The Fort

by Bernard Cornwell

  “I would still wish for more men,” Wadsworth said quietly.

  “I would wish for the same,” Lovell said fervently, “but we must make do with what the good Lord provides and remember that we are Americans!”

  “Amen for that,” the Reverend Murray said, “and amen again.”

  The waist of the Sally was filled with four flat-bottomed lighters commandeered from Boston harbor. All the transports had similar cargoes. The shallow-draught boats were for landing the troops, and Wadsworth now gazed at those militia men who, in turn, watched the coast from the Sally’s portside rail. Tall plumes of smoke rose mysteriously from the dark wooded hills and Wadsworth had the uncomfortable feeling that the pillars of smoke were signal fires. Was the coast infested by loyalists who were telling the British that the Americans were coming?

  “Captain Carver was grumbling to me,” Lovell broke into Wadsworth’s thoughts. Nathaniel Carver was the Sally’s captain. “He was complaining that the state commandeered too many transports!”

  “We anticipated more men,” Wadsworth said.

  “And I said to him,” Lovell went on cheerfully, “how do you expect to convey the British prisoners to Boston without adequate shipping? He had no answer to that!”

  “Fifteen hundred prisoners,” the Reverend Murray said with a chortle. “They’ll take some feeding!”

  “Oh, I think more than fifteen hundred!” Lovell said confidently. “Major Todd was estimating, merely estimating, and I can’t think the enemy has sent fewer than two thousand! We’ll have to pack two hundred prisoners into each and every transport, but Carver assures me the deck hatches can be battened down. My! What a return to Boston that will be, eh Wadsworth?”

  “I pray for that day, sir,” Wadsworth said. Did the British really have fifteen hundred men, he wondered, and if they did then what possible reason could Lovell have for his optimism?

  “It’s just a pity we don’t have a band!” Lovell said. “We could mount a parade!” Lovell, a politician, was imagining the rewards of success: the cheering crowds, the thanks of the General Court, and a parade like the triumphs of Ancient Rome where the captured enemy was marched through jeering crowds. “I do believe,” the brigadier went on, leaning closer to Wadsworth, “that McLean has brought most of Halifax’s garrison to Majabigwaduce!”

  “I’m certain Halifax is not abandoned, sir,” Wadsworth said.

  “But underdefended!” Lovell said warmly. “My word, Wadsworth, maybe we should contemplate a raid!”

  “I suspect General Ward and the General Court might want to discuss the matter first, sir,” Wadsworth said drily.

  “Artemas is a good, brave man, but we must look ahead, Wadsworth. Once we’ve defeated McLean what’s to stop us attacking the British elsewhere?”

  “The Royal Navy, sir?” Wadsworth suggested with a wry smile.

  “Oh, we’ll build more ships! More ships!” Lovell was unstoppable now, imagining his victory at Majabigwaduce expanding into the capture of Nova Scotia and, who knew, maybe all Canada? “Doesn’t the Warren look fine?” he exclaimed. “Just look at her! Can there be a finer vessel afloat?”

  At twilight the fleet turned into the vast mouth of the Penobscot River where it anchored off the Fox Islands, all except the Hazard and Tyrannicide, which were ordered to make a reconnaissance upriver. The two small brigs, both from the Massachusetts navy, sailed slowly northwards, using the long evening’s gentle light to probe closer to Majabigwaduce, which lay a full twenty-six nautical miles from the open sea.

  Commodore Saltonstall watched the two brigs until the gathering darkness hid their sails, then he took his supper on the quarterdeck beneath a sky bright with stars. His crew left him alone until one tall figure crossed to the commodore. “A pot of wine, sir?”

  “Captain Welch,” Saltonstall greeted the tall marine, “I’m obliged to you.”

  The two officers stood side-by-side at the Warren’s taffrail. A violin sounded from the foredeck of the brig Pallas, which was anchored closest to the frigate. For a time neither the commodore nor the marine said anything, but simply listened to the music and to the gentle sound of waves slapping against the hull. “So,” Saltonstall broke their companionable silence, “what do you think?”

  “The same as you I reckon, sir,” Welch said in his deep voice.

  The commodore snorted. “Boston should have demanded a Continental regiment.”

  “That they should, sir.”

  “But they want all the credit to go to Massachusetts! That’s their idea, Welch. You mark what I say. There won’t be many thanks offered to us.”

  “But we’ll do the work, sir.”

  “Oh, we’ll have to!” Saltonstall said. Already, in his brief tenure of command, the commodore had earned a reputation as a difficult and daunting figure, but he had struck up a friendship with the marine. Saltonstall recognized a fellow soul, a man who strove to make his men the best they could be. “We’ll have to do their work,” Saltonstall went on, “if it can be done at all.” He paused, offering Welch a chance to comment, but the marine said nothing. “Can it be done?” Saltonstall prompted him.

  Welch stayed silent for a while, then nodded. “We have the marines, sir, and I dare say every marine is worth two of the enemy. We might find five hundred militiamen who can fight. That should suffice, sir, if you can take care of their ships.”

  “Three sloops of war,” Saltonstall said in a tone that suggested neither confidence nor pessimism about the prospects of destroying the Royal Navy squadron.

  “My men will fight,” Welch said, “and by Christ they’ll fight like fiends. They’re good men, sir, well-trained.”

  “That I know,” Saltonstall said, “but by God I won’t let Lovell throw them away. You only fight ashore with my permission.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “And if you get orders that make no sense, you refer them to me, you understand?”

  “Perfectly, sir.”

  “He’s a farmer,” Saltonstall said scornfully, “not a soldier, but a goddamned farmer.”

  On board the Sally, in the captain’s cramped cabin, the farmer was cradling a mug of tea laced with rum. Lovell shared the table with his secretary, John Marston, and with Wadsworth and the Reverend Murray, who appeared to have been promoted to senior aide. “We should reach Majabigwaduce tomorrow,” Lovell said, looking from face to face in the feeble light of the lantern that hung from a beam, “and I assume the commodore will prevent the enemy ships from leaving the harbor and so obstructing us, in which case we should land immediately, don’t you think?”

  “If it’s possible,” Wadsworth said cautiously.

  “Let us be hopeful!” Lovell said. He dreamed of the victory parade in Boston and the vote of thanks from the legislature, but small doubts were creeping into his mind as he gazed at the crude map of Majabigwaduce’s peninsula that was spread on the table where the remains of supper still lay. The Sally’s cook had produced a fine fish stew served with newly baked bread. “We shall need to anchor off the land and launch the lighters,” Lovell said distractedly, then used a crust of cornbread to tap the bluff at the western end of the peninsula. “Can McLean really have left this height undefended?”

  “Unfortified, certainly, if the reports are true,” Wadsworth said.

  “Then we should accept his invitation, don’t you think?”

  Wadsworth nodded cautiously. “We’ll know more tomorrow, sir,” he said.

  “I want to be ready,” Lovell said. He tapped the map again. “We can’t let our fellows sit idle while the commodore destroys the enemy shipping. We must put the men ashore fast.” Lovell gazed at the map as though it might provide some solution to the morrow’s problems. Why had McLean not placed his fort on the high bluff? Was there a trap? If Lovell had been given the task of defending the peninsula he was sure he would have made a stronghold at the harbor’s entrance, high on the point of land that dominated both the wide bay and the harbor, so why had McLean not don
e that? And McLean, Lovell reminded himself, was a professional soldier, so what did McLean know that Lovell did not? He felt a shiver of nervousness in his soul, then took comfort that he was not alone in his responsibility. Commodore Saltonstall was the naval commander, and Saltonstall’s ships so outnumbered the enemy that surely no amount of professionalism could redress that imbalance. “We must believe,” Lovell said, “that our enemies are afflicted by overconfidence.”

  “They are British,” the Reverend Murray said in agreement, “and ‘pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.’ Proverbs eighteen,” he added helpfully, “verse sixteen.”

  “Words of wisdom,” Lovell said, “and indeed they do underestimate us!” The general was staring at the map and searching for the optimism that had lightened his morning.

  “They shall suffer for their arrogance,” Murray said, and raised a reverent hand, “‘what is this thing that ye do? Will ye rebel against the king? Then answered I them, and said unto them, the God of Heaven, he will prosper us.’” He smiled benignly. “The words of the prophet Nehemiah, General.”

  “He will indeed prosper us,” Lovell echoed, “and perhaps you would lead us in prayer, Reverend?”

  “Gladly.” The men bowed their heads as the Reverend Murray prayed that God would send a swift victory. “May the forces of righteousness glorify Thy name, O Lord,” the Reverend Murray beseeched, “and may we show magnanimity in the triumph that Thy words have promised us. We ask all this in Thy holy name. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Lovell said fervently, his eyes tight shut, “and amen.”

  * * *

  “Amen,” Brigadier McLean muttered in response to the grace before supper. He had been invited to Doctor Calef’s house, which lay two hundred yards east of Fort George. That name, he thought ruefully, was a grand name for a fort that was scarcely defensible. Captain Mowat had sent one hundred and eighty burly seamen to help the work, yet still the walls were only waist high and a mere two cannons had been emplaced in the corner bastions.

  “So the wretches are here?” Calef inquired.

  “So we hear, Doctor, so we hear,” McLean responded. News of the enemy fleet’s arrival had come from the river’s mouth, brought by a fisherman who had fled the rebels so quickly that he had been unable to count the ships and could only say that there was a terrible lot of them. “It seems they’ve sent a considerable fleet,” McLean commented, then thanked the doctor’s wife, who had passed him a dish of beans. Three candles lit the table, a finely polished oval of gleaming walnut. Most of the doctor’s furniture had come from his Boston home and it looked strange here, much as if the contents of a fine Edinburgh mansion were to be moved to a Hebridean croft.

  “Will they come tonight?” Mrs. Calef inquired nervously.

  “I’m assured no one can navigate the river in the dark,” McLean said, “so no, ma’am, not this night.”

  “They’ll be here tomorrow,” Calef averred.

  “So I expect.”

  “In some force?” Calef asked.

  “So the report said, Doctor, though I am denied any specific detail.” McLean flinched as he bit onto a grindstone chip trapped in the cornbread. “Very fine bread, ma’am,” he said.

  “We were maltreated in Boston,” Calef said.

  “I am sorry to hear that.”

  “My wife was insulted in the streets.”

  McLean knew what was in Calef’s mind, that if the rebels were to take Majabigwaduce then the persecution of the loyalists would start again. “I regret that, Doctor.”

  “I dare say,” Calef said, “that if the rebels were to find me, General, they would imprison me.” The doctor was merely toying with his food, while his wife watched him anxiously.

  “Then I must do my utmost,” McLean said, “to keep you from imprisonment and your wife from insult.”

  “Scourge them,” Calef said angrily.

  “I do assure you, Doctor, that is our intent,” McLean said, then smiled at Calef’s wife. “These are very fine beans, ma’am.”

  They ate mostly in silence after that. McLean wished he could offer a greater reassurance to the loyalists of Majabigwaduce, but the arrival of the rebel fleet surely meant an imminent defeat. His fort was unfinished. True, he had made three batteries to cover the harbor entrance. There was one on Cross Island, the large Half Moon Battery down on the shore, and a third, much smaller, on the high bluff above the harbor mouth, but none of those batteries was a fort. They were emplacements for cannon that were there to fire at the enemy ships, but not one of the earthworks could withstand an assault by a company of determined infantry. There had simply not been enough time, and now the enemy was here.

  Many years before, while fighting for the Dutch, McLean had been captured by the French and held prisoner. That had not been unpleasant. The French were generous and had treated him with courtesy. He wondered how the Americans would behave and feared, as he ate the tough, undercooked beans, that he was about to find out.

  Tomorrow.

  Marine Lieutenant Downs of the Tyrannicide took men ashore on the northernmost of the Fox Islands. It was fully dark by the time their longboat grounded on a shingle beach beneath the black shapes of a half-dozen houses that stood on the higher ground. Small lights shone from behind shutters and around doorways and, as the marines dragged their boat higher up the beach, a voice hailed from the darkness. “Who are you?”

  “His Majesty’s Royal Marines!” Downs called back. The Fox Islands were notorious for being loyalist and Downs did not want one of his men being killed or wounded by some malevolent Tory shooting out of the night. “A relief fleet for Majabigwaduce!”

  “What do you want here?” the voice called, still suspicious.

  “Fresh water, news, a couple of women would be welcome too!”

  Boots sounded on the shingle and a tall man emerged from the shadows. He carried a musket that he slung on his shoulder when he saw the dozen men about the longboat. He had noticed the white crossbelts, but in the dark of night he could not see that their coats were green and not red. “Strange time to be looking for water,” he said.

  “We’re after water and news,” Downs said cheerfully. “General McLean is still at Majabigwaduce?”

  “No one’s kicked him out yet.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “I was there yesterday.”

  “Then, sir, you will do me the honor of accompanying me to my ship,” Downs said. His marines, like those of the Hazard, had been sent to find men who had seen McLean’s fortifications.

  The islander took a pace backwards. “What ship are you from?” he asked, still thoroughly suspicious.

  “Take him,” Downs ordered and two of his marines seized the man, confiscated his musket, and dragged him back to the longboat. “Don’t make a sound,” Lieutenant Downs warned the man, “or we’ll stove your skull in like an egg.”

  “Bastards,” the man said, then grunted as a marine punched him in the belly.

  “We are patriots,” Downs corrected him and, leaving two men to guard the prisoner, went to find more loyalists who could tell the expedition just what waited for them upriver.

  Dawn brought a thick fog into which Lieutenant John Moore went with twenty men to the small battery that McLean had placed high on Majabigwaduce’s bluff. The battery possessed three six-pounder cannons mounted on naval carriages and served by sailors from HMS North, commanded by a midshipman who, to the eighteen-year-old Moore, looked no older than twelve or thirteen. “I’m fifteen, sir,” the midshipman responded to Moore’s inquiry, “and three years in the Navy, sir.”

  “I’m John Moore,” Moore introduced himself.

  “Pearce Fenistone, sir, and honored to make your acquaintance.” Fenistone’s battery was no fortress, merely an emplacement for the guns. A space had been cleared in the trees, a patch of ground leveled, and a platform of split logs laid for the carriages. Four trees had been deliberately left unfelled and the gunners used their tru
nks as anchors for the cannons’ breeching ropes and train-tackle. A ship’s cannon was restrained by its breeching ropes, which were seized to the hull and stopped a gun recoiling across a deck, while the train-tackle was used to run the gun back into position, and Fenistone’s men were using the tree trunks to tame their beasts. “It does check the recoil, sir,” Fenistone said when Moore admired the ingenious arrangement, “though we do get showered with pine needles every time we fire.” The battery had no parapet and its ready magazine was merely a shallow pit dug at the rear of the makeshift decking. Two gratings were piled with round shot beside which were piles of what looked like children’s rope quoits. “Ring-wadding, sir,” Fenistone explained.

  “Ring-wadding?”

  “The guns point downwards, sir, and the ring-wads hold the balls in the barrel. We’d look a little foolish if we loaded and the balls rolled out before we fired. It’s most embarrassing when that happens.”

  The battery had been placed above the harbor’s mouth rather than at the western edge of the bluff. The six-pounders, which had been taken from the North’s portside broadside, were too light to have much effect at long range, but if the enemy ships attempted to enter the harbor they would be forced to sail beneath the three cannon that could fire down onto their decks. “I’d wish for heavier metal, sir,” Fenistone said wistfully.

  “And a proper fort to defend your guns?”

  “In case their infantry attacks?” Fenistone asked. “Well, fighting infantry isn’t our job, sir, it’s yours.” The midshipman smiled. For a fifteen-year-old, Moore thought, Fenistone was wonderfully confident. “Captain Mowat gave us strict instructions what to do if we are attacked by land, sir,” he went on.

  “Which is?”

  “Spike the guns and run like buggery, sir,” Fenistone answered with a grin, “and get the gunners back to the North, sir.” He slapped at a mosquito.

  Moore looked down at Mowat’s ships, which were wreathed in mist. The three sloops looked formidable enough in their line, though he knew they were lightly armed compared to most warships. Behind them, in a parallel line, were the three transport ships, which looked far larger and more threatening, but in truth were defenseless hulls, merely there to act as an obstacles in the event the enemy managed to pierce Mowat’s first line.