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After a couple of days, he happened to meet someone who knew someone who knew a captain who was urgently looking for crew on a merchant ship due to sail the next day. After a bit of smooth talking, he secured his position as almost the lowliest member of this crew. Despite what he must have told the captain, Francis knew nothing at all about sailing. But he did know how to work hard, and he was good at watching and learning. It becomes easier to learn when your life rests on your knowledge and, of course, once on board the ship, Francis soon found that tying the right knots in the right places could mean the difference between going overboard and staying on the ship in a storm, or during a battle. Of course, he hadn’t known in detail about the battles there were likely to be at sea; how hard-fought every single passage was. It wasn’t until the voyage was under way that the other crew-members started to tell him about the time John Ford lost an eye to a pirate, or the time Stephen Falconer fell overboard in a storm but was pulled back up by a halyard to which he had become attached. This was a dangerous business indeed, from which only the most brutal seemed to profit, and only the luckiest survived. Occasionally, Francis heard the men complaining. When John Ford lost his eye he wasn’t compensated by the merchants at all. If he had been on a pirate ship, they said, he would have been given 100 pieces of eight – as specified by a document called the Articles of the ship – which could be used on various distant islands to buy rum, women and a life of general fun and debauchery.

Francis Stevenson’s first voyage was a fairly simple passage across the Mediterranean. For the first three days he was terribly sick, probably due to the deep, churning water. Then he started to pay attention. As the only crew member who could read and write (apart from the captain and the officers) he was occasionally called on to help with navigation, and learnt as much as he could about stars, sextants and charts. Most of the time, though, he was wet and cold, hanging off ropes, halyards and rigging, adjusting various sails on the ship. Being below decks was somehow worse, however, with crowded conditions leading to rashes, boils, coughs, breathing problems, dysentery and the dreaded itch. For several weeks Francis was either too hot or too cold; always hungry and often sick. There was hardly any fresh water on board the ship, and what there was soon became riddled with bacteria and disease. He learnt a partic
ular method for dealing with the cramped, dangerous conditions. This method was simply to clear his mind of everything, to not think of open spaces or Molly or his former life. Instead, Francis fancied he was a small part of a bigger whole, his job being to keep very still. He never panicked, although many people did. He concentrated only on his breathing, keeping it slow and steady, and survived many rough nights of the crowded voyage that way, almost meditating. Two crew members died on that first trip.

Back at Plymouth, Francis wrote letters to Molly – letters he would never send. He spent his small wage in less than a week, even though he was careful with the money. He stayed at his former inn and waited for the next opportunity to arise. He now had experience, and the beginnings of a good reputation. After a few days he desperately wished to be back at sea, unpleasant though the experience was sure to be. He took the next position offered to him, as a crew member on another merchant vessel, this time bound for the West Indies. He did become ill on this voyage but was helped immeasurably by an excellent physician on board the ship who carried mugwort, which he said cured almost everything, and a tincture of crushed bone and red wine for everything else – especially dysentery. Francis learned from the physician as well: how to cauterise severe wounds or amputations with boiling tar and pitch, using rum to deaden as much of the pain as possible; and the practice of giving small pieces of lemon or lime as a protector against scurvy.

This routine, going to sea and coming back, always learning, continued for the next couple of years until 1621, when Francis was offered a position on board the
Fortune
, a 55-ton ship containing thirty-five pilgrims emigrating to the new colony across the Atlantic which had been created by the people who had left on the
Mayflower
earlier in the year. The trip was fairly clandestine – emigration was still illegal – and funded by a shady group called the Merchant Adventurers, but would at least be interesting. Francis would get to see the New World, and would be able to read books on the voyage as the pilgrims were taking virtually a whole library with them. He had been caught up in the excitement of the
Mayflower
leaving like everybody else, and had heard about these paradises overseas. Recently, the Virginia Company had sent something like a travelling circus around the whole of Devonshire, trying to drum up interest in their colonies. You could invest, they said, and reap
vast rewards. Or you could become a settler and sail away to a paradise where all you would have to do was pick some tobacco occasionally and package it up to be sent back to England. Francis didn’t like the idea of settling; he enjoyed his life at sea too much. In 1619 he had been on board the 200-ton ship from Plymouth that had managed to obtain and trade
£
2000 worth of furs in only six weeks. For the first time in his life as a mariner, he had actually made a decent sum of money –
£
20 – which he invested in the Somers Islands Company, an offshoot of the Virginia Company. Investing, yes. Settling, no.

It is hard to know exactly what Francis Stevenson would have read on his 1621 voyage across the Atlantic, although for various reasons many people have tried to work it out. Stevenson would certainly have been well acquainted with the Bible by this stage of his life, and would have seen various miracle or morality plays in his locality as a young man. In one of the many secret letters exchanged between him and Molly in about 1617, there were several references to a play they had attended in the local market square, thought to be called
The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl
. In this performance, the most engaging character had been the Devil, with the best lines and the only jokes. The idea had been to keep the ‘yokels’ interested in the religious and moral elements of the performance by including some bawdy, naughty bits, but it had led, certainly in Francis’s case, to some intriguing ideas about good and evil which would not fully surface until later. It is thought that as well as religious texts, Stevenson read Chaucer’s
The Canterbury Tales
, Sir Philip Sidney’s
Arcadia
, Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene
and, a bit later, the works of Ben Johnson. Although the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays was not published until 1623, it is thought probable that Stevenson also read these later. When Tavistock Abbey was dissolved back in 1539, all the books had been burnt, sold for small sums or given away. Tavistock would have had a flood of books at this stage and although no one knows what their availability would have been seventy or eighty years later, it may also in part account for Francis Stevenson being so well-read as a young man.

By 1621, Francis had become a member of the congregation of St Andrew’s in Plymouth. It was common for seamen to pray there before a voyage and afterwards, too, thanking God for carrying
them home safely. Many people forgot to give thanks afterwards, however, heading straight for inns where ale and women could be found, only remembering God before the next voyage. But Francis always went straight from the ship to the large church. He got to know the vicar, Henry Wallis. Wallis, along with many of the most important merchants and political figures in Plymouth, was a Puritan. Having been on the wrong end of the Spanish Inquisition for thirty years, Plymouth people were not impressed by any sort of Catholicism, and embraced this new, disapproved-of Christianity wholeheartedly. Francis Stevenson passed by the church occasionally when a lecture was being given from someone with Puritan sympathies. He understood its central ideas, although whether he genuinely supported Puritanism at any stage remains unclear. Still, while he loaded people and their belongings on to the
Fortune
, he understood why the women looked so deliberately plain in their white bonnets, and why the men had no ribbons or fripperies on their costumes. They must have looked quite elegant, despite the simplicity, and these God-fearing people even influenced fashion, eventually. It was only after the Puritans that simple, well-cut outfits in dark colours came to be worn by courtiers and nobles.

The
Fortune
sailed from Plymouth on August 9th, 1621. Francis watched as the walled town, his adopted home, gradually faded from view, the St Andrew’s church tower being the last thing to disappear. The passage was rough, although Francis was a good seaman by now. He had been promoted within the hierarchy of the crew, now occupying the position of second mate. But what he really wanted, of course, was a position as captain. But this would come. On the journey, he became friendly with a young woman called Dorothie Pope, an ironic name for a Puritan, who was travelling to the New World with her parents. Francis risked severe punishment if caught being indiscreet with this woman on the ship, so the two of them decided to wait until they had docked at their destination. When they arrived, however, the mood was fairly grim. The original settlers had expected the merchant adventurers to send supplies with the new pilgrims but there were none. The merchants were apparently annoyed at the lack of goods being sent back to pay for their investment. In the end, Francis and Dorothie never got their moment together, although it is thought that she asked him to stay there with her and he refused. It was a life at sea or
nothing at all. And there was Molly, of course, for whom Francis had promised to go back.

Loaded with beaver pelts and other furs worth about £500, the
Fortune
set sail again on December 13th 1621, an unlucky day to begin any sort of undertaking. Later, someone said that a rabbit had crossed the Captain’s path on his way to the ship, an omen of such terrible proportion that he would have been better advised to camp for the night and set off the next day. But yet the ship sailed. It should have been an enjoyable passage, as there was certainly more space now, but Francis spent the first month wet and cold, bailing out the ship during the several storms almost certainly brought on by the rabbit. Waves of over thirty feet high washed over the boat, probing under her hull, or occasionally catching her broadside, threatening to tip her over. During these storms, Francis may have prayed. He certainly would have got used to the strange bucking rhythm of the ship as it rode up to the top of gigantic waves, hung peacefully for a moment and then fell, slapping the sea with such ferocity that he would have believed it must surely break up. For days at a time, all he heard was the rumble of sea and thunder and rain, and the cries of men for help.

As soon as the ship found itself in calmer waters and everyone was drinking rum to celebrate, a French privateer ship attacked. Privateering was still a very lucrative enterprise in 1621, although by now everybody knew it was just piracy with an official seal. All Francis would remember of the attack – the first he had ever faced – was the noise of gunfire, and shouting, French and English voices dissolving like salt in water. It sounded distant, even though it was going on right in front of him. Gunfire, smoke and the horrible metal-and-egg smell of gunpowder and sulphur. Men losing control; throwing themselves in the water, their clothes smeared with blood and other bodily fluids. It seemed like a hundred years before the ship and her paltry cargo was taken.

Ropes, tight and burning on his wrists. Hardly room to breathe. No room to turn around. Francis spent the next month as a prisoner on board the privateer ship, on his way to a prison in France. Every day that he found himself still alive felt like winning top prize in a raffle. With no physician, no clean water and no fresh air, it is a wonder that the men taken from the
Fortune
survived at all. Francis knew of the practices of pirates and privateers, of course.
Not knowing that his destination was a French jail, he wondered whether he might be thrown overboard, marooned or sold as a slave to a galley ship. A ball and chain around his ankles; the whip. The idea was too much to bear. He made a pact with God at that moment. As images rose and fell in his mind like the waves outside, images of men with their liberty taken away, forced into labour for another’s profit, whipped, bleeding and trapped, he promised God that he would never make another man his slave and would personally wage war on those who practised this – the Spanish and the Portuguese in particular. Francis would never make another man fear what he now feared. He vowed to God that he would have revenge on his captors, too. He would seek out the French and make them pay. Francis remembered a story he heard about Sir Walter Ralegh. He had apparently freed some island people who had been tied up and tortured by the Spanish – for his own ends, of course, as he needed the people to help him defeat their common enemy. But he had freed people who were not free, from the people who would use them – against their will – for their own profit. And Francis would do the same, he now decided. He would give people their liberty when he could. Life or death – but no imprisonment or slavery, he decided. This would be his new way of life.

After a short time imprisoned in France, Francis Stevenson and the rest of his crew were freed, and sent to London. Francis had never seen London before but his weak, diseased body couldn’t cope with the excitement of it now. His shares had made some money while he had been at sea, so he cashed them in and obtained some medical help and a carriage to Plymouth. Once there, recuperating in his usual inn, he set down some of his political thoughts in the form of a pamphlet which, like the letters he used to write to Molly, he never actually showed anyone. However, this pamphlet, entitled ‘Liberty For All Men’, was a profound document that would eventually be picked up by a group aligned to the Parliamentarians some years later during the Civil War.

The physician Stevenson paid to tend him during this period was thought of locally as a ‘witch doctor’. Known as John Christian, and having been converted to Christianity, this unfortunate ‘Indian’ had been captured somewhere in Virginia some years ago and traded for some trinkets. As the ‘property’ of the captain of the ship to whom he had been traded, this man was brought, bound
in chains, to Plymouth, to be sold eventually into servitude in London. At the time, it was not very common, but not unheard of, for ‘Indian’ or African people to be traded in this way and brought to England as exotic servants. John told Francis his story, from the horror of his entrapment and passage to England to his dull, repetitive and humiliating period in service to a wealthy noble family in London, virtually a slave until a mysterious woman had met him one night and given him money and helped him to escape. John, previously a peaceful sort of man, had armed himself and set off on the road to Plymouth, tackling all the highwaymen who set upon him, intending to retrace his steps back to America. However, over two years later, he was somehow still in Plymouth, selling his services as a physician, still trying to get the money for his passage back. Francis asked why he hadn’t got a position as a ship’s surgeon, or even a deck-hand on a ship bound for Virginia. ‘I will not work for the people who sold me,’ he said. ‘And they will not employ me anyhow.’ John always had to be on his guard in Plymouth, ready for those who would call him a heathen or a beast. However, sailors in Plymouth did a lot of trade with ‘Indians’ like John, and, although not particularly friendly towards him, at least did not treat him like a monster. He and Francis became good friends.