Seeing London with Nathaniel Balch
Balch may have been planning the trip for a while for business or personal reasons and just didn’t want to cancel, even in wartime.
But John Andrews’s letter (quoted yesterday) suggests that the price of the passage was unusually high. Passengers paid Capt. John Callahan extra to sail the Minerva across the Atlantic without a full cargo.
Like a lot of Bostonians, Balch had good reason to get out of the besieged town before it came under attack. But he didn’t take his wife and five children with him. He also still owned real estate in Providence, so he probably could have found refuge for the whole family in America.
Balch doesn’t appear to have been so deeply involved in politics that he would need to go to London to lobby for a patronage job, like his fellow traveler Samuel Quincy, or to talk with British opposition politicians on behalf of the Boston Whigs, as his friend Josiah Quincy had just done.
I know of no documents from Balch explaining his motives for the voyage—no letters, diary, business accounts, memoir.
We have a few glances of what Balch actually did in London after arriving on that ship full of Loyalists. They come from the diary of Samuel Curwen, a Loyalist from Salem who had crossed the ocean after a visit to Philadelphia. On 31 July, Curwen wrote:
Went in company with Messrs. I[saac]. Smith, N. Balch, J[oseph]. Greene Esq. and Berry [or was this John Barrell?], Colburn Barrell, a Mr. Peacock, a Glass Dealer in Fleetmarket Street, our Guide and young Oliver, to the [word?] Flintglass house over blackfryar’s bridge where we saw a drinking glass formed, completely made, ink bottles and smelling bottles, from which place returning we proceeded through a paved ally so called on this Side the Bridge to a glass grinder and polisher, whom we saw work. Dined at Kingshead Jury Lane, the glass grinder worked in a loft up 50 or 60 stairs. From dinner we repaired to St. Paul’s…(A rumor was going around London that day that Lord North had shot himself. It was false.)
Three of those men and one more got together on 22 August:
Went to Bow with Nathaniel Balch, lying beyond White Chappell, from whence we took Coach, 2 Miles in order to see the China Manufacture, but the clerk received and dismissed us very cavalierly, with an abrupt answer, that he should not show it to us.Those expeditions might indicate that Balch was studying English manufactures. Then again, that might just have been a sort of sightseeing that businessmen from the provinces did.
We met J. Berry and Mr. Silsbee at the door having trudged it afoot, returned by Bromley, stopping at Mile End, we took a bowl of punch and some bread and cheese, and from thence walked together to the Exchange, where J.B. and Mr. S. departed together.
Mr. B. and myself entered Lamp Chop House in Bartholomew Lane, took each a porringer of broth, and after taking a Survey of different rooms in the Bank, departed each for his lodgings, I being weary and lame.
On 24 August, Curwen, Balch, Silsbee, Isaac Smith, “John Berry and his Brother,” and “Capt. Martin” took a boat up the river to Barnes, then hiked through Kew Gardens and Richmond to Hampton Court Palace. Curwen thought the royal family should get out there more often. “Out of hatred to his grandfather the last excellent Geo. 2, the present King seems to make it a point to hate every object of his worthy grandfather’s approbation,” he wrote. The next day the men took a coach on to Windsor Castle as well.
Finally, on 28 August Balch called on Curwen “to go to Mr. Gilbert Harrison’s to dine from whence we went to puddledock.” Curwen visited the “Herald’s office” to inquire about his coat of arms, and there the men had tea.
The diary of former governor Thomas Hutchinson shows that in those same months he often saw people that Balch had sailed with, but he never mentioned meeting Balch. That might indicate a political gap between them, or perhaps just a social gap between a hatter and a governor.
The genial hatter’s reason to be in London that summer remains a mystery.
TOMORROW: Home again.
2 comments:
Samuel Curwen of Salem? Any relation to Joseph Curwen of Providence, formerly of Salem, who died under mysterious circumstances shortly before the Revolution?
[Joseph Curwen was a sorceror in a story by HP Lovecraft, who was fascinated by Georgian America and probably would have loved this blog as much as I do. It always amuses me to see how Lovecraft used his antiquarian studies in his stories.]
Samuel Curwen's diary was first published (in heavily edited form) in the mid-1800s, so it would certainly have been available to Lovecraft as a source about colonial New England.
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