The Discovery

17 April 1665

At thirteen years old, Samuel Higgins remembered his mother, but the mental image was fading.

He’d been only six, after all, when Sewell’s men had come for him — small enough to be carried off, kicking and howling, in a burlap sack. It was a kidnapping, to be sure, but no constable or sheriff ever came to far-off Liverpool to search for him. What reward might there have been? Samuel’s family had nothing. And now six-year-old Samuel had no family.

He would not have been hard to find, if anyone had been looking. Sewell, the chimney sweep, had many climbing boys working for him — all undersized and underfed, abandoned or kidnapped. Samuel, it turned out, excelled at the dirty work. He could scamper up a chimney as easily as walking down the cobblestone alleyways of the port city. And, unlike the boys who worked alongside him, he did not grow long of limb or broad of shoulder as he reached his adolescence.

“Don’t worry, lad,” laughed old Mr. Sewell over and over, “I’ve seen a hundred like you. You’ll be dead of a fall long before you’re too big to climb one of those chimneys.”

The man was as sharp as he was heartless, but he turned out to be wrong about that. Samuel never succumbed to the terrible accidents that extinguished the short, unhappy lives of the other boys. And the day did finally come when young Samuel Higgins could no longer fit into the narrow sooty tunnels where he’d earned his keep since he was only six.

“Sorry, lad,” Mr. Sewell had told him. “If you do no work, I can’t be keeping and feeding you.”

It had not been a loving family. But at least he’d belonged. Now he was being driven out. Would the world ever find a place for Samuel Higgins?

Sewell had been hard, but hunger, Samuel’s new master, was even harder. At first, he considered a return to the countryside and his mother. But he was not certain where he might find her, or if she was even alive. This life — with Sewell — was the only life he remembered. And now that was over.

His heart yearned for his lost family, but his empty belly was in charge. There was no future in England for a penniless boy except starvation and death. His only hope, his one chance, lay with the sea.

He signed on with the Griffin for a plate of stew and a promise of future wages — not a princely contract, to be sure. But considering that his former employment had come as the result of a kidnapping, this represented freedom, and he was much satisfied. He had no inkling, at that time, of the true purpose of the Griffin and its fleet, nor what its business was in the vast ocean that stretched westward to a new world. He knew only that there was food in the galley for him to eat, and a small rectangle of deck planking outside the captain’s quarters where he could sleep. Home.

As the captain’s boy, Samuel was the personal manservant to Captain James Blade. His duties included everything from delivering the captain’s meals to cleaning and brushing his uniform and wigs, delivering messages to crew members, and emptying the man’s chamber pot.

To Captain Blade, Samuel was less than human, a utensil, like a spoon or a shaving razor. “Boy!” he would bark when he needed something. Or often he’d shout, “You!”

The one time that Samuel had the audacity to venture, “My name is Samuel, sir,” the captain pulled out a furled snake whip from his belt and smacked him across the side of the head with the bone handle.

“You can ride on this ship or in the waves below — take your choice, boy. But you’ll not open your lip to me!”

The blow knocked Samuel clear through the hatch to the captain’s quarters, sending a laden tray of food flying every which way.

“And swab this deck!”

There was an emerald the size of a musket ball set in the handle. It left a deep, bloody gash in Samuel’s cheek. The wound did not stop oozing until they had passed the Canary Islands.