Genius of Place (5 page)

Fred had read both of these books. Despite his piecemeal schooling, Fred was—and would remain—a voracious reader. He had also recently read
Two Years Before the Mast
, Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s classic account
of a voyage from Boston to California, by way of Cape Horn. The book had created a sensation upon its publication just two years earlier, in 1840. The striking parallels between his own life and Dana's were not lost on Fred. As a child, Dana had studied under a cruel schoolmaster, who one time nearly pulled off his ear. Later, complications from measles—leading to a condition called ophthalmia, characterized by temporary blindness—prompted Dana to drop out of Harvard. On recovering his vision, he decided to take an ocean journey.

Among Dana's well-heeled peers, it was in vogue to travel to Europe as a passenger on a luxury ship and embark upon a “grand tour.” He chose instead to enlist on a merchant ship as an ordinary seaman, the better to have a genuine adventure. Fred wanted to do the same.

 

Securing a job on a ship proved a challenge. First, there was the matter of Fred's chosen destination. Fred concluded that he wanted to sail to China. Great-uncle Aaron and his grandfather Benjamin had both made this voyage, so it was something of a family tradition. But choosing China meant that Fred had to wait some months for the timing to be right. In those days, in order to avoid the most treacherous monsoon winds, ships bound for China from ports on the East Coast of the United States tended to depart in the spring. So Fred came home to Hartford and passed some more idle months in waiting.

As spring drew nearer, Fred faced the not inconsiderable challenge of finding a ship's captain willing to hire him on. He teamed up with Jim Goodwin, a Hartford friend who had the experience of a single voyage under his belt. With his stories of fierce storms and exotic ports, Goodwin seemed like a ship-worn veteran to Fred. The pair took a trip to New York City and visited the offices of various maritime trading companies. They stopped by the Sailor's Home, where members of ships' crews hung out during shore leave. Together, Fred and Jim canvassed the Manhattan waterfront, looking for leads to a job aboard a ship.

They were much encouraged by a talk with a principal at Gordon and Talbot, an outfit involved in the China trade. The man informed them that the
Ronaldson
, a ship operated by his firm, would be leaving within a matter of days. Some additional hands were needed, he suspected,
and he urged Fred and his friend to go meet with the captain at once.

On meeting Captain Warren Fox, Jim Goodwin was immediately hired. The captain wasn't so sure about Fred. He expressed concern about taking on a “green boy,” someone who had never before been to sea. Now pushing twenty-one, Fred was hardly the typical green boy. In response, Fred pulled out all the stops. He explained that although he lacked experience, he came by his yen to sail honestly, as one of the seafaring Olmsteds of Hartford. And he promised to work hard and to follow orders. Presently, he wore down Captain Fox and was hired as an apprentice sailor. Salary: roughly $5 a month.

During their interview, Captain Fox impressed Fred as immensely capable. He seemed to have thought of everything. The
Ronaldson
was a bark, a medium-size vessel with three masts, and for the voyage to China it would have a crew of about twenty men. Captain Fox explained that he did not like the seasoned sailors to mix with the younger, less experienced hands. They could be a corrupting influence. In fact, one of his primary rules was that no cursing was allowed on his ship. He planned to set aside separate sleeping quarters for the voyage's four youngest sailors. To Fred, Captain Fox gave the appearance of a deeply honorable man.

Fred was elated. After being hired, he remained on the dock on Manhattan's East River where the
Ronaldson
was anchored to get a good, long look at the ship that would be conveying him to China. Standing there, he dashed off a letter to John, who was back from his Europe trip and enrolled at Yale. At last, Fred had some news of himself to share with his brother: “Now's the time, as I have a sailor with me, to describe the ship. Bark, I should say. She is of about 330 plus tons, pretty good form, but nothing clipper. Rakish rigging, long black yards (main royal up).” Fred carried on for several more paragraphs, breathlessly cataloging the features of the
Ronaldson
: “[The ship] has a long boat, quarter boat & whale boat. Carries two bulldogs (6 lb. carronades or so), wheel of the best construction under cover (when wanted) & is about two years old, having been but two voyages to Valparaiso or thereabouts. Mr. Coghlin [the first mate] says she is the best calculated for Canton of any ship he ever saw except the ‘Morrison.'”

The
Ronaldson
was scheduled to depart in two weeks for a journey that would last eight months, minimum. Fred made a whirlwind visit back to Hartford to say good-bye to his family and prepare for his voyage. He bought an almanac, a sea chest, cloth pants, and three flannel shirts. From a Hartford doctor, he obtained a homeopathic remedy for seasickness. His spinster aunt Maria voiced concern that Fred might be “drowndered,” as she termed it. So he also bought a life preserver. As a final touch, a local artist was hired to sketch Fred in his sailor's uniform.

 

On April 24, 1843, the
Ronaldson
set sail from New York. Fred's father and brother, who had accompanied him down from Hartford to see him off, stood on the Pike Street wharf, waving.

It was a perfect day for sailing, sunny with a light breeze. As a result, nearly thirty other ships departed at the same time as the
Ronaldson
. It was like a flotilla, heading out of New York Harbor. For a while, the
Ronaldson
sailed alongside a packet called the
Albany
. The crews yelled back and forth, and Fred learned that the other boat was sailing to Havre. When they pulled up beside another ship, the
Pilot
, he learned that this one was bound for Batavia. All these ships, sailing to all these different destinations—it seemed very glamorous. Fred noticed a spout in the distance. It turned out to be a whale.

The
Ronaldson
was packed with fur pelts, machine-spun cloth, and other “Yankee notions,” as Fred termed them. These were to be sold in China, though specific buyers had not been lined up. Rather, the
Ronaldson
planned to anchor in China and open up for business to whomever came onboard. That was the standard practice. Fred's ship was like an amphibious Wal-Mart.

Of course, the fuller the ship, the more goods one could hawk. Prior to embarking, Captain Fox had stuffed every available spot, even sleeping quarters, with saleable wares. The
Ronaldson
was almost comically overloaded. Once the ship hit open water, when it was safely away from the prying eyes of the captains and crews of ships such as the
Albany
and
Pilot
, a kind of rejiggering of the cargo took place under the direction of Captain Fox. To shed some weight, he ordered the men to toss overboard barrel after barrel of salt beef and other rations. Food was getting jettisoned
in preference for saleable merchandise. Never mind that U.S. maritime law prescribed that a ship must carry a certain allotment of rations to feed the crew.

As for the separate quarters Captain Fox had promised Fred, meant to keep impressionable young sailors away from morally suspect veterans, this proved quite a comedown. Even following the food toss, the
Ronaldson
remained incredibly overloaded. Many of the cabins, while designed for human habitation, were actually filled up with China-bound wares. Fred and three other young hands were crammed into a tiny, foulsmelling space deep belowdecks.

Fred was put to work on a head pump. Hours before dawn, he was out on the ship's undulating deck, squatting low to open a spigot, filling a bucket with bilge water, closing the spigot, walking a few teetering steps to dump the water into a tub, where it was used to clean the decks. Repeat. By 8:00 a.m., he was already exhausted. The ship's carpenter was working nearby, and Fred asked if any kind of break was in sight. The carpenter simply laughed.

Fred kept going. His hands grew raw and blistered from opening the spigot and carrying the bucket. His clothes were soaked through with spray. And then the nausea began to set in. Now, he really was a green boy. His discomfort grew over the next couple days, until it got so bad that he was ordered to leave off work and go below deck.

But he couldn't get to his sea chest. During the cargo shuffle, his chest—containing his seasickness remedy, changes of clothes, everything—had gotten wedged somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship, completely inaccessible.

Fred staggered into his tiny quarters and vomited. Then he lay down and tried to shut out the ship's agonizing pitch and yaw. Fortunately, Fred's Hartford friend Jim Goodwin was there to look after him. When Fred was well enough to eat again, Jim brought a tin pot of food, specially prepared by the ship's cook.

Fred took a bite. “Bah!”

“What's the matter?”

Fred explained that the food tasted really sour. But Jim assured him that the bad taste was in his own mouth from being sick.

“It will taste better in a minute,” Jim said. “You must get it down. It will do you a great deal of good.”

So Fred tried again. But the food still tasted awful. Had it maybe been prepared with saltwater? No, said Jim, the cook had most certainly used fresh rainwater collected in the ship's scuttlebutt. Fred tried one more time. But it was so repulsive that he couldn't choke down a single bite. So Jim decided to give it a try. The moment the spoon reached his mouth, he made a horrible grimace.

“Why, there is something wrong,” he said.

“I knew there was,” said Fred, and then he joked: “Try a little more; perhaps it will taste better.”

Turns out, the cook had viewed Fred's “special” dinner as an opportunity to unload some old meal that had gone sour. In fact, it was left over from the
Ronaldson
's previous voyage.

While he recouped, Fred was put on light duty, filing rust off the ship's cutlasses and blunderbusses. Encountering pirates was always a possibility; the ship's crew might have to use these weapons. Meanwhile, Jim separated out the palatable parts of meals—things like beans—and brought them to Fred. When Fred could keep down scouse, a thin stew made with cod and chunks of hard biscuit, the worst was finally behind him.

Fred had gotten his sea legs—or sea stomach, rather. He began to get into the flow of life on a ship. Water was forever collecting in the hull, and this bilge water had to be pumped. The decks were forever getting dirty and had to be swabbed. Fred took his turns on watch and was initiated into one of the great sailor's arts, learning to tie and splice various knots.

Fred soon gleaned that the crew of the
Ronaldson
worked hard, harder than crews aboard other ships. The weather had been calm so far, and Captain Fox was keen to take advantage by quickly covering as much distance as possible. As a result, the men were placed on extralong shifts, putting in eighteen-hour days, six days a week.

As the days bled one into another, Fred found that the thing he craved most, more even than a decent meal, was sleep. The vast unbroken sky, the sea stretching endlessly in all directions, the ceaseless rocking motion—it was like the ultimate soporific. As he worked, Fred constantly caught himself nodding off. But the lure of sleep was balanced by a powerful
disincentive. He'd snap to instantly. Two of the younger sailors dozed off while on duty and had been “rope's ended” as in: flogged.

A month into the journey, the
Ronaldson
crossed the equator. By now, Fred was growing comfortable going aloft, shimmying up ropes and edging out along narrow wooden spars, squaring the sails to catch the wind. Sometimes he'd climb more than one hundred feet above the deck. He was learning the lingo—“set the lee foretopmast stud'n sail” and “clew up main-royal” and “haul down flying jib,” directions for positioning the ship's twenty or so sails.

 

Part of the flow of life on a ship is sudden change. As the
Ronaldson
rounded the tip of Africa, it encountered a stretch of dreaded “Cape weather.” There was driving rain and wind so fierce that the main topsail was ripped to ribbons. This gave way to a blinding snowstorm. Because weather in the Southern Hemisphere is the reverse of weather in the Northern, the crew spent the day of July 4, 1843, battling a blizzard at sea.

The sleep-deprived men soon grew woozy. A sailor lost his purchase on a spar and pitched to the deck. It wasn't such a long fall, and his trajectory was fortunate. Had the sailor fallen a few feet farther over, he would have plunged directly into the roiling, frigid sea—and certain death.

Then Fred fell. He lost his grip on an icy rope and tumbled to the deck. He actually fell farther than the other sailor; he, too, could easily have been killed, had it not been for a piece of luck. His impact was cushioned when he landed on a coil of manila rope. Fred got right up, sustaining only an injury to his hand. In the biting cold, the hand soon stiffened and was useless.

This was the worst storm that anyone onboard had ever seen. Every man was needed; Fred was placed on watch, duty that could be performed by a one-handed sailor. Because the
Ronaldson
was so grossly overloaded, with each swell, huge volumes of frigid saltwater washed across the deck. Wind pelted the sailors with snow. When even the most hardened crewman began to show anxiety, Fred became alarmed. It looked like the
Ronaldson
might sink.

Captain Fox gave the order to furl the sails. The
Ronaldson
was nearly impossible to control at this point anyway. The sails had become useless,
a detriment even, simply catching the wild winds and driving the ship this way and that. For several terrifying days, the crew huddled below deck and waited while the naked-masted
Ronaldson
contended with the elements without any human guidance whatsoever. The ship was like a tiny cork bobbing on an infinite turbulent sea.