Logan, Pt. IV: Out to Sea

We return again to Logan's tale.  What follows is somewhere between fact and imagination. The facts are largely gleaned from Rediker's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, from which I have generalized and borrowed the occasional phrase.  There's probably some debt as well to Dana's Two Years Before The Mast, certainly O'Brian, and even a little Moby Dick.  The rest comes from my head.  This is historical fiction in a raw form...a writer's warm up.

Liverpool's Old Dock and Custom House, 1773

Logan has managed to slip, relatively unnoticed, into the dirty streets by the docks of Liverpool.  He was free of at least the immediate attention of English authorities, but he was ready to be away from here, too, knowing that he had a new set of dangers.  Like any crowded city, pickpockets came out of shadows and sidled up quietly, tho' they would have been sore disappointed with this bedraggled Scottish fugitive, who had no purse at all.  He was far more worried about the crimps.  These unscrupulous men preyed on the down and out, the sailors whose pay had already been spent on ale and women, or were still too drunk to know that they had been shanghaied.  They might have been working for some equally amoral captain who needed whatever crew he could get, but the crimps were most interested in their cut than who they got or how they got them--a little bribery, a quick knock to the head, it didn't matter.  The unlucky seaman could suddenly find himself signed to a wicked vessel with a vicious commander for next to no pay.  More insidious were the "spirits," who lured the vulnerable with immediate cash and the promise of good wages but were actually indenturing their careless prey.  Finally, there was the ever-present risk of the press gang.  This was less of a concern, as there was no war going on; the War of the Spanish Succession had just ended, and in fact many soldiers at sea were out of work...and turning pirate.   Nevertheless, there were many reasons for Logan to not linger in port.

Logan, Pt. III: Escape to Liverpool

When we last left Logan--back with my long post over a year ago on the Jacobite Rising of 1715--the Battle of Preston had been lost, and soon thereafter the whole rebellion was crushed.  Logan would have been among nearly 1,500 prisoners of war in Preston.  It was late November.  Common soldiers like Logan were held in the town church for a whole month, cold and uncomfortable, barely existing on bread and water, unsure of what doom may await.  If he was not imprisoned or executed, he was likely to be indentured and sent to America.  By some ruse (that I have yet to invent), perhaps alone at night, Logan managed to get out of the church.  Marked as a rebel, his only option was to flee as quickly and as far as possible.  For Logan, this meant getting to sea and leaving England completely, perhaps never to return.

Warton Marsh on the Ribble Estuary, from the blog ribbletoamazon.com

The port of Liverpool was only about thirty miles away.  The most obvious route would have been directly south, but this led through Wigan and thus in the direction from which General Wills had brought his troops.  Luckily for Logan (and, for me, the writer), the geography of the area gave him a way to travel that few if any people would notice.  West of Preston, the River Ribble broadens into a massive estuary.  Even today, thanks to preservation as a National Nature Reserve, over a quarter of a million waders and waterfowl winter in the area.  The region was sparsely populated, limited to small, scattered fishing and farming villages such as Banks and Churchtown in the ancient parish of North Meols that had been settled by the Norse before the Norman conquest.  By keeping to the marshes, Logan would have been seen by no more than thousands of birds such as wigeons, geese, and plovers.  The going was slow, muddy, and treacherous.  Eventually, south of what is today the seaside resort of Southport, the wetlands would have given way to miles of beach and sand dunes.  The flat, broad West Lancashire coastal plain saw Logan all the way to the outskirts of Liverpool.

A 1917 map of the Ribble Estuary