The Lively Lady

by Kenneth Lewis Roberts

  With me I carried fifty-five hundred dollars, forty-two hundred being my mother’s money and my own, and two hundred belonging to my aunt Cynthy, she having made it in a venture of twenty dollars during my first year as captain of the Neutrality. Four hundred and sixty belonged to that violent man, Rowlandson Drown, seventy to Jeddy, and five hundred to Dominicus Lord, the shipowner. Fifty-seven dollars of it was the sole wealth of Tommy Bickford’s widowed mother, and I wouldn’t have taken it if my mother had not insisted, saying it was a good thing to have a responsibility like that on my mind.

  In Portsmouth and Newburyport we found only the regular run of brigs and snows and sloops laid up by the embargo, none of them fit for our purpose. All through the taverns and along the waterfront the people were talking against the war, which was fairly on us, since the President on the first of June had sent a message to the Congress, telling of the wrongs we had suffered at England’s hands.

  Much of this hatred of the war was due to the knowledge that there would be fighting in Canada, Thomas Jefferson having said in one of his frequent moments of lunacy that the capture of Quebec was merely a matter of marching, and that we would therefore invade Canada to take it from the British. Having no dislike for Canada or the Canadians, and being with good reason suspicious of Thomas Jefferson, our New Englanders declared hotly that any war fought in Canada would be fought without them.

  When we reached Salem, we found little outcry against the war and no argument in favor of a Canadian campaign; but everywhere there was talk of privateering and privateers: how the Crownin-shields would take off the upper deck of the ship America and fill her sides solid between planking and ceiling, like a man-of-war, and fit her for a privateer; how Holton Breed would take out a privateer for the leading merchants of the place as soon as a fast enough brig could be found; how twenty-four Salem captains had formed a company to go out in their own vessel against the British.

  At Crowninshield’s wharf, by good fortune, I found Captain William Webb, who had helped me buy the shawl for my mother in Cadiz. He was superintending changes in a pink little larger than a ship’s longboat. She had two six-pounder carronades, one mounted aft of her mainmast, and one between the main and foremast, so arranged that both could be pivoted and fired from either side. There were twelve or fifteen men crowded on her deck, working at this and that, and it took no more than a glance to see they were not common seamen.

  “Hey!” Webb said, when I nudged his elbow, “what you doing here?”

  “Looking,” I told him.

  Webb scanned the drifting white clouds overhead. “If you’re looking to sign on with me,” he said, “it can’t be done. She’s all divided: twenty-four owners. All masters. We’re taking her out ourselves.”

  “I’m looking for one of my own,” I said.

  Webb studied the sky to the westward: then to the eastward. “What you think of this craft?” he asked.

  “Good for her size,” I said. “She’d make a nice cutter for my brig.”

  “Yes,” Webb said. “She’d run all the way around your brig twice while you were shaking the reefs out of your topsails. Built in Chebacco in 1804. There’s a pink that is a pink! Thirty tons burden, and I’d take her to Canton as quick as to Boston.”

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  “Fame” he told me, smiling affectionately at the little craft. “That’s her name, and I hope it’ll be her nature. Fame for her, fortune for us, and hell for the British.”

  Never was there a vessel, it seems to me, so aptly named; for there was no American privateer afloat who didn’t learn, before the war was five months old, how the Fame, in spite of her diminutive size and her thirty tons and her two little sparrow guns, took eight British prizes in no time at all, one an armed British ship of 300 tons, and another a 200-ton brig, and all of them together representing a loss of two hundred thousand dollars to the English.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve had something the same idea, only I want a sloop.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” he said gravely. “Everybody in Salem tells me I’m crazy, going to sea in a toy like this. What I ought to have is a Baltimore clipper schooner.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ve heard there’s nothing like a Baltimore clipper schooner. I want a sloop.”

  Webb laughed. “Good sloops are scarce. You’ll find plenty of sloops laid up here but none that I’d—”

  A thought came to him. “By gum!” he exclaimed, “how big a sloop can you do with?”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t rightly know till I’ve seen her. Fifty tons. Sixty maybe. Maybe more. I figure on thirty men, and I guess I could scare up thirty-five.”

  “Then I guess this won’t interest you,” he said. “A North River sloop slid in here yesterday, loaded with grain, and clumsy-looking as they come; but she had an old h’ister of a stick in her. Prob’ly she’s too big for you. Seventy tons—eighty, maybe: it’s hard to tell about those North River sloops.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s up toward Whipple’s Wharf,” he said.

  In ten minutes the five of us were scattered along Whipple’s Wharf, scanning, with apparent indifference, the towering mast of the Lottie Green. It was the tallest stick I ever saw on a craft of her size, ninety feet high if an inch, with so few shrouds and stays that it seemed likely to whip out of her at the first blow. She was broad beamed; and a litter of hen coops, old sails, and lumber up forward distracted the eye from her flush and level decks. A part of her seeming clumsiness was due to her heavy bowsprit and her solid bulwarks, as well as to the manner in which she was daubed with paint, as though the owner’s money had run out and he had borrowed some light green here and some dark green there. As soon as I had looked hard at her I knew she was worth thinking about.

  “But,” I said to myself, as I stood staring at her, “she’ll never be the Lottie Green if I should come to be part owner of her, and her master.”

  Straightway I fell to thinking how I should name her, and thereupon a curious little thing happened. The green of her sides made me think suddenly and with little relevancy of a green dress I had seen; and unconsciously I put my hand to my breast pocket and felt the round contour of the miniature I carried there as a provision against poverty.

  In that very moment I renamed the sloop: the words came murmuring upon my lips without my knowing well just how they got there.

  “The Lively Lady!” I whispered. “The Lively Lady!”

  That was how the Lively Lady got her name.

  * * *

  I turned to ’Lisha Lord. “What about guns?”

  “She’ll carry anything,” he said confidently.

  I went down onto the sloop’s deck, where a tall man with a large stomach was wearily supervising the unloading of grain from her hold. “You cap’n?” I asked him. This was flattery; for we merchant captains are masters in theory, and only the captain of a war vessel is supposed to be called a captain.

  “Yes, I be,” he said, shifting a straw in his mouth.

  “War’s going to catch you, isn’t it?” I asked, thinking to pave the way for a trade by frightening him.

  “No, it ain’t. There ain’t nothing going to catch me. You looking for a privateer?”

  “Well,” I admitted, “I might be and I mightn’t be. If I got a fast craft cheap, I might.”

  “Listen, mister,” said the large-stomached man, blowing the straw from his mouth, “this sloop come off the ways at Newburgh in 1809. She’s staunch and she’s gentle and she’s fast. You might not think it to look at her, but this sloop can do thirteen knots.”

  “Thirteen knots your grandmother!” I said, for thirteen knots is better than any of His Britannic Majesty’s frigates can do, even if they throw over all their guns, their reefers, and their bos’n’s mates.

  “Thirteen knots and nobody’s grandmother,” he said impressively. “She can do better than ten knots for twenty-four hours on end, and she ain’t never been pushed. This l
ittle old sloop, she’s sweet as a nut and sound as a bell; and what she’d do if she was pushed I’d hate to say.”

  “If she was pushed,” I said, “she’d carry away the top of that coach whip you’ve got in her.” From the inward movement of his eyes I could tell I had touched him on a tender spot.

  “Mister,” he said, “you’re all fouled up! She’s sweet as a bell and sound as a nut from stem to stem, blow high, blow low. She’s ninety-six tons, and you know the rule for masting North River sloops: a foot of length for every ton.”

  “She looks about seventy-five tons to me,” I said, for the sake of saying something. “How many men you carry, and what you asking for her?”

  The large-stomached man waved his hand toward the three men who were swaying up the grain. “There they be, and I got to get sixty dollars a ton for a craft like this.”

  “Good grief!” I said, “that’s nearly six thousand dollars figuring at ninety-six tons. I see now why you claim she’s ninety-six. I’ll bet she’s not an ounce over eighty; and no sloop afloat’s worth more than forty dollars a ton.”

  “Mister,” he assured me, “you New Englanders beat anything I ever see! Durned if you wouldn’t turn your back on a dollar to hunt for a copper. This sloop’ll make you a hundred thousand dollars—a million, if you know how to handle her—and yet you’re shaking in your boots at spending fifty-seven hundred and sixty for her. Well, there ain’t nothing mean about me! I’ll knock off the sixty and make it an even fifty-seven hundred.”

  The upshot was that I gave him four thousand dollars for his sloop, which may have been a whisker less than she was worth; and as soon as her grain was out we took her in hand, slipped away from Salem and scudded up the coast with as little fuss as a loon moving out of gunshot.

  Thanks to General Dearborn, with whom my mother had marched to Quebec in her youth, we had an order on the Portsmouth Navy Yard for guns, so we ran up the Piscataqua that afternoon and anchored off Kittery.

  “Our order calls for six thirty-six-pound carronades,” ’Lisha Lord told me. “I don’t know how you feel about carronades, but I wouldn’t give ’em house room. They ain’t bad for clearing an enemy’s decks at close range; but at long range their shot just bounces. If you want to take vessels without boarding, you want long guns that’ll throw a shot clear through a ship.”

  “I’m afraid of long guns,” I objected. “Their pivots are too high and they weigh too much. They’d make us top heavy and slow.”

  “Not if you mount ’em on carriages,” ’Lisha said. “We’ll fire ’em through ports; and if she blows too hard, we can sway ’em into the hold in five minutes.”

  Lisha, being from Bath, would, I knew, have profited by all the mistakes as well as the wisdom of the British under whom he had learned about guns.

  “If you want to know what I think,” he said, “I’d ask for two long eighteens—traversing pieces. For carronades I’d take two eighteen pounders, so I could use my long-gun ammunition in ’em if there’s need, and a twenty-four pounder betwixt my bow ports to throw langrage wherever it’s handiest. Then I wouldn’t be over-gunned, and there’d be few craft as dangerous.”

  By langrage Lord meant the old iron and scraps of lead and odd bullets that are loaded into guns at close range to chop up stays and shrouds and clear the decks of an enemy vessel.

  We got our guns the next day, and in addition to them our barrels of powder, pistols, forty cutlasses, forty boarding axes, twenty boarding pikes; round shot, grapeshot, and double-head shot; musket and pistol cartridges aplenty, cartridge boxes, rammers, and sponges; worms and ladles; tubes, priming wires, lanthorns, blue lights, wads, cartridge paper, gun tackles, gun aprons, bed and quoins, gun hand spikes, tompions, gun breechings, kegs of manila rope, hooks for breeching; and a mighty mess our sloop was when we had all this aboard.

  We had only a part of it stowed when a pleasant young lieutenant came down to tell me war had been formally declared. “The British’ll be down from Halifax like hornets,” he said, “and all our ships are in New York; so if you see a frigate or a sloop-of-war, cut and run, for she’ll be British.”

  Fortunately we had not far to go, yet in the short distance after we had scudded between Boon Island and Cape Neddick and stood away across Wells Bay for home, we sighted eleven brigs, all of them back from foreign parts—and all of them, as I knew from my own caution and watchfulness, feeling as hurried and harried as a dog that scuttles past a master wishful of kicking him.

  From far off we could see the squat chimneys of our house behind the Arundel dunes, rising against the green slope of the high land across the river. Behind the house, as we skirted the half circle of brown reefs that guard our river and beaches from the sea, we spied a brig’s topgallant sails moving slowly upstream with the tide. We rounded Mile Ledge, slipped easily over the bar and followed the topgallant sails around the bend.

  They belonged to the Neutrality; and on her quarter-deck, his feet on the taffrail and his stump of a tail cocked over his back as if hoisted up and sheeted home, barking and barking in a sort of ecstasy, as if he knew he’d find me on our river, was my little white dog Pinky.

  X

  N O MAN, I have learned, is qualified to say what brings joy or sorrow to another. There was a man in our town of Arundel whose home and worldly goods were entirely destroyed by fire, and two of his children as well; yet the one lost thing for which he mourned loudest and longest was a snuffbox made from a cow’s horn.

  We should have been in a state of excitement because Cephas Cluff had brought the Neutrality safe home, laden with salt as instructed, so that we not only had our brig, together with her crew to join with us aboard our sloop, but a handsome profit on our cargo —a profit so large that my mother would be well fixed, no matter how long the war might last; for salt had shot up in price as the war came close. Yet the thing that stirred me was neither of these things, but the knowledge that I had my little white dog Pinky again; whereas my mother seemed to have no thoughts for the brig because of her interest in the sloop.

  She had me row her from one side to the other and back again, and she climbed around the deck and in and out of the cabin until I was in a mind to order her home so we could set to work undisturbed. When I spoke of this she set her hands on her hips and stared up the mast as though looking for a twist in it, and said nothing could be done until she had gone out in her and got the feel of her.

  “Look here,” I said, “I won’t have it; not with your back apt to be lamed again. Besides that, this country’s at war. We’ve no time for pleasure cruises.”

  Her eyes seemed to scoff at me. “I suppose not,” she said. “I suppose you only have time for a trip to Dartmoor Prison. You’re saving all your time for that, no doubt.”

  “Stop fretting about how she feels,” I told her. “She feels good. There’s nothing to worry about, and I’d like to get out and pick up a couple of Britishers before they’re all gone.”

  “Try to contain yourself,” she said. “This war won’t be over in a week or two. If it lasts till we get an army, I think it may even last two or three hundred years. What I want to find out is this: Is that stick of yours all right?”

  “Well,” I said, “to tell the truth, I think it’s a trifle long.”

  “I see.” Smiling a faint one-sided smile, she twisted her fingers rapidly in her string of cat’s-eyes. “That was something you’d forgotten to mention! You thought it was too long, and you were willing to go to sea without making sure! Richard, Richard! Haven’t I taught you better than that?”

  “She logged over- ten knots coming down here,” I told her, which would have been enough of a defense to satisfy anyone except my mother. She only turned her shoulder to me and lifted it a little; then scanned the sky and sniffed the wind. “It’ll come in from the southwest this afternoon,” she said. “We’ll take her out and see about this.”

  * * *

  There were times, that afternoon, after my mother had all sail cracked on an
d was conning the sloop around the ledges off the southerly tip of the point we call Hell’s Two Acres, when I wished we had left our gunners’ stores on the river bank, being sure we must rip off our bends against the barnacle-covered rocks.

  My mother was in high spirits, humming constantly with her lips tight closed, and seldom opening them except to call, “Luff!” or, “Nothing off!” to John Cromwell, who was steering. The wind holding constant, we logged her again and again. She showed always just short of eleven knots.

  “Let’s reef that mainsail,” my mother said at length.

  I saw what was in her mind, so we reefed it. “Now,” she said to me, “work her!” I took the wheel from John and worked her. There was a lift to her, as though a whale were fast to us, drawing us forward; and she hissed in the water, so there was a noise beneath her counter like streams from a dozen pumps pouring overside.

  We logged her again. This time she showed eleven knots and two fathoms.

  “There you are, Richard,” my mother said. “I suspected it, and now I know it! She’s got too much mast and too tall a sail. It forces her head down. I say take off ten feet of mast and ten feet of canvas. If you do, she’ll sail as well as most Baltimore clippers and keep you twice as dry.”

  We went to work on her the next day, Rowlandson Drown in charge of the carpenters, and ’Lisha Lord supervising the mounting of the guns.

  On this little sloop of ours, only sixty-eight feet over all, we made living quarters for forty men, and a cabin and a gun room aft, if you want to call it a gun room, though I think Jeddy Tucker was nearer the truth when he called it the popgun room; for it was about as big, Jeddy said, as a pint of rum half poured out.

  Also we had to allow for water casks and gunners’ stores and a place for prisoners; because, though I wanted no prisoners, we well knew the day might come when willy-nilly we’d have them. And, finally, we needed plenty of space in the hold for whatever we might take from prizes, though I’m not ashamed to say now that none of us spoke of making prizes without knocking on wood or spitting over our left shoulders, these two precautions having long been known, in our province of Maine, as sure preventives of disaster.