The Louisianian’s face paled. He stared about stupidly, expecting the whole roomful of people to rise in protest. But they did not. The faces swam before his eyes crazily as, stumbling a little, he was led away. Later he heard them applauding on the upper deck.
The next day they sighted land. A mist between the ocean and the sky turned green, took shape. The man beside Frederick gripped the rail with his broken nails.
“’Tis Ireland,” he repeated softly. And there was pain and heartache in his voice.
Frederick did not sleep that night. He was one of the huddled group that stayed on deck. They talked together in low voices, watching the distant flicker of an occasional light, straining their ears to catch some sound. Some of them had failed in the bewildering New World, and they were going back. Others had succeeded and now were returning for parents or wives and children.
But Frederick was breaking through the horizon. He was getting on the other side. He had sailed through the sky. America and all that it had meant to him lay far behind. How would Europe receive this dark-skinned fugitive from slavery?
The ship docked at Liverpool, but certain preliminaries prevented the passengers from going ashore immediately. Baltimore, New Bedford, not even New York, had prepared Frederick for the port of Liverpool. It was rapidly becoming Britain’s monstrous spider of commerce, flinging its sticky filaments to the far corners of the world and drawing into its net all that the earth yields up to men.
Just inside the bottleneck entrance to the Mersey River, kept relatively free from silt by tidal scour, Liverpool was once a shelter for fishing vessels which built up a comfortable coastal trade with Ireland. Medieval sailors gave little thought to the sandstone hill that lay beyond the marshy fringe. The Dee River silted up and trade with America grew; and it was found that Liverpool was well situated to meet the change. The mouth of the old pool was converted into wet docks, the marshes were hollowed out, and railroads tunneled through the sandstone hill with ease. The British Empire was expanding.
Now all along the wharves rode merchant ships of every variety, ships laden with iron and salt, timber and coal, grains, silks and woollens, tobacco and, most of all, raw cotton from America.
Frederick saw them unloading the cotton and piling it high on the docks. He knew it was going to the weavers of Lancashire. He wondered if those weavers knew how cotton was planted and chopped and picked.