The negotiations moved haltingly while the sailors waited in prison in Tetuan. After a long delay enough money was received from Gibraltar to redeem twenty-five of them, who were selected by the governor of the city, “who dismissed them with wishes for a happy voyage.” Three weeks afterward the balance of the cash came to Tetuan, but the emperor put a spoke in the wheel by refusing to let the privateersmen go until that matter of the old debt was canceled. The British ambassador sent a naval officer to England for more money, and there was another delay, which annoyed the Moorish governor of Tetuan. A squadron of British men-of-war, under Commodore Keppel, rode at anchor in the harbor, but their guns were silent while the ambassador was arrested, his property seized, and his secretary thrown into a dungeon pit twenty feet deep, where the playful Moors dropped dead cats and dogs and stones on him. It could scarcely be said that Britannia rules the waves that washed the shores of Morocco.
Commodore Keppel pledged his word that the old account should be squared, although it was well known that the British Government had already paid it once, and the ambassador gave a promissory note for the whole amount. Finally the claims were settled to the satisfaction of the Emperor of Morocco, and the survivors of the privateer were put aboard H. M. S. Sea-Horse. “They ran into the water as deep as the waist, each thinking himself happiest that he could get in the boat first.”
Fifty-seven of them had lived to gain their freedom after four years of slavery. Their sad story ended more happily than might have been expected, for when they returned to England the king was pleased to give them a bounty of five pounds each.
The Jews in London supplied them with clothing and showed them many acts of kindness. Mr. Rich, manager of one of the principal theatres, presented each man with five pounds and devoted the proceeds of a night’s performance to their use. The proprietor of another public exhibition did the like, on which occasion they appeared in iron chains and collars such as they had worn in slavery.
The privateersman of the Inspector who wrote the narrative of the adventures and miseries in Morocco was a hardy salt, if ever there was one. Unharmed by the experience, this Thomas Troughton lived until 1806, and died at the uncommonly ripe old age of one hundred and fourteen years.
It seems proper that one of these true tales of luckless seamen long in exile should have for its hero a mariner of that rugged New England, the early fortitude and daring of which laid the enduring foundations of this nation. In the year of 1676 Mr. Ephraim How of New Haven found it necessary to undertake a journey to Boston. Express-trains were not then covering the distance between these cities in four hours. In fact, there were not even post-roads or stage-coaches, and the risk of being potted by hostile Indians was by no means negligible. To the Pilgrims and the Puritans of that era the country was still a wilderness almost as soon as they ventured inland beyond the sound of the sea.
As was common enough, Mr. Ephraim How had a vessel of his own to carry the cargoes which, as a merchant, he sold to his neighbors of the New Haven colony. They were a web-footed race of pioneers who traded and farmed and sailed or fished to earn a thrifty dollar. For his business trip to Boston Mr. How sensibly went by sea as an easier and quicker route than by land. With him in his small ketch of seventeen tons went his two sons as sailors, another youth named Caleb Jones, whose father was a magistrate in New Haven, a Mr. Augur, who was a passenger, and a boy, unnamed, who probably cooked the pork and potatoes and scrubbed the pots in the galley. It was in the month of August, and the ketch made a pleasant voyage of it around Cape Cod and into Boston Bay.
Illness, contrary winds, and business delays postponed the return journey until October, and they made sail with every expectation of a good passage. Off Cape Cod one heavy gale after another drove the ketch far offshore. The experience must have been terribly severe, for after eleven days of it the eldest son died, and the other son died soon after. It was too much for young Caleb Jones also, and he followed the others over the side, stitched up in a piece of canvas. Poor Ephraim How had lost his crew as by a visitation of God, and it seems as though some contagious disease must have ravaged the little ketch. The passenger, Mr. Augur, was no sailor at all, and Mr. How lashed himself to the helm for thirty-six hours at a stretch.
In this situation the two men cast lots whether to try to struggle back to the New England coast or to bear away with the wind and hope to reach the West Indies. The gambler’s choice decreed New England, but the weather decided otherwise. For more than two months the distressed ketch tossed about and drifted, and was beaten to and fro without a glimpse of landfall. It was late in November when she was wrecked on a ledge of rock, but Ephraim How had not the slightest idea of where it was. He later learned that he had driven as far to the eastward as Nova Scotia, and the ketch had smashed herself upon a desolate island near Cape Sable. For Ephraim How it was a long, long way from Boston to New Haven.
Cape Sable in the winter time is even now a wicked refuge for shipwrecked mariners. Fortunately, there drifted ashore from the ketch the following list of essentials: