The ship’s masts were now swaying back and forth, making him dizzy and sick. To keep himself from falling, he grabbed hold of one of the lee braces for support. With his other hand, he pulled his pea jacket tighter around him even as he shuddered in the cold wind. The winds had switched to the north and it had started to sleet. The yard he was perched on was already icy and slippery. Down below him on the frozen, ice-covered decks, he could see men slipping and falling as they tried to make their way forward. He thought of his mother and the warmth of the kitchen fireplace, the reassuring smells of freshly baked bread and roast turkey, his three older sisters giggling as they ladled a creamy filling into a pie crust. This work aloft in the rigging was frightening enough in calm seas, but in stormy weather it was deadly.
Morgan wondered if this was what could have happened to Abraham so many years ago, falling, falling. He looked down some eighty feet to the deck below, then to the ship’s plunging bowsprit, diving, slicing the water like an axe splitting a log in two. Suddenly, he felt as if an unknown force was pulling him downward. He clung to the slippery, cold jackstay, his feet resting precariously on the foot rope slung under the yard. A destructive urge seemed to be pulling him downward and telling him to let go.
Morgan shook his head, calmed himself with deep breaths, and followed the example of some of the old veterans who controlled their nerves by singing. He would conquer this wave of fear, he told himself. He thought of the terror he’d experienced when those British Navy sailors had fired on him and Abraham. He thought of the angry, scowling face of his father. For some reason, his mind flashed back to that first year after Abraham left home. He and Abraham had always gotten into trouble, letting out the neighbors’ pigs, or scaring the girls next door by pretending to be Indians on the warpath. With Abraham gone, the pranks seemed less fun and he had gotten into fights. After one of those scraps in the center of town, one of the deacons, Squire Ridley, had come out of the meetinghouse to break up the fight. News of that shameful rebuke made its way back to the Morgan farm and Ely was given a thrashing by his father. The old man had met him with his whipping belt in hand. He marched him into the barn where he was forced to drop his pants and lean over. He whipped him until the skin was raw and he cried for mercy.
“Maybe that will beat the freewheeling nature out of you,” he had yelled. The memory of that beating and how it had stiffened his defiance of his father strengthened him now. He started to climb down the ratlines, more confident than before. If he couldn’t control his fears, he told himself, the only alternative was to return to the Connecticut River Valley to work as a farmer. That image of a life shackled to a horse-drawn plow helped him overlook the new hardships he was enduring at sea.
On that first voyage, Morgan soon got used to a sparse diet of salt beef or pork and weevily sea bread. In fact, the Hudson’s cook, whose name was Scuttles, was the first to befriend him. He told him that if he ate a pound of cold salt beef he wouldn’t get sick. Scuttles had escaped from a Maryland plantation when he was eight years old. He’d then found a life with the small Negro community living on Staten Island. When he got older he realized that there were few good opportunities for him in New York. Like so many colored men, he’d ended up choosing the sea as a way to escape the severe discrimination he faced ashore. Generally speaking, the sailors accepted most everybody once they were on ship, though when they didn’t like the food, some of the sailors called him “that no-good Guinea nigger-cook.”
Morgan had never come into close contact with a black man before, so with food as the primary incentive but curiosity a close second, he befriended Scuttles, whose real name was Samuel Cuttlefish. Hiram had the same idea. As a result, the ship’s galley and pantry became a meeting place for the two boys, a refuge from the mates and the constant abuse they received from many of the other sailors. It was there as they ate their burgoo porridge after their four-hour watch, among scattered pots and pans, that Morgan and Scuttles heard how Hiram came to be on the Hudson.
“Is this your first voyage with Captain Champlin?” Morgan asked as he took a spoonful of the thick oatmeal mush covered with molasses, which the sailors called long-tail sugar. Hiram shook his head. He was a Penobscot boy from Thomaston, Maine. He confessed that he had left home when he was only fourteen years old. His mother had remarried and his stepfather used to beat him. One day down at the docks in Thomaston, he had spotted a small trading schooner that was sailing to New York. He decided to sneak on board where he hid in a dark corner in the bow of the ship. They never found him until they were well out to sea. Once they arrived in New York, they booted him ashore.