The Continental Risque

by James Nelson

  From the head of the Delaware Bay one could walk overland to the head of the Chesapeake Bay in an afternoon, but it would take them five days at least to sail out into the Atlantic and beat south against wind and current, if that was indeed where they were bound. Now they could stand down to an anchor watch, and all hands would be well rested for getting under way and reaching blue water tomorrow night. Still, he had envisioned covering more than two miles on the first day of their expedition.

  The five vessels heaved themselves against the stout wooden docks to the clacking of five capstans. An hour of hectic activity aboard the Charlemagne and then quiet, the pervasive quiet of winter, as the men were stood down to an easy anchor watch and most of them sought shelter below.

  Biddlecomb slept well that night, as if he were still ashore, undisturbed by any violent motion of the brig, or any motion at all, and dreamed of the noble expedition to which they would sail on the morning tide. He woke before dawn, dressed and stepped out onto the quarterdeck just as the first hint of gray appeared in the east. And even in that thin light he could see that they would not be sailing on a noble expedition. They would not be sailing at all.

  From the western shore of the Delaware River to the eastern, from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, the river was a flat expanse of ice, thick and impregnable, and in it the American fleet was frozen solid.

  CHAPTER 9

  Icebound

  The good humor felt by the men of the navy and marines of the United Colonies, which started with the cheering crowd and had stayed with them the two miles they had made downriver, did not abate with the prospect of being indefinitely frozen in ice. The men laughed and shoved each other across the slick decks and flung snowballs at each other, starboard watch against larboard, as they tumbled out at first light.

  Biddlecomb, standing on the quarterdeck, was at least happy to see that his own disappointment was not shared by the others.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said an hour later to the Charlemagne’s assembled officers, gathered around the table in the great cabin and hungrily consuming what they imagined would be the last fresh eggs they would see in some time, ‘that we might as well exercise with the great guns. The men seem to have a tolerable level of seamanship, but I imagine those that just joined us have little experience in gun drills.’

  ‘I don’t know about seamanship, sir,’ Tottenhill said. ‘Most of the hands, and I mean the older hands as well as the new men, seem far too slack. That isn’t a problem with my North Carolina boys, but some of the others … this ain’t a merchantman, we can’t have merchantman ways.’

  ‘Many of these men have been with me for a long time, some back to my time as a merchantman,’ Biddlecomb said. ‘Pray don’t let their outward appearance fool you; it amuses them to make a show of being chuckleheads, but when it counts, they are the men I would rely on most.’

  ‘I understand, sir, and no doubt you’re right, but, with all due respect, this is an actual navy now, not a collection of privateers, doing what they will.’

  ‘I’ll take your words under consideration, sir, if you will remember that there are no “North Carolina boys.” These men are Charlemagnes first and Americans second. Another cup of coffee with you?’ Biddlecomb said with more irritation in his voice than he had intended to reveal. It apparently did not occur to Tottenhill, and Biddlecomb was amazed to realize as much, that every time he criticized the manner in which the Charlemagne was run, he was criticizing her captain.

  ‘With your permission, sir, I shall drill my marines in the … don’t tell me, the chief part of the deck there …’ Faircloth began to touch the parts of his body, starting at his head and moving down, stimulating some aid to memory. ‘The waist,’ he said at last. ‘So bloody confusing. You have the head of a ship, and the waist, but you don’t come to the foot until you consider the parts of a sail.’

  ‘More confusing still when you consider that the head is where you put your bottom,’ Rumstick said. ‘You are well into your Seaman’s Vade Mecum, I perceive.’

  ‘Quite. Fascinating stuff. Did you know that on a topsil or a topgallant you have a clewline, but on a course sail the very same line is called a clew garnet?’

  ‘I believe I’ve heard that.’

  ‘Lieutenant Faircloth, please, drill your marines, with my blessing,’ said Biddlecomb. ‘I’ve meant to ask you about their uniforms and arms. Surely they did not provide those themselves?’

  ‘No, not at all. I’m afraid that for the most part the men who signed up for the marines were not men who could afford such a rig. Except perhaps the officers; you have Mullan there, the proprietor of the Tun Tavern, he was made a captain, and Sam Nicholas, who’s in command on this expedition, he was owner of the Conestoga Wagon, that well-loved public house. I reckon most of the officers owned taverns, and most of the privates were their customers.’

  ‘So you outfitted your men?’ Rumstick asked.

  ‘Well, certainly. I mean, the damned Light Horse of Philadelphia, I went to school with most of those spoiled bastards, you know, prancing around in their finery. I wasn’t about to get involved with them, riding those damned horses. They snub their noses at the army, and my seamanship isn’t yet quite up to snuff for the navy, so it was the marines. But I couldn’t let my lads look like some tag and rag militia.’

  ‘Those are nice muskets they have, and uniforms. They couldn’t be cheap,’ Rumstick observed.

  ‘No, they were not. But I hope the Congress makes those green coats official. They look marvelous, I think.’

  Ten minutes after they had finished their breakfast, and with no warning to anyone save for the officers, Biddlecomb ordered the Charlemagne cleared for action. Mr Sprout, the boatswain, ran from hatch to hatch, blowing his boatswain’s call as if he were possessed and pushing the men to their stations, aided in that last effort by the gunner and Mr Weatherspoon.

  The older men, the core of the Charlemagne’s crew, who had fought on Narragansett Bay and had sailed with Biddlecomb to Bermuda, instructed the others in the drill, showing them the most efficient ways to prepare the brig for combat. A full fourteen minutes and forty-three seconds later, Rumstick appeared on the quarterdeck and declared the brig cleared for action, but still Biddlecomb was satisfied.

  ‘That’s good, for the first go-round,’ he said. ‘We must shave five minutes at least from that, but for now that’s good. Now let us drill at the great guns. Dumb show only, I fear. The commodore will never let us use even an ounce of this precious gunpowder.’

  And thus the routine was established, a routine that varied little, day to day, except when Biddlecomb would call for the brig cleared away at odd hours, day and night, to keep the men from becoming complacent. The time needed to clear for action dropped steadily away until they broke the ten-minute mark, and then the nine.

  The men went about their duties cheerfully, quickly, and willingly. The Charlemagne was a happy ship, but it was a fragile happiness, Biddlecomb had no delusions about that. Nothing could eat away at a ship’s morale more effectively than being stuck – becalmed, windbound or icebound – and he hoped desperately that the ice would disappear faster than the men’s good humor.

  On the seventh of January the Katy, now renamed Providence and officially a vessel of the navy of the United Colonies, managed to push its way down from Philadelphia and join the fleet in their frozen world. She rounded up and dropped anchor in the small patch of open water, fifty yards from the Charlemagne.

  They fired a salute to the flagship, then hoisted a flag of their own, a yellow flag with some device in the center. Biddlecomb put the signal telescope to his eye. It was the rattlesnake he had seen on the marine recruiter’s drums, and the motto Don’t Tread on Me. He smiled. Don’t tread on me, indeed, he thought. With this small but growing fleet the United Colonies could at last deliver a genuine and possibly lethal bite. The motto was altogether more uplifting than Washington’s somewhat pathetic An Appeal to Heaven.

  At last, on the seventee
nth of January, twelve days after the ice had enveloped the American fleet, it broke up again. Biddlecomb could hear it cracking as he made his way through the gunroom and onto the quarterdeck. The air was still cold, but less cold than it had been, and the rising sun was no more than a dull white spot behind a thick cover of clouds, the unfailing harbinger of warmth. Water dripped like rain from the rigging overhead, and the deck was a uniform wetness rather than a variegation of patches of ice and planks.

  ‘It looks like we may be under way today,’ he said to Tottenhill, who had moved over to the leeward side upon the captain’s arrival.

  ‘God, I hope so, sir.’ Tottenhill stared at the eastern horizon, never meeting Biddlecomb’s eyes. He seemed to be increasingly morose, and it concerned Biddlecomb and would have concerned him more if he thought they would be stuck in the ice for very much longer.

  He felt a hint of guilt about Tottenhill; he did not invite his first officer to the great cabin as often as a captain might be expected to do. But neither would he allow himself all of the blame. It was hardly his fault that Tottenhill made himself so obnoxious that his captain could not stand his company. He wondered if the first officer was being likewise ignored by his fellows in the gunroom.

  Nor, he assured himself, was that entirely the source of Tottenhill’s black mood. Biddlecomb had seen this sort of thing before, often enough to know that breaking free of the land and finally having blue water all around would shake Tottenhill from his funk, as Isaac had seen it shake others from theirs. But in the meantime he resolved, again, to be more tolerant of the lieutenant.

  It was only nine o’clock in the morning when Biddlecomb’s prediction proved accurate. The Alfred, after considerable fuss, loosened her fore topsail and sheeted it home, the signal for coming to sail, then worked her way off the pier and began her slow progress downstream.

  The other ships of the Continental navy – the Columbus with her high, black sides; the Cabot, yellow-sided, like the flagship; the Andrew Doria; the Charlemagne, and now the little Providence and the smaller Fly schooner, which had come up from the Delaware Bay – followed in her wake. They sailed line ahead, a smaller version of one of the great fleets of the world. For the rest of the morning and into the afternoon the fleet pushed seaward, moving past the frozen fields and the mouths of ice-choked rivers.

  By the end of the afternoon watch the Delaware River was growing wider as it flared out into the Delaware Bay. Biddlecomb had hoped desperately to reach that wide expanse of water before nightfall; there would be little chance of being frozen in there, and with anything like moonlight they would be able to continue on after nightfall, continue their progress toward the sea.

  But he could see now that that would never happen. Reedy Island was four miles ahead, the Bay ten miles beyond that, and the sun, what sun there was, was already dipping rapidly toward the horizon. What was worse, the river, wide as it was, was choked with floating ice, and it was starting to impede their progress.

  With great reluctance, he ordered the Charlemagne’s best bower cockbilled and then her warps laid along as he saw the Alfred making ready to anchor off Reedy Island. An hour later the fleet was riding at their hooks. Biddlecomb stamped his foot in frustration. He wished the commodore had taken the risk, had pushed on through the dark and the ice, imprudent as that choice might be.

  It was black night, and the cold settled in on them like the hand of death. And the next morning they were once again frozen solid in a perfect field of ice.

  The good humor that had marked the first episode of their being icebound was entirely gone now, like a joke carried too far. There was no laughing, no snowball fights or roughhousing among the men. They just stamped up on the deck and glared out at the ice and muttered profanities to themselves, and that was the full extent of conversation to be heard on board.

  And so began again the routine that had been so firmly established at Liberty Island, forty miles upstream. The ships were cleared for action, the guns run in and out, but now it was done grudgingly, sullenly, and the time it took to clear away grew longer with each day. Tempers flared, harsh words flew across the deck when words were spoken at all.

  ‘We’ll stand down to an anchor watch, rotate your men through the week,’ Biddlecomb said to his officers, Rumstick and Tottenhill, Faircloth and Weatherspoon. They were all assembled on the quarterdeck, bundled in coats and scarves and greatcoats, their heads and ears bound in cloth under their cocked hats to keep out the numbing, pervasive cold.

  ‘You know the routine, you’ve been doing it for a goddamned month now.’ He spat those words out. He was sick of trying to bolster morale. A captain needed some morale himself before he could bolster others, and his was entirely exhausted. He could well imagine how the foremast jacks felt.

  Seven bells rang out, eleven-thirty at night, and he was still wide-awake, weighted down by three blankets and still miserably cold. He had been thinking about mutiny and what it took to spark that in a ship’s crew: boredom, misery, internecine fighting among the officers.

  He reckoned that all of those elements were there aboard the Charlemagne. There was boredom aplenty, and the cold brought all the misery one could ask for. There was palpable tension among the officers, at least between Tottenhill and Rumstick. He did not know how Faircloth felt; the man was hard to read.

  But despite all of that, he was not worried, at least not about a mutiny. For one thing, even if the crew did successfully mutiny and take the Charlemagne, they would still be stuck in the ice. The marines from the other ships could stroll over and shoot them at their leisure. What was more, it was too damned cold to mutiny.

  These thoughts were in his head as he drifted off, and they added to his confusion when he jerked awake some hours later, woken by the sound of a shout topside. What was that? he wondered, sitting up, staring into the absolute blackness of the caboose. Had he dreamt it, an extention of the morbid thoughts he had been entertaining before he fell asleep?

  And then there was another shout and a clang of steel on steel. Biddlecomb flung the covers aside and his feet hit the cold deck just as a pistol went off. His hand reached out and wrapped around the brass-bound grip of his sword, sliding it out of the scabbard as he flung the door to the caboose open.

  He was thinking back to his earlier conclusions as he raced through the great cabin to the gunroom, running for the weather deck, thinking, ‘They will not mutiny, they will not mutiny, this cannot be a mutiny.’

  CHAPTER 10

  French Leave

  It was not a mutiny.

  Biddlecomb burst out of the scuttle onto the weather deck, his sword in a defensive position, ready for whatever might come. But nothing did. It was quiet, and as far as he could tell, no one was on deck.

  He felt the numbing pain of the ice on the deck through his stocking feet. He looked forward, peering into the shadows, suddenly afraid that he was losing his mind, then Rumstick and Tottenhill and Faircloth, each in various states of dress, came tumbling out on deck.

  ‘Sir, what’s acting?’ Rumstick shouted, looking around as Biddlecomb had done.

  ‘I …’ Biddlecomb began, then they heard it – a low moaning coming from the shadows around the booms amidships. The four men approached cautiously. One of the foredeck men was lying there, clutching his head.

  ‘Goddin, what happened? Were you shot?’ Biddlecomb asked, crouching down beside the man.

  ‘Oh, no, sir,’ Goddin said, as much of a moan as anything. ‘They hit me with a belayin’ pin. Took French leave.’

  ‘Took French leave?’ Biddlecomb asked. French leave was forecastle vernacular for deserting. ‘Who?’

  ‘Dunno, sir. About twenty of ’em I reckon. Went over the side.’

  ‘How … who’s watch is this?’ Biddlecomb demanded of the assembled officers.’

  ‘Mr Weatherspoon’s, sir,’ Tottenhill supplied.

  ‘And where in hell is he?’

  ‘Went after ’em, sir,’ Goddin said. ‘Lit right a
fter ’em, over the ice. It weren’t his fault, sir, they just all come up at once. Only me and three others on deck, and the others went with ’em. Mr Weatherspoon tried to stop ’em, came at ’em with his hanger, but they took shot at him and was gone.’

  Biddlecomb stood and stared out over the ice. Weatherspoon had chased twenty deserters, men who had already shot at him, out into the frozen night. The boy was brave, if not as thoughtful as he might be, and Biddlecomb was suddenly very afraid for his safety, a paternalistic fear that surprised him.

  ‘Mr Tottenhill, get all hands on deck. Mr Rumstick, tell off ten of our men, some of the old hands, and issue muskets and cutlasses. Mr Faircloth, I want your marines turned out and ready to march in five … three minutes. I’m going to go below and dress, and when I come back, I want my party assembled and ready to go and get those sons of whores back.’

  Biddlecomb dressed quickly; breeches, sea boots, sword, coat, cross belt onto which he clipped his brace of pistols. He threw his heavy boat cloak over his shoulders, wrapped his head in a wool scarf, and jammed his cocked hat down over that. By the time he returned to the weather deck, all of the Charlemagnes were turned out.

  Faircloth’s marines were dressing ranks, and because of the speed with which Faircloth had driven them to turn out, it seemed as if the ranks were the only things that were properly dressed. But it did not matter. Muskets and cartridges were all that Biddlecomb required of them.

  ‘Mr Tottenhill, form the men up by divisions.’

  With a few shouted orders the men that were left fell in by their divisions, and Biddlecomb, standing on the ladder to the quarterdeck, ran his eyes over them. Most of the deserters, he saw, had been from the North Carolina contingent, which surprised him not in the least. There were only a few of the North Carolinians still aboard, including Hackett, who stood in a back row, glancing around and apparently trying not to laugh.

  That at least was a surprise. The very moment that Biddlecomb had heard the sound of the pistol shot, he had thought of Hackett. But Hackett was still on board.