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added hopefully, “Even surveying begins to have some interest in your mind.”
    Fred learned the basics from Barton. But he was more interested in laying out imaginary cities. Even this activity lost out to one of the biggest draws of surveying—it was outdoor work. Under the guise of learning a useful trade, Fred engaged in the things he truly loved—hiking and swimming and hunting and fishing.
    Then Fred simply returned home to live. It was an unfathomable move, the kind of thing that able-bodied young men simply did not do in
the 1840s. He was a boomerang child when the concept simply did not exist. His father was exhausted and confounded but welcomed him back. What other option was there? His stepmother was tolerant, but barely.
    Fred had become a source of puzzlement to those who knew him. He was a person of such obvious intelligence, yet he was entirely adrift. He was a wastrel, yet he wasn’t a difficult person or mean-spirited. More than anything, he just seemed to lack any real sense of urgency. It was as if he was following his own private calendar, and he behaved as though he had all the time in the world. “I hear Fred’k coming (whistling),” wrote John Olmsted in a letter. “He works in the garden (with great moderation) in the morning and this P.M. has been breaking the laws of our town, shooting poor blackbirds.”
    To some degree, at least, Fred’s maddening indolence appears to have been a front. During this time, his brother John was off studying in Paris, an opportunity furnished by a family friend. This seems to have secretly eaten at Fred. Here, after all, was his younger brother, leaving him behind, quite literally. “Dear brother,” begins a letter from Fred to John in Paris. “I have nothing particular to write to you about.” In another letter, Fred first offered a piece of national news. (There had been a big flood in Natchez, Mississippi.) He followed this with a piece of Connecticut news (the legislature was about to adjourn) and closed with local news from Hartford (gutter work in progress). And that was all. Signed, Fred.
    In his own strange way, Fred seemed to be communicating embarrassment in this letter by not bothering to include a solitary detail about himself or his current life. Or maybe it was an act of emotional withholding: You think you’re better, away in Paris—well, I’m not even going to bother to tell you about myself, living at home, in Hartford. Certainly, there’s something off-kilter about writing such an impersonal letter to one’s brother.
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    Ultimately, John’s Paris trip may have goaded Fred back into the world. While his brother was away, Fred got a job at Benkard and Hutton, an importer of high-quality French silk located at 53 Beaver Street in Manhattan. Benkard and Hutton was a supplier to his father’s store. Fred’s father, in turn, used his connections to land the job for his son.

    At age eighteen, Fred moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he took a room in Mrs. Howard’s boardinghouse on Henry Street. It was his first time living on his own. Rent, breakfast, and laundry service cost $3.50 per week. Fred was desperately lonely. After work, he’d sit by himself, slowly picking his way through dinners taken at Pine’s Coffee Rooms. Back in Brooklyn, he spent his time on the roof of his boardinghouse, looking after a pair of doves that he adopted.
    He hated the job at Benkard and Hutton. He hated the twelve-hour workdays. He hated the six-day workweeks. He hated sitting at a desk. He hated the rules and regimentation. But Fred’s job required him to go onboard ships anchored in New York’s harbor to inventory their cargoes of silk, and it was while visiting these ships that he began to form an idea of something else he might do with his life.

CHAPTER 2
    At Sea
    FRED RESOLVED TO become a sailor. If he had to choose a trade, this made far more sense than the