The Fort (44 page)

“Well, it’s one or the other,” McLean said happily, “or maybe neither? But I do remember a nautical fellow assuring me of it.” And perhaps firing the two chasers on HMS
Blonde
had brought on a small wind because the British ships seemed to be making better speed as they approached the rebel fleet. “It will be bloody work,” McLean said. The foremost three frigates would be far outgunned by the rebels, though the big
Raisonable
was not that far behind and her massive lower guns were sufficient to blow each of the rebel warships out of the water with a single broadside. Even the
Warren
, with her eighteen-pounders, would be far outmatched by the two-decker’s thirty-two-pounders. “Mind you,” McLean went on, “sailors do tell us the strangest things! I had a skipper on the Portugal run who swore blind the world was flat. He claimed to have seen the rainbows at its edge!”

“The fellow who took us to Halifax,” Campbell said, “told us tales of mermaids. He said they flocked together like sheep, and that down in the southern seas it’s tits and tails from horizon to horizon.”

“Really?” Major Dunlop asked eagerly.

“That’s what he said! Tits and tails!”

“Dear me,” McLean said, “I see I must sail south.” He straightened on the stool, watching the three sloops. “Oh, well done, Mowat!” he said enthusiastically. The three sloops had laboriously used their anchors to haul themselves out of the harbor and now loosed their sails.

“And what does that signify?” Major Dunlop asked. His question had been prompted by a string of bright signal flags that had appeared at the
Warren
’s mizzen mast. The flags meant nothing to the watchers on the bluff who had now been joined by most of Majabigwaduce’s inhabitants, curious to watch an event that would surely make their village famous.

“He’s taking them into battle, I suppose,” Campbell suggested.

“I suppose he must be,” McLean agreed, though he did not see what the rebels could do other than what they were already doing. Commodore Saltonstall’s seventeen ships were in a line with all their broadsides pointing at the oncoming ships, and that gave the rebels a huge advantage. They could shoot and shoot, secure in the knowledge that only the bow-chasers on the three leading frigates could return the fire. The Royal Navy, the brigadier thought, must take some grievous casualties before the big two-decker battleship could demolish the American defiance.

Except the Americans were not defiant. “What on earth?” McLean asked.

“Bless me,” Campbell said, equally astonished.

Because the meaning of Saltonstall’s signal was suddenly clear. There would be no fight, at least no fight of the commodore’s making because, one by one, the rebel warships were turning away. They had loosed their sheets and were running before the small wind. Running northwards. Running away. Running for the safety of the river narrows.

Six ships and three sloops chased thirty-seven vessels.

All running away.

Three rebel ships decided to make a break for the open sea. The
Hampden
, with her twenty guns, was the largest, while the
Hunter
had eighteen guns and the
Defence
just fourteen. The commodore’s orders had required every ship to do its best to evade the enemy, and so the three ships tacked westwards across the bay, aiming to take the less used western channel past Long Island and so downriver to the ocean, which lay twenty-six nautical miles to the south. The
Hunter
was a new ship and reputed to be the fastest sailor on the coast, while Nathan Brown, her captain, was a canny man who knew how to coax every last scrap of speed from his ship’s hull. There was precious little wind, not nearly as much as Brown would have liked, yet even so his sleek hull moved perceptibly faster than the
Hampden,
which, being larger, should have been the quicker vessel.

Signal flags fluttered from a yardarm on HMS
Raisonable
. For a time it was hard to tell what those flags portended, because nothing seemed to change in the British fleet, then Brown saw the two rearmost British frigates turn slowly westwards. “Bastards want a race,” he said.

It was an unequal race. The two smaller rebel ships might be quick and nimble sailors, but they had the disadvantage of sailing closer to the wind and the two frigates easily closed the gap through which the rebels needed to tack. Two guns fired from HMS
Galatea
were warning enough. The shots were fired at long range, and both blew past the
Defence
’s bows, but the message of the two near misses was clear. Try to sail through the gap and your small ships will receive the full broadsides of two frigates, and to escape past those frigates the rebels needed to tack through the channel where the frigates waited. They would be forced to sail within pistol shot and John Edmunds, the
Defence
’s captain, had an image of his two masts falling, of his deck slicked with blood, and of his hull quivering under the relentlessly heavy blows. His guns were mere four-pounders and what could four-pounders do against a frigate’s full broadside? He might as well throw bread crusts at the enemy. “But I’ll be damned before the bastards take my ship,” he said.

He knew his attempt to sail the
Defence
past the frigates had failed and so he let his brig’s bows fall off the wind and then drove her, all sails standing, straight towards the Penobscot’s western shore. “Joshua!” he called to the first mate. “We’re going to burn her! Break open the powder barrels.”

The
Defence
ran ashore. Her masts bowed forrard as the bows grated on the shingle beach. Edmunds thought the masts would surely fall, but the backstays held and the sails slatted and banged on the yards. Edmunds took the flag from her stern and folded it. His crew was spilling powder and splashing oil on the decks. “Get ashore, boys,” Edmunds called, and he went forrard, past his useless guns, and paused in the bows. He wanted to weep. The
Defence
was a lovely ship. Her home was the open ocean where she should have been living up to her martial name by chasing down fat British merchantmen to make her owners rich, but instead she was caught in an enclosed seaway and it was time to bid her farewell.

He struck flint on steel and spilled the burning linen from his tinderbox onto a powder trail. Then he climbed over the gunwale and dropped down to the beach. His eyes were wet when he turned to watch his ship burn. It took a long time. There was more smoke than fire at first, but then the flames flickered up the tarred rigging and the sails caught the blaze, and the masts and yards were outlined by fire so that the
Defence
looked like the devil’s own vessel, a flame-rigged brigantine, a defiant fighting-ship sailing her way into hell. “Oh God damn the bastards,” Edmunds said, brokenhearted, “the sons of goddamned bitch bastards!”

The
Hunter
sought shelter in a narrow cove. Nathan Brown, her skipper, ran her gently aground in the tight space and ordered an anchor lowered and the sails furled and, once the ship was secure, he told his crew to find shelter ashore. The
Hunter
might be a quick ship, but even she could not outsail the broadsides of the two enemy frigates, and her four-pounder cannon were no match for the British guns, yet Nathan Brown could not bring himself to burn the ship. It would have been like murdering his wife. The
Hunter
had magic in her timbers, she was fast and nimble, a charmed ship, and Nathan Brown dared to hope that the British would ignore her. He prayed that the pursuers would continue north and that once the Royal Navy ships had passed he might extricate the
Hunter
from the narrow cove and sail her back to Boston, but that hope died when he saw two longboats crammed with sailors leave the British frigates.

Brown had ordered his men ashore in case the British tried to destroy the
Hunter
with cannon-fire, but now it seemed the enemy was intent on capture rather than destruction. The crowded longboats drew nearer. At least half the
Hunter
’s crew of a hundred and thirty men were armed with muskets and they began shooting as the longboats approached the grounded ship. Water spouted around the oarsmen as musket balls struck, and at least one British sailor was hit and the boat’s oars momentarily tangled, but then the longboats vanished behind the
Hunter’s
counter. A moment later the enemy sailors were aboard the ship and attaching towlines to her stern. The treacherous tide lifted her off the shingle and a strange flag, the hated flag, broke at her mizzen gaff’s peak as she was towed back to the river. She was now His Majesty’s ship, the
Hunter
. Just to the south, hidden from Brown’s crew by a shoulder of wooded land, the powder magazine in the
Defence
exploded, sending a dark smoke cloud boiling above the land and a shower of burning timbers that fell to hiss in the bay and start small fires ashore.

The
Hampden
was the largest of the three ships that tried to reach the sea, and she saw the fate of the
Hunter
and
Defence
and so her captain, Titus Salter, turned back to make the safety of the river narrows. The
Hampden
had been donated by the State of New Hampshire and she was well-found, well-manned, and expensively equipped, yet she was not a fast sailor and late in the afternoon HMS
Blonde
came within range of her and opened fire. Titus Salter turned the
Hampden
so that her portside broadside of ten guns faced the enemy and he returned the fire. Six nine-pounder cannon and four six-pounders spat at the much larger
Blonde,
which hammered back with twelve and eighteen-pounders. HMS
Virginia
came behind the
Blonde
and added her broadside. The guns boomed across the bay as dense smoke rose to shroud the lower rigging. Fire twisted from the cannon barrels. Men sweated and hauled on guns, they swabbed and rammed and ran the guns out and the gunners touched linstocks to portfires and the great guns leaped back and the round shot slammed remorselessly into the
Hampden
’s hull. The shots shattered the timbers and drove wicked-edged splinters into men’s bodies. Blood spilled along the deck seams. Chain shot whistled in the smoke, severing shrouds, stays, and lines. The sails twitched and tore as bar shot shredded the canvas. The foremast went first, toppling across the
Hampden
’s bows to smother ripped sails across the forrard cannon, but still the American flag flew and still the British pounded the smaller ship. The frigates drifted closer to their helpless prey. Their biggest guns were concentrated on the rebel hull and the smoke from their eighteen-pounders shrouded the
Hampden
. The rebel fire became slower and slower as men were killed or wounded. A rib cage, shattered by an eighteen-pounder shot, was scattered across the deck. A man’s severed hand lay in the scuppers. A cabin boy was trying not to cry as a seaman tightened a tourniquet around his bloody, ragged thigh. The rest of his leg was ten feet away, reduced to a pulp by twelve pounds of round shot. Another eighteen-pounder ball hit a nine-pounder cannon and the noise, like a great bell, was heard on Majabigwaduce’s distant bluff, and the barrel was struck clean off its carriage to fall onto a gunner who lay screaming, both legs crushed, and another ball slammed through the gunwale and struck the mainmast, which first swayed, then fell towards the stern, the sound splintering and creaking, stays and shrouds parting, men screaming a warning, and still the relentless shots came.

Fifteen minutes after the
Blonde
had begun the fight Titus Salter ended it. He pulled down his flag and the guns went silent and the smoke drifted across the sun-dappled water and a prize crew came from the
Blonde
to board the
Hampden
.

The remainder of the rebel fleet still sailed north.

Towards the river narrows.

The rebels had occupied no buildings in Majabigwaduce and Doctor Eliphalet Downer, the expedition’s Surgeon General, had complained about keeping badly wounded men in makeshift shelters constructed from branches and sailcloth, and so the rebels had established their hospital in what remained of the buildings of Fort Pownall at Wasaumkeag Point, which lay some five miles upriver and on the opposite bank from Majabigwaduce. Now, as the guns boomed flat across the bay, Peleg Wadsworth took forty men to evacuate the patients to the sloop
Sparrow
, which lay just offshore. The men, most with bandaged stumps, either walked or were carried on stretchers made from oars and coats. Doctor Downer stood next to Wadsworth and watched the distant frigates pound the
Hampden
. “So what now?” he asked bleakly.

“We go upriver,” Wadsworth said.

“To the wilderness?”

“You take the
Sparrow
as far north as you can,” Wadsworth said, “and find a suitable house for the hospital.”

“These arrangements should have been made two weeks ago,” Downer said angrily.

“I agree,” Wadsworth said. He had tried to persuade Lovell to make those arrangements, but the general had regarded any preparations for a retreat as defeatism. “But they weren’t made,” he went on firmly, “so now we must all do the best we can.” He turned and pointed at the small pasture. “Those cows must be slaughtered or driven away,” he said.

“I’ll make sure it’s done,” Downer said. The cows were there to give the patients fresh milk, but Wadsworth wanted to leave nothing that could be useful to the enemy. “So I become a herdsman and a slaughterer,” Downer said bitterly, “then find a house upstream and wait for the British to find me?”

“It’s my intention to make a stronghold,” Wadsworth explained patiently, “and so keep the enemy to the lower river.”

“If you’re as successful at that as you’ve been at everything else in the last three weeks,” Downer said vengefully, “we might as well all shoot ourselves now.”

“Just obey orders, Doctor,” Wadsworth said testily. He had snatched a couple of hours’ sleep as the
Sally
drifted northwards, but he was tired. “I’m sorry,” he apologized.