“Where’s your chum, Morgan?” asked the second mate, his voice growling with hostility. The reflected light off the white canvas sails revealed the man’s yellow teeth and shiny black eyes. Morgan thought he knew the answer. On one of the voyages a year ago, Ochoa had taken him and Hiram down into the dark corners of the main hold and shown them where the rum barrels were kept. This was the black belly of the ship, where rats scurried over crates and barrels and the cross beams creaked and cracked with the ship’s movement. To Morgan, the place seemed like a musty tomb with the smells of rank bilge water filling his nostrils, but despite the unattractive surroundings, trips to the rum barrels soon became a welcome diversion for him and Hiram.
Ochoa taught them the sailors’ trick of sucking the rum directly from the barrels with long quills. Once the novelty had passed, Morgan still enjoyed numerous forays into the rum barrel area on each passage, but he noticed that Hiram was always pushing to go again. He was probably down there now. His friend was fond of the grog, no matter what the risks of being caught, no matter how stormy the weather.
“So where is he, Morgan?” Mr. Brown asked again in an even more menacing tone.
“I reckon he’s out on the jib boom tending to the sails,” Morgan lied, in as convincing a voice as he could muster. As a sailor, he had learned how to lie with a straight face and a forthright voice. That answer seemed to partially satisfy the second mate. Brown had already caught Morgan and Hiram below decks around the rum barrels before on an earlier trip. They had been busy sucking the rum out of one of the barrels with quills when they heard footsteps. The second mate had been snuffing around below decks when he heard voices and saw the glow of their lantern. When he yelled out, they’d been quick to come out of the shadows with a story about how Scuttles had sent them down there to look for more flour. The cook was making biscuits and didn’t have enough, they’d said. Mr. Brown had been suspicious, but fortunately for them Scuttles had backed up their story.
Like many in the crew, Morgan tried to stay away from Brown. The man was edgier than usual on this trip. No one seemed to know much about his history. It was rumored that he had gone to sea at an early age because of a crime he committed, but no one knew where he came from or what the crime was. He clearly enjoyed inflicting pain on any sailor who crossed him or failed to do his job. Morgan had also heard other unsavory things about Mr. Brown and some of his activities when he was on shore leave.
On that early summer passage, the Hudson had taken a more southerly route to stay clear of possible ice fields. One of the Black X packet ships on the London to New York run had never arrived in port and was presumed lost. The Crisis had not been heard of now for more than two months. The talk on board ship was that the captain had been given orders to look for any signs of wreckage.
For the first one thousand miles they sailed along the North American mainland, leaving the dangerous Nantucket Shoals to the west, and passing over the Great South Channel. They endured several days of stormy weather with heavy rains, thunder, and lightning. Despite more vigilance than normal, there was no sign of a shipwreck. The Crisis, with its twelve passengers and two dozen sailors, had disappeared without a trace. The Black X Line now only had one other remaining ship besides the Hudson. Morgan once again thought of Abraham and looked out at the sea from high atop the masthead, where he was tightening one of the stays. For a moment, he imagined that he was looking at a battlefield cemetery, the foaming whitecaps extending to the horizon like luminescent marble gravestones. He felt humbled, and he thought of the captain’s words about the reminders of death out on the ocean. He looked up at the stormy, black sky crackling with lightning and listened to the roll of the thunder. He murmured a small prayer.
Among the cabin passengers on board was the famous American author James Fenimore Cooper, who was traveling to England with his wife and five young children. Cooper was already well known as a successful and widely read author after publishing The Pioneers. Some even referred to him as America’s Sir Walter Scott. He was headed for Europe on an extended stay to give his young children the benefit of learning French and Italian. He was also trying to secure English rights for his books.
For Morgan, that June voyage was memorable because Captain Champlin brought him back to the quarterdeck to take the helm. Like all the sailors, Morgan was required to take his turn at the wheel, but usually he was given the early morning or night watch. This time his watch occurred in the late afternoon, when the cabin passengers were being served tea and refreshments in the quarterdeck area. A dense fog had rolled in, and the air was cold.