Chesapeake (66 page)

For his part, he loved her more than he had when they first traveled together in Virginia. Her smile was so genuine, and it irradiated her face so totally that it kept him enchanted. She was kind, and laughing; any room she entered was illuminated, and it pleased him to see the way men inadvertently followed her with their admiring eyes. Under her care, Rosalind’s Revenge became the outstanding house on the Eastern Shore insofar as generous hospitality was concerned, and when she became visibly pregnant both she and Simon moved with stately pride, and his love for her increased.

‘When I think of the years we might have been married,’ he said ruefully one day, and she answered, ‘There was no possibility that we could have been wed a day earlier. I wasn’t ready.’

When he asked her how it was that a girl so charming had been free to come to America, ‘I mean, why weren’t you married already?’ she said, ‘From the time I was a little girl Guy told me that my fate was to come to America and marry you. He used to bring your letters home and let me read them … tobacco and pig iron … I became an expert on the Maryland plantation.’ She smoothed the apron over her protruding stomach and said, ‘He also told me you were rich and kind.’ She reached up and drew her thumbnail down his chin. ‘And he said that in France you had acquired perfect manners. He made you sound irresistible. So I waited.’

‘You saved my life,’ he said simply, and she accepted this, for she could see the change that had come over him since her arrival. She knew that prior to her visit his life had been trapped in an iron routine: each day he had risen, read in the classics, written his letters to Europe, breakfasted, and gone about the business of managing a great plantation. He had assumed that this was his permanent destiny and that if he conserved the wealth of the plantation, it would pass into the hands of his nephews, who would live much as he was living.

Jane’s arrival had revolutionized that staid routine. She had driven him to new occupations, such as boating for pleasure and having neighboring plantation couples in for six or seven days. Also, the orders being carried to London by the Steed captains were much different now, and
when the fine furniture arrived the interior of Rosalind’s Revenge became as elegant as the exterior.

‘You launched a revolution,’ he told her affectionately one morning in February, but instead of acknowledging his compliment as she usually did, she startled him by saying abruptly, ‘Don’t use that word around me. These damned colonies want nothing but revolution.’

Eager to assure her, he said that whereas Maryland might kick up its heels, it would never break away from the king. ‘We might have arguments,’ he said quietly. ‘And maybe even an exchange of fire. But we’ll always honor our loyalty to the king.’ She rejected this, claiming that everything the colonials were doing implied disloyalty to the king, but he reminded her that in
The Patamoke Determination
it was he who had insisted on the sentences reaffirming loyalty.

‘Words!’ she said, and the force with which she spoke made him realize that she had for some time been brooding about the actions of the colonies. Some days later Simon was handed an unsealed letter for transmission to London. It was addressed to Guy Fithian, and since it was a family custom for both Jane and Simon to add postscripts to each other’s letters to Guy, he casually unfolded the paper and was shocked by its contents:

Soberly, his jaw quivering, he carried the letter to his desk, lit a taper, melted the wax and sealed it, without adding the customary postscript. He placed it with the substantial pile of correspondence intended for Europe, leaving it on top so that Jane could satisfy herself that it had been posted. He said nothing to her about its contents, but he did become trebly attendant, listening to her complaints about their neighbors and responding to each of her small demands.

When word reached the Chesapeake of how conditions in Massachusetts had deteriorated after Lexington, with rebels continuing to fire upon the king’s men, Jane fell into a despondency from which Simon could not lure her. She began ranting openly against the drabness of Maryland life: ‘No breeding, no sense of station. And those damnable month-long visits by plantation boors. And what I simply cannot abide a day longer, the monotony of the greasy cooking.’

Steed deemed it wise not to remind her that only a month previous she had been praising Maryland cooking. Instead he did his best to placate her, but nothing offset the fact that insolent colonials had fired upon the king’s troops. Her impressions were intensified when Captain Turlock sailed into Patamoke with triumphant news about the
Whisper.
In a moment of thoughtlessness Simon invited him to Devon, where his crude manners and peasant gloating infuriated Jane. Turlock said, ‘This schooner can do anything! Fore-and-aft sails, close to wind. Big ones upstairs, before the wind like a hawk.’ Enthusiastically he reported on a close brush with an English frigate and on how the
Whisper
had shown her heels.

‘Did you fire on the king’s ship?’ Jane asked.

‘Didn’t need to.’ Turlock recalled the encounter and grinned, his broken teeth showing through his beard. ‘Matt stood aft, laughing at the Englishmen as we pulled away.’

‘Who’s Matt?’ Jane asked.

‘My son.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Soon to be eight.’

Jane gave a little shudder and left the room.

‘I think you’d better get back to the
Whisper,
’ Steed said, and in some confusion the lanky captain left. He had expected dinner, but at the wharf he assured Simon, ‘I’m ready to sail any time,’ and they stood beside the vessel and talked over plans.

‘Always the same problems,’ Steed said, one foot on the gunwale. ‘No salt. No money.’

‘In Jamaica they say the Portuguese port St. Ubes has plenty of salt.’

‘Our ships have never sailed there. Too close to England.’

‘I’d like to try St. Ubes. Big cargo, big profit.’

‘You willing to risk it?’

‘With
Whisper,
yes.’ So it was agreed that Turlock would try a risky
passage to a new port whose salt mines were reputed to be the best after the ones in Poland and Austria.

When Steed said that his perpetual problem was money, he did not mean that the Devon plantations were in financial straits; they were building two more Atlantic schooners and the manufactures were doing well. The problem was: the rich men of the English government refused to coin sufficient currency to enable the colonies to function. For a century tobacco had been utilized as coinage, but with the dreadful slumps in recent years, it no longer served as currency; instead business was conducted with the aid of an incredible mélange of paper documents and European coins. Letters of credit from one merchant to another were circulated like pound notes, and none were more highly sought than those of John Hancock, Robert Morris and Simon Steed. But these were scarcely adequate to meet the needs of a burgeoning commerce, so every colonist had to contrive one trick or another to get his hands on real money.

‘Were you able to acquire any coins?’ Steed asked.

‘That’s what I really came for,’ Turlock said, and he took Steed to a bench beside the creek, and there, when they were alone, he confided, ‘We took a merchantman. Spanish. Look.’ And carefully he unwrapped a large cloth packet which had been secreted in his coat. Loosening the ends, he spread a hoard of gold coins in the sunlight.

‘You have big-joes!’ Steed said excitedly, for it had been some time since he had seen these splendid gold coins of Portugal; they had been minted in 1723 during the reign of King João and bore his bewigged portrait and name in Latin, Ioannes, from which the American name derived. A whole coin, heavy and worth about thirty dollars, was called popularly a big-joe; when sawed in half, which was usually the case, it was a half-joe.

‘And these,’ Turlock said proudly, sifting the pile to show the Spanish doubloons, the English sovereigns and the mass of livres tournois, the smaller French coin which circulated the world as a standard.

‘It was a worthy trip,’ Steed said, and as he retied the packet, returning it to his captain for deposit at headquarters in Patamoke, he reflected on how strange it was that the capture of a merchant ship should be celebrated on Devon: What our family used to condemn as piracy we now praise as patriotism.

The long voyage that Captain Turlock started in late 1775 was notable for a chaotic chain of events: the vast profits earned on Portuguese salt, the running fight with the English frigate
Chancery,
the two months in a Lisbon jail for lack of proper papers, the capture of a rich merchantman heading home from Peru, the start of Matt’s education.

His teacher was the second mate, a Choptank man named Mr. Semmes who had been taught to read by the fat Rector of Wrentham. When Captain Turlock learned that his mate had studied with the rector, there was salty discussion of that churchman’s habits and Mr. Semmes said, ‘He taught me to read, hoping to acquire thereby a servant for nothing. When I said I was going to sea, he sought to have me arrested as a deserting bondsman.’

‘Did you punch him in the nose?’

‘No.’

‘Pity.’

Mr. Semmes had a fine sense of the sea, and one day as young Matt was lugging him his breakfast he caught the boy’s arm and asked, ‘Do you intend being a captain?’ and Matt said, ‘I do,’ and Mr. Semmes said, ‘Then you must learn to read and write,’ and the boy said, ‘Cap’m doesn’t read or write,’ and Captain Turlock knocked the lad down and growled as he got up, ‘I’d be a better captain if I did.’

So the lessons began. On a fiat board Mr. Semmes drew the alphabet and the numbers, and for three days Matt memorized them. Within a brief time he was writing not only his own name but also those of the crew; he would lie on a hatch cover and write down the name of every sailor who passed, and before long he knew the spelling of each.

But what fascinated him was the ship’s log, for he realized that it recorded facts much more important than names. ‘The life of the ship is written here,’ Mr. Semmes said as he made his entries, and Matt tried to be present whenever the observations were recorded: ‘Course East-north-east. Day calm. All canvas.’ And to understand better what the words meant, he mastered the compass and could box it as well as any sailor, rattling off the hundred and twenty-eight points as if playing a game. ‘Listen, Mr. Semmes, I’m going to do the Second Quarter.’ And he would stand at attention and recite in a monotone, ‘East, East one-quarter south, East one-half south, East three-quarters south, East by south. And now the hard one! East-south-east three-quarters east.’ And as he completed each quarter, Mr. Semmes would applaud.

The day came when Captain Turlock shot the noonday sun, then walked to where the ship’s log was kept, and instead of barking his data to Mr. Semmes he gave them to Matt and watched with glowing eye as his red-headed son wrote in large childish letters: ‘Latitude 39° 10′ North. Longitude 29° 15′ West approx.’ Teach entered his positions in this form because with the aid of a good sextant captured from a Spanish merchantman he could be sure of his latitude, but lacking a reliable clock, he had to guess his longitude.

But when he saw the entry completed, as well as Mr. Semmes could have done, he had to turn away lest he betray his emotion, for Matt was the first in his lineage going back five thousand years who could write,
and his arrival at learning seemed much like the arrival of the colonies at nationhood: prospects unlimited lay ahead.

In the spring of 1776 it became apparent that the contentious lawyers of Massachusetts and the philosophical patriots of Virginia were determined to take the thirteen colonies out of the British Empire, and nothing that the more prudent loyalists of Pennsylvania and Maryland might caution was listened to. Echoes of meetings occurring in Philadelphia, in which men as stable as the Marylander Charles Carroll were actually discussing revolution, filtered down to the Eastern Shore, but they were not credited, for most of the citizens in towns like Patamoke or on plantations like Devon wanted to remain attached to England. They saw every reason for doing so; they calculated each advantage.

Levin Paxmore was typical. As a Quaker he had lived to see his religion accepted without serious restraint; true, he had to pay a fine for not drilling with the militia, and he still had to contribute thirty pounds of tobacco each year to the Church of England, but he viewed these only as irritating impositions. He was free to pray as he wished, to marry whom he liked, to speak his mind in meeting, and to rear his children in his faith, and these were freedoms to be cherished. His business also prospered under English rule; for the past nineteen years he had risen every morning with more work to do than he could complete, and while he often had to wait for payment because no money circulated, he was never defrauded. Right now, things were better than they had been in many years; he had finished two schooners for Simon Steed, and had two more under way, with additional inquiries from officials in Philadelphia. For some time he had known that gunfire with the English was inescapable, but he still trusted that it would be brief and without damaging consequences. But now he began hearing rumors of actual separation, and some of his more apprehensive neighbors were talking about returning to the homeland, England, if the troubles worsened. When two Quakers from the meeting approached him with a sensible plan for repatriation, he assembled his family in that spare room at Peace Cliff in which Ruth Brinton Paxmore had laid down the principles by which her brood would live. ‘I believe we should stay with the land,’ he said. ‘Our task is to bring God’s commonwealth into being here.’