At 1,107 tons, the triple-mast coastal packet-ship, Windermere was a sizeable vessel, equipped to transport 100 passengers – mostly British and European emigrants travelling on one-way tickets to try their fortunes in a new world – and a motley crew of thirty Anglo-Irish, Dutch and American seamen. The ship, owned by the Smith-Pilkington Line, regularly sailed between Liverpool and New Orleans, via Jamaica, a voyage taking anything up to sixty days to complete. On journeys to Liverpool she carried a cargo of cotton bales and on return voyages transported textiles and finished garments made from the same material at northern mills.
Once the ship had passed the north-western tip of Wales, it steered a southerly course into the chilly Irish Sea and down through St George’s Channel before passing the south coast of Ireland and out into the rolling winter waters of the North Atlantic. The Windermere would not see land again for a further 3,971 nautical miles and fifty days when it would call into Jamaica to unload some passengers and freight and take on fresh supplies for the remaining 1,021 nautical miles to the port of New Orleans.
But when the Windermere was less than an hour into its long voyage and off New Brighton, it began sharply to rise and fall in Liverpool Bay’s rough waters, causing its newest cabin boy to suddenly feel light-headed. As he gripped the handrail, the ship, sea and sky began to swirl around at speed, forcing the boy to confine himself to his bunk in the apprentice cabin on the main deck for the next three days.
On the fourth day, Captain Hartinge sent word below to remind his new cabin boy that he was not engaged on a pleasure cruise and had work to do. He was expected on deck immediately – or he could expect trouble. The message was delivered by ‘a hoarse, rasping voice, whose owner seemed in a violent passion, bawling: “Now, then, come out of that, you — young Britisher! Step up here in a brace of shakes, or I’ll come down a’ skin your — — carcase alive!”’
With a swirling head and stomach that had not taken in food for three days, the boy was assigned deck-washing duties. Fear of more threats from the owner of the rough voice drove away any remaining nausea as he was urged to ‘seize that scrubbing broom, you — joskin! Lay hold of it, I say, and scrub, you — son of a sea cook! Scrub like —! Scrub until you drop! Sweat you — swab!’
The boy snatched a look at the man issuing these crude commands. It was ‘a kind of creature never dreamed of before by me’. His name was Nelson, second mate in charge of apprentice crew members, with a mission to make life as miserable as possible for his young charges.
After a day of deck scrubbing, John Rowlands was taken aside by an older boy called Harry, who warned him to avoid Nelson. Harry had undertaken an Atlantic voyage already on the Windermere and considered himself an expert seaman, having learned to get stuck into his work and never to answer back. John Rowlands’s announcement that he was hired as a cabin boy and not a deck hand amused Harry. He told him that on his previous voyage two other lads had been induced to join the ship with promises of a similar job but ended up as deck skivvies for the entire journey. Once back in Liverpool, they were first down the gangplank, not even stopping to collect their wages, so keen were they to put as much distance as possible between the Windermere, Nelson’s brutality and themselves.
Harry told John that while Nelson was dangerous, Chief Mate Waters was ‘the very devil’, a man prepared to punch anyone weaker than himself. Waters had taken a liking to Harry because he had been brought on board by his father, who insisted the Captain signed articles making him an official member of the crew. ‘The skipper has to account for me when we get into port; but you may be blown overboard and no one would be the wiser,’ said Harry. ‘I am now as good as an ordinary seaman, though too young for the forecastle. I can furl royals as spry as any bucco sailor on board, and know every rope on the ship, while you don’t know stem from stern.’
For a moment John thought he was back at St Asaph’s, only this time it was a floating workhouse with a pair of sadistic ship’s mates taking James Francis’s place. Just as Francis had beaten inmates in his charge, so the ruffian mates stormed, swore, struck and kicked junior wretches on the Windermere. It was too late to climb over the rail and dive to freedom. They were now crossing the Atlantic – and John Rowlands couldn’t even swim.
The workhouse boy learned that the rest of the crew also had nothing but contempt for land-lubbers working on the Windermere. Nothing pleased them more than seeing a boy doubled over with seasickness. If they encountered a lad going about his duties in one of the ship’s corridors, they thought nothing of landing blows across his head or giving his rear a sharp kick. They enjoyed watching other seamen making lives a misery and the Captain rarely interfered.
Five days out of Liverpool, three stowaways – a pair of starving young Irish boys and a down-at-heel Irishman – appeared on deck. They were taken to the Captain who closely interrogated each one before dismissing them to the mercy of the crew. Nelson was first in line ‘to warm their cockles’, as he phrased it. The cries of the youngest lad were the loudest, but when he finally appeared on deck to beg for food, the remainder of the crew guessed from his roguish smile that he had been the least injured.
The arrival of the stowaways acted as a buffer between John and ‘a considerable amount of inglorious mauling’ which Nelson might otherwise have dealt out to the Welsh landlubber. The second mate was in the habit of chasing both Irish boys around the ship. Both were able to run, but there were few places to hide on the Windermere and when they were finally captured ‘the cries of the innocents would be heart-rending’.
Henry Morton Stanley’s account of his early years at the workhouse and on the Windermere make frequent reference to sadistic brutality and ‘maulings’. The moral climate of the time prevented Stanley from describing the form the maulings took. They were, most likely, sexual. Homosexual rape of younger, weaker apprentice crew by older, stronger and undisciplined shipmates was common on merchant ships. Sexual activity between consenting males was frowned upon, but a blind eye was often turned by officers rarely present in quarters shared by the lower orders.
The boy gradually found his sea legs and even looked forward to sailing through the gales and tempests he heard about from shipmates. Somewhere in mid-Atlantic he encountered them, on a day when ‘a shadow passed over the ocean, until it was almost black in colour; and then, to windward, I could see battalion after battalion of white caps rushing gaily, exultingly, towards us’.
Oilskins were passed around as waves began to lap over the sides and ‘every “man jack” seemed electrified and flew to his duty with all ardour’. There was little an inexperienced landlubber could offer in such a situation, so he stood to one side, taking in the scene as men pulled on ropes and sails were lowered. Looking back, he recalled ‘a gale at sea is as stimulating as a battle’.
Just as the boy was beginning to enjoy the experience of a storm at sea, a harsh voice told him to get back to swabbing the deck. It was Waters and the lad seized the first mop that came to hand and spent the rest of the storm soaking up what appeared to be the entire Atlantic Ocean as the mate’s colourful language stung his sensitive ears.
‘That first voyage of mine was certainly a remarkable one, were it only for the new-fangled vocabulary I was constantly hearing,’ he recalled. ‘Every sentence contained some new word or phrase, coined extemporate, and accentuated by a rope’s end, or un-gentle back-hander, with gutter adjectives and explosive epithets.’ Harry gave back as good a range of invective as he received – with interest – but John Rowlands was afraid to use similar language, which appeared to have been designed for people other than himself.
The remainder of the voyage took place under blue skies and the lad spent his time endlessly scrubbing paintwork, cleaning brass, painting, oiling, sloshing out the bilges and tarring. On Sundays, Nelson and Waters gave their spiteful invective a rest and ‘there might have been worse places than the deck of the Windermere on a Sunday’. Quieter moments were few and far between. Before the end of the voyage both first and second mate felt the need physically to attack both junior and mature crew with spikes, ropes and the soles of their boots until the day before the ship entered the Mississippi. Suddenly the sadistic pair changed their attitude and began praising everyone they had mauled and beaten. Everyone agreed the pair were anxious they would be reported to the Captain and end up in a New Orleans jail.
The Windermere laid anchor off one of the four mouths of the Mississippi in mid-February 1858, fifty-two days after leaving Liverpool. On the following morning, a tug towed the ship upriver for 100 miles to New Orleans, where it joined hundreds of others lined up alongside sailing vessels and river steamers. Once the passengers had disembarked, a multitude of boarding house touts climbed on board and took possession of the entire crew, leaving Harry and John the only members on board who had travelled from Liverpool. They stood at the railing taking in the scene. The boy later recalled:
The levee sloped down with a noble breadth to the river, and stretched for miles up and down in front of the city, and was crowned with the cargoes of hundreds of vessels which lay broadside to it. In some places the freights lay in mountainous heaps, but the barrels, and hogsheads, and cotton bales, covered immense spaces, though arranged in precise order; and with the multitudes of men – white, red, black, yellow – horses, mules, and drays and wagons, the effect of such a scene, with its fierce activity and new atmosphere, upon a raw boy from St. Asaph, may be better imagined than described. . . . I think it is one of the most vivid recollections I possess. Of the thousands of British boys who have landed in this city, I fancy none was so utterly unsophisticated as myself.
It was time to set foot on American soil and John Rowlands and Harry flew down the gangplank in the direction of Tchoupitoulas Street, New Orleans’ main thoroughfare and some ‘diggings’ where Harry had friends. ‘I was nearly overwhelmed with blissful feeling that rises from emancipation. I was free – and I was happy, yes, actually happy, for I was free,’ Stanley wrote years later.
As they walked down the bustling street, the boys breathed in the balmy air and its rich mixed aroma of fermenting molasses, semi-baked sugar, coffee beans, pitch, tar, rum and whiskey. The people they passed seemed different to those in Denbigh and Liverpool; they possessed a sense of equality, confidence and independence.
They stopped at a boarding house where Harry was welcomed by the proprietor. He ordered dinner for them both – okra soup, grits, sweet potatoes, corn pone and mashed-pudding. Harry later paid for the meal ‘with the air of one whose purse was deep beyond soundings’. He ordered a cigar and sat back in his easy chair puffing away like a millionaire.
It was time to explore. John was happy to follow Harry who headed in the direction of another house he knew where the proprietress ‘was extremely gracious’. Harry whispered something to her and the boys were shown into a parlour ‘where four young ladies wearing such scant clothing that I was speechless with amazement bounced into the room’. The naive Welsh workhouse boy had no idea what a brothel was or exactly what profession the young ladies were engaged in – ‘but when they proceeded to take liberties with my person, they seemed to be so appallingly wicked that I shook them off and fled out of the house’. Harry followed and attempted to persuade his shipmate to return, ‘but I would as soon have jumped into the gruel-coloured Mississippi as have looked into the eyes of those giggling wantons again. My disgust was so great I never, in after years, could overcome my repugnance to females of that character.’
They entered a waterfront saloon and Harry ordered whiskey – but John refused, telling his friend he belonged to the Band of Hope and had taken the pledge of abstinence. ‘Well smoke then, do something like other fellows,’ said Harry irritably, aware that the young pair stood out in the crowded bar. Wishing ‘to appear manly’, John called for a cigar, which he ‘puffed proudly and with vigour’, until he was overcome with nausea and rushed out to bring up his recently consumed dinner.
With no money in his pocket or anywhere to stay, the lad returned to the Windermere where he was discovered next day by Nelson who greeted him with ‘Hello, you here still? I thought you had vamoosed like the Irish stowaways. Not enough physic, eh? Well, sonny, we must see what we can do for you. . . .’ The boy was put to work cleaning brass fittings and spent the following days carrying out shipboard jobs, frightened to walk alone down the gangplank. Whenever he mentioned his wages, Nelson and Waters avoided the subject and raised threatening fists in his direction.
He decided to jump ship – which is what the Captain and his mates were expecting, so they might pocket his wages for themselves. He emptied his seabag onto the cabin floor and picked out the few contents he owned – some clothes, a pair of shoes and the Bible the bishop had given him at the workhouse. He dressed and lay on his bunk until a drunken Harry arrived and fell into a deep sleep. When it was quiet, he crept out into the night, down the gangplank and ran along the riverbank until he found a pile of cotton bales in the shadows. There he curled up and slept until daybreak. He was alone and adrift again.