Rebels of Babylon

by Parry, Owen

  Approaching the cab man and keeping an eye on his whip, I told him, “You shall have to wait for your pay until I return.”

  Now, when you anger an Irishman you are lucky if he does not resort to fisticuffs. Fortunately, the fellow was sober and weary.

  Still, his language turned the sailors’ heads.

  “You shall have your pay and … and even something extra,” I said to placate him.

  Between his imaginative, even lyrical, obscenities, he managed to say, “Ye promised me fifty dollars, ye low, dirty taffy, ye skulking, low Welshman, ye bummer. Fifty dollars it was to be, and that atop me wages for last night, for taking ye out to yer filthy doings with those Cajun lasses in the swamps …”

  His voice was raised to stir half of the city and my embarrassment was undeserved. Fumbling, which was unlike me, I drew out my pocket watch and offered it to him in pawn until my return.

  He did not even deign to take it up. “Tisn’t worth five dollars, that piece o’ tin. Ye dirty—”

  Now, I am ever a just and temperate man, but I will admit that, in the past, I have not always thought generously of anyone who chose a life at sea. For I have always been a proper soldier, who kept his two feet nicely in the mud. But on that day my thoughts embraced amendment.

  A lieutenant of Marines appeared at my elbow, along with two fellows in uniform who looked like white-skinned cannibals afflicted with indigestion and bad tempers.

  “You,” the lieutenant told the cab man. “Shut your mouth. And get out of here. Or I’ll arrest you for interfering with military operations. After I shoot your horses.”

  His tone did not encourage indecision.

  At once, the officer turned to me and snapped his hand to his cap in a perfect salute. “Lieutenant Gray, sir,” he reported. “Captain Senkrecht invites you to come aboard.”

  That was the day I began to like Marines.

  TWAS ALSO THE day my luck began to turn. If I may speak of luck and not God’s mercy.

  I was scribbling out a note to General Banks and trying to keep out of the way of the sailors, who had a great deal to do before we could sail. In truth, I understand no part of the bluejacket’s life, but it seems an awfully complicated thing. There are ropes enough aboard a ship to hang a century’s murderers, and not a few members of the crew on any deck look fearful of the noose. They scramble about as if pursued by Death, while their officers keep an eye on things and preen.

  The ships with which we fought the war were queer things. I do not speak of the ironclads in the illustrated weeklies or of the turtle gunboats on the rivers, all of which were strange enough in their ways, but of the warships that patrolled our coasts and the oceans. They were, like all of us, caught between two ages, one of wood and wind, the other of metal and steam. The smokestack of the Cormorant rose straight between her masts, a confident brat between two hapless elders. The humps of her twin wheels gave the vessel a muscular look, as if her strength were clenched to spring on her prey. You could not doubt her. And yet, for all her polished brass and the shining bronze of her guns, the Cormorant lacked the grace of the older vessels creaking and sighing along the commercial wharves. The gunboat was a creature of our times, which value power and do not pause for beauty.

  Of course, I stand for progress and only mean to offer you a picture. Nor could I much dislike those leviathan boilers, since many were powered by our Pottsville coal. But we were all in the middle then, caught in the very war that made us modern. None of us could see what was to come, but all sensed that the past could not return.

  My note to General Banks was nearly finished, counseling him to apprehend Captain Bolt and confine him on the charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy against our government. I had all but signed my name when the bulk and churn of a vessel lifted my eyes. Twas just coming up on our stern, alive with uniformed men and flying our nation’s flag, with a big Dahlgren gun on her deck. She seemed so near I feared we must collide.

  Captain Senkrecht hailed the vessel through a speaking trumpet as bright as the helms of Mr. Homer’s Greeks.

  “Ahoy, Hermes!”

  “Ahoy, Cormorant!”

  “Did you pass the Anne Bullen?”

  “Aye. The Anne Bullen. Fifteen miles downriver.”

  I saw a look of surprise cross the captain’s face. The Hermes plunged along, roiling the waters. Our own deck rose and fell as cold gulls swooped. After a lapse, the captain called out again.

  “Was she under steam?”

  “No steam up. Under sail.”

  Captain Senkrecht did not even bother to end with a salutation, but turned to me at once and said, “We’ve got her! The damn fools must be mad not to be under steam. They’ve barely got enough wind to let them steer.” He smashed his fist into his palm and looked as pleased as Lord Nelson at the Nile.

  But now that my intelligence had finally cast off its slumbers, another possibility occurred to me. I wondered if we were being given a chance. If some of the better, or braver, souls among the New Orleans negroes had interfered with the Anne Bullen’s machinery. To give their dusky brethren a last chance at freedom.

  I did not voice my suspicions to the captain. All that could wait. I descended to the wharf to dispatch my message and nearly toppled into the river before I reached solid ground. A shudder had wracked the ship. But when I looked back, I could not complain of endangerment. For the tremor that had nearly spilled me over had come from the first great belch of the fired boiler.

  A black cloud rose between the masts, as if the vessel itself had been angered and yearned to get into a fight.

  It had taken but an hour and not two to trim the ship for the chase. Say what you like about Navy men and all their suspect habits, they rush to a scrap as other men rush to sweethearts.

  I barely had time to impress my note on a guard, with the warning of frightful penalties if General Banks did not receive it as quickly as the poor fellow’s legs could run.

  THE DAY WOULD not decide to be fond or foul. Bright sun struck brown water, promising warmth. But each time I thought to remove my greatcoat, a contrary breeze swept up the river to stop me, shifting clouds whose shadows harbored winter. The air on the river was wet as a mine that has not been pumped out, even when the sunlight warmed my face. Twas a sickly climate.

  Along the banks, beyond the useless forts and unkempt levees, the few plantation houses looked bereft. Some had burned, in all or part, casualties of war. Lean children failed to wave. Elsewhere shanties perched at the edge of swamps, as if their occupants meant to reverse the theories of Mr. Darwin. Unbothered by the modern life on the river, their freedom seemed the liberty of the poor, to breed, quarrel and fail. That is the queer thing, see. Setting aside the high and mighty landowners, I never understood what the Southrons were fighting for.

  When I explained to Captain Senkrecht that the Anne Bullen’s cargo consisted of kidnapped negroes, he looked crestfallen. As if he would have thought it more in keeping with his station to apprehend an illicit load of cotton.

  The Southrons fought to keep the negro enslaved. Reluctantly at first, we fought to free him. He began as a cause and became an inconvenience.

  The captain convened a council of war in a cabin below the wheelhouse. Included were the commander of the Cormorant—a younger officer with a fine moustache—as well as a river pilot and Lieutenant Gray, who had charge of the detachment of Marines. Charts I could not read covered a table, overlaid with instruments fit for astrologers. The cabin smelled of tobacco, oil and paraffin.

  Earlier, I had judged the captain falsely, thinking him a plunger and no strategist. But as he and his officers studied the charts, he proved himself to be a lively thinker, weighing his enemy’s possible actions and plotting his course accordingly. He would not have been liked in our regiments in India. Nor, I fear, in our Army of the Potomac, where genius is employed to explain failure, not prevent it.

  Abruptly, Captain Senkrecht looked up from the talk of depths and currents.

/>   “If we have to choose, which is more important to you? Capturing the crew or freeing the niggers?”

  “The negroes,” I said. Although the crew deserved hanging.

  He made a sound deep in his throat, neither approving nor disapproving. Turning back to his subordinates, and with especial attention to the pilot, he said, “If she still isn’t under steam, we can probably overtake her here.” Placing a forefinger on a map of the river, he traced a course. “Or there, at the latest.”

  The pilot nodded.

  “I don’t want to run past her,” the captain continued, “in case her crew decide they’d just as soon ram us. Given what they’re carrying, they might feel desperate enough. We’ll come alongside … say, here … and edge them toward that bar.” He looked at the pilot once more, who nodded and sucked on an unlit cigarillo. “I believe they’ll choose to run her aground, gentlemen, as close to shore as possible. Once they realize we’re onto them, their prime concern will be to escape the gallows. They’ll want to get off that ship. So we’ll encourage them.” He shifted his eyes to Lieutenant Gray. “Place your best sharpshooters in the masts. Shoot the crew in the water, if they won’t surrender. They’ve forfeited their right to be called human. Should any of them reach the shore, shoot them before they can slip into the swamps.”

  “They won’t much like it in there, anyhow,” the pilot interjected.

  “I want two longboats ready to lower the instant we mark her turning for the bar. Swiftly, gentlemen, swiftly. Lieutenant Gray, you will divide the remainder of your men. Half will pursue the crew if they flee and gather up any wise enough to surrender. The other boat will ferry the boarding party. I don’t expect much of a fight, but we’ll give them one, if they want it.”

  He turned again to me. “Lieutenant Gray will be master of the Anne Bullen until her crew has been secured. Thereafter, Mr. Fox will take the vessel, but he and Lieutenant Gray will give you every assistance in freeing the contrabands. If her crew runs the Anne Bullen aground, we’ll take the darkies off before we leave her.” He took a manly breath and spoke to all of us. “It’s all straightforward, gentlemen. But pay attention, in case our quarry indulges in any foolishness.”

  “Shall I run out the guns, sir?” the fellow in command of the Cormorant asked. “For effect?”

  Captain Senkrecht shook his head. “They’ll know we don’t intend to sink her.” He grimaced. “They probably wish we would. To get rid of their cargo. No, Mr. Brock, if they don’t obey our order to lay by, the sharpshooters will scour her decks. Then we’ll board her.”

  They all seemed to think it a fine plan. But I did have one question, of course.

  “And if they are under steam?” I asked the captain. “And we do not overtake them as your plan supposes?”

  In his element now, he was imperturbable. “Then we’re in a race to the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. “In a deep channel, we’ve got fourteen knots to their ten or eleven.”

  But we were not in a race to the open sea. I wish I could report a ripping chase, but we come upon our quarry precisely where Captain Senkrecht thought we should. There was still no hint of smoke from her bowels as she floated slowly downstream, lazy as Cleopatra’s royal barge. The wind had taken the side of the Union and justice, putting so little swell in the slaver’s sails that they looked like untucked shirts.

  The captain and I stood just outside the wheelhouse as we closed on the Anne Bullen. He peered through a pair of those newfangled spyglasses, moving his lips just slightly, as if asking the air a question.

  “She’s busy amidships,” he told me. “My guess is that they’ve been having problems with the engine all along. Only explanation for it. Contraband boat doesn’t want to draw attention by running all out, but she doesn’t dawdle, either. And that canvas isn’t doing them much good.”

  We were not yet in hailing range and the captain wished to surprise them, so we made no more show than any Federal vessel to-and-froing on the Mississippi. But the sharpshooters were crouched in their buckets atop the masts, while the Marines and sailors to man the boats sat quietly on deck, concealed from the Anne Bullen by our gunwale.

  Captain Senkrecht passed me the glasses. With the aid of the lenses, I began to make out faces. The crew were as mixed as the lot who had tried to capture me on that rooftop, black and white and every shade in between. Busy they were, indeed, although there seemed to be some fine confusion.

  Then I saw him. The gargantuan colored fellow with the scars cut into his cheeks. The one Mr. Barnaby referred to as Petit Jean.

  I do not know if he was a proper sailor, but he seemed to be in charge of the doings on deck.

  “We may be in for a bit of a fuss,” I warned the captain. Passing the glasses back to him, I added, “You’ll see a tall, brown fellow. He likes a scrap.”

  The captain raised the glasses again, although we were coming on at such speed that we could see much without them. The chaos on the Anne Bullen only increased.

  “Good God!” the captain said. He was a steady fellow on the water, strict and stalwart, with a voice long practiced not to rise until necessary, in order to keep secrets from the crew. But his tone at that moment was such that it alarmed me.

  I squinted to see what he might mean. I did not think the mere sight of Petit Jean could have much disturbed him.

  “They’re splashing pitch on the decks,” he said in a sharpened voice. “Pitch and maybe oil. Can’t tell.”

  I nearly grabbed the glasses from his hands. I understood, see.

  “They know we’re after them now,” he said. “They’re going to burn her.”

  He swept into action, ordering Lieutenant Gray’s sharpshooters not to wait for his challenge, but to start shooting down the crew as soon as they could. Ordering the longboats into the water, he advised me to join the boarding party immediately.

  Before I climbed down to the main deck, which was a minor trial with my leg, I saw the Anne Bullen shudder and halt a rifle shot ahead.

  The captain had been right about that much. Her crew had run her aground. Not a hundred yards from shore.

  But not a one of us had foreseen that the slavers might burn their human cargo alive.

  Atop the masts, the sharpshooters opened fire.

  I hastened to the boats, expecting to find the confusion that attends a plan rushed forward. But the Marines were crisp and the sailors were methodical.

  “This one, sir,” Lieutenant Gray called to me. “In this one, with me.”

  I passed my greatcoat to a sailor who would remain aboard. I meant to fight.

  Now, I am a fellow who can prance about with bayonet or sword. Despite the bit of bother to my leg. But that is on dry land. Although the river was not so turbulent as the ocean seas, I was not at my best while clambering into the boat.

  The Marines were of assistance, for which I was grateful, despite a shade of soldierly embarrassment.

  Tugged along on a line at first, our longboat was a plaything for the sidewheel. The mighty instrument churned and groaned, creating a choppy, artificial tide. I held to the side of the boat and took a splashing.

  The crackle of shots from the sharpshooters come regular as drill. Our sailors sat erect, with oars raised high. When the sidewheel sent us a nasty wave, the Marines shielded their rifles, not themselves.

  As the Cormorant maneuvered close, I saw the first men leap from the Anne Bullen. They struggled with the current and strove landward.

  A cloud of smoke rose from her deck. It was not from her boiler. The pirates had fired their ship, as the captain feared.

  Furious and sick inside, I was about to shout at Lieutenant Gray. But he forestalled me. Ordering the line cast off, he told the sailors to speed us to our goal.

  A bluejacket who looked as though he had survived all the world’s diseases called the rhythm as the sailors rowed. We rose and fell from atop a last wave fashioned by the sidewheel, which had already creaked to a halt.

  I looked, again and again, to see
if Petit Jean would jump from the ship. I could not spot him. Soon the Anne Bullen’s stern blocked my view of the landward side.

  The sharpshooters kept up their fire from the Cormorant.

  Twas queer. A bucket bobbed by. Then another.

  “Scum,” Lieutenant Gray declared. “They’ve heaved their buckets overboard. So we can’t fight the fire.”

  That fire was running high, if flaring unevenly.

  Just before we closed with the hull, I heard the first cries of terror, then of agony. There were only scattered voices at first, like the opening shots of a skirmish. Then the ship before us shuddered again, this time with a roar of human fear.

  The poor creatures in the hold knew the ship was burning.

  The Anne Bullen’s gunwales did not ride high, for she was new and sleek, but the Marines still had to swing up hooks as we bobbed by the hull.

  I smelled the fire and felt its warmth before I reached the deck. But more than anything else, I smelled the fear.

  The wailing from the hold grew so loud that the Marines could hardly communicate one to another. I heard the unmistakable rattling of chains, a sound that seemed colossal.

  Now, I am a strong enough fellow. In my salad days, I could climb a rope like a mischievous temple monkey. But that had been on land, before I was encumbered by a cane.

  Fair raging at my awkwardness I was. I feared I would drop my stick into the river. And the Lord only knew what price that ancient Frenchman would demand once he learned I had lost it.

  After watching me fumble and bumble, a red-haired Marine reached down and grasped my encumbrance. “Come on, sir,” he called, “for she’s burning like Betty’s behind when the fleet comes in.”

  Relieved of my cane, I scaled the rope quite nicely.

  The deck was a maze of fires through which a man roamed at his peril. One sail had caught, as well. Beneath our feet, the vessel shivered and shook with the cries of the negroes.