How, I asked him, could we be so sure that our wool was markedly superior to what the British grew?
“How? How? We’ve seen the shoddy goods they try to foist off on us poor colonials, pitching it to us at prices way above our own. Owen, that stuff’s grown by peasants!” he pronounced. The Irish and Scottish shepherds were poor and demoralized, he explained. They were practically serfs, a conquered, abject population impoverished for generations by a feudal over-lordship. They were farmers who couldn’t even own the land they worked or the animals they raised, and thus they had no more pride in the products of their labor than did slaves in the American South. And off he’d go on an elaborate comparison between the products of slave labor and free, quite as if all the cotton being produced in the South by slave labor were not of sufficient quality to control the world market in cotton and make the slaveowners richer than Croesus and their senators and congressmen powerful all out of proportion to their numbers.
Dream on, Old Man, I thought, but said nothing. Scheme on, Father. But even if you’re right, and the price of English wool drops like a stone because our product is so much more desirable in Liverpool than their own, the New England merchants will simply turn around and buy cheap English wool instead of ours, and the cotton kings of Washington, as soon as they discover it, will vote heavy tariffs on imports, until the prices are equalized again and the cost of trans-Atlantic shipping makes the difference, favoring the buyer at home again. A wasted enterprise.
None of that mattered to the Old Man, though. To him it was a self-evident truth: our wool was superior to the British wool; therefore, the British would pay more for it than for their own; and thus, despite the tariffs and the costs of shipping, we could beat the New England merchants at their own game. His anger — at the collaborationists, as he called them, and at English feudalism, as he saw it, and at slavery and the slave-powered cotton economy, which he viewed as the root cause of the sufferings of all Northern sheepmen — made him deaf and blind. Deaf to me, and blind to the winking smiles of the Boston merchants who traveled with us aboard the Cumbria and who were subjected to Father’s constant explanations of his plans to crack the English woolen market.
Business was not his only subject, needless to say. Every day following breakfast, Father sermonized to our fellow passengers, leading his tiny congregation in long prayers and hymn-singing and Bible study. Later, he harangued them on the evils of slavery. His congregants were four Boston merchants, a young English journalist, Mr. Hugh Forbes, who said he was attached to the New York Tribune and was returning to England to visit his wife and children, and a middle-aged woman and her young female companion. These two were an aunt and her niece, going abroad for the senior woman’s health, supposedly, although Father believed that the motives for their journey had more to do with the younger woman’s likely pregnancy than the other’s health. It was the journalist, Forbes, who most intrigued Father, for he claimed to have fought alongside Garibaldi in the recent, failed Italian revolution, was supposed to have written a two-volume manual on military tactics, and had once (or so he said) been a Viennese silk merchant. In Father’s daily reports back to me in the cabin, the most frequently discussed passenger was Mr. Forbes.
Unfortunately, I was miserable and sick with nausea, with giddiness, headache, and vomiting, from the first hour of our crossing to nearly the end of it, from Boston Harbor to the Irish Sea. It was the first time at sea for me, and except for our return, it would be the last. According to several passengers and the crew, who had much experience in these matters, the crossing was a relatively calm one; yet I suffered as if we were aboard a small barque upon storm-tossed waters, as if we were at sea in a hurricane.
There was, of course, an element of convenience in this for me, for it kept me belowdecks in our tiny cabin day and night and thus well out of sight and sound of Father, except when he came to our cabin to report on his day’s activities and conversations and then to read, pray alone, and sleep, all of which he did no more than necessary, as the cabin stank of vomit and my chamber pot, and my company was that of a man curled in his bunk like a cutworm, bloodless face to the wall, body wrapped in sweat-soaked sheets, conversation limited to moans and chattering teeth.
For a time, Father tried various remedies, some of them suggested by his fellow passengers and some by Captain Roote himself — drinking warm water, sassafras tea, herbal potions, eating bits of biscuit, loblolly, and so forth. But nothing cured me of my sea-sickness, and so, after a few days, I became a pathetic object of the other passengers’ derisive, feigned concern, until gradually everyone, even Father, seemed to forget that I was aboard or else regarded me as if I were merely Father’s cargo, out of sight and mind until we landed.
This did not displease me. I wanted no more than to be left alone with my thoughts and memories. For it seemed to me then, as it does even now, half a century later, that I was passing out of one life into another. I was like a snake shedding its skin. There was no single event or insight that had instigated this painful transition, nor was it the result of careful reasoning and analysis. Certainly, the three disturbing days and nights in Boston had played a crucial part, leading as they did to my seizure and apparent conversion at the Negro church, my “awakening.” But the rapid collapse of our work back in Timbuctoo, its easy, deadly violence and our inability to stave it off — indeed, the relish with which we all, Father, John, Jason, and I, had taken it up, and then the tragic and, as it seemed to me, unnecessary death of poor Mr. Fleete — all this mattered greatly. And yet somehow, due mainly I suppose to Father’s fervor and singleness of purpose, and due also to my ignorance of my own true nature, I could not fully acknowledge these experiences or absorb them with understanding. And so I welcomed the chance to re-read them, as it were, in my mind.
Meanwhile, Father preached to our fellow passengers and the ship’s captain and crew. Much to their consternation, surely. It may have been the failure of his work in North Elba, combined with his fears of financial ruin, but he was possessed by a sort of mania during those weeks at sea, which must have frightened some of his listeners and surely amused others, for he would come back to our cabin in the evenings and condemn them all roundly for their mocking refusals to hear him out.
The merchants, he said, were more attentive and polite, more religious even, than the two Transcendental women, as he called them, and the English journalist, Mr. Forbes. Which was a puzzle to Father, because when it came to the question of slavery, it was the women and Mr. Forbes who sided with him, and the merchants who thought him foolish. “But regardless of their stance on slavery,”‘ he said, “they all split the Bible off from the Declaration and the Laws, and in that way they mis-read both. Consequently, every one of them gets away with feeling smug and above it all. I don’t understand these people. It’s the Holy Bible that impels us to action, and it’s the Declaration and the Laws that show us precisely where to act. What’s the problem with these people?”
My response was usually to groan in pain and queasiness and turn my back to him and stare at the wall next to my bunk, which seemed to calm him somewhat or at least to divert his attention and fix it onto the question of my cure. “Will you try to eat a biscuit, my boy? Just try a bite of biscuit.”