Crowds gather about the sign, vendors sell money-belts and hawk handbills describing the exploits of captured violent thugs, "creatures, with others of the sort, one and all exterminated at the time, and for the most part, like the hunted generations of wolves in the same region, leaving comparatively few successors; which would seem cause for unalloyed gratulation, and is such to all except those who think that in new countries, where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase."
Into this scene a stranger "in the extremest sense of the word" arrives and, working his way to the place where the placard is posted, mutely holds up a slate on which he writes a series of messages about "charity." Those in the crowd variously ignore and ridicule him.
By way of contrast to the mute stranger, the ship's barber, opening his shop, hangs a sign reading "No Trust" (that is: No Credit), thus establishing the polarity of "The Confidence Man" between faith and skepticism, gullibility and suspicion.
That polarity further explored with appearance of legless negro beggar who is denounced as fake by an embittered peg-legged man, "a limping, gimlet-eyed, sour faced person -- it may be some discharged custom house officer, who suddenly stripped of convenient means of support, had concluded to be avenged on government and humanity. . . . hating or suspecting everything and everybody."
The crippled Negro begs by creepily imitating a dog and catching pennies in his mouth. When the peg-legged man continues to denounce him, the beggar is asked by the crowd for people who can attest to his honesty. He describes several, all of whom, it becomes clear, are disguises of the "confidence" man at loose among the ship's population.
Later, the peg-legged man, challenged as to why anyone would perform such a massive deception for mere pennies, jeers "you greenhorns! Money, you think, is the sole motive to pains and hazard, deception and deviltry in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?"
The Fidele's passengers representative of all America, indeed all humanity: "As among Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims . . . there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; man of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers and mocassined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fe traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man."
Episodes that follow describe various disguises of the Confidence Man, extracting charity (the Seminole Widow and Orphans Asylum) or investment (the Black Rapids Coal Company) from the ship's passengers -- pleading, sometimes querilously for their "confidence," soliciting their "trust." As each new incarnation of the confidence man emerges, queries regarding the prior ones are answered by saying he has just disembarked.
Among the confidence man's targets is a "good" man whose suit is lined in white and who wears a white glove (though his ungloved hand is just as white); the bills in his wallet are "crisp with newness, fresh from the bank, no muckworm's grime upon them" and all manual activity needed of him is performed by a black servant who "did most of the handling for him; having to do with dirt on his account."
To this visibly "good" man, the confidence man proposes a "World's Charity" that by taxing all the globe's population at a rate of a dollar a year would efficiently eliminate all poverty and heathenism by letting out charitable projects for bidding "in the Wall Street spirit."
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