“I didn’t know where to go,” Hiram said. “I had not a cent in my pocket and no clothes neither.”
“What did you do?” asked Morgan.
“Spent a couple of nights sleeping in a fish vendor’s cart down by Pine Street. That fishmonger discovered me when he came to hitch up his horse. He kicked me from here to kingdom come. Some sailors came and yanked me away. Took me to see Captain Champlin, and when he found out I was a New England boy, he put me to work on board the Cincinattus. He says New England boys work harder. That’s why he hired me. That was two years ago, and now I’m on this new ship.”
Morgan told Hiram his own story, about how he had met Captain Champlin. His parents had gone upriver to Middletown to a baptism, and he had slipped away and taken the ferry over to Great Meadow. A new ship was being launched at Hayden’s Yard. Champlin had singled him out from a group of boys, and offered him a berth if he could get to New York. Then he told his new friend about the cryptic letter from John Taylor.
“The letter didn’t even say for sure that my brother was dead or how he died.” Morgan hesitated. “Something strange there, don’t you think?”
Hiram shrugged as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Could be, but then maybe not. What sailors do and what they say don’t always make sense. Your brother could be lying senseless in a street somewhere. Maybe he’s shipwrecked somewhere off the coast of Africa. You’ll probably never know, but if there was foul dealing, I understand you need to find out who done it.”
Those conversations helped create a tie between the two cabin boys. Morgan even confessed to Hiram his love of reading and produced the book of poetry that Mrs. Carpenter had given to him. He hid the book under his mattress. If any of the other sailors saw him reading, he knew it would create an ugly scene, not just name calling, but possibly a fight. That was another reason why the friendship with Hiram was so important. Morgan sensed he had found a new ally who could help him learn the ropes, and he sorely needed one. The tobacco-chewing second officer was always looking for him to clean the farm area or to lower him from the catheads over the side of the ship to chip rust from the anchor.
When Mr. Brown first ordered Morgan to slush down the masts, he replied he didn’t know what that meant. The mate flew into a rage, hitting him with the belaying pin. Morgan felt his hands drawing into fists as he thought about fighting back. Then he heard Hiram’s voice cautioning him, and he thought of how Josiah had always counseled him never to cry out when their father was in one of his rages. Mr. Brown handed him a heavy two-gallon bucket filled with thick gravy, which Scuttles had prepared from the remnants of the boiled salt beef. He then ordered him up the rigging.
“If one drop falls, Morgan, you’ll be licking it off the deck. I want the masts to be thoroughly greased so the topsails, topgallants, and royal yards can be hoisted up and down easily.”
Biting his lip in humiliation, Morgan held onto a rope attached to the pail with one hand, twisting it around his wrist. It was so heavy he felt like his hand would separate from his arm. With the other hand he pulled himself up the ratlines, squeezing through the narrow lubber’s hole, hauling up the heavy bucket behind him. The slush-filled pail scraped against the mast, tipping back and forth, its foul-smelling contents almost spilling over the edge. Gritting his teeth, Morgan pulled the bucket up the shrouds. His heart pounded as he kept climbing past the topgallant yards up into the royals, refusing to look down. The higher he climbed up the swaying mast the colder he felt. He held on tightly to the shrouds from his precarious perch, more than eighty feet above the deck on the three-foot-wide crosstrees. There he was able to set down the slush pail and gather his strength.
Mr. Brown sent Hiram up to help him. The two cabin boys were busy slathering the masts with the thick grease when they first heard a commotion below them on deck. It sounded like a fight. They had worked their way down the mast so that they were now perched just below the upper topsail yard, about fifty feet from the deck. They could hear stomping and an angry voice shouting, “I’ll give you the toe of my boot and knock you all the way into the middle of next week.”
“What’s going on, Hiram?”
“Sounds like Mr. Brown is having a frolic with one of the sailors,” Hiram replied dryly. Morgan looked down through the spiderweb of the rigging until he spied the blue pea jacket and the black leather hat of the second mate, hurling abuse at a big sailor and shouting into his face.
“Answer me, you great white monkey!” he yelled as he rained blow after blow on the big man’s back with the belaying pin. Morgan could recognize the sailor by his yellow hair tied back in a ponytail. He was a great hulk of a man with wide and broad shoulders, a big square face with thin whiskers, pale blue eyes, and thin lips that rarely smiled. His name was Olaf Rasmussen. Everyone just called him Icelander because that’s where he was supposedly from. The story was he’d gone to sea because he’d killed a man, or at least that’s what some of the crew whispered behind his back.