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

the town’s needs with the helpers he already had. There was no room for Franklin.
    But Bradford had a son, Andrew, who operated a print shop in Philadelphia. Andrew had just lost a journeyman, a promising and engaging young fellow who had died suddenly. A replacement was needed. William Bradford thought it worth Franklin’s time to explore the possibility.
    Franklin could see little alternative. The money that remained from the sale of his books would not last more than several days, and he had no marketable skill but what he had learned in James’s print shop. Philadelphia had the added attraction of being even farther from Boston. It seemed unlikely that James would send someone after him, but it would not hurt to put another hundred miles between himself and what he owed on his apprenticeship.
    The first fifteen of those miles proved to be the hardest. Husbanding his shrinking supply of cash, Franklin boarded the cheapest boat he could find to carry him across the estuary of the Hudson to Perth Amboy. But an autumn squall caught the craft midpassage and tore away its rotted sail, preventing it from entering the sheltered strait west of Staten Island, driving it instead east across the Hudson’s mouth toward Long Island. Amid the pitching of the small vessel, a drunken Dutch passenger was hurled overboard; Franklin, the most alert and active person on the boat, pulled him back in by the scruff of his shaggy head. The fellow, sobered only slightly by his close brush with a watery death, proceeded to fall asleep in the scuttle.
    As the wind drove the stricken vessel closer to Long Island, Franklin and the others looked for a suitable landing. But the beach was rocky and the surf high, and to risk both was more than the ferryman was willing. So they dropped anchor to ride out the storm. By now the drunken Dutchman clearly had the better part of the bargain; the spray from the water had doused everyone almost as thoroughly as his ducking had wetted him, but at least he was unconscious. Some villagers on shore saw the boat bouncing beyond the breakers; the ferryman, Franklin, and the others shouted for them to come fetch them in smaller boats they could see lying by. But the villagers chose not to hazard their lives for these strangers and went back to their houses.
    Although the wind gradually abated, Franklin and the others spent a most uncomfortable night on the water—cold, wet, hungry, and thirsty. A single dirty bottle of rum had to sustain them as what should have been a passage of a few hours stretched well beyond twenty-four. The next morning, with the storm over and the wind shifting again to the east, the master of the craft jury-rigged a sheet that carried them by nightfall on the second day to Perth Amboy.
    Franklin, feverish from the strain and the exposure, collapsed into the first bed he could find. Just before passing out, however, he remembered reading somewhere that a large dose of water at the onset of a fever could forestall it. So he quaffed several glasses, then collapsed again. During most of the night he tossed fitfully, sweating profusely, but finally he fell asleep, and he awoke feeling as hale as healthy seventeen-year-olds generally do.
    He made another ferry passage, uneventful this time, across the Raritan River and set out on foot in the direction of Burlington. There he hoped to catch a boat down the Delaware for Philadelphia. The storm of two days earlier had given way to a hard rain, which, after what he had already experienced, dampened his spirits as much as his body. “I was thoroughly soaked, and by noon a good deal tired, so I stopped at a poor inn, where I stayed all night, beginning now to wish that I had never left home.” Moreover, in his bedraggled condition he looked the fugitive he was, or something similar. “I found by the questions asked me I was suspected to be some runaway servant, and in danger of being taken up on that suspicion.” But he kept to himself, found a