Book One: The Olive Branch Part Five: The Peace of Boston Characters
Chapter Thirty-eight
The Stilling of Waves
Benjamin Franklin. At sea, in the Atlantic Ocean. Tuesday, 19 October 1779.
The Peace constituted the negotiating process on 19 October, but the first working session at Philadelphia followed several weeks later. The delay allowed commissions to be issued, British and American negotiators to return from wartime diplomatic posts, colonial delegations to receive instructions, and the parties to agree on safe conduct and records.
The water came up warm.
He had the bucket hauled at seven, as he had had it hauled every morning since they cleared the Bay of Biscay, over the lee side on a line, by the same patient Portuguese seaman who had decided in the second week that the old gentleman was mad and harmless and paid in silver; and he put his thermometer into it, and held it there while he counted a hundred, and took it out and read it through the lower half of his spectacles. Seventy-six. Yesterday it had been sixty-eight. The air was sixty-five, and the wind was in the south-west, fresh, with a long sea running under it from the same quarter, and there was weed on the water all round the ship, yellow-brown, in long trailing islands that went by the side and away astern, with little berries on it like a vine.
“We are in it,” he said.
Temple, who had been sent up to hold the book, wrote down the figures. He was nineteen and had got used to it.
“In the Gulf Stream, sir?”
“In the Gulf Stream.” Franklin looked over the side at the weed. “It is a river, Temple. A warm river, running through a cold sea, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Banks of Newfoundland and beyond, and nobody can see its banks, and every whaleman in Nantucket knows exactly where they are. My cousin Folger, who has a whaler, drew it on a chart for me ten years ago, and I had it engraved and sent to the Post Office captains at Falmouth, so that they should not sail against it and lose a fortnight on every voyage. They did not read it. They were English, and Folger was a Nantucket fisherman, and they would not be taught by a Nantucket fisherman.” He took his spectacles off. “So they went on losing their fortnight, and I suppose they are losing it still. It is a great comfort to me, at my age, how little of what I have done has made any difference.”
He did not believe it, and Temple knew he did not. But it was a fine morning, and the water was warm, and he said it to hear how it sounded.
They had been at sea for seven weeks.
He had not meant to go home. That was the thing he kept coming back to, at the rail, in the long empty days in the middle of the ocean, when there was nothing to look at but the sea and nothing to do but think about how one had come to be on it. He had meant to die at Passy. He had not said so to anybody, but he had supposed it, the way one supposes the weather; he was seventy-three, and he had the gout, and he had thought that the war would go on for as long as the King of England was alive, as he had told the Count, and that he would very likely be buried in France among people who were fond of him, and that somebody else would go home at the end of it and sign whatever there was to sign.
Then in the first days of August a letter had come from Mr Hartley.
It came by way of Ostend, in Mr Hartley’s large careful hand, and it was long, as Mr Hartley’s letters always were; he had been writing to Franklin for a year and a half, about the prisoners and the exchange of them and the cartel ships that were always coming and seldom came, and about a truce, and about a great many other things, with the patience of a decent man who believes that if he explains a thing clearly enough to enough people it will in the end be done. This letter was different. It said that His Majesty had been pleased to change his servants. It said that the new ministers, of whom Mr Hartley named several, and of whom Lord Shelburne had the American business, were determined to put an end to the war in America; that the King’s commander-in-chief at New York would be empowered to propose to General Washington a cessation of arms; and that commissioners would follow, to treat with the Congress upon every point in dispute between the two countries, not excepting, Mr Hartley had written, and underlined it twice, a legislature in America under the Crown.
Franklin had read it in the garden, on the bench under the lime trees where he had read the Congress’s answer the summer before. He had read it twice. Then he had sat for a long time with the letter on his knee, looking at the Seine going by below the terrace, and thought about the words not excepting, which were two of the most important words he had ever seen written down, and about where the thing they promised would be done. It would not be done at Passy. It would be done at Philadelphia, in the State House, at a table, by men who would have to go on living with each other afterwards; and he found, sitting there, that he wanted very much to be at the table, and that it was the first thing he had wanted very much for some years.
He had written to the Committee for Foreign Affairs that week that he was coming home, and that he would very likely be there before his letter. Then he had set about leaving France, which took a month, because France did not like to be left.
He took leave of the Count at Versailles in the third week of August.
Vergennes received him standing, by the same window, with the same courtyard full of carriages below it; and listened, with his round careful face, while Franklin said what he had come to say: that the Americans were going to make their peace with the King of England, if the King of England would make it, and that Franklin was going home to help them do it, and that he was sorry, and that he had come to say so himself, because one did not leave a friend’s house by the back stairs.
“I know why you are going, Doctor,” the Count said. “I read the English papers too. The King of England has changed his ministers. For a King of England it is the same thing as changing his mind, and very much less painful.” He folded his hands. “His Majesty will go on with his war. He did not go into it for the Americans, as I told you, and he will not come out of it for them. You will tell your Congress that France asked nothing of them, and was refused, and asks nothing still.”
“I shall tell them, Monsieur le Comte. I shall also tell them that they would not have had a single musket at Saratoga without His Majesty, and that they are not to forget it at Philadelphia.”
“They will forget it.” The Count almost smiled. “Nations do. It is the only thing that makes it possible for them to go on having friends.” He went with Franklin to the door, as he had the summer before, and stopped there, as he had then. “I shall wish you a calm passage, Doctor. You will notice that it is not the same thing as wishing you success.”
“I noticed,” said Franklin, and bowed, and went down the stairs to his hired coach.
Madame Brillon cried, and then beat him at chess, in that order, on the Wednesday. She said that he was not attending, which was true. At the end she swept the pieces off the board into their box with her hand and said that she would remember all her life that a great man had wished to be her friend; and he told her that she had it the wrong way round, and kissed her hand, and went out to the carriage without looking back, because he was seventy-three and had found that it was better, at that age, not to look back at things in doorways.
He did not ask Madame Helvétius the thing he had been meaning to ask her. He went out to Auteuil on the Saturday and sat in her untidy garden among her cats and her young abbés for the whole of a long afternoon, and was very happy, and did not ask it. He thought, on the way home, that he had not wanted to hear the answer, whichever it was; and that a man who has reached seventy-three without learning that much about himself has not been attending.
He wrote to Benny at Geneva that his grandfather was going home to America, and that Benny was to stay where he was and finish his Latin, and be a good boy, and write; and that his grandfather thought of him every day. Then he sent Temple down to Nantes ahead of him with the trunks, to find a ship.
Temple had found a Philadelphia brig at Paimboeuf, at the mouth of the Loire, loading powder and cloth for the Congress: a stout, ugly, well-found vessel of about two hundred tons, with ten guns and a Philadelphia captain named Allison, who had been at sea since he was eleven and had heard of Dr Franklin, and said so, once, on the first day, and never mentioned it again, for which Franklin liked him very much.
They had sailed on the first of September. There was no safe conduct. Mr Hartley had written, in a postscript, that he did not think the new ministry would hang Dr Franklin if one of the King’s cruisers took him, but that he could not promise the cruisers had been told; and Franklin had laughed at that, and then thought about it a good deal in the Bay of Biscay, where the cruisers were. A man of seventy-three taken at sea would be carried into Plymouth or Portsmouth and sent up to London, and there were a great many people in London who would be glad to see him, some of them in the government. He thought he would very likely be asked to dinner by Lord Shelburne. He thought that might be worse than the Tower.
They had seen nothing. Once, in the third week, a sail had come up over the rim of the sea to the northward and stood towards them for most of an afternoon, and Captain Allison had cleared for action and run his ten guns out, and Franklin had sat on a coil of rope by the mainmast and watched him do it, with great interest, as he had once watched the men at Philadelphia raise the frame of a house; and towards evening the sail had turned out to be a Danish merchantman going to St Thomas, which was a disappointment to the ten guns and a relief to everybody else.
After that there had been nothing but weather. The westerly winds had been against them, as they generally were going this way; and the brig had gone south of west for a fortnight to find a better wind, and found it, and lost it, and found it again, as ships did; and now, seven weeks out, she was in the Gulf Stream, and Captain Allison said that the capes of the Delaware were ten days off, if the wind would let them, and perhaps less.
In the afternoon the sun came out, and the captain had the people bring up their bedding to air, as was done at sea on a fine day, and Franklin had his trunk opened on the deck.
He had not meant to do it. He had meant to get out a dry shirt, because everything below was damp, and always would be until they were ashore; and he had knelt down by the trunk, which was not a thing a man of his age and his gout did lightly, and lifted the shirts out, and found under them, at the bottom, where he had put it at Passy with his own hands, the linen bag.
He took it out. He took the suit out of the bag, and stood up, slowly, and held it up in the sun.
It had kept very well. There was a little mould coming along one seam of the coat, white, the beginning of it, the sea air having got into the trunk as the sea air got into everything; and he brushed it off with his fingers, and looked at the rest. The spotted Manchester velvet, a little rubbed at the cuffs. He had worn it at the Cockpit, five years and nine months ago, and stood in it for an hour with his face perfectly still while Mr Wedderburn called him a thief, and the Lords of the Council laughed; and he had taken it off that night and folded it, and had not worn it since. He had carried it to France. He had carried it out of France. He had stood in front of a press at Passy with a candle, twice, and thought about putting it on, and had gone to bed instead.
“Is that the coat?” said Temple, behind him.
Everybody knew about the coat. Franklin had never told the story to anybody, and everybody knew it, which he supposed was how one could tell a story was true.
“That is the coat.”
Temple came and stood beside him, and looked at it, with the bedding of the whole ship’s company hung up in the rigging round them like washing in a yard, and the brig rolling easily on the long swell.
“You will wear it at Philadelphia,” Temple said. He did not say it as a question.
Franklin looked at the coat for some time.
He had always known what it was for, or thought he had. He had known since the day at the Cockpit, walking out through the anteroom with the laughter still going on behind the door; he had known in the carriage, and at his lodging, folding it. It was for a day when he would be answered: when he would put his name to something, in the same velvet, that the men who had laughed would have to read and mind. It was a coat for winning in. He had carried it to France without knowing why, and had known why for a fortnight in the winter of seventy-seven, when he thought the day had come, and it had not; and he had carried it home because he had thought it would come at Philadelphia instead.
The men at Philadelphia would not be the men at the Cockpit. He would enter a room where nobody had won and ask them to keep talking. The coat would bring his own quarrel in before he spoke. He looked along the sleeve for the mould.
“No,” he said. “I shall not wear it.”
“Then why have you carried it all this way?”
“I thought I knew what it was for.” Franklin folded the coat across his arm, along its old creases, which it had kept. “I find I was wrong. I have been wrong about a great many things this year, and I have only now got as far as the coat.”
He put it back in its bag, and the bag back in the trunk, at the bottom, under the shirts, and got out the dry shirt he had come for.
The wind got up in the late afternoon, as the captain had said it would, and the sea with it; not a gale, only a fresh breeze and a short steep sea running across the long one, so that the brig began to pitch and throw the spray aft, and the white tops of the waves were breaking all round her, as far as one could see.
The cook came up out of the galley to empty his slush over the lee rail, a bucket of the greasy water he had boiled the salt beef in, and Franklin, who was sitting by the mainmast with his coat buttoned to the chin, watched him do it, and then got up quickly, quicker than he had got up for a week, and went to the rail and looked down.
“Temple,” he said. “Come here. Look at that.”
The slush had gone over the side and spread out on the water astern of them, a long greasy wake; and the wake was smooth. All round it the sea was breaking, white and short and quarrelsome, under the wind; and in the wake, for twenty or thirty yards behind the brig, there was no break at all. The water rose and fell, as the swell rose and fell. It did not break.
“I saw that first in fifty-seven,” Franklin said. “In Lord Loudoun’s fleet, going out of New York against Louisbourg. Ninety-six sail of us, and the wakes of two ships were smooth as a looking-glass and all the others were ruffled; and I asked the captain why, and he said the cooks had been emptying their greasy water through the scuppers, and looked at me as though I had asked him why the sun came up. Everybody at sea knows it. The Bermudians do it, to see the fish. The divers in the Mediterranean take oil in their mouths and spit it out on the water to see the bottom. The fishermen of Lisbon put a little oil on the sea at the bar when they come in, so that it will not break over their boats.” He was talking fast, as he talked when he was pleased, and he knew it and did not mind. “Nobody had ever asked why. Mind the book, my boy. I want it.”
He had a little oil in the hollow joint at the top of his bamboo cane, where he had kept a little oil for some years now, for exactly this; he had shown it off on ponds all over England. He got the cane, and unstopped it, and went to the lee rail amidships, where the sea was breaking along the side, and let the oil out on the water, a teaspoonful, no more.
It spread. It always surprised him, though he had seen it fifty times. A teaspoonful of oil went out over the water as though something were pushing it from underneath, a film too thin to see except by what it did, and where it went the little waves lay down, as a cat’s fur lies down under the hand. In a few moments there was a patch of smooth water beside the ship as big as a room, and then as big as a house, and the sea round it was white and breaking and the patch was not; it lay on the side of the swell like a looking-glass on the side of a hill, rising and falling with the swell, quite smooth.
Temple looked at it for a long time, holding the book.
“It has not stopped the sea,” he said at last.
“No. It never does.” Franklin put the stopper back in his cane. “I tried it at Portsmouth once, in front of a party of gentlemen and a captain of the navy, from a boat off the beach, in a swell; and the surf came in on the beach exactly as it had before, and broke there, and the captain went home to his dinner very well satisfied that I was a fool. They had wanted me to stop the sea. I had only told them I could stop it breaking.” He looked down at the smooth place, which was drifting astern now, and growing thinner, and beginning to go. “Nothing lays a swell, Temple. The swell is the whole weight of the ocean, moving, and it was moving before you and I were born and will be moving after. All the oil does is take away the wind’s hold on the surface, so that the water cannot be heaped up into a wave and thrown over. The sea goes on underneath, as it always has. But nothing breaks.”
“For how long?”
“For as long as there is oil on it,” said Franklin. “And then you must put on more.”
In his cot that night he listened to the brig’s timbers groan over the swell. Temple slept across the cabin with his mouth open. Franklin turned carefully on to his side and watched him in the lantern light.
He thought of the old fly at the Moulin Joly, who had lived seven of the eighteen hours of the world and did not expect to live above seven or eight minutes longer. He had written that for himself, and supposed he would be dead before anybody could prove the Congress right. He was seventy-three, in a brig in the Gulf Stream, going home to a table where it would be proved, or near enough, by the King’s own commissioners; and he had not known the day could be so long.
He thought about his son.
William had been exchanged and was in New York. The Jerseys had taken him from his house in seventy-six and sent him to Connecticut; his wife died while he was confined. Franklin knew that much. They had written nothing to each other since the war began. There was a sheet to William in a drawer at Passy, begun and never finished. He could not guess what William would say to a letter now, or what he himself would put at the foot of that one.
There would be an amnesty. There would have to be. No peace that left both armies standing could hang the men who had stood with either of them; Hartley had said as much, and Franklin had known it before Hartley said it. The King would forgive his rebels, and the Congress would forgive its loyalists, and everybody would go home. William would be free to come to Philadelphia, if he liked, and walk down Market Street, and knock at his father’s door.
Franklin lay and thought about that for a long time. He thought that a man makes it up with his sons in the end. He thought that it was very likely true of most men, and that he did not know whether it was true of him. He had been a great many things in his life, and good at most of them; he had never been good at forgiving anybody who had been right against him. He did not know whether he would write. He thought, being honest, in the dark, where there was nobody to be honest for, that very likely he would not; and that he would be sorry for it later, at some great age he could not now imagine, as he was sorry for a great many things; and that being sorry would not make him do it.
Before he went to bed he had written up the day in his book, by the light of the cabin lantern, as he had written up every day since Paimboeuf, in the hand he had learned at twelve in his brother’s printing house and had never improved: the figures first, and then the rest, as briefly as possible, because a journal was for facts and not for feelings, and a man who wanted to write down his feelings ought to write a bagatelle and give it to a lady.
October 19. Tuesday. Water at 7 in the morning, 76; air, 65. Much gulf weed. The water does not sparkle in the night. Wind S.W., fresh, with a short sea in the afternoon. Oil tried upon the sea, with the effect formerly described; the swell continued, but nothing broke. The captain judges us ten days from the capes.
He had looked at that for a while, with the pen in his hand, and the lantern swinging, and the brig going over the swell in the warm river under the dark. Then he had dipped the pen again, and added the line with which he closed most days at sea, and sanded the page, and gone to bed.
Nothing else remarkable.