The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (17 page)

One of Franklin’s shipmates accused another of cheating at cards. The accused was English, the accuser Dutch; Franklin accounted the national difference partly responsible for the fraud. “We are apt to fancy the person that cannot speak intelligibly to us, proportionately stupid in understanding…. Something like this I imagine might be the case of Mr. G—n; he fancied the Dutchman could not see what he was about because he could not understand English, and therefore boldly did it before his face.” An ad hoc court of justice heard the matter; the accused was convicted and sentenced to pay a fine of two bottles of brandy and to be placed in the round top for three hours, there to be subject to public ridicule. The prisoner resisted his punishment, prompting one of the sailors to lower a rope from aloft, which was forcibly fastened about the prisoner’s waist and used to hoist him off his feet. Suspended above the deck, the man kicked and pitched wildly, cursing in a loud voice. After about fifteen minutes he began to turn black in the face. Murder! he cried. Concerned that death, if not murder precisely, might indeed be the consequence, the others relented and lowered him. Yet they excommunicated him from their company till he consented to pay his fine. He held out for a few days, then gave in and was received back into the group.

This outcome elicited another Franklin reflection on human nature:

Man is a sociable being, and it is for aught I know one of the worst of punishments to be excluded from society. I have read abundance of fine things on the subject of solitude, and I know ’tis a common boast in the mouths of those that affect to be thought wise,
that they are never less alone than when alone.
I acknowledge solitude an agreeable refreshment to a busy mind; but were these thinking people obliged to be always alone, I am apt to think they would quickly find their very being insupportable to them.

He contradicted another bit of conventional wisdom, one he placed in the mouths of “the ladies,” that alcohol provided the best test of men’s true nature and disposition. “I, who have known many instances to the contrary, will teach them a more effectual method…. Let the ladies make one long sea voyage with them, and if they have the least spark of
ill nature in them and conceal it to the end of the voyage, I will forfeit all my pretensions to their favor.”

Franklin did not confine his observations of nature to the human species. On this voyage he commenced his study of the natural sciences, discovering an interest that would make him famous in middle age. Now, as in some of his other early intellectual endeavors, his inexperience showed beneath his analytical power. When a storm stirred up some seaweed, he employed a boat hook to pull samples aboard; among the tangled branches (in some cases attached to the branches) he found tiny crabs. No one in that era knew much about the life cycle of crabs, and Franklin guessed—incorrectly—that the crabs were in fact the progeny (“a fruit of the animal kind”) of the seaweed. He attempted to test his hypothesis by taking some seaweed without crabs and placing it in a bucket of seawater on board the ship. He watched to see whether new crabs emerged. Unfortunately, the seaweed died, terminating the experiment.

He made numerous observations of the finned fish of the Atlantic. Most striking were the flying fish and the dolphins (the gilled kind, not the mammals). The reason the flying fish took to the air was to escape the dolphins, which raced beneath them, ready to gobble them up as soon as they touched down. Franklin confirmed this by noting that whenever dolphins were caught by persons on the ship—for food, and tasty food at that—they invariably had flying fish in their bellies. Moreover, the dolphins responded to no other bait the shipboard fishermen had to offer.

Franklin observed the heavens as well. A night with a full moon and intermittent rain showers yielded the first rainbow-by-moonlight he had ever seen. He witnessed two eclipses: a nearly complete one (“at least ten parts out of twelve”) of the sun, and a half-eclipse of the moon. Not till late in Franklin’s life would precise chronometers allow regularly accurate measurements of longitude at sea; in 1726 eclipses furnished one of the few methods by which a ship’s east-west position might be charted. Franklin sat up the night of September 30 to time the eclipse. A calendar informed him that the eclipse would reach its maximum extent at 5
A.M.
London time; his own measurement indicated the maximum at half-past midnight local time. From this he deduced that the ship was four and a half hours, or 67 degrees 30 minutes, west of London. By subtraction, landfall lay little more than one hundred leagues to the west.

This news prompted all aboard to scan the western horizon for any sign of shore. “I cannot help fancying the water is changed a little, as is
usual when a ship comes within soundings,” Franklin wrote on October 2, before adding a disclaimer: “But ’tis probable I am mistaken, for there is but one besides myself of my opinion, and we are very apt to believe what we wish to be true.” When five more days brought no sight of land, Franklin employed irony to alleviate the anticipation: “Sure the American continent is not all sunk under water since we left it.”

Finally, on October 9, the call “Land! Land!” came from the lookout. “In less than an hour we could descry it from the deck, appearing like tufts of trees. I could not discern it so soon as the rest; my eyes were dimmed with the suffusion of two small drops of joy.” Even calculating latitude, while in principle far easier than longitude, was imprecise enough that the captain could not initially tell just what part of the coast the ship had reached; soon, however, someone suggested that the promontory in view was Cape Henlopen at the mouth of Delaware Bay, a judgment confirmed by a pilot-boat that came out to greet them. The pilot brought aboard a peck of apples. “They seemed the most delicious I ever tasted in my life,” wrote Franklin, weary of a diet of salt meat, biscuit, and dolphin.

The
Berkshire
ran up the Delaware toward Philadelphia. Most of the passengers, eager to end their confinement as soon as possible—it was now nearly twelve weeks since they had left London—jumped ship at Chester to finish the journey on land. Franklin, reckoning that the long voyage had weakened him, preferred to stay with the vessel. But even he changed his mind at Redbank, where the ship anchored just six miles out from Philadelphia. A pleasure boat bound for the city offered him and the three other remaining passengers a ride. “We accepted of their kind proposal, and about ten o’clock landed at Philadelphia, heartily congratulating each other upon our having happily completed so tedious and dangerous a voyage. Thank God!”

4
An Imprint of His Own
1726–30

Ben Franklin had left Philadelphia a journeyman printer intent on opening a shop of his own; he returned a budding merchant, engaged for £50 a year and with every prospect of earning more, perhaps much more. Franklin’s London stay had not diminished his ambition; if anything, his experience with Governor Keith afforded a reminder that a young man who had chosen to strike his own way in the world could count on nothing but his own efforts and abilities. The promises of others, however pleasing to the ear, were trusted at peril.

Franklin took up his new job with customary industry. Thomas Denham opened a store on Water Street with his cargo of merchandise; Franklin served in the store as clerk, accountant (an aspect of the job he quickly mastered), and salesman. As in all branches of the retail trade, the key to success was skill at sales. Franklin possessed the tools of the salesman: he was intelligent, well spoken, a student of human behavior, and determined to get ahead. By his own entirely credible account—an account corroborated by the persuasiveness he demonstrated during the rest of his life—he quickly became “expert at selling.” Denham, himself an astute salesman and a proven success in the business, doubtless congratulated himself on acquiring such a promising assistant, one who would rapidly make the transition to partner.

Nor was this the end of Denham’s plans for Franklin. With no obvious successor in the business, the elder man took the younger as not merely a protégé but a surrogate son. Franklin, needless to say, had a father of his own, but Josiah remained in Boston, had numerous other children, and had nothing to offer in career terms that approached what Denham was making available to Ben. Future prospects apart, Denham had a hold over Franklin from the (recent) past: the cost of Franklin’s passage from London, which the young man was working off in the store.

For his part, Franklin warmed to Denham in a way he found difficult with his own father. “I respected and loved him,” Franklin wrote. He certainly might have written similar words about Josiah, if only because he felt he ought to. But Denham was a man of the world, a man of substance, a man who understood success in terms with which Franklin increasingly identified. As Franklin had outgrown Boston, so he had outgrown his father. There was nothing unusual about this; it is a fundamental task of growing up. But the precocious Franklin, having grown up sooner than most sons, still felt the need for a father figure. Thomas Denham filled the need.

From this mix of emotional and pecuniary motives, the two developed a close relationship. Franklin lodged and boarded with Denham; Denham instructed him as a father tutored his son. In the store, over dinner, before bed the two spoke of how Franklin might advance in the business by taking a cargo of foodstuffs to the West Indies to be traded for cash or molasses, or by leveraging his time and contacts by accepting goods on commission from other merchants. Thoughts of the printing trade, which offered no such straightforward path to financial success, dimmed with each passing week. Franklin came to see himself as a merchant.

Fate saw things differently. The winter of 1726–27 brought its usual coughs, colds, and fevers to the Delaware Valley; amid the general ill feeling, Franklin developed a case of what he identified as pleurisy. Pleurisy is characterized by an inflammation of the pleura, the membrane that covers the lungs and lines the chest cavity, and it comes in two forms: dry pleurisy and pleurisy with effusion. The latter involves a fluid (the effusion) that fills the chest cavity outside the lungs and makes breathing difficult; it typically accompanies chronic lung conditions, such as tuberculosis. Franklin had no such chronic condition; consequently his pleurisy was probably the dry kind, which is usually a response to a bacterial infection. In an otherwise healthy person it is rarely life-threatening; this was true even in the days before antibiotics. Yet it can be quite uncomfortable, as it was with Franklin. “I suffered a good deal,” he recalled. In fact, he felt as though he might die. The illness “very nearly carried me off,” he wrote. He added that he “gave up the point in my own mind, and was rather disappointed when I found myself recovering, regretting in some degree that I must now some time or other have all that disagreeable work to do over again.” In this passage, even more than was usual in his autobiography, the sexagenarian author was speaking rather than the twenty-one-year-old subject. Possibly the young Franklin, who had never been badly sick before, mistook his malady for something fatal; but no young man making a full recovery, which Franklin quickly did, ever regretted missing an early opportunity to exit this life.

More critical for Franklin was the simultaneous sickness of Thomas Denham. The precise nature of Denham’s disease is unknown, except that it lasted long and finally proved fatal. In time, perhaps, Denham might have left the business to Franklin; quite possibly that prospect had entered Franklin’s mind. But all he left in the event was an oral statement releasing Franklin from his debt of ten pounds, three shillings, and five pence—the ten pounds being the price of Franklin’s passage from London, the balance an amount forwarded against wages. (It may have been an indication of Franklin’s high hopes for his future with Denham that for one of the very few times in his life he lived beyond his means.) Denham’s executors and heirs honored the deceased’s wishes in dropping the debt, but apart from this they had no desire to share their new wealth with an interloper, however worthy he might be. Franklin was informed that his services were no longer needed, and he was left once more to the wide world and his own wits.

Briefly
Franklin attempted to pursue his new calling as a merchant. But as he might have guessed, a city as attuned to business as Philadelphia had more merchants than it could well support, and, lacking the kind of personal connection Denham provided, he had no luck finding work.