Rough Passage to London(49)

“Start talking, Bull. Tell me what happened to my shipmate. Where did they take him?”

Dazed and disoriented, Bailey just shook his head. Then he recognized Morgan and his confusion turned to fear.

“There was nothin’ we could do. That man Blackwood said ’e’d kill us all if we didn’t help ’im find some Yankee boy. ’E offered us money, real sovereign coins. We had no choice.”

“What did he do with the man he grabbed? Where’s my shipmate?”

“I don’t know. They took ’im away, maybe to the Charon. That’s Blackwood’s ship.”

“Who is this Blackwood?”

“Can’t say.”

Morgan tightened his grip on the knife handle and leaned in toward Bailey until the man squealed with pain.

“Enough. Enough. Some say ’e’s an opium trader. All I know is when ’e comes ’ere to the tavern, his pockets are always full o’ money.”

“What does he look like?”

“Big, tall, powerful bludger with curly black hair, square face with strange squinty eyes, almost like a Chinaman. That’s why they call him China Bill.”





That conversation was on his mind as he stepped on board the smelly, sooty steamer that would shuttle him to the Hudson anchored in the middle of the East River. He wondered if he would ever see Hiram again. He spotted the ship’s new steward surrounded by a storehouse of supplies and crates of chickens and geese.

“How are you, Mr. Lowery?”

“Fine and dandy, Captain.”

Morgan’s eyebrows rose in surprise. It was the first time that anyone had called him captain. It took him a moment to recover.

“You and Mr. Scuttles making sure we won’t starve on this trip?”

“Yes, sir, Captain Morgan. We’ll be sailing with full stomachs all the way. Plenty of belly timber on board from smoked Virginia hams to pickled oysters and barrels of potatoes and turnips.”

Caiphus Lowery was a colored freedman from New Orleans, a tall, handsome-looking man with gray eyes and a bushy head of curly black hair that tumbled over his forehead and ears. Morgan had met him at Peck’s Slip one day when he was playing the bones alongside a couple of fiddlers. He was the steward for one of the other London packets with the Red Swallowtail Line. Morgan had heard that the man knew how to cook finely seasoned French dishes, New Orleans style. He thought that those culinary skills might come in handy in the cabin to supplement the generally bad food that Scuttles cooked. So he offered him the job of steward and was surprised when the man accepted.

Soon the steamer was crowded with passengers and their mountains of chests, trunks, and bags. The small ferry chugged and puffed up to the sides of the packet. Morgan was first on the ship, climbing the fifteen feet up the rope ladder to the top of the bulwarks. He looked around him, surveying the decks of the ship on which he’d sailed so many voyages. There was an awkward moment of silence as he stepped on deck. He felt the eyes of the sailors turn in his direction.

Two men who were lounging by the fife rail jumped up like rabbits and began swabbing the decks. Another man bending over the scuttlebutt looked up like a startled deer, his face dripping with water. Still another quickly hid his small bottle of rum in the folds of a greasy rag. Some of the sailors, particularly the newcomers, showed him deference by taking their hats off. Others glanced away with downcast eyes or glared at him with a defiant look. By the foremast, a few sat together with crossed arms. Many of these foredeck hands were new to him, but some of his old shipmates had stayed with him, including Icelander, the Spaniard, Scuttles the cook, and Whipple the carpenter. His ship’s officers, Horace Nyles and Ezra Pratt, the two old-timers from the river, met him at the gangway.

With his gray, whiskery face and large, smoky eyes revealing nothing, Nyles welcomed Captain Morgan aboard the ship. Morgan knew that the man must resent him, as he had been passed over for shipmaster time and time again.

“Good to have you aboard, Cap’n,” echoed the smaller, bearded Pratt with a note of insincerity in his hoarse voice. Morgan again felt awkward.

“Muster the men, Mr. Nyles,” he ordered with a slightly uncertain voice. As the chief mate read out the names, each sailor muttered, “Here” or “Yes, sir,” and shuffled forward. Morgan sized up the two dozen men who would serve under him, taking a good look at each face. Sullen, solitary faces, weathered and unsmiling, others with friendly broad grins and whiskery beards, young and old. These were the sailors under his command, a mixture of men, several stooped-shouldered newcomers and deep-chested veterans, their leathery faces, taciturn and defiant, chewing their quids of tobacco. These hardened packet ship men could outsail any others, but Morgan well knew that they were hard to discipline.