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St. Paul’s struck ten, carrying only a few passengers, some mail, and a bit of freight. She reached Liverpool twenty-five days later. Meanwhile a sister ship had set out for New York at exactly the same time. It took forty-nine days to make the westward journey, but men of business either side of the Atlantic fancied the notion of scheduled departures firmly adhered to and the idea caught on. Only the Black Ball’s crews knew what brutalizing was required to make tars keep to those artificial schedules that disregarded wind and water. The line’s flag was crimson with a black circle, but that’s not why her ships were called blood ships.
    Time and speed. Master them and you control commerce. Control commerce and you control the world. He was Samuel Devrey. That understanding was bred in his bone.
    His twice great grandfather was Willem van Der Vries, son of a Dutch doctor, and Englishwoman Sally Turner, an apothecary, who murdered her Netherlander husband and hung his tarred body from the town gibbet. As for Willem, he recognized the rule of time and speed in the late 1600s, when he founded what became Devrey Shipping after its owner modified the name more appropriate to New Amsterdam than New York. Devrey’s first ships were schooners engaged in the triangle trade, sailing from the American colonies south to the Caribbean, then east to the African coast and home again. Molasses to bibles to rum, that was the common explanation. It was a lie. The ships carried black gold—slaves. In those days the slave market at the foot of Wall Street was second in size only to that of Charleston in South Carolina, and had been the hub and heart of the slave trade here in the north. But though in this nation of twelve million, two million were still held as slaves, the practice was no longer legal in New York. Statewide Emancipation was declared in 1827.
    No matter. Devrey ships had been off the Africa run for over a century. The nigras were docile enough stood up there on the block on Wall Street as long as the whipper was ready with his lash and the goods were properly shackled. But you had to take the irons off if you wanted any work out of them. You had to give your new property a place to sleep, and city life didn’t offer space for the separate slave quarters of the southern plantations. So what was to keep those nigras housed under your roof from rising up to murder you in your bed? Two revolts, a few dead whites…After that, no amount of public burnings and rackings and hangings could restore New Yorkers’ sense of ease, and bringing slaves direct from Africa was outlawed.
    For a time they were replaced by seasoned slaves from the canebrakes of the Caribbean, already lash-trained to obedience. Eventually a flood of immigrants from the Old World came to meet the city’s need for labor. As for the Devrey ships, these days they filled their holds with the made goods of England and France. And after Independence the bounty of the China trade.
    Sweet Christ but didn’t he know about that.
    “Tea and silk and porcelains from the Orient. They’ll make us rich again.” So said Bastard Devrey after his foolhardy speculations with the moneymen of Wall Street nearly exhausted the Devrey fortune. That’s why Bastard sent Samuel, his only son, to Canton, to learn the ways of doing business in Asia.
    Fourteen years old Sam was in December of 1811 when he saw Canton for the first time. He should have been home in six months; instead the War of 1812 brought with it a British blockade, and he was marooned half a world away. He couldn’t blame Bastard for that or for the fact that the war strangled the life out of American trade. Devrey ships were not the only ones left to rot in harbor.
    But while most of the shippers hung on, Bastard Devrey pissed away Samuel’s legacy. Mired in debt and drink, he lost everything to his despised cousin Joyful Turner and to Turner’s partner, Jacob Astor, the richest man in New York. When Samuel