The Fort (20 page)

“There must have been confusion in Boston,” Marett said helplessly. He pointed to a neat pyramid of round shot. “It seems they’re for twelve-pounders,” he went on, “and even if we could wad them the windage would make it near useless.” Windage was the tiny gap between a missile and the cannon’s barrel. All guns suffered from windage, but if the gap was too great then much of the gun’s propellant would waste itself around the ball’s edges.

“You’ve sent for Colonel Revere?”

Marett’s eyes darted round the cleared space as if searching for somewhere to hide. “I’m sure there’s eighteen-pounder ammunition on the
Samuel
, sir,” he said evasively.

“Suffering Christ,” Hacker said savagely, “it’ll take two hours to fetch it downriver!” The
Samuel
was anchored well to the north, a long way from the creek south of Cross Island.

“We could open fire with the twelve-pounder,” Marett suggested.

“You have wadding for that?”

“We could use turf?”

“Oh for God’s sake, let’s do it properly,” Hacker said, then had a sudden inspiration. “The
Warren
mounts eighteen-pounders, doesn’t she?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“She does, and she’s a hell of a lot closer than the
Samuel
! We’ll ask her for ammunition.”

Hoysteed Hacker’s inspiration proved a happy one. Commodore Saltonstall snorted derision when he heard of the request for ammunition, but he acceded to it, and Captain Welch sent to the
General Putnam
and ordered Captain Thomas Carnes to assemble a work party of marines to carry the necessary wadding and round shot ashore. Carnes, before he joined the marines, had served in Colonel Gridley’s Artillery Regiment and afterwards commanded a battery of the New Jersey Artillery in the Continental Army and he was a cheerful, energetic man who rubbed his hands with delight when he saw how close the
Nautilus
lay to the guns. “We can use the twelve-pounder shot in the eighteens,” he declared.

“We can?” Marett asked.

“We’ll double-shot,” Carnes said. “Load an eighteen-pound ball by the charge and wad a twelve on top. We’re going to splinter that nearest ship, boys!” He watched the Massachusetts gunners, all imbued now with enthusiasm from Carnes’s energy, load and lay the cannon. Carnes stooped by the barrel and peered along its upper side. “Aim slightly higher,” he said.

“Higher?” Marett asked. “You want us to aim for the masts?”

“A cold barrel shoots low,” Carnes said, “but as it heats up she’ll shoot true. Lower her elevation after three shots, and take it one degree lower than you reckon necessary. I don’t know why, but round shot always rises from a barrel. It’s just a fraction, but if you compensate then you’ll hit true and hard when the guns are hot.”

The sun was glowing bright in the fog when, at last, the battery opened fire. The two big eighteen-pounders were the ship-killers and Carnes used them to shoot at the
Nautilus
’s hull while the twelve-pounder fired bar shot at her rigging and the howitzer lobbed shells over the
Nautilus
to ravage the decks of the
North
and
Albany
.

The guns recoiled hard and far on the rocky ground. They needed realigning after each shot, and every discharge filled the space between the cleared trees with thick powder smoke that lingered in the still air. The smoke thickened the fog to such an extent that aiming was impossible until the view cleared, and that necessity slowed the rate of fire, but Carnes heard the satisfying crunch of round shots striking timber. The British could not return the fire. The
Nautilus
had no bows chasers, and her broadside of nine cannon was aimed west towards the harbor approach. Captain Tom Farnham, who commanded the
Nautilus
, might have warped his ship around to face Cross Island, but then Mowat would have lost a third of the cannons guarding the channel, and so the sloop had to endure.

The commodore, satisfied that the battery was at last in action, sent an order that Carnes and his handful of marines were to return to their ships, but before he left Carnes used a small telescope to stare at the
Nautilus
and saw the holes ripped in her bows. “You’re hitting her hard, Captain!” he told Marett. “Remember! Aim low at this range and you’ll sink that bastard by noon! Good day to you, sir!” This last greeting was to Brigadier-General Lovell who had come to watch the new battery in action.

“Good morning! Good morning!” Lovell beamed at the gunners. “’Pon my word, but you’re hitting that ship hard, lads!” He borrowed Carnes’s telescope. “My word, you’ve knocked an arm off that ugly figurehead! Well done! Keep going and you’ll sink her soon enough!”

The
Nautilus
was still afloat an hour before noon when Colonel Revere arrived with eighteen-pounder ammunition from the
Samuel
. He came in his smart white-painted barge, which belonged to the Castle Island garrison and which Revere had commandeered for the expedition. Revere ordered sailors from the
Providence
to carry the round shot to the battery, then strode uphill to discover General Lovell still standing beside the guns. The fog had lifted and the general was peering through a glass that he rested on a gunner’s shoulder. “Colonel!” he greeted Revere cheerfully, “I see we’re striking hard!”

“What the devil do you mean, the wrong ammunition?” Revere ignored Lovell and challenged Captain Marett who pointed to the twelve-pounder round shot and began a halting explanation of his difficulties, but Revere brushed him aside. “If you brought the wrong round shot,” he said, “then you’re to blame.” He watched as the gunners hauled one of the huge eighteen-pounders back into place. The gunner squinted down the barrel, then used a long-handled maul to drive a wedge deeper under the breech. The wedge slightly lifted the rear of the barrel, lowering the muzzle, and the gunner, satisfied with the angle, nodded at his crew to reload the cannon.

“They must be suffering, Colonel,” Lovell said happily. “I can see distinct damage to her hull!”

“What are you doing?” Revere again ignored Lovell, rounding on Marett instead. The colonel had peered down the barrel and had not liked what he saw. “Are you shooting at the water, Captain? What’s the use of shooting into the water?”

“Captain Carnes’” Marett began.

“Captain Carnes? Is he an officer in this regiment? Sergeant! I want the barrel raised. Loosen the breech wedge by two degrees. Good day, General,” he at last greeted Lovell.

“I came to congratulate the gunners,” Lovell said.

“We’re just doing our duty, General,” Revere said briskly and again crouched behind the gun after the sergeant had loosened the wedge. “Much better!”

“I trust you’ll be at the Council of War this afternoon?” Lovell said.

“I shall be there, General. What are you waiting for?” This last was to the gunners. “Give the bastards some iron pills!”

The sergeant had pierced the powder bag with a spike and now inserted the portfire. “Stand back!” he shouted, then, satisfied that the space behind the gun was clear, he touched the burning slow-fuse to the portfire. There was a hiss, a puff of smoke from the touchhole, then the gun roared and smoke billowed to fill the sky around the battery. The cannon leaped back, its wheels bouncing off the stony soil.

The shot flew down the
Nautilus
’s deck and narrowly missed her masts, though it passed close enough to shatter a stand of boarding pikes at the base of the mainmast before smacking harmlessly into the beach of the peninsula. A sailor on the sloop twisted and fell, scrabbling at his throat, and Captain Farnham saw blood where a splinter from a shattered pike-shaft had speared into the man’s gullet. “Get him below,” he ordered.

The surgeon’s assistant tried to withdraw the splinter, but the man convulsed before he could slide it free. Blood spilled across the dark lower deck, the man’s eyes widened to stare vacantly at the deck above, then he made a choking, gurgling noise and more blood welled from his throat and mouth. He convulsed again, then went still. He was dead, the first man killed on board the sloop. The surgeon himself was wounded, his thigh pierced by a sharp blade of wood driven from the hull by one of the earlier shots. Six men were in the sick bay, all of them similarly injured by splinters. The surgeon and his assistant were pulling the wood fragments free and bandaging the wounds, and all the while waiting for the dreaded hammer blow of the next shot to smash into the hull. The ship’s carpenter was hammering wedges and caulking into the damaged bows, and the ship’s pumps were clattering constantly as men tried to stop the water rising in the bilge.

“I do believe,” Captain Farnham said after another eighteen-pounder shot had screamed just above his deck, “that they’ve lifted their aim. They’re trying to dismast us now.”

“Better that than hulling us, sir,” his first lieutenant observed.

“Indeed,” Farnham said with evident relief, “oh indeed.” He aimed his glass out of the harbor and saw, to his further relief, that the rebel warships showed no sign of readying themselves for another attack.

“Signal from the
Albany
, sir!” a midshipman called. “Prepare to move ship, sir!”

“That’s hardly a surprise, is it?” Farnham said.

Colonel Revere’s battery on Cross Island had started its day in confusion, but now it had succeeded in one ambition. The three British sloops that barred the harbor entrance were being driven away eastwards.

And the door to Majabigwaduce had been opened.

General McLean stood on Dyce’s Head and stared towards the enemy battery on Cross Island. He could see nothing of the rebel guns because their smoke shrouded the clearing the rebels had made on the island’s summit, but he recognized the damage that had been done to his defenses. Yet he could never have spared enough men to garrison Cross Island properly. Its fall had been inevitable. “The wretched Yankees have done well,” he said grudgingly.

“A slow rate of fire,” Captain Michael Fielding observed.

Yet if the rebel gunners were slightly slower than Fielding’s men of the Royal Artillery, they had still unblocked the harbor. Captain Mowat had sent a young lieutenant ashore who discovered McLean on the high bluff. “The captain regrets, sir, that he must move the sloops away from the enemy guns.”

“Yes, he must,” McLean agreed, “indeed he must.”

“He proposes to make a new line at the harbor’s center, sir.”

“Give Captain Mowat my best wishes,” McLean said, “and thank him for informing me.” The three sloops and their attendant transport ships were already moving slowly eastwards. Captain Mowat had marked their new anchorage with buoys made from empty barrels and McLean could see that their new position was not nearly as formidable as their old. The ships would now make a line well to the east of the harbor entrance, no longer a cork in a tight bottleneck, but halfway inside the bottle, and their retreat would surely invite an attack by the enemy fleet. That was a pity, McLean thought, but he understood that Mowat had no choice but to retreat now that the rebels possessed Cross Island.

The brigadier had gone to the bluff to see whether Fielding’s twelve-pounders could be deployed to shoot down at the new rebel battery on Cross Island. The small six-pounders on the bluff were already firing at the rebel position, but they were puny cannons and, besides, the new enemy battery lay in the island’s center and was shooting down a corridor of cleared trees, and that corridor pointed northwards. The guns themselves were hidden from Dyce’s Head, lying to the northwest of the enemy battery, and Midshipman Fenistone’s three guns were spitting their small balls into Cross Island’s trees in optimistic hope of hitting whatever was hidden by the smoke and the foliage. “I’m not sure we gain much by using twelve-pounders, sir,” Fielding said, “except to cause more damage to those trees.”

McLean nodded, then walked a few paces westwards to gaze at the enemy shipping. He was astonished that the Americans had made no move to attack him. He had expected the rebel warships to be at the harbor entrance, adding their fire to the new battery, and that rebel infantry would already be assaulting him, but the anchored fleet lay peacefully under the sun. He could see clothes hung out to dry on lines slung between the transport ships’ masts. “My worry,” he said to Fielding, “is that if we put twelves here we won’t have time to withdraw them when the enemy attacks.”

“Without horse teams,” Fielding agreed, “we won’t.”

“I do miss my horses,” McLean said gently. He took off his cocked hat and stared ruefully at the inner leather band, which was coming apart. His white hair lifted in a sudden waft of wind. “Well,” he said, “I dare say we can afford to lose a trio of six-pounders, but I won’t abide the loss of any twelves.” McLean turned and gazed at the smoke enveloping Cross Island, then carefully replaced his hat. “Leave the twelves at the fort,” he decided, “and thank you, Captain.” He turned as footsteps sounded loud among the trees. Lieutenant Caffrae, a Hamilton, was running towards the general. “More bad news, I suspect,” McLean said.

Caffrae, a lithe and energetic young man, was panting as he stopped in front of McLean. “The rebels have landed men north of the neck, sir.”

“Have they indeed! Are they advancing?”

Caffrae shook his head. “We saw about sixty men in boats, sir. They landed out of sight, sir, but they’re in the trees beyond the marsh.”

“Just sixty men?”

“That’s all we saw, sir.”

“Major Dunlop is apprised?”

“He sent me to tell you, sir.”

“The devil moves in a mysterious way,” McLean said. “Is he trying to make us stare northwards while he attacks here? Or is that the advanced guard of his real attack?” He smiled at the breathless Caffrae, whom he considered one of his best young officers. “We’ll have to wait and see, but the onslaught must come soon. Well, I’m going back to the fort and you, Caffrae, are going to tell Major Dunlop that I’ll reinforce his picquet on the neck.”

On board the sloops the sailors readied to drop anchors for their new position. The guns on Cross Island still pounded the
Nautilus
where men bled and died. North of the isthmus the rebels began making an earthwork where cannon could command the redcoats’ escape route from Majabigwaduce. It was Tuesday, July 27th, and the ring around Fort George was closing tight.