Chesapeake (37 page)

He then moved to the other end, and here he faced problems of the most acute and perplexing nature: how to hook upon the fore end of the backbone the front end of the ship, which required a rising curve. While the Indians worked squaring away the long reach of the spine, he concentrated on this problem, and saw that if he could shape the forward end of the log into an upward curve, however slight, he would start with an advantage. So quickly he redirected the cutting so that the forward end would achieve the maximum upward sweep. He was not able to gain much, but when the backbone was finally finished, it did curve upward, and on this advantage he would erect the crucial forward thrust of his ship.

But with each success new problems evolved and now he must determine the precise manner in which the bow of his ship, the cutting edge which would breast the waves, would be put together. He had not the slightest instruction as to how this could be accomplished. He was a house carpenter, but like any prudent man he could sit down and apply what he knew about houses to ships, and the crucial fact he clung to was that an open rectangle could never be stable, because sufficient pressure at any one of the corners would collapse it, whereas a diagonal, if hammered securely into position, would permit enormous pressures to be exerted on the corners without collapse; the resulting triangles might break apart, or the wood might shatter, but they were stable.

Abstractly, the problem was simple: crisscross the interior of the ship with diagonals and no storm would ever be able to collapse its sides; of course, no cargo or passengers could be loaded either, because the interior would be consumed with diagonals.

So the problem really became this: how to achieve the rigidity of the diagonal without using ones which would prohibit the loading of cargo? Like most important difficulties, it was easily stated, laboriously solved.

He was at an impasse. How he wished that some great ship from London would sail into Devon so that he might inspect it. None came.
One page of a book from London would explain everything, but he had no such books. Bitterly he recalled his tedious days aboard the ships that had carried him from London to Boston to Barbados to Marigot Bay to Devon: I spent all that time on ships and saw nothing.

That was not entirely correct. He had seen a great deal about decking a ship and building bulwarks and finishing off the gunwales, but like an artist who rides a horse a hundred times, and never comprehends it until he tries to draw it, or like a novelist who has witnessed a human situation repeatedly but has not really understood it until forced to state in cold words what happened, he had lived in the heart of ships but had not seen them.

Ironically, during his confusion, the solution lay all about him … on the ground. As he paced at the forward end of his log, eyes fastened on the waiting curve, he happened to stumble, and when he looked down to see what had tripped him, he saw the massive roots of the oak sweeping sideways from the stump of the severed trunk. He stopped, studied the curious joint made by root and trunk, then knelt and began feverishly scraping away the earth, and when he finished he had laid bare one of the most powerful joints in nature, the flexed kneelike structure that is formed where a heavy root branches out from a main trunk, and as it lay exposed Paxmore realized that he had found the solution to his problem: instead of bracing his exposed bow with cumbersome diagonals, he would build into it this massive joint which contained its own bracing.

But when he turned to his Indians, about to ask them to help him dig out this knee, he found that they had gone; they were tired of building ships and would work no more. For him to continue without them would be impossible, so in profound anxiety he launched his log canoe by himself and sailed to Devon to ask the Steeds what he must do. When he reached there he found them occupied at the wharf, for a ship from Barbados had recently dropped anchor in Jamestown, and the Steed sloop had brought across the bay Samuel Spence’s extraordinary letter and a cargo which Paxmore could not have anticipated:

The slaves had not yet been unloaded, and when Paxmore went to the sloop he found them huddled forward, and he wondered why, in the safety of harbor, they still clung together, but when he jumped down into the boat he saw that they had been chained to prevent disturbance during the passage across the bay. He stood for a moment scrutinizing these strangers: he saw their black forms, their promising muscles, the way in which the women held themselves proudly, even in chains.

‘Cut them loose and I’ll take them to Peace Cliff,’ he called to Henry Steed, but Steed, who had often overheard Jamestown planters gossiping about their slaves, said cautiously, ‘Safer to keep them bound till they’re off the water,’ and he directed his captain to sail the sloop to the cliff. There the blacks were marched onto the wharf, still in chains: six strong men, three women of childbearing age, all wearing iron collars. The Eastern Shore had received its first cargo of slaves, the lawful property of Quakers.

‘All prime,’ the captain said as he threw the chains back into the sloop.

‘We can use them,’ Paxmore said. The women he led to the house, where Ruth Brinton was on the floor, nailing together an extra table for her kitchen. She was astonished to see the blacks and asked, ‘What are these?’

‘They’re ours.’

‘In what way?’

‘Samuel Spence, in Barbados, sent them in discharge of his debt to me.’

‘And what are we to do with them?’

‘They belong to us. They’re our slaves.’

Ruth Brinton rose, wiped her hands, and studied the women. She could remember when she was that age, burdened with perplexities, and thought: How much greater theirs must be. To her husband she said, ‘It would be quite improper for us to hold slaves. It would be against the will of God.’

And then began the great debate which would ultimately invade every legislature, every church and every home. Edward Paxmore cited three facts, the first two of which were economic and therefore of little persuasion
where Ruth Brinton was concerned: ‘Spence owed me the money and had the right to pay it in his way. Also, the slaves arrive just when we need them most. God must have sent them to help us finish the ship.’

His wife looked at him, aghast that he would offer such irrelevancies, but his third citation was moral, and not at all irrelevant: ‘When I was an indentured servant in Massachusetts it was the custom for preachers to sermonize once each quarter on the duties of servant to master. How well I recall those thundering admonitions!’ And he began to recite, as he remembered them, those compelling passages in which God specifically ordained and supported a system of slavery:

Ruth Brinton was appalled as she heard this recital; she could not believe that he was taking such teaching seriously. It was as if she were seeing for the first time the whole profile of her husband—and it was ugly.

‘Edward,’ she said with iron force in her soft words, ‘does thee not realize that the whole teaching of Jesus is opposed to the slavery of one man to another?’

‘I only know what the Bible says, and it says over and over that some men are to be slaves, and are bound to obey their masters.’ Before his wife could interrupt he said, ‘Now, the Bible also says that masters must be just, and that they must look after the welfare of the slave. The ministers in Boston used to emphasize that, too. In fairness to them I must say they always warned the masters to be gentle.’ Then, in recollection of those distant sermons, he added, ‘But I do recall that they warned us servants more sternly than they warned our masters.’

He would be a good master. He stopped all work on the ship so that stout cottages could be built for his slaves. He suggested to Ruth Brinton that she take the women into the house to do the heavy work, but she refused. She did, however, train one of them to look after her baby; the others grew vegetables and tended tobacco.

The men, tall and straight, proved excellent helpers at the ship, Abiram and Dibo showing such skill in ripping out planks that Paxmore established a sawyers’ pit for them: huge pine logs were rolled into
position atop a deep pit, in which Dibo stood day after day. Abiram, the stronger of the two, perched on the log, holding a long two-handled saw whose teeth he kept biting into a straight line along the pine. At the shout of an African word, Dibo in the pit would jump in the air, wrap himself about the saw’s handle and exert all his weight in pulling downward. This descent of the saw made the cut; Dibo then pulled it loose, shouted another word, and Abiram would haul the heavy saw back into position. In this way, these two men hacked out the planks from which the ship would be constructed.

But when the time came to fit the timbers to the keel, and thus form the skeleton of the ship, Paxmore ran out of roots with which to brace his work. He searched the cliff area for oak roots formed into right angles, but found none; he did uncover a few of pine, but quickly learned that these lacked the requisite strength, and he was wandering far from his own lands when he came upon Stooby Turlock hunting wolves. He reported to his wife on this first meeting:

When Paxmore required additional roots to frame out the ship, he looked for Stooby but did not find him. Learning that the young man lived in the marsh with his disreputable father, he sailed there one afternoon, failed to find the entrance, and was beating about the edges when a musket shot rattled past the canoe. Rising from the rushes like an apparition, Timothy Turlock shouted, ‘Who that?’

‘I’m looking for Stooby.’

Turlock spat in the water, then indicated where the entrance to his creek lay, and when Paxmore drew up to the rickety wharf the old man was waiting. ‘Can I see Stooby?’ the carpenter asked.

‘Not here.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me—’

‘You can wait.’ He helped Paxmore from the canoe, then led him to a filthy shack in which a heavyset blonde was lounging. She made no effort to greet him, so he sat on a log which had been propped on tripod legs, and as he waited there he became aware that in one corner of the hut a young girl was standing.

‘It’s Nancy from James Lamb’s!’ he cried, rather pleased to find someone he knew. ‘What’s thee doing here?’

‘She run away,’ Turlock said. Paxmore could not know that this was
the child with whom old Turlock had frequently been found in bed. He assumed that she had escaped for the usual reasons given by servants and slaves.

‘James Lamb is a kind master,’ he argued, and no one refuted him.

Stooby did not appear, and after a prolonged wait which grew more and more unpleasant, for the hut and its occupants were loathsome, Paxmore announced that he must get back to the cliff. ‘Mr. Turlock, will thee please tell thy son I need more roots?’

‘I may,’ and the visit ended, but three days later Stooby came to the shipyard with word that he had located more than two dozen excellent specimens and that if Paxmore would assign three slaves to do the digging, he would deliver them to the site. It was in this offhanded way that Stooby began working for Paxmore, never on a regular basis, for he refused to be tied to any job; he simply responded whenever Paxmore needed special timbers or roots.

‘He’s really stupid,’ Paxmore told his wife, ‘and yet he isn’t.’ What he failed to discover was that whenever Stooby delivered wood, he studied with ratlike eyes every new step taken in building this ship. In the end, Stooby would know as much about building ships as Paxmore, and he would have taken one more giant stride toward becoming the complete waterman: he would know not only the waters but the ships that sailed them.

The most remarkable aspect of Edward Paxmore’s shipbuilding was his collection of tools. Whatever he needed, he had to fashion for himself, and at the end of two years he owned an amazing collection of implements. He had, of course, his saws and adzes, those sovereign tools of the boatbuilder; Paul Steed, watching him carve a plank with delicate precision, told his brother, ‘Paxmore could write his name with an adze.’

He made clamps for holding small items, gouges for tearing away unwanted wood, augurs for boring holes, and the most intricate saws. Since nails were precious beyond gold—all colonial construction depended upon what could be imported from England—he learned to carve small pieces of oak into nail-like forms; when they were hammered or screwed into position and water applied, they swelled and held disparate parts together almost as well as metal nails.