When the word was brought to Salem that de Soto was to be found on the Cuban coast, more than one Salem skipper, when voyaging to Havana or Matanzas, took the trouble to find the former pirate and spin a yarn or two with him over a cool glass and a long, black cigar.
CHAPTER XXII
GENERAL FREDERICK TOWNSEND WARD[47]
(Leader of the Chinese “Ever Victorious Army”)
The career of Frederick Townsend Ward flashes across the later day history of Salem like a meteor. After a youth crowded with astonishing adventure this merchant sailor and soldier of fortune became the organizer and first leader of the “Ever Victorious Army” of the Chinese Imperial forces in the Tai-ping Rebellion and was killed while storming a walled city at the head of his troops in his thirtieth year. So memorable were his services in this, the most disastrous armed conflict of modern times, that to this day his ashes which rest at Sung Kiang, are yearly honored by offerings of incense and solemn rites. A temple and a shrine mark his burial place and by an edict of their Emperor the Chinese people are commanded forever to worship and do reverence to the spirit of this foreign soldier who died ten thousand miles away from the New England seaport in which he was born and where his forefathers sleep.
In this extraordinary man were focused at white heat the spirit of high adventure and the compelling desire to seek far distant seas and play the game of life for high stakes which had made Salem famous in her golden age. Frederick Townsend Ward came of old seafaring stock which had fought and sailed through one generation after another for more than two centuries of Salem history. As far away as 1639 his ancestor, Miles Ward, had been a commissioned officer at the siege of Louisburg and had served with Wolfe at the storming of Quebec. His paternal grandfather, Gamaliel Hodges Ward, of a family of fifteen children, had one brother who served as a lieutenant in the American navy during the War of 1812 and another who was naval officer of the Port of Salem. This grandfather married Priscilla Lambert Townsend, thus uniting three strains of militant seafaring blood. Captain Moses Townsend had died in England as a prisoner of war during the Revolution, his son of fifteen sharing his captivity as a patriotic seaman. On the records of the Salem Marine Society, founded in 1766, are the names of nine Wards and three Lamberts, and among the members of the Salem East India Marine Society are to be found six Wards, six Hodges and a Townsend all of whom must have doubled Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope as shipmasters or supercargoes in order to qualify for admission to the Society.
The father of Frederick Townsend Ward was a shipmaster and the son born in 1831 passed his boyhood in Salem at a time when, although the world-wide commerce had begun to ebb, the old town still had its schools of navigation, its nautical instrument dealers, its shipyards and ropewalks, its East India warehouses, its sailors’ lodging houses, dance halls and slop shops crowded along the water front. The wharves were still thronged with the activities of voyagers inbound from and outbound to the uttermost parts of the earth. Although the railroads had begun to build up the larger deep water ports and to sap the life of such lesser ports as Salem, yet even in those days to be born in Salem was to be born a sailor. The harbor still knew the fleets which kept it in touch with scores of remote and romantic ports and the marvelous tales of sea-tanned sailors tempted boyhood to dream of exploring regions little known in books.
“The stick the schoolboy whittled shaped itself into a hull, a rudder, a bowsprit or a boom. When in school he drew lines on his slate to relieve the tedium of the rule of three, his sketches took form in yards and shrouds and bob-stays. Give him a box of water colors and the private signals of the East India merchants were its earliest products. If he were too little to pull a pair of oars, he sculled a dory with one, and he was no more than in breeches when he knew every ring-bolt, block and gasket from cutwater to stern-post of the East Indiamen discharging at Derby Wharf. If he could muster a few shillings, some kindly mariner took charge of them as a venture and brought him home in a twelve month or so their value trebled in nutmegs or pepper-corns or gum copal. If, on leaving school, he did not ship before the mast he tried to sail as cabin boy or ship’s clerk, or supercargo.
“When he had won his fight on the sea and came at last to live in comfort on shore, if he built himself a den in which to doze and smoke and read and chat, it was apt to be shaped like a ship’s cabin, to have a swinging light overhead, transoms for bunks, and spyglass, compass and barometer handy. The dust and cobwebs under the eaves of his attic concealed camphor and cedar trunks stuffed with camel’s hair shawls, pongee silks and seersucker suits. A log or two of sandalwood, brought home for dunnage, might sizzle on the andirons and fill his house with the spicy breath of Arabia.
“When a family returned from residence in foreign lands it was not unusual for them to bring Chinese cooks, nurse maids and house servants. The high-bred Parsee merchant with his lofty head-dress of figured taffeta and buckram was no stranger in Salem, nor was the turbanned Indian or Arab unknown.”
Such was the atmosphere in which young Frederick Townsend Ward was reared and the spirit of the place lured his daring and romantic fancy to dream of enterprises on blue water. He sailed in all kinds of small craft about Salem harbor before he was in his teens and was noted as the boldest lad and best seaman of the company of ardent friends whom he chose as his companions. He sought and found employment at sea when he was no more than fifteen years old and it sounds extraordinary in these times to learn that at this age he went out on his first voyage as second mate of the clipper ship Hamilton bound from New York to China. This stripling mate of fifteen years was placed in a position of authority over his watch of rugged forecastle hands, some of whom had been going to sea before he was born. Young Ward’s father was known as a stern disciplinarian of the quarterdeck, and the son won a reputation for the same quality of resourceful manhood. His captain found him to be a smart, efficient and capable officer and so reported him to the owners of the ship. At eighteen years of age he was first mate of the ship Russell Glover commanded by his father, on a voyage from New York to San Francisco. In the latter port the ship was laid up for a long time and young Ward was kept on board as ship-keeper. His impetuous temperament could not long endure such monotony as this and it was at San Francisco that he forsook the sea for a time to lose himself in a haze of stormy adventures as a soldier of fortune in Spanish American countries. It is known that during this period he gained the friendship of Garibaldi, who for eleven years previous to 1848 had been fighting in behalf of the revolutionary cause of Brazil.
