Rough Passage to London: A Sea Captain's Tale (38 page)

Author’s Note

When I started my research on Elisha Ely Morgan four years ago, I wasn’t thinking about writing a novel. I was merely trying to get more basic information about Morgan and his collection of important friends in London. I had inherited a short letter from Dickens to the captain as well as several letters from Dickens to the captain’s son, William. They implied a close friendship between Dickens and the Morgan family, and I wanted to find out how this happened. I knew nothing about Morgan’s seafaring life. I didn’t even know what packet ships were, and I certainly had never heard of the Black X Line. I began gathering information by reading well-known books on the early American merchant marine and the packet ship era by Carl Cutler, Arthur Clark, Robert Albion, Richard McKay, Basil Lubbock, and William Fairburn, with his multivolume
Merchant Sail
. Of those books,
South Street
by Richard McKay and
The Western Ocean Packets
by Basil Lubbock were the most helpful in giving me a broad-brush understanding of the ships and the era. Albion’s well-researched and informative book
Square Riggers on Schedule
became a constant companion, providing me with most of the specific information on the world of packet ships. Most of these books make mention of E. E. Morgan because of his connections in England, and the fact that he eventually became the manager of the Black X shipping line. This was an unusual transition for a packet ship captain. I was intrigued.

This led to my reading several ship captains’ memoirs:
From the Forecastle to the Cabin
by Captain Samuel Samuels, Captain Hervey Towns-hend’s
Self-Portrait of an American Packet Ship Sailor
, and
Before the Wind
by Captain Charles Tyng, all from the packet ship era. I then discovered Melville’s
Redburn
and Cooper’s
Homeward Bound
, both fictional works reputed to be based on these authors’ respective experiences at sea. Cooper’s
Ned Myers
was also helpful in capturing the voice of the sailors. As I continued my research, I came across an excellent source on the packet ship era in a little-known book by H. Hobart Holly on New York ships and ship captains, called
The Vessels of Robert Carnley
.

When Morgan was mentioned in these historical books about the packet ship era, he was frequently described as a ship captain who was considered a social lion in London. He had entertained Queen Victoria on board one of his ships, and had carried Joseph Bonaparte, the exiled brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, across the Atlantic on three occasions. Much of the information about Morgan seemed to come from one article written in October 1877 for
Scribner’s Monthly
by an M. F. Armstrong. It was entitled, “A Yankee Tar and His Friends,” and I soon realized maritime historical writers had been quoting portions of this article for decades.

This endearing, informative article mentioned a few details about Bonaparte’s voyages with Morgan and quoted tantalizing portions of short notes and letters to Morgan from Dickens, Thackeray, Turner, Landseer, Sydney Smith, C. R. Leslie, and others. It was clear he had entertained many of these men of the London literary and arts scene on board ship when he sailed from London, down the Thames to Gravesend, and then on to Portsmouth, where they landed and took the train or carriage back to London. Morgan was given the unusual distinction of being selected as an honorary member of the London Sketching Club, and it was clear that he socialized with a far different group than most American ship captains while in London. The writer described Morgan as “charming, witty, and with an immense heartiness of nature, wherein seems to have lain the attraction which drew to him men so different from himself.”

The
Scribner’s
article and my other readings did provide me with a solid base of information and some important clues about Morgan’s time in London. Early on in his career as a ship captain, Morgan had carried over to America in the passenger cabin the English artist Charles Robert Leslie, his wife Harriet, and their small family, and then six months later he brought them back to London. Charles Robert Leslie’s autobiography and letters,
Autobiographical Recollections of Charles Robert Leslie
, enlightened me on how Morgan had become one of the artist’s close friends.

Leslie’s eldest son, Robert, proved to be one of the best sources of information about Morgan. Robert Leslie wrote three books about his love of ships, and in those he described some details about the voyages he made with Morgan. These books,
A Waterbiography
,
Old Sea Wings and Words
, and
A Sea Painter’s Log
, gave me more insight into Morgan’s character as a confirmed optimist who seemed “to consider it a duty to always be cheerful.” It was from Robert Leslie that I got a description of Morgan as a colorful raconteur of sea stories who was calm under pressure and who preferred friendly persuasion over conflict on a ship’s deck. I also got some of Morgan’s folksy sayings from Leslie’s recollections.

An article written by Robert Leslie in a March 1896 issue of the London magazine
Temple Bar
also helped give insight into Morgan’s life ashore. The article focused on Leslie’s memories of the London Sketching Club, and among those recollections was an account of how Captain Morgan fit in. Leslie wrote, “It mattered little what might be the rank of those about him, Morgan was sure to hold his own, and become the animating spirit of the party.” That same article provided me with much historical detail about the London Sketching Club’s activities, including the quirks and traits of some of its members, as well as some brief descriptions of Morgan’s first meeting with Turner.

In that same article, Leslie quotes a letter from his father, written to the captain after he has decided to retire from a life at sea: “My Dear Captain: We hear you talk of retiring into private life; of course, you cannot do this without the consent of your friends in England. . . . Everybody wants to see you. I sat next to Dickens at a dinner-party lately, and he would talk of no one else. We say no one ever sees you without feeling happier for the rest of their life.”

I soon understood that the Leslie connection provided the key to understanding how Morgan came to know all of these important people in London. Turner, Constable, Sydney Smith, Landseer, Thackeray, Dickens, even Queen Victoria and countless lords and ladies, including the Duke of Wellington, all were friendly with Charles Leslie. These friendships between Morgan and this group of renowned Englishmen were all the more remarkable because of the ongoing cultural friction between America and England during these early decades of the nineteenth century.

The
Scribner’s Monthly
article contained wonderfully personal details about Morgan, including some of the stories he told. This caused me to wonder who the writer was. How did he or she get access to these personal letters? M. F. Armstrong described Morgan’s early life as typical of many New England boys of his generation. He was born on “a rocky New England farm, received his education at the common school,” and was described as having “a keen brain and a generous soul.” His sense of humor “was of the dry Yankee type,” the author wrote, “and his jokes and stories, of which he had an unfailing supply, had always a flavor of the keen New England air.” The article was written thirteen years after Morgan’s death, and I was intrigued by the writer’s mention of letters and personal papers of Morgan’s. If I could find these letters, I thought to myself, I might find a diary or a journal.

While reading a published collection of Dickens’s letters, I came across several letters the author wrote to Morgan after he had retired from the sea. In one letter written in January 1861, Dickens mentions the fictional story he had just written about the captain in his Christmas publication,
All the Year Round
. It was called “A Message from the Sea,” and it depicts the arrival of an American ship captain by the name of Jorgan in a picturesque fishing village in Devonshire on the southwestern coast of England. The captain carries a mysterious letter. With the help of a distinguished English club called the Arthurians, he solves a troubling mystery that removes a cloud of suspicion from one of the families in the town, saving their reputation. In the short story, Dickens describes his seagoing hero as “American born . . . a citizen of the world and a combination of most of the best qualities of most of its best countries.” In Dickens’s folksy, cheery description of this captain, I got a better understanding of how the English author may have perceived Elisha Morgan, as a problem solver “with a sagacious weather-beaten face,” who was witty and clever and had a healthy sense of humor and an open nature. In that same letter, Dickens mischievously describes to Morgan how his sea captain hero has “a touch or two of remembrance of Somebody you know.” The “Somebody” was Morgan.

What I still was searching for most diligently were any journals, diaries, or letters that might still be in existence. I contacted the South Street Museum in New York, the Mystic Seaport Museum, and the Connecticut River Museum. From those institutions, I received good, useful facts on Morgan and the ships he sailed on, as well as a good background on life in the Connecticut River Valley at the time. The Connecticut River Museum was most helpful in providing me with detailed primary material on the English raid on the town of Potapoug, and information about Henry Champlin. One excellent source that helped me depict Morgan’s life as a young boy was a small book published by the Connecticut River Museum titled
Recollections of John Howard Redfield
. A compilation of letters between Charles Chadwick and his wife, Mary, titled
Dear and Affectionate Wife
were also revealing about life in Lyme in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the colloquial language used at the time.

Still, no letters or journals from the Morgan family had been given to any of these museums. I went to the Library of Congress and also found nothing on Morgan, except for the
Scribner’s Monthly
article on microfilm. Finally, through calling members of the larger Morgan family, I came across what were the remnants of the letters and papers that the
Scribner’s Monthly
writer, M. F. Armstrong, had come across back in 1877. They were in the possession of one of the captain’s direct descendants, Gerald Morgan Jr., a great-grandson. They had been placed in an old scrapbook, which was now quite tattered and frayed, and appeared to date back to the nineteenth century. It wasn’t the complete collection that was mentioned in the article, but there were enough letters to get an appreciation for how the captain used his ships as a way to return the hospitality he received in London.

It was through this distant cousin of mine and the family records he provided me that I came to realize who M. F. Armstrong was. She was none other than the captain’s youngest daughter, Mary Frances. Her married name was Armstrong. She had written that article for
Scribner’s Monthly
shortly after her mother, Eliza Morgan, had died, and the family was cleaning out the house in Saybrook. The captain had died thirteen years prior to that. Once I discovered who she was, I soon found an 1862 letter from Dickens to her and her sister, Ruth, thanking them both for delivering a gift of a box of cigars from their father. They were visiting in London and had gone to see Dickens at one of his readings. The captain’s eldest son, William Morgan, was the company’s shipping representative in London at the time, and he was a constant visitor at Dickens’s house at Gad’s Hill. Now the small handful of friendly letters from Dickens to William Morgan that I had inherited from my grandmother made sense. Dickens was friendly not just with the captain and Eliza, but with the Morgan children as well.

From the family records, I did get a list of the captain’s siblings, his children, and the pertinent dates of death for his mother and father. The details about Eliza’s father I uncovered with the help of a library researcher. When it came time to end my research and write something about Morgan, I first tried to put together a history, but I realized that there weren’t enough details about his more than one hundred trips across the Atlantic, all over a nearly thirty-year period. The only way to tell his story as a sailor and a ship captain was through fiction. Similarly, the only way to convey his character, his personal life with his family, and to depict his relationship with his London friends was again through fiction. Thus I became a reluctant novelist. This freedom allowed me to write about his early life before he became a captain, about which there is absolutely no record. Because I knew he was a young seaman on the
Hudson
when James Fenimore Cooper traveled across the Atlantic on this same ship with his family in 1826, it allowed me to create a scene between Morgan, the young sailor, and Cooper. There’s no record that it happened, but then who’s to say it didn’t? That general philosophy guided me in how to weave together the fiction with the known facts about the captain’s life at sea to create this novel. My goal became to fill in the blanks of all those many voyages with a compelling fictional story that would capture the man, the era, and the ships he sailed on.

Another example of this approach was my curiosity about how Morgan met Eliza. I could find no details about this. Given his itinerant lifestyle and her background, I thought it probable that they might have met at sea on the
Philadelphia
. From the family records, I knew the date of their marriage, the name of the church, Trinity Church, and the unusual early morning hour of six o’clock as the time of the wedding. This was reportedly written into a family Bible that I never saw. As there were no details about their life together, I took a funny story mentioned in the
Scribner’s Monthly
article that Morgan had told to an appreciative Dickens. This was the story of “the wet lovers and the dry one.” This endearing tale inspired me to write this much expanded, fictional version in the novel about how Eliza and Captain Morgan first met. Morgan’s luncheon meeting with Queen Victoria, the Crown Prince, and their entourage on the
Victoria
is mentioned in several of the maritime books. The quote from the Duke of Newcastle asking Morgan why a ship named for the queen had not been built earlier is part of that factual story, along with Morgan’s response.