The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (9 page)

As a result the colonists were often reduced to barter. One Philadelphia shipbuilder, James West, recorded charging £39 for building a sloop. His customer lacked cash, so West accepted payment in flour, butter, sugar, raisins, and beer. Partly because this was a recurrent problem, he had gone into the sideline of operating a tavern; he served the proceeds from his ship contract to his patrons. As part of this redefinition of liquidity, West boarded his boatwrights at the tavern and paid them their wages in beer.

In good times the dearth of money was merely annoying; in bad times it threatened to strangle the colonial economy. And times were rarely worse than following the collapse of the South Sea bubble in 1720. The South Sea Company had been chartered in 1711 and granted a monopoly of British trade with South America and the islands of the Pacific Ocean (formerly and still sentimentally the “South Sea”). During the next several years this monopoly rewarded shareholders handsomely, prompting wealthy and influential individuals, including King George I and many close to the court, to purchase stock. To tighten the company’s connections to the Crown still further, the directors made George a governor of the company in 1718. A year later the directors concocted a scheme to privatize the national debt; they would assume the Crown’s obligations in exchange for an annual payment—and, most significantly, the chance to persuade the Crown’s creditors to exchange their notes for stock in the South Sea Company. With the company’s stock appreciating rapidly, the task of persuasion was easy enough, which made the stock rise all the faster. Between January and July of 1720 it octupled in value, sucking in all manner of speculators and inspiring no end of imitators. In August the inevitable occurred: the price broke. By November nearly nine-tenths of the stock value of the company had vanished, shaking such rocks of the establishment as the Bank of England, disgracing the directors of the company (who proved to have collaborated in assorted
other shenanigans with the company’s accounts), ruining thousands of investors, and wreaking havoc on the finances of the entire British empire.

Philadelphia
was still reeling when Ben Franklin arrived in October 1723. If he had known how bad things were, he might not have come. In any event, Philadelphia was not his first choice. Franklin’s original plan upon leaving Boston was to settle in New York, the thriving town on the island at the mouth of the Hudson River that retained the Dutch character of its founders, including the burghers’ ambitions of worldly success. In such a setting a young man of similar ambition ought to have no difficulty finding work, unbothered by the formalities of an unfulfilled contract back in Boston.

But once out of Boston, Franklin found himself at the mercy of forces beyond his control. After two days at sea the fair wind that had swept his escape vessel south failed, leaving the fugitive and his shipmates becalmed near Block Island, off the mouth of Narragansett Bay. The ship’s hands, accustomed to the vagaries of sea travel, employed the time to fish for the cod that had drawn seafarers to the northeastern coast of America for more than two centuries. The fish were thick, and the crew hauled them up by the hundredweight. The smaller ones were cleaned, boned, and tossed into a pan of hot oil, emerging moments later golden brown, steaming hot, and exuding an aroma that enclouded the ship and stirred the digestive juices of all hands and passengers.

When he had entered the ship, Ben Franklin still held to his vegetarian philosophy. One leg of this philosophy—which proscribed both flesh and fish—was economic; the other was moral. The essence of the latter was that the creatures to be eaten had done nothing to deserve death at the hands of humans and therefore ought to be allowed to live out their innocent lives. Franklin continued to reason thus as the first codfish were pulled up over the ship’s gunwales. But his reason wavered as the smell of the frying fish wafted across the deck. Before his vegetarian days he, like most Bostonians, had loved fish: fried, steamed, boiled, stewed. The present smell conjured recollections of memorable meals past, and he decided to revisit the argument for interspecies pacifism. To his delight he discovered a loophole. “I recollected that when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then I thought, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.”
And so he did, dining “very heartily” with the rest of the passengers and crew. This was the beginning of the end of Ben Franklin’s vegetarianism; he remarked later, with signature irony, “So convenient a thing it is to be a
reasonable creature,
since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”

The ship’s eventual arrival in New York overturned Franklin’s expectations in another respect. For all their commercial energy—perhaps because of it—the Dutch merchants and tradesmen in Manhattan evinced scant interest in the services of printers. The town lacked a newspaper, the merchants evidently being too busy to read about the world they lived in. And sermons had no such sale as in Boston, the merchants being equally unable to focus on the world to which they were going. The single printer who kept a shop in New York, William Bradford, had no difficulty supplying the town’s needs with the helpers he already had. There was no room for Franklin.

But Bradford had a son, Andrew, who operated a print shop in Philadelphia. Andrew had just lost a journeyman, a promising and engaging young fellow who had died suddenly. A replacement was needed. William Bradford thought it worth Franklin’s time to explore the possibility.

Franklin could see little alternative. The money that remained from the sale of his books would not last more than several days, and he had no marketable skill but what he had learned in James’s print shop. Philadelphia had the added attraction of being even farther from Boston. It seemed unlikely that James would send someone after him, but it would not hurt to put another hundred miles between himself and what he owed on his apprenticeship.

The first fifteen
of those miles proved to be the hardest. Husbanding his shrinking supply of cash, Franklin boarded the cheapest boat he could find to carry him across the estuary of the Hudson to Perth Amboy. But an autumn squall caught the craft midpassage and tore away its rotted sail, preventing it from entering the sheltered strait west of Staten Island, driving it instead east across the Hudson’s mouth toward Long Island. Amid the pitching of the small vessel, a drunken Dutch passenger was hurled overboard; Franklin, the most alert and active person on the boat, pulled him back in by the scruff of his shaggy head. The fellow, sobered only slightly by his close brush with a watery death, proceeded to fall asleep in the scuttle.

As the wind drove the stricken vessel closer to Long Island, Franklin and the others looked for a suitable landing. But the beach was rocky and the surf high, and to risk both was more than the ferryman was willing. So they dropped anchor to ride out the storm. By now the drunken Dutchman clearly had the better part of the bargain; the spray from the water had doused everyone almost as thoroughly as his ducking had wetted him, but at least he was unconscious. Some villagers on shore saw the boat bouncing beyond the breakers; the ferryman, Franklin, and the others shouted for them to come fetch them in smaller boats they could see lying by. But the villagers chose not to hazard their lives for these strangers and went back to their houses.

Although the wind gradually abated, Franklin and the others spent a most uncomfortable night on the water—cold, wet, hungry, and thirsty. A single dirty bottle of rum had to sustain them as what should have been a passage of a few hours stretched well beyond twenty-four. The next morning, with the storm over and the wind shifting again to the east, the master of the craft jury-rigged a sheet that carried them by nightfall on the second day to Perth Amboy.

Franklin, feverish from the strain and the exposure, collapsed into the first bed he could find. Just before passing out, however, he remembered reading somewhere that a large dose of water at the onset of a fever could forestall it. So he quaffed several glasses, then collapsed again. During most of the night he tossed fitfully, sweating profusely, but finally he fell asleep, and he awoke feeling as hale as healthy seventeen-year-olds generally do.

He made another ferry passage, uneventful this time, across the Raritan River and set out on foot in the direction of Burlington. There he hoped to catch a boat down the Delaware for Philadelphia. The storm of two days earlier had given way to a hard rain, which, after what he had already experienced, dampened his spirits as much as his body. “I was thoroughly soaked, and by noon a good deal tired, so I stopped at a poor inn, where I stayed all night, beginning now to wish that I had never left home.” Moreover, in his bedraggled condition he looked the fugitive he was, or something similar. “I found by the questions asked me I was suspected to be some runaway servant, and in danger of being taken up on that suspicion.” But he kept to himself, found a dark corner to the side of the fire, and retired early.

The next morning he headed out with the first travelers and made it almost to Burlington by nightfall. This evening passed more pleasantly than the previous; his host, a Dr. Brown, delighted to find a guest whose
reading and interests approached his. Franklin and the physician spent hours conversing on various topics. (The acquaintance struck up on this occasion continued, as it happened, for the rest of Brown’s life.)

Rested and with his spirits revived, Franklin walked the remaining several miles to Burlington the following morning, a Saturday. To his renewed discouragement, however, he discovered that he had just missed the regular packet boat to Philadelphia and that the next would not be leaving until Tuesday. An elderly matron of the village took pity on him, fed him a dinner of ox cheek, and offered to lodge him till the boat came. He accepted the invitation and resigned himself to a long weekend in the hinterlands of New Jersey. But that evening after supper, while stretching his legs by the bank of the Delaware, he spied a boat that appeared to be headed decisively downstream. His inquiries revealed that it was indeed bound for Philadelphia, and, yes, there was room for one more. With no time to beg leave of his hostess, he climbed aboard, and off they went. The current was nearly slack in this part of the river, and the wind afforded little help, so the young and strong among the passengers took turns at the oars. Franklin, younger and stronger than most, pulled more than his share.

They rowed for several hours through the darkness until some on board wondered whether they had passed their destination by mistake. Tired and uncertain, the rowers refused to pull anymore. A collective decision was made to put in to shore, where several of the passengers started a fire of old fence rails they stumbled upon, to ward off the cold of the October night. At daylight one of them recognized their campsite as being only a short distance above Philadelphia. They wearily clambered back into the boat and finished their voyage, landing early on Sunday morning at the wharf at the foot of Market Street.

As Franklin
walked up from the dock, the ravages of the South Sea collapse remained everywhere apparent. “I saw most of the houses in Walnut Street between Second and Front Streets with bills on their doors, to be let,” he recalled; “and many likewise in Chestnut Street and other streets, which made me then think the inhabitants of the city were one after another deserting it.”