The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (11 page)

Dawn brought a charge from the assembled dragoons of the 14th Hus-sars, who swarmed throughout the city and bluntly set about restoring order. By the break of day hundreds of Bristolians lay dead and wounded

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by sword and fire. It was, wrote a nineteenth-century British historian,

“the most disastrous outbreak of popular violence which has occurred in this country during the present century.”

The glow from the fires burning in Queen Square could be seen for forty miles around, and East Brent, where Richard Adams Locke and his family were living, was just thirty miles from Bristol. The riot’s epicenter was only four blocks from the shop where he had edited the
Cornucopia,
and he had surely strolled often through that beautiful square, now reduced to ashes, surely taken a drink in those tidy pubs now pillaged and burned. Two years earlier Bristol had endured some anti-Catholic riots, but this time the rioters were overwhelmingly Irish. In a single night, Catholics had demolished the goodwill that the long emancipation campaign had managed to foster; now, surely, would come the backlash.

What future would there be for a writer who had opposed the claims of Anglican and Catholic alike? He had left Somerset once before, as soon as he had the chance, but over time the ties of familiarity had pulled him back; now, though, those ties were badly frayed. His parents were both dead; the estate would not be coming to him; no reasonable job prospects were on the horizon. He was not a young man anymore, and leaving would get harder with each passing year. They could always go back to London, but he found that his thoughts kept drifting toward America, that beacon of the Republicans: the land of economic opportunity, freed from the weight of aristocracy and prelacy, where he might shed some of the burdens of his own history.

In November 1831, Richard and Esther gathered their belongings into five bags, as much as they could expect to carry, plus the family’s bedding; after bundling up Adelaide against the cold, they climbed aboard their hired coach. Bristol was nearly a day’s journey, even on the newly tar-macked roads. When they arrived, the coach dropped them at the shipping office. The office was crowded with families like theirs; it was warm from the heat of the bodies. Bags were piled everywhere. Outside, a pall seemed to have settled over the city.

He booked passage on the
James Cropper,
embarking at Bristol, bound for New York.

At sea, the nights were always worst. He lay sleepless in the narrow berth, no more than boards and sacking; his sides ached from the incessant rolling, the sudden, stomach-clenching plunges. Of all the transat-

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Bearer of the Falcon Crest

lantic trips a ship could make, this one—winter westbound—was the roughest. The trade winds had long since grown frigid, gathering strength as they swept across the ocean, and they seemed to run straight at the face of the ship no matter which way it tacked: the sailors said that a westward passage was like running uphill the whole way. His wife and baby daughter were in the women’s cabin at the other end of the ’tweendeck. At least some of his fellow cabin passengers were managing some sleep; the snores, like the waves, rose and fell, maintaining a steady rhythm and then, unexpectedly, turning loud and agitated. At such moments, at least, they drowned out the cries of the pigs and geese and chickens housed in makeshift pens on deck, the animals obviously terrified, as if cognizant of the fate that awaited them downstairs in the galley, sometime before the ship made landfall in New York. Worse still were the nighttime sounds of the ship itself, the rale of the wind as it streamed through the riggings, the creak of the masts twisting, the groans of the hull, its joints wracked by dozens of such hard ocean crossings: a dowager’s complaints and, for one listening, a grim reminder of mortality.

Richard Adams Locke was now thirty-one; he had been to London, and to Bristol, and none of it had amounted to anything. His life now was on the water: his wife and daughter asleep in the women’s cabin, and, packed in the upper hold, the few books and journals he had managed to carry aboard along with the family’s clothes and bedding. Years before he had edited journals of his own, at a time of youthful optimism, when he felt flush with his own powers. Sometimes on the ship he could regain that feeling: evenings when the wine and the talk flowed, the passengers gathering in the saloon for group singing or charades, whatever might distract attention from the dark, churning sea outside. He was the sort of man who could talk about anything, from the latest political scandal or Sir Walter Scott novel to recent discoveries in electromagnetism and scriptural evidence of Christ’s divinity. It was easy to lose himself in stories. Inside the cabin, though, it was different, especially when he was lying awake at night, his ears full of the ship’s unsteady thrumming, the alcohol still singing in his veins. Then memories would have swirled around him, as foul as the gases that drifted up from the bilge; in such moments, he might have risen from his berth, donned his coat and scarf, and climbed the narrow ladder heading topsides.

The first moment above was like plunging his head into an icy bath.

His cheeks instantly began to burn from the cold, and his eyes watered,

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but the fresh air was a tonic after the suffocating closeness of the cabin.

Out here the world had narrowed itself down to renditions of black and white. Beyond the rail of the ship, the North Atlantic roared invisibly. In the distance, in every direction, water blended into sky, the edge of the ocean perceptible only by the absence of stars. He had been watching night skies ever since he was a boy, in the fields around his family’s farm in East Brent, but he had never before seen a sky quite like this, so alive, flooded with stars, most splayed out in undifferentiated washes of light, but some of them linked together in his mind as constellations. There was Orion stalking the east, the Dippers to the north, and straight overhead, descending in a line, Aries, Pisces, Aquarius. He scanned the teeming eastern sky—Murzim, Lepus, Eridanus, Cetus: the dog running with the hare, the river opening itself up to the sea monster. And reigning over them all, huge and brilliant, the moon. What was it Shelley had called her?
Orbéd
maiden, with white fire laden.
He had read deeply in astronomy, he knew full well that the moon shone purely with reflected light, but at such moments, with his lungs aching, his cheeks wet with spray, he felt he could almost see that fire on the lunar surface: burning white and clear, and seeming almost near enough for warmth.

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c h a p t e r
4

The Atrocious

Impositions of Matthias

The word
skyscraper
originally referred to the mast of a ship, and though the multitude of ships’ masts in the port of New York in the early nineteenth century is invariably described by writers then and now as a “forest,” it was at least as much a skyline, a magnificent cluster of spires rising up unexpectedly from the water’s edge, defining the essence of the city, its splendor and clamor and measureless ambition, built in pursuit of commerce. Like the later architectural skyline, it was a sight that inspired awe and, invariably, optimism in those who saw it for the first time, from the water, on a ship arriving from far away.

Richard Adams Locke’s ship, the
James Cropper,
arrived in New York on January 13, 1832, after a two-month voyage from Bristol. The ship likely moored overnight at Sandy Hook, the spit of land in New Jersey that set the outer limit of New York’s waters; at first light of morning the passengers, weary but happy, would have dressed in their best clothes and come on deck to watch the entrance into the harbor. From the Lower Bay the ship sailed into the Narrows, where, after the great expanse of the bay, the land seemed to close down on the water; to the starboard lay the scattered villages of Brooklyn, and to the port side the low hills of Staten Island, the farmhouses and cottages there giving off the early-morning smoke of chimney fires. Beyond the Narrows came the Upper Bay, at the end of which the water forked into two rivers, the East River and the Hudson, then commonly known as the North River. Now, in the distance, came the first sight of New York, at the southernmost tip the
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greenery of the Battery making a brief pause amid the thicket of masts sprouting from hundreds of ships moored on the narrow wharves that jutted out, fingerlike, from both sides of the island. Manhattan was

“belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs,” as it would later be described by Herman Melville, who, like Richard Adams Locke, worked for the Customs Service for two decades when he could not support himself as a writer.

It was no small feat for a captain to successfully navigate New York Harbor, as it abounded with ships, the surface as full of motion and color and bewildering diversity of form as the water below: stately packet ships, flat-bottomed steamboats and ferries belching black smoke, schooners and sloops, tugboats and fishing skiffs and the barks of the oystermen, speedy news boats on their way to meet the oceangoing packets, attaching themselves like remoras on a whale, pausing only long enough to receive the latest batch of European newspapers that within hours would be fil-leted for items of interest to the readers of New York’s merchant papers.

As once, it was said, all roads led to Rome, now all waterways seemed to lead to New York. The East River ran into the Long Island Sound, and from there to New England and its fishing fleets and factories; the North River began its journey far upstate, where it linked to the newly opened Erie Canal, extending westward to the farms of the American Midwest; and the harbor itself provided unparalleled access to the Atlantic, because it was large, deep, and almost never blocked by ice, even, as now, in the middle of winter. By the 1830s most of the nation’s import business flowed through New York Harbor, with more than 1,400 ships arriving annually from 150 ports around the world, and thousands more from America’s own coastal cities. New York’s docks presented an ever-changing daily exhibition of hemp, iron, lumber, coal, cotton, tobacco, granite, molasses, coffee, and innumerable other goods dug or cultivated or otherwise taken from the earth.

Even in the early hours the streets and docksides were thronged, a babel of sailors, of carpenters, caulkers, riggers, rope makers, ship owners off to read the merchant papers at one of the local coffee houses, well-dressed families waiting to board a ship or having just disembarked from one. For families like the Lockes, looking to make a home in the city but having no family to call upon or much money of their own, the ill-lit, dingy streets around the waterfront offered numerous boardinghouses where, for anywhere from fifty cents to three dollars a
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week, payable in advance, guests would be provided a small, damp, poorly ventilated room, with little in the way of sanitary facilities.

(Backyard outhouses were the rule; boardinghouses did not supply chamberpots to their guests, the vast majority of whom were too new or simply too poor to have purchased their own; as the saying of the day had it, they were “without a pot to piss in.”) Often as not, the paying guests had to share their room with permanent residents such as flies, bedbugs, and wharf rats. Still, despite the lowness of the accommodations boardinghouses were a necessary expedient for many new arrivals, and probably it was in one of them that the Locke family found lodging, at least for a short while, and probably for a time after that in one of the “rookeries” just then becoming widespread in New York—large buildings, such as warehouses, breweries, and churches, converted by enterprising property owners into numerous tiny apartments. The Lockes do not appear to have obtained a fixed residence until sometime between May 1833 and May 1834, when they settled at 18 Duane Street, on the corner of Chatham.

It was one of the noisiest intersections in all of New York. Street vendors assembled there daily, under sun and lamplight, each makeshift stall displaying items for sale: apples and melons carted in from Long Island and New Jersey, coconuts shipped in from tropical islands, homemade buckwheat cakes, ears of corn boiled in the husk and sprinkled with a little salt, shoelaces, pocket combs, boxes of matches split from pine and dipped in brimstone, oysters and chestnuts in the colder months and ice cream and lemonade in the warmer. All of the wares were available for only one cent, as the vendors, men and women alike, beckoned to the hurrying passersby:
A penny apiece! A penny apiece!

The cries resounded through the street, echoing from the stained wooden facings of the buildings pushed up tightly against it.
A penny
apiece!
The cries of the vendors were the Locke family’s constant companion, their rooster crows in the morning and the lullabies by which three-year-old Adelaide fell asleep at night.

That little apartment above a shabby storefront, so assailed by the noises of the city, was a world removed from Mill Batch Farm, the tidy whitewashed farmhouse with the porch that ran the length of the house, and on some of those clamorous New York days Richard Adams Locke must have thought back to that farm and wondered if they had made the right choice in leaving. Still, he knew, there was no future for them in Somerset; New
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York, for all of its difficulties, offered a fresh start. Someday he would move the family out of the city, perhaps buy a house of their own, ideally some-place near the water, where Adelaide could watch the ships coming in from all over the world. It wasn’t far off, he knew. He just had to establish himself first, put together a bit of money.