Chesapeake (76 page)
Authors: James A. Michener
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Family Saga, #Sagas, #Historical, #Action & Adventure, #General, #Romance, #Eastern Shore (Md. And Va.), #Historical Fiction, #Fiction, #Chesapeake Bay Region (Md. And Va.)
Kicking at the river, and splashing its cool water over himself even to his hair, he cried to the forest, ‘I am searching for the soul of this river,’ and he covered the last miles in Pennsylvania as if enveloped in a kind of glory, the splendor a man sometimes experiences when he is engaged in seeking for a source.
He was some miles into New York before he met anyone who could give him advice, and this man had no idea as to where the little stream known as the Susquehanna might begin. ‘Somebody who hunts deer might know,’ a farmer told him, and the man’s wife suggested Old Grizzer. Applegarth found him on a shabby farm, a man in his late sixties with no teeth and no hair on his head but a massive lot over his face.
‘By God, sonny! I’ve always wanted to know where that danged stream began myself. For two dollars I’ll take you as far as I know, and for two more dollars we’ll go plumb to the beginning, even if’n it’s up in Canady.’
So they set out on a twenty-eight-mile journey, an old man who knew the terrain and a young man who knew the river. They went along cornfields which had not yet been plowed for spring planting and through woods which only the deer and crazy coots like Old Grizzer had penetrated. And always the Susquehanna was tantalizingly ahead of them, growing narrower until it was no more than a creek, but persisting in a fiendish determination to survive.
‘By God, sonny, this is a damn stubborn trickle,’ the old man said. And on the fourth day he said, ‘Sonny, I made a bad bargain. This damned river has no beginnin’ and I’m tuckered out.’ But when it
dawned on him that he must hand back the two dollars he had collected as guide, he found new resolve. ‘I’ll go a little farther. There’s simply got to be a spring up here somewheres.’
So they continued for another day, until they found what might in an emergency have been considered a spring. ‘Would you call that the source?’ the old man asked.
‘I might,’ Applegarth said, ‘except for that stream leading into it.’
‘Goddamn,’ the old man said. ‘I was hopin’ you wouldn’t see it.’
‘I’d like to follow it a little farther,’ Applegarth said.
‘You do that, sonny. As for me, I’m announcin’ here and now that this is where the Susquehanny begins. Right here.’
‘You wait. We’ll go back together.’
So the old man made himself comfortable beside the bogus source while young Applegarth strode north, following the trickle of water. He slept that night under an oak tree, and before noon on the next day, May 4, 1811, he came to the ultimate source of the river. It was a kind of meadow in which nothing happened: no cattle, no mysteriously gushing water, merely the slow accumulation of moisture from many unseen and unimportant sources, the gathering of dew, so to speak, the beginning, the unspectacular congregation of nothingness, the origin of purpose.
Bright sunlight fell on the meadow, and where the moisture stood, sharp rays were reflected back until the whole area seemed golden, and hallowed, as if here life itself were beginning. Thomas Applegarth, looking at this moist and pregnant land, thought: This is how everything begins—the mountains, the oceans, life itself. A slow accumulation—the gathering together of meaning.
There is no need to remember the name Thomas Applegarth. Neither he nor any of his descendants figure in this story again. He was merely one of a thousand Americans of his time who were trying to fathom the significance of things: the explorers, the machinists, the agriculturists, the boatbuilders, the men and women who were starting universities, the newspaper editors, the ministers. They had one thing in common: somewhere, somehow, they had learned to read, and the demands of frontier life had encouraged them to think. From this yeasty combination would spring all the developments that would make America great, all the inventions and the radical new ways of doing things and the germinal ideas which would remake the world.
(Of course, this encouragement of creativity never applied to blacks. They were seldom allowed to read, or pursue mathematics, or discharge their inventive skills. The social loss incurred by our nation because of this arbitrary deprivation would be incalculable.)
In 1976, when a congregation of Bicentennial scholars sought to assess
the contribution of that little band of unknown philosophers like Thomas Applegarth, they wrote:
A minor classic is that book which occasions little notice when published, and no stir among the buying public. It appears in one small edition, or maybe two if members of the author’s family buy a few extra copies, and it dies a quick and natural death. But as the decades pass we find that everyone in the world who ought to have read this book has done so. It enjoys a subterranean life, as it were, kept alive by scholars and affectionate laymen of all nations. They whisper to one another, ‘You ought to read this little book by So-and-so. It’s a gem.’ And after a hundred years we find that more people have read this little book by So-and-so than have read the popular success which was such a sensation in its day. What is more important, the people who do read the little book will be those who do the work of the world: who educate the young, or make national decisions, or endeavor to reach generalizations of their own.
A perfect example of the minor classic is Thomas Applegarth’s
To the Ice Age,
published in an edition of three hundred copies at Patamoke in 1813. Applegarth had no formal education, so far as we can ascertain. He was taught to read by Elizabeth Paxmore, a Quaker lady living near Patamoke. It was she who awakened his interest in scientific matters.At the age of twenty-seven this Maryland farmer set out with some sixty dollars to explore the Susquehanna River, with a view to proving to his own satisfaction whether northern Pennsylvania could at one time have existed under a sheet of ice. His general observations were extraordinary for his age. He seems to have anticipated theories far in advance of his time and to have foreseen quite accurately what later exploration would prove. His specific conclusions, of course, have long since been superseded, a development which he predicted in a remarkable passage on the nature of discovery:
The speculative mind of man moves forward in great revolutions, like a point on the rim of a turning wheel, and if now the point is forward, it cannot remain so for long because the wheel, and the cart which it carries, must move ahead, and as they do so the point on the rim moves backward. This oscillating movement whose temporary position we can rarely discern, is what we call the process of civilization.
What Applegarth did do which has never been superseded was to view the Susquehanna riverine system, past and present, as an ecological whole. In this day this word had not been invented, but he
invented the concept, and no team of contemporary engineers and environmentalists has ever had a clearer picture of the Susquehanna and its interrelationships. He has been an inspiration to generations of American scientists, and no one who has followed his sixty-dollar exploration to that final day when he stood at the veritable headwaters of the Susquehanna can forget his description of that moment:I stood in that meadow with the sun reflecting back from the isolated drops of water and realized that for a river like the Susquehanna there could be no beginning. It was simply there, the indefinable river, now broad, now narrow, in this age turbulent, in that asleep, becoming a formidable stream and then a spacious bay and then the ocean itself, an unbroken chain with all parts so interrelated that it will exist forever, even during the next age of ice.
IN THE WAR OF 1812 AMERICAN FORCES WON EXHILARATING
victories on the open ocean, in Canada, on Lake Erie and at New Orleans, but on the Chesapeake Bay they were nearly annihilated. A group of brave and cunning British sea captains roamed the bay, making it an English lake populated at times by as many as a thousand ships, small and great, eager to ‘discipline the Americans and teach Jonathan his manners.’
Among the more impetuous leaders of the British effort in 1813 was a young man of twenty-eight, totally contemptuous of the former colonials and determined to avenge their victory over his father at the Battle of the Chesapeake in 1781. He was Sir Trevor Gatch, son, grandson and great-grandson of admirals.
His promotions had been meteoric, as might be expected of a young man with such a heritage. At the age of eleven he had gone to sea in his father’s flagship. At fifteen he was a full-fledged lieutenant in command of a patrol boat, and at nineteen was awarded the rank of captain, an august one in the British navy. He was a slight man, not much over five feet three and considerably under nine stone. He had watery blond hair, somewhat feminine features and a high-pitched voice, but despite his trivial appearance, he had acquired by virtue of a ramrod posture and love of command a formidable military presence. He had a passion for discipline and his inclination to flog was notorious, but men were proud to serve with him because he was known to be a lucky captain whose bag of tricks rescued ships that would otherwise have been lost. His men said of him, ‘I’d sail to hell with Clever Trevor,’ and his promotion to admiral was assured.
His fiery temperament could best be explained by family tradition. The
Gatches had come originally from Cornwall, ‘the peninsula that wishes it were the sea,’ and generations had sailed from Plymouth, attracting the favorable attention of kings. In the late 1500s Queen Elizabeth had wanted to establish in northern Ireland a congregation of families loyal to her Protestant cause, and first among her choice were the contentious Gatches. Secure in an Irish castle, honored by King James I with a baronetcy which would subsequently produce two lords, the Gatches had continued at sea, fighting in support of Marlborough off Flanders, at the capture of Jamaica and against Admiral de Grasse at the Battle of the Chesapeake.
In 1805 it had been expected that Sir Trevor would serve beside Nelson at Trafalgar, and he did, a twenty-year-old captain in charge of a ship-of-the-line with seventy-two guns. When his foremast and spars were shot away, he responded by grappling his ship to a wounded French battleship and pounding it to pieces from a range of inches. Now he was in the Chesapeake, thirsting for the sight of any American vessel, determined to be an admiral and a lord.
In late August 1813 he was anchored near what had once been Jamestown, Virginia, when a spy slipped across the bay with intelligence which caused him to leap in the air with excitement: ‘The
Whisper
was badly damaged in its last running battle and is now at the Paxmore Boatyard in Patamoke, seeking repairs.’
‘The
Whisper!
’ Gatch cried when he gained control of his enthusiasm. ‘We’ll find her and destroy her.’
Urging his rowers, he sped in his longboat to the admiral’s flagship and there sought permission to raid the Choptank, destroy the
Whisper
and hang her captain. The British command, having kept watch on this swift schooner for two generations, gave enthusiastic consent, and the admiral, fresh from having burned plantations throughout the tidewater, added his benediction: ‘God speed you, Gatch, and have the band play when he dances on air.’
So Captain Gatch in the
Dartmoor,
eight guns, accompanied by seven small craft, set out to chastise the Americans and sink the
Whisper.
The spy who had informed the British of the
Whisper’s
plight left tracks as he set out to cross the bay, and a clever waterman from the Wicomico River south of Patamoke deduced what he was about, and this second man came north to alert the Americans along the Choptank: ‘The British fleet is being informed that the
Whisper
is in the boatyard.’
This worrisome information was of vital importance to two quite different men. Captain Matthew Turlock, owner of the
Whisper,
was a red-headed, red-bearded waterman of grizzled appearance and conduct. Forty-five years old, he had been fighting at sea since the age of seven,
and with the passage of those years had developed a conviction that the principal responsibility of a sea captain was to save his ship; cargo, profit, schedules, even the lives of his men were subsidiary to the great command: ‘Save your ship.’ And he had done so under difficult circumstances and in varied weather. He had seen many ships lost, but never one under his command. Now, trapped on shore for overhauling, the
Whisper
was in peril, and he intended saving her.
The other American troubled by the news was George Paxmore, the young Quaker now in charge of his family’s boatyard, for he realized that if the British sailed into the Choptank and found the
Whisper
on blocks in his shed, they would burn both it and the yard; as a boy he had often heard the story of how in 1781, two years before his birth, a British raiding party had come into the river and set aflame the Paxmore yards, and he did not wish a repetition.
So as soon as the loyal spy delivered his news, these two men sprang into action. ‘First, we must get her off the ways,’ Paxmore said. He was a spare young man, serious of purpose and extremely energetic. With a huge mallet he crept among the timbers, knocking away the lesser supports, then climbed into the sides of the slipway, directing the removal of the principal props.
Captain Turlock, meanwhile, had assembled his crew and had them ready to improvise a jury rig which would get the
Whisper
moving through the water, even though her masts and spars were not yet in position. When the men were instructed, he joined Paxmore in knocking her free and watched with satisfaction as she slid into the harbor. As soon as she struck water, he directed twenty-eight of his men in two longboats to start rowing, and slowly they edged the beautiful hull out into the Choptank, where low, slapdash masts were erected, enabling the heavy schooner to move toward the marshes.
Now came the stratagem on which the success of this venture would depend. While the
Whisper
slowly made her way downstream, George Paxmore led twoscore men into the woods, where their axes bit into the stout trunks of the loblollies. Satisfied that they would fell enough green trees, Paxmore hurried back to the boatyard, where he conscripted another two dozen men to haul sawed timbers to a rude warehouse standing some two hundred yards upriver from the main building. As soon as the lumber arrived, and ladders were provided, Paxmore jumped into a small sloop and sailed out into the river.