Free The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands

South Sea Company. With the company’s stock appreciating rapidly, the task of persuasion was easy enough, which made the stock rise all the faster. Between January and July of 1720 it octupled in value, sucking in all manner of speculators and inspiring no end of imitators. In August the inevitable occurred: the price broke. By November nearly nine-tenths of the stock value of the company had vanished, shaking such rocks of the establishment as the Bank of England, disgracing the directors of the company (who proved to have collaborated in assortedother shenanigans with the company’s accounts), ruining thousands of investors, and wreaking havoc on the finances of the entire British empire.
    Philadelphia was still reeling when Ben Franklin arrived in October 1723. If he had known how bad things were, he might not have come. In any event, Philadelphia was not his first choice. Franklin’s original plan upon leaving Boston was to settle in New York, the thriving town on the island at the mouth of the Hudson River that retained the Dutch character of its founders, including the burghers’ ambitions of worldly success. In such a setting a young man of similar ambition ought to have no difficulty finding work, unbothered by the formalities of an unfulfilled contract back in Boston.
    But once out of Boston, Franklin found himself at the mercy of forces beyond his control. After two days at sea the fair wind that had swept his escape vessel south failed, leaving the fugitive and his shipmates becalmed near Block Island, off the mouth of Narragansett Bay. The ship’s hands, accustomed to the vagaries of sea travel, employed the time to fish for the cod that had drawn seafarers to the northeastern coast of America for more than two centuries. The fish were thick, and the crew hauled them up by the hundredweight. The smaller ones were cleaned, boned, and tossed into a pan of hot oil, emerging moments later golden brown, steaming hot, and exuding an aroma that enclouded the ship and stirred the digestive juices of all hands and passengers.
    When he had entered the ship, Ben Franklin still held to his vegetarian philosophy. One leg of this philosophy—which proscribed both flesh and fish—was economic; the other was moral. The essence of the latter was that the creatures to be eaten had done nothing to deserve death at the hands of humans and therefore ought to be allowed to live out their innocent lives. Franklin continued to reason thus as the first codfish were pulled up over the ship’s gunwales. But his reason wavered as the smell of the frying fish wafted across the deck. Before his vegetarian days he, like most Bostonians, had loved fish: fried, steamed, boiled, stewed. The present smell conjured recollections of memorable meals past, and he decided to revisit the argument for interspecies pacifism. To his delight he discovered a loophole. “I recollected that when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then I thought, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.”And so he did, dining “very heartily” with the rest of the passengers and crew. This was the beginning of the end of Ben Franklin’s vegetarianism; he remarked later, with signature irony, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”
    The ship’s eventual arrival in New York overturned Franklin’s expectations in another respect. For all their commercial energy—perhaps because of it—the Dutch merchants and tradesmen in Manhattan evinced scant interest in the services of printers. The town lacked a newspaper, the merchants evidently being too busy to read about the world they lived in. And sermons had no such sale as in Boston, the merchants being equally unable to focus on the world to which they were going. The single printer who kept a shop in New York, William Bradford, had no difficulty supplying