Rough Passage to London: A Sea Captain's Tale Read Free Page B

Russets. His brother Josiah would be carting the apples over to the neighbor’s cider mill where they would be thrown into a circular trough, crushed into a pomace, and then squeezed in a heavy screw press.
    He would miss that family ritual, the first cup of cider. He would miss Josiah. His brother was the one who had made the arrangement with the schooner’s captain. He was the only one in the family he had confided in. Josiah had tried to dissuade him, but he had shook his head. The whippings that his father used to give him were now replaced with fists and slaps and shouting. It seemed like old Abraham had donned the sackcloth of the prophet Jeremiah, even as he saw his willful son as a sinner who needed to repent.
    A freshening northwesterly breeze filled out the sails, and within an hour, the small schooner was clearing the Saybrook Bar headed into Long Island Sound toward the entrance to the East River at Throgs Neck. Ely looked back at the low-lying coastline, barren and empty of trees. The sun was now shining brightly over the leeward side of the boat. He felt a knot in his throat and a tightening in his stomach as he thought about what he was doing. He felt nervous, guilty, anxious, and excited, all at the same time. It was a confusing mix of emotions and sensations that overwhelmed him as he looked back at the fading entrance to the Connecticut River.
    His mother would be heartbroken when she read the letter he’d left behind, but there was nothing to be done. He could no longer work under his father’s thumb. The old man’s anger and rage had only intensified after the tragic news about William and Abraham. Josiah got along with his father, and so did the girls, at least those who remained at home. Asenath had married a church deacon named Talcott from the small inland town of Gilead, but neither Sarah nor Nancy showed any signs of leaving Lyme. Then there were the two younger girls, Maria Louisa and Jesse. They would all find a way to keep the farm working, he told himself. Then again, he knew the pain he would cause his mother, and he felt the knot in his throat return.
    After William and Abraham had left home, Sally Morgan was determined that her younger son get a good education. She was friendly with Margaret Carpenter, one of the local deacons’ wives, who was well read and had a small library and a piano. She persuaded her that Ely was the scholarly one in her family and asked if she could teach her young son about the Bible’s lessons and also introduce him to some of the classics like Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Cervantes’s Don Quixote . Part of Ely’s mother’s hopes was that her religious friend would instill in her young son an ambition to become a deacon or even a pastor at the Lyme Congregationalist Church. Margaret Carpenter’s father had been a ship merchant, and she had traveled with him when she was younger to Paris and London. France had left a strong impression on her. At church meetings, she’d described the Parisians as poor, misguided heathens who worshiped statues of naked men and women and who cared about nothing but gratifying the carnal mind and feasting their lowest senses. In England, she said, the food was awful and the people boring.
    Sally Morgan had thought these negative views of the ways of the Old World might persuade her son to give up his wayward dreams of going to sea. Paradoxically, the reverse happened. Young Ely Morgan found Margaret Carpenter’s descriptions of her early life at sea to be the most interesting part of their Sunday-afternoon reading sessions. She had spoken to him of the beauty of the sea at dawn, and showed him one of her sketchbooks with watercolors and drawings of the ship’s deck with ocean birds flying alongside. All of these stories only served to fire up the boy’s imagination.
    Ely again thought of the note he had left for his mother in the kitchen. He had simply written that he had to leave home to find Abraham and he did not know when