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JACK BALLISTER’S FORTUNES
[Illustration: “‘SPEAK UP, BOY, SPEAK UP,’ SAID THE GENTLEMAN.” (SEE
PAGE 90.)]
THE STORY OF JACK BALLISTER’S FORTUNES
by
HOWARD PYLE
[Illustration: DECORATION]
Being the Narrative of the Adventures
of a Young Gentleman of Good Family,
Who Was Kidnapped in the Year 1719
and Carried to the Plantations of the
Continent of Virginia, Where He Fell
in With That Famous Pirate Captain
Edward Teach, or Blackbeard: of His
Escape from the Pirates and the Rescue
of a Young Lady from Out Their Hands
[Illustration: LOGO]
New York
The Century Co.
1895
Copyright, 1894, 1895, by
The Century Co.
The De Vinne Press.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE AMERICA MERCHANT 5
II JACK BALLISTER 9
III JACK AND HIS UNCLE 26
IV CAPTAIN BUTTS 31
V KIDNAPPED 38
VI ABOARD THE ARUNDEL 43
VII ACROSS THE OCEAN 47
VIII TO THE END OF THE VOYAGE 57
IX IN VIRGINIA 65
X INTO BONDAGE 77
XI MARLBOROUGH 85
XII DOWN THE RIVER 92
XIII THE ROOST 97
XIV IN ENGLAND 102
XV LIFE AT THE ROOST 109
XVI JACK’S MASTER IN THE TOILS 116
XVII JACK RIDES ON A MISSION 124
XVIII MISS ELEANOR PARKER 130
XIX THE VISITOR AGAIN 135
XX THE WILD TURKEY 146
XXI THE STRUGGLE 154
XXII THE ESCAPE 161
XXIII A MEETING 168
XXIV AT MARLBOROUGH 179
XXV IN CAPTIVITY 190
XXVI THE PIRATE’S LAIR 198
XXVII AT BATH TOWN 203
XXVIII IN NORTH CAROLINA—IN VIRGINIA 211
XXIX AN EXPEDITION 221
XXX THE ATTEMPT 229
XXXI THE RETURN 237
XXXII A SCENE 243
XXXIII HOW JACK RESOLVED 253
XXXIV THE ESCAPE 265
XXXV THE BEGINNING OF THE VOYAGE 272
XXXVI A STOP OVER NIGHT 280
XXXVII THE SECOND DAY 287
XXXVIII THE THIRD DAY 296
XXXIX THE FOURTH DAY 305
XL FIAT JUSTITIA 319
XLI THE BOAT ADRIFT 327
XLII THE NEXT DAY 336
XLIII THE RETURN 346
XLIV RISING FORTUNES 353
XLV PREPARATION 362
XLVI THE FIGHT 373
XLVII IN THE NEW LIFE 385
XLVIII JACK MEETS SOME OLD FRIENDS 391
XLIX THE DEPARTURE 404
L THE RETURN 412
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“‘SPEAK UP, BOY, SPEAK UP,’ SAID THE GENTLEMAN” Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
“‘HE’LL COME TO BY AND BY; HE’S ONLY STUNNED A TRIFLE,’
SAID THE CAPTAIN” 42
“‘NOW, THEN, GENTLEMEN, HOW MUCH DO YOU BID FOR THIS
BOY?’ SAID THE AUCTIONEER” 82
“MR. PARKER STOOD LOOKING STEADILY AT HIS VISITOR” 122
“‘I DON’T WANT TO BE ANYBODY’S SERVANT, LADY, AND
WOULDN’T IF I COULD HELP IT’” 132
“HE PICKED UP THE BIRD AND HELD IT OUT AT ARM’S LENGTH” 152
“HE LED JACK UP TO THE MAN WHO SAT UPON A BARREL” 174
“JACK FOLLOWED THE CAPTAIN AND THE YOUNG LADY UP
THE CROOKED PATH TO THE HOUSE” 200
“THEY FOUND HER STILL SITTING IN THE SAME PLACE” 234
JACK AND DRED RESCUE ELEANOR—THE START 272
THE PIRATES FIRE UPON THE FUGITIVES 316
“COLONEL PARKER REACHED AND LAID HIS HAND UPON JACK’S
SHOULDER. ‘AY,’ SAID HE, ‘’TIS A GOOD, HONEST FACE’” 348
“THE COMBATANTS CUT AND SLASHED WITH SAVAGE FURY” 384
“‘THEN I WILL COME,’ SAID HE” 408
JACK BALLISTER’S FORTUNES
JACK BALLISTER’S FORTUNES
INTRODUCTION
ONE of the most important problems that confronted the Virginia
plantations in the earlier colonial days was the question as to how to
obtain sufficient labor to till the soil and to raise tobacco for the
English market.
Some of the colonial planters of Virginia owned thousands of acres of
the richest tobacco land in the world—whole tracts of virgin earth
where the priceless loam lay open to the rain, the air, and the warm
sky; bountifully fruitful loam, only waiting for tillage to be coined
into vast tobacco fortunes for the princely owners. All that was needed
was human labor to dig the earth, to plant, to hoe, to cultivate, and
to prepare the tobacco for market, for there was not a hundredth part
enough labor to turn the waiting soil, that lay ready to yield at any
time its thousands of hogsheads of tobacco, and the question was, where
and how labor was to be obtained.
The easiest and quickest solution of the question appeared to be the
importation of negro slave labor from Africa.
The introduction of such slave labor began almost in the earliest days
of the provinces. Hundreds of shiploads of African negroes were brought
across the ocean and set to work digging and hoeing in the tobacco
fields, and slave trade became a regular traffic between the west coast
of Africa and the Americas.
But the African slaves, when imported, were found only fit to do the
very rudest and simplest sort of labor. They were poor, ignorant
savages, who, until they were set to work on the plantations, knew
almost nothing at all about such labor as was practised by civilized
mankind. When they were told to dig the earth, they dug, but they
labored without knowing either why they worked or wherefore. They did
just as their masters or their overseers bade them, and nothing more.
Beyond this they could be taught little or nothing, for not only were
those earlier savages like children, incapable of learning much of
anything; but, in most instances, they could not even speak a single
word of the language of their masters, and so could not understand what
their owners wanted of them. They were of use only to work as a dumb
animal might work, and not as white men could work.
So the Virginia plantations were still without that intelligent labor
which white men alone could bring to the tilling of the soil; labor
that knew what it was about when it dug the earth, and which, when told
to do so, could turn its hand to other things that might be required of
it. And so it was that every means was used to bring English men and
women to the Virginia plantations.
Even in the last part of the seventeenth century those immigrants
who afterward developed our great country into what it now is, were
beginning to pour into the colonies. But, of this immigrant labor,
the best and the most intelligent did not come to Virginia or other
of the southern provinces. It drifted to the New England or the
Pennsylvania provinces rather than to those in the South. There, in
the North, any man could obtain a farm for himself by hewing it out
of the wilderness. In Virginia the land was nearly all owned by the
great tobacco planters. Hence it was that only the poorest and least
ambitious of these white men and women could in the earlier provincial
days be induced to go thither, and hence white labor was so much more
in demand in the South than in the North.
A certain class of the immigrants of that time were called
“redemptioners” or “redemption servants.” They were so called because
they had to redeem by their labor the cost of their passage across the
ocean from England to America. Upon their arrival in the New World they
were sold for a term of years—seven, eight, nine, ten, as the case
might be—and the money received from such sale was paid to the ship
captain or the merchant who transported them from the Old World to the
New. Thus their debt was redeemed, and hence their name.
Those who came thus as redemption servants from England were generally
the poorest and most wretched of its people—paupers, outcasts,
criminals—unfortunates who were willing to do almost anything to
get away from their surroundings into a new life, where they hoped
something better might be in store for them than that wretchedness
which they had had to endure at home.
Thousands of such people were sent across the ocean to the Virginia and
other plantations, where, poor and miserable as they often were, the
demand for them grew ever greater and greater as the wilderness became
more and more open to cultivation.
Every year higher and higher prices were paid for such servants, until,
at last, a ship-load of redemptioners (provided the voyage across the
ocean had been speedy and no contagious disease had developed aboard
the vessel) became almost the most profitable cargo exported from
England.
When the transportation of servants became thus so remunerative,
the crimps who supplied them to merchants or to ship captains were
oftentimes tempted, when other means failed, to resort to kidnapping,
or man-stealing, to supply the demand.
During the earlier fifty years of the last century, thousands of men,
women, and even children were stolen from England and sent away to the
Americas, perhaps never to return, perhaps never even to be heard of
again. In those days—“The kidnapper will catch you!” were words of
terror to frighten children and gadding girls on all the coastways of
England.
CHAPTER I
THE AMERICA MERCHANT
HEZEKIAH TIPTON had been a merchant in the America trade for upwards of
forty years. He had shipped hundreds of servants to the Americas; they
were as much a part of his cargo as tea or broad-cloth or books or silk
stuffs.
Maybe he was not always scrupulously careful to know whence came some
of the servants he thus transported. He was reasonably honest in his
dealings, as the times went, and he would not often buy a servant from
a crimp if he knew positively that the crimp had kidnapped the man.
But if he was not positively sure, he would not go out of his way to
inquire into things that did not concern him. He would either take the
servant offered for sale, or else he would not take him; but he would
not trouble himself to ask how the crimp obtained the man, or whether
the man himself was or was not really willing to emigrate to the
colonies.
There was, for instance, a good deal of talk at one time about three
men whom Hezekiah had sent to South Carolina. A Dutchman had brought
them into the harbor in his lugger. He said that the men desired to
emigrate, and Hezekiah, who at that time had a ship just clearing for
Charleston, expressed his willingness to pay the captain something for
them, if he did not demand too much. Two of the men were stupefied
with drink, and the third had a bloody clout wrapped around his head,
and was cut and bruised as though he had been beaten with a club or a
belaying-pin. It was an evident case of kidnapping, but nevertheless
Hezekiah paid the Dutch captain for the men, and had them sent directly
aboard the ship. One of the three men was sober the next morning.
Hezekiah had come aboard the ship, and as he was rowed away toward the
shore the man leaned over the rail above, shouting out curses after the
old merchant, swearing that he would certainly come back to England
some time and murder him. “You think you’re safe,” bawled the man after
the departing boat,—“you think you’re safe! Wait till you feel my
knife in your back this day twelve-month—d’ye hear?—then you won’t
feel so safe.” The men rowing the boat to the shore grinned and winked
at one another. Old Hezekiah sat immovably in the stern, paying no
attention to the man’s threats and imprecations, which continued until
the captain of the ship knocked him down, and so silenced his outcries.
This affair created, as was said, a good deal of talk at the time.
* * * * *
In the year 1719, beginning in February and ending in November,
Hezekiah Tipton sent away to the American colonies or plantations in
all over five score servants.
One day early in March, a company of nineteen men who had volunteered
to emigrate to the Virginias was brought up from London to meet the
brig _Arundel_ at Southampton. They were quartered at the Golden Fish
Inn, and during the morning the old America merchant went to look them
over. The men were ranged in a row along by the wall of the inn yard,
and the old man walked up and down in front of the line, peering at
each man with half-shut eyes and wrinkled face, while a few people from
the inn stood looking on with a sort of inert interest. He did not seem
very well pleased with the appearance of the servants. There were
only nineteen, and there should have been one and twenty. The agent
explained that there had been twenty-one of them when he wrote from
London, but that one of them had run away during the night, and that
another would not sign the papers. “‘Twas,” said he, “as fine, good
a young lad of sixteen or eighteen as ever you see. But his mother,
methinks it was, comes in crying at the last minute and takes him away
from under our werry noses, so to speak.” Hezekiah grunted a reply as
he walked up and down along the row of grinning, shuffling men, looking
them over. The big knotted joints of the old man’s fingers gripped the
cracked and yellow ivory head of his walking-stick, which he every now
and then tapped, tapped on the stones of the court-yard. “That man,”
said he, in his cracked, querulous voice, poking his walking-stick as
he spoke at a lean little man standing in the line—“that man—why did
ye bring him? How much d’ye think he’ll fetch in the Virginias? I’s
warrant me not fifteen guineas.”
“Why, Master Tipton,” said the agent, referring to a slip of paper
which he held in his hand, “there you are mightily mistook. Maybe,
like enough, that man is worth more than any of ‘em. He’s a skilled
barber and leecher, and a good man he is, and knows his trade, to be
sure, and that werry well. Just you think, Master Tipton, how much he
might be worth as a vally or body-servant to one of them there Virginia
planters.”
“Humph!” grunted the old man, and he shook his lean head slowly
from side to side. “I’ll tell you what it is, Master Dockray,” he
said again, after a while, “they be not nigh so good as those I had
last—and only nineteen where there should have been one and twenty.”
The agent made no answer and the old man continued his inspection for
a while. He did not say anything further, and by and by he turned away
and, with the agent at his heels, entered the inn to receipt the
papers, and with his going the inspection came to an end.
Finally, in making you acquainted with old Hezekiah Tipton, it may be
said that he was a notable miser of his time. To see him hobbling along
the street in his snuff-colored coat, threadbare at the seams, and here
and there neatly patched and darned, one might take him, perhaps, for
a poor decent school-teacher of narrow means, but certainly not for
one of the richest men in the county, as he was reputed to be. There
were a great many stories concerning him in Southampton, many of them
doubtless apocryphal, some of them based upon a foundation of truth.
One such story was that every Sunday afternoon the old man used to
enter into his own room, bolt the door, and spread gold money out on
the floor; that he would then strip himself and roll in the yellow
wealth as though taking a bath. Another story was that he had three
iron chests in the garret of his home, each chest bolted to the floor
with iron bolts. That the one chest was full of Spanish doubloons, the
second full of French louis d’ors, the third full of English guineas.
The Southampton tradesmen used to say that it was more difficult to
collect their bills from Hezekiah Tipton than from almost any one in
the town.