We left for Gravesend on the sixteenth day of sixth-month, the month the world calls August. This was the first stage of our journey. At Gravesend we would embark on the Promise, and sail to Deal, on the Kent coast, where we would take on stores and more passengers. Only when wind and tide were right would we begin our voyage to America.
The boat that conveyed us to Gravesend left Wapping soon after dawn. I stood on deck with my family, among a crowd of other passengers, mostly Friends, each of us alone with our thoughts as we gazed back at the London skyline. For me, it was the city where I had been born, the only home I had known. In the distance, gathering form and solidity as the light grew, I could see the scaffolding and half-built walls of the new steeple-house of Paul’s – the old building having been destroyed in the Great Fire.
It was seventeen years since the fire that had blazed for four days and nights and left London in ruins. My parents had been caught up in that catastrophe, and as a child I’d loved to hear my mother tell how they escaped, with me in her belly, into the fields of Islington.
“We thought the fire would cleanse the city of its wickedness,” she said once, “but it did not. The Truth is still unheard in the great Babylon.”
The great Babylon: a place of luxury and corruption. How different would Philadelphia be? I wondered. My father, who had been brought up an Anglican and had learned Greek and Latin at school, had told me that the name Philadelphia meant “City of Brotherly Love”. It could surely not yet be a city at all, for it was only last year that William Penn had sailed there with a hundred other Friends to found it.
When I remembered the alarms of my childhood – the meetings violently broken up by soldiers, my parents sentenced to prison, the bailiffs ransacking our house – I’d thought how good it would be to live in such a place as William Penn envisaged. And yet now I wondered if I might also miss some of the wickedness of the great Babylon.
The City receded from view, and in its place we passed through smaller docks and clusters of mean houses and brothels. The land was marshy and flat, and the river looped across it, slowly widening towards the estuary until we came in sight of Gravesend.
And there, at last, we saw the Promise. She was an old, round-bowed, weathered ship, her brown sails dirty and patched. My sisters and I were disappointed. We had imagined something more impressive – a vessel worthy of such a momentous voyage.
My father was watching anxiously for our chests and boxes, which were being removed from the boat by porters and transferred, along with everyone else’s luggage, to the hold of the Promise. In addition to all our household goods, he’d brought a crate full of books for sale in Philadelphia, and cases of fonts, ink, paper, quills, notebooks and ledgers of all kinds. The bookshop and stationer’s could be set up almost immediately on arrival, but the print works would take longer, for a press would need to be built and men hired. Once the decision was made to go he had spent weeks working out the packing and finances. The cost of our passage, he’d told me, was the smallest part.
“Look to the women, Jos,” he chivvied me now. “And help find our cabin space.”
A somewhat unseemly rush to claim the best spaces was in progress on the lower deck. We installed ourselves in a spot near the stern. When she saw the sleeping quarters we had been allocated, Betty was appalled. The so-called cabin the five of us would share for the next eight, twelve or perhaps even fourteen weeks, was an airless space, partitioned off from neighbours on either side by thin walls, and with just enough room for us all to lie down. A curtain screened it from the gangway.
“I won’t be able to bear this!” she complained. “Mam! There’s no privacy! We are all together – it’s not decent. And where is the privy?”
My mother had no patience for her. “A little overcrowding is nothing to what Friends have suffered in their time,” she said (at which Betty, turning away, rolled her eyes). “Dost thou imagine we had privacy in Newgate? We’ll hang up a sheet if thou must pretend to such maidenly modesty…”
“It’s not pretence!” protested Betty, but to no avail.
Our mother was more concerned about Sarah, whether the damp, malodorous air would harm her. Sarah was already coughing, but she was happy enough, helping Mam to unpack the few possessions we would use on the voyage.
There were several families on board whom we knew from Ratcliff and Stepney meetings, and the women soon began to help one another and to find ways of making their situation more comfortable. My mother brought out some sheeting and got us to help her make divisions in our space. “Catch hold of that end, Betty. Jos, can you reach up and fix it?”
I soon became tired of these domestic tasks and wanted to go ashore, but my mother forbade it; I think she was afraid I’d get into trouble again. Instead, I escaped by going up on deck. I breathed the salty, tarry air of the docks, and watched sailors and porters working on the quay, and seagulls swooping and crying. I had never seen the Thames estuary before, let alone the ocean. Later, lying on a thin mattress below decks at night, it was strange to feel the tide tugging the ship at its moorings. The cabin space was full of small sounds: a baby cried and was shushed; Sarah coughed and sighed; and my parents murmured together in low voices for a long time.
The next day we had to wait for a suitable tide and did not leave Gravesend till late afternoon; and then in Deal we were delayed for five days by contrary winds. Most people went ashore from time to time. A few, who could afford to pay for an extra passage, hired servants in the town, which was a rough sort of place, full of cheap lodgings and alehouses. We Friends kept together, and I caught the curious, sometimes unfriendly eyes of the inhabitants on us.
Our father gave each of us a small book in which to keep a journal. I knew he meant it for a spiritual journal – this being, for Friends, a voyage of the soul as much as of the body. He knew that Betty would write about everything she heard and saw; that Sarah would struggle with her letters, and lapse; and he knew that I would draw more than I wrote. But he left it to the spirit to guide us. Betty began writing that very day, with great enthusiasm. I tried dutifully to write about my hopes for our life in Philadelphia, but found myself daydreaming of forests and wilderness – vague imaginings that could not be put into words. Instead, I turned to drawing. I drew the harbour buildings, the quayside and the ship, paying careful attention to every detail of the rigging.
The night before we sailed, when all were aboard, we held a meeting for worship on deck: more than eighty people standing silent together. Even the crew fell quiet. The only sounds were the creak of the ship’s timbers, the slap of waves on her sides, the cries of gulls. This meeting affected me more powerfully than any I had experienced before; and it was the silence itself that held me, for whenever a Friend spoke the wind carried away his words and I could not hear. It seemed to me, in the silence, that we felt and breathed as one, that we were all held in this great endeavour, this holy experiment.
Before mid-morning the tide began to turn. The master shouted orders, the seamen ran to their stations, and I watched the sails hauled up, bellying out as the wind caught and tugged them. Nearly everyone was on deck now, my family among them. My mother stood quietly, elbows on the rail, head lowered. She was praying. My father laid his arm about her shoulders. Betty and Sarah stood, intent and absorbed, as did I; I believe we all felt the seriousness of the moment.
The anchor was raised. And the Promise was under way.