His plan was one of drunken courage. He proposed to exploit the last men that still owed him respect: the accommodating Negroes of the South-land themselves. These men had seen their comrades run away, and had not seen them brought back. They thought, therefore, that they'd found freedom. Morell's plan called for a general uprising of the Negroes, the capture and sack of New Orleans, and the occupation of the territory. A pitiless and depraved man, and now almost undone by treachery, Morell planned a response of continental proportions—a response in which criminality would become redemptive, and historic. To that end, he headed for Natchez, where his strength ran deeper. I reproduce his own narration of that journey:
"I walked four days," he reported, "and no opportunity offered for me to get a horse. The fifth day, I had... stopped at a creek to get some water and rest a while. While I was sitting on a log, looking down the road the way that I had come, a man came in sight riding on a good-looking horse. The very moment I saw him, I was determined to have his horse.... I arose and drew an elegant rifle pistol on him and ordered him to dismount. He did so, and I took his horse by the bridle and pointed down the creek, and ordered him to walk before me. He went a few hundred yards and stopped. I ... made him undress himself, all to his shirt and drawers, and ordered him to turn his back to me. He said, 'If you are determined to kill me, let me have time to pray before I die.' I told him I had no time to hear him pray. He turned around and dropped on his knees, and I shot him through the back of the head. I ripped open his belly and took out his entrails, and sunk him in the creek. I then searched his pockets, and found four hundred dollars and thirty-seven cents, and a number of papers that I did not take time to examine. I sunk the pocket-book and papers and his hat, in the creek. His boots were bran-new, and fitted me genteelly; and I put them on and sunk my old shoes in the creek....
"I mounted as fine a horse as ever I straddled, and directed my course for Natchez."*
THE INTERRUPTION
Morell leading uprisings of Negroes that dreamed of hanging him ... Morell hanged by armies of Negroes that he had dreamed of leading ... it pains me to admit that the history of the Mississippi did not seize upon those rich opportunities. Nor, contrary to all poetic justice (and poetic symmetry), did the river of his crimes become his tomb. On the 2nd of January, 1835, Lazarus Morell died of pulmonary congestion in the hospital at Natchez, where he'd been admitted under the name Silas Buckley. Another man in the ward recognized him. On that day, and on the 4th of January, slaves on scattered plantations attempted to revolt, but they were put down with no great loss of blood.
The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro
I give him that name because it was by that name he was known (in 1850 or thereabouts) on the streets and in the houses of Talcahuano, Santiago de Chile, and Valparaiso, and it seems only fair that he take it again, now that he has returned to those lands—even if only as a ghost, or a Saturday-night amusement.[¹] The birth register in Wapping calls him Arthur Orton, and gives the date of his birth as June 7, 1834. We know that he was the son of a butcher, that his childhood was spent in the gray meanness of the London slums, and that he harkened to the call of the sea. That story is not an uncommon one; "running away to sea" was the traditional English way to break with parental authority—the heroic ritual of initiation. Geography recommended such a course, as did the Scriptures themselves: "They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep" (Psalms 107:23-24). Orton fled his deplorable, dingy-pink-colored suburb and went down to the sea in a ship; with ingrained disappointment he regarded the Southern Cross, and he jumped ship at Valparaiso. He was a gentle idiot. Though by all logic he could (and should) have starved to death, his muddle-headed joviality, his permanent grin, and his infinite docility earned him the favor of a certain family named Castro, whose patronym he took ever after as his own. No traces of his stay in South America remain, but we know that his gratitude never flagged: in 1861 he turned up in Australia, still bearing the name Tom Castro.
In Sydney he made the acquaintance of a man named Ebenezer Bogle, a Negro servant. Bogle, though not handsome, had that reposeful and monumental air, that look of well-engineered solidity, often possessed by a black man of a certain age, a certain corporeal substance, a certain authority. Bogle had another quality, as well—though some textbooks in anthropology deny the attribute to his race: he was possessed of genius. (We shall see the proof of that soon enough.) He was a temperate, decent man, the ancient African appetites in him corrected by the customs and excesses of Calvinism. Aside from the visitations from his god (which we shall describe below), he was normal in every way; his only eccentricity was a deep-seated and shamefaced fear that made him hesitate at street corners and at crossings, survey east, west, north, and south, and try to outguess the violent vehicle that he was certain would end his days.
Orton came upon his future friend one afternoon as Bogle was standing on a run-down corner in Sydney trying to screw up the courage to face his imagined death. After watching him for several minutes, Orton offered him his arm, and the two astounded men crossed the inoffensive street. Out of that now-bygone evening a protectorate was forged: the monumental, unsure Negro over the obese Wapping simpleton. In September of 1865, the two men read a heartbreaking piece of news in the local paper.
THE ADORED ONE DECEASED
In the waning days of April, 1854 (as Orton was inspiring the effusions of Chilean hospitality, which was as welcoming as that country's patios), there had sunk in the waters of the Atlantic a steamship christened the Mermaid, bound from Rio de Janeiro to Liverpool. Among the drowned had been one Roger Charles Tichborne, an English military officer brought up in France, and the firstborn son of one of England's leading Catholic families. How-ever improbable it may seem, the death of this Frenchified young man (a young man who had spoken English with the most cultured of Parisian ac-cents and who had inspired the unparalleled envy that can only be aroused by French intelligence, grace, and affectation) was an event of supreme importance in the destiny of Arthur Orton, who had never so much as laid eyes on him. Lady Tichborne, Roger's horrified mother, refused to believe the reports of his death. She published heartrending advertisements in all the major newspapers, and one of those advertisements fell into the soft, funereal hands of Ebenezer Bogle, who conceived a brilliant plan.
THE VIRTUES OF UNLIKENESS
Tichborne had been a slim, genteel young man with a reserved and some-what self-absorbed air. He had sharp features, straight black hair, tawny skin, sparkling eyes, and an irritatingly precise way of speaking. Orton was an irrepressible rustic, a "yokel," with a vast belly, features of infinite vagueness, fair and freckled skin, wavy light-brown hair, sleepy eyes, and no, or irrelevant, conversation. Bogle decided that it was Orion's duty to take the first steamer for Europe and realize Lady Tichborne's hope that her son had not perished—by declaring himself to be that son. The plan had an irrational genius to it. Let me give a simple example: If an impostor had wanted to pass himself off as the emperor of Germany and king of Prussia in 1914, the first thing he'd have done would be fake the upturned mustaches, the lifeless arm, the authoritarian scowl, the gray cape, the illustrious and much-decorated chest, and the high helmet. Bogle was more subtle: he would have brought forth a smooth-faced Kaiser with no military traits, no proud eagles whatsoever, and a left arm in unquestionable health. We have no need of the metaphor; we know for a fact that Bogle produced a fat, flabby Tichborne with the sweet smile of an idiot, light-brown hair, and a thoroughgoing ignorance of French. Bogle knew that a perfect facsimile of the beloved Roger Charles Tichborne was impossible to find; he knew as well that any similarities he might achieve would only underscore certain inevitable differences. He therefore gave up the notion of likeness altogether. He sensed that the vast ineptitude of his pretense would be a convincing proof that this was no fraud, for no fraud would ever have so flagrantly flaunted features that might so easily have convinced. We should also not overlook the all-powerful collaboration of time: the vicissitudes of fortune, and fourteen years of antipodean life, can change a man.