optimism swept over him. The threat of war with England over the Oregon dispute fortunately had been averted. He liked to think that the mutual benefits of transatlantic trade had won the day. Now the wharves of South Street were overflowing with cargo. Shovels, pick axes, pans, and other supplies, all brought from England, were emptied out of the packet ships and loaded onto clipper ships bound for the gold fields of California. Out of those same ships came a human river of hopeful emigrants also headed for the El Dorado. His new ship, the 1,299-ton Southampton, was the biggest of the London liners at 181 feet in length, far bigger than the American Eagle or the Margaret Evans, which had been built for the Black X Line a few years earlier. It was also about seven feet longer than the firm’s speedy Devonshire, which the New York papers had called “almost a steamboat of speed.”
Morgan felt that the Southampton was the fastest ship he had ever sailed on, capable of sustaining a speed of fourteen knots under full sail, just like the clippers now breaking all records on their way to the goldfields of California. Ironically, even as the sailing packets got bigger and faster, the Cunard steamers continued to steal away more and more travelers. The new larger and more elegant Collins steamships were also attracting the more affluent. Notwithstanding the Herald’s James Gordon Bennett’s estimate a few years earlier that the New York ocean packets were still carrying over half of the cabin passengers, it was clear that the sailing ships were no longer the preferred way to cross the Atlantic. Even Morgan could no longer deny this. His writer friend Caroline Kirkland had written him in October 1848, “As to going home with you, you may be sure going in the steamer is none of my plan.” She would have come, she wrote him, but her traveling companion wanted to try one of the new steamers.
As he sat there at his desk, he thought of Eliza and how she had been able to join him on the ship these last few years. It had been like old times, the two of them sailing together. She had kept the saloon filled with melodious sonatas of Mozart, Bach, and Chopin. In London, she had happily reacquainted herself with the Leslies and many of the other artists, including old Turner. Eliza also met Thackeray for the first time and was charmed by this witty man with his owl-like spectacles and his melodious voice. They’d traveled by carriage to Hampstead to see Stanfield’s new house, whirling by the rolling green hills and trim hedgerows in that picturesque village. Then they had taken the train to Brighton to meet Morgan’s new friend, Charles Dickens, who was vacationing there with his wife and some of his children. Eliza had been pleased that the author’s eldest son, Charles, and her son, William, had gotten along famously, as he also did with Dickens’s two daughters, who were just a couple of years older than her Ruth and Mary Frances.