The Continental Risque

by James Nelson

  The rising sun revealed an overcast and mournful day: a thick, gray-mottled cloud cover and a wind that stung like driving rain, whistling out of the southeast. The men stood at a semblance of attention, shuffling around and blowing on their hands for warmth. Only Faircloth and his marines, drawn up along the break of the quarterdeck, remained stationary, nearly identical in their beautiful green uniforms and small cocked hats.

  There was a uniformity now among the men as well. Most of them had come aboard with only the poor clothes on their back, but now, on Biddlecomb’s insistence, they were dressed in trousers, shirts, and blue jackets from the slop chest.

  He wished that their spirits were as uniform as their clothes. The protective wall formed by the marines made him think, and it was not a comfortable thought, of the Praetorian Guard. Was it absolutely necessary that he be so protected from his own men?

  ‘Mr Tottenhill, Mr Rumstick,’ he called his officers over to him. ‘Let’s get this over with quickly. Get Hackett up here. I’ll touch on the germane rules and then we’ll carry out the punishment.’

  Hackett was brought up from below, his hands and feet in shackles, and he and his shipmates stood impassively, save for their fending off the cold, as Biddlecomb skimmed through the Rules for the Regulation. ‘Amos Hackett, you stand convicted by a court-martial of the crime of striking a superior officer and are sentenced to two dozen lashes upon the bare back. Mr Sprout, secure the prisoner.’

  The armorer knocked the shackles away, and Sprout instructed Hackett to remove his shirt. When he did, the prisoner’s wrists were bound to a grating leaned against the starboard bulwark. Sprout pulled the cat-o’-nine-tails from its red baize bag – Biddlecomb was surprised to see that Neeley had had the time to craft that as well – and ran the nettles through his fingers.

  ‘Do your duty, Mr Sprout,’ Biddlecomb said, and the cat came down on Hackett’s back, and the first blood of the voyage was spilled.

  Biddlecomb glanced up at the men assembled and watching the flogging and did not like what he saw. In his brief time aboard the British brig-of-war Icarus he had learned a great deal about floggings. Among other things he knew that a ship’s company would accept the punishment if, in the opinion of the lower deck, it was warranted. But Biddlecomb recognized the grimaces, the set faces he was seeing now, and he knew that the men were not at all pleased with what was happening.

  He heard Sprout say, ‘Twelve,’ and looked down at the grating. Hackett was hanging limp, and only his sharp intake of breath with each stroke told Biddlecomb that he was still conscious. His back was a series of red ribbons, and the blood was seeping into his trousers and pooling on the deck. With each stroke of the cat he jerked under the impact. This despite the fact that Sprout was clearly going easy on him, letting the wicked tips of the nettles strike the grating and not his bare skin.

  Biddlecomb ground his teeth together hard and twisted his hands behind his back. He had known this moment would come and had dreaded it, dreaded it more than combat. He recalled those many times, standing on the Icarus’s deck, witnessing a flogging, hating the man who had ordered it. Were his own men having those same thoughts now? Biddlecomb could hear a murmur rising from the watching crowd.

  And finally Sprout said, ‘Twenty-four,’ and the horror was over. Hackett was cut down, supported by two of his messmates, and carried below to be attended by the Alfred’s surgeon, who had come aboard for that purpose.

  Lieutenant Faircloth, that generally cheerful officer, stepped up onto the quarterdeck, looking more morose than Biddlecomb had ever seen him. The captain turned to his other officers. No look of satisfaction was on Tottenhill’s face, no expression of any kind. That was fortunate for him, for Biddlecomb was ready to dress him down mercilessly if he had looked even a little smug.

  ‘All right,’ Biddlecomb said. ‘We’ll drill with the great guns until dinner, then issue canvas for make and mend and stand down to an anchor watch for the rest of the day. Mr Faircloth, I don’t know what your intentions are, but perhaps it would be best to keep your marines under arms for a while. Drill them or something so they don’t actually appear to be on an alert.’

  ‘Aye, sir.’ Faircloth nodded. Biddlecomb was not certain why he had ordered that, did not know what it was that he feared, but somehow it seemed a good idea to have the marines and their weapons at the ready. He looked out at the white ice stretching away to the far shore and cursed it, cursed it out loud, unconcerned with who might hear or what they might think.

  Fifteen hours later, Amos Hackett lay facedown on a bunk swung from the beams at the forward end of the berthing deck. His little area was screened off from the rest of the deck by a canvas screen hung from the overhead, giving the convalescing man some small degree of privacy.

  Hackett was rated as a fore topman, able-bodied, but he was able-bodied no longer, and the mere act of breathing caused him pain enough to make him gasp. From the other side of the screen he could hear the cacophony of snoring from his sleeping mates, but he was awake, his back and his mind on fire.

  He cursed the navy and the ship and the officers. And mostly Biddlecomb, who could have prevented this flogging, who had let that idiot Bennett go and had quashed the insurrection that he had so carefully begun. He fantasized about his revenge. It would be his, and it would not be too hard to come by. Not with the way the men were feeling now.

  He heard footsteps on the deck overhead, the middle anchor watch prowling around, making certain that the brig was safe and that no more of her company managed to escape their frozen hell by slipping over the side and running across the ice to shore.

  There was a small hatch just above him, and a ladder that descended almost to the head of his bunk, the forwardmost scuttle to the berthing deck. Those men who had come to see him had come and gone through that hatch. Now he heard the familiar groan of the grating being lifted, surprising at that time of night. He twisted as best he could to see who was coming, but the effort caused him renewed agony and he gave it up.

  He heard steps on the ladder, and the grating easing back in place, and he waited in the dark to see who was there. Some member of the watch coming to see if he needed anything, coming to listen to his sorrows. A figure, a shade in the dark, appeared at his side, standing motionless, looking at him.

  ‘How are you, Hackett?’ the visitor asked in a whisper. Hackett lay still, peering into the shadows. He could make out the person’s outline, could see the suggestion of a white waistcoat under a darker coat, white breeches.

  ‘Poorly,’ Hackett said, and then, ‘Who is that? Lieutenant Tottenhill?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Hackett was silent for a moment, wavering between anger and confusion, and then anger won the day. ‘I got nothing to say to you, hear? What do you want?’

  ‘I was hoping to have a word with you.’

  ‘I got nothing to say to you. You was the one had me flogged, wasn’t you? And just because you slipped on the deck?’

  ‘Yes, and I was wrong. I have come to offer you this, by way of apology.’

  Tottenhill’s shape had become more defined as Hackett stared into the dark, and now he saw the lieutenant’s arm reaching out toward him. He reached out as well, and his hand touched the cold glass of a bottle, and at the same time he whiffed the familiar, comforting smell of rum.

  There was no man on earth he would less wish to drink with than Tottenhill, but here was an officer offering him rum. Such opportunities did not come along often. He took the bottle and took a long swallow of the liquor, feeling it warm, not burn, as it went down. He had never tasted rum this good. He took another drink.

  ‘I am dreadfully, dreadfully sorry about what has happened to you,’ Tottenhill continued as the fore topman drank. ‘I can see now it was an accident, tempers flaring because of this ice and all. I never … well, I don’t know what it was I wanted. I lost my head a bit too, I suppose. Had the master-at-arms lock you down. I just wish to say that I am sorry.’

  This wa
s all very surprising to Hackett, and difficult to understand, and the rum, which he was drinking steadily, was not helping. ‘Why in hell would you want to apologize to the likes of me? You, a gentleman and an officer, and me just some poor rat in the forecastle?’

  ‘Here’s the thing of it, Hackett. This is a Yankee navy, if you haven’t noticed; Yankee captains and Yankee officers. Now, I may be an officer and you may be a foremast jack, but we are both sons of the South, if you follow. They’ve got no use for Southerners like you and me. Don’t think I get treated with any respect. You better reckon on more floggings, for you and anyone who isn’t from New England. You should know that Biddlecomb is convinced that the desertion the other night was all the fault of the Southerners. He’s mad, and we are all of us Southerners in for a bad time, unless we look out for each other.’

  Hackett took another pull from the rum. ‘I understand, sir.’

  And he did understand, understood far more than Tottenhill might have guessed. Here was a rift in the crew far worse than he had imagined: Southerners versus Yankees. The best part of it was that the rift apparently existed among the officers as well. In the dark, and despite the pain, Hackett smiled. ‘You’re right, sir. I can see that now. It all makes sense, when you lay it out for me like that.’

  ‘Good, good. Listen, I have to go now. I just wanted to make sure you were all right, as all right as you can be, anyway, after being so ill-used. Let me take that bottle; if Biddlecomb catches you with that, he’ll flog you again, on top of the stripes you’ve already got. You get some sleep now.’

  Hackett saw Tottenhill move, like a shadow in the dark, and felt him pull the bottle from his fingers.

  ‘Sir,’ Hackett said as contrite as he could, ‘bless you, sir, for … for coming to me like this.’

  ‘Think nothing of it. We fellows from North Carolina must hang together, you know, look out for each other. Get some rest now.’ Silently Tottenhill went up the ladder and was gone.

  Hackett lay still for a long while, thinking over the strange meeting he had just had. Tottenhill was reaching out to him, actually reaching out to him even after he, Hackett, had quite purposely taken the opportunity of the fight to lay him out flat on the deck. And still Tottenhill was coming to him with a genuine offer of friendship, and showing him the perfect way to get the entire crew worked into a frenzy of self-destruction.

  ‘Stupid bastard,’ he said out loud.

  CHAPTER 14

  Blue Water

  They were free of the land, free of the land at last, and Biddlecomb’s heart swooped with the long blue rollers, soared with relief and optimism. They had left Cape Henlopen in their wake two days before and had seen nothing but blue water in that time. It was like the final fulfillment of a dream long held, and he had not felt this uplifted since Virginia had invited him to her room that night over a month before. He loved every minute of it, and even the big storm building on the northeastern horizon could not diminish that fact.

  The crew, however, did not seem to share his joy. He had to admit that, at least to himself. Isaac Biddlecomb’s jubilant mood and former predictions notwithstanding, their southerly progress and liberation from the accursed ice seemed to have had little if any effect on the dark and brooding attitude of the men.

  He stood at the weather rail of the quarterdeck, one hand on the main topgallant backstay, and squinted aloft. They were carrying full topsails and foresail, pressing their luck in the mounting wind. He looked out to weather. The gray sky, threatening at sunrise, looked positively ominous now.

  Between the Charlemagne and the horizon to windward was the Andrew Doria, the first reef tucked in her topsails, and a mile ahead of her the lumbering Columbus, already making heavy weather of it, though worse was yet to come. The rest of the fleet was visible to leeward, with the flagship almost hull down, leading the way south.

  ‘Mr Rumstick,’ Biddlecomb called to the officer of the watch, and Rumstick made his way across the slanting deck. ‘I reckon we’re in for a rough night. Been building all day and it’s still building.’

  ‘Aye, sir, I reckon so.’

  ‘This is hardly the thing to bring good cheer to the men.’ Biddlecomb could not help but smile.

  ‘No, but it’ll take their minds off their woes.’

  ‘Well, they seem to have a lot of woes, whatever the hell they might be, so they’ll need a lot to keep their minds off it. Let’s turn out the watch below. I’ll have the second reef in both topsails and strike the topgallant masts and yards to deck.’

  ‘Second reef in the topsails and strike the t’gallant gear, aye, sir.’ The Charlemagne’s bow rose on a wave, rearing up like a startled horse. The two men took a firm grip on the rail as the wave passed under the ship. Then the bow dropped, crashing into the sea and sending a great shower of spray aft that soaked them as thoroughly as if a hose had been turned on them.

  Rumstick looked up at Biddlecomb and smiled, despite the water streaming off his face and dripping from the end of his nose. ‘At least we ain’t in the ice anymore, sir.’

  ‘And I say amen to that, Brother Rumstick.’

  Six days earlier, on the morning of the eleventh, the eleventh of February, after several days of mounting temperatures, they had woken to find the ice around them reduced to floating pieces. The largest was as big as a ship’s boat, but they were sufficiently scattered to allow the American fleet to weigh anchor and make its way downstream.

  They ran down the last twenty miles of the Delaware River and into the wide Delaware Bay. It was five weeks since they had left Philadelphia, five weeks frozen in the river, five weeks to travel sixty miles downstream. But it seemed even longer, much longer than that.

  It took them thirty-six hours in the light air to run the length of the Bay and come to anchor in the ice-free, glassy water of Holekill Road. They were joined there by the sloop Hornet and the schooner Wasp, fitted out in Baltimore and just come around to join the fleet.

  Biddlecomb stood on the Charlemagne’s quarterdeck as the longboat was swayed over the side. A red pennant hung limp from the Alfred’s ensign staff, the signal for all captains to come aboard the flagship.

  Dinner in the flagship’s great cabin was an amiable affair, loud and raucous as a tavern, and as crowded as well, with the commodore, nine captains, Captain Nicholas of the marines, Jones, and the Alfred’s surgeon. The Yankee sailors crowding the great cabin, old and young, were not men given to subtlety or much refinement, and that added greatly to the public-house atmosphere, as did the quite extraordinary consumption of wine, slings well to the northward, canhooks, and various other intoxicating concoctions.

  At last dinner was done and rum punch served out, and the commodore called the group to order.

  ‘All right, gentlemen, listen here. We get under way tomorrow, so I reckon you should have some tolerable idea of what we’re about. This here’ – he held up a folded paper – ‘is the orders from the Naval Committee of Congress, and when I read them to you, you’ll see what a bunch of’ – and here Hopkins reeled off a string of obscenities, that Biddlecomb, despite having been a sailor for sixteen years, found genuinely shocking – ‘lawyer’s clerks they truly are.’

  Hopkins held the sheet of paper up to the light coming in from the stern windows and read, ‘“To Esek Hopkins, Esquire, Commander-in-Chief of the fleet of the United Colonies, Sir. The United Colonies, directed by principles of just and necessary preservation against the oppressive and cruel system of the British Administration whose violent …” They always write this kind of horse shit. Who do they think they’re talking to? Preaching to the god-damned choir. If we didn’t already know this crap, we’d be out making our fortunes on some privateer, eh, Whipple, like the last war, instead of sitting on our arses here.

  ‘Anyway, let’s see … “and hostile proceedings by sea and land” et cetera, et cetera … “Continental Congress have judged it necessary to fit out several armed vessels … you are instructed with the utmost diligence to pro
ceed with the said fleet to sea and if winds and weather will possibly admit of it to proceed directly for Chesapeake Bay, in Virginia … you are immediately to enter the said Bay, search out and attack, take or destroy, all the naval force of our enemies that you may find there,” blah blah blah.

  ‘“… should be so fortunate as to execute this business successfully in Virginia you are then to proceed immediately to the Southward and make yourself master of such forces as the enemy may have both in North and South Carolina …”’

  Now brows were furrowing around the table, and several captains were exchanging glances. ‘That’s getting to be something of a tall order, ain’t it, Commodore?’ asked Hoysteed Hacker of the Fly.

  ‘Oh, it gets better, sir, depend upon it,’ Hopkins said, and turned again to the orders. ‘“Having completed your business in the Carolinas you are without delay to proceed Northward directly to Rhode Island, and attack, take and destroy all the enemies’ naval force that you may find there.”’

  A howl went up from the captains as a dozen different points were offered up in loud and louder voices. ‘Rhode Island?’ said Nicholas Biddle, fairly shouting to be heard over the rest. ‘After we get the tar beat out of us down South? That ain’t some cobbled-together bunch of merchantmen, there, that’s an honest-to-God British squadron. What have they got there, two frigates?’ The last he directed at Captain Whipple.

  ‘Two frigates and then some,’ Whipple said. ‘The Rose and the Glasgow, and the frigate Cerberus is always poking around. You can ask Captain Biddlecomb here about them.’ He gave Biddlecomb a conspiratorial wink. ‘They got the Nautilus too, and the brig Bolton, and the Dear knows what else. That’s quite an assignment we’ve got there.’

  ‘And our men sick already, before we’ve even got to sea,’ added John Hopkins of the Cabot. ‘I’ve got twenty down with the smallpox, and my surgeon won’t give odds on how many’ll live.’