And the wolves were coming.
Redcoats gathered at Dyce’s Head to watch the unfolding drama. Brigadier McLean’s servant had thoughtfully brought a milking stool all the way to the bluff and McLean thanked the man and sat down to watch the unfolding battle. It would be a privileged view of a rare sight, McLean thought. Seventeen rebel warships waited for six Royal Navy vessels. Three British frigates led the way, while the big two-decker and the remaining two frigates came on more slowly. “I do believe that’s the Blonde,” McLean said, staring at the nearest frigate through his telescope. “It’s our old friend Captain Barkley!” Off to McLean’s right the nineteen rebel transports were inching northwards. From this distance it looked as if their sails hung limp and powerless, but minute by minute they drew further away.
The Blonde fired her bow-chasers. To the watchers ashore it looked as if her bowsprit was blotted out by blossoming smoke. A moment later the sound of the two guns pounded the bluff. A pair of white fountains showed where the round shots had splashed well short of the Warren, which lay at the center of the rebel line. The smoke thinned and drifted ahead of the British ships.
“Look at that!” Lieutenant-Colonel Campbell exclaimed. He was pointing at the harbor mouth where Mowat’s three sloops had appeared. They were kedging out of the harbor against the prevailing wind. Ever since he had heard that the rebels had abandoned the siege Mowat had been retrieving his ships’ guns from their shore emplacements. His men had worked hard and fast, desperate to join the promised fight in the bay, and now, with their portside broadsides restored, the three sloops were on their way to join Sir George’s flotilla. Longboats took turns to carry anchors far forrard of the sloops’ bows, the anchors were dropped, then the sloops were hauled forward on the anchor rode as a second anchor was rowed still further ahead for the next leg of the journey. They leapfrogged anchor by anchor out of the harbor and the North’s pumps still clattered and spurted, and all three ships showed damage to their hulls from the long rebel bombardment, but their guns were loaded and their tired crews eager. The Blonde fired again, and once again the shots dropped short of the rebel ships.
“They do say,” McLean remarked, “that firing the guns brings on the wind.”
“I thought it was the other way round,” Campbell said, “that gunfire stills the wind?”
“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.
“I’ll see you upriver,” Downing said, his tone indicating regret for the words he had spoken before. “Go and do your work, General.”
The transport ships were in the northern part of the bay now. Most had anchored during the ebb tide and now used the evening flood and the small wind to crawl towards the river narrows. James Fletcher had explained that the entrance to the narrows was marked by an obstacle, Odom’s Ledge, that lay in the very center of the stream. There were navigable channels to either side of the rock, but the ledge itself was a ship-killer. “I
t’ll rip the bottom out of a boat,” James had told Wadsworth, “and the British won’t try and get past in the dark. No one could try and pass Odom’s in the dark.”
Wadsworth was using the Sally’s longboat and he and Fletcher were being rowed northwards from Wasaumkeag Point. The oarsmen were silent, as were the enemy frigates’ guns, which meant the Hampden was taken. Wadsworth turned to gaze at the view. It was a summer evening and he was in the middle of the largest fleet the rebels had ever gathered, a huge fleet, their sails beautifully catching the lowering sun, and they were all fleeing from the much smaller fleet. The rebel ships converged towards the ledge. The British frigates fired an occasional bow-chaser, the balls splashing short of the rearmost rebels. The wolves were herding the sheep, Wadsworth thought bitterly, and the Warren, taller and more beautiful than all the surrounding vessels, was running like the rest when her duty, surely, was to turn and fight her way into legend.
“There’s the Samuel, sir,” James Fletcher pointed to the brig which had almost reached the narrows, entrance.
“Get me close to the Samuel,” Wadsworth ordered the boatswain.
The brig was towing both Revere’s barge and a flat-bottomed lighter. Wadsworth stood and cupped his hands as his longboat closed on the Samuel. “Is Colonel Revere on board?”
“I’m here,” a voice boomed back.
“Keep rowing,” Wadsworth said to the boatswain, then cupped his hands again. “Put a cannon on the lighter, Colonel!”
“You want what?”
Wadsworth spoke more distinctly. “Put a cannon on the lighter! I’ll find a place to land it!” Revere shouted something back, but Wadsworth did not catch the words. “Did you hear me, Colonel?” he shouted.
“I heard you!”
“Put a cannon on the lighter! We need to get guns ashore when we find a place to defend!”
The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War Page 40