In the morning, she ate breakfast on the deck sitting on a coil of rope, for once “not sea sick but sick of the sea.” Two weeks into the voyage, Charlotte discovered that if she stayed on deck in the fresh air as much as possible, she could avoid the worst of her sickness. She got in the habit of walking the deck in any kind of weather.
One evening when the captain warned her of a coming storm, she decided to keep reading, rather than go down to her putrid berth. The squall came quickly. Before she had a chance to race belowdecks a giant wave reared up over the side of the ship and crashed down on her.
Blinded by the water, she thought she had been swept overboard. The wave shook her like a doll, knocking her off her feet and across the ship, where she lodged under the bulwark and stuck there. The bulwark, it turned out, was all that saved her from being thrown into the sea. Panicked sailors pried her out “half-drowned” and took her, shivering, below deck, where someone gave her dry clothes. Even then she was still “a little afraid,” reminded of almost drowning off Long Wharf when she was a girl. But soon she regained her composure, even cracking jokes. “I was,” she wrote in a letter to her mother, “the most dripping young woman you ever saw.”
The next day, the mood of the sea had changed completely; the sky was clear and “glaringly beautiful.” Charlotte, in a lilac dress with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders in the early morning chill, walked on the deck shading her eyes from the sunlight reflecting off the water. Looking up, she saw in the pale sky a few “fleecy” clouds and the slender new moon “in its first quarter.” Over the side she saw what she took to be a good sign: porpoises jumping from the water “and bringing a beautiful wake behind them.” Taking breakfast with the captain in the wheelhouse, round and windowed on all sides like a goldfish bowl, she could see the ocean surrounding her. She was the first passenger to hear the botswain shout out, “Land ho!”
The shout brought everyone on deck, and Charlotte saw with alarm that they were within a mile of Fastnet Rock and speeding toward it. Fastnet Rock marked the southernmost point of Ireland, but with no lighthouse to guide ships around it, many crashed there, within sight of land. Thankfully the Garrick sailed deftly around it, and soon they were journeying past Wales. Looking up at the white cliffs where “the foam there curls / And stretches a white arm out like a girl’s,” Charlotte thought how close she’d come to being a body washed up on that shore.
chapter nine Enemies Abroad
What fairer seal
Shall I require to my authentic mission
Than this fierce energy?—this instinct striving
Because its nature is to strive?
—Robert Browning, “Paracelsus”
(copied in Charlotte’s diary)
The Garrick docked in Liverpool in November 1844, and before heading to London Charlotte spent a few days in Manchester with a couple she’d met on the ship. Although she’d made friends on board, Charlotte knew that most of the British people she would meet looked down on Americans as unmannered roughs. Charles Dickens had recently published his scathing American Notes, and Charlotte had made the mistake of bringing his new novel Martin Chuzzlewit on board. In the novel a young rogue is punished by being forced to immigrate to America. She’d also heard many “disgusting” arguments between American and British passengers during the trip and found herself acting in the role of cultural ambassador—not just for her country but for her profession. One Englishwoman told her how surprised she was to discover Charlotte was an actress. “Whether she means it as a compliment or not,” Charlotte wrote in exasperation, “I cannot know.”
In Scotland, she went out riding every day. One afternoon, riding over the hills, she was stopped cold by the sight of a fox hunt. It was a scene of violence and beauty that could have been painted by Turner. Men in red coats and white breeches tucked inside tall black boots bent low over their horses’ necks to follow the hounds racing across the landscape, its natural beauty punctured by long, slim smokestacks rising along the horizon.
When she returned to the house, there was a letter waiting for her. Macready wanted her to come to Paris, where his leading lady, the beautiful Helen Faucit, had just dropped out of a show. Charlotte relished the chance to turn her onetime friend down and knew it was a bad idea to debut as the replacement for an actress famed for her good looks. She immediately rejected his offer. He wrote back, “quite ill-tempered,” saying she was “taking an irreversible step,” and the next day sent a man from London to persuade her. But Charlotte remained firm, still resentful of him for standing her up at her benefit. When she read later in the newspaper that some small accident had kept him from traveling to Paris as he’d planned,
