Chapter 1: Bound for America

Even those who hated him, and there were many, acknowledged that Eben String was proficient at his unsavory business, a pursuit some oldtimers still called "trepanning," which, of course, meant entrapping. He had not actually kidnapped a child for a decade unless one counted a handful of stubborn, pre-pubescent boys he had used and then sold into sex slavery to keep them unheard. Some knew the small man with the scraggly fringe of graying hair and deeply pox-scared face as Strings or Stringer; others called him "scawbanker" and spat when they did. Almost no one called him Ebenezer; he had no friends.

String subsisted on the squalid, odoriferous, outer margin of London society as an ossifying remnant of the human-flesh trade, a once-profitable profession made nearly obsolete by changing times and African slavers. Like his father before him, he was in fact a "spirit" who, in his lengthy and curious career, had procured hundreds of men, quite a few score young women and a fair number of children for ambitious shipmasters to cram into their vessels' holds and take to America; white men, women and children were his stock in trade, white slaves as some called them. He had been doing it since the days when a Tidewater planter could buy four years of a full-grown farm laborer's life for a hogshead of inferior tobacco. He longed for those days.

In these uncertain times the fractious colonials wanted docile young males, free men with a useful skill, or sturdy field hands; the ones slave drivers called "breeders" with a knowing smirk. Hardy youngsters who could be apprenticed were still desirable in some city markets, but full-grown women, especially those over twenty years, were troublesome at best. Many shippers simply refused to take any females at all because they could seldom get a fair price for their bond unless the girls were uncommonly handsome or promiscuously talented. Eben String found few of those in prowling London's scrofulous cells and noisome waterfront precincts. He mentally categorized most of the vapid young women he saw as "poxy whores," unlikely to survive the voyage much less bring eight or ten quid on the other side where they would have to bear close inspection.

On this uncommonly soft, late-September evening in 1773, now that the chilling rain had blown past, Eben String was hard at work filling the hold of the Janet Lune, a Maryland-built-and-Annapolis-owned top-sail schooner whose oft-tested master was hoping to transport at least ten dozen "likely" servants to the Chesapeake region. He could land no other legal cargo so potentially lucrative.

Proprietary Maryland, more than all the other colonies from the Bermudas to Upper Canada, remained a ripe market for human cargo, black or white, slave or indentured, convict or free. Pennsylvania imported German and Swiss redemptioners by the overcrowded boatload, and General Oglethorpe's Georgia experiment struggled along on a much-reduced scale, but the Chesapeake market was ripe for English speakers and an occasional Welshman or domesticated Scot, if such existed, and if he denied being a Papist or Presbyterian. Those who claimed to be coopers, smiths, carpenters or some similarly skilled guildsman were, of course, always welcome. A few shiploads of the ever-troublesome Irish had been landed at Baltimore Town, but most of those were transported criminals of one kind or another who were sold still shackled and always well guarded. Even then, most of the Irishmen had proved more trouble than any farmer or mine owner needed when plenty of other, more tractable hands were readily available at a reasonable price.

Eben String had already completed his customary visits to the mouldering gaols and gathered up all those culls the magistrates would pardon to be transported for numerous years in lieu of their often-well-earned stripes, painful branding, or even public execution for petty theft, coining, housebreaking and the like. He avoided the screeching female convicts altogether no matter how young and lithesome they appeared. But he did accept numerous capital cases, including a few horse thieves, but for this prime vessel spurned the vicious types and avoided the madmen who would have to be chained down to be shipped. Occasionally he ran across an older criminal who swore he would rather face the headsman than be transported, but they were generally men who had already enjoyed one involuntary trip to the Atlantic colonies. It was not a voyage anyone was likely willingly to suffer twice.

Just the previous year the government, in its peculiar wisdom, had decided that it would no longer subsidize convict removal from London and the Home Counties with a £3 per head payment, so String had to be extra careful at the prisons, and his choices were limited. Most of those sentenced in the late summer assizes had already gone to the specialists in criminal transportation and many of those left had been in the cells too long to bother with. Jail fever was almost as sure a killer as the executioner's ax.

He had gathered up vagabonds from several street corners and gleaned a few vagrants from the hedges and by-ways. He welcomed wide-eyed volunteers from the various charitable hovels and alms houses, promising them limited indentures as servants and a chance to start a new life. He had easily convinced some two score out-of-work farm boys, impoverished by enclosure and softened by gin, that jobs aplenty could be found in America and that, in Maryland's fair and fruitful acres, they could easily become prosperous free-holders in a few years and find scores of eager maidens willing, nay, eager to bed them and wed them. As far as String knew, he was telling the truth.

Of course, he did not care whether or not his practiced spiel was gospel true, and he never considered that there might be numerous masters in the Chesapeake fens who treated their slaves much better than they did their short-term servants. The Janet Lune sailed on the tide, this brightening evening or the next for sure, and still had more than a score of unfilled spaces. That was String's concern; the push was on to catch the flood with a chock-a-block hold and the resultant heavy purse for both the greedy captain and the consumptive spirit.

Over the past twenty-five years in his inherited vocation, Eben String had been responsible for sending many hundreds of "freighters" to the New World, most of them what the genteel called the "meaner sort," if they ever thought of them at all. The captains calculated their ship's capacity and laid in their supply of food and water on the basis of so many bodies as full-freight, those over fourteen years of age, and counted the younger ones as half-freight. Water was usually loaded at about five gallons per person per week although some captains bragged that their freighters made it on but two pints a day without mentioning that many resorted to drinking their own urine after the first fortnight.

The diligent String received but two shillings for the apprentice-aged, but he pocketed four for each of the full-grown bondsmen and five if they had mastered one of the prized mysteries. These days the gruff ship masters did not pay him anything for ordinary females, including wives and daughters, although some were quite willing to take a comely girl as a shipboard mistress for the duration of the lengthy voyage. Letting the poor lass "work her way across," they called it and often dumping the pregnant girl into the Bay before they let go their anchor.

Once the would-be colonial had boarded the ship and signed or made his mark upon the bond, he was immediately forgotten by the "spirit" who procured him. String was only interested in satisfying his endless thirst for potent gin and his boundless appetite for plump-assed boys. He cared nothing for the people he led aboard various vessels any more than if they had been cattle or goats.

In his amourous youth Eben String had eagerly followed in his father's mercenary footsteps, and his unlamented Da, as he often said with bitter regret, had been working in a much happier time when the demand for labor in the colonies and the shortage of women on the western side of the Atlantic seemed endless and the competition from the Bite of Benin barely noticeable. Ship captains would take almost any bondsman or woman who could walk aboard and be happy to have all of them, as long as they were free of active smallpox, bloody flux or such obvious scourges.

Masters then had packed their ships to the gunnels, slept their freighters spoon fashion, stuffed them into narrow 'tween-deck spaces and crassly expected a quarter of their breathing, excreting cargo to perish before they were halfway to the promised land. In the last month of the often savage voyage against the Westerlies, when anyone downwind could have smelled them from miles away, they attempted to fatten up the survivors on peas and beans and forced them to exercise so they could at least stand to be sold off at what amounted to cattle auctions. Some of these bond-servant voyages, admitted the prospering captains, made the Liverpool slave traders' infamous Middle Passage look like a Sunday excursion to the Isle of Wight.

But now they shipped their white slaves in a much more enlightened era, under the beneficent rule of George III, of John Wilkes' gracious influence and of Lord North's restive Parliamentary edicts. Successful ship masters washed their holystoned decks and reeking holds with vinegar water. They dosed the puking servants-to-be with diluted lime juice and led their blinking passengers on deck almost every day in decent weather and had them jig or at least walk about and get some sun although many had to do this by shifts for lack of deck space. They forced their ambulatory cargo to use the heads and disposed of rapidly putrefying bodies as quickly as possible. They watched for signs of rot in the salt horse and dried fish that were diet staples and cut away putrid parts when they could.

They still crammed in as many freighters as possible, but they now had better ventilated spaces and seldom lost as much as ten percent unless they were unlucky enough to have an outbreak of dysentery, typhus, or the plague. However, when the winter winds turned contrary and the voyage stretched out beyond three months, they had to ration both water and food. Then only the strongest or meanest survived.

Over in the Atlantic colonies during the second half of the 18th century home-grown, chattel slaves had been replacing imported, indentured servants and the less-expensive but more-troublesome, transported criminals at an increasing rate. Some middle-colony planters now found more profit in breeding Negroes than in cultivating sot weed. The price had narrowed between the two herds of workers as slave children came on the market, many more brown than black, and the raffish reputation of some of the Irish and Scottish "redemptioners" harmed the white trade as did their fabled inability to survive the "hardening" process.

Even stoic Marylanders were getting picky about taking convicted felons these days while most were still willing to accept political prisoners or those jailed for their religious beliefs or lack of them. And, of course, the trade was no longer in tobacco, but in coin of the realm or its equivalent in the numerous hard monies circulating in the American colonies.

At his usual table as the smoky lamps were lit, bent over his seldom-empty mug of gin, Eben String impatiently watched the shuffling parade of early drinkers come and go. He kept his private bottle between his feet and clicked the few teeth he had left on the mug's thick rim in time to some interior melody. When he spied a likely young man finishing his pint or dram, he would invite him to his table and pour him a drink or two from the poteen jar while he extolled the merits of not-so-distant Mary-land. He could do this now by reflex and in what seemed a confidential and sincere manner, his claw-like hand on his new-found friend's forearm, testing for muscle.

On occasion when time and tide were pressing, he had resorted to drugs, but usually two or three strong drinks were enough for those accustomed to ale and grog. Much better than being pressed into the bleeding Navy, Eben Spring told many yeomen with a knowing grin as he shook their sweaty hands and led them into more-or-less voluntary servitude. Few knew they could bargain over bond terms and most simply made their scrawled mark where they were told and woke up on a heaving ship with a terrible headache, a pressing need to urinate and a vague memory of somehow deciding to go to North America.

At this vile tavern, The Bell and Bowl, String now worked with a fat Welsh trollop of sixteen or so whose broad hips and incredibly upright breasts attracted more young men than they repulsed. She was presently roistering with two brawny boys who would soon be safely tucked into the hold of the Janet Lune harboring a few more lice than they had brought to the big city. The first time the crewmen sluiced them down with sea water, they might discover some odd growths or small critters on their private parts, but that was small enough price for a trip to a better life in the New World, was it not? By then Eben String would have invested the shillings he earned from bartering their full grown bodies on much younger, but often willing flesh.

"No wimmen in here, laddyo," barked the prickly innkeeper to a obviously-tired but rugged-looking pair just off the filthy street.

"This 'ere's m'wife," said the young man, pulling off his dusty cap and knuckling his forehead as if he were addressing the titled lord of some towered manor.

"Don't care if she's the bleedin' princess of friggin' Dorchester, get 'er skinny ass out of 'ere."

"Wait, Tim," spoke Eben String quickly, raising a crooked forefinger. "They c'n perch at my table."

"Don't like no women in 'ere 'cept my own," said the scowling man. "Have enough trouble with them jades. Reminds me, Stringer, your Polly ain't paid this week."

String flipped the barkeep a shilling and ushered the tattered couple to his scarred table. He wiped two small glasses on his sleeve and poured each of them a generous portion of raw whiskey from his brown jug. "Drink hearty," he said. "Where about's you pilgrims from?"

"Cornwall, d'mines that was, Lord bless 'em," said the young man with pale blue eyes. His matted hair hung loose and his mended clothes looked too large on his lean, big-boned frame. He downed his drink in a gulp. The woman, equally pale and only a bit more robust, wore a dress of uncertain color with thorns replacing the missing buttons down its front, a soiled kerchief about her neck and a frayed, loosely-knit shawl. String refilled the man's empty glass, but the woman put her hand atop her half-full one and shook her head. She watched her husband with a patient, thin-lipped look, a scattering of tan freckles across her prominent cheekbones and pain in her grey eyes. The Cornishman shook as the alcohol cleared his mouth, fumed in his nose and burned down to his empty belly.

Behind them String saw his faux-amorous Polly stumbling down the stair case, coughing and pulling her lace-laden sleeve and dirty shift up to cover the dark nipple of one huge, jiggling pyramid. He caught her eye and nodded toward the bar and the tot he knew she needed. She slid in that direction with what passed for a smile on her pock-marked face. Almost two years in the trade and about finished, String decided, mostly from raw opium and cheap gin as well as a pair of crude abortions at a dock stanchion. Soon have to be on the lookout for another.

Behind her tumbled the two muscular rustics who had been doing their best to horse her. Must be like swiving a freight canal, thought the spirit with a slight shudder. The young men were hitching up their britches, stuffing in their loose shirts and grinning like the randy fools they were, and now the grey-headed predator was ready to pounce and profit.

"Be back in a wee minute, friends. Help yourself," String said to the travel-worn pair at his table, pushing the half-filled bottle between them. He scurried across the crowded room like some oversized hedgehog.

"Plenty more where she come from, m'boys, ripe and eager ones." He pulled out two of his printed cards and handed them to the dark-haired, broad-backed mechanics. "Just make your easy way to the docks, find number seventeen and g'this to the mate of the Janet Lune. Can either of y'read? 'Ere, I'll write it out. Be sure you get the right ship now less y'end up in Africa. Seventeen. Tell the mate Eben String sent y'along, Phil's his name, but mind now, y'call 'im 'sir.' Tell 'im you're to be signed aboard. A fine ship, it is. There's girls in America eager to bed giant cocksmen like you two whoremongers, there are that. They'll wear ya out, they will."

"Hah, not likely," said the larger of the two. "M'brother and me, well, jus' you lead us to 'em." He scratched his crotch and then put his hand to his mouth and looked as if he might vomit right there in the dank, narrow stairwell.

"Come, Benjy," said his slightly smaller brother, who might well have gone fifteen stone and whose shoulders barely fit through the door, "You'll feel better outside. G'day, Mr. String. We'll go find the ship, don' you worry none, seventeen it is, sir, seventeen."

They staggered through the door, and the younger man pounded his brother's throbbing back while he voided his stomach into the rain-washed gutter. When he finished shuddering and wiped his nose, they swayed on down toward the Thames, singing a bawdy ballad about foxes and hares. String returned to his table, mentally adding a couple of crowns to his take.

"Now," the small man said with what he thought of as a friendly if gap-toothed smile. "What c'n I do for you two travelers?"

"Looking t'work," said the man, banging his empty glass to the table.

"What sort?" asked String, lifting an eyebrow and filling the glass. "What kin ya do?"

"Farm, dig, split wood, mine, mill, most anything ye has."

"A 'ard worker, my Clem is," said the woman, speaking very softly and pulling her shawl together across her thin chest. "An' a good man."

"Peckish are ya?" asked String, looking at the man's sunken eyes.

"Ah, yes. 'Ad but water since yest'day, at a stableyard well over on d'South Bank. Wagon man put us off, 'e give us directions. Chewed grass n'nettles, wife and me did, like sheep."

"We've walked much a'the way," said his uneasy wife, her hand upon her husband's, her grey eyes wary, breathing unsteady.

"Le'me get ya some pasties. They's not too bad," String announced. He stepped to the bar and returned to the table with a greasy trencher holding three pale, fist-sized meat pies. The man grabbed one in a broad, dirt-blackened hand and devoured it in two or three bites. String saw that the young miner was missing a thumb and the upper joints from two fingers on his left hand. He hoped the purser on the ship would not notice.

"You'll need a beer," said String, beckoning. Polly set two pints on the table with a vacant smile and waddled away to her room with one of her regulars in tow, a fisherman by his smell.

The lean young woman ate more carefully but with equal hunger. When the plate was almost clean of crumbs, String asked. "Have you thought of America yet? You know London's full of country folk looking for work nowadays."

"We 'ave," said the man, licking his thumb, "but can't afford the passage. Not 'ardly."

"Have you not 'eard of bonding for it, indenture some calls it?" asked String warmly. "Many find it a good way to start over. Y'knows of the redemptioners, surely."

"Yes, we've 'eard," said the woman, pleased that she was aware of the wider world. "Work for passage, like. We c'do that."

"Well now, friend of mine is gettin' ready to sail to the Chesapeake shores, tonight perhaps. If you'd like, I could put in a word for you both. Good food on that ship, I'm sure, and they's bound for America." The weary spirit mumbled on, sniffing his gin fumes but attentive for signs of interest.

The young pair leaned forward to hear him and then looked at each other. The man nodded and clenched his jaw; the woman sighed and silently prayed as she often did of late.

"Come then. No time like now. I 'ope they'll take you both, 'ope they has room." String rose quickly and the couple followed him out of the noisy tavern and down to the docks, avoiding the filth and eyeing all the strange, half-lit alley sights they had never thought to see, a forest of shivering, bare masts tilting before them.

String led them up the busy quay and, with a nimble leap, onto the long, narrow ship with its huge main mast and only slightly smaller fore mast, both raked and carrying heavy fore-and-aft rigging and furled sails. He was happy to see that his hefty pair from Polly's recent swiving were in the process of being signed to bonds on the small quarterdeck. Oxen, thought the elderly spirit with a mix of awe and contempt as he glanced at their broad backs.

"This 'ere is Mister Philips, the first mate of the Janet Lune," said String with a slight bow to the man wearing a dark, tight-fitting jacket, small wig and cocked hat. His folded right sleeve hung empty, and he carried a tarred rope end in his left hand as if it were a riding crop. His smallpox-marked cheeks seemed somehow bent.

"How do?" said the mate, lifting the thick piece of rope toward his brow. "Welcome aboard. Are you for America?"

"Might be, aye," said the young man, a bit unsteady, his colorless hair falling into his eyes and his stomach in turmoil. "Jus' might be."

"She's a fine ship, sound and freshly caulked, barely three years old, sir. Some call her a brig, she's so commodious. We've an airy hold and often do the trip in six weeks or so." He smiled with the practiced lie, showing a smooth scar that ran from one corner of his misshapen mouth to his torn ear. Sailing this late in the season, he knew they would be lucky to make the crossing in two months.

"What about vittles?" asked the man as his wife looked about at the clean and orderly deck where the ropes were all coiled into neat circles and the brass fittings glowed.

"Oh, let's see now, last trip it was cod, really good hard cheese, beef, least they called it beef," he gave a chuckle to show he doubted the beef. "We have ship's biscuit, good peas I know, bread, raisins, various soups and, of course, citrus. Sour but it keeps y'healthy, it does."

"Where would we be sleeping?" the wife said, and the mate looked at her in a way that made her uneasy, wishing she had not asked about such a private thing. She felt her chin quivering, crimped her mouth and commanded it to stop.

"Below, just as the crew does," the mate gestured toward a large, square hatch with his heavy rope end. "It's crowded but dry."

The man walked to the hatch combing and looked down to see double rows of hammocks gently rocking with the ship's slight motion. They looked to be two or three feet apart.

"What would it cost then?" asked the young man, standing as tall as he could, his arm around his wife's thin shoulders, his belly rumbling.

"For the two of you?" asked the mate, pursing his lips.

"Of course."

"Fifteen pounds, on the barrelhead," said the mate, inventing a price. "As good a rate as y'll find on the river."

"M'lord in heaven," said the young man. "Never seen that much, m'whole life."

"Moit we work it off, sir?" asked his wife, who had known little but hard work since she was nine years old. She had never been so far from her home but harbored few regrets about leaving.

"Hardly think you're a sailor, ma'm, and we have a good cook. Have you sailed, m'boy?" he asked the young Cornishman, with a forced smile.

"Never. Fished a bit, a'course." He shook his head. "Twasn't there another way? This man 'ere said, well?"

"Yes, indeed yes, sign the bond and do the work in America. Many choose that. Those big lads you see over there by the rail, they just signed on."

"Did they now?" the man said. "C'n I go talk wi' them, then?"

The mate looked at Eben String who nodded. "I'll leave you to it," said String, clapping the young man on his broad but bony back. "Good luck and safe voyage. You too, mum."