A Sailor, a Mohawk, and a Malamute

                                Billy Boy and Seabreeze

    Born William Alexander Seaworthy in 1676 to a poor millwright in a run-down neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, William had a remarkable life from the very start. As a baby he never got sick and there was talk even back then that there was something about him that just wasn’t right. His parents were proud of their only son and often would tell people of things he did that were special. But the people in town thought the things they heard were too strange to believe and stayed away from the family entirely. Eventually the family had to move away from the Boston area after being asked to leave by a committee sent to talk to them.
    His father picked a small fishing village along the northern coast of Maine, thinking people there would leave them alone. Bill grew up in the village, but children stayed away from him because of stories their parents told them. Some of the things they said the children had seen with their own eyes. There was the day Bill ran into a jagged piece of metal sticking out of an old sea wall down close to the water line. There was no blood. Bill looked down at his arm and there was a gash running from his wrist to his elbow, but not a drop of blood. The kids next to him could see the white bones and the red tissue but not a drop of blood. They all ran home to tell their families about Bill’s accident.
    There were other stories as well. One winter Bill was playing with Jim and Sarah from next door down by the pond. Their parents let them play with Bill because it would be awkward to forbid it, being right next door to the Seaworthy family. That day Bill was walking out on the ice, and telling the others it was thick enough to walk on. The next thing they saw was Bill falling through and disappearing under the gray-white sheet of ice. Sarah ran for help while Jim tried to break off a large tree branch to hold out to Bill. Jim could see Bill’s face through the ice, a slight smile is all he could make out. Both fathers showed up about the same time with rope and a long sled. Bill’s father got on the sled and Jim and his Dad held on to the rope they had tied to one end of the sled. Once they had pulled the two of them back to shore, no one was particularly surprised that Bill wasn’t shivering. Bill walked back to the house, changed clothes and returned to playing like nothing had happened. In fact Bill never seemed to mind the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean and could be seen playing in the surf year-round.
    Bill never formed a close friendship while growing up in that remote village. Although his Mother loved him and took care that he had whatever he needed there was always a distance Bill maintained with her. He was slightly closer to his father, but the closeness ended at the point his father stopped showing him something he wanted to know. Teachers were amazed at his breadth of knowledge and ability to learn new things as fast as they could teach them. Repeating subject matter would cause Bill to stare off into the distance or worse, disrupt the class until a new topic was started. On the playground, if Bill fell he would get up and keep playing, never rubbing where the bump had formed. He would correct them if they misspoke. He couldn’t get enough information on certain subjects and became irritated with any teacher that couldn’t provide what he wanted. By twelve Bill was tired of school and tried to sign on a ship as a deck hand. He was big for his age and made the man signing sailors up uneasy. There was something about the young man that made him uncomfortable, but he signed him on since they were short handed as it was. Other members of the crew picked up on it immediately. There was an undeniable strangeness to the boy. An older boy on the first day at sea came over to Bill and shoved him into some netting. Bill didn’t fight back, just looked at him and didn’t say a word. The older kid took out his knife and swiped across Bill’s arms. Two cuts opened up but no blood showed up. Several sailors were watching and laughing at the new kid not defending himself. The laughing stopped as they all stared at the inch wide openings in Bill’s arms. The older kid screamed “You devil. I’ll make you bleed for sure.” Suddenly everyone there was staring at the knife handle sticking straight out from Bill’s stomach. Bill looked down, grabbed the handle, pulled the knife out and threw it back at the other boy. The knife sank deep into the aged, pitch covered mast where it pinned the boy’s jacket while grazing his chest. At that everyone to the man quickly scattered as Bill went back to securing some lines he had been working on. After that day, none of the crew, even the most aggressive sailors stayed clear of him for the rest of the entire voyage.
    At each port of call Bill would go into town and show up again just before they weighed anchor. No one saw him in town and the crew spent much of the voyage making up things they had seen him do while in port. After the incident with the knife no story seemed impossible. In Lisbon he was said to have caused a man to blackout with just a dirty look because the man had interrupted a beer-drinking contest Bill was involved with. In Athens it took over 30 men to throw him out of a bar and two dozen policemen let him go because they didn’t think they could arrest him and haul him to jail. The police captain decided it wouldn’t look good if they tried and failed. He wasn’t about to lose his job over some disturbance in a local bar. Some one said they heard that when shot in the chest at point blank range, he merely stuck his index finger in the hole and popped the slug out onto the floor. There were also stories of him lifting a six-horse carriage off the ground while injured passengers were pulled from underneath.
    By 1692, after four years at sea Bill Seaworthy returned to New England a man at sixteen years of age. In a dockside eatery he saw a vision of beauty and asked around about her. They told him her name was Elizabeth and she had come down from the North to seek her fortune. He introduced himself to Elizabeth Joyce at a market in Portland and courted her for quite some time before she agreed to marry him. She was a widow with two hansom sons and a beautiful three-year-old daughter. Unfortunately for the newly formed family the sea was all he knew. Working in town or fishing locally would have made him restless. So he kissed his loving family goodbye and set off again with one of the crews he knew from before.
    “Billy Boy” was a legend. Elizabeth had heard of the stories about a boy no one could kill, injure, or for that matter hurt in any way. But she had no idea that her beloved Bill was that boy. In seaports all over the world, drunken sailors told stories of a boy that couldn’t die. If a sailor wanted to watch a man go ghostly white he would point behind the man and say “Isn’t that Billy Boy at the bar, weren’t you just saying you could wipe the bar room floor with him? As with any story after it’s told several times, the facts get lost in the shuffle as men try to amaze and shock those listening. Now, as the story goes, it took over 300 men to throw Billy Boy out of that saloon in Athens. In Lisbon the man died from the dirty look. The carriage became a collapsing second story of an orphanage where sixty small children scampered to safety while he held tons of sagging timbers. It was said he never walked completely upright after that, some of the ligaments in his back were torn beyond repair. It was the first time anyone had heard of him being injured. That didn’t mean that men were ready to try their luck at challenging him to win fame and glory. In fact a slightly stooped Billy Boy was even more unsettling when he came through a doorway. His arms were covered with scars from early wounds. Eventually no man anywhere in the world would brag that he could Billy Boy a thing or two, no matter how drunk he got.
    Whenever Billy Boy was home he divided his time between the family and looking for the right town to settle down in. He had only one requirement of the ideal location, that they had never heard of Billy Boy of Boston. So up and down the eastern seaboard he went looking for peace and quiet. He would go directly to the central part of town, walk in to any bar, and tell a Billy Boy story, hoping they would just look at him funny. He would roar at some of the stories, amazed at the imagination of men when they are drunk. But he noticed that even the braggarts avoided saying they could take him in a fight.
    In 1698 on Bill’s 22nd birthday he rode into a small delta town in the Carolinas that housed the families of guards at the local colonial prison established years before. No one had heard of Billy Boy, or as he was called these days Boston Billy. So the Seaworthy family left Boston, the largest city in the colonies with 7000 residents and settled in for rest of their lives. Bill’s sons joined him in the family business, a bait and tackle shop that also repaired anything that was broke. Darkwood Dock, named after local trees with unusually dark wood, was so far from the beaten path, Bill and his family were the first outsiders the people had seen in four years. No one counted the new prisoners from England that arrived twice a year on a well-guarded prison ship.                                                                                      .  Bill and Elizabeth were happy living in the quiet little town and their sons married local girls and had large families. The seasons were mild. The summer sun was cooled by ocean breezes and giant white clouds. Bill always wore loose fitting long sleeved shirts to cover his past. His daughter, Rebecca or Becky was a curious girl and wanted to know everything about the world. He would take her to the ocean beaches and tell her Billy Boy stories. He would tell what he heard had actually happened, then tell her the first time he heard it told, then any following versions he had been told. She loved the stories and asked him if he had ever seen Billy Boy. He said no, but one day when he was repairing an axle on a buggy, she saw his arms bare with all the scars and bumps and knots. He quickly covered them up and grunted to get him some water. She never asked him about his arms and he never said a word either.
    Bill didn’t like the name Rebecca that much so he started calling her Seabreeze since they spent so much time on the beach and there seemed to be ocean breezes all the time, day and night. She didn’t marry any of the local boys when she reached the marrying age of 13. She said it was a new century and she was going to do something with her life. The schoolteacher lived with the Seaworthy family so Seabreeze had all the books she wanted to read. She would read well into the night under the covers with a small candle at her feet. In the morning she would carefully peel all the wax off the sheets that had dripped over the edge of the holder the night before. Her mother had warned her about starting a fire with candles, but hadn’t actually forbid her from reading under the covers. Seabreeze looked up to one woman in particular, Aphra Behn, whose political poetry and theatrical plays catapulted her from an unknown origin to a pinnacle of success in London society. Bill would tell her that the idea that women are incapable of critical thinking was absurd and for the idea that they were to remain silent and obedient, he used to laugh out loud. 
    The next ten years were the best of Bill’s life. Seabreeze’s teacher, Miss Brighton was French on her mother’s side and taught a strict Parisian French class, a luxury in a town so remote. Seabreeze was sure she was ready to visit Paris in the spring and meet some extremely hansom boy, fall in love, then return a wiser, more worldly woman. Miss Brighton said she could learn French in the newly established Detroit before going to Paris, but Bill put his foot down. He thought she was too young and would miss her too much to allow such a thing to happen. He took this stand in spite of his going to sea at 12 against his parent’s wishes.
    Word reached Darkwood Dock of war being declared against Spain and France following the recent coronation of Queen Anne. Although there were raids by French troops along the entire East Coast, none came anywhere near Darkwood Dock. Though the dealt was known for rich bottom land, few plantations were closer than 50 miles for fear of escaped convicts. Bill’s views were strongly against slavery and told Seabreeze since she was little that black men were men too. So it was with great reluctance that he forbade her to invite a young black boy she was interested in to her sweet sixteen birthday party in 05. All the townspeople would be there and a law had just been passed that it was now illegal for whites and blacks to marry. It was one of the only times Seabreeze wouldn’t talk to Bill and he went into a depression that lasted for weeks.
    It was that same summer that Bill had an accident while fixing a harvesting machine. The blades were sharp and his mind was on the fiasco at the birthday party when it happened. Before he could pull his hand back a blade had sliced off his thumb along the life line. Theodore, his oldest son was there and insisted that he take Bill to Bensonville to see the only doctor in a hundred miles of hard riding. Doc Singleton had studied medicine with a Doctor in Boston from Europe and the rumor was he had to run from some big gambling debts that he couldn’t pay off. Bill knew the Doc from when there complications with the birth of his third grandchild and thought him quite competent. Still, Bill had never gone to a doctor and if it wasn’t for an infection that set in he wouldn’t have gone. Bill had positioned the thumb carefully in its proper place then bound it so tightly his skin was white all the way to his small finger. The Doc had to cut away some dead skin around the wound and found that it did not bleed where he was cutting. He left the room immediately and brought back two large books. After several minutes, he put down his reading spectacles and told Bill he had a rare condition of the blood vessels. His blood vessels would close up and seal themselves instantly upon being severed and there was a good chance that his vital organs would do the same. Doc said it had been documented only five times in recorded history and asked Bill permission to make it six times. Bill said no and re-wrapped his thumb while walking out of Doc’s office. He had spent years seeking privacy and he wasn’t about to get it up because of some rare medical condition. 
    By 1714, the year George I ascended to the throne, the Queen Anne War was over and the Motherland had been the United Kingdom for several years. The Carolinas and been divided into North and South, so Bill and his family were now from North Carolina where importing new slaves was illegal and what plantations were still around were in hard times. The town of Darkwood Dock had grown some, mostly newborns from marriages of locals since strangers were seldom seen for years at a time. Miss brighton had married Jim Bob Thompson, the town’s blacksmith back in ‘09 and Seabreeze had taken over a school of 22 children grades 1-8 at 20 years of age. She was known as the old schoolmarm since women her age had large families of their own and were considered middle aged. Seabreeze always told Bill the local boys seemed like her brothers and she had no interest in them romantically. The books she read told of dashing young men who did great deeds and rode giant white stallions that carried them into battle. Seabreeze had added Greek and Latin to English and French classes in the one room schoolhouse on the bank of the delta.
    It was that year when three things happened that made it impossible for Bill to stay in North Carolina. In late spring his beloved wife Elizabeth has come down with influenza and died. Seabreeze had been seeing a hansom, recently released prisoner that talked real smooth and slid out of town just as easily. She was with child when a traveling pots and pans salesman came to town with his wagon of every day goods and recognized Bill as Billy Boy of Boston. Bill denied it but several people standing there asked why the man was so sure. The vendor listed five things about Boston Bill that fit Bill like a glove; the scars on his chest and arms, the way he couldn’t stand perfectly upright, the ages of his wife and children, his unbelievable strength, and the steely look he would give a man that would paralyze the man where he stood. The men in town knew it was true. It explained how no one could beat him arm wrestling at picnics. It also explained the feeling they got if he looked at them a certain way, how their arms and legs went stiff and their heart seemed to stop beating. Bill gave the peddler one of those looks as he helped the old man back on his wagon and slapped the hindquarters of his horse. As the wagon went off down the road the townspeople began to pull back from Bill and Theodore as they finished loading their buckboard.
    The following week Bill signed ownership of the business over to Theodore and Douglas who by this time were expert at fixing anything that turned, rotated, or had gears. Bill’s right thumb had knitted back in place but most of the nerve endings never healed and he wasn’t able to switch to his left hand for much of the work he needed to do. Bill was still depressed and lonely from Elizabeth’s passing and almost welcomed the chance to get away from all the things that reminded him of her. He would miss his sons and their wives who he had known since they were little girls. The eight grandchildren were going to miss him the most. Much of their weekends and every day after school they would run to Grandpa to hear stories of the sea and ports of call all over the world. He spent two to four hours with each one before leaving going over their time together and what he wanted them to do in the up coming months.
    The leaves were beginning to fall and there was a light frost on the ground the morning that William and Rebecca Seaworthy kissed and hugged their family goodbye and climbed up on the small buckboard loaded with all her books and their personal belongings. They had left just enough space for a Giant Malamute he had bought from a man in Bensonville the year before. He figured he would sleep easier at night on the road traveling with a 300 pound guard that could fit a man’s head in his mouth before swallowing it. Klondike was the biggest dog he had ever seen anywhere in the world. That included a giant St. Bernard in Geneva and huge Mastiff in Oslo. The man he bought it from said Klondike had carried a man with a broken leg two hundred miles through the mountains of the Yukon Territories on his back to safety.
    Seabreeze was just starting to show and as she pulled herself up to the seat, she looked at Bill and said it was time to go before she threw up again. They were headed to Boston where she would teach school and be the widow from the South. A tragic story of a newly wed husband killed by Indians near the end of the Toscarora Indian War the same night she gave birth to their first child. Bill planned to spend a year or so getting to Boston so there story matched the baby’s age.
    They settled into a small cottage just outside of Baltimore. It was a cold morning in March when Elizabeth Aphra Seaworthy came into the world. She was a happy baby and spent much of her day creating mounds of bubbles she delivered to waiting shoulders. Bill loved her dearly and called her Seafoam.
           
                                     
                                          Boston Bill in Baltimore
 

    The day they arrived was the start of the Blizzard of ‘14. They had stayed in inns along the way and Klondike had been posted outside the door where he could keep an eye on them and the buckboard. Bill had a hard time finding enough food for Klondike on the road. Back home it was fairly easy since he had an agreement with a local farmer to deliver fresh meat daily. Bill bought grain and eggs to mix with the meat to balance his diet. Bill would go to the local market and buy chickens or squirrels and boil them and skin them for Klondike. Even though Seabreeze was eating for two and Bill always had a healthy appetite Klondike needed twice their combined meals.
    Money wasn’t a problem since Bill had saved over half of every dollar he made from the business. The cottage they rented was run down. The roof leaked, there were large cracks in the corners of each room, and fireplace didn’t have a proper draft. Bill patched the roof first so they could get rid of the dozen or so buckets that were strategically placed throughout the house. Next came the fireplace. He had heard that making the chimney shorter or taller would change the dynamics of the draw. Bricks were expensive so he tried lowering the chimney a foot at first. When that didn’t work he went up eighteen inches, again nothing. Another six inches, nothing. Another six, nothing. At two feet over original height—success. Finally the cracks in the walls, which took the most time to repair because every room had them.
    Bill would ride the horse into town to pick some odd jobs, but his right hand stopped him from doing many of the jobs he would have been good at. He would accept more unskilled, manual types of work, which left him tired at night. Seabreeze was busy with the baby and keeping up with the housework. Bill didn’t like riding a horse but men didn’t use buggies unless they had a woman with them. Eventually he found a job at a local tobacco farm doing repairs on farm equipment and the buildings on the plantation. Bill picked up the smoking habit while working on the plantation. Seabreeze forbid him from smoking in the cottage, so he built a shed out back where he worked on various things that needed repair. Bill was never out of things to do.
    Seafoam grew up fast and Bill took plenty of time to answer questions she had about everything. The only subject Bill wouldn’t talk about was Elizabeth. He just couldn’t bring himself to talk about her at all. The story of the widow was working well so far. There was little chance of anyone from Darkwood Dock coming to Baltimore and even less chance of the reverse happening.
    Bill had never been a religious man so he found paying the Church of England 40 pounds of tobacco each year particularly unfair. He was able though to work something out with the plantation owner to get the tobacco for the tax as well as his own use, which became considerable within months of starting to smoke, at a discount. Bill didn’t spend the kind of time he used to as a young man in the bars. But he was no stranger either. The talk of every bar in Baltimore was the Catholic plot to kill every Protestant in Maryland with the help of the Indians. Actually it wasn’t just Protestants, it was anyone that wasn’t a Catholic. This talk of massacres and religion and politics was new to Bill and he longed for his old life in North Carolina. The Maryland had been planted by Lord Baltimore an English Catholic. When the Protestants revolted over talk of a massacre, George I took over the colony and Catholics were not allowed to practice their religion until 1776. Then there was a border dispute with William Penn that didn’t get settled until 1767 by the surveyors Mason and Dixon.
    Seabreeze applied for a position as schoolteacher when Seafoam was five and could join her as a student. Seafoam learned about the sea and world from Bill and from Seabreeze and from books in the house. By the time she started school she could read and write and speak French, Spanish and of course English. Like her mother before her Seafoam was shown the wonders of the ocean. Her eyes got wide when Bill would tell her of distant shores and foreign lands. The elephants of India, the rites of islanders of the south seas, the jungles of Africa, the camels of Arabia, the cannibals of New Zealand, the canals of Venice, all were part of her world.
    As a young girl, her constant companion was Klondike. At night he would lie beside her bed until morning. If she woke up in the night she could reach over the side of the bed and feel his thick coat and his heavy breathing. During the day he would follow her every where she went. There was a short bench in the front yard and she would use it to get on top of him and ride him around the yard. Klondike was careful to adjust his movements to offset any leaning that may occur as she slid back and forth and sideways. When she started school he would follow both of them to the schoolhouse and sit outside until recess when all the children would take turns riding the massive dog then follow them home in the afternoon. One day soon after she started school, three drunk men approached her mother and her on their way to school on a path that was still new to them. Two of the men held Seabreeze and asked what the hurry was. The third bent over to say something to Seafoam. Had the men not been so drunk they would have seen Klondike following close behind. Before the third man could get his hands on Seafoam, Klondike was airborne. When he hit the ground he had the man’s head in his jaws and spun around to face the other two men. When he spun his canine teeth punctured the man’s neck right next to the main artery and any additional force would cause major gushing. The man lay still clearly in shock from the impact of the attack. The other two men tightened their grip on Seabreeze and demanded she call off her dog. The older of the two men pulled a knife but before he could get it to Seabreeze’s throat klondike landed in his chest. All four hit the ground and in the skirmish that followed Seabreeze rolled to one side and grabbed Seafoam and ran back towards the house where they kept a loaded rifle above the fireplace. She called to Klondike but all they could hear was growling and screams of men in pain. The screaming stopped and Klondike showed up at the door with blood all over him. Seabreeze gave him a bath and checked for wounds. Nothing, there wasn’t even a scratch on him, but she did have to pull some pieces of meat out of his gums, she wasn’t sure if they were from breakfast or the men that attacked them.
    When she finished bathing Klondike they went on to school using a round a bout way on the main road. All the children were waiting when they got there. She sent one of the older boys to get John Spencer, foreman of the Baltimore plantation. John was the closest thing to law and order the colony had. He sent two of his men over to the school to investigate. Seabreeze put Sarah, her assistant, in charge until she got back. The men were well armed so she felt safe enough to return to the path. As they got close Seabreeze wished Bill was with them or at least more men were along. There were two men on the ground, only one was moving. Spencer’s men recognized the attackers right off as two of the three Plower brothers. The Plower clan had been terrorizing the colony for years. There were rumors that the family that went missing in ’09 was killed over a land dispute with the Plowers. The men said that the Seaworthys should leave the colony within the hour, before word gets back to the clan of the death of the youngest son. One of the men threw the surving brother over his shoulder and started back to the plantation. Seabreeze headed off to find Bill at work. Bill was in an out building working on an old well pump when Seabreeze burst in. He was quiet throughout the telling of the story then said they better get home. He knew they were on their own. The stories of the Plower clan were endless. Even Lord Baltimore was supposed to have backed off in a dispute with the clan over a small strip of land close to the water.
    Bill, being a careful man, had secretly dug a 5x5x5 foot cellar under the cottage and lined it with three inch thick slabs of rock. The entrance was in the floorboards of the kitchen and a steel plate was used to secure it from inside. Air channels were run out from the cottage and surfaced under bushes. Water, food, and an airtight potty were also down inside. Bill helped his daughter, granddaughter, and Klondike climb down the narrow passageway. He didn’t want Klondike getting hurt in the inevitable attack that was coming. The cellar was also stocked with three loaded pistols and reloading powder and shot for dozens of additional firings. There were two swords and half dozen throwing knives. But the first obstacle a man would face would be the biggest set of teeth and jaws in North America driven by more muscle than three men combined.
    The day went slowly as he sat hidden in the heavy brush with his riffles. He figured they would come for him and his family as soon as they heard what happened. None of the townspeople would come to their defense. He wouldn’t have asked them to anyway. He didn’t like owing other people for anything. So he waited there in the shadows. He had cleared just enough branches to a clear shot to the front of the cottage. Behind him was underbrush enough to hide him after the shots. He placed reloads in several locations, so no matter where he had to go in the fight he would be close to a hidden stash of powder and shot. Bill was a quiet man that tried to think of everything ahead of time. And when he felt he had no choice whatsoever he had taken men’s lives in the past. But now that his family was in danger, his resolve was like steel. He was determined that no matter how many angry men showed up---none would leave. The morning turned into afternoon, which turned into dusk. In the distance he could hear the horses of many men coming, the ground shook from the weight of so many men on horseback. When they pulled up there all kinds of screaming and yelling about taking care of the killers. The Plower clan included five brothers, each with one to four sons each, so Bill was hearing at least a dozen men dismounting and cocking pistols and riffles.
    In spite of the stories about him being able to stop men in their tracks with just his mind, there were limits. First, the man needed to know the legend of Billy Boy so fear could do its part and second, the more intelligent the man was the more subject to suggestion he would be. These men were neither category. He went over in his mind the location of each stash as he waited for the first good shot since it would be the last element of surprise shot. The leader went right up to the door after sending five or six around back to stop any chance for escape. The leader then said to come out and the women wouldn’t be hurt. They just wanted the father and the dog. Bill took a deep breath lined up the neck of a man right behind the leader and the leader’s head, then slowly squeezed the trigger. Bang! The shot ran true and two men fell without a cry or whimper, just flopped to the ground like dropped rag dolls. What followed was a dozen rounds fired into the cottage windows, along with plenty of curses and cries about those devils got pa! At the end of the volley of shots to cover up the direction Bill was firing from, Bill used his second rifle and finished a third man. This of course caused more wailing and hurried reloading of their firearms. Bill took this time to reload his first and second riffle. The anguish in their voices was real as love ones hit the dusty ground dead, not wounded to fight another day. The next hour was a blur of firing, running, reloading, firing, feeling around for a stash, reloading, firing, running on and on. Towards the end they threw torches in the windows and as the cottage went up in a blaze of crackling timber, Bill knew he couldn’t fire on them anymore without them figuring out he was outside the cottage with them. A wagon was pulled up front of the cottage and bodies were piled on while they checked for life signs of the fallen. Because of the dark and the bad angles of some of his shots there were wounded on the ground, screaming in pain and calling for someone to help them. Bill carried a British Army issue bayonet he kept was so sharp he had to replace the custom sheaths every couple of months because the edge had cut through the leather just from the friction of walking along. In the dark, away from the dying flames Bill finished many of the wounded where they lay crying for help. The driver of the wagon and three on horseback were all that remained of the small army that had showed up hours before. The rest of the night was spent following these men home picking them off one by one until finally the driver felt Bill behind him saying you’re the last.
    As daybreak came to the cottage Bill was just finishing up packing the buckboard with whatever supplies were stashed in the cellar. All the other possessions were destroyed except the iron, steel, and stone items, which were carefully packed in the back, next to Klondike. They let Seafoam sleep as long as possible since several hard days of travel lay ahead.
    By the time John Spencer arrived late in the morning, Bill had covered  the opening with flat rocks in the area and brushed the tracks they made when leaving out to the main road. John Spencer was no fool but when he declared there were no survivors to the bloody battle, no one asked any questions. Questions like, were there bodies inside the ashes of the cottage? or where did the buckboard go? The town was peaceful for the first time that anyone could remember, and there wasn’t a reported rape until after the  official founding of Baltimore ten years later in ’29.
    For years people in town speculated on how it was possible for a small family with a big dog could kill seventeen well-armed men. The town erected four head stones over the burnt remains of the cottage to honor the small Seaworthy family and the biggest dog any of them had ever seen.

                                          Boston Bill in Philadelphia


    The Seaworthys were travel weary when they pulled into the Hampton Inn, just outside of Philadelphia. After their experience in the rural plantation life of Maryland, he was determined to stay in the cities from now on. His original purpose of hiding from his past had succeeded for the most part except for that pots and pans vendor in North Carolina. Bill was sure that things would turn for the better in the city. He thought at first of moving to rural Pennsylvania where many religions had found a place of tolerance but in the end he, along with Rebecca Ann decided the city was the best place to raise Elizabeth Aphra. The city was bigger than Boston was when he left it so many years ago. It had been a long time since he had lived in the city and at first he was uncomfortable with the pace of life.
    Seabreeze loved the city and immediately applied for teaching positions in all the surrounding schools up through high schools. She was offered a position at private Catholic school teaching French and Spanish. The classes started at break of dawn and ran till dusk and involved students from grades 1-12. She loved her work but Seafoam needed someone to look after her till her mother got home at night. A neighbor offered to do it for two silver pieces a week, almost a day’s pay. Bill tried to get work at several factories including; shoes, textiles, locomotive, machinery, and shipbuilding. Although he wanted to work at shipbuilding none of his particular skills were needed, so he ended up working on the production line of a farm equipment manufacturer as a tooling technician. He was good at fixing the machines when they broke, but he didn’t like the work and liked the people even less.
    Because he wasn’t happy on the job he took to the bars at night. He fell into the company of some hard drinking Irishmen at O’Touls bar and grill. There was a lot of talk about how Admiral Sir William Penn loaned Charles II 16,000 pounds forty years earlier and was given all the land between Lord Baltimore and the Duke of York. And all of a sudden it didn’t matter that the Swedes, Finns, and Dutch had been here for fifty years. Then to make things worse York gives Penn three counties to the south and Penn sets up his cousin, William Markham as deputy governor of the newly formed Delaware. So the English took control just before Bill was born and now it seems all the land has been divided up among the wealthy from England.
    One hundred years of slavery had made Pennsylvania as rich as it had the southern colonies in spite of the predominance of Quakers and other freedom loving religions that had settled in the area and insisted on laws protecting the rights of worship. Bill was careful with his drinking and avoided the usual fights that happen in bars over women and bets. But one night late there came a large man with scar across his throat from ear to ear about half an inch wide. When he pushed his way through the crowd, he wasn’t that careful about whose toes he stepped on. By the time he reached the bar he had five or six men cursing him and finished with shouldering Bill to one side to make room for his wide shoulders. Bill looked him right in the eye. The man was at least twice his weight and had eight inches on him in height. He bellowed out that his name was the Dutchman and he hailed from Amsterdam and he called out any man brave enough to step outside with him. All eyes went to the floor except Bill’s. Bill quietly told the Dutchman that he had spilled a drink when he first pushed his way to the bar and that a replacement was expected.  The Dutchman roared with laughter and before Bill could move his hand the man had sunk a fish-scaling knife into his hand that was holding what was left of his drink. The Dutchman said something about replace this little man. The next second Bill pulled out the knife that had his hand pinned to the counter and drove it through the Dutchman’s upper arm and into a post he had been leaning against. The tip of the blade protruded on the other side of a five-inch diameter support. The Dutchman screamed in pain and took his free hand, grabbed a pitcher of beer and swung it at Bill’s head. There was a flash of steel as Bill’s bayonet was briefly seen and a pitcher of beer with a large hand still attached to the handle flew over Bill’s head onto the tavern floor. By this point everyone in the bar was back from the two of them several feet. Bill went back to drinking his beer just beyond the reach of the big man’s stump. With no way to pull the knife out of the arm pinned to the post the Dutchman soon slumped to one side. Bill calmly finished his beer and left. Once Bill was outside the crowd rushed over to the Dutchman to lower him to the floor and get some help. Bill never went in that bar again, he didn’t really like all that whining about how unfair it was the English own everything. When he got home Seabreeze didn’t notice the additional slot in his hand, but Seafoam did the next day. She asked what happened to his hand and he mumbled something about some man dropping something on his hand.
    Seabreeze started going to mass at the church with Seafoam, but Bill resisted. Even the mention of religion made him uncomfortable. When he was in Spain he heard stories of the Spanish Inquisition where basically all non-Catholics were tortured till they converted or died. But the priests seemed nice enough and Bill thought he didn’t have to worry about his small family while they were at the church and there was Klondike to see them home. Becky became active in church affairs and soon had Elizabeth helping with the charities and volunteering at the orphanage. Since they didn’t need the money she spent most her money on books, any book, all books, free books, gifted books, books on history, books on science, books about education, just about anything in print she could get her hands on. Bill did like to go through the ones on politics and science. Many evenings were spent with the three of them reading well into the night with Klondike snoring to the point of them shaking him to break up the pattern.
    Bill was the one who usually walked Klondike at night since the three men incident. But in the day Klondike was pretty much Seafoam’s shadow. The school kids loved playing with him at recess. He would pretty much let them do anything that didn’t hurt much. So there were rides where five sometimes six kids would ride around the schoolyard on his back and when he had had enough he would simply lie down and they would go tumbling off to one side or the other. Other dogs would lower their heads when approaching Klondike to trade sniffs but mostly they would avoid him at all costs. Only two times that Bill knew of were there fights involving Klondike. The first was when he was walking Klondike at night and big black Newfoundland came running down the street alone with a pack of twenty or so dogs following. They encircled Bill and Klondike and one by one they would dart in try to bite one of them then jump back before they were bit. Finally one managed to get a back leg of Klondike and Bill let go of the leash. Klondike was exceptionally fast for a big dog and quickly removed the heads of two of the yappers. The Newfoundland was another matter. The two dogs went into the most vicious fight Bill had seen since he was in Hong Kong at a dogfight between a pit bull and a mastiff. All at once there was quiet. The pack ran down the street leaving their leader hanging from Klondike’s jaws. Klondike gave one final shake then dropped the dog to the street. The second was when Becky and Elizabeth were walking home from a church function. Four teenage boys knocked Becky down as they ran by laughing and yelling at her to get off the sidewalk. Klondaike had been momentarily distracted behind a porch stoop where some meat was lying on the sidewalk. The boys hadn’t gone ten feet when the one at the back was smashed to the ground by hundreds of pounds of growling dog. The boy lay unconscious with the wind knocked out of him like a horse at full gallop had just hit him. Klondike sat with one paw squashing the boy’s face into a puddle of dark, oily liquid. Becky got up quickly and started for Klondike to grab his collar before anything really bad happened. The three boys stopped turned and began throwing anything they could get their hands on at Klondike to get his paws off their friend. This was a mistake, they should have kept running. Klondike would have moved on with some urging from Becky to leave the unconscious boy alone and continue on. But by the time the second rock hit Klondike in the face he was in no mood to listen to Becky ordering him to stop. People were gathering to watch the drama. Some had seen it all and were encouraging Klondike to get the other boys. The neighborhood had been terrorized by those teenagers for months and more than one father had sworn to take care of the problem once and for all. They were brothers and their father had told anyone who said something about the boys to shut up or he would shut them up. The constable said the boys hadn’t broken any laws and to stay away from the father who had friends in city hall. When the oldest brother took out a knife and started for Klondike, Becky screamed for him to stop. Just as he lunged at the dog with the blade aimed at Klondike’s chest, Klondike sprang forward and while still in an upward momentum caught the head of the boy in his teeth. The weight of Klondike and the twisting of the fall of the two, left the boys face a bloody mess when they finally came to a stop several feet away. No legal action was taken against the Seaworthys upon the death of the oldest son that day and the father did not approach Bill since the story of the Dutchman was well known by that time. Life otherwise was without incident during the early days in Philadelphia.
    Seabreeze, besides reading everything in print, took up the violin and played in the community symphony after the first year of playing. Elizabeth also had started piano lessons from an older woman that once played in Vienna professionally. Bill was happy about the kinds of things his family was involved in, but he had no such interests. He would go though to recitals and events in the arts center. It was the center where Rebecca met Hans Buerer, a second generation descendent of one of the original eighty families that settled Philadelphia area in 1683 and fourth generation Pennsylvania families from Sweden in the 1630s. Hans was an accomplished man of letters and would make a good match for Rebecca. The family thought Seabreeze to be a delightful woman and would welcome her into their family readily.
    Philadelphia in 1725 was the strongest economic city in the colonies and would remain number one for almost the next hundred years. Pennsylvania like Delaware, New York, and New Jersey were mostly made up of people who had left their families in the old country while they made their fortune in the colonies before they sent for them. This was essential for the industry to flourish with all these people with no home life to fuel the great industrialization under way. Paper and textiles were the main products and labor was plentiful and cheap. There was also an extensive infrastructure of shipyards and the ironworks needed to supply them. Bill changed jobs frequently during these years. There was always something that he couldn’t go along with, each time he’d show up at a new job. His smoking and drinking became more and more of a problem for Seabreeze to deal with, but her life was so busy that Seafoam got lost in the busy routines of both of them. She was eleven now, only a year younger than Bill was when he went to sea and she didn’t let him forget either. He started spending Sundays with her and things settled down some.
    Just because Pennsylvania had laws to guarantee the right to worship does not mean freed slaves had any real rights. If one should have a desire and go ahead with a marriage to a white they would be sent back into slavery for life no exceptions or possibility of freedom whatsoever. Even being caught alone with a white where anything of a sexual nature was suspected the penalty was seven years of slavery. So when a black boy around Seafoam’s age showed up at the door to get the assignment for school the next day, Bill asked him to not come back to their house again for both their sakes. He then spent the rest of the night and most the next day going over why she was never to talk to him even at school. The colony was good in many ways but that was not one of them, and yes it wasn’t fair the way things are.
    The biggest city was growing faster than any other city as well. Germans from the Rhineland, Scotts and Irish that didn’t settle in the Cumberland gap, and the English were still moving in by the thousands each year. The arts were attracting people from throughout the North American continent. In fact, the title “Athens of the Colonies” was bestowed on Philadelphia during this period. Bill was feeling more out of place with each year. The excitement Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” was creating in certain circles was lost on Bill completely. He longed for his quiet life in the Carolinas with his dear Elizabeth, working at his own pace on farm equipment that had broken down. Taking Seabreeze to the beach and telling her stories of far away places. These stories had less and less interest as his little family became more and more involved with city life. Aphra would tease him whenever he would dose off in the symphony, like during the summer passage of the Four Seasons, when only a couple of the musicians were playing and they were playing so quietly you could barely hear them. Bill preferred marching music where your blood ran faster and you wanted to get up and do something, anything. It wasn’t that he was an embarrassment to them in their circles because he could tell great stories without cursing throughout.
    Rebecca’s rise in the elite circles of society continued with her marriage to Hans. The women in that circle were champions of women’s suffrage and abolition of slavery. Bill was assigned one of the rooms on the fourth floor of the Buerer mansion, next to the attic doorway. There was talk of sending Aphra off to finishing school in Paris or London. It would seem he was longer needed in any real sense at this point and began to look for still another job closer to the mansion. But there were no factories in that part of town and whatever professional work there was needed a degree of some sort. Bill headed back to the bars of yesteryear to regain some control of his life. He even needed help paying for the biggest wedding he ever heard of. He‘d had so many jobs ’19 that he would skip two at a time so it didn’t sound so bad.
    Rebecca’s ties to the Roman Catholic Church grew strong with each year. Pennsylvania had the largest Catholic population in the colonies and the second largest population of a religion behind only the Quakers. Rebecca now had strong ties to a Jesuit order with origins in Paris. It was decided that Elizabeth would be given special permission to study at the Seminaire de St-Sulpice in Paris and receive an education usually reserved for future leaders of the church and Catholic monarchs. She would be staying at an adjoining Ursuline nunnery where she would receive additional instruction and supervision. Bill was chosen to see her safely across the Atlantic with Effa Buerer as the voyage nanny. Arrangements were made for a special stop over of a French ship leaving Quebec in a month from the decision day. Bill insisted that an aging Klondike be brought for additional protection on the high seas. Seafoam hugged her Grandpa and told him how glad she was that he was coming too. She knew he missed the sea and was bored with all the society events that went on and on and on.