Prelude to Glory, Vol. 7

by Ron Carter

  The two silently positioned themselves on the rise called Brooklyn Heights, and for more than ten minutes used their telescopes to search for campfires. There were none. Across the East River they could see lights in New York, one mile distant, and north of the city were scattered flecks of light reaching north for more than two miles.

  They moved on south, following little known trails through the woods, past Flatbush, on to Gravesend, and once again stopped to search for campfires. They counted ten. Silently Eli gave hand signs, Billy nodded, and they separated, each circling opposite sides of the camp. Just over one hour later Billy stopped, bowed his head, closed his eyes, and concentrated. From the east it came—the haunting, distant call of an owl. Fifteen minutes later the two were on their haunches, speaking in whispers.

  “Anything?”

  Eli shook his head. “No pickets. No patrols. Nothing moving. You?”

  “The same. This camp is not expecting to move any time soon.”

  “Are they on Staten Island?”

  They covered the three miles due west at a trot, to stop on the west bank of Long Island, one mile from the near shore of Staten Island. For more than twenty minutes they glassed the far shore, looking for anything that would betray a British camp. There were three small lights, nothing more. They glassed once more, looking for the masts or the running lights of ships, and there were none.

  There was frustration in Eli’s whisper. “Nothing. No camp, no ships, nothing. That leaves Manhattan Island. We have time to get back up to the canoe before dawn if we go now. Kip’s Bay is about five miles above New York City, on this side of the river. We might be able to cross the river to Manhattan Island in daylight, if the British don’t have pickets or patrols up there. I haven’t seen any yet, not at White Plains, not Brooklyn, not Gravesend, not Staten Island.”

  He moved, irritated, unable to reach a conclusion. “No lights? No patrols? No pickets? No ships? Are they that sure of themselves?”

  Billy shook his head, puzzled, in doubt. “We’ll see.”

  Dawn found them sitting next to their hidden canoe, in the thick cover of the New England forest on the south bank of Kip’s Bay, working on cooked mutton, cheese, and raw potato. Billy smacked the corncob stopper back into his canteen. “My turn for first watch. You sleep. This could be a long day.”

  * * * * *

  Beneath a bright noon sun they set the canoe in the water and minutes later beached it at the mouth of the bay. For ten minutes they studied the traffic on the East River—a few deep-water, three-masted ships, a multitude of barges riding low in the smooth water, loaded heavy with lumber, coal, and grain, two garbage scows, and many rowboats moving people north and south up and down the river, a few east and west, across it. They counted seven Indian canoes with the high, sweeping curves front and back, constructed of birch bark stretched over a hickory frame, sinew lashing it together, and sealed with pine tar.

  Eli rounded his mouth to blow air. “You’ll have to take off your officer’s tunic to make the crossing.”

  “I know.”

  “If we’re caught you’ll be out of uniform. Hung for a spy.”

  Billy shrugged out of his tunic and laid it in the bottom of the canoe. “If I’m caught. Let’s go.”

  There was little notice paid them as they worked their way across the river. They were just another canoe carrying an Indian and a white man wearing a sweated cotton shirt among the many craft on the watery highway that bounded the east side of Manhattan Island. The nose of the canoe struck the sand of the riverbank, and they both stepped splashing into the chill water to drag it ashore past the tree line, out of sight in the woods where they hid it in the ferns and undergrowth. They took their rifle and musket, and the now nearly empty burlap sack, and walked directly west until they came to Post Road, the dirt road that divided Manhattan Island on a north-south line. Carts and wagons loaded with spring vegetables, eggs, chickens, rabbits, milk, grain, and fresh meat rumbled south toward the city, while a few empty ones traveled north. A few mounted horsemen rode among men on foot, each preoccupied with their business of the day, paying little attention to others. There was not one red coat in sight. Without hesitating, Billy and Eli blended into the mix with a swinging stride, unnoticed, just another Indian and white man going south on business of their own.

  They were three miles north of the city when the first British patrol came marching, a perspiring captain leading ten men in two columns. The traffic opened for them as they marched squarely up the center of the dirt road in dusty boots and sweated tunics. Billy and Eli stepped off the road and watched them pass, then kept moving, unnoticed in the crowd. They were forty yards past the patrol before Eli turned his head far enough to look. The soldiers were still in rank and file, marching north in cadence.

  Less than five minutes later Billy and Eli slowed at the first faint sounds of drill sergeants shouting orders ahead. Two hundred yards later they were passing between row upon row of tents pitched in massive fields on both sides of the road. The British Union Jack stirred in the wind on sixty-foot flagpoles. Officers moved briskly between tents and buildings, while regulars saluted and went on with the work of a great military installation. Billy watched to the left while Eli studied the right—counting, absorbing everything they could see. Twelve regiments on the half-mile square parade ground at one time, drilling. The wagon depot, with more than six hundred wagons parked in orderly lines, hub to hub, wagon tongues all turned to the left. More than thirteen hundred penned horses. Four acres of the area stacked twelve feet deep with hay and dried grass for horse and oxen feed. Away from the road, three hundred sixty cannon aligned in twelve rows, and beyond the heavy guns, spaced one hundred yards apart, were six fenced, sunken powder magazines with more than sixty pickets on duty, muskets unslung, bayonets mounted. At the south end of the sprawling encampment were six hundred tons of crated foodstuff in two locations, one on each side of the road.

  A sweating driver slowed his wagon, then reared back on the right reins of his four-horse team, and the heaping load of bagged oats rattled off the roadway to be added to the eighty tons of bagged oats already stacked near one of the huge horse pens. A second wagon with twelve quarters of fresh-killed beef covered with old, blood-spotted canvas followed, angling toward a long, low mess hall where men in butcher aprons waited. Billy and Eli watched and counted as the wagons began leaving the road, right or left side according to their load, to deliver their produce and wares to the British, and get their pay. They looked into the bearded faces of American farmers, and the farmers kept their eyes on the rumps of their horses. They had long since learned that contracting their wares for British gold was much more profitable than selling to the Americans for paper money that was rapidly becoming worthless. They refused to look anyone in the face while they drove and unloaded their wagons and stood in line for their pay before returning home with a purse heavy in their pockets while they argued with their violated consciences.

  Men riding horses reined off the road and cantered to buildings marked QUARTERMASTER, to make contracts for their summer crops of grain, corn, fruit, and meat. Men in worn shoes and threadbare trousers walked from the road into the great camp to stand nervous, eyes downcast as they asked for work doing anything they could—anything the British deemed beneath themselves—anything that would bring pay in British gold. Digging latrines, clearing rotten straw and horse droppings from the barns, slaughtering mutton, chickens—anything.

  Billy and Eli watched them leave the Post Road, and walked on south with the traffic thinning as they moved. They were three miles from the southern tip of the island when they sighted the first of the great estates east of the dusty road. Three-storied brick mansions with huge pillars forming the front portico. Stables in long, low buildings with stalls for sixteen horses. Sculpted gardens and landscapes. Wrought-iron fences and gates nine feet in height. And each of them now flying a British flag and housing British officers. The spoils of war.

  West of the
road, toward the Hudson, they passed a second British camp, strung out for more than a mile. Again they walked on, silently counting the men, supplies, cannon, horses, watching for any sign that the British might be preparing for a massive movement. The wagons stood in rows, empty.

  The farmers with their loads for sale sawed on the reins and their horses turned right, and the wagons disappeared among the tents and buildings. Most of the laborers on foot followed, peering about for the quartermaster to beg for work. A few stayed on the road moving south toward the docks, hoping for another day’s work among the ships tied up at the great New York waterfront. Eli and Billy walked among them, silent, suddenly conscious that they were the only ones carrying a rifle and a musket, with a powder horn and bullet pouch slung over their shoulders, and wearing belts with sheathed knives and a tomahawk.

  Both knew it was only a matter of time.

  They were passing the lower end of the huge encampment when they saw two British officers, one husky with a red beard and a Scottish accent, the other lean and vociferous, on the west side of the road. They were in hot argument, pointing first south to the forest of masts of the great ships in the harbor, and then west toward the lesser ships and rowboats and canoes tied to the wharves and piers along the Hudson. Billy and Eli did not slow, nor look, as they passed the two perspiring redcoats, but three seconds later the raised voices of the two officers suddenly fell silent and both Billy and Eli tensed. They dared not stop nor turn, but they could feel the bony finger of the lean one pointing between their shoulder blades. They walked casually on, but were searching the west side of the road, toward the river, for the place they would break if the officers challenged them.

  There was no challenge, and they walked on toward the harbor, listening to the sounds of the few men left on the road and of the men working the watercraft to their right, and the great harbor half a mile ahead. They nodded to a British patrol led by a sergeant with dusty boots and sweat rings beneath his swinging arms, and listened as they passed until the sounds of the measured cadence faded and died. They reached the south end of the island and came onto the great spread of docks and wharves from the west, past what was left of Canvas Town. There were still some blackened hulks of buildings remaining from the great fire that had swept the New York waterfront on September 21, 1776. The holocaust destroyed almost the entire waterfront and one fourth of the city, to leave it open to vagrants and criminals and people of the night who moved in to take up residence in the still smoldering remains. The new occupants had used scorched and partially burned canvas to make hovels where they huddled during the day, to come out at night, and for a long time the respectable citizenry dared not venture into the squalor and robberies and murders of Canvas Town.

  Men of all nationalities, in all manner of dress, moved about on the waterfront, loading and unloading ships tied to the piers. Quickly Billy and Eli walked among them, listening to the confusion of languages, watching eyes that conveyed fear or defiance or indifference in faces that were black, yellow, brown, and white. Men with beards or smooth faced, some stripped to the waist, others clad in white loose robes with their heads bound in turbans. Billy gave a head gesture, and Eli followed him away from the water, toward a row of buildings, some rebuilt since the fire, others old, weathered, unpainted with faded, peeling signs that read INDIA LTD. or ORIENT TRADING or AMSTERDAM INTL. or a dozen other names from seafaring nations the world over. Quickly they began the count of the ships, those moored to the wharves first, then the men-of-war riding at anchor in the harbor, mixed with the British military transports.

  For twenty minutes they counted, with only those nearby glancing at them from time to time, suspicious of two men who were clearly not of the sea, one carrying a rifle and one a musket, loitering about without any discernible purpose.

  They had just finished their count when from their right came the hollow sound of shod horse hooves on the heavy timbers of the docks. Instantly their heads swiveled, and two seconds later they caught a flash of red one hundred fifty yards down the pier. For ten seconds they stood still, and their breathing slowed.

  Two tall bay saddle mounts came prancing on the dock, necks arched, fighting the bit in the unfamiliar smells and sounds of the waterfront, ridden by two British officers, one husky, red beard, the other lean and hawkish. Their saddles each had two holsters with the brass-bound handles of pistols thrusting upward. The two officers were spurring their horses through the throng, scowling as they peered into the crowd, looking for two men—one an Indian with a Pennsylvania rifle, the other a white man with reddish hair and a musket.

  Without a word, Billy reached to open the door behind him, into the office of CHERBOURG TRADING, and backed in, Eli following. Behind a gated counter where the shipping company did their business, three startled men raised their heads from the books on their desks to look. The nearest one, frail, with black sleeve garters on a white shirt, pushed his spectacles back up his nose and spoke with a decidedly French accent.

  “You have business?”

  Neither Billy nor Eli stopped. Billy quickly unlatched the gate, and they both barged past the startled men to the rear door of the square, plain office, threw it open, and were in an alley filled with broken and discarded crates and refuse, with the three Frenchmen standing wide-eyed, bewildered in the doorway behind them.

  Without a word Billy and Eli sprinted west, toward the Hudson River, glancing to their left down each narrow passageway to the waterfront for the oncoming British officers, but did not see them. They cleared the waterfront and turned north, running hard, dodging through surprised men moving in both directions on the dirt road leading back the way they had come. They had covered four hundred yards when Eli veered to the left, toward the river, and tossed his rifle into the nearest canoe. In a single stroke of his tomahawk he cut the mooring rope as Billy tossed his musket clattering into the bottom of the light craft and seized the gunwales. Thirty seconds later they were digging their paddles deep, stroking toward the center of the mighty Hudson, running with the northbound, incoming Atlantic tide.

  They were six hundred yards from shore when they heard shouting and commotion from the shore behind them. They glanced back to see the two bay horses and the officers in a cluster of men staring after them. The officers were shouting, shaking their fists. While Billy and Eli watched they dug their spurs into their mounts and jumped them to a full gallop north, up the river, scattering men in all directions.

  Billy pointed and shouted, “They’re going for the cannon redoubts up by the supply depot!”

  They were one mile from the Manhattan Island shore and two hundred yards south of the four heavy cannon guarding the big depot when they saw the great cloud of white smoke erupt from the first big gun, and flinched at the whine as the thirty-six pound ball passed ten feet over their heads to raise a thirty-foot geyser, forty yards beyond them, followed by the boom of the distant blast. They saw the white smoke leap from the next two guns, and the whine of the cannonballs was not more than five feet over their heads. The two shots raised geysers less than twenty yards to their left, and instinctively both men angled the canoe away from the shore as the last cannon belched smoke and the cannonball came singing twenty feet short, close enough to wet them with spray.

  Billy was counting the seconds. A good cannon crew could ram the wormer down the hot cannon barrel, then the wet swab to kill all remaining sparks, ladle in the powder, seat the dried grass or straw to hold the powder, drop the cannonball into place and drive the ram home to lock the entire load in place, tap powder from a powder horn into the touchhole, and touch the smoking linstock to the hole, all in about one minute. The crew on the first gun on the Manhattan shore still had fifteen seconds to finish reloading when a ball ripped into the water thirty feet ahead of the canoe to throw spray in the faces of Billy and Eli, followed by a distant boom from the New Jersey side of the river. Instantly both men looked up at the three-hundred-foot-high granite cliffs of the great New Jersey Palisades, s
tunned when they saw the smoke rising from one gun on the rim, with four others being brought to bear on them.

  Both men knew. It was only a matter of time.

  Eli turned. “Ready?”

  “Ready!”

  The next cannonball from the New Jersey heights cleared their heads by only three feet and the spray wet them, head to toe. The gun on the Manhattan side fired, and the cannonball tore into the water two feet short of the center of the frail craft and tipped it violently. When the two men felt the side of the canoe rise, each grasped his weapon with one hand and gunwale opposite with the other and threw their weight with the force of the water. The canoe reared up on its left side in the water, held for a moment, then went on over, upside down in the white foam from the blast, with a large, visible split in the birch bark from the near miss. Both men clung to the gunwales with all their strength as they hit the cold water, then kicked their way under the fractured, upside-down canoe, and hung to the underside with one hand, their weapon in the other. They made no movement in the scarce light coming through the crack, but let the craft drift with the incoming Atlantic tide, moving north, up the river.

  The gun crews on both sides of the river watched the canoe overturn in the great geyser of water, the two men thrown into the water, and then the canoe settle upside down. With their telescopes, the gun crews saw the fracture in the hull. They held their telescopes on the capsized craft as it drifted north with the tide, turning slowly in the water, crippled, showing no signs of life. The bodies of the two men never appeared.

  The red-bearded officer nodded his head in triumph. “Dead. Both of them. Sucked down by the river current.” He looked at the gun crews, proud, superior. “Quite good. Quite good.”