Morgan sat stunned at what he was reading. He turned the page back and forth, but found nothing more there. His mind raced ahead. The two anchors and the words tattooed on the man’s back, “Bosom friend and Brother”; it suddenly came to him. Those were the words John Taylor had used to describe Abraham in the letter he had sent. Even the odd use of capital letters was the same. How could he have forgotten that? Each sentence was imprinted in his mind like a phrase from the Bible.
Now it was clear. Dobbs was Taylor, the man he’d been searching for. Here he was lying in a bunk below him. He allowed himself to think that perhaps Abraham was alive. Taylor had not mentioned any details, only that his brother had been surrounded by wickedness, and that they would not see each other again. He must keep this man alive. The mates had told him that he now had a recurring fever with severe chills and sudden sweating. Scuttles thought it was one of the African fevers.
Days later, Morgan was draped over the fore topsail yard tying off the gasket to secure the sail to the yard when he spotted the line on the horizon several miles to the northward of them. At long last, they’d arrived across the Atlantic. They passed one of the emigrant ships carrying a full boatload of three hundred passengers. Two or three outward-bound ships with their cathedral-like towers of white sails were heading south en route to the Caribbean, South America, or even further to China. By afternoon, he could hear the faint booming of the surf even before he could see the white line of breakers rolling onto the sandy shoreline of Long Island. The voyage had taken a punishing six weeks. Most of the steerage passengers had pale and hollow looks. He looked down at a small group of them who had gathered on deck near the barnyard area to sing a hymn of thanks, their voices drifting upward, blending in with the murmur of the breakers in the distance. The melodic singing made him think of home and the Sunday service at the Lyme meetinghouse. He wondered if he would ever see his mother again. He clenched his teeth to fight back a muted sob, shook his head and looked out to sea. Soon he spotted the narrow spit of land called Sandy Hook that marked the entrance to New York harbor, and the first mate gave the order to back the yards. From his perch in the topsail area, he could see the pilot boat and the speedy news schooners sailing quickly toward them, black-backed gulls riding the air currents around the hulls.
As one of them came closer, Captain Champlin shouted out, “What’s the news?”
A man at the bow of the boat shouted back that General Marquis de Lafayette had arrived safely.
“He’s back! He’s here in America.”
It was August 15, 1824.
The sixty-seven-year-old Lafayette had come back to the United States for the first time since the revolution. The next day New York’s streets were filled with the sounds of patriotic Yankee Doodle marching bands and men dressed in military uniforms on prancing white horses. With the sight of Lafayette waving at the adoring crowds from his horse-drawn carriage, Morgan and Hiram carried the semiconscious John Taylor off the ship and put him on a cart. The captain had told them to get the man off his ship. He never wanted to see him again, and he didn’t care what they did with him. At the sight of a sick man, the crowds parted, giving them plenty of space. They took him to a sailor’s boarding house where a doctor eventually confirmed that Taylor had come down with a recurrent form of malaria. The doctor treated him with quinine, and over the next two days Taylor improved considerably. By the time Morgan came to see him, just before the ship sailed for London, Taylor was conscious, although extremely weak.
At the sight of Morgan walking through the door into his room, the sick man began shivering uncontrollably. His eyes opened wide with fear.
“No, Abraham,” he shouted. “Have mercy! Have you come for me?”
Morgan didn’t reply. He shook the man strongly and slapped his face.
“Pull yourself together, man. I’m not Abraham. For God’s sake, tell me what has happened to my brother. Is he alive or dead?”
The bedridden man was taken aback by this sudden attack.
“Why did you sail under a false name?” Morgan continued with his interrogation. “What have you got to hide?”
The sick man looked up at him, his eyes only half open. “It was the Englishman who did it. It wasn’t me. It was the Englishman, William Blackwood, that’s his name, the captain on that blood boat. He and his curly red-haired mate, Tom Edgars. Big Red, they called him, but it was Blackwood who done it. He hated and resented Abraham, and now he wants me dead.”
“What blood boat?”
“The Charon,” he replied with fear in his eyes. “That’s the English ship that conscripted us. The Devil’s own ferry, that one.” Old memories of the British raid up the Connecticut River suddenly resurfaced in Morgan’s mind. His childhood fear and anger toward the British Royal Navy rose up like unwanted phlegm in his throat.