Middle Passage

After forty-one days, the ship arrives and docks at Bagalang, a West African slave trading post, ending the first part of the journey of the Republic. Rutherford takes advantage of Falcon’s absence from the ship one night to bypass the booby traps and break into the captain’s cabin. Rutherford reads Falcon’s journals, which reveal Falcon’s early history. Falcon is the son of a Massachusetts minister and a highly educated woman who was very lonely after she married. She gave maps to her son and filled his head with stories of exploration.

Falcon, ashamed of his small size, decided that his only recourse was to grow up to outshine his very successful father. Falcon thrived during the American Revolution, but he despised how poorly the US managed the War of 1812, during which the British disrupted American shipping. Commissioned as a privateer, Falcon made money by moving contraband. Rutherford finds the man in these journal entries to be almost puritanical but lacking in virtue. Above all Falcon is a perfectionist who is plagued by “loneliness, self-punishment, and bouts of suicide” (51) as a result. The man is wellread, a dead shot, and paranoid that his crew plots to poison him. The last thing Rutherford reads in the journal is that Falcon’s cargo will include Allmuseri tribesmen and something so precious that it is worth “a king’s ransom in Europe” (53).