Pete Hamill - Forever

Mary Morrigan.

Ireland had vanished. Cormac and Mr. Partridge were lodged in one of two cramped cabins built under the raised platform of the poop deck, on the starboard side of the Fury . A gloomy passageway separated the cabins and led down six steps to the captain’s own cabin. When his door was open, Cormac could glimpse a polished table and windows opening to the foamy wash behind the Fury . A clergyman and his wife occupied the port cabin. Cormac saw them the first day out to sea: he tall and grim, she small and pale. They were dressed in mourning black. The clergyman’s wife soon disappeared into the cabin. The clergyman, whose name was Andrew Clifford, carried meals to her on a small board. Cormac couldn’t tell if she was seasick, or being guarded from the heathen roughness of the crew. Sometimes, late at night, he could hear her weeping.

Mr. Partridge told Cormac (or, as he knew him, Martin O’Donovan) that he was himself a Londoner and that this was his third voyage to New York. With any luck, I’ll make my fortune this time, he said. And if I do, I’ll have to decide. Do I stay and get even richer? Or do I go home to London? The source of his potential fortune, he explained, was crated and wrapped and buried in the hold: a printing press. They have something unique in the colony, he said. Freedom to print what they want, thanks to this legal case—have you read about it?—this case of John Peter Zenger. He told Cormac how Zenger, a printer, had been charged by the authorities with using a press to subversive ends, and how he fought the charges in court in 1735, and won. The problem is they have much to say but too few presses upon which to say those things. I intend to help them speak. At the moment, he said, there were only two printing presses for eleven thousand people! Incredible! He laughed a deep belly-growling laugh. So it’s missionary work, lad. Bringing the modern world to the barbarians!

His enthusiasm seemed to press against the walls of the cabin. He showed Cormac the books he planned to print in his own New York editions, volumes that would give the barbarians some instruction and pleasure. Like an excited schoolboy (he was at least thirty-five) Partridge rummaged in his cloth bag, dropping items on the bunk, and when Cormac saw the titles of the older man’s books, his heart beat more quickly. There were four by Alexander Pope: his translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad, his own Rape of the Lock and Dunciad . Partridge seemed startled when Cormac quoted a few lines from Pope’s poem on Heloise and Abelard. And when he showed the young man his copies of Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, Cormac took from his satchel The Drapier’s Letters, and Mr. Partridge’s eyes widened and his lower lip trembled.

“Well, at least you will not add to the barbarism of New York, lad.”

Then he saw the banknotes folded into Swift’s pages and looked surprised.

“You have a lot of money for a young man,” he said.

“My father died and left it to me,” Cormac said, telling the truth. Or a truth.

Mr. Partridge looked at Cormac in a dubious way and handed back the book with its folded notes.

“How old are you anyway?”

Cormac told him.

“Sixteen? And do you have a trade?”

“I can blacksmith a bit, Mr. Partridge, sir.”

“Well, you can learn to print then too,” he said, his jolliness returning. “Everybody should have more than one trade. I’ve got more than one myself.”

He handed Cormac a copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and a Milton pamphlet called Areopagitica . He caressed the pamphlet in a loving way.

“Read that, lad. It’s the best argument ever made for freedom of the press. Perhaps we can personally hand it to this Mister Zenger.”

He talked of Milton and Pope and Swift as if he knew them (and, of course, he knew the best of them) while they walked the decks and ate their meals. His tone was enthusiastic and always personal and very serious. Cormac thought: O Father, I wish you could have met this Englishman.

Hour after hour, when he was not reading or dozing, Mr. Partridge explained what the sailors were doing in the rigging, which they climbed like athletes, and why there were so many objects lashed to the deck. All had to do with the voyage. The rough wooden cage was called the barnyard, with its four segregated pigs and many chickens, and that grave, solemn man peering through the slats was Jeffries, the cook. Other bundles contained provisions for the voyage: kegs of water, salted beef, limes for scurvy. The rest were the luggage of sailors and passengers alike. Mr. Partridge said that among his several trades (barber and knife sharpener, along with printer), he was a tailor, and one of the lashed bundles contained cloth for suits he planned to make in New York, or even during the voyage. He eyed Cormac’s ill-fitting clothes when he said this.

“You’d best get a suit yourself, lad, or they’ll think you’re a fugitive. That thing you’re wearing looks pulled off a dead man. And, yes, we’d better trim your hair before you land.”

Cormac’s nerves trembled then; if Mr. Partridge believed he looked like a fugitive, perhaps some of the ship’s officers would too, and they might wonder about the money he was carrying and hold him for arrival in New York. On general suspicion of felony. He vowed silently to get himself a new suit, quickly cut to fit by Mr. Partridge. But he said nothing, because at this point Mr. Partridge was serving as a guide to the world called Belowdecks.

Down there, Cormac began to see what he had never seen before. The crew’s quarters, Mr. Partridge explained, were all in the bow, on the first deck below the main deck. Holding a lantern, he showed Cormac the next deck, and for the first time the young man saw the deck of the emigrants. They lived in four rows of bunks hammered together from rough plank, with no bedding supplied by the ship, jackets serving as pillows, coats as blankets. All slept in their clothes. The only natural light came dripping down from the fore and aft hatchways, but in the orange light of Mr. Partridge’s lantern, faces peered at them in a wide-eyed way. A few old men stared at the deck, blinking, ignoring the light. Strapping young men tried to stretch, smoking from short earth-colored clay pipes, nodding, smiling, or throwing hostile glances at the visitors. Children scampered about, up one aisle, down another. Many women were seasick, their faces ghastly with the loss of control, and the air was stained by a mixture of vomit and shit. On that deck, they were all Irish.

A moment of silence greeted Cormac and Mr. Partridge and was broken by a man crooning in Irish from the shadows, a melody Cormac knew, a melancholy tale of a lover’s journey. Then dozens of them joined in, and someone produced a fiddle and began to play in counterpoint, and all of them were shaking heads about the loveless land that was vanishing behind them and then smiling about the magic land to which they were going. The land ahead, of course, was Tir-na-Nog. The land of eternal youth.

“They have no idea how far it is,” Mr. Partridge whispered. “They think crossing the Atlantic is like crossing the River Shannon. The educated ones know but won’t explain to the others. Afraid of what might happen, I suppose, afraid of despair, or riot. They’re almost all Presbyterians, the educated ones, fleeing the Church of Ireland and its endless bloody cruelties. But the ones singing in Irish, they’re real Irish, out of the hills and the bogs and the hungry towns. Most of them don’t speak English. And they’ve signed on as indentured servants. Poor buggers.”