Captains and The Kings Read Online Free PDF

Joseph had read his father's books, not with Daniel's interpretation that man became better and nations more civilized as time passed, but with cynical understanding. Tyranny was man's natural mode of government and his secret desire, and liberty was always threatened by men, themselves, through their governments and through their easy acquiescence and lack of fortitude. On realizing this, Joseph became a man and was no longer a child or even a youth.

Joseph sat in the deepening cold of the men's portion of the deck, and thought. The sick moaned in their pain-racked sleep. The men no longer sang, but sat mutely side by side on the lower bunks, their heads and hands hanging, or they, too, slept. The ship groaned and creaked. The cattle below lowed uneasily. Joseph sat near his sleeping little brother, his eyes fixed, almost without blinking, on the gritty deck beneath his feet. Where would they go, now? Where would they be permitted to land, if ever? Joseph knew of the many little ships that had put out from Ireland during the Famine, only to be broken on reefs or to founder in the ocean, or to bring a dying cargo back to the stricken shore. He knew that a half or more of those who had sailed for America on great ships had died before their arrival of disease and Famine Fever and slow starvation, and had been buried at sea. (Many of those on this ship had suffered that and had been lowered quickly into the water at night, accompanied only by the prayers of the old priest and the Sisters.) The survivors, he had learned, had been forced to take shelter in cold sheds on the wharf, there to suffer or die without food or water or warm clothing, until "authorities" could determine whether or not they were a danger to the cities with their cholera and "consumption" and fever. The healthy, and the lucky, then had been permitted to join relatives and friends who waited for them and who could take them to warmth and fires and food. The dead were shoveled into mass graves, anonymous and forgotten. Many of the ships, too, had been turned back at various ports in America. They were not wanted. They were the destitute and the starveling, and they were "Romans" and Irish and trouble-makers and strange. The Religious were especially despised and secretly feared.

Was Daniel Armagh still waiting for his family on the wharf in New York? Did he know they had been rejected, and could not land? It was winter: Was he standing at the door of one of the sheds and staring hopelessly at the big anchored ship with its slack sails and its wet fortress-like hull? Was he doing, thought Joseph with an acrid taste of bitterness in his mouth, anything at all for his imprisoned family except praying? Did he know that hrs young wife was dead? Dead. Joseph squeezed his dry eyes shut and his chest became tight and smothering with his huge hatred and sorrow. Oh, Mum, he said in himself. They could not consign her to the ocean in the harbor. They would wait until they were at sea, again. They would bind her in a ragged blanket and fasten her body to a thin frame of wood, and she would go into the cold and blackness of the water just as her soul was in the cold blackness of nothingness now. But he dared not think of this yet. There was the immediate calamity to be faced. Would they be returned to Ireland, and would they then all perish inevitably on the way back, or on landing? Joseph did not ask himself: "Is there no pity and mercy among men, no help for the helpless, no justice for the innocent?" That question was for men like his father and those who had unrealistic hope, and the weak and sentimental and stupid. The real question confronted him: How was he to assure the survival of his brother and his infant sister, and himself? If he were alone or had only Scan to consider he might contrive, in the morning just before dawn, to steal from the ship when it moved to the wharfs to unload the cattle and the passengers who comfortably traveled on the upper decks, from