How Dark the Night

by William C. Hammond

  “So you’ve discussed this with her as well?”

  “I discussed it with her first,” Will said firmly. “And she’s open to it as long as I don’t make the Navy my life, which I have no intention of doing. But if—perhaps I should say when—push comes to shove and this country finds itself in a war, I don’t want to be sitting on the dock twiddling my thumbs. Adele understands that.”

  “If so, she’s a rare woman.”

  “That she is. And so, by the bye, is Mindy, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Of course I’ve noticed,” Jamie grinned. “But cut me some slack, brother dear. I’m just home from the Mediterranean. My sea legs still aren’t used to land. And I’m not about to rush into anything. As you say, we’ll have to wait and see.”

  Eight

  Chesapeake Bay

  February 1807

  YOUNG SETH CUTLER peered over the rim of his mug at a table three away from where he was sitting with two companions. The four men he held under scrutiny at that table were enjoying themselves immensely, and had been for quite some time. Now that the hour was getting late and multiple rounds of frothy ale had lubricated their speech, they had become more boisterous and less guarded, so much so that other patrons in the cozy public house were casting looks of disdain and indignation in their direction. That Seth could not make out what the men were actually saying to each other did not matter. What did matter was that their physical characteristics fit to a tee the description of four of the six tars who had recently run from HMS Tigress while she lay at anchor in Lynnhaven Bay. Their accents likewise made them worthy of attention.

  Seth slid his eyes over to his two companions. Robert Larkin met his gaze and gave a brief nod, confirming his suspicions. Seth had been to England only once, as a boy traveling with his father, Robin Cutler, to the family’s ancestral home in Fareham, north of Portsmouth. Larkin, however, was a Devon man, a West Country man, and he knew the dialects of that region like the back of his hand. As did Kenneth Duggan, the tall, burly man sitting between them sucking contentedly on a long-stemmed clay pipe.

  “Steady, lads,” Larkin cautioned under his breath.

  A waiter stepped up to the table and served three steaming bowls of the mutton stew that was advertised as the house specialty on the hand-written menu, which offered four other entrées as alternatives. The three men ate in silence, occasionally dipping slabs of bread torn from a freshly baked loaf into the rich brown liquid, ever keeping a weather eye on the four men at the other table, ordinary seamen judging by the cut of their cloth. Each was wearing the loose-fitting slop-chest garb preferred by both merchant and navy sailors. Seth and his companions were wearing the same garb, their rank notwithstanding.

  By the time the roaring fire in the hearth had burned down to flickers of blue flame, only five tables remained occupied. Waiters began cleaning and sweeping up, the cue for those who had lingered to pay their tab and be on their way. Robert Larkin reached into a side pocket and withdrew two U.S. gold quarter-eagles, placing them on the table and indicating with a small gesture to the waiter that he expected no change.

  The waiter arched his eyebrows. “Why, thank you, sir,” he said earnestly. “That is most generous of you.”

  “Think nothing of it, my good man,” Larkin asserted. “The food and the service were impeccable, and we have occupied this table for the entire evening. We’ll be on our way shortly.”

  “Stay as long as you please, sir,” the waiter insisted. “No need for you kind gentlemen to hurry off. May I offer a round of our finest ale, on the house?”

  “Thank you, no,” Larkin said with a smile. “That is neither necessary nor advisable. We’ve drunk more than our fill.”

  At length, the four men at the other table hauled themselves up and fumbled about in their clothing for the wherewithal to pay their tab. Coins tinkled onto the tabletop, several of them falling off and rolling along the floor. A waiter picked up the fallen coins and added them to the pile on the table. After he carefully confirmed that the total was sufficient to cover the tab and a modest tip, the four men tugged on their overcoats, giggling at each other’s clumsiness, and set out unsteadily toward the front door. One of them, propped up by two of his shipmates, started bellowing an off-key sea chantey about a Spanish woman of voluptuous build, robust sexual appetite, and exotic sexual preferences. The few remaining patrons in the alehouse looked on distastefully.

  As the four men were about to stumble by Seth’s table, Seth stuck out his leg. Two of the three in front tripped over it and lurched forward, off balance. Kenneth Duggan was up in a flash, springing like a leopard at its prey. Before the two could hit the deck, the wide span of the boatswain’s muscular arms broke their fall.

  “’Ere then, mateys,” Duggan said, in a gentle, soothing tone. “That was a close one, it was. You’re a right sorry sight, blotto as ye are. ’Ad a merry ole time of it t’night, did ye?”

  The man who had been singing had gone silent. Struggling to his feet, he looked at Duggan with glazed eyes. “That we are,” he slurred. “That we did,” he corrected himself. With an effort he pulled himself away, struggling for balance, suddenly embarrassed by his drunkenness. “I be much obliged to ye, good sir. Me name’s Cates, able seaman. Me and me mates ’ere are bound for Havana in the mornin’ and was enjoyin’ our last night ashore. We best be shovin’ off so’s we can sleep it off.” He giggled at his turn of phrase; nonetheless, he sounded a bit more sober when he said, “If you’ll please excuse us.”

  “We’re shoving off ourselves,” Robert Larkin interjected in a friendly tone. “Me mates and me would be pleased to see ye to yer vessel. No telling what or who’s lurking out there in the darkness, and we fo’c’sle types need to watch out for each other, eh? T’would be our honor. What say ye?”

  “I say God’s mercy on ye,” Cates replied, a blessing echoed by his three shipmates.

  After exchanging brief introductions the group set out. The route they followed in the not uncomfortably cool air of late February took them from the alehouse on Orleans Street across Eastern Avenue and then across Fleet Street, the intersection a stone’s throw from the Baltimore office of Cutler & Sons, and on to Lancaster Street. From there it was an easy walk to the shipyards on Locust Point Peninsula, located adjacent to a newly constructed, star-shaped fortress named in honor of James McHenry, a Scots-Irish immigrant who, as President Washington’s secretary of war, had been a leading advocate of the need for such a fort to protect the commercial hub that defined Baltimore Harbor.

  Along the route, the seven men engaged in loose chatter about the sorts of things sailors of all nations found important: ships, the sea, and women. Within the half hour they reached Locust Point, where an impressive array of merchant vessels of various sizes and rigs lay nested bow-out on the quays, their yards set a-cockbill to avoid entanglement. In those thirty minutes Cates and his three shipmates had sobered sufficiently to offer firm handshakes as they bid farewell to their newfound friends. Larkin and his two companions waited until the four sailors had trudged up a gangplank onto their vessel and all was quiet along the waterfront.

  “You’ve taken note of that snow, Duggan?” Larkin inquired. He was referring to the vessel’s rig. A snow was similar in design to a two-masted brig but differed in that a square sail was furled on the lower yard of her mainmast while the gaff of her fore-and-aft trysail was secured to a shorter jack mast stepped a foot abaft the mainmast.

  “That I ’ave, sir. Her name’s Dolphin.”

  “So I see. Anything to add, Mr. Cutler?”

  “Only that she’s lying low in the water, sir. Whatever her cargo may be, she has it on board.”

  “Yes. And that cargo will slow her.” Larkin had also noticed, as certainly his shipmates had, that the snow carried three guns on each side of her weather deck. But they were small guns, 3- or 4-pounders judging by their muzzles, and the threat they posed to a fourth rate was so puny as to be laughable.

  “Gentlemen,
” he said with a smile, “let us return to our ship. Our captain is most keen to hear our report.”

  ALTHOUGH BRISK northerly winds propelled the single-masted, double-banked cutter at a rousing clip, it took the balance of the night and much of the next morning to cover the one hundred sea miles separating Baltimore from the mouth of the Potomac River. Speed, however, was not essential. Whatever time Dolphin cast off her lines, she would plot a similar course down the Chesapeake, through the Thimble Shoals Channel west of Cape Henry, and out into the Atlantic; the cutter thus had a healthy lead on her. Robert Larkin nevertheless ordered the two-man auxiliary crew who had been standing by in the cutter to snatch every breath of air possible within the taut bellies of the mainsail and jib, sheeted out wing-on-wing so far that they lay nearly at right angles to the 24-foot craft. Not long after the morning sun had risen above the low-lying eastern shore of the bay and spread its meager warmth across the light chop, Larkin ordered Seth Cutler to relieve Seaman Paulus at the tiller, just as Paulus had relieved Seaman Kelliher three hours earlier. Larkin then shifted position from the stern sheets to the bow thwart, just aft of the cutter’s collapsible bowsprit. From there he kept a wary eye ahead into the widening waters between the bay’s eastern and western shores.

  When the cutter entered the widest part of the bay, thirty miles from shore to shore, Larkin ordered her close in toward the Virginia coast. Ahead, in Tangier Sound on the Maryland side of the bay, two French frigates lay at anchor, and these he wanted to avoid. The two third rates had been bottled up for months, virtual prisoners of a Royal Navy squadron based in Lynnhaven Bay and prowling the waters off the Virginia Capes. That America’s largest and most fertile estuary had become a potential battleground for European belligerents galled Americans of every region and every political stripe. That the British squadron was based at the very doorstep of the American naval base at Hampton Roads galled the Navy Department no end. President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison, however, had done little in response beyond registering routine diplomatic protests in Paris and London. Navy secretary Robert Smith had ordered the U.S. Navy to stand down unless American lives and property were threatened. After all, Smith had noted, the United States had invited the British to use Lynnhaven Bay as a temporary base. Or at least it had not denied them the opportunity.

  In due course the three masts of a significant ship loomed into view. She was anchored a half mile south of where the Potomac emptied into the Chesapeake, and any Virginia tobacco farmer could readily identify her as a British warship even without the red-crossed white ensign flying from the gaff peak of her mizzen. Although she was more or less the same size as a U.S. Navy superfrigate and had a similar top-hamper, her two tiers of guns set her apart: twenty-two 24-pounder guns on her lower gun deck and twenty-two 12-pounder guns on her upper gun deck, plus four 6-pounder guns on her quarterdeck, three to a side, and two 6-pounder bow-chasers on her forecastle. She was a 50-gun Portland-class fourth rate, designed by her Portsmouth shipwright in 1776 to be a ship of the line. Today, however, the British Admiralty considered her firepower too limited to engage in fleet actions against the 100-gun leviathans she would have to face.

  And unlike virtually all U.S. Navy warships, HMS Leopard boasted a stern richly adorned with two tiers of mullioned windows, white trim all around, a glossy blue band painted starboard to larboard beneath the lower tier, and four chaste maidens in flowing pewter-gray robes: one each at the starboard and larboard edges of the stern, and two others positioned in toward the center. It was this decorative stern that Robert Larkin and his shipmates took in after they had swept past the cruiser, come about into the wind, doused main and jib, and run out a set of oars through rowlocks cut into the cutter’s top strake.

  As they were pulling toward the larboard entry port, a figure wearing a fore-and-aft bicorne hat popped up at the taffrail.

  “Boat ahoy!” his prepubescent voice called down. The hail of the junior watch officer was a matter of protocol only. Those on board Leopard had long since identified the cutter as one of their own ship’s boats.

  “Boat, aye!” Seth Cutler shouted up, those two words signifying that there was a commissioned officer on board the approaching boat. That he held up no fingers signaled that the officer was not of senior rank and therefore did not require a formal side party at the entry port.

  As the cutter coasted in under the ship’s larboard quarter gallery, Seaman Kelliher, stationed in the bow with a boathook, made ready to latch on to the mainmast chain-wale. He lunged, and the hook found its mark. Kelliher hauled the cutter up to the chain-wale, secured the bowline to the thick plank of oak jutting out from it, and then played the line out until the cutter had drifted back up beside the steps built into the ship’s tumble-home. Robert Larkin was first up, in deference to his rank of third lieutenant; he was followed by Midshipman Cutler and then Boatswain Duggan. Seamen Paulus and Kelliher remained in the cutter to disassemble and stow the mast and bowsprit, and to otherwise aid the deck crew assigned to hauling the ship’s boat back on board to her normal position above the main hatch.

  First Lieutenant Bradford Morse met the returning officers at the entry port. “Welcome back,” he said, returning their salutes. From the belfry, located at the break of main deck and forecastle, the ship’s bell chimed six times in three double hits. “A fruitful sojourn, I trust?”

  “I believe it was, sir,” Larkin replied.

  “Excellent. And how did you find the city of Baltimore, Mr. Cutler?”

  “I found it interesting, sir,” Seth replied.

  “Yes, I thought you might. Didn’t happen to run into one of your American cousins, did you?”

  Seth stood at stiff attention. “No, sir, I did not.”

  Morse studied him a moment, then: “I imagine you three to be a bit cold and hungry. Might I suggest you go below for a change of clothes and a bite to eat? Mr. Larkin, you and I shall confer with Captain Humphreys at seven bells—unless, of course, you see a need for greater urgency.”

  “I do not, sir,” Larkin assured him. “Seven bells will serve.”

  “Very well. In thirty minutes, then.”

  THE LOOKOUT stationed on the fighting top secured to the head of the lower mainmast was the first to make out the black hulk. It was not an easy sighting; the moon was in its dark phase, and stars and planets peeking out between scattered clouds provided the only light from the heavens above. But the mass was dark, darker than the night itself, and it was standing to the southeast and moving slowly, like a phantom, in a sea breeze that had all but died during the late evening. Once the phantom was in the seaman’s sight, however, he had her cold. He had no need for a night glass. She was not far off, and the seaman could see well enough with his naked eye to determine that the rig on this vessel was similar to the rig he had been ordered to watch for.

  The seaman called softly below to report his sighting. A deck officer relayed his message aft to the quarterdeck; from there a duty midshipman relayed it to the captain’s after cabin located beneath the ship’s poop deck. Within the minute, Captain Humphreys stepped out onto the quarterdeck, buttoning up his gilt-edged blue uniform coat and smoothing his unruly ash-colored hair before setting upon it, just so, a gilt-edged bicorne hat.

  At age twenty-eight, Humphreys was tall, handsome, and lean—and highly respected both by his ship’s officers and by his superiors at the Admiralty. His no-nonsense attitude and his ability to make hard decisions and get things done had won him many accolades. The third son of a vicar and his wife, Humphreys had entered the Royal Navy through the “hawser hole,” not through a “wardroom quarter gallery” as was true of many of Britain’s senior naval officers. He had enlisted in 1790 as an able seaman and had worked his way up through the ranks to post captain as a result of his achievements, not his pedigree or “interest” in Whitehall or Parliament. His derring-do in the North Sea and the West Indies had caught the eyes of My Lords of the Admiralty in London and, soon thereafter, the heart of
a rich English heiress living in Kent. Their marriage had made Humphreys a very wealthy man, a status that seemed to suit him as perfectly as the elegant blue, white, and gold uniform he had become accustomed to wearing.

  Second Lieutenant Trevor Elliot touched his hat. “Good evening, Captain.”

  “Good evening, Mr. Elliot,” Humphreys replied. “What do we have?”

  “We have sighted a two-masted vessel, sir,” the senior officer of the deck replied. “She appears to be snow-rigged.”

  “The Dolphin, then.”

  “It would seem so, sir. Mr. Larkin and Mr. Cutler were quite specific in their description of her. We won’t know for certain until first light.”

  “Quite so, Lieutenant,” Humphreys acknowledged. He scoured the waters where Elliot had pointed. Yes, there she was: a dark shape standing in toward shore under jib, topsails, and what appeared to be a trysail. “Well, whoever she is,” he said to his officer, “we shall shadow her throughout the night and in the morning see what we see. I want all running lights kept extinguished and the ship rigged for night sailing. Unless, of course, she starts to get away from us, in which case we shall have to set additional canvas to keep her close. No doubt she has spotted us, and to be safe, she will hug the shore. May these light northerlies continue. Were we to sail too far south and too far in, we should have the Hatteras shoals to contend with, and perhaps a lee shore. Be aware of that, Mr. Elliot, and please inform me immediately of any changes.”

  Elliot touched a forefinger to his hat. “Aye, Captain.”

  Early the next morning, under dark cloud cover that threatened rain or sleet or a dreary combination, the sighting was confirmed. The vessel in question was indeed a snow, and the name painted in bold black script on her stern was summoned into sharp focus by a long glass. She stood not more than a mile downwind from Leopard, and although the British warship was flying neither her ensign nor her jack, those in the snow clearly had recognized the British warship for what she was. Dolphin had pressed on all sail and was running as best she could west-southwest toward the Virginia shoreline lying low on the horizon. The officers in Leopard were well aware that the shoreline harbored, among other amenities, the U.S. naval base at Hampton Roads.