Adrift

Chapter One

JANUARY 7, 1856; LIVERPOOL.

Call it a premonition.

Or perhaps a husband’s protective reflex. Then again, maybe the impulse arose from something far more obvious: an ambitious ship captain wanting to concentrate on a hard trip across the Atlantic without any distractions. Such as his wife on board.

She was fine with any of these explanations. Each one offered some comfort. At the very least, they were something to hang on to.

The way it turned out, however, was the worst of all possible outcomes for Captain Alexander Kelley’s wife. She would never know the real reason she was left behind in Liverpool that January. Later court documents never offered a clue. And she cared not to talk about it much. What was the point of revisiting a painful mystery? All she was sure about was the peculiar way the matter was decided. The captain—her husband of eight years—was unusually insistent. He had made up his mind. Almost to the point of being unreasonable.

She would stay in Liverpool, he said. And that was that.

This was a side of her husband that Irene Snow Kelley hadn’t seen before. He could, at sea, be iron-willed. She expected that and so did his crew. All ship captains had a bit of an imperious streak. But Irene never had it directed at her in any meaningful way. She considered herself more his partner and helpmate, in the model of many captains’ wives. Their bond had grown even stronger on their last trip, a December sail from New York to Liverpool.

Then, her husband made it clear she would not be making the return crossing. At least not yet. Not in winter. Irene said nothing and let him talk. She looked for a hole in his argument or a flaw in his logic. He gave her little to work with. Well then, she thought. Let’s look at this from his perspective. She couldn’t be blamed for his decision to leave her behind. She had done nothing wrong to anger him or the crew, either on the voyage over or while they were docked in Liverpool. So it must be something about the coming trip itself. There was no doubt he was caught up in the pressures of his new command.

This was a big one for him.

It was Kelley’s first transatlantic circuit—New York to Liverpool and back—as captain of the John Rutledge, a fine specimen of a packet ship with less than five years of service under its belt. The new responsibilities must be weighing on him. Why else would he want to leave her in a strange port?

He justified his case.

There was simply no reason for her to endure a winter crossing back to New York. The weather would be rough the entire way.

Wait here, Kelley said. Enjoy Liverpool. Maybe go to London. I will be back in the spring, he added, and we can return to New York together.

She thought it over.

True, she would not be lonely. Even though they were new to Liverpool, the couple already had a wide circle of acquaintances and others angling for the captain’s attention. All ship captains in the Atlantic packet business were instantly included in a network on shore as old as Liverpool’s shipping trade, made up of portside gentry, businessmen of all stripes, royal contacts, self-styled dandies, diplomatic liaisons, and various hangers-on. A constant hum of invitations occupied ship captains—and their wives, of course, if they were along—in northern England’s main port.

And Irene could not argue with her husband’s premise: setting out on the North Atlantic in mid-January—westbound, with the wind in your teeth—was guaranteed to be a nasty affair. The seas could be monstrous and the ice could close in like a pack of hungry wolves.

He would be back in the spring on the next sail of the John Rutledge, she told herself.

If nothing else, she could count on the regularity of the Atlantic packet ship fleet, which included the Rutledge and hundreds of other sailing vessels and paddle-wheel steamers. They were in constant motion: back and forth across the Atlantic on a demanding schedule carrying passengers, freight, and mail. It certainly would be more pleasant to stay in England. She could sail home in May and arrive in time for the lovely first day of summer.

So, my dear, are we in agreement? Captain Kelley said this more as a statement than a question.

Fine, she consented. But promise me one thing. Promise me you will be safe.

She knew it was an empty appeal. The sea and ice dictated the terms of the crossings, not the captains or crew. Still, it made her feel better to hear him pledge to take extra care.

I promise, he said.

Irene Kelley then let the whole thing rest.

She didn’t want to quarrel with him two days before his thirty-second birthday, which they planned to celebrate at the Waterloo Hotel, one of Liverpool’s finest. At the Waterloo, you might just bump into the American consul Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was always happy to chat with a fellow New Englander, that is, so long as they met his rather pretentious standards. Ship captains made the cut. Normal seaman, middling merchants, and average working stiffs most certainly did not merit his attention. Hawthorne liked the good life and the exclusive company who could afford it or who were welcomed in by benefactors.

Irene understood that her husband had a lot resting on his shoulders just to prepare the John Rutledge for sea. The ship was scheduled to set sail in a little more than a week and there was much left to do. The Liverpool agent was still soliciting cargo. And Kelley needed to round out the crew.

After shedding some deck hands to Liverpool’s many temptations and traps, the Rutledge was a few men short, and a ship needed a full complement in winter. There was always the chance of losing one or two crewmen along the way: swept overboard or subject to a ghastly accident. All it took was a rogue wave or a misplaced step on the rigging.

Besides that, the crew would have to deal with an unexpectedly full passenger list. Though many emigrants preferred to wait for spring, more than a hundred had booked tickets for steerage, the gloomy compartment below the main deck that would serve as their place to sleep, eat, wash, worry, battle seasickness, stave off disease, and generally hold on until the ship reached American shores. To some of the poorest folks heading to America, the hardships of a winter crossing didn’t matter all that much. Being cold and miserable at sea was not much different from being cold and miserable on land.

The steerage passengers booked on the John Rutledge were mostly Irish. No surprise there. It was once assumed the flood of Irish to America would ease up once the potato blight ran its course in Ireland. But that wasn’t proving true at all. Even though potato crops started to rebound by the mid-1850s, the number of Irish emigrants did not decrease. Irishmen with jobs in the States were like homing beacons for relatives and friends. Some dreamed of setting out for America’s western frontier, maybe making it all the way to California with the other strike-it-rich dreamers and homesteaders. The island was emptying at a frightful clip. Packet ships such as the John Rutledge crowded them in and sailed them over if they had the fare.

Spring will be here before you know it, Kelley said. You are really the lucky one, my dear. You can stay in Liverpool. I must get this ship to New York.

That evening, just before five, a strange light appeared in the southern sky.

It cut ruler-straight across the last blushes of twilight—a glowing scar of aqua blue and silver that angled down into a cloudy haze on the horizon. The streak in the heavens held there for minutes before the last shimmer was gone.

The learned classes in Liverpool knew immediately what it was. Why, a meteor was giving an uncommonly fiery farewell. “Very similar,” wrote one observer in a Royal Astronomical Society journal, “to the trace that is left by a Roman candle on a dark night.” But many common deck hands in Liverpool, hard-wired to recognize omens and specters, didn’t like it. Not one bit. This was not a promising sign for those about to head out to sea.

The compendium of sailors’ superstitions is as vast as it is baffling. It covered everything from specific days not to set sail—all Fridays included—to special seagoing curses, including ones brought on by crewmates with flat feet or ginger hair.

Seamen had no trouble interpreting a weird flash in the sky as bad juju. About a century earlier, the Scottish poet William Falconer, a seafarer who was lost rounding the Cape of Good Hope, wrote of “portentous meteors” cutting through the gloom in his epic “The Shipwreck.” The average shipmate probably never heard of Falconer, let alone delved into his work. They might not have been able to read at all. But Falconer was attuned to what set sailors’ knees knocking. And that definitely included strange lights of all kinds.

One young seaman, a thin and soft-spoken American with coal-black eyes and not much of a beard, didn’t go in for such foolishness. Thomas W. Nye was firmly rooted in a world he could see and measure and explain. The sea was complicated and dangerous enough, he figured. Why add hocus-pocus to make it more frightening?

Nye was not yet twenty-two, but he felt like he’d been partnered with the sea forever. In one sense, he was right. His education in all things nautical went back to as early as he could remember. It was part of being a New Englander of the Nye clan, which extended far and wide from its roots on Cape Cod. His pedigree included an impressive assortment of ship captains, whaling shipowners, and merchant sailors. There was always a Nye heading out to sea, returning from sea, tallying up how much he was making off the sea, or mourning someone lost at sea. Understanding the rewards and the risks of life offshore was all part of being a Nye.

The rest of Thomas’s upbringing came in the form of basic, but solid, schooling. It was the kind drilled in by no-nonsense Quaker schoolmarms along Buzzards Bay on Massachusetts’s southern coast. The classes included reading, writing, civics, and enough etiquette to get him by and spare him some embarrassments—nothing close to the polishing offered by prestigious schools to the north, like Boston Latin or Phillips Academy. Yet it was a far sight better than the spotty schooling of many of his crewmates. Nye was no scholar. He was no simpleton either.

He tried to tell his fellow seamen on the John Rutledge that the thing in the sky was just a meteor. Same as a shooting star, he said. You see those all the time, right? But this one was bigger and closer. That’s all. No harbinger. No sign from sea nymphs or Davy Jones. Simple, old science, my friends.

Some listened. Some scoffed. Nye didn’t push it.

He didn’t want to get a reputation as a nag or know-it-all. He had to live and work with these men—a stitched-together crew of Yanks, Scots, and Irish. They had come over from New York together on the Rutledge, sorting out their personalities and peculiarities along the way. It wasn’t a bad mix of gents. There were no big fights or smoldering tensions crossing from New York to Liverpool. But that leg was a smooth, twenty-one-day milk run, riding a nice late-fall tailwind and relatively easy seas. They all knew the trip back would be a far greater test. The season was later, the water colder, and the winds brasher, slamming into their faces rather than caressing their backs.

The John Rutledge had arrived in Liverpool on Christmas Eve. The weather had warmed a bit, and that brought smiles after a wicked cold snap had covered the port in a thick varnish of ice. The city’s markets, decorated by festive gaslights, weren’t slowed by any weather. Holiday geese and slabs of beef and extravagant seasonal delights such as hot chocolate packed sellers’ stalls for those who could afford them, and plenty could in Liverpool.

This was one of the world’s busiest ports. With ships came money. That meant a few coins for the lowly dockhands, but piles of cash for the traders and shippers at the highest reaches of the port city pyramid. Still, not everyone was boosted by Liverpool’s rise. Those who were sick, disabled, widowed, or orphaned and numbers of others struggled in Liverpool, like they did in any Victorian-era city on both sides of the Atlantic. The rules of the sea transposed onto land: you stayed afloat or you went under. No one was going to help you.

But once in a while, often at Christmas, guilt made an appearance. Those with means might toss a bit extra to those without. At one Liverpool workhouse, a last-chance haven for the destitute, the overseers decided that their charges should be “regaled” with roast beef and plum pudding on Christmas Day. By their own count, there were 372 more paupers this Christmas week compared with this Yuletide week in the previous year.

There was no holiday rest for the Rutledge crew. They were thrown into work the moment the ship reached port. They stowed the sails—first repairing any rips—checked the rigging, and scrubbed the deck. They took shifts keeping an eye on the Liverpool dock porters who unloaded the cargo, making sure nothing slipped into a pocket or slipped away in a sack. The crew preferred sailing for Liverpool for one important reason: usually the ship carried no passengers down in steerage on the eastbound voyage. That spared the sailors the unpleasant dockside task of cleaning and disinfecting the bunks and alcoves that acted as steerage passengers’ makeshift urinals and places for the seasick to retch. It was horrid work. Sailors said it could be worse than slithering down into the head of a giant sperm whale to scoop up that last bucket of oil.

Word spread among the crew that the ship would have an unusually full manifest of emigrants for the westbound leg. That brought some groans, especially from the cook, who would have to keep the chow coming. The Rutledge crew expected a few dozen passengers down in steerage—not the one hundred or more who had already bought their tickets for New York. This was unusual. Sometimes, a winter sail back to America could carry as many passengers as crew. That didn’t matter too much to the shipowners. The far more critical factor was keeping to the timetable and getting the mail and cargo across the Atlantic on schedule. This was where the real money was made. On its latest trip, the