The Blackbirder

by James Nelson

  ‘If I am accused I shall make a quick escape upon my broomstick. But as I hear it, they are done with that nonsense.’

  ‘Perhaps. In any event, these Puritans have a bloody lot of money. They can hardly avoid it, they do nothing but work and pray. They are a serious, sober, chaste, and deeply pious people, which is why I find them such intolerable bores.’

  ‘Then why have you spent so much time in Boston?’

  ‘I just said, my dear. These Puritans have a bloody lot of money.’

  The Revenge followed the ship channel between George’s and Lovell Islands, winding her way north-west through island after island, pine tree-capped rock thrust up from the bottom of Massachusetts Bay. It was late afternoon when Governors Island and Bird Island passed along the starboard side and before them, two miles away, lay Boston, like a toy city, glowing in the rays of the late-day sun.

  The city was arrayed along a tapered hump of land, not much above four miles across, beginning where low, narrow Roxbury Neck clung tenuously to the rest of the colony and running north to where the city ended in a great cluster of buildings and wharves and a tangle of masts at the North End. Rising above the town, like a great sleeping beast, Beacon Hill, with its tall tower, and beyond that, hills that were higher still, looking down on the city, hills that Billy informed Elizabeth were separated from Boston by the Charles River, which they could not see.

  There were watercraft everywhere, boats pulled by oars or working under sailing rig, fishing smacks, sloops, brigs, heavy full-rigged merchantmen. The harbor was alive with activity, vessels working in and out, setting and stowing sails. After tiny, sleepy Williamsburg, and the relative peace and isolation of the past five days, this bustling, crowded scene was no little shock to Elizabeth.

  And it was not just Boston Harbor. The city itself, rather than ending abruptly at the water’s edge, seemed to ease itself into the bay with a complex array of wharves and shipyards and batteries. There were ships tied to nearly every inch of waterfront, so many ships that one could not tell where one left off and the next began, or which masts belonged to which vessel. Jutting out from the middle of the halfmoon harbor was Long Wharf, over half a mile long, and the center of the frenetic harbor activity.

  Perpendicular to Long Wharf, and even longer, Old Wharf ran like a connecting street from the middle of Long Wharf north to where it touched the shore at the foot of Clark’s Wharf. And all along the whole of it, ships, men, trade, and beyond that the city of two- and three-story buildings, shoulder to shoulder and rising one above the next as the city of Boston climbed up the hill at its center.

  ‘Body of me, Billy, I had no notion that Boston was such a city!’ Elizabeth said, and to her great annoyance Billy burst into laughter.

  ‘Dear me, you have been too long out of London! Sure, by the paltry standards of America it is some great metropolis, but come now, have you really turned such a country bumpkin? This is no city, not by the standards of the civilized world.’

  ‘Humph.’ Billy was right, of course. Perhaps she was becoming a country bumpkin. She might not be fit for the backwoods, but the dozen or so houses and shops and ordinaries in Williamsburg were metropolis enough for her now. She was done with cities. She knew cities, and she knew that little good happened in them.

  The sun was disappearing behind the distant hills by the time the Revenge found a clear anchorage among the vessels off Long Wharf and dropped her best bower into the Massachusetts Bay mud. Billy, for reasons that Elizabeth could well guess at, preferred to go ashore after dark in any event, so they had their supper in the great cabin and packed Elizabeth’s chest with those things she might need ashore, such as dresses and her toilet, and when the sun was well down they were rowed to the Long Wharf in the Revenge’s jolly boat.

  The Revenge’s boatswain, Ezra Howland, and a foretopman whom Elizabeth knew only as Black Tom, pulled the boat’s oars. In the bottom of the boat lay their swords, wrapped in canvas, beside her chest and Billy’s seabag. Under their coats, mostly hidden, each carried a brace of pistols. It seemed a lot of weaponry for pious, Puritan Boston, but Elizabeth made no comment.

  The jolly boat at last drew up to a worn and slime-covered ladder that ran from the Long Wharf, ten feet over their heads, down into the dark water from which it rose.

  ‘William?’ Billy gestured toward the ladder and Elizabeth rose on uncertain legs and grabbed the ladder and found one of the rungs with her oversized shoe. She could feel the slickness and she made certain of her foothold before stepping up and up again. The tide, by good fortune, was more than halfway through the flood and she did not have too far to climb before she stepped up onto Long Wharf itself, moving aside for Billy with his seabag over his shoulder and Black Tom with her chest.

  The sun was gone, but night had not brought much of a lull in the activity along the wharf. By lantern and moonlight fishermen unloaded catches and cleaned their day’s haul and packed it down in barrels of salt. Serious men hurried along the prodigious length of the wharf on some business of great personal import. Piemen and oystermen and women selling clothes and ribbons still paraded along, calling out the virtues of their wares, hoping to make one last ha’penny before retiring for the night. It seemed wild, frenetic, harried.

  Elizabeth smiled and shook her head in wonder at what a naive, simple country girl she had become.

  ‘Here, boy,’ Billy snapped, and a young boy with a wheelbarrow grabbed up the handles and maneuvered the vehicle over to them with practiced ease. ‘You know the Ship and Compass on Crooked Lane, by the Town House?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Take this dunnage there, boy, and be quick.’ He pressed a coin into the boy’s hand – Billy’s usual excessive payment – which made the young man’s eyes go wide. When the shock had worn off he lifted the trunk and bag into the barrow and hurried off with great alacrity.

  ‘Good lad,’ Billy called after him. He nodded his thanks to Black Tom and then, with a gesture as if he were welcoming Elizabeth into his home, he indicated that they might now proceed down the wharf to the town beyond.

  They stepped over rough-cut planks worn smooth by the traffic. To their left, the wharf’s single row of permanent buildings, big two- and three-story structures, surprisingly substantial, given that their foundation was just a wooden platform.

  Long Wharf ran on to King Street and into the heart of Boston town. A block beyond, Crooked Lane intersected King. The Ship and Compass was two doors down from the corner.

  Elizabeth paused, looked up at the sign that hung over the door, a bas-relief ship superimposed on a compass rose.

  They had made it, had arrived in Boston at last. On Billy’s urging she had agreed to come all this way, to try and root out Frederick Dunmore’s darkest secret.

  And suddenly all of the fine arguments Billy Bird had made in the inn in Williamsburg seemed insane, the task before them impossible.

  Whatever had she been thinking?

  CHAPTER 22

  The closer they drew to the French Indiaman, the grimmer things looked. Marlowe had purposely sent no flags aloft until they had smoked the stranger’s identity. Once they had, he ran French colors aloft, fore, main, and mizzen. It did not appear to have fooled them.

  The two ships had closed to a mile or so when the Indiaman began to casually reduce her spread of canvas to fighting sail. The studding sails disappeared first, and though they were not doused with any sort of breathtaking speed, neither was the evolution the kind of slow and clumsy work that would indicate a small or poorly trained crew.

  Topgallants after that, with hands sent aloft to stow, and then the mainsail was hauled up in its gear. It was all unhurried, almost leisurely, like a confident duelist who carefully removes his coat and waistcoat and sets them down with care, certain he will be putting them on again soon.

  The Elizabeth Galleys watched this and they were not immune to the effect.

  Not that the men who sailed under Marlowe were wanting in courage, not at
all. But being ordered into battle was one thing, being able to choose one’s fight was another, and the closer they drew, the bigger and more imposing the Indiaman looked, and the less certain they became.

  ‘She is a monstrous thing,’ Bickerstaff noted. He and Marlowe were at the weather rail on the quarterdeck and not aft in their private place. The time for privacy was past. ‘Are they all so big?’

  ‘Generally. Not much protection from the navy in the East Indies, and quite a bit of danger. There are the native pirates, of course, and the Great Mogul’s navy. And now these fellows on the Pirate Round, sailing out of New York and Newport and such and taking whatever they can lay hands on. Thomas Tew’s successes there in ninety-four have quite inspired those of an adventurous mind.’

  ‘Sailors from the American colonies? Taking prizes with never a letter of marque?’

  ‘Shocking, ain’t it?’ Marlowe agreed.

  ‘Thomas Tew, if I am not mistaken, died while holding his guts in place with his own hands, trying to replicate his famous voyage.’

  ‘True enough, but those of an adventurous bent understand that such things could not happen to them.’

  Marlowe looked forward at the grim men standing by their guns. He wondered how many of them thought they were impervious to French iron. Not many, he imagined, not anymore. Given the chance, he reckoned a solid majority would now vote to turn and run, but none of them down there was going to be the one to broach the subject, and neither was he. The die was cast.

  ‘How do you think she is armed?’ Bickerstaff asked. His was an active mind. Marlowe thought that if Bickerstaff was about to be shot in the head he would be wondering about the make of the gun, the merits of firearms over cold steel, the physiological aspects of a bullet tearing through flesh.

  ‘Probably eighteen-pounders. Perhaps twenty-fours. I think I count twelve gunports.’

  ‘Indeed? Heavy armament, to be sure. Much heavier than ours. Have they the men to work those big guns?’

  ‘Good question. That might be their weakness. You see, for all their arms and man-of-war styling and such, East India companies – and this is true of all of them – are still merchantmen, which means they are parsimonious to a fault. They’ll keep crews as small as ever they can to save on wages, so it is possible that their guns make a great show, but they do not have the crews to work them.’

  ‘If that is the case, then, this should not be a bloody day for us. Either broadsides or boarding, we should have them.’

  ‘We should. Unfortunately, the Indiamen are often used to transport troops. If that is the case she could be packed with men. Trained fighting men.’

  ‘Which could explain her apparent disregard of the potential threat we pose.’

  ‘Yes it could. And damned insulting it is, I might add. I think she should be quite terrified of us.’

  If the Indiaman was in fact terrified, she continued to do an admirable job of hiding the fact. The Elizabeth Galley, with all plain sail set, and studding sails to weather, ran down fast on her, but she made no attempt to run, no attempt to gain the weather gauge, no attempt to defend herself beyond reducing down to fighting sail. It was making Marlowe’s men very nervous indeed.

  They were no more than a quarter of a mile apart when Marlowe saw something flash on the Indiaman’s side. He put his glass to his eye. They had opened gunports and run out the great guns. Marlowe shook his head. Now what?

  ‘Studding sails in! Clew up topgallants and mainsail!’

  That was the first thing. Now what?

  They had to exchange broadsides, at least two. That would tell Marlowe how well manned they were, whether he should consider boarding, or standing off in an artillery duel, or throwing up his hands and running for the horizon.

  ‘Get those Frenchy colors down, run up the English,’ he called. ‘Sail trimmers, stand by. Gunners, a broadside on my command …’

  He looked aloft. The French colors were coming down, those of Old England on their way up. Do this thing proper, he thought.

  The English ensign hit the main truck. ‘Larboard your helm!’ Marlowe called, and the Elizabeth Galley swung off. ‘Sail trimmers, meet her … fire!’

  The larboard broadside went off in one great blast. The deck shook like an earthquake under their feet, the thick smoke swirled and rolled downwind, and the men, well trained by now, fell to loading again.

  Marlowe saw shot fall around the Frenchman and two at least strike the high-sided ship. Now the Indiaman was turning to starboard as well, bringing her broadside to bear. More and more of her high side was revealed as she turned. Marlowe counted gunports. Fourteen per side, not twelve.

  The Frenchman fired. Marlowe saw the smoke through the glass, spurting from fourteen muzzles, and he whipped the glass from his eye as the noise of the broadside and the whistle of iron and the heavy fusillade all reached the Elizabeth Galley together. Round shot whipped past, punched holes in the sails, slammed into the side of the ship, tore sections of bulwark free.

  ‘Damn my eyes!’ Marlowe said in surprise. Well aimed, and heavy shot. Twenty-four-pounders. They had to be.

  ‘Frenchy’s tacking, sir!’ Fleming called out.

  The Frenchman was still turning, her bow pointing right at the Galley’s waist, and the faster of the Galley’s gun crews were able to get off racking shots, but Marlowe did not think they would do much good.

  The Indiaman’s sails came aback and they hauled main and mizzen around, and despite Marlowe’s fervent wish that they should miss stays and get hung in irons, they completed their turn through the wind.

  The Frenchman’s larboard broadside now came around to bear on the Elizabeth Galley and the two ships fired nearly at once, the Galley’s fire ragged, uncoordinated, with the crews loading and firing at their best speed, the Frenchman’s all as one, the preloaded guns throwing out a wall of smoke and flame and iron.

  A shot hit the ship’s bell in a great clanking and screaming blast of metal. ‘Damn it!’ Marlowe shouted, and when he saw that none of his men had been felled by the spray of shrapnel, he added, ‘Bloody thing cost thirteen bloody pounds!’

  Two cable lengths separated the ships as they passed, the Frenchman having tacked and begun clawing her way to windward, the Elizabeth Galley still running with the wind between two sheets.

  ‘Now we shall see how well she is manned,’ Marlowe said to Bickerstaff. ‘See how quick she can load those fine, big guns.’

  And then, as if answering that question specifically, the great guns rolled out again and fired, all fourteen at once. The section of bulwark between numbers five and seven guns was knocked flat and number seven was overturned, half the gun crew blown apart in the blast, the rest slipping on their mates’ blood as they tried to flee from the loose gun barrel.

  The stay tackle was severed, and the big fiddle block plunged down onto the main hatch and dropped one of the powder monkeys as he ran for the scuttle. The fore brace was likewise parted and the foreyard swung away at a crazy angle.

  ‘Hands aloft! Reeve off a new brace there!’ Marlowe shouted, and then in a low voice he said, ‘Well, my dear Francis, they’ve no dearth of men aboard, it would seem.’

  ‘I should say not.’ The Elizabeth Galley was firing back, firing fast and true. Marlowe could see the wood flying in sprays of deadly splinters as the shot struck home, could see the holes in the sails, the bits of rigging hanging free. But it was still the Elizabeth Galley’s six twelve-pounders per side versus the Frenchman’s fourteen twenty-fours. If the Elizabeth Galleys did not get lucky, they would not survive the day alive and free.

  ‘Sail trimmer! Stand by to brace up, larboard tack! Starboard your helm!’ The Elizabeth Galley began her turn, swinging her bow toward the Frenchman, coming around on a parallel course. ‘Gunners! Starboard battery!’

  Marlowe paced the quarterdeck watching his men in the waist, the sails overhead, the enemy across the stretch of deep blue sea. How long had this battle lasted? Ten minutes? Was it just ten m
inutes ago that the two ships had been sailing in the lovely quiet of a ship at sea, just the water rushing down the side, the occasional squeak of a block or thump of the rudder?

  Ten minutes and their whole world had changed. Now ears were ringing with the blast of cannon, decks ran red with blood, the air was choked with gunpowder smoke and the sound of flying metal and the shouts of the living and the screams of the dying. From one world to the next. And what would be the next world after that?

  The forwardmost gun on the Galley’s larboard side came to bear and the gunners fired, and then the next and the next, but from the Frenchman, nothing. Their gunners were taking orders from an officer, and that officer chose to fire in broadsides, and he was waiting.

  He did not wait long. The Elizabeth Galley’s bow came around, just past the midsection of the Indiaman when they fired again. It was the full broadside, shot almost down the Galley’s centerline, a terrible, racking fire.

  Marlowe saw men flung into the air and come down in broken heaps on top of the guns. A ball plowed through the main shrouds and parted three of them like spunyard, and he heard the mast groan and settle. The number-one gun was on its side, on top of its swabber, but the man was happily dead.

  And then Marlowe was spinning around and falling and then he was on the deck, dazed, looking up. He breathed, breathed again, did a mental inventory of his parts. He was alive. Something had knocked him down but he was alive.

  He rolled over, pushed himself up, shouted in agony, and collapsed to the deck again. He turned his head, looked at his right arm. It was still part of him, but the angle was not right. Just below the elbow. It was not supposed to bend that way.

  Bickerstaff appeared above him, reaching down. ‘Thomas, Thomas, are you all right? Are you hit?’

  ‘Damned arm is broken. Here, help me up.’

  Bickerstaff grabbed him under the arms, pulled him to his feet. He was as gentle as he could be, but still it was agony. Marlowe let his arm droop at his side as he surveyed the destruction on deck.