The Uncolonized Letters [Narrative Nonfiction/History]

[Opening Scene--introduces antagonist, setting, tone, foreshadows primary conflict]

Elam Luddington’s obituary stated he was the first missionary to China, but it’s not true. Nor as it claimed, did he “perform an important mission to Japan”.^[1] Five months after it appeared Levi Savage, his former companion on that journey, belatedly corrected the errors. He wrote to Salt Lake City's Deseret Weekly on August 8^th, 1893, and included this seemingly detached detail of their parting, “Some time after[,] I learned that Elder Ludington had left Rangoon for parts unknown to me^[2].” Another story in a letter-journal lay on a shelf, in an archive, nearly untouched.

       Roughly 75 years earlier, in 1817 along the rolling orchard hills and farm plots of Bethlehem, Connecticut, ten-year-old Elam kicked the rocks of a treelined road then bounded past the church. Somehow the Luddingtons kept their names off its register, the town’s most prominent and influential institution. Not just nurturing sleepy home piety, Bethlehem ministers trained recruits. Elam, instead, imagined himself at sea.

       Then his cord to the town broke. Elam’s mother died. His father remarried but he didn’t get along with her and ran away.^[3] He left again as a young man, aiming for the sea, first working for the grain store in Poughkeepsie, New York then to a packet sloop on the Hudson River, cooking meals and stewarding passengers. He finally moved south to hew beams at the shipyards in Manhattan. 

       “I took quite a liking to the sea and clipper ships, brigs, and schooners with all sails set and colors flying,” Elam Luddington wrote. “I think a ship, a field of wheat, and a lovely maiden are the three prettiest things in the world.”^[4]

       In lower Manhattan near Grant, Broome, and Norfolk Streets, streaming with laborers, he woke up for his first job as an ordinary seaman. He likely stepped over four to five others, pulled a ballooning shirt over his head, and clamped suspenders to his work pants. He shared a cold face-wash in a community basin. Grabbing his satchel, a seaman’s kerchief, or a cap, he tramped down the stairs. He didn’t realize yet this would also be his last stint as a seaman.^[5]

He didn’t write about this uneventful morning in 1825 but we know he rambled south along more open land and freshly constructed churches toward the factories, the hammers and machinery clanking in the shops, past dock storage and shipyards, and out along the gusty docks. He breathed the salty legacy of his father and grandfather before him: his grandparents who dredged oysters, living in a home at the mouth of the Mill and Quinnipiac Rivers in Fair Haven, Connecticut. Their simple life spoiled during the war with England when British General Tryon ordered his men to set their house on fire as a parting gift on their way out of town—the spark that led Luddington’s grandfather to enlist in the rebel army.^[6]

Luddington’s father’s life at sea was also cut short; his father who started a career on a ship then left during an American embargo against the British.^[7] He moved inland to farm. Now it was Elam’s chance to outlast them at sea. 

Luddington strode past the jib-booms jutting over the paved dock and the masts bobbing and tilting in a forest of smoothed timber off Manhattan’s wet shores. Drawings of New York left out Elam’s sort, their lives not worthy enough to ink a piece of paper. 

A handful of men in tall hats and waist coats with pocket watches did make it into print. They had recently ventured into trade with China. Luddington was oblivious to those discussions, but he may have heard a few throw-away remarks about Asia in the grog houses or during the rowdy sermons he attended like the one from the firebrand, Lorenzo Dow^[8]. No thought to Asia appears in his early writings. His compass for adventure pointed eastward to Europe. This morning he angled toward his ocean-bound vessel for his first assignment, headed, he thought, for Le Havre, France.

The only record of Elam Luddington’s appearance comes from a pension application listing him as a stout 5'8" feet (173 cm) with "dark brown" hair and "dark grey" eyes, the color of the sea in a storm.^[9] The only other clues come from his descendants, like Sam Bush, who is also stout and with wolfish eyes.^[10]

Luddington checked in at the ship John Adams. Over a few drinks he bonded with his ship mates. In 1825 men drawn to work at sea, Germans, Irish, Africans, and Black Americans, sought the lifestyle or the freedom. What they generally had in common were not their origins or interests but their shorter size, a characteristic that allowed them to slip under and between the ship’s lines. Captains recruited single, unattached men like Luddington because few would mind their absence.     

Alongside the men Luddington loaded the ship with 500 tons of raw cotton^[11]. On schedule, April 1^st, 1825, a tug towed the John Adams into the harbor. The captain navigated a course for France 3,662 nautical miles away.^[12] The date and the cargo load appear in Luddington’s autobiographical statement of several folios he wrote as an older man. What he included there linked the events that forced him out of a career at sea. 

In 24 days the John Adams reached the harbor outside of Le Havre. When the captain learned the price of cotton had "taken quite a fall a few days before," he ordered the crew to weigh anchor, and charted a new course to Liverpool, England.^[13]

Perhaps the dampness or the unwieldy loads unsteadied him. As Luddington hauled cotton bales out of the hold in the port at Liverpool, he fell. "Here, while discharging cargo between daylight and dark I fell down the hold and broke my left arm," he wrote.^[14] Some merchant ships provided medical care, but it seems his did not, or he refused it. He mentioned a woman's name, "Mrs. FizHenry,” who put him up for 21 days on Blundell Street, near the docks. That he remembered so many years later—both her name and the very street of her boarding house—she may well have been the warm face attending him. Whoever cared for his arm, though, "It was not properly set, and is lame to this day.”^[15]

Back at sea, heading to New York, gusts punched at the sails.^[16] Wood creaked. Canvas clapped in the wind as the John Adams pitched through the waves. The ocean swelled and spritz pelleted them. Alone on the sea, clouds blurred the touch of earth and sky. With bent knees and fists at their eyes, the seamen braced themselves listening through gale force winds for the boatswain's orders. The deck rose and fell beneath them. 

‘Hands about ship! Reef topsails in one!’, went a common order of the day from the mate on the watch and his boatswain, if they had one, coning the shout with his palm.

‘Reef the sails’, men acknowledged back in a roar.^[17]

The stout ones bent for the rail of the ship, scaling the salty ropes up the shroud for the yardarm, Luddington amongst them, he wrote.^[18] They crossed the moist yardarm stretching for the guard lines. Sliding into their posts they hinged themselves at their waists over the arm shimmying above the sail. Timber groaned and yawned. The ship's carpenter gauged it all from below. 

A gale of wind danced Luddington’s hair. He strained to mind the commands. As he and the others clung to the weathered yardarm and reached for the sail, their suspended legs wriggled. In the wind and waves the wood in his clutch dipped sharply with the tilt then in reflex, pushed back up hard against him. His hands and face turned slimy with sweat and sea. 

Luddington lunged again for the reefing ties on the bloated sail. His arm still ached from the break at Liverpool. His grip slipped. His face creased. 

"I cried out to the carpenter to catch me," he wrote^[19]. Then fell.

The drop from a yardarm might be fifty feet or so if the tilt of the ship angled him over the sea. The drop to the deck was shorter but less forgiving. If he survived he could lose an arm or a leg or become paralyzed. Those watching winced.

“…[A]nd I barely saved myself by the sail flapping on the windward yard arm or main top sail."^[20] Clinging to the soggy cold canvas he must have realized that muscling through the pain in his arm endangered his life, and the others. 

When he stepped off the ship in New York he likely already wondered if he might never return to work as a seaman again.