Rough Passage to London(98)

“Did it work?” asked the two boys, their eyes wide with wonder.

“That old gentleman may have been too clever by half because for the next six weeks, there was no wind. There was a dead calm across the entire ocean. Not even a slight breeze. His four ships floated along with their sails limp and lifeless, and he was forced to cancel all his contracts. He went to church the next day and told the minister he never should have tried to outwit the Devil.”

Morgan laughed at the sight of the puzzled faces of the two boys. They ran off to tell their cousins about this story from the sea they had just heard from their Uncle Ely.





On a cold Thanksgiving Day morning, Morgan and Eliza accompanied his parents and Josiah and Amanda with their two children to the service at the meetinghouse in Lyme. The tall, square building with its steeple stood on a small triangle of land and dominated the town’s Common. The clanging of the steeple bell brought Morgan back to when he was a boy. The whole town had turned out to see the new bell arrive in town on the back of an ox cart, which had come all the way from Boston. He and Abraham had run alongside the cart to try to be the first ones to touch the new bell.

“Going to meeting” also reminded him of sailing amidst a field of icebergs. He could already feel the cold, chilly draft as they sat down in the long pews with the rest of his family. The soaring thirty-two-foot-high ceilings had much to do with the bitter cold temperatures. Eliza was shivering, her teeth chattering as she knelt to say her prayers. When they stood up with the rest of the congregation to begin singing the opening hymn, Morgan whispered, “You know why you’re so cold, don’t you?”

Eliza looked up at him with a quizzical look.

“You are supposed to be cold. It was the intent of the builders.”

He gazed up at the high ceiling. Eliza again looked at him in puzzlement. He leaned closer and breathed into her ear.

“They wanted to test the resolve of the truly devoted.”

Eliza almost laughed, but quickly controlled herself by shooting him a baleful, disapproving glare.

The service went on from eleven in the morning to two in the afternoon, and the church was crowded. His mother told him there were lots of new members thanks to the new young pastor. Some of the other seafaring families were there, the Chadwicks, the Pratts, the Tinkers, and the Lords. Reverend Erdix Tenny, who was around Morgan’s age, spoke from a pulpit reached by a winding stairway with a lofty view of the entire congregation. The sermon was long and the meetinghouse increasingly cold, but the singing of some of the hymns with the accompaniment of the big bass viol and the flute brought back childhood memories for Morgan. The congregation belted out the rousing words of the “Missionary Hymn” and he felt a reassuring warmth inside of him at the sound of these familiar lyrics. It wasn’t that he felt overly religious. It was more a moment of remembering the past. He thought to himself that this choir music was all his family had ever listened to, so different from the refined world in London he was now being exposed to.

After the meeting Abraham Morgan, despite his frail condition, was intent on introducing his packet shipmaster son to all the deacons and their wives. Morgan felt like he was being shown off like a prize bull at the annual fair. He may have softened somewhat, he thought to himself, but his father was still as proud and stubborn as ever. Still as he made the rounds amongst Abraham Morgan’s friends and watched his father’s face, he began to understand a bit more about the man he had once feared, a man devoted to his church. He could see the pride in his father’s face, a man so conscious of his image and his standing in the community. That pride in the way others perceived him was all-important to Abraham Morgan. He had been ashamed of having his sons become sailors, fearful they would return home as penniless drunks, and concerned this would bring dishonor to the family name. And when the family received the tragic news in that letter, old Abraham had seen it as a message from God, a punishment from the heavens. His family had been marked as sinners.

When Morgan ran away from home, it was as if the Devil himself had been mocking him for his inability to control the wayward behavior of his own sons. Now that the rebellious younger one had at last returned, miraculously not as a drunken sailor, but as a successful packet ship captain and a part owner of several of the line’s newest ships, he wanted to bask in some of that prestige. To him his son’s success was a sign that God now approved. The shame had gone and the pride had returned. Shame and pride, Morgan thought to himself as he watched his smiling father shake hands with some of the deacons’ wives. They are close cousins indeed, flip sides of the same coin.