A Counterfeiter's Paradise (5 page)

At the age of thirteen, Sullivan ran away from home. He roamed the
countryside, wandering westward. The landscape he traversed must have offered countless scenes of the poverty endemic to Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century. Tenant families farmed potatoes on rugged plots of a few acres each, living in windowless cabins made of dried mud. Inside were single rooms lit by slow-burning peat fires, livestock dropping dung on earthen floors, a few broken stools. In 1727, Jonathan Swift deplored the “miserable dress and diet and dwelling of the people, the families of farmers who pay great rents living in filth and nastiness upon buttermilk and potatoes, not a shoe or stocking to their feet.” Two decades later, little had changed. In an impassioned 1748 editorial published in the Dublin periodical
Reformer
, a nineteen-year-old Edmund Burke wrote that tenant farmers wore “clothes so ragged, that they rather publish than conceal the wretchedness it was meant to hide…it is no uncommon sight to see a half dozen children run quite naked out of a cabin, scarcely distinguishable from a dunghill, to the great disgrace of our country with foreigners, who would doubtless report them savages.”

Anglo-Irish Protestants owned most of the land, and as the country’s population rose precipitously over the course of the eighteenth century, they raised rents and further subdivided their estates, forcing more people to live on less acreage. A series of laws passed by the British Parliament severely restricting Irish trade had made farming essentially the only livelihood, and the island became almost wholly dependent on agriculture. To make matters worse, the harvests failed regularly, causing devastating food shortages. A famine in 1740–1741 killed hundreds of thousands of people, emptied whole villages, and left the roads littered with unburied corpses.

A young face amid the scruffy sea of beggars and landless laborers then tramping around the country, Sullivan drifted about a hundred miles from home before meeting a rich man riding along the road. The teenage runaway made up a tearful story about being the orphan of poor Dubliners, and the performance was so convincing that the gentleman, affected by
the tale, brought Sullivan back to his estate to work as an errand boy. He ended up staying six years, enjoying what must have been a life of relative comfort. But as he grew older he began to feel homesick, and vowed to visit his parents at the next opportunity.

He soon had his chance. One day the gentleman gave him a letter to deliver, and after riding twenty miles to drop off the message, Sullivan continued for another fifty at breakneck speed, arriving at Waterford, a port town near his home, at four o’clock in the afternoon. Flushed and sweaty after a full day of travel, he ducked into a tavern to drink a tumbler of wine. But instead of cooling him down, the wine made him sick, and he had to lie down. Sprawled on a bed waiting to feel better, he was only thirty miles from his parents’ house—he had traveled more than twice that distance in a day but couldn’t finish the last leg of the journey. During his convalescence people asked Sullivan who he was, where he was headed; but he refused to reveal his true identity, perhaps fearing that news of his presence might reach his parents.

Once he had recovered, he unaccountably lost all interest in returning home. “After I got well I went down to the Wharf,” Sullivan reports, “where I saw several Passengers going on Board of a Vessel bound for Boston, in New-England.” Finding the captain, he negotiated to pay his passage with an indenture of service for four years, and after a few days, the ship set sail. Perhaps Sullivan couldn’t face seeing his parents after all those years, or was suddenly tempted by the promise of the New World; his motivations are unclear, but his destination was New England, three thousand miles across the ocean. By Sullivan’s own account, the most important decision of his life—his emigration to America—appears to have been completely spontaneous.

Within the first few pages of the counterfeiter’s tale, a personality emerges whose outlines are immediately recognizable from later accounts: impulsive and impatient, marked by a hustler’s itch for a better angle and resentment of anyone who stands in the way. Sullivan’s hostility toward
authority of any kind would only increase in the coming years, as the early tyranny of his well-intentioned parents became the tyranny of a government trying to capture and kill him. He followed his instincts, and often appeared to act without thinking, yet his resourcefulness rarely failed him, and he seemed to know intuitively how to get what he wanted. Sullivan was the kind of man it would have been easy to underestimate. He was a drunken Irishman who, in the language of the period, fell victim to vice; but he was also indisputably ambitious, driven first across the Irish countryside and then across the ocean by something greater than just pleasure-seeking.

IN THE FALL OF 1741,
a sloop named the
Sea-Flower
floated off the coast of Massachusetts. Its mast had split in a gale, and the boat drifted helplessly with the current. On deck, emaciated men and women, tongues swollen from thirst, sat staring at the horizon with bloodshot eyes. Many of their companions had died of starvation and sickness. The corpses that hadn’t been thrown overboard or left decomposing in the hold were sitting half-digested in the stomachs of the survivors: chunks of putrid muscle and brittle bone, carved in desperation from the withered bodies of former friends and relatives. The passengers ate six carcasses altogether. While cutting into the seventh, a vessel appeared, a British warship under the command of Captain Thompson Commander. Commander boarded the
Sea-Flower
and found that the ship had departed Belfast for Philadelphia months earlier.

Fifteen days into the voyage, the
Sea-Flower
’s captain had died, followed by the first mate; the mast snapped off, and the supplies of food and water ran out. Commander loaded provisions onto the ship and put one of his midshipmen on board to navigate the
Sea-Flower
into port. About a week later the survivors spotted the flickering candles of Boston’s lighthouse. By the time the
Sea
-
Flower
arrived in Boston Harbor
on October 31, 1741, it had been at sea for sixteen weeks, and 46 of the original 106 passengers had died. The survivors were taken to a hospital to recover, but no one seems to have seriously considered releasing the half-starved servants from their indentures. A month later, on December 1, an advertisement appeared in the
Boston Gazette
: “Just arrived in the Sloop Sea Flower, from the North of Ireland, several likely Men Servants, both Tradesmen and Farmers, their Time to be disposed of, for four years, by Capt. John Steel, at the North End of Boston.”

While an extreme case, the
Sea
-
Flower
was fairly typical of transatlantic journeys for indentured servants at the time. Sullivan probably boarded a boat at the Waterford pier in 1742, a year after the
Sea
-
Flower
disembarked from Belfast, and often went hungry during his nine-week passage. He cut a deal with the captain to fill his empty stomach: in exchange for adding three more years to his indenture (for a total of seven years), he would be allowed to eat as many biscuits—bread designed to survive long sea voyages—as he could in the span of ninety minutes, as timed by the ship’s hourglass. The skipper burst into laughter when he heard Sullivan’s offer. He agreed to it on one condition: the Irishman couldn’t have any water for the hour and a half he was eating. The captain upended the hourglass and Sullivan stuffed the biscuits into his mouth, the parched bread ground down to a semi-edible paste of flour and saliva by his teeth before being forced down his throat. A few dozen biscuits were worth this little piece of sadistic entertainment, the captain figured, even if he lost some servants to starvation as a result.

The reason for the nightmarish conditions aboard these ships was simple economics. People like Sullivan who were too poor to afford the trip to America sold contracts of their future labor for a certain period of time, usually between three to five years, to the ship’s owner, who recouped his expenses by retailing the contracts to customers in the colonies. Merchants tried to maximize profits by cramming as many servants as they could into their ships and keeping costs low by feeding them as little as possible.
Even if a quarter of their cargo died, the traders reasoned, enough would survive to turn a profit. Provisions consisted of heavily salted bread, meat, and cheese calculated to last for twelve weeks, although a ship making several stops along the British Isles and the Continent before departing for America could be at sea for much longer. Even if there had been enough food, it would have been nearly impossible to stay healthy under such circumstances. One observer who inspected the servants’ quarters on a ship in the middle of the eighteenth century described foul odors, vomiting, seasickness, fever, dysentery, constipation, boils, scurvy, and mouth rot.

If Sullivan came to America hoping to find the good life, he would soon be disappointed. When the ship arrived in Boston, the captain sold Sullivan’s seven-year indenture to a man named Captain Gillmore, who put the Irishman to work clearing wooded land on his estate near the St. George River in Maine. Maine in the 1740s was still mostly wilderness, beset by severe winters that kept its settlements rugged and small. It was also a major battleground, perhaps the bloodiest in North America, aggressively contested by the English, the French, and local Indian tribes for more than a hundred years. The fighting had been ruthless, with atrocities committed on all sides—villages burned to the ground, civilians massacred, corpses scalped. By the time Sullivan arrived, however, Maine had been relatively peaceful for almost two decades. While tensions still ran high—British colonists along the St. George River complained that they frequently lost horses and livestock to Indian raids—no major hostilities erupted.

The next conflict, when it came, would last for four years and yet leave the political map of North America virtually unchanged. It would also set in motion the chain of events that led Sullivan to counterfeiting and, along a parallel path, enabled Thomas Hutchinson to eliminate paper money from Massachusetts. It began in Europe, triggered by the unexpected death of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI. One rainy night in October 1740, after returning from a hunting trip, Charles ate a meal of sautéed mushrooms. He spent the night vomiting, became feverish, and died nine
days later; although there was never a conclusive diagnosis, most people blamed the mushrooms, which were said to be poisonous. Charles’s death posed a serious problem, since his succession was disputed: he had decreed that the crown would pass to his eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, but not everyone accepted her as legitimate, partly because of an ancient Frankish law forbidding royal inheritance by a woman. Prussia took advantage of the confusion by invading Silesia, an Austrian possession, in December 1740. The invasion eventually ignited the War of the Austrian Succession, with Prussia, France, and Spain on one side and Austria, Britain, and Russia on the other. As Voltaire recalled in his memoirs, “This plate of champignons changed the destiny of Europe.”

Despite heavy fighting on the Continent, war was not officially declared between England and France until the spring of 1744. The news reached the French at Louisbourg on May 3, a full twenty days before it reached Boston. Emboldened by the element of surprise, the French wasted little time, striking British positions in Nova Scotia and dispatching privateers to capture British ships. This began the North American phase of the War of the Austrian Succession, named King George’s War after Britain’s King George II, the same conflict that would soon force the Massachusetts legislature to boost its production of paper money. When Sullivan’s master, Gillmore, heard of the French attacks, he decided to move his family to safety in Boston, fearing a wider war in the Northeast. He sold the remainder of his servant’s contract to Captain Jabez Bradbury, the commanding officer at a nearby fort along the St. George River.

Bradbury was a veteran of colonial Maine. He had spent the last thirty-odd years living in trading outposts along the northeastern frontier, and was almost fifty when he took command at the St. George River in 1742, where he had the unenviable task of manning an isolated garrison in territory inhabited by mostly hostile Indian tribes. He hated it, and in his correspondence with the governor of Massachusetts, William Shirley, he frequently requested to be reassigned, or “diliverd from this place of
torment,” as he put it in one such letter. By the summer of 1744, around the time that Sullivan got there, the mood at the fort must have been extremely tense. Now that the British and the French were officially at war, it was only a matter of time before the Indians, many of whom were allied with the French, emerged from the dense cover of the Maine forest and attacked the garrison. When he arrived, Sullivan found a fort full of frightened soldiers commanded by an aging officer who loathed his job.

WHILE SULLIVAN AND BRADBURY’S MEN
waited, their superiors in Boston set their eyes farther north, to another fiercely contested strip of terrain, Nova Scotia. The British had controlled mainland Nova Scotia since 1713, but Île Royale, the landmass that capped the peninsula, remained in French hands. Its main settlement, Louisbourg, was a heavily fortified seaport and one of New France’s most important trading hubs. Hoping to consolidate British control over the North Atlantic, Governor Shirley started building support for an ambitious plan to capture the fort. The proposal, approved by the Massachusetts legislature in February 1745, was wildly impractical. It involved using three thousand poorly trained New England militiamen to stage an amphibious assault that even an elite British regiment would have found challenging. When operations began in the spring of 1745, the campaign started stumbling right away. Discipline among the New England militias, whose ranks consisted of plunder-hungry colonists with little to no military experience, was nonexistent. They made all sorts of mistakes, like loading the siege cannons with multiple shots, thinking that doubling the ammunition would pack twice the punch. Instead, the iron siding of the cannons burst, and the shrapnel from these explosions caused a significant number of casualties on the New England side. If the battlefield was chaotic and carnivalesque by day, the camps at night were no different. The men sat around the fire drinking, singing, and roasting hunks of meat carved from poached French cattle.