Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [19]
Night after night he went sleepless in his smelly cabin, tossed about in darkness, oppressed by the creaking bulkheads, dashing of glass bottles, and distressed cries of the sailors. “If we should arrive at length in our port,” he wrote in his journal, “what great reason shall I have for praise & thanksgiving.” One sunset he was on the cabin stairs when the heaving sea rose over the Ceres, drenching him as it flooded the stairwell. After something more than a month, provisions began running out. The surly captain rationed what potatoes and moldy bread remained. Soon the water supply ran short. The passengers, washed in seawater, looked solemn and barely spoke to each other.
But on October 18, a Wednesday, the Ceres came in sight of Cape Cod. And fifty-eight days—nearly two months—after leaving England, Finley returned to Charlestown, from an absence of four years. “Thanks to a kind Providence who has preserved me through all dangers,” he wrote from aboard ship, “I have at length arrived in my native land!”
THREE
A Terrible Harum-Scarum Fellow
(1816—1823)
LITTLE OF FINLEY’S vision of his next few years survived his return to America. As he had planned to do, he set out at once to earn money for further study in Europe. First he rented a large room in Boston to mount a show of his paintings. The ten canvases represented much of his best London work, including a scene from Don Quixote, John Howard Payne in costume, and the large Dying Hercules and Judgment of Jupiter.
Finley’s exhibition drew visitors and brought him publicity in the local press as an “accomplished young painter” with a “poetick imagination.” After hearing that the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts had purchased Allston’s Elijah for $3500—the most ever paid for an American painting—he offered his Hercules to the Academy for display and possible sale in Philadelphia. The directors accepted, remarking that Hercules showed “uncommon powers in an artist so young.”
With his most ambitious works on view in Boston and Philadelphia, Finley took to the road as an itinerant portrait painter—the drudging routine of most American artists since colonial times. Sketching along the way, he toured New Hampshire and Vermont. He put up in town only long enough to complete what commissions he could acquire, mostly for “cabinet” portraits painted on small millboards. The wandering by stagecoach, horse, or on foot was no more pleasant than he might have expected—muddy roads and loose wheels, animals that kicked and snorted, breakfast in a “hovel.” Just come from London, he thought some of the towns despicable: the natives of Windsor, Vermont, mistook “drunkenness and noise, for good humor, gambling, for sociability, and filth for wit.” Painting his sitters rapidly for about $15 a head, he did not much more than clear his travel expenses. He often thought of Allston, particularly when smoking an evening cigar.
In getting about New England, Finley called on Jennette Hart. His letters to her while abroad had spoken of their prospects in an off-putting tone of possibly-but-possibly-not, sounding much as if he wanted to wriggle out. He did not have to, for when he visited Jennette she “undeceived” him. Their college romance, she declared, could not become a marriage. Relieved, but eager to display sincerity and preserve his dignity, Finley told her brother-in-law that he would remove himself to Europe, “where I shall probably spend the greater part, if not the remainder of my life.”
Far from doing that, he quickly found a wife. Early in August 1816, while seeking