He moved his hand from his throat to his face. He felt the thick coat of salty wetness from heavy sweat, yet his skin was cool. The fever had broken. Water! His body screamed at him to drink. He dragged himself to the spring. His shredded throat still permitted only the smallest of sips. Even these caused pain, although the icy water felt like tonic, replenishing and cleansing him from within.
* * *
Hugh Glass’s remarkable life began unremarkably as the firstborn son of Victoria and William Glass, an English bricklayer in Philadelphia. Philadelphia was growing rapidly at the turn of the century, and builders found no shortage of work. William Glass never became wealthy, but he comfortably supported five children. With a bricklayer’s eye, William viewed his responsibility to his children as the laying of a foundation. He considered his provision for their formal education as the crowning achievement of his life.
When Hugh demonstrated considerable academic aptitude, William urged him to consider a career in the law. Hugh, though, had no interest in the white wigs and musty books of lawyers. He did have a passion—geography.
The Rawsthorne & Sons Shipping Company kept an office on the same street as the Glass family. In the foyer of their building they displayed a large globe, one of the few in Philadelphia. On his way home from school each day, Hugh stopped in the office, spinning the globe on its axis, his fingers exploring the oceans and mountains of the world. Colorful maps adorned the office walls, sketching the major shipping routes of the day. The thin lines traversed broad oceans, connecting Philadelphia to the great ports of the world. Hugh liked to imagine the places and people at the ends of those thin lines: from Boston to Barcelona, from Constantinople to Cathay.
Willing to allow his son some rein, William encouraged Hugh to consider a career in cartography. But to Hugh, the mere drawing of maps seemed too passive. The source of Hugh’s fascination lay not in the abstract representation of places, but rather in the places themselves, and above all the vast masses marked terra incognita. The cartographers of the day populated these unknown spaces with etchings of the most fanciful and terrifying monsters. Hugh wondered if such beasts could truly exist, or if they were mere fabrications of the mapmaker’s pen. He asked his father, who told him, “No one knows.” His father’s intent was to frighten Hugh toward more practical pursuits. The tactic failed. At the age of thirteen, Hugh announced his intention to become the captain of a ship.
In 1802, Hugh turned sixteen, and William, afraid the boy might run off to sea, relented to the wishes of his son. William knew the Dutch captain of a Rawsthorne & Sons frigate, and asked that Hugh be taken aboard as a cabin boy. The captain, Jozias van Aartzen, had no children of his own. He took his responsibility for Hugh seriously, and for a decade worked to school him in the ways of the sea. By the time the captain died in 1812, Hugh had risen to the rank of first mate.
The War of 1812 interrupted Rawsthorne & Sons’ traditional trade with Great Britain. The company quickly diversified into a dangerous but lucrative new business—blockade running. Hugh spent the war years dodging British warships as his speedy frigate transported rum and sugar between the Caribbean and embattled American ports. When the war ended in 1815, Rawsthorne & Sons maintained its Caribbean business, and Hugh became the captain of a small freighter.
Hugh Glass had just turned thirty-one the summer he met Elizabeth van Aartzen, the nineteen-year-old niece of the captain who had mentored him. Rawsthorne & Sons sponsored a Fourth of July celebration, complete with line dancing and Cuban rum. The style of dance did not lend itself to conversation, but it did result in dozens of brief, twirling, thrilling exchanges. Glass sensed something unique about Elizabeth, something confident and challenging. He found himself taken completely.
He called on her the next day, then whenever he docked in Philadelphia. She was traveled and educated, talking easily of far-off peoples and places. They could speak an abbreviated language, each able to complete the other’s thoughts. They laughed easily at each other’s stories. Time away from Philadelphia became torture, as Glass remembered her eyes in the sparkle of the morning sun, her pale skin in the light of the moon on a sail.
On a bright May day in 1818, Glass returned to Philadelphia with a tiny velvet bag in the breast pocket of his uniform. Inside was a gleaming pearl on a delicate, golden chain. He gave it to Elizabeth and asked her to marry. They planned a wedding for the summer.
Glass left a week later for Cuba. He found himself stuck in the port of Havana, awaiting the resolution of a local dispute over the tardy delivery of a hundred barrels of rum. After a month in Havana, another Rawsthorne & Sons ship arrived. It carried a letter from his mother with the news that his father had died. She implored him to return to Philadelphia immediately.
Hugh knew that the dispute over the rum might well take months to resolve. In that time he could travel to Philadelphia, settle his father’s estate, and return to Cuba. If the legal proceedings in Havana proceeded more quickly, his first mate could pilot the ship back to Philadelphia. Glass booked passage on Bonita Morena, a Spanish merchant bound that week for Baltimore.
As it turned out, the Spanish merchant would never sail past the ramparts of Fort McHenry. And Glass would never again see Philadelphia. A day’s sail from Havana there appeared on the horizon a ship with no flag. Bonita Morena’s captain attempted to flee, but his sluggish boat was no match for the speedy pirate cutter. The cutter came abreast of the merchant and fired five cannons loaded with grape. With five of his sailors dead on the decks, the captain took down his sails.
The captain expected his surrender to result in quarter. It did not.
Twenty pirates boarded Bonita Morena. The leader, a mulatto with a golden tooth and a golden chain, approached the captain who was standing formally on the quarterdeck.
The mulatto pulled a pistol from his belt and shot the captain point-blank in the head. The crew and passengers stood shocked, awaiting their fates. Hugh Glass stood among them, looking at the buccaneers and their ship. They spoke a jumbled mix of Creole, French, and English. Glass suspected, correctly, that they were Baratarians—foot soldiers in the growing syndicate of the pirate Jean Lafitte.
Jean Lafitte had plagued the Caribbean for years before the War of 1812. The Americans paid little attention, since his targets were primarily British. In 1814, Lafitte discovered a sanctioned avenue for his hatred of England. Major-General Sir Edward Pakenham and six thousand veterans of Waterloo laid siege to New Orleans. In command of the American army, General Andrew Jackson found himself outnumbered five to one. When Lafitte offered the services of his Baratarians, Jackson did not ask for references. Lafitte and his men fought valiantly in the Battle of New Orleans. In the heady wake of the American victory, Jackson recommended a full pardon of Lafitte’s earlier crimes, which President Madison quickly granted.