Chesapeake (49 page)

‘That’s to be it,’ she said, and before the doll had been in America two hours, its lines were being reproduced not in heavy bombazine but in soft dimity, and when the new dress was finished, and the lace cap made, and the slippers covered in red, she presided at her table with added assurance, for she knew she was dressed as well as the most fashionable women of London.

Thoughts of England reminded her of Mark, and she became impatient for his return. She knew him only as the initiator of letters from Europe, but his manner of writing was so distinct, and his wit so apparent, that he was becoming a real person whom she knew she would like:

She was therefore delighted when, in January 1707, Mark tested his luck once more by slipping a letter home with the captain of the swift-darting snow
Fair Rosalind.
When accepting the letter the captain warned, ‘It’ll take God’s luck for us to sneak our way past the devils.’ But he had escaped the pirates, and when his gaily painted snow tied up at Patamoke, there was much admiration for his daring, and Fitzhugh showed Mark’s letter through the town and said, ‘The boy’s coming home on the October convoy.’ And townspeople replied, ‘Pray God the ships get through.’

It seems incredible, but in these years the Chesapeake shivered under a state of siege; more than a hundred pirate ships—English from Jamaica, French from Martinique—clustered at Cape Henry, waiting to pounce on any merchant ship from Virginia or Maryland foolhardy enough to risk running the blockade. And if the frightened merchantmen remained huddled at their wharves, the pirates ventured arrogantly into the bay, ravaging any plantations on exposed headlands. Many an English family on the James River, or the York or Rappahannock, experienced the terror of seeing French pirates sail boldly to their wharf, storm ashore and plunder the plantation. Silverware, tobacco and slaves were taken, and sometimes the home was burned. Farmers were slain and valuable ships were stolen from their moorings.

It was an age of terror—when a pirate might sail a ship with forty guns and a crew of two hundred, and nothing on the Chesapeake could
withstand their assault. Nor was the British navy of much help; it was engaged in that wild and futile War of the Spanish Succession; its ships were needed to support the Duke of Marlborough as he fought in Flanders against the French, and none were available to confront the pirates of the Caribbean. Any English ship leaving either London or Annapolis ran the risk of almost certain capture, and if resistance was offered, it was likely that all passengers would be either shot or hanged.

The distraught colonists, whose existence depended upon commerce with London, devised a strategy that was furiously expensive but also effective: English ships would cross the Atlantic only in giant convoys, one leaving London in October, another departing the Chesapeake in May. During the remainder of the year no ship would venture forth, except swift blockade runners like the
Fair Rosalind.
These took enormous risks, trusting upon their speed to outrun the waiting pirates; if they succeeded, their profits were exorbitant.

Mark Steed left England in the October convoy. His ship, a two-masted brig built years ago by the Paxmore brothers, was owned by his family, but he sought no special privilege; he was an ordinary passenger making a dangerous transit. As his ship sailed down the Thames he became aware that seven others seemed to be moving in concert, and their presence lent assurance; but as they left the Thames and entered the Channel he realized that the convoy was not to be a mere eight ships. Some fifty waited in the roads, and all turned gracefully to the south, dotting the Channel with their sails.

‘Magnificent,’ Mark said to a gentleman returning to Annapolis.

‘We’ve still to pass the coast of France,’ the gentleman warned, and as the convoy stood off the cliffs of Dover, with the menacing shores of France quite visible, young Steed was gratified to see two English warships move up to give protection. ‘With them on our flank,’ the gentleman said, ‘the French will never dare.’

The impressive convoy now turned westward for the run down the Channel, but winds failed and the sixty ships idled on the glassy sea, almost touching one another as they drifted. Sailors were assigned to guard the rails, so that if two ships appeared near collision, they could push them apart with little apparent energy. Night fell, and slim lights showed from distant portholes.

‘Ahoy!’ the watchmen cried whenever some ship moved too close, and if the cry was repeated, sailors ran to the railing to push the invader away, and all seemed like an assembly of toys set adrift in a basin by children.

But when the wind rose, and the convoy could move on toward Plymouth at the end of the Channel, Mark gasped at what awaited. There, in the roads where the Spanish Armada had been defeated by Drake and Hawkins, stood no less than a hundred and sixty ships, their sails aloft, their captains waiting for the signal.

‘I never knew there were so many ships!’ Mark cried to his fellow passengers. And then, to cap his astonishment, a squadron of nine warships left Plymouth and moved into position at strategic points about the vast convoy.

A gun fired, its echoes muffled by the thousand sails. A blue pennant ran up the commodore’s halyard, and each of the warships responded with a gun salute. ‘Look smart!’ the captain of Steed’s brig shouted, and his vessel, along with the more than two hundred and twenty others, turned with the wind and set out for the New World.

It was an unforgettable passage, an assembly of riches, a convocation of daring spirits. At no time could Mark look from the railing of the brig and see less than fifty sails scattered upon the horizon, and at night he could see the same number of lights, except when fog settled over the Atlantic. Then, in the gloom, the commodore’s ship would fire its gun at intervals, and the heavy air, bearing down upon the waves, would deaden the sound. Sometimes it seemed as if the gun had exploded only a field away, and then Steed would clasp his hands about his chest in the cold November air and experience a sense of well-being that he had never known before.

‘We’ve passed the French coast,’ he muttered to himself, but now came the greater risk.

It was customary for the annual convoy to sail not directly to the Chesapeake, for that route was impossibly stormy, but to head for the calmer waters of Barbados, where regrouping was possible, and from there to proceed north past the pirate strongholds and on to the Chesapeake. The disadvantage of this route was that its final stages traversed waters infested by pirates. However, with the warships constantly circling the huge fleet, it was sometimes possible to make the transit while losing only a few ships.

‘But the strictest discipline must be observed,’ said the young ensign dispatched from the commodore’s brigantine. ‘If there is any straggler, he will be lost.’ At Barbados he issued printed instructions and said that signals would be changed for this part of the voyage: ‘Two guns and red pennant mean that the faster ships must luff and wallow in the wind until the slower catch up. If any ship, and yours looks to be a fast one, passes the commodore’s, it will be sunk. Understood?’

The captain nodded, so the young man continued, ‘We enter dangerous waters. Keep a constant lookout. We know that Carpaux is on the prowl and so is Jean Vidal. What’s worse, we have information that Bonfleur now has three swift ships under his command. Look smart.’

Carpaux had often invaded the Chesapeake, and Vidal was fierce, a young firebrand out of Martinique known to burn ships and cast away passengers, but it was Bonfleur who had become the constant terror. He was an old man now, sixty-four, and the survivor of numberless attempts to catch him. He was the scourge of the Caribbean, the burner of Panama,
the destroyer of Belize. He had fought for so long and so viciously that no English tactic could surprise him, and for the past forty years he had preyed upon the Chesapeake, invading the rivers and setting the plantations aflame.

He had often sailed in concert with Stede Bonnet and L’Ollonais, smaller in stature than either, more brutal than both. Once he had gone into Cartagena alone, with only thirty-seven men, and had captured the entire city, divesting it of a fortune and slaying more than a hundred. In 1705 he and the two other ships that often sailed with him cut out eleven merchantmen from the October convoy, burning them all and killing scores.

The French offered him sanctuary at Martinique, because they hoped he might inflict great damage on the English, but just as often he captured French ships and put them to the sword, or Spanish, or Dutch. He was without morals, or pity, or remorse, a vicious old man who had seen a score of pirates hanged by the various authorities; his war against all civilized nations was endless. In the late days of December 1708 he commanded ninety-one guns and seven hundred men, and he had boasted that he would ‘cut the English convoy to ribbons.’

The commodore had other plans. He intended shepherding his huge collection of sail past Point Comfort and into the relative safety of the Chesapeake, and to accomplish this he must tighten his formation so that his warships could act in concert if an attack came. Accordingly, he flashed his signals, but when the two hundred and twenty ships moved closer, minor collisions, and some not so minor, became inevitable. The winds would change and ships would have to tack, and as they did so they would climb slowly upon the backs of smaller ships, and spars would shatter and sails would be lost.

Then the commodore would signal: ‘Faster ships luff!’ and those like the one Mark Steed rode would turn with the wind, and hoist a staysail and ride sideways to the waves, rolling like pith balls in a shallow saucer, hour upon hour, and all except the most practiced hands would become sick from the pitching motion, but the convoy held.

Off the northern coast of Haiti, where the wind was brisk, the pirates decided to attack: Carpaux down from the Carolinas, with Vidal and Bonfleur out from refitting in Martinique, descended upon the stragglers, eleven pirate ships with two thousand fighting men and more than two hundred cannon. And they might have succeeded had not the commodore anticipated their bold action. Swinging his own ship about to confront the pirates, he signaled all warships to follow and invited any merchantmen with heavy guns to move on his flank. Steed’s ship was one of the latter, and it sped at the two pirate vessels commanded by Carpaux.

It was a short, violent engagement. The huge pirate guns ripped into
many of the lumbering merchantmen, but destroyed none. The commodore’s flotilla ran directly at the pirates, scattering them and sinking one of the craft attached to Jean Vidal. The big merchant ships with heavy armament fired resolutely at the swifter pirates and in time drove most of them off, but Henri Bonfleur, victor in many such battles, knew that no convoy was safe if it could be scattered, and with great heroism directed his three ships to cut directly into the heart of the vast collection.

He sailed through it like an avenging spirit, spitting fire and threatening the very existence of this massive assembly. But when he came to the brig in which Steed rode, he found that captain not turning to flee but bearing directly down upon him. It was obvious that the two must crash, but Steed’s captain refused to waver. On and on his bowsprit came.

‘Prepare to crash!’ the mate shouted, and Steed braced himself as the forward part of his ship raked the pirate, knocking men down and tearing away much of the rigging.

‘Prepare to repulse boardings!’ the mate cried, and Steed grabbed a pin, brandishing it as if it had a chance to repel a pirate’s pistol. Some of Bonfleur’s men did try to board, hideous creatures with beards and knives, but the English sailors repelled them as the two vessels ground and scraped their way free.

At this moment young Mark Steed caught full sight of the pirate captain: a smallish man with a beard flecked in gray, a heavy sweater about his neck, two pistols dangling useless at his knees, words screaming from his ugly lips. He was so repulsive that Steed felt driven by some avenging force to hurl his belaying pin, but his aim was bad and it clattered harmlessly to the deck. As the two vessels ripped apart, leaving the pirate ship sorely damaged, Bonfleur glared momentarily at his opponent, then ignored him in the business of saving his ship.

This proved impossible, for two of the commodore’s vessels bore down on the wounded pirate ship and began peppering it with such heavy gunfire that it was plainly doomed. But not Bonfleur. One of his subaltern ships, aware of the master’s peril, swung boldly in a circle that brought it along the lee side of Bonfleur’s sinking vessel, and as it swept past, pirates reached out and grabbed Bonfleur, pulling him to safety.

‘Convoy reform,’ signaled the commodore, and as night fell, it reassembled, deck close to deck, while warships prowled the edges.

The pirates had been driven off. The merchantmen turned north, and before the new year they sailed into the Chesapeake. As the vast congregation moved up the bay, cohorts dropped off for the James, and the York, and the Rappahannock, and the Potomac, and wherever they touched shore people came from many miles to receive that year’s mail from England and a joyous sight of friends they had not seen for six or seven years. Guns were fired, and far up the rivers planters told their friends, ‘The convoy’s here!’

On the third day of passage up the bay, Steed’s ship left the dwindling assembly and turned toward the Choptank. Slaves on watch at the western end of the island lit fires. Other slaves, observing them, set their stacks of wood ablaze, and before long someone at the plantation was firing a cannon, so that people in the big house could run to the north shore and watch their ship as it came home, safe from perils, safe from pirates.