The sea momentarily opened a new chapter in the book of Zion’s life. He sailed on a Kittery-based sloop, the Hazard, which ventured as far south as the English Caribbean, and on which he experienced the freedoms and vicissitudes of the maritime life. Next came a whaling tour, during which he served in a variety of capacities for a year, enduring an ever-rising tide of depredations that culminated in his being chained belowdecks, without food or water for weeks, for theft, attempted mutiny and insulting the honor of the whaler’s drunken captain. Only the intervention of a galley slave from the Barbados, who held the captain’s affections, and most importantly, brought him fresh water and salt cod at twilight, saved his life.
Liberty
The 1770s: great changes were blowing through streets of the colonial capital. The Crown’s troops had irrevocably stained Boston’s cobblestones with the blood of Attucks and others; the promise of freedom sweetened the air like incense. When Zion was freed by his captain upon return to Sherburne, in Nantucket Island, instead of a duel to restore his honor, the young man stowed away on a brigantine returning to the port of Boston. Penniless, carrying on his person only a pocket pistol and several cartouches he had stolen from the whaler captain’s wares, and finding that both Lacy’s cousin and the safe woman had moved or been moved from their residences, leaving no place to stay, for the town appeared to his eyes to have evacuated its entire black population, Zion grew restless and proceeded to rob a tanner’s store. He was captured within hours by the Crown’s authorities and confined, pending his arraignment, to the city prison on Queen Street. After a short period of time, the under-magistrate discovered that he was a fugitive slave, and returned him, pending his trial, to Mr. Pennyman, now thriving handsomely with five shops throughout Suffolk and Bristol Counties. Pennyman determined to get rid of him. His personal scruples, however, did not permit him to entertain simply manumitting the slave. He must first earn back his investment.
After Zion’s conviction and brief imprisonment, he was again returned to Pennyman, and the businessman ordered him to be flogged for his effrontery, which to his preoccupied and rigid mind had assumed the character of outright treachery. He then sent him south to work in a shop in Attleborough, far from the negative influence of the sea or Boston, where the atmosphere fairly crackled with sedition. Zion — who yearned either to take up residence in Halifax, which he had learned about during his time at sea as a free man, and from there to ship out on a frigate bound for parts unknown, or conversely to return to the only settled home he had known, that of the Wantones, where he would be again among those who knew him best — did not take kindly to this turn of events, and revolted. After only a week, he fled towards Boston, following the coastal route and getting as far as Duxbury, where he stole two cakes of gingerbread, a package of biscuits, and a pint of milk out of a horse-cart heading north. He secreted himself in a nearby marsh. He was discovered a week later, arrested and housed in a local jail. He swiftly broke out by eluding his guard, commandeered a piebald, and headed south by southwest along the lesser roads and trails. The local authorities again captured, tried and imprisoned him, not only for his crimes but for his defiance of the social order, yet his realization of his own personal power had galvanized him, making life insufferable under any circumstances but his own liberation.
During Zion’s second incarceration, Pennyman had quick-deeded his ownership of the slave to a fellow reformed merchant, Simon Warren, of Boston, who in return promised to pay full, rather than wholesale, price for several cases of contraband liquor Pennyman was trying to unload. Zion left jail in May of 1772, and for a brief spell worked agreeably under Warren. Within the year, however, during which the enslaved man resumed a life of debauchery, including but not limited to periodic flights to Middlesex and lower Suffolk Counties, allegedly fathering several children by white, Indian and Negro women, drunkenness and brawling in the streets of Boston, celebrating on the Sabbath day, breaking curfews, threatening shopkeepers, openly praising London, and selling wine stolen from his master, Warren found the situation so unbearable that he gave him to another merchant, his second cousin, Job Hollis, of Boston.
Hollis, who had once held positions of prominence in the shipbuilding trade in Marblehead, was now reduced to running a scrap metal-working and trading shop on Lynn Street near the Hunt and White Shipyards. Possessed of an increasingly liberal mindset, and realizing almost immediately that he could only loosely control Zion, he afforded his charge some berth by giving him traveling papers. With these the slave immediately took the widest latitude, for had not the Reverend Isaac Skillman preached in that very year that “the slave should rebel against his master”? One midday he took Hollis’s horse and a fiddle he had bought with some of his earnings, and rode out to a cornhusking at Medford. Here his singing and strumming, striking appearance, and lively manner at the husking hall attracted the attentions of a number of the local women. The one on whom he set his sights, however, was a married white lady in her late 20s, Ruth Pine, of evident gentility. She coldly rejected his serenades all afternoon. By the early evening, armed with rum, he demanded that she accompany him back to a local inn, a suggestion that visibly offended her, leading her to denounce him in the strongest terms possible. He responded by slapping her so hard that she passed out. This led to a great commotion in the hall, wherein there were numerous calls for the Negro’s death. He promptly fled. Pine’s husband, a stout local farmer, was enraged that his wife might be so mistreated by any man, let alone a black one, and even more incredibly a slave. He pursued Zion on horseback all the way to Boston, where he finally overtook the offender and engaged him in a battle of fisticuffs in Orange Street, the city’s main artery. An officer of the courts walking by glanced at the boxers, then continued on his way. Within minutes Zion had reduced Pine to a heap of bloodied flesh and linen. To celebrate, he mounted Pine’s horse, his own having galloped off, and proceeded to Cambridge, committing a series of burglaries of homes and carriages along the way.
Bounty
Items stolen: a bottle of rum, several pieces of jerky, a tricorner felt hat, nine pounds sterling four shillings, suttler’s markee, some chocolate, twenty pounds sterling, a flask of French brandy, a pair of moreen small clothes (which did not fit and were thus discarded in the Charles), a man’s white linen shirt, a leg of mutton, two weight of salt pork, eleven pounds sterling six shillings, five pence, a carbine and two pocket pouches, a magnifying glass, a map of the easternmost British provinces in Canada.
Advertisement
A likely Negro Man aged about 18 or 19 years,
that speaks very good English
of great strength and brawn
sings and plays the violin
sold on reasonable terms by Mr.
Ebenezer Minott, trader over against
the Post Office in Cornhill, Boston.
(There were no takers.)
Spree
After settling this most recent plight with the Middlesex County magistrate, Job Hollis arranged to place Zion on board a vessel bound for Virginia where he would be sold at auction and his wildness might finally be whipped or worked out of him. Only under such conditions would this slave learn respect for the common and hardworking citizenry in whose colonies he had been fortunate enough to dwell, Hollis reasoned, and if Zion continued in his ways down there, the penalties would be swift, and ultimate. Hollis walked Zion, hands bound, the requisite papers pinned to the slave’s tattered coat, all the way to Hancock’s Wharf, where the South-going vessel was to dock. He wished the young bondman a safe passage to the southerly port, saying a prayer for his soul as they stood before the open water. To drown out his master’s voice, Zion began singing. On this note of defiance, the exasperated Hollis departed. For an hour or so the slave stood there singing and whistling on the wharf as the bailor and a customs official sat lubricating in a nearby ale house. When the ship, a frigate, did not arrive at the stated time, Zion charmed a Dutch whore strolling by to untie his bindings, whereupon he set off to find the first loosely hitched horse. As he ran he proclaimed himself free. Under duress one’s actions assume a dream-like clarity. An unattended nag stood outside a tavern, and off Zion rode.