Chesapeake (67 page)

‘Even if Maryland separates from England?’ Ellen asked.

‘There will be no separation,’ he said firmly. ‘I expect trouble, perhaps serious trouble, but we will always be English.’ And by holding up his left hand, as if to silence further comment, he forestalled his wife’s question as to why, if they were to be English, he was building ships intended for use against the English.

For Simon Steed such decisions were more difficult. His whole being was tied to Europe; his business interests focused in England, for which
he felt the warmest ties. In London, Fithians held his wealth; in Berkshire, his forefathers had defended the faith; and while his own education had been in France, it was to England that he looked for fundamental leadership. Up and down the Atlantic coast thousands of men like him were casting up their spiritual accounts and deciding to remain loyal to the king. In Simon’s case the impetus to do so was greater, because he was married to an English girl who desperately wanted to go home.

Steed was distressed that she retained her animosity toward the colonies; she now abhorred the Eastern Shore and what she termed its provincialism. Her husband’s repeated assertion that from here she could keep in touch with the entire world did not satisfy her. The Americans she saw were boors, and were threatening to become traitors as well. The horrible Captain Turlock who brought his big-joes to their counting-house never confessed what English ships he had robbed to get them, and to think of those miserable idiots that she had seen in Virginia presuming to govern a new nation was absurd, the height of folly.

The birth of her daughter had not been easy, and the infant was proving difficult. Jane was convinced that it was Choptank water that irritated the baby, and she grew to loathe the ugly name of that river which surrounded her on all sides. ‘Thames, Avon, Derwent, those are real rivers. Who ever heard of a river whose water was always salt?’

‘At Edentown it’s fresh,’ her husband pleaded.

‘And who ever heard of mosquitoes on the Thames?’ she fumed. ‘Simon, I warn you, if those fools in Philadelphia utter one word against the king, I’m going home.’

In July the shocking word reached her that men in Philadelphia, including Charles Carroll and Samuel Chase of Maryland, had not only declared their independence of England but had also dared to put in writing the insulting list of charges against the king. ‘The impudence!’ she stormed. ‘Those pretentious upstarts!’ When her rage subsided she said coldly, ‘You watch, Simon. We’ll punish you the same way we did the Scots.’ And from the moment news of the Declaration reached her, she directed all her energy to preparations for flight. She refused to remain in this rebellious colony and relished the prospect of English warships coming up the Chesapeake to discipline it.

Teach Turlock did not hear of the formal Declaration until late August, but this did not signify, for he had been conducting his private war for more than a year now. In January he had been so bold as to venture into the Thames on the gamble that the
Whisper
had not yet been identified as a privateer, and he had been right, but trade with the colonies was so depressed that he was unable to pick up any profitable shipments and had left England with empty holds. When he reached St. Ubes he found that merchant ships had loaded all available salt, and it became apparent that the profits for this voyage would be limited to what he might steal from French or Spanish merchantmen.

He met none, so the
Whisper
drifted back and forth across the Caribbean, but when it put into Martinique on the chance of picking up even the most trivial cargo, French captains advised him that the thirteen colonies had become the United States of America and were engaged in open warfare against the mother country.

‘United!’ Turlock snorted, remembering Maryland’s constant feuding with Virginia. ‘We’ll never be united.’ Then his chin firmed, making his beard bristle, and he told the French with joy, ‘Now it’s real war!’ And he stormed back to his schooner.

North of Barbados he captured and sank a small English trader, setting her crew adrift in lifeboats. He then cruised northeast to intercept any English ships bound for Martinique or Guadaloupe, and here he caught another small English trader, again setting her crew adrift in sight of land.

His third capture occurred almost in the shadow of Caracas; it was a Spanish ship well laden, and after it was robbed, it was set loose. And his fourth interception was a substantial English merchantman heading out of Panama for Jamaica. That night young Matt Turlock wrote in the log the words that glorified the privateer: ‘For each gun, one ship.’ The
Whisper
carried four cannon, and with them it had captured four prizes. No privateer could do better.

In triumph Turlock sailed home to the Chesapeake, and his feats were trumpeted from shore to shore. He had a small casket of big-joes and livres tournois, but when he spread them on the desk at the counting-house, his employer came with perplexing news: ‘Captain, the Council of Safety at Annapolis has requisitioned the
Whisper.
You’re to carry the families back to England.’

‘Which families?’

As Steed tried to explain, his voice choked and he turned away to compose himself, but when he turned back to talk with his captain, his face flushed and he hurried from the countinghouse.

‘What’s happened?’ Turlock asked the man who came to count the coins.

‘Families loyal to the king are being taken back to England.’

‘Steed going?’

‘No, but his wife is … and the baby.’

Turlock could not fathom this. In his world a man told a wife what to do, and she did it unless she wanted a beating from the broad side of a shovel. For a wife to leave her husband for another country and to take a child along was unprecedented. ‘Not right,’ he muttered as the coins were removed.

But it happened. The
Whisper
sailed to Baltimore, where two families came aboard; one woman knelt down and kissed the deck, crying, ‘It’s a blessing to be on an English ship,’ but then she saw Captain Turlock and asked tearfully, ‘Is he taking us to England?’

At Annapolis nine families joined, and from the tidewater plantations another six; at Patamoke two groups were taken on, with slaves carrying vast amounts of luggage. As the trim schooner moved down the Choptank, a barge moved out from Devon Island containing Jane Fithian Steed, her infant daughter and her husband. A rope ladder was lowered from the
Whisper,
but before Mrs. Steed could climb up, her husband caught her by the arm and said, ‘I’ll join you in England. For the present I must tend the plantation.’ But she said sternly, ‘You’ll never come to England, and I’ll never see Maryland again.’

‘But what …’ Before he could frame his question she was clambering aboard the rescue ship, and when she reached the deck her husband lifted their baby in the air and passed it along to sailors leaning down to take it. Slaves tossed up the luggage and the
Whisper
moved on, leaving the barge drifting in midstream.

But the passenger list was not complete. As the
Whisper
headed for the bay, a speedy sloop appeared from the direction of Patamoke, firing a small gun to attract attention, and when it drew alongside, passengers saw that the fat Rector of Wrentham was appealing to be taken aboard—‘I want no more of these foul colonies. I’m an Englishman.’ And ropes were lowered so that twelve men could haul him up, after which some nineteen boxes and parcels followed.

Only when he was securely on board, with no possibility of retreat, did he discover that the owner of the schooner in which he was fleeing was Simon Steed and her captain Teach Turlock, whom he had defrauded. He hastened below, and was seen no more on deck.

On the voyage to London young Matt was given the job of caring for the Steed baby, and he quit bringing food and tea to the mess and carried milk and crackers to the child, for whom he acted as nurse and watchman. There were women who could have performed these tasks, but some were stricken with seasickness and others were busy caring for Mrs. Steed, who collapsed in the captain’s cabin as soon as the
Whisper
cleared the Chesapeake, and none could have cared for the baby better than Matt.

He fed her, carried her about the deck and kept her amused with little games. She was less than a year old, and when she wanted to crawl toward the bulkheads, he watched her carefully. While she slept in her basket he felt free to pursue his studies with Mr. Semmes, but he had pretty well exhausted what the mate knew, and he now found a gentleman from Annapolis who was returning to a Sussex home he had left fifty years earlier, and this man delighted in teaching him advanced figuring and verb forms.

On most days, however, Matt and the baby stayed in the bow, riding it up and down as the long swells of the summer Atlantic slid past. These were days he would treasure, when whole new fields of knowledge were
opening up, when he had some appreciation of the mournful tragedy which had overtaken these good families, and when he tended the Steed baby, who rarely cried and seemed to enjoy being with him.

But what Matt would remember most was something that occurred not on deck but below. One morning as he was watching over Penny Steed he noticed that his father was nowhere to be seen, and after a while Mr. Semmes came forward to ask in a low voice, ‘Will Master Turlock accompany me?’ and Matt went belowdecks, where he heard gurgling sounds.

They came from the cabin occupied by the Rector of Wrentham, and when he went inside he found the fat clergyman in a furious sweat, with his father standing over him. A paper prepared by Mr. Semmes lay on a table before the unhappy man, and Captain Turlock was saying, ‘Sign it or I’ll throw you to the sharks.’

‘I won’t give up my rightful land,’ the fat cleric whimpered.

A sharp blow to the back of his head provoked new groans, and the rector cried, ‘You’re killing me!’ and Turlock said, ‘The only escape is to sign.’ With his left hand he thrust the quill at Wilcok and growled, ‘Sign it, or feed the sharks.’

‘I’ll sign!’ And with the quill he fixed his signature to this paper:

When the company left the cabin and climbed the ladder to the deck, Captain Turlock took his son to the wheel and showed him a box in which the ship’s papers were kept. ‘This one we guard with our life,’ he told his son.

For Levin Paxmore the years 1776–1777 were a disaster. Under goading from Simon Steed he finished four copies of the
Whisper,
but learned with dismay that three of them had been quickly captured by the English
and converted into British men-of-war to prey upon the colonists’ shipping. The fourth, the schooner
Good Hope,
was sent into the Atlantic with an untrained crew of Choptank farmers and was promptly sunk, causing sharp-tongued Ellen Paxmore to tell her husband, ‘I warned thee not to build ships of war. Thee has sent forth a covey, and all have been lost.’

‘Not Turlock’s,’ he said, at which she reminded him caustically, ‘But that was not built as a ship of war.’

She pestered him to cease his support of this futile fighting; on all sides the British were victorious, and she interpreted the quick loss of the Paxmore schooners as proof that God looked unfavorably on the rebellion. She predicted that it would soon collapse.

But her husband worked on. ‘It’s my job,’ he said as he laid down the keel for his sixth schooner, already named by Isham Steed the
Victory.

‘Does thee foresee victory?’ Paxmore asked as the transom was carved.

‘Not in battle. But I think we shall prove our points to the king and enjoy many more freedoms when this is ended.’

In these early years of the rebellion Simon Steed faced tantalizing decisions. In order to pay for the war, both the government of Maryland and the Continental Congress issued paper money; patriots were exhorted to turn in their metal coinage and accept these promissory notes, and many did. Crusty men with only a few shillings in hard currency would troop to the customs house and trade their good money for bad and were applauded for their patriotism.

‘Shall we surrender our metal?’ Isham asked one afternoon when pressures to do so had been exerted by justices and Annapolis officials.

‘Not yet,’ Simon said stubbornly, resisting all arguments. As he told Isham, ‘This paper money’s worth nothing. We’ll hold on to our coins and watch the paper collapse.’

And he was right. Within months the paper was depreciated, first $1.50 in paper to $1 in coins, then $2.50 and soon $10 paper to $1 real. When this level was reached, and patriotic pressures continued, Isham asked, ‘Couldn’t we buy some now?’ but Simon merely glared at him, then predicted, ‘We’ll see the paper sell at thirty to one,’ and before the year was out it stood at forty.

‘Now?’ Isham asked, but again Simon shook his head, but one day he did come into the office showing excitement. ‘The paper has fallen, eighty to one. Now’s the time to buy.’

‘But won’t it collapse altogether?’ Isham asked. ‘Five hundred to one?’

‘No,’ Simon explained. ‘Maryland’s a proud state. We’ll redeem our paper. Buy as much as you can get.’ And at eighty to one the Steeds began to turn in their solid currency, and Simon was correct. Maryland was proud, and she did redeem her paper at forty to one, which meant that Simon had doubled the family fortune. That he had done so at the
expense of sentimental patriots did not concern him, for, as he said, ‘the management of money is a skill and must be practiced as such.’

For Captain Turlock the early years of the revolution were a kaleidoscope: a tropical dawn off Panama waiting for an English merchantman; a quick run to New York with provisions; long, easy trips to St. Ubes for salt; a foray into the English Channel in pursuit of an English sloop, a visit to Nantes for the hardware and cordage sorely needed at Baltimore.