Skeletons On The Zahara (3 page)

Neither was James Riley. Both Justus and Josiah knew a trustworthy man when they saw— or hired— one. They had great faith in Justus's nephew. They liked his intelligence, his industry, his no-nonsense attitude, and— not least— his massive frame. At six foot one and 240 pounds, James Riley was a good man to have on your side. He was athletically built and powerful by nature, augmented by years of hauling hay and hoeing fields as a youth. Having worked his way up through the ranks, he understood not only his vessel but also the hearts and minds of sailors.

At forty-eight, first mate George Williams was the most experienced seaman on board, a man who could navigate and stand a watch, giving the captain time below in complete security. Williams, whose aunt had married a Riley, had a wife and family in nearby Wethersfield. He was the dependable grandpappy of the crew, linked to the men by family ties, loyalty to their captain, and a shared faith in the sea.

Josiah Savage figured that his third son, Aaron, could learn much by sailing with Riley and Williams, and he had a knack for putting his sons in a position to succeed. His eldest would go on to help found the Aetna insurance company. Another grew immensely wealthy financing the railroads, and his next-to-youngest, a Yale-educated priest and the first Episcopal missionary to Africa, was later credited with discovering the gorilla. Aaron would learn his father's business from the water up.

Captain Riley had taken another Savage on board as well: Horace, the son of William Savage, Josiah's youngest brother and a close friend of Riley's. William had gone to sea in a coasting schooner in November 1799, the year Horace, his second son, was born, and never returned. Ever since, Riley had felt a responsibility to protect the boy and ensure his success. On this trip, the fifteen-year-old would be his cabin boy.

From the brig's flush quarterdeck, Riley could see his former home on Prospect Hill at the top of Main Street. It looked down on Upper Houses and as far as Lamentation Mountain and Mount Higby to the west and southwest. On a tour of the Valley in 1771, John Adams had stood on what would become Riley's property and taken in the view. “Middletown, I think, is the most beautiful town of all,” he later wrote in his diary. “When I first came into the town, which was upon the top of a hill, there opened before me the most beautiful prospect of the river, and the intervals and the improvements on each side of it, and the mountains, at about ten miles distant.” Adams admired the surrounding fields and small farms with loam “as rich as the soils of Egypt.”

In 1807, when everything was going his way, Riley had bought No. 33 Prospect Hill Road, built half a century earlier by Deacon Ranney. The large two-and-a-half-story clapboard house on a foundation of cut brownstone came with fifteen acres of land and gave his growing family plenty of elbow room.

But hard times had forced Riley out of that house and into humbler lodgings. He could picture his pregnant wife, Phoebe, still asleep in their warm bed there. He was disappointed that their fifth child had not arrived before he sailed, but unfortunate timing was often the lot of the sailor, and there could be no delay. Three long years had passed since he had last set sail, and more than twice as many since a run of profitable voyages had made him temporarily wealthy. There was no more time to lose, not even a day.

Phoebe, the daughter of Hosea Miller, a local Revolutionary War veteran, bore her fate well. She had watched her husband, a passionate man with wide-set eyes and thick dark eyebrows, struggle and brood ever since returning home at the beginning of this recent war. He had been unable to find a position in the Navy. He had no funds to outfit a privateer vessel, and he refused to engage in the lucrative illicit trade with the enemy in Canada or the West Indies, unlike many sailors in New England, a region that opposed the war. Nor would he conduct trade under false colors, trade that necessarily evaded the authorities on both sides of the conflict and was thus against the law.

While he was away, Phoebe would have her hands full with their children— ten-year-old James, Amelia, six, Phoebe, two, Horatio, thirteen months, and a newborn— but she would have help.1 Upper Houses was a tight-knit community, and James's two spinster cousins, Ann and Eleanor, lived nearby. When their brother, Julius Riley, had sold the place on Main Street in 1784, the new owner agreed to allow the sisters to stay on the third floor until they married. In what was perhaps a case of extreme Yankee thrift, not only did neither ever marry, they both lived to be more than a hundred.

One of the Middletown newspapers, the Middlesex Gazette, recorded the Commerce's departure from Middletown on May 2, under a clear sky, with winds blowing providentially from the northwest, and the temperature rising in the afternoon to sixty-two degrees. Two miles south of Savage's wharf, the Commerce slipped past the shipbuilding center Chatham on the east bank, which along with Upper Houses was considered part of greater Middletown.

To the north, through fifteen miles of wide floodplains, the river was regularly dredged to Hartford for sloop navigation— vessels drawing eight feet of water or less. Larger vessels drawing up to ten feet of water could reach only as far inland as Middletown, where the federal government, in 1784, had established one of the state's four customs houses to track the profitable sea trade. While Valley ships often ventured across the Atlantic, as the Commerce was about to do, trade with the West Indies prevailed.

The Valley's merchants, shipbuilders, and farmers worked together in a lucrative partnership, the farmers raising livestock on fields of clover, timothy, and other grasses and shipping to the West Indies butter, cheese, beef, and pork, along with such crops as corn, rye, oats, and potatoes. They also sent horses, which were tethered on the decks of vessels nicknamed “horse jockeys,” and lumber, especially oak barrel staves, which were essential for transporting the islands' sugar. Their ships returned from the islands carrying sugar, salt, coffee, indigo, and rum, as well as manufactured and luxury items from Europe. Until 1790, when it was outlawed, some Connecticut vessels also came home with slaves, who in this part of the country mostly worked as domestic servants.

All of this trade fueled the shipbuilding and maritime industries, and made the lower Connecticut a busy stream. Blessed not only with productive farms but with hardwoods that in colonial days had made Royal Navy shipbuilders drool, it was the most important commercial shipbuilding center between New York and Boston. Over the decades, thousands of small craft and large merchant vessels had rolled off the stocks here. Often painted dark with a single red, white, or blue stripe on the side, the sloops and square-riggers tended to be somewhat rounded in the bow and were admired more for their sturdiness than their speed. By 1815, the wooded banks and hillsides along the lower Connecticut had been largely clear-cut by farmers and shipbuilders. Loggers floated timber for shipbuilding downriver from ever-northerly stands. The demand for new vessels grew steadily, and builders tried to keep up.

Aspiring seamen rose just as quickly to fill the vessels. The Commerce had a choice crew, commensurate with its reputable owners and well-regarded captain. Bill Porter, a powerful and friendly man of thirty-one, hailed from Windsor, the inland-most port of the Lower Valley. James Clark of Hartford was a veteran of war-hero Daniel Ketchum's company of the Twenty-fifth Regiment of U.S. Infantry, which had distinguished itself in the 1814 campaign on the Niagara Peninsula. The five-foot-ten-inch Clark, who had enlisted as a private and been appointed sergeant, had dark hair, pale eyes, and a cross tattooed on his arm. The Commerce's cook, Dick Deslisle, a free black man, was Ketchum's former servant.

Tommy Burns, who at forty-one was one of the elders of the crew, came from Hadlyme downriver. Burns had served as a fifer in the Sixth Company of the Thirty-third Regiment of Connecticut militia under Captain Calvin Comstock in New London in 1813. Afterward, he had returned to his work on his in-laws' Mount Parnassus farm. In the spring of 1814, his wife, Lillis, had become ill and died suddenly. Grieving, Burns soon left the farm and moved to Hadlyme. He was called up again by the militia in August. At the war's end, he had decided that rather than return to the farm and its painful memories, he would go to sea.

Ordinary seamen Francis Bliss and James Carrington rounded out the regulars, the men who stand a watch. Able seamen such as Porter, Clark, Robbins, and Burns could hand, reef, and steer and could scurry out on the yards in a pitching sea to set or shorten sail as easily as most people walk down a sidewalk. Ordinary seamen, still learning their trade or incapable of advancing, looked after the less technically demanding tasks, mostly on deck or below, heaving, hauling, and swabbing as needed.

They all knew every foot of this last pitch of New England's longest river. Rock ledges, islands, eddies, sediment banks, submerged trees, and creek mouths, as well as wooden posts marking the channel, were the sailors' road signs. The spring freshet always brought changes, sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic. The officers and seamen kept a keen eye out for these as well as for the river's complex traffic. Fishermen, loggers, brownstoners from the quarries, and merchantmen— mostly sloops and schooners smaller than the Commerce— plied the navigable channels. Ferrymen's flat-bottomed scows, each powered by a sweeping oar, crossed from bank to bank carrying horses and wagons, as they had been doing for nearly two centuries.

That evening, spring showers arrived in the Lower Valley. Rain fell all the next day, May 3. One of the sailors, twenty-four-year-old James Clark, who had been released from the military and reunited with his wife, Ruth, and their two young children just six weeks earlier, celebrated his fourth wedding anniversary that day. Back in Upper Houses, Phoebe Riley gave birth to a boy, whom she and the captain had previously agreed to call Asher, after James's father. Barring any unforeseen delays, the captain would meet his son before he was six months old.

From Middle Haddam, where they steered hard astarboard at the end of the Middletown Gorge, the river tugged them south and then steadily southeast. Salt water reached sixteen miles up the river, as far as East Haddam. Here the Salmon River joined in, broadening the Connecticut, at no place more magnificent than in its estuary, where the life of the river commingled with that of the sea. Hardly a Valley mariner could hit this stretch of the river without his heart quickening at the sound of seabirds squawking overhead and the smell of salt air filling his lungs. The Commerces, as the sailors of the Commerce would have been called— as if they were simply the living parts of their vessel— were no exception.

In rising high spirits, they chattered and hummed ditties. Yet departing the Lower Valley was always bittersweet. To them, no landscape was as green and salubrious, or as filled with friendly faces, as this one. Some were leaving behind young belles, others would return to a new child in the family. Or, like Horace's father, they might not return at all. Few seafaring families in the Valley had not been touched in this way. Fever took many in the West Indies. All too often a vessel found an unmarked shoal or a sudden squall and was never heard from again. Hostile tribes, cutthroat “salvagers,” and pirates held sway in secluded pockets around the globe.

Still, right now departure was more sweet than bitter. Over the years, the sailors had grown used to making two or three round-trips a year to the West Indies. This voyage and the bracing damp chill of the North Atlantic— not to mention a turn of good luck— were long overdue. Activity, conversation, and fresh sights kept their minds in the present while the familiar blue tang of burning Connecticut hardwood still reached out from the riverbanks.

Though young, Archie Robbins, whose father, Jason, was a Wethersfield sea captain, had known almost nothing but hard times at sea and had plenty of stories to tell. In six years, Robbins had been detained or imprisoned by the British three times. In February 1813, the frigate Surprise had swooped down and captured the merchant craft in which he was bound for St. Bartholomew, a Swedish territory in the Leeward Islands of the West Indies. He returned on board a cartel ship to New York. In the fall of that year, again in a merchantman bound for St. Bartholomew, he was taken by the blockade off New London. This time he was sent to Halifax, where he was detained for two months. On a third attempt to reach St. Bartholomew, Robbins, who was charged with business from a New York merchant, wisely boarded a neutral Swedish vessel and succeeded, but returning north on board an American vessel, he was taken by the brig Borer.

By any standard, Robbins had suffered an impressive run of bad luck, culminating in eighteen months spent in a British prison on Melville Island, Halifax. Now he felt sure that blue skies lay ahead. He called the Commerce “a fine stout-built new vessel” and the owners the most respectable merchants. He knew Captain Riley to be an experienced and well-liked commander, and Robbins, whose mother, Honor, was a Riley, also had family ties to the first mate, whose aunts had married Robbins's uncles.

Captain Riley, too, was on the rebound. He had fallen afoul of the international political maneuvering that had oppressed merchant vessels of neutral nations during the Napoleonic Wars. On Christmas Day, he had sailed from New York in the merchantman the Two Marys bound for Nantes, at the mouth of the Loire River in France, a port from which he had recently returned. While Riley was at sea, Napoleon had issued the infamous Milan Decree, giving the French any number of pretenses for seizing neutral ships.

On the high seas, Riley had been stopped by two British cruisers. The first was the Agincourt, which chased and fired at the Two Marys on January 14, 1808. A condescending Royal Navy captain had boarded the merchant ship, admonished Riley not to enter any French or French-controlled port, and recorded the warning in the Two Marys' register. Indignant, Riley had demanded to know by what right the captain had barged onto the quarterdeck of a vessel from a neutral nation and made such a rebuke, but he received no answer. Five days later, the schooner Pilchard played out a similar scene in the Bay of Biscay. When a third British warship opened fire, Riley sailed into the French port of Belle-Ile. There, officials examined his register, which showed that he had allowed a British officer to board his vessel. They used this excuse to seize the brig and her cargo as a prize of war while Riley watched in impotent fury. He spent the better part of two years traveling around the Continent trying to straighten out his affairs, but in the end the labyrinthine bureaucracy for which the French even then were famous defeated him. When he returned home to his wife and two children in 1809, he was broke.