Rough Passage to London(36)
During those last days in port, stevedores were busy loading cargo onto the Hudson, everything from Kendall cottons to blankets to bundles of pans and spades. The sailors attended to more last-minute repairs, fixing the rigging and mending the sails. At dusk, on one of the last days in port, Morgan and a small group from the packet walked out of the garrisoned London Docks to the freedom and danger of the city’s crime-infested East End. Morgan persuaded them to head for the Shadwell area, where sailors liked to say there was a whore for every twelve men. He was determined to get to the Frying Pan Tavern, even though he realized they were now walking through the roughest part of London.
Once they’d done several twists and turns through squalid riverside streets and crumbling stone archways, they found themselves in the alleyways near Prince’s Square, not too far from Wellclose Square. Morgan watched as men, women, and children lined up to pump water into pails close by the common privy, its foul-smelling contents spilling into the streets. A woman dressed in rags lay in a heap on the street, her baby crying and screaming. A thief was picking through the pockets of a drunken man lying unconscious at the foot of some stairs. Morgan yelled at the robber, shaking his belaying pin, which he had brought along for protection. A good-looking middle-aged woman hung out a second story window in a suggestive, revealing way and laughed at him derisively.
“Ain’t you the gentleman now sailor boy. Ye be my knight in shinin’ armor, my own sweet prince,” she cried out in a throaty voice. Then she leaned further out the window, her face breaking out into a lurid smile. “Come up ’ere and I’ll make ye a king.”
Her laughter echoed into the small courtyard. A few blocks later there were more women, standing by doorways, calling out to these men like seductive sirens. One by one, the sailors disappeared; even Hiram left him when two young buxom women with dark seductive eyes approached them, their loose-fitting, wide-necked blouses leaving little to the imagination. It was too much for Hiram to resist.
“I’m sorry, Ely,” he said as he walked off with a grin, the two women laughing on either side of him. “These two beauties have given me a glimpse of paradise.”
Morgan walked on, exhaling deeply, fighting his own temptations. He was alone by the time he reached Vinegar Lane and spotted the sign for the tavern, which was hanging outside the ground floor of a blackened brick building with a dark green door. Underneath the sign, a drunken sailor was belting out a lover’s ballad, his sonorous baritone voice rising above the noisy din around him. Across the street there were various lodging houses and brothels where he could hear the sounds of raucous laughter, but a few others seemed to attract a more dignified clientele seeking anonymity amid the squalor. These were small hotels for the toffers who catered to the amorous needs of discreet gentlemen from the West End. He looked up at one of the two-storied houses and caught the eye of a striking young brunette looking down at him, his starved eyes transfixed as he paused for a moment to look at her.
With his mind still on the pretty woman in the window, Morgan stepped inside the tavern and began to assess the kind of place he’d walked into. The air was stagnant and stale, not unlike the ship’s moldy forecastle. The bar was lined with sailors, each with their hands squarely around a mug of ale. Several dusty lamps swung overhead. The smoky blue walls were filled with sailors’ drawings of ships and mermaids, sea chanteys and poems. Sailors were belting out lusty ale songs as they stared dumb-eyed and dim-witted into the blousy, loose tops of the bar maidens delivering them ale swipes.
“I put me arm around her waist
Sez she, young man, yer in great haste!
I put me hand upon her thigh,
Sez she, young man, yer rather high!”
Morgan soon found the owner of the establishment, a portly man by the name of Stillwell, who was behind the bar. His puffy red face and piggish eyes told the story of a tavern owner who patronized his own grog far too generously. Morgan introduced himself as an American sailor off a New York packet.
“What will ye ’ave?” he asked.
“A tankard of swipes,” Morgan replied.
“Not that often that we get Yanks in ’ere,” said Stillwell. “What brings ye to this part of London?”
Morgan asked if he knew an English sailor named William Blackwood, and Stillwell put his hand to his bulldog jaw and double chin as if he was thinking, and then nodded his head slowly.
“Sure, I know of ’im. Bill, yeah I know ’im. ’E comes in ’ere from time to time. A right fine sailor is Bill.”
“Where do I find him?” Morgan asked abruptly.