So Ends This Day: Far Horizon

By Graham Young

In the year 1819, a full rigged Indiaman of American registry, heavy laden with riches from the Indies, drives ashore in a roaring gale and wrecks on the string of barrier islands known as Cape Hatteras, “Graveyard of the Atlantic”. Sinking in the shallows, masts still above water, crew clinging to the rigging, three women and a babe in arms are safely secured together in the rigging of the main top where drenched by lashing rain they can only pray for help. Time and again rescue attempts launched by local fishermen are thwarted by raging seas and thundering surf while those on shore watch helplessly as one by one the crew are swept from the rigging to smother and drown before ever reaching shore. Only the three women in the main top remain above water slowly perishing of cold, hunger, and despair until as the storm dies only the half-drowned infant is left with bare life enough for saving. From this near death experience comes a struggle for survival of a nameless, destitute orphan revived by miracle and reared in an orphanage as a “foundling” of unknown origin. Toughened by his misfortunes and seeking only to establish a peaceful and respected slot for himself in orphan hierarchy, he becomes an innocent victim of lies and intrigue resulting in a violence so disruptive to the institution he is banished to allow for a cooling off period and sent on an impossible project that becomes a mission of danger ending in accusations of murder he did not commit. Fleeing from the law with a price on his head he is reluctantly accompanied by a runaway slave who reasonably believes escape more easily achieved on his own than with a useless white boy lacking in any experience or ability to live off the land. Faced by the risks and dangers of escape the two are forced into an uneasy collaboration, which gradually transforms into one of mutual reliance and respect forming an unbreakable bond as they struggle together to gain their freedom. Telling it like it is in his own words the orphan takes the reader with him under fire, on narrow escapes, and the ceaseless searchings of woods and shorelines for enough wild food to sustain life. Without attempts at excuse, speaking directly to the reader the orphan hopes for a sympathetic hearing and a better understanding of the paths he is forced to take.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Graham Young
• Release date: Aug 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780996612807

Graham Young

After a continental education in the various capitals of Europe, Graham received a “Fine Arts” training in Paris. Here he gained a lifelong interest in the possibilities of film and education leading to a decade with camera and brush, recording tribal life and big game in Africa, while developing an educational program for third world countries using film pictorially as a multilingual medium. With a newly formed museum in America interested in his work, he joined a companion on his thirty-four foot yawl for a seven month crossing of the South and North Atlantic from South Africa to North America, always recording their voyage and experiences with camera and brush. Lecture tours followed on educational circuits, then an expedition on Arctic ice counting seal herds and collecting specimens, again covered with camera and brush. This was followed by filming the “Tall Ship North Sea Race” onboard the famous “Christian Radich”, then a voyage around the coasts of Norway in the square rigger “Staatsrad Lemkhul” winner of the race. While engaged on film production in the USA, his lifework collection of film, photos, and paintings in process for exhibition was totally destroyed by fire. Viewing this disaster as a salutary catharsis Graham turned to television joining the United Nations’ Department of Information, then helped pioneer England’s move from the BBC as a single provider of programs into the wider field of commercial TV. Continuing his interests in educational projects Graham now spends his time writing and painting between Canada and the USA.

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Acknowledgments

I wonder whether there has ever been a book written totally without the aid of friends and people of goodwill. This book is certainly no exception and I thank the undying patience of those who put up with me long enough to keep this project alive until it saw the light of day. Because this is the first book of a trilogy that has taken many years to research and write in more than one country, some of which have a different regard for individual freedoms, these good Samaritans are become too numerous to mention either by name or by discretion although my thanks go out to them all individually. Then there are those who went the extra mile with unflagging help giving generously of their time for proofreadings, constructive criticisms, and ideas who deserve a special thanks: George MacDonell, Anne Dobbs, Mern O’Brien and John Brett, Michelle Gallinger, Julia Landry, Paul Hemphill, Julia and Bryan Hope, and Joe Weeks who provided reference material including a key diary from the Cuban period. What would I have done without you all and the warmth and caring of your friendship?

Graham

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Apologia

Cape Hatteras and the three Sounds of Carrituck, Albemarle, and Pamlico are real places but Kingston on the Albemarle between its two rivers, the Curritank, and the Shiptank, does not exist and neither do either of its rivers. Names have evolved over the millennia as handy labels to describe objects and animals, places and people, and the writer is left to repeat these old names or invent new ones of his own, I chose to repeat the old. So there was a real Fanny Kemble, English actress and abolitionist who married a real Pierce Butler who grew cotton on St. Simons Island off the Coast of Georgia, and rice on its tidelands, and apparently throughout their married lives disagreed over the issue of emancipation for the Butler work force of some six hundred slaves. That I know of, there is no record of the real Fanny ever helping a runaway slave escape. The Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler of this story are two completely fictitious people created just for this trilogy, and their actions are similarly works of fiction.

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All the main characters in this adventure story are of my own invention, but the story line to which they march is mainly based on historical fact and on my own true life experiences garnered while roaming a world seldom if ever dull.

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, locales, establishments, or organizations, historical or otherwise are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictionally. All other characters and all incidents and dialogues are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be constructed as real.

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Table of Contents

So Ends This Day

Book 1: Far Horizon

Blinding rainsqualls swept in repeatedly on a keening wind, and the lace-foamed seas, dark-humped and high, drove mercilessly down upon the staggering ship. Black clouds raced low along the torn edges of the storm, while the wind harped in the rigging as her reeling mastheads raked the low and sagging clouds.

Rounding the wild exposed tip of southern Africa homeward bound from years of successful trading on the coasts of India and Ceylon, now richly laden, amply watered, and provisioned, the captain of the East Indiaman strove for a record passage home to New England. Proud of his new infant son born just weeks before in Madras and fearing for the health of his wife, a north bred woman who barely withstood the heat of India, he drove his ship hard, a bone in her teeth with the northeast monsoon winds behind her.

First rounding the southernmost Cape of Aghulas and then the infamous Cabo Tormentoso, the Cape of Storms, known also as Cabo de Boa Esperanza or The Cape of Good Hope. For the promise it gave at last of turning the vast bulk of Africa’s southern tip to enter the Indian Ocean and reach for the richest prize of all, the treasures and trade of Asia. Here, sixty-five days out from Madras the ship put in at Cape Town for fresh staples and water.

As the ship drove from the warmth of the Indian Ocean into the slaty cold of the South Atlantic, the glass dropped dramatically and heavy weather set in.

Here they should have picked up the south east trade winds for a safe and easy passage north, but gale after gale with raging seas roared up the west coast of Africa and on up into the North Atlantic driving the East Indiaman before it at record speeds and imposing the maximum of strain on her already overladen hull.

However hard day after day of heavy weather is on a ship, it is even harder on the crew, and now both watches were constantly on standby repairing chafe and damage to rigging carried away by storm. Continually bracing up the yards as lines and halyards stretched under the strain of a gusting wind so violent that it split the canvas seams and ripped sails out of their boltropes. Now reduced to storm canvas they still made record time

Lifelines were stretched fore and aft where no man could move in safety on decks constantly awash while she rolled, plunged, and took it green over the rails. The ship was wet above and below and everyone from foc’sle to quarterdeck was constantly soaked. With the fires drawn as a safety measure the passengers were little better off than the crew, for there was no hot meal or drink to put warmth and heart into anyone onboard.

Caught out on the open sea a vessel overtaken by heavy weather cannot avoid the storm and must batten down to survive the tempest as best it can. Staying afloat often depends as much on the severity of the weather as the seaworthiness of the vessel and endurance of her crew. Many an unfit vessel and scurvy stricken crew was saved only by the storm blowing itself out before ship and crew were finally overwhelmed.

In this instance, the East Indiaman was being tested beyond her limits as one gale blew itself out and another raced up astern to overtake the still staggering ship, allowing it no respite in putting storm damage to rights or providing a chance of recovery for the crew.

They drove close past the Island of St. Helena coming within seven miles of its high dark brown cliffs and rock bound coasts that offered no bay or harbor to shelter from the storm, but allowed them to verify their position having with a storm obscured sun had no reliable sights in days.

Until now, the captain had every confidence in his ship believing the Indian refit in a Madras dry dock had returned his vessel to the peak of seaworthiness. Now driving north from St. Helena began his first misgivings. The gale-force weather, which had delighted him for the record passage back to New England that it promised, now seemed more of an enemy for the continuous pounding of her hull into heavy seas had begun to open leaks in her planking and more water was making its way into her holds.

All ships leak, especially older wooden ones, and usually pumping out the bilges is just another part of onboard routine carried out by the changing watch. However, this was worse and growing more serious and as a check, the well was sounded at ever increasing intervals and there was soon no doubt that water in the holds was rising to a menacing level.

From sounding the well twice a day, the carpenter now checked the depth of water in her holds with the change of every watch and their first duty now was increasing time manning the pumps.

At this stage everything was under control, the pumps kept ahead of the leaks and as storm after storm swept up behind them, they were still making excellent time and the stress on masts, yards, and rigging had so far caused no irreparable damage.

They verified their position again driving past Ascension Island some six days later and then again as they sighted the Rocks of St. Peter and St. Paul nine days after that. They were making splendid time, but now the leaks were assuming more serious proportions.

There was no let up in the weather, but the pumps were keeping ahead of the leaks, which influenced the captain’s decision not to seek the shelter offered by the Cape Verde islands some ten sailing days ahead on the starboard bow. Somewhat off course but reachable, where might be found a sheltered cove in which to careen the vessel for a recaulking, which at the time was all the captain believed was needed to staunch her leaks.

After that, the nearest safe harbor where the help of shipwrights might be available was English Harbor in the West Indies some ten to twelve days ahead of them fine on their larboard bow and close to their course for the Northern States of America.

This was the better choice because it was possessed of a fully equipped Naval Dockyard built and operated by the British. Now would the Royal Navy permit its use by a merchantman flying a foreign flag? He was a proud man and reluctant to risk a rebuff when another twelve or fourteen days in such driving weather would see him safe home in Boston Harbor. Since the leaks were still contained by pumping, the captain decided to carry directly on for Boston, which at the time seemed the right decision.

By now, the captain was faced with the extreme nature of the disaster overtaking them and realized that for the ship and her treasure, his frail wife and infant son, and all on board reaching Boston before the ship sank under them was a very close race against time, but still one he had confidence in winning.

Unfortunately, for the captain the condition of his ship’s hull was far worse than he suspected and for her present state of disrepair, he was unknowingly to blame. It was the deep concern he felt for his ailing wife birthing a child for the first time in a strange land that taxed the health of even the most robust, which took him for a critical period of time away from what should have been a major concern for the welfare of his ship. Repairs, which normally would have been carried out under his sharp and critical eye, were instead placed in the hands of a younger officer.

Typical of that era, building, operating, and sailing the ship were often a family concern. The young mate and the captain were first cousins, both closely related to the owning family of the East Indiaman and the four other ship’s in their jointly owned fleet.

Barely past his yeasty sixteenth year, the mate’s attentions were easily distracted from the needs of his ship. Straight from the restrictions of a Blue Stocking New England upbringing, he was suddenly confronted by the all too available charms of a certain class of Indian prostitutes.

This colorful procession of enticement was thoughtfully provided by the dockyard where the East Indiaman was hauled out in dry dock for a refit prior to her long voyage home. Replacement of the badly wormed bottom planking was entrusted to the younger mate. The dockyard found it profitable to keep the Mate’s interests diverted elsewhere with a relatively low cost service, which they happily provided while puttying and painting over the teredo worm boring deeply into the ship’s bottom, a task for which the dockyard naturally charged the full cost of replanking.

This tragedy in the making did not become apparent until the ship was hard pressed under extreme conditions. By then Cape Town and the chance of emergency repairs were hundreds of miles astern. It was as if the sins of the father, or at least of the Captain, were being visited both upon the son and upon his ship!

Confronted with the growing severity of their problem the captain faced a narrowing race with time. Realizing the seriousness of their position the captain did not spare himself never quitting the deck for more than the time it took to check on his ailing wife and child while his crew worked longer and longer hours at the pumps, which were finding it harder and harder to keep ahead of the growing leaks.

It is axiomatic that a ship usually outlasts her crew, but at this stage, fatigue of the one was overly matched by the wormed and leaking condition of the other.

Despite their wretched and exhausted condition, the captain still felt that he could win his gamble and reach Boston safely for they were now one hundred and thirty five days out of Madras and already nearing the coasts of America.

Unfortunately, the weather again began to worsen and with the additional strain it placed upon the rearing and plunging hull the leaks rapidly increased in proportion. It was not until this point that the captain, racking his brains to discover what ailed his ship, connected his young cousin’s refusal to continue the voyage home with them and the youngster’s decision to remain behind in Madras to pursue at his leisure, the dissolute life he had tasted at the expense of the ship’s safety. Guessing accurately at the train of events the captain with a heart sinking even faster than his vessel at last had a clear picture of what, in his absence from the Madras dockyard, had been done to sabotage his ship.

True they were fast closing the coast of the Carolinas and only five sailing days away from the safety of Boston harbor, but now both the ship’s officers and all the available male passengers were taking turns at the pumps helping an exhausted crew keep them going night and day without cease.

With water flooding the holds faster than it could be pumped out, the gamble was now between foundering at sea or reaching the nearest coast before the ship sank under them.

Fortunately, the storm roaring in from starboard was more out of the east than the south, allowing them to change course without swamping and bring the wind further aft for a direct run in on the coast then about a day’s sail away... the coast being a string of narrow barrier islands sheltering calmer waters behind them.

Unfortunately, those barrier islands also formed the promontory known as Cape Hatteras, famous for its turbulent weather and fatal reputation, which had earned it the sinister label of Graveyard of the Atlantic.

However, it was the captain’s hope that once the islands and calmer waters were reached, and the stress of wind and wave reduced the leaks that plagued his ship would ease sufficiently, that pumping would suffice to keep her afloat. Then once anchored should she sink, it would be in such shallow water that enough of her would remain above the surface to prevent her being declared a total loss and making for easier salvage of her precious cargo.

This was no rockbound coast they faced, for Cape Hatteras was entirely composed of low-lying treacherous sand banks with an outer and an inner bar to cross before reaching the flat scrub covered barrier islands themselves. Fortunately, there were several passages or passes between these barrier islands wide and deep enough for safe passage that would allow his ship entry to one of the three sounds that sheltered behind the islands.

The northernmost and smallest of these waters was the narrow Carrituck Sound running parallel with the coasts, then southwards and westwards the bigger and wider Albemarle and south of that the immense reach of the Pamlico several times bigger than both the Carrituck and the Albemarle together.

The captain had charts enough, but without a chance to shoot the sun, his navigation since taking bearings on St. Helena had been by dead reckoning alone and could place their position no more accurately than two or three miles north or south of the pass for which he aimed. Rain and wind driven spray made visual recognition equally uncertain leaving no alternative but a blind run in on the cape hoping their guesswork navigation would not let them down.

Wallowing ever lower in the water, they successfully stayed afloat for their run in on the Cape. The captain’s worries now centering on having enough depth of water to carry his ship over both bars, then find a navigable passage between the Barrier Islands into the safety of the sheltered water beyond them.

As an extra precaution, the women were carried aloft and secured high in the rigging. The frail wife with the braw young Scottish girl who had supported her since Madras in exchange for a free passage to America, and the babe in arms with his wet nurse, an Indian ayah who guarded and cared for him with a devotion even fiercer than had he been her very own.

Now the shrouded coast rushed at them allowing too little time for soundings and less to heed them, and no chance at all to turn back and face the storm if as they drove recklessly on the outer bank their choice were wrong. Then to the captain’s relief through the ghosting rain and spume loomed the faint outline of a wide inlet, which could save them all.

Moving swiftly towards salvation but now so low in the water they must pin their faith on the cresting waves to lift and carry them safe across the outer bar. The whole company watched heart in mouth as she rose gallantly to the task. Surging forward on a wave impelled thrust, their luck ran out when she sank in the trough and the hull touched bottom with a thud that so opened her worm-riddled planking to the sea that while the next crest carried them clear they were settling faster than ever. Again, the ship rose soggily on a cresting wave that rushed her forward only to make a second and even more disastrous contact with the inner bar. Striking with a force that ripped the bottom planking out for half her length then drove her clear on the following surge to leave a long trail of oriental riches strewn across the sandy bottom to mark the passage of her final plunge.

Still carried forward by the following waves the battered East Indiaman slid beneath the surface in a long shallow dive, her decks swept again and again by the overtaking seas to founder a half cable length north of the channel that could have saved them and within a hundred yards of the nearest rain shrouded shore.

Great waves swept the crew from her decks as she settled to the bottom in the thundering shallows. Few even had a chance to climb high enough in the rigging to escape the racing seas, while what was left of her topmasts and yards remained above water like crosses on her grave.

Bodies and wreckage drove ashore where the local fishermen watched helplessly from the beach glimpsing her topmasts between the rainsqualls, and each time there would be fewer men left clinging to the rigging. Three rescue attempts were launched only to be driven back, the seas thundering down on the shore with a crashing force that shook the sand and shingles on which they stood.

It took three days for the storm to blow itself out and the seas to subside enough for a boat to reach the wreck, and by then there was little hope. The decks were all below water, no member of the crew was left in the rigging, and only the three women and the babe were still lashed in the tops.

By the time they were cut free and brought down, the three women and the child had been exposed to storm and rain chilled rigors so long, that hope of rekindling life within them was indeed slim.

Out of sympathy and a natural sense of decency, they were not exposed alongside the still and silent rows of crew laid out on the dunes awaiting only the digging of their sandy graves. Instead, were carried into the warmth and shelter of the headman’s cabin, there if all hopes of resuscitation failed to be prepared for a more compassionate form of burial.

CHAPTER 2

Shipwreck was the tragedy most often associated with the treacherous waters off Cape Hatteras. There were other even greater disasters on the landward side of the Cape. Different in nature, but often more deadly, striking indiscriminately at towns and settlements on the mainland, devastating fires that raced through vast areas of the highly inflammable pine forests of the Piedmont, floods that inundated the lower-lying flatlands, and in the hot and humid days of summer pestilence and disease that struck down both animal and man.

For now it is just one such tragedy that makes this history personal, a tragedy which struck deep into the flat country running inland from the edge of the Albemarle Sound back to the distant Blue Ridge Mountains.

Since this is a personal account of one such tragedy, an early introduction is perhaps in order: I have been appointed the recorder of this chronicle and my name is Boy. My age is somewhat uncertain, but it cannot be much above twelve. I, having been rescued from a ship, wrecked on Cape Hatteras in the year 1819, a babe in arms and by consequence of this aqueous beginning, a foundling of no evident attachment until taken. Along with fifty-nine other children, under the wing of that most compassionate man, Doctor of both Divinity and medicine, Dr. Standfast Ashton Peacewell Stirling, living in the town of Kingston upon the Albemarle, which is not a river, but a Sound. Kingston is never spoken of as being on either of its twin rivers, the Shiptank or the Curritank, but only as ever being on the larger body of water, the Sound.

By great good fortune, a sufficiency of wit survived my wet beginnings enabling me these past two years to be apprenticed to the Doctor himself. First, my ability to read and write a clear label set me to the preparing as Apprentice Apothecary potions distilled from curative herbs, tree barks, leaves, and flowers, and in lesser degree from finely ground substances and powdered chemicals. Then having more by chance than by diligence avoided the untimely termination of a single patient, I was provided a closer than cared for opportunity to inspect the success or failure of my potions by becoming his assistant in surgery.

Most probably I would never be examined before an appointed medical board, but if after a sufficient passage of years I showed the skill, and of course, had the luck for continued successful diagnosis and treatment, Dr. Stirling would, in time, write me a letter attesting to my competence. Allowing me to hang out a shingle and practice as a doctor in my own right. Then should the law be changed to make it necessary I would apply for a Medical License from the State of South Carolina and should they refuse me, apply to any of the other states until one of them agreed to accept Dr. Stirling’s letter of commendation.

Well I was one of three score children both girls and boys, housed in what first became Dr. Stirling’s Orphanage, and then his Academy and probably would have no tale to tell had I not been singled out for an experiment in learning, and then because I came to like books, reading, and writing more than the other fifty-nine. I was chosen to become the first apprentice and student to be trained medically in the Institution.

Now in view of all that has happened and the changes that are taking place, it has been decided it were best to keep a written general record, unofficial but descriptive, and of an all embracing nature, from which a true history can later be compiled and that this task, by reason of my proficiency with a pen, be placed in my hands.

Every inmate here excepting for me grew up in the surrounding pine forests where all were orphaned by the same tragic disease. Most are strong and sturdily built true sons and daughters of the land whereas I being of lighter and swifter materials depend on speed and dexterity to keep me out of trouble and being dark haired and with an open expression and wide blue eyes am fortunate enough to also give the illusion of innocence. Then coming from the sea I escaped the disease my fellow orphans faced, but instead barely survived a thorough drowning.

Much has changed in over a decade since the Orphanage was founded in 1818, and we are now to become an Academy, famous for its learning. It being the year 1830 we orphans are supposed to bring ourselves more in line with the industrial revolution which is taking place all around us and help make the Academy more up-to-date and in keeping with the general tenure of the times. Because of the Academy’s continued shortage of funds, this is mainly in small affordable ways so that I no longer take pen-knife to sharpen a goose quill, but write with one of Mr. Joseph Gillott’s newfangled steel-nibbed pens issued me on this occasion for the special purpose of recording in a style of suitable dignity the nature of death and tragedy which brought the Academy into being.

So this being semi-official along with the need for a dignity of word and style this account may not sound like the real me speaking to you even though it comes to you by virtue of my pen and my hand, and I certainly am real enough despite what many of the other occupants in this sixty strong orphanage might wish to imply.

Of course, they are all entitled to their own opinions however wrong they may be and despite their resentful and jealous protests, it is I who am appointed as their official voice to tell the story of how they came to be orphaned in a few short tragic weeks all by the same overwhelming disaster of which I was the lone exception.

So, while I am their voice I am not of their body, they arriving dry while I was soaking wet, and they all coming from the same areas deep in the pine forests of the Piedmont and the upper Kingston Peninsula, while I come from the sea and an entirely different background to that of their land-locked origins.

In truth their story starts even before the tragedy which destroyed whole families and created orphans by the score. For such orphans it is the story of bare survival of the few and then the struggle to find food and shelter for three score hungry mouths which led to the founding of an Academy to house, clothe, and educate this large family, guide it to a general betterment, and for the sake of propriety, control its course. This last being open to interpretation, for I doubt there is even a day passes when one or more of us does not at least try to circumvent those rules.

Looking objectively at this group I have since wondered whether girls are not more enduring than boys are, for among the surviving children girls were in the far greater number at the time, and mostly aged between four and fourteen. Now, at the time of writing, the youngest is coming up on fifteen and the oldest over twenty-four, and in the ways of nature they have multiplied and formed almost a small colony of their own. Well, if not a colony then at least a small self-contained community born out of mutual tragedy and despair.

I am of course one of the sixty, smaller than most because I am four years or so behind the youngest and I think tougher because of an endless battle with them for recognition and respect. However, for the next few pages this is the chronicle of the other fifty-nine and how their suffering formed the inspiration, which established this Academy. It also reflects an even greater tragedy for the relatively few of those who survived were perhaps no more than one in ten making ours the lucky fifty-nine where nearly six hundred perished.

The death rate peaked at the end of a humid, fatal summer, but by then the great Cholera Epidemic of 1818 had ravaged the low coastal plains from the waters of the Pamlico Sound deep into the pine forests that run west into the foothills known as the Piedmont of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Decimating rich and poor alike, the contagion struck impartially at plantation, town, and village but saved some of the worst devastation for the scattered and largely inaccessible forest communities where men tapped longleaf and slash pines for the turpentine and tar required for Naval Stores, and where whole families perished deep in the woods far beyond the range of what little help was available.

Tapping pines for turpentine was mostly a hardscrabble existence, where whole families lived marginal, semi-nomadic lives with little resource or reserve in either food or medicine. This may seem strangely unrewarding in view of the vital importance of both turpentine and Stockholm Tar to the essential Naval Stores, which protect the standing rigging of our warships and our mercantile fleets on which depends the prosperity of our country and without which we cannot survive. Despite their importance, it is sad to note that such vital services, especially if of a manual nature, are usually held in poorest regard and are the least rewarded.

It is perhaps ironic that the wealth of teas, silks, coffees, perfumes, dye woods, and opium, which Naval Stores help carry to our shores for our profit and our pleasure never seem to enrich those who work the hardest to provide them.

That is more a philosophical observation than a complaint, for we orphans are among the lucky ones who toil not neither do we spin and almost in contradiction have benefited, if indirectly, from the labor of slaves and those lowly ones. For our Academy is sponsored by the wealthiest planter in the area, a bon viveur as good-natured as he is generous who, unlike many that raise cotton, tobacco, and rice for the market never sought to reduce his obligations to us orphans, or to cut production costs on his plantations by skimping on slave rations. Even in times when commerce lagged and profits dropped as now when overproduction has helped choke the sluggish markets of the eighteen thirties.

Back to 1818 and the disaster, which produced so many orphans from the pine-tapping communities of the forests. These were the children of families, which spent their lives far off in the distant evergreens, where the men worked for such small reward to produce our vital Naval Stores.

The port of Kingston, on the Albemarle Sound, collection depot for the Pine Tar Trade, was in times of emergency, the only community where help and medical supplies might still be found. Even though it was become the epicenter of the plague, where fever first struck and now quarantined and reeling from the onslaught was full occupied in caring for the dying, burying its dead and digging its lonely Cholera graves.

Deep in the forests the tappers of turpentine were hardest hit of all where the oldest seeming to be the least resistant to the fever and with parents dead or dying, the plight of their children was the greatest of tragedies, they being left without either resources or guidance and often not even old enough to fend for themselves.

Those who managed to survive the plague, mainly the younger ones, faced immediate starvation, and driven by hunger sealed their own fate by walking deeper into the woods searching vainly for relatives who had already perished.

More wandered aimlessly amongst the trees, grubbing for edible roots and berries, until they fell exhausted. Others, perhaps one in ten, became known as the Lucky Ones, who instinctively turned towards Kingston as the center, which bought the Naval Stores their parents produced, and in return supplied the axe blades, wood pullers, wood hacks, and necessities the Turpentiners could neither make nor grow for themselves.

So began the long and tragic struggle out of the forests towards Kingston, in a last desperate hope that somewhere they might find a source of food, care, and the help they so desperately needed.

Wraith-like, barefoot, and in rags they ghosted out from among the trees, threadbare and travel scarred, lacerated by thorn and brier, skeletal arms and legs covered with fly-blown sores, gaunt eyes already glazed with the near-doom of exhaustion.

The survivors of that death march were the most fortunate, for without knowing it, they were headed, not just for Kingston, but also for the one place that had suffered least of all from the Cholera. A natural haven of calm and recovery half a mile up the Shiptank River from the town where the low riverbanks gave way to tidal pools and marshes and occasional areas of fertile ground high enough to support limited fields and the scattered homesteads of small-holders.

In this remote area, the sheer distance between neighbors and the abundant supply of water helped promote a health and a hygiene that slowed the deadly spread of infection and turned the area into a comparative vale-of-health.

Only the immediate acreage adjoining this healthier east side of town along the Shiptank River and reaching to the point where marsh and pool took over was prime land wide and long. Enough to support a single plantation known as Tower Place, named after Tower Hill in far off London, where the town house of the Stirling family overlooked the traditional execution place of traitors to the crown.

Executions were considered exciting events watched by eager crowds come from afar for the entertainment offered by a beheading or the hanging, drawing, and quartering of the victim and high prices were paid for the better vantage points, such as the windows of the surrounding buildings, of which the Stirling house was a prime example.

Tower Place on the Kingston Peninsula was the second part of two land grants held by the Stirling family. Both with the all-important water access for there were still too few roads, bridges, and turnpikes to serve the area and barges and wherries were the bulk carriers of plantation produce to the city markets of Washington and Baltimore and in larger vessels by high seas to the outside world.

The Stirling’s first and main plantation, Tarnside, reached along the opposite west side of Kingston Peninsula, where the land thrusts out into the Albemarle Sound between its two wide tidal-streams, the Curritank to the west and the Shiptank to the east.

Because of the higher, better-drained land, this select area along the Curritank was the site of all the finest plantations, their Great Houses like mansions, strung out at intervals along the low bluffs above the river.

Well-spaced they might be, but their densely packed slave lines carried the cholera from plantation to plantation so that the Great Houses became as besieged by death as the loneliest of Turpentiner’s settlements far away amongst the distant pines.

Along these bluffs and higher banks of the Curritank, where wealth and power could command all available resources to fight contagion, no effort was spared to check the fever raging through the slave lines where death was perhaps measured less in humanitarian terms than in the loss of a work force worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Slave deaths, however, were no less tragic for slave orphans.

In one sense, slave orphans were better off than free forest children were, slave orphans never being left foodless to wander the streets of Kingston, for although no heavy fieldwork was expected of them until old enough at nine or ten. So placing them in the least productive and least profitable section of the slave work force, they were still a readily saleable, self-replenishing product, in a market sense as valuable as any other plantation crop.

Therefore those starving children dragging themselves into town, were only white orphans, colloquially known as Pineys, valueless because under existing laws whites, or Caucasians, could not be enslaved, and so could not be bought, sold, or legally forced to work.

In an era when slavery was defended from the pulpit, Kingston was not considered a heartless town, but now stricken with its own grief and the problems of depleted supplies and rationed food, it had little enough time or pity to spare for the plight of outsiders, for even young children meant extra mouths to feed.

Kingston might ignore the plight of these children, yet there were still a few citizens who could not stand idly by in the face of such desperate need, and who found it in their hearts to help alleviate the suffering of these homeless ones. In this case, the conscience of Kingston was spearheaded by the sole medical officer to survive the epidemic, a Dr. Standfast Ashton Peacewell Stirling, only son of the plantation owners, newly down from Harvard with the ink barely dry on his medical diploma.

Young, idealistic, and energetic he tended the sick all daylight hours then organized like compassionates to ride out with him at dusk to search the woods for exhausted stragglers, picking up as many of the fallen children as could be found before darkness finally hid their trail of tragedy and woe.

By daylight, the survivors came straggling out of the woods again, starving, beyond tears, some staggering, some crawling on their knees, silent with fatigue, hands out in supplication, stumbling into Kingston, stained and filthy. Dragging door to door in wordless pleas for help, until someone compassionate pointed them towards the only refuge willing to take them in, that run by Dr. Stirling in the tent city he set up on the fields of his Tower Place Plantation on the eastern edge of town.

It was so final an effort for many that a small graveyard, marked with simple, often nameless wooden crosses, grew forlornly on a stretch of flat ground behind the rows of tents housing the emaciated survivors under canvas.

First things first, in an age when the greater commonality of the populace considered scratching at head and body lice as normal and natural as eating and drinking, all the surviving children first needed delousing. Their heads were shaved, clothes burned, bodies scrubbed repeatedly until it was certain they no longer harbored any form of cootie or their eggs. Until cleansed of all parasitic life forms they were housed in isolation tents.

Kingston needed no reminding of the tragedy it shared with these Cholera orphaned children and found tent-city both offensive and an untimely drain on the town’s exhausted resources and their even more exhausted tolerance.

This finally threw the whole burden of orphan maintenance on young Stirling’s shoulders. A burden he could not have carried without the financial help of his childhood friend, Colonel Gunner Trent, owner of cotton plantations on the Kingston Peninsula of North Carolina, rice fields and cotton fields on St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia and who also experimented with the growing of sugarcane on the mainland further south down Florida way.

The somewhat portly Gunner, as he was affectionately known, was easily the Kingston area’s wealthiest and most fun-loving citizen and an unregenerate slave owner despite his long friendship with young Stirling, whose conscience had prompted him to become an ardent abolitionist.

The Gunner was still helping provide essentials for the orphans when winter snapped in, harsher and earlier than usual, forcing the need for warmer cover than the canvas tent-city could provide.

In view of the town’s unwillingness to help, Dr. Stirling was again thrown back on his own devices and began moving the freezing children under cover of the barns and outbuildings of Tower Place’s Great House, barely a stone’s throw up river from tent-city. There, aided by the Gunner’s supply of labor and lumber, he hastily converted the Plantation’s farm buildings into dormitories, classrooms, and the necessary workshops for what in time was to become a largely self-contained academic institution.

Kingston gave its grudging approval to anything, which helped remove the eyesore of tent-city and separate the orphans a little further from the town. However, it gave no practical help and little sympathy besides.

To finance the expense of this move and lay in sufficient supplies for the winter, Stirling borrowed from the Gunner, on generous terms, against Tarnside the larger and more valuable of his two family plantations. Tarnside resided six miles west of town on the banks of the Curritank River, and by this charitable means, the Gunner spread his already extensive holdings still further.

This help was not entirely philanthropic on the Gunner’s part, for as a slave owner he considered his life-long friend’s missionary-like zeal to help ex-slaves re-establish themselves in the newly created colony of Liberia, on the West Coast of Africa, the waste of a valuable white life in a Negro cause, in which he had but little confidence, and counted on these new orphan responsibilities to keep young Stirling where the Gunner felt he belonged.

However self-serving this might appear the Gunner chose to see it as part of the necessary heroic measures he must undertake to save his friend from what he saw as a useless sacrifice.

Doctor Standfast Ashton Peacewell Stirling was a direct descendant of that Thaddeus Peacewell Stirling who took up the first grants of land on the Kingston Peninsula in 1628 and named the first Tarnside after their country home in England and the second Tower Hill after their house in London.

The Stirlings were thrifty husbandmen who managed to prosper come rain or shine always working their holdings profitably with a small army of slaves that varied in number according to the state of the economy.

But now, some two hundred years later, in the first quarter of the 1800’s, these were changing times and idealistic young Stirling, sent to study better methods of planting and land administration at Harvard University across the river from Boston, fell under the spell of the eminent Dr. William Ellery Channing, spiritual leader of New England liberalism, great humanitarian and anti-slavery advocate, and fired by Dr. Channing’s righteous teachings switched from agriculture to medicine and the more liberal of religious studies.

Emerging cum laude and full of zeal, he was now an ardent abolitionist fiercely determined to break the family mold, vowing never to be a planter or live again off the labor of slaves.

Feeling the need to expiate what he now saw as the sins of his forefathers he planned to become a medical missionary bringing spiritual and physical relief to the Society of Freed Slaves in the newly formed colony of Liberia on the far away coast of West Africa.

Returning home for family farewells, Dr. Stirling was prepared to meet with tears and parental opposition but instead met his first medical challenge when he found cholera raging the length and breadth of the Kingston Peninsula and deep into the pine forests beyond, with the whole area placed under a strict quarantine.

With all the formality of the age he was immediately attended upon by the two local medical men, Drs. Layton and Cromwell, and after the long, polite preamble demanded by a tedious etiquette of manners, was invited to roll up his sleeves and join them in fighting a tragic disease, which respected no one and had no manners at all.

After a nightmare summer, death, which seldom takes a holiday, gradually slowed its pace until finally frozen out by the harshest and coldest of winters that followed. By the time fatalities began dropping, Layton had long collapsed and succumbed in the dockside warehouse hastily converted into a makeshift hospital, while a fever-wracked Cromwell, while making rounds, toppled from his horse never to mount again.

Surviving the Cholera as much by chance as by skill, an exhausted Dr. Stirling escaped infection while, despite his every effort, both his elderly parents, and forty-three of their slaves, succumbed to the deadly fever while his only sibling, a married sister living in far off Savannah, was safely out of reach and far beyond the zone of infection.

Grieving, his burden was yet increased, for by the right of primogeniture as the only son he was now saddled with inheriting two large plantations, a responsibility he did not want and had so determinedly planned to escape.

Now the only medical man left in the whole area, with sixty surviving, hapless orphans to feed and nurse back to health, Stirling was reluctantly forced to shelve his altruistic dream of becoming a Medical Missionary in Liberia.

While hoping this would be but a temporary setback, he was well aware of the town’s feelings towards the orphans and rightly, feared Kingston would refuse to take over their responsibility so making him the permanent solution to what should have been the town’s problem.

True to his new abolitionist ideals, Dr. Stirling manumitted his remaining slaves. He donated each one sufficient land for cabin, kitchen garden, and fodder, provided them with tools and materials to build and enough seed and livestock to farm on a small scale, and after helping them set up independent lives, turned his bachelor talents to the larger family task of fending for sixty orphans!

However, one newly freed slave, a woman, when barely more than a child herself, had looked after young Stirling and his younger sister from the time of their births, refused to desert him. Louise Labelle d’Aubigny, took her name from the Louisiana family who owned her when she was sent as a wedding present for their only daughter who came north to Kingston as the bride of Thaddeus Peacewell Stirling, and raise a family of which the Doctor was the only son.

Louise was small, bird-like, swift and intelligent, and a source of never tiring energy. As a trusted house servant and nurse she had taught herself to read and write, and with an ear for languages, was fluent in the coastal Igbo of the Niger River Delta spoken by her West African forebears, Creole French from Louisiana, formally correct English from the Stirlings, Gullah from the coastal sea-islands that grew the famous long staple cotton, and the slave patois of the surrounding cotton and tobacco fields which bore little, if any, resemblance to the orphans’ pine forests’ dialect. She was also a gifted cook in the Louisiana tradition.

Louise, who never married, became a competent manager, nurse, cook, great-hearted den-mother, and equal partner in what later, as the townsfolk woke up to the charitable achievements of this remarkable pair, became known as "The Kingston Academy for

Orphaned Children, and as a result of her self-sacrifice, her compassionate care for the orphans, her skills with potions, and her fearless nursing of the sick and dying during the Cholera Epidemic, attained a local reputation little short of sainthood. Young Dr. Stirling, for like heroic reasons, became known to all as the Good Doctor".

These two, freed slave and medical doctor of divinity, were recognized as leading the conscience of Kingston, and later, when the town was fully recovered and two more medical men were invited to practice in the area, they were always formally spoken of by their names as Drs. Jordan and Blakely. But to say just the Doctor meant Kingston’s one and only: Dr. Standfast Ashton Peacewell Stirling, wise counselor and trusted friend who treated the ills of rich and poor alike except that he made no charge for the latter.

Time, familiarity of usage, and the lassitude of sweltering summers soon shortened The Kingston Academy for Orphan Children to The Academy, or in orphanese: t’Cadmy, and as it took on the nature of a permanent institution it also became, of necessity, a school which gradually assumed the luster of its learned progenitor.

The first-sons of planters, well-to-do merchants, and sea captains were naturally sent for their educations up to Harvard, Yale, or the College of New Jersey at Princeton, for which the Kingston Academy became an ideal preparatory school and also a suitable repository for second sons and even daughters. Although this last was considered an indulgence, because girls were required only to marry, please a husband, and raise his children, and for such natural and basic function were not considered to need learning or any higher degree of knowledge than the three R’s.

Of course, within the Academy these pampered children of the wealthy were treated differently, they were among the orphans but of a world apart. Arriving daily from town and surrounding countryside by horse or carriage, coming and going as they pleased, having their own meals brought in by house slaves, providing their own cushioned chairs and sitting in the center of the Great Hall well separated from we orphans who sat ranged along the side walls on wooden benches.

Right from the start there was no fraternizing, just envy and resentment on one side and arrogance and disdain on the other, factors which made for a very uneasy peace. Both the Doctor and Cookie, as Louise d’Aubigny was now known to both orphans and day students, made it clear that tuition fees of the latter and occasional gifts from grateful parents, covered a large part of the food bill for the orphans.

Understanding the Academy’s financial needs helped restrain the hotheads but did not cure the problem and tensions, which came to a head in the summer of 1831. The same year Gregory XV1 became Pope in Italy’s Vatican City. While in England, by August 1 of that year, the old London Bridge, with its many arches and rows of shops, was a thing of the past. The new, wider version of London Bridge opened to accommodate the increased flow of horse-drawn traffic generated by the Industrial Revolution, which was shaking up a sleeping world, or at least the western part of it.

At the Academy, the lid was ready to blow off the kettle!

CHAPTER 3

In hot, humid Kingston, it was one of those sweltering days when the land wilted under the weight of a heavy sun, far too hot for shoes yet the ground scorched bare feet and heated the air to shimmer and radiate with fire-pit intensity.

A day when a group of orphans, sullen with sweat, languidly watched a half-hearted game of stick-ball just as a group of the elite, in their fine clothes and fresh linens, sauntered casually past tut-tutting and shaking their heads in an obvious but wordless commentary on the poor quality of play while wrinkling their noses in an insulting manner at the lively body odors generated by the sweating players!

At bat was the Academy bully and worst player, furious at being struck out by the weakest pitcher on the other side. Unused to such humiliation, steamed up and ready to blow, he wanted a distraction to cover his embarrassing performance and thought this just the excuse he needed!

Letting out a bellow of rage he turned and leaped on the nearest aristocrat, a slim, elegant youth half his size, grabbing him by a silken arm sure of an easy victim and a crowd-pleasing diversion. In a flash of double-action the aristocrat whirled around, free hand whipping into a side pocket to emerge with a small and deadly pistol which he jammed hard against his attacker’s forehead, in the same instant thumbing back the hammer to full-cock with a deadly click!

That one flash of short, blue-barreled steel paralyzed the whole school, dispelled any hint of boredom, sent an indiscriminate shock of horror through orphan ranks, and gave new meaning to sweating with excitement!

On both sides everyone immediately fell back leaving the antagonists a clear field of action while the bully, with positions so suddenly reversed that he was bewildered, slowly came to terms with being the victim instead of the aggressor and in slack-jawed amazement dropped his hold on the silken arm!

The aristocrat shook his sleeve disdainfully, as if to rid himself of any lingering dirt or infection, then slipped the free hand into the other pocket and produced the mate to his pair of pocket pistols!

In a breathless silence he thumbed the second hammer back from half to full-cock with a click, which punctured the dank air like a knell of doom!

Holding the bully, and in a sense the whole school, at pistol-point while everyone stood frozen in disbelief, he expounded at length in ornate, almost supercilious language, with the perfect diction used to recite poetry in class, on the unbridgeable gap which existed between prince and pauper, although without using those exact terms. Making it quite clear to his audience that since a duel was a matter of honor, which could only take place between gentlemen of equal standing, such attack, whether on himself or anyone else of quality, was the gravest of insults and one which could only be expunged by an extreme penalty!

Then, as a gallant gesture to the ladies present, and for those with a weak stomach, he informed us he would delay sentence until anyone with such an effeminate frailty of the intestines withdrew to a discrete