The Lively Lady

by Kenneth Lewis Roberts

  We set out again in February to chasten the British, believing that when we were back from our cruise the Latours would have settled our affairs. Yet I think I would have done better to stay on shore: for we were twice chased away from prizes by British frigates; and when the cruise was over the men, headed by Rowlandson Drown, were grumbling louder than ever, demanding a larger vessel and crew so we could man out our prizes.

  When we were back in Nantes, furthermore, I found the Latours had disposed of our cargo to such good advantage that I dared not tell the crew for fear their newly acquired wealth would make them unwilling to risk their skins in fighting; since every ordinary seaman’s share now amounted to something better than twenty-four hundred dollars. Consequently I kept my own counsel, banked the money with the Latours, refitted the sloop; and early in May, when the hawthorns were pink-and-white clouds against the rich green of the swelling fields, we slipped down the Loire again and stood off to the northwestward on a cruise that, for general cussedness, would have been difficult to beat.

  We ran straight into one of the hellish westerly gales that blow into the Bay of Biscay with hurricane force, kicking up such seas that a sloop the size of ours is stuck against the face of one of them like a fly against the page of a book; and we, clinging to our canted deck, must look upward to the crest of the wave and downward to the trough of it, with no horizon at all save that furnished by our own wave and the next one to it.

  The gale seemed bent on wringing the Lively Lady as a woman wrings a towel, twisting the stern in one direction and the bow in another. We were obliged to heave-to under a double-reefed mainsail, nor did one of us dare move without a leg or an arm hooked around something, lest we be snapped through the air like a whip lash.

  Fearing for Pinky, I tied him tight in a blanket and corded him to the roof of the cabin, where he hung with head protruding and whiskers a-bristle, barking passionately when lamps were broken from their fastenings and every loose object sent flying from one side of the cabin to the other. After four hours of this a tremendous sea came down with a roar in the wake of our starboard shrouds. It seemed to me we were gone; but the sloop struggled gradually upright, and I found the force of the blow had broken one of the top timbers and split open the plank-sheer, so that I could look directly down into the hold.

  Knowing one more like this would leave us clinging to splintered spars in the cold green surges that towered around us, I sent Jeddy and ’Lisha Lord and Cromwell and Rowlandson Drown to cut loose a spare boom. This we spanned with a piece of new four-inch rope; and to the bight of the span I had them fasten our small bower cable. The other end of the cable we fastened to our mast. Thereupon we threw over the boom, paying out sixty fathoms of cable, and at once the sloop came head to the wind, riding as easily as a mallard; for the boom not only acted as a floating anchor, holding us in place, but it broke the ragged crests from the seas and forced them to march at us in a more orderly manner, instead of rushing from every direction like becrazed things. Thus it gave us a chance to nail tarred canvas over our broken plank-sheer; and we rode out the gale without further injury.

  Following this we gave chase to a ship, lost her in the darkness, cruised two days in search of her, picked her up again, and lost her for good during the night. We sighted a brig and hove her to, only to find she was an ancient craft, in ballast and not worth sinking, so we let her go. Then we lay and creaked in a calm for two days, a hot, steamy, uneasy calm, smelling of newly caught fish, after which we suffered from light and variable airs that left us wallowing here and there like a drunken seaman.

  We were well over toward the coast of Cornwall one dismal morning when the lookout sighted two craft in the southwest. We made all sail in chase of them, and when we discovered that one was a ship and the other a small xebec—a xebec being a three-masted craft with square sails on the foremast and lateen sails on the main and mizzenmasts—it seemed to us our luck had taken a turn for the better.

  When we came up with the ship, she hoisted English colors. It seemed strange to me that she should be so slow a sailer, for she had the appearance of smartness; so we hoisted American colors, bore up and gave her both long guns, hulling her near the water line. I thought for a moment she had struck, for she lowered her ensign. The men set up a roar; but there was something about her I misliked. She kept a small yellow flag at her main, which seemed contrary to good sense; then, in merchantman fashion, hauled up her mainsail slowly and clumsily backed her maintopsail.

  I shouted to ’Lisha Lord that something was wrong and immediately wore ship, passing into her wake. When we were in a raking position, ’Lisha and Pendleton Quint gave her both long guns, and we could see the distant cabin windows go out as the grape and the round shot went in.

  The gun crews stood with open mouths, waiting for her to come into the wind in token of surrender. Instead of that, she wore; and as she wore she ran up her ensign again. Ports flew open along her gun deck, and we saw she was a heavy sloop-of-war, disguised by closed ports and by having a tier of ports painted on a strip of canvas stretched over the channels, so to look like a merchantman.

  “My God!” ’Lisha shouted. “It’s the Gorgon!”

  Her side disappeared in a white cloud, above which we could see her sails spreading, fast, as no merchantman ever set them.

  The round shot from her broadside went over us, wailing like giant sea gulls, and there was the clattering hiss of passing grapeshot, a most unsettling noise.

  I heard a grinding thump from the waist. When I looked along the deck I saw a round shot had caught poor black Sip, the brother of Pomp, and taken his hip away. He lay there looking first at the great raw hole in himself; then up at Pendleton Quint; then back at himself again, with a terrible look of anxious surprise on his face.

  Pendleton jumped over him and sighted his gun, careful and delicate, as if sighting at a distant goose. He pulled the lanyard, and the smoke blew down across us, setting us to coughing and filling our eyes with moisture. When it blew away, Jotham Carr had got Sip out from under the feet of the men, so they could load with no interference.

  We made sail upon the wind and left her very fast; but fast as we left the Gorgon—if indeed it was the Gorgon, as ’Lisha Lord said and swore—it was nothing to the quickness with which Sip left us. He lay in the scuppers for a time; for Jotham Carr refused to let us move him, saying it would be no use and would only hurt Sip. He smiled a gray smile up at me. “Gosh,” he whispered in his flat Maine speech, that seemed to me so strange to come from a black man’s lips, “smoky wind, Cap’n Dick—good troutin’—Kimball’s Brook—le’s go fishin’—to-morrah—”

  So Sip went home to Arundel; and I, remembering it was I who had persuaded him and Pomp to leave their little cabin on the high land above the marshy banks of our river, wished myself back where I could hear the red-winged blackbirds chucking and whistling in the bayberries at the edge of our creek—where I would never have to smell gunpowder again.

  * * *

  It was the devil’s own work to hold the men in hand and get the Lively Lady out of the Loire again that autumn. The amount of our prize money had leaked out and been magnified in the leaking; and so sure were the men that they were close to having the wealth of merchant princes that I was hard put to it to make them remember our country was still at war. They let slip no chance to remind me they were set on sailing in a larger vessel than the Lively Lady; and I knew it to be true that the increasing wariness of the British made it advisable for privateersmen to use larger craft, heavily armed and manned. None the less I knew the Lively Lady was a lucky boat, whereas God alone could tell what our fortune might be if we changed.

  Finally I got her to sea again, and the cussedness of this cruise was greater, even, than that of the preceding one.

  Again and again we were robbed of prizes by the alertness of British cruisers; and once a fast British merchantman struck her colors to us toward dusk, let us slip alongside her, then ran up her colors, opened fire onc
e more, cut up our rigging so that our mainsail came down on the run, and finally escaped us in the dark. To cap it all, while we were cruising off the Spanish coast, we found ourselves one dawn in the midst of the whole British fleet supporting Wellington’s armies. We tacked like a fly dodging a broom, got some holes in our sails and one through our hull, and to escape had to throw over our carronades, so that the only guns left to us were our two long eighteens.

  When, therefore, we saw the islands of the Loire again, the men were glum and dark and truculent, and I was no less gloomy than they.

  * * *

  There were new faces in the narrow front room of L’Aigle d’Or when I came into it on a dark night in early December, though Captain Hewes was still there, a bottle of Vouvray before him and a stranger sitting across from him—a stranger whose hat perched precariously on the side of his head.

  Hewes pushed a glass of Vouvray into my hand before I could unbutton my jacket. “We needed you,” he said. “Dawson sailed for home, and Troutman was captured; and France has too many Frenchmen in it for our taste. Captain Hailey and me, we’re getting lonesome.”

  “Hailey?” I asked, looking quickly at the stranger.

  “You hit it!” Captain Hewes laughed. “He’s the one: captain of the True Blooded Yankee, out of Brest.”

  Now there was no American seaman who hadn’t heard wild yarns of the brig True Blooded Yankee, though she had been privateering only since late in February or early in March; but, accustomed as I had become to hearing fantastic tales of our privateersmen, I didn’t believe the tenth of what I heard about the True Blooded Yankee, any more than a grown man believes fo’c’sle rumors of the Flying Dutchman.

  “Well, sir,” I said to Captain Hailey, “I’m glad to meet you and find you’re flesh and blood and not some sort of corposant that’s been fevering the brains of the British.”

  Hailey laughed and lifted his hat, replacing it on the opposite side of his head, tilted at the same dangerous angle.

  “Why,” he asked. “What have I done now?”

  “We heard you’d captured an island in the Channel and held it two days,” I said.

  Hailey scratched contemplatively at the comer of his mouth. “That wa’n’t quite so,” he said.

  “Well, it didn’t sound reasonable to me,” I told him.

  “What happened,” Hailey said, “was that we rammed a wreck off the Irish coast and had to careen ourselves somewheres and fit two new planks; so we picked ourselves a nice island and took it and put the natives to work. There was an armed schooner that thought different, but we mounted our long guns on shore and sank her.”

  “How long did you hold it?” I asked, goggling at him.

  “Heh, heh, heh!” Hailey said. “Six days!”

  Hewes raised his eyebrows at me. “He took nine towns in Scotland and Ireland and held ’em for ransom; and he went into one harbor and burned seven vessels. He came home with two hundred and seventy prisoners and a four-million-dollar cargo, in addition to the prizes he manned out.”

  “Oh, here, here!” Hailey protested. “It wa’n’t four million dollars!”

  “How much was it?” I asked.

  “Gosh, I don’t rightly know,” Hailey said. He checked on his fingers. “There was twelve thousand pounds of raw silk, eighteen bales of Turkey carpets, twenty boxes of gums, a hundred and sixty dozen swan skins, twenty-four packs of beaver skins—oh, gosh! Say three million and a quarter, or three and a half, or so. I’m going up to Paris now to see Mr. Preble. He’s owner.”

  “Well,” I said, “you made a great haul!”

  Hailey hitched forward in his chair. “I tell you, I’ve got a fast brig. She’s fast! And I got a crew that won’t be took. They’ll outshoot and outfight anyone.”

  “Why will they?” I asked. “They won’t outshoot and outfight my crew, man for man!”

  “Yes, they will,” Hailey said. He tilted back in his chair with an air of confidence. “Yes, they will! We couldn’t pick up enough Americans; so Preble, he had some hokus with the French, and we searched the prisons for seamen: American—English—anybody that wanted to chance it.”

  We stared at him in silence, and he smiled at us.

  “Was you ever in a French prison?”

  We shook our heads.

  “No,” he said, “and you don’t want to be. These men of mine, they wanted to get out, and they don’t want to go back. And the English among ’em, they don’t want to be took. If they’re took they’re swung from the yardarm quick. Quick! Real quick! Why wouldn’t they fight? I’ve got a big crew, two hundred of ’em; and you never saw anybody shoot faster and straighter than they shoot, when they have to. I’ve got a fast brig, and there ain’t anything going to get away from me when I start out after her; not anything!”

  I began to see why the True Blooded Yankee had become such a terror to the British, and I wondered how I would like a crew taken out of French prisons; but before I could make up my mind, I heard someone running along the flagstones that edged the river.

  There is little running in French towns on dank December evenings, when all good Frenchmen are snugly sealed in steamy kitchens; so we fell silent and looked toward the door, where M. Solbert, his hands cupped around his eyes, had pressed his forehead against the glass to see who it was that pelted so unceremoniously beneath the silent elms of Nantes.

  The rapid footsteps came closer. M. Solbert fell back suddenly from the door, and in that moment it opened. Tommy Bickford stood before us, blinking and peering about the room. There was a smudge of soot on his cheek and a charred hole in the front of his pea-jacket.

  He came to me. “Cap’n Dick—the sloop! She burned!”

  He made a quick little bow to Captain Hailey and Captain Hewes, and smiled at me uncertainly.

  “Did she bum to the water?” I asked.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “How’d she catch?”

  Tommy looked at Captain Hailey and then at Captain Hewes. “Speak up!” I said. “I think I know. They set her, I’ll bet! They saved my papers and the long guns, didn’t they?”

  “Yes, Captain: they saved pretty near everything.”

  “Then they set her,” I said. I turned to Hewes and Hailey. “They wanted something bigger, so to carry more men and man out prizes.”

  Hailey laughed dryly. “I can tell you where to find the extra men,” he said. “I can show you all the nicest jails in France.”

  So there was I, who wished to shorten the war, left without a vessel. I thought of the miniature in my pocket and stared at Hailey, while it seemed to me clear that I’d have most earnestly preferred his jailbird crew to my own simple downright fellows from home.

  XV

  THE brig I got to take the place of the old lucky Lively Lady I bought from a fox-faced Frenchman, Robert Surcouf: she lay in the basin at La Rochelle, and we were three months reconditioning her. Privateering was no new venture for her: the fox-faced Robert Surcouf had sailed her and fought her years before against the English —sailed her and fought her in such a manner as to bring him undying fame. Her figurehead had been a white shrouded woman of wood; and Surcouf had called her the Revenant, which means the Ghost; and always, in Surcoufs hands, she had disappeared like a wraith from the fastest British frigates that hunted her. But six years before, rich from the taking of prizes, Surcouf had married and given his wife his word that he would fight no more; and being determined that the British should never touch her, yet wishing to have her somewhere within reach, he had dismantled her and laid her up, a dismasted hulk, in La Rochelle.

  It took a power of persuading and 4,000 English pounds to get her from him; and on top of everything I was obliged to sign a paper that I would never allow her to fall into the hands of the British. Having gone that far with him, I brought my crew from Nantes to work upon her, and they did it with a good will too; for not a man of them but could see, under the lumber and the pigsties and the steep-roofed penthouse with which she had been disguised
and disfigured, her beautiful run and great breadth of beam.

  “Fifteen knots!” Surcouf had bragged. Yet when I saw her made fit for the sea again, I doubted that he had bragged at all. We rigged her as she had been rigged when Surcouf had sailed her—as a taunt-rigged brigantine: square-sails, that is, on her foremast only, and high-masted. Her mainmast was a handsome tapering stick; her upper spars drew out into topgallant, royal and skysail masts that seemed as slender and fragile as the new wands that spring from a willow stump in June. Her shrouds and stays, beautifully fitted and served with hide wherever they lay in another’s chafe, were so few in number that a landsman would have deemed her as sparsely rigged as two fishing poles, and therefore useless.

  Our two faithful long guns stared grimly from their ports amid- ships; and sixteen carronades, which had come with the brig when I bought her, were lashed snugly on their slides.

  Her decks were scrubbed; the bolts and rings in her high and solid bulwarks shone clear and bright. Except for her riband she was painted a dull green, against which her copper shone like newly minted gold. We gave her a black streak, set off from the green by stripes of gilding; and I went down over the bows myself with Rowlandson Drown, bent on making her figurehead into something that would keep me from forgetting I must do whatever lay in my power to help make this war a short one.

  We cut away the shroud from the head and body of the corpse Surcouf had built, leaving a tight braid of hair around the brows, and making the shoulders smooth and sweetly rounded: then fashioned a snug little dress that flowed back into the cutwater. The lips and the eyes I carved myself with my jackknife; and when she was done we painted her carefully, the face a creamy ivory with a faint flush to the cheeks, the lips a brilliant red, and the hair a copper color, like that of a copper bolt chafed by the rubbing of a rope. The dress was a beautiful shimmery green with shadows and high fights, so that a breeze seemed to be whipping it around her.

  When she was finished, one evening early in March, I walked down to see how she would look in the moonlight, and Jeddy went with me, and Davy Maffett, captain of the privateer brig Rattlesnake out of Philadelphia—the same Davy Maffett who had sent prizes valued at one million dollars into Norway during the winter just past, and as daring a captain as ever sailed.