Some journeys change us on a molecular level. We depart one person and arrive another. I’d like to say it is magical, but that is not right. Something else is going on. The act of travel, of movement, doesn’t change us so much as solidify us. On the road, free from expectations, others and our own, pieces of ourselves, previously scattered fragments, click into place, and we are whole. This is what happened to Charles Darwin in the Galapagos, Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa, George Harrison on the banks of the Ganges. They all experienced what author Robert Grudin calls “the beauty of sudden seeing.”
Benjamin Franklin took such a journey. Only twenty years old, he traveled from London to Philadelphia. He departed one person and arrived another. He left London a punk, engaging in “intrigues with low women,” making moves on his best friend’s girl, cozying up to aristocrats, writing a scandalous and largely inane dissertation, and in general acting like a typical guy. Thirteen weeks later, he arrived in Philadelphia a man.
I gingerly step aboard a bullet of a boat called the Red Jet and find a seat up front. Soon we’re rocketing across the English Channel, powered, the brochure informs me, by “high-speed MTU diesel engines with waterjet propulsion.” I have no idea what that means, yet I marvel at the smoothness and effortlessness of it all, so different from Franklin’s time. Speed seduces. It lures you with flagrant flattery and enticing promises. Hey, you, yeah you, Speed whispers, you seem like a person going places. Come with me and you’ll go to more places, see more, live more. Who can resist?
The boat is sleek and airline-like, with seats seemingly designed not for comfort or safety but to amplify the sense of speed and, by extension, of progress. Is it a sham? Franklin wouldn’t think so. He cared a lot about appearances, not as a substitute for authenticity but as an augmentation. When Franklin was a young apprentice-printer, freshly arrived in Philadelphia, he made a point of noisily carting his wheelbarrow through the city’s cobblestone streets. “Thus being esteem’d an industrious thriving young man, and paying duly for what I bought… I went on swimmingly.” Franklin was industrious. He just wanted to make sure everyone knew it.
We’re zipping along, subduing nature, conquering time. This, too, Franklin would appreciate. His lifelong mission, one of them anyway, was to defang nature, a commitment epitomized by his most famous invention, the lightning rod—or, as it was known in his day, the “Franklin Rod.”
The captain cuts the engine. We glide like an airliner on final approach. Directly ahead lie the Isle of Wight and the harbor town of Cowes, with its hodgepodge of buildings clinging to the shoreline and, atop a hill, what looks like a castle. To my side is the harbor, specked with tiny sailboats and the occasional yacht.
I’ve arrived nearly three hundred years to the day since twenty-year-old Benjamin Franklin did. It took Franklin’s ship more than a week to reach here from London. I made the journey, by rail and sea, in a few hours. I didn’t worry about fickle winds or changing currents or mutinous crews or scurvy or the sundry other perils that tormented seagoers of the eighteenth century. This too represents progress, I know, but I can’t help but wonder about the cost. By “conquering” nature, have we jettisoned vital aspects of our humanity?
This is not a question Franklin spent much time fretting over. He was a consequentialist. What mattered was not the perceived morality of any given action but its outcome. If it was helpful, useful, then it was good. If not, it was bad. I am not that way. I am an inconsequentialist. My mind is easily derailed by the theoretical. I am more comfortable in the world of ideas than in the world of, well, just about everything else. I’ve been called “Esoteric Eric.” I’d like to think it was meant as a compliment, but I know it wasn’t.
As I disembark the Red Jet, clutching Franklin’s account of his three-hundred-year-old journey, a thought occurs to me: This is like stepping back in time. I immediately regret that thought. Such a cliché! Such nonsense. Stepping back in time is a lie that tour guides and high school teachers tell us. Sure, we can visit museums, read history books, watch reenactments, wear funny hats, and even close our eyes and picture centuries past, but these are crude facsimiles of time travel. We are forever prisoners of the present. As for the past, the best we can hope for is the occasional conjugal visit. It is, I suppose, better than nothing. As Franklin would no doubt advise: Work with what you have.
Franklin walked the four miles from Cowes to Newport, the island’s largest town. I take a double-decker bus, sitting up front and upper deck, entranced like a wide-eyed eight-year-old. If Franklin was right and travel lengthens life, then I want to have a front-row seat to this elongated life.
Fussy Franklin liked Newport. “The houses are beautifully intermixed with trees, and a tall old-fashioned steeple rises in the midst of the town,” he notes in his journal. I like it too. Everything feels old, not musty old but heritage old. Good old. The yoga studio, the barbershops, the Comic Coffee café, and the supermarket (“Morrisons: Since 1899”) all exude comforting continuity. Even the McDonald’s looks old. I find a park bench and ponder.
Why are we so drawn to old buildings? It is about appreciating—and decoding—works of art written in an architectural language at once familiar and foreign. It is also about connecting to the past and locating ourselves on this vast temporal continuum. But it is more than that. Old buildings make us feel better about the present too. No longer is it free-floating, severed from what came before and what will come after but, rather, just another link in a long chain. The more fluid and unpredictable life in the present is, the greater the need for this continuity with the past. Nothing is more comforting than a building that has seen more than you ever will.
“Old buildings are like memories you can touch,” says architect Mary DeNadai. I like that. It explains why people still travel in the age of Google Street View. It explains why I am here now, on this small island in the English Channel when every bit of information I might gather, every data point, is available online. Yet it is not the same. I need to touch memories, Franklin’s three-hundred-year-old memories, to be precise.
I walk, the latest version of Apple Maps in one hand and Franklin’s journal in the other. I turn a corner and pass an old man shuffling down the street, deploying his metal cane as both walking aid and percussive instrument, a clink-clink reverberating with each step. Reflexively, I avert my eyes. Why does the man’s aged visage offend me? It’s not only me. Most people find old places desirable but not old people. We showcase the former—charge admission prices, open gift shops—and warehouse the latter. We avoid the elderly not because they are different but because they are familiar. We catch a glimpse of our future selves in them, and we don’t like what we see.
I walk a bit farther then stop, pocket my phone, and read Franklin. The journal, chronicling his journey home to Philadelphia, is a rarity. Franklin seldom kept a journal. This annoys me, to be honest, but I can’t blame Ben. He was too busy being a traveler to write about travel just as “he found it more pleasant to be a philosopher than to write philosophy,” as Carl Van Doren, the renowned Franklin biographer, notes.
On this journey, though, he had the gift of time. Like most true gifts, it wasn’t recognized as one at first. Far from it. This ocean crossing was Ben Franklin’s Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Journey. It was plagued from the moment the Berkshire sailed from London. The winds blew infrequently or, when they did, from the wrong direction. Progress was stunningly, painfully slow. At one point, the ship traveled backward. Nearly everyone on board (except Franklin) got seasick. A shark circled the ship, forcing Ben to skip his daily swim. Onboard, a card cheat was uncovered, as well as a careless cook.
There was one significant upside. Ben had time on his hands, and he used it. He mused about the sciences—natural history, navigation, mathematics—and also psychology and morality, matters of the heart. He got personal, too. The journal provides a rare window into the mind and heart of a private man who rarely revealed his interior life. It’s no coincidence Ben opened up on the open seas, sailing in slow motion. Speed may be seductive, but it is during life’s slower moments, its intermissions, when genuine breakthroughs become possible.
I turn off the main road and onto a footpath. I like that very English term, footpath, and prefer it to trail or walkway. To my ears, it sounds softer, friendlier. A woman on a bike tinkles her bell and apologizes profusely—“sorry, sorry”—as she’s about to pass and then thanks me just as profusely—“thank you, thank you”—once she has done so. It seems a bit “extra,” as my teenage daughter would say.
Was the woman on the bike really sorry? Was she really grateful? Frank, an American friend who has lived in London for years, assured me that no, she was not. The Brits are polite, yes, but they don’t mean it, he told me. Does this alleged lack of sincerity matter? Franklin, I bet, would answer no, it does not. Sincere or not, the British are polite, and politeness serves a social function. It is the lubricant that keeps society’s wheels turning. Writing years later, he describes politeness as a universal value. “Perhaps if we could examine the manners of different nations with impartiality, we should find no people so rude as to be without rules of politeness.” For Ben, politeness is useful and therefore good.
The footpath wends through the countryside. I spot something around the bend but at first can’t identify it. Then I realize it’s the old church Franklin mentioned in his journal. Three hundred years later, there it is, just as he said it was. I know it’s silly, but matching Franklin’s journal to what I am seeing—not on my iPhone but in real life—makes me feel closer to Ben.
I arrive first at the churchyard cemetery. Tombstones lean every which way, yet for centuries they haven’t fallen. I try to read the inscriptions, but they are too weathered to make out, some so pockmarked and faded it’s hard to believe anything was ever inscribed on them. Yet there was. Someone is buried here. Someone lived here. Like me, Franklin was unable to read the inscriptions; they were too faded even then. Three hundred years is a very long time, and no time at all.
I approach the church’s front door. A sign informs me that it is “open daily for private prayer and reflection.” Franklin would like that. For him, prayer was a private matter, always. Inside, it is cool and quiet. Two microphones hang from the ceiling. Otherwise, the church is unchanged since Franklin’s time. It is still “an elegant building,” as he noted, and still “looks very venerable in its ruins.” Everywhere I look I see wood rafters and stone and, on the walls, plaques commemorating the dead. This time they are legible. The ages range from nine to eighty. Death was closer during Franklin’s time than it is now, and even more capricious.
I resume my walk, paralleling the stream Franklin mentions. I feel as though he is guiding me and doing a better job than Apple Maps, which is flummoxed by the English countryside. The path steepens, just as Ben said it would. I am huffing and puffing. Ben, some forty years younger than me, did not strain a bit. Whippersnapper.
I walk under a canopy of trees, then open sky. The path is paved, then not, then paved again. All is flux, Franklin would say. He was a fluid thinker whose life revolved around flow in its sundry forms. Cash flow. The flow of printer’s ink, and of blood pumping through veins. The river under the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream. The flow of water under his body as he swam the Thames. The flow of coffee at St. Paul’s Coffee House in London or Café Procope in Paris, and of Madeira everywhere. The rising air that lifts a balloon aloft. Most of all, the unceasing, turbulent flow of history.
During Franklin’s time, people thought a lot about motion and change—not any particular change but about the idea itself. One product of the eighteenth century, the century of progress, was the belief in perpetual progress. The present is better than the past and the future will be better than the present. Today, such a progression, at least when it comes to science and technology, strikes us as self-evident, but it is a relatively new idea, born in the coffeehouses of London and the salons of Paris three centuries ago.
It was a difficult birth. There were dissenting voices. The loudest of these belonged to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “There is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction, we lose in another,” he said. We think we’re swimming across the English Channel but maybe we’re doing laps in a pool, exerting much energy but getting nowhere.
I enter dense woods, and the footpath turns cooler and steeper. The quaint village of Carisbrooke lies below, a miniature collage of black roofs resting atop red-bricked houses. What a beautiful scene, I think, unmarred by the passage of time, when a tour bus roars by, jerking me back to the twenty-first century.
I walk downhill, catch a double-decker bus, and soon I am back at the harbor town of Cowes. I have some time to kill before catching the Red Jet, so I grab a flat-white coffee and stop to listen to a street musician, playing the guitar and singing. “Where you gonna sleep tonight…” He’s no spring chicken, I note, but he’s good. I stop myself. Why the “but”? Why do I assume abilities diminish with age? They didn’t with Franklin, at least not the abilities that matter.
Age reveals character, good and bad. That was Ben’s conclusion after learning of one Joseph Dudley, a former governor of the Isle of Wight. Not a nice man, he was universally despised. Dudley tried to conceal his nastiness, as nasty people do, but to no avail, prompting Franklin to latch onto a truism that stuck with him the rest of his life and, thanks to his snappy formulation, with us too: “Honesty is the best policy.”
I believe it is impossible for a man, though he has all the cunning of a devil, to live and die a villain, and yet conceal it so well as to carry the name of an honest fellow to the grave with him, but someone by some accident or other shall discover him. Truth and sincerity have a certain distinguishing native lustre about them which cannot be perfectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame that cannot be painted.
Franklin left Cowes, much as I do: reflective. I’m thinking about the specter of—I’ll just say it—old age. It frightens me. Death frightens me too, but old age frightens me more. Death—dying, to be more precise—is a finite experience. Nature ensures it won’t take long (even if it feels interminable). Old age is another story. It can last a long time and, unlike dying, the rules are less clear. The dying are supposed to die. The old are supposed to… what? Get older? Pretend they are young? I don’t know what the correct answer is. I’m not sure anybody does.
The Berkshire finally broke free of the English Channel and was now in open ocean, sailing for Philadelphia. It was doing so slowly. The winds remained uncooperative. Days passed with hardly a breeze. Franklin’s journal entries toggle between the loquacious and the staccato, depending on the wind. Here is his complete entry for Monday, August 8: “Fine weather, but no wind worth mentioning, all this day; in the afternoon saw the lizard.”
He spent a lot of time observing marine life: porpoises, flying fish, oysters, dolphins, sharks and a tiny crab “about as big as the head of a ten-penny nail, and of a yellowish colour.” A few days later, he placed a crab in a vial filled with saltwater, hoping to preserve it for future study. Franklin the Possibilian at work.
The flying fish were of particular interest. They leaped out of the sea, soaring gracefully but unable to turn midflight. This lack of directional control, notes Franklin, made the fish easy prey for the dolphins. I can’t help but wonder if he was talking about more than flying fish. Franklin always needed to turn, to pivot at a moment’s notice, as he did when Governor Keith duped him. He needed options. That way, he avoided the dolphins and the sharks.
Franklin also observed the social life aboard the Berkshire. People’s moods swayed with the winds. When they blew strongly and from the East, spirits soared. “Every one puts on a clean shirt and a cheerful countenance, and we begin to be very good company,” he notes in his journal. But when the winds flagged or turned contrary, the mood onboard soured. From his journal entry on September 11: “The long continuance of these contrary winds has made us so dull, that scarce three words have passed between us.”
With supplies running low, the captain was forced to ration bread; each passenger was allowed two and a half biscuits per day. The cook, suspected of “making an extravagant use of flour in the puddings,” was whipped. I read that and cringe. Whipped for using excess flour? Life on the Berkshire makes The Great British Bake Off look like a cakewalk.
One day, a Dutchman spotted a fellow passenger marking a deck of cards. This was a serious accusation. A “court of justice” was convened, and the passenger was found guilty. The accused man maintained his innocence and refused to pay the fine levied. The “court” then devised an especially cruel punishment: the man was excommunicated. No other passenger would dine, drink, play, or converse with him until he paid his fine. This continued for several days until the convicted passenger could no longer bear the isolation. He paid his fine and rejoined his shipmates.
The episode prompted Franklin to ponder the nature of solitude. He acknowledges it can serve as a tonic, “an agreeable refreshment to a busy mind,” but on balance, he found solitude disagreeable, even a form of torture. “Man is a sociable being, and it is for aught I know one of the worst of punishments to be excluded from society.” He recalled hearing about a man sentenced to seven years’ solitary confinement at the Bastille prison in Paris. He was “a thinking man” and, were it not for the inventive ways he occupied his mind with scraps of paper, would have gone insane.
I’m not so sure, Ben. Don’t get me wrong. I like people (most anyway), but I like them the way I like exercise: intermittently, in small doses, and with plenty of recovery time afterward. Solitude is underrated.
Adrift in the Atlantic, Ben pondered other big questions, his mind churning in the still, summer air. He began to question his earlier convictions—about everything. He started with his London pamphlet. Virtue and vice are different, he decided, and they matter. A lot. He vowed to lead a virtuous, useful life. For him, the two were inseparable. Virtues such as sincerity and industry are the personal tools that enable you to achieve social goods. He also began to question the philosophy of deism. Years later, recalling this shift in thinking, he wrote, “I began to suspect that this doctrine tho’ it might be true, was not very useful.”
When I first read that sentence, it flummoxed me. Isn’t something that is true also, by definition, useful? Two plus two equals four. That is true and useful when it comes to tasks like, oh, counting and making it past elementary school.
Sure, Franklin would say, but the connection between truth and usefulness grows murkier when it comes to ethical and religious matters. He was less interested in lofty truths and more interested in what the philosopher John Dewey would later call “instrumentalism.” For Franklin, the ultimate test of any moral proposition was not its truth but its utility. Okay, something is “true.” That’s nice, says Franklin. But what are the consequences of acting on it? If they are not good, not beneficial either on a personal or societal level, discard it and find another, more useful truth.
Franklin valued truth, of course, just not at all costs and not blindly. There are many truths out there, and it is our job as intelligent and caring humans to separate the useful truths from the useless ones. Or, as the philosopher and psychologist William James would say more than a century later, “Truth is what works.” James helped construct a philosophy, pragmatism, to describe the way Franklin lived.
Journeys, the good ones, never really end. They stay with us long after our bags are unpacked and we’ve returned to “the world of dust,” as the Chinese call our everyday existence. So it was with Franklin. His Great London Adventure had begun with a ruse and ended with a revelation.
He was still at sea but no longer adrift. He had devised a “Plan of Conduct” and vowed that “henceforth, I may live in all respects like a rational creature.” His plan consisted of four simple rules. He would be frugal and pay off his debts. He would aim for sincerity “in every word and action.” He would practice patience and focus on the business at hand, not allowing himself to be distracted by “any foolish project of growing suddenly rich.” And he would not speak ill of anyone and instead excuse their faults.
It is a simple plan, deceptively so. I like it. It identifies the basics needed to become better, more useful humans. Pay what you owe. Say what you mean. Focus on what matters. Treat people kindly.
But a problem remained. Franklin couldn’t implement his plan while bobbing aimlessly in the Atlantic. Would the Berkshire ever reach its destination? Franklin and his fellow passengers began to doubt it. He wondered, only half-jokingly, if America had sunk under the sea, or perhaps the entire world had been swept away in a tremendous flood and the Berkshire’s passengers and crew were now “the only surviving remnant of the human race.”
One day, Ben noticed the water had changed color, as it often does near land, and his mood lifted. But he soon realized it was just his imagination. “We are very apt to believe what we wish to be true,” he writes. This quirk of human nature—the rational mind’s tendency to trick itself—is something Franklin would remain wary of throughout his life. He was a rational man, the Age of Reason embodied, but he also recognized the limits of reason.
Finally, after thirteen long weeks at sea, came the sound Franklin had longed to hear. “Land! Land!” cried the lookout. Passengers scrambled to the deck. Soon, most could discern the outline of the mid-Atlantic coast, “appearing like tufts of trees.” It took Franklin a while longer to see this. There was nothing wrong with his vision. “My eyes were dimmed with the suffusion of two small drops of joy,” he said.
Ben Franklin, home at last, was right. Travel does lengthen life. What he failed to note is that sometimes, when the winds are fickle and the seas rough, when speed takes a holiday and everything that can go wrong does, travel deepens life too.