The next morning they went aboard the Cincinnatus, accompanied by their kind friends who had come to take the last farewell of them. When Matilda Tone went down to see her quarters she found the little state-room her husband had taken for his family full of the good things these friends had provided for their comfort: sea-stores, wine, porter and spirits, fresh provisions, sweetmeats, and so on. The foresight of Dr. MacDonnell had also provided a small medicine chest with written directions. This was to be of the greatest service, not for the Tones alone, but for their unfortunate fellow-passengers during the trying weeks ahead of them.
A voyage across the Atlantic in those days, in a small sailing vessel of 230 tons, was a most horrible experience. There were three hundred passengers on board this boat and they were “crowded to a degree not to be conceived by those who had never been aboard a passenger ship.” “The slaves who are carried from Africa,” Tone writes, “have much more room allowed them than the miserable emigrants who pass from Ireland to America.” The captains were out to make as much money as possible and they loaded their vessels with as little care for the accommodation of their passengers as of any other lumber aboard. The Tones had a small state-room eight feet by six. In this Tone fitted up three berths. One was occupied by Matilda and little Frank; the second by the two Maries; the third by Tone himself and the elder boy William. Tone took on himself the “policing” of the ship, and tried to introduce some cleanliness. Moreover, with the aid of Dr. MacDonnell’s medicine chest and “written directions,” he doctored the passengers—his prescriptions drawing also on his own sea-stores, and the wines and spirits provided by his Belfast friends. He had the satisfaction of landing all his patients safe and sound; and his own family, wonderfully fortunate, had not known one hour’s sickness.
But strait quarters, overcrowding and all the other horrors we have described did not exhaust the sufferings endured by Irish emigrants in the eighteenth century. “About the 20th July ... we were stopped by three British frigates, the Thetis, Captain Lord Cochrane; the Hussar, Captain Rose, and the Esperance, Captain Wood, who boarded us, and after treating us with the greatest insolence, both officers and sailors, they pressed every one of our hands, save one, and near fifty of my unfortunate fellow-passengers, who were most of them flying to America to avoid the tyranny of a bad government at home, and who thus, most unexpectedly, fell under the severest tyranny, one of them at least which exists. As I was in a jacket and trousers, one of the lieutenants ordered me into the boat, as a fit man to serve the king, and it was only the screams of my wife and sister which induced him to desist. It would have been a pretty termination to my adventure if I had been pressed and sent on board a man-of-war. The insolence of these tyrants, as well to myself as to my poor fellow-passengers, in whose fate a fellowship in misfortune had interested me, I have not since forgotten, and I never will.”[[66]]
[66]. “Autobiography,” p. 217.
With such gracious sway did great Britannia “rule the waves” in the good old days!
On August the 1st the Tones landed in Wilmington, their voyage having lasted from June the 13th. They found the principal tavern of the place kept by an Irishman, Captain O’Byrne O’Flynn, a veteran of the American War of Independence. Here they rested for a few days, and made a useful and agreeable acquaintance in the person of General Humpton, an old Englishman, of the best type (“a beautiful, hale, stout old man of near seventy, perfectly the soldier and the gentleman”) who had fought on the American side in the late war. He took a great liking to Tone, and his charming wife, and sister and pretty children, and showed himself very eager to serve them.
The Tones left Wilmington, as soon as the ladies and children had recruited from the fatigue of the sea-voyage and reached Philadelphia on August the 8th. Here Tone met two old friends—Hamilton Rowan and Dr. Reynolds, both of whom had, like himself, got into trouble with the Irish Government over the “affaire Jackson.” They had a great time telling each other their adventures since they had last met in Hamilton Rowan’s cell in Newgate fourteen months previously. Reynolds and Rowan were athirst for news from Ireland, and eagerly listened to all Tone had to tell them.
Tone lost no time in approaching the French Minister, Adet, in Philadelphia. Bearing a letter of introduction from Rowan, he waited the very day after his arrival on Adet, and signified in as clear a way as was possible under the circumstances (“he spoke English very imperfectly, and I French a great deal worse”) the desires of himself and his friends in Ireland for French aid to shake off the English yoke. Adet requested him to draw up a memorial, and promised to transmit this to his Government. He also promised to use his influence to procure the enlargement of Matthew Tone, who was a prisoner at Guise. But this was as far as he would go.
Poor Tone, much disheartened by the Minister’s attitude, found little ground for hope that the French Government would pay any attention to his memorial. It seemed to him that the only result of his exertions was the satisfaction of having discharged his conscience to his country. But as for anything being likely to come of them, he could see no prospects at all.
This being so, he bent his mind to making some provision for his family. Living in Philadelphia being enormously dear, he moved his family to Donningstown, near General Humpton’s place, and leaving them there under the General’s kind supervision, he roamed the country in search of a suitable farm. After some disappointments he found one about two miles from Princeton. He took a small house in that town, furnished it frugally and decently, moved his family into it, and having fitted up his study, determined to settle down, as contentedly as he could, to the life of an American farmer.