Wadsworth nodded in reply. He waited for the right moment and then, with Richard’s help, pushed the tiller hard to larboard, forcing the sloop’s bow to starboard. Richard signaled Avery to release the mainsheet. As her bow tore through the wind, Elizabeth took the full brunt of the near-hurricane-force winds on her larboard side. She yawed sharply over to starboard, close to her beam ends. Avery slipped and fell onto his back and slid helter-skelter across the deck until the rope securing him to the jack-line jerked him to a halt just shy of the bulwarks. He struggled to his feet, groping wildly for the flailing mainsheet. He managed to seize hold of it, wrestling it as though a bucking stallion were at its other end. As Elizabeth slowly came to rights, Richard eased her bow back to eastward, forcing the wind from the mainsail, which thundered in protest. Wadsworth, again judging the moment right, surrendered the tiller to Richard and stumbled forward to where Avery was battling the mainsheet. Together they hauled in the unruly beast and secured it to a belaying pin. At the tiller, Richard eased Elizabeth off the wind until her double-reefed mainsail came taut, her rudder found traction, and she plunged ahead into the frothing, mounting swells.
Wadsworth fought his way back to the helm, and Richard yielded the tiller. The oilskins both men wore to protect them from the storm were weighted with snow and ice. “Steer by the binnacle, Jake,” he shouted in encouragement. “Keep her as steady as you can on a course south by east.”
“South by east, aye, Captain,” Wadsworth shouted back into the screaming wind.
That course, Richard calculated, would take them inside the great sandy wings of Nantucket Island, a landfall that he pictured as a gargantuan manta ray swimming upon the ocean’s surface in a southeasterly direction. Her outer shores might feel the shock and surge of the stormy Atlantic, but once inside those protective wings, the eastern one capped by a towering wooden lighthouse on Sandy Point, a vessel found safety as long as the wind did not rage from due north, which it rarely did. The harbor of Nantucket Town was Elizabeth’s destination, and they would get there none too soon, unless one of the two hundred whaling ships that called Nantucket home suddenly appeared before them in the murk. A collision would likely mean the swift end of everyone on board the sloop. At this time of year, the life expectancy of a man immersed in these waters could be measured in minutes.
Gradually the seas subsided, although a stark wilderness of wind and snow continued to engulf them. Forward, Joel Collins grabbed hold of the jack-line and trudged aft, hand over hand, toward the helm.
“The fog lifted long enough for me to catch the shore, Captain,” he shouted when he reached the binnacle. He pointed in the general direction. “Brant Point lies two points to larboard. Land’s coming up fast, sir,” he warned.
“Understood, Joel,” Richard yelled back. “Alert the men. We’ll need their help. It may be safer now on deck, but I want everyone on deck tied on until we’ve passed the point.”
Their ordeal wasn’t over yet. Land was closing too rapidly to steer into the northeaster on a close haul to the harbor entrance. They had to swing Elizabeth around to northward, back into the fierce onslaught of wind and waves, to the outer reaches of the protective wings, before she could make one last final lunge to safety on a broad reach.
In due course Elizabeth glided past Brant Point and into the harbor’s sheltered waters. One final swerve to the northeast and her crew dropped anchor and doused her small strips of sail. Around them, vessels of various sizes and descriptions bobbed at anchor, their top-hampers white with snow and ice, an armada of ghost ships facing into the wind.
Richard ordered everyone below and the hatchway secured. In his cabin he peeled off his oilskins and seaboots and leaned against a bulkhead, closing his eyes as he uttered a short, silent prayer of thanksgiving. Wearily, his energy spent, he went to his sea chest and pulled out a thick woolen sweater, adding it to the two layers he already wore. Gathering up the remainder of his dry clothing, he carried it forward to where his crew had slumped down onto the damp deck. Most had their heads down with their arms dangling across their knees.
Richard tossed his spare clothing onto the deck. “For anyone who needs these,” he said. He looked around at his spent crew. “Let’s see where we are, lads. For starters, has anyone taken inventory of our stores?”
“I have, Captain,” replied Timothy Cates, a young topman who did double duty as ship’s cook. “They didn’t leave much. We have a few biscuits and some bits of meat. That’s about it. We do have wood for the stove. And,” a grin lit his face, “they didn’t take the rum, sir. I reckon they didn’t find it, stored up forward. We have all four casks.”
“Well, at least there’s that,” Richard acknowledged, adding, in a more hopeful tone: “All right, lads, here’s the drill. We’ll get the galley stove going and we’ll keep it going. Everyone sleeps here tonight, by the stove. We’ll maintain five watches of two hours each, two men each. Collins and I will take the first watch. Each watch has two responsibilities: to make certain the fire doesn’t go out and to go up there,” indicating the hatchway ladder, “every hour to clear away the snow and ice from the hatch cover. Unless, of course, you enjoy it down here so much you’d prefer to stay the winter.” He attempted a smile. No one seemed able to summon much of a reaction. The eyes fixed upon him were those of the half-dead.
“Right. I suggest we indulge ourselves with a tot of rum and what biscuit we can spare. Mind you, no one gets drunk tonight. We must keep our wits about us. We won’t feast, but we won’t starve either. Tomorrow, when this storm blows over, we’ll find provisions ashore to see us home.”
Two days passed before Elizabeth’s crew was able to climb up on deck and begin the arduous task of dumping snow overboard and chipping away at the inch-thick ice on the standing rigging. The morning was brilliant and bitterly cold, with a cloudless sky and a moderate northwesterly breeze. Snow, perhaps two feet of it, with drifts considerably higher, cast an almost blinding white pallor over Nantucket Village, a cluster of shops and homes nestled close together by the harbor’s edge. Wisps of smoke curled up from many of those homes, some of them, those belonging to whaling captains and ship owners rising up in the background, as elegant in federalist design and red brick construction as anything Richard had seen in Louisburg Square in Boston.
His first order of business: find food for his crew. The meager rations they had managed to unearth had run out the previous afternoon. Seeing no activity ashore, Richard scanned the decks of vessels anchored nearby, most of them whalers of one design or another. He saw no activity there, either, except on board one ship-rigged vessel anchored not far away. On her deck, men were chipping away at ice-coated rigging with iron mallets, just as his own crew was doing.
“Call out the gig,” he ordered. “Cates, go below and bring up a cask. Put it in the bow of the gig.”
“A cask, sir?” Cates questioned.
“Yes, Cates, you heard me. A cask. A full cask.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Swinging out the boat was a relatively easy task, secured as it was to the weather deck bottom-up. The men had just to flip it over, loosen the binds holding the oars, insert tholepins into the gunwale on both sides, and hoist it out and down with tackle rigged on stays and the yardarm with a midshipman’s hitch. Richard was soon on board, seated on the center thwart and rowing toward the whaler.
“Ahoy!” he cried up to a deckhand breaking ice on lower shrouds at the fore chain-wale. The man was so heavily clothed that Richard could distinguish nothing about him except that his beard was long, curly, and coal black. “Is your master aboard?”
“No,” the man yelled down. “He be ashore.”
“Are his mates aboard?”
“One is. What can I do fer ye?”
Richard shipped an oar and brought his free hand to his mouth.
“I am the master of the sloop you see over there. We were caught in the storm on our way home to Boston. I need provisions for my crew.”
“So
rry,” the mate declared unsympathetically. “We’ve no provisions to spare. Try ashore in town.”
“I cannot,” Richard persisted. “You can see for yourself that everything is closed up tight and will be for some time. Please, sir, my men are hungry. They have not eaten since yesterday. There are ten of us, and we need only a two-day supply.”
“Sorry, mate,” the man shouted again, irritation entering his voice. “I can’t help you.” He went back to chipping at the ice-laden shrouds.
“I am prepared to pay!” Richard shouted up at him.
“Do tell. With what? Spanish gold?” The man guffawed at his own wit and whacked a shroud with his mallet. Shards of ice clinked onto the deck and splashed into the water.
“No. With something better than Spanish gold.”
“And what would that be, pray?”
Richard pointed his thumb back at the large wooden cask. “West Indian rum.”
The man paused in his work. For several moments he stared down at Richard and the cask set behind him.
“Rum, you say?”
“Aye. Barbados dark rum, the best you’ve ever tasted. As you and your mates will agree once you sample it.”
Early the next morning Elizabeth set sail for home, her crew content with full stomachs.
NORTHWARD BOUND, they could see evidence ashore that the blizzard had struck the mainland of Cape Cod with the same devastating force as it had the islands. Each picturesque coastal village they passed—Chatham, Wellfleet, Truro, Provincetown—lay entombed in white, and hardly a glimpse of human activity was to be seen anywhere. The fishermen and tradesmen of these seaside communities sat huddled inside their homes before the hearth, taking what comfort and solace they could from human fellowship and a crackling fire, in the same way their Saxon and Celtic ancestors had done when confronted with such a calamity. Aboard Elizabeth, as she sailed past wintry scenes that were at once spectacular and horrifying to the eye, every man prayed that his own family was safe and warm and somehow managing to cope.
As it turned out, the storm had only grazed the South Shore of Boston before it howled eastward into the Atlantic. Because every member of his crew lived in or near Hingham, Richard decided to bypass Long Wharf and steer directly for Crow Point. It would be late in the evening by the time they arrived there, too late for those who lived farther away to get home that night. But at least those who lived near the docks could be with their families.
“Goodnight, lads,” Richard said later that evening to the four sailors remaining on board. It was 9:30, and Elizabeth lay snug against a Hingham quay. “I’ll be back in the morning with horse and carriage to take you home.”
“Thank ye kindly,” one of the four replied. “An’ Cap’m, seeing as how we’re off duty, do ye mind a-tall if me and the boys nip into that last cask of rum?”
“Nip to your heart’s content, Pulley,” Richard urged. “Lord knows you’ve earned the right. Tomorrow I’ll bring along some extra hands in case we should need to carry you and your mates aboard the carriage.”
The full moon cast an amber glow as Richard trudged through several inches of freshly fallen snow to his home on South Street. He hoped his family would still be up, although he realized that was not likely. The black shroud of winter closed in early over New England in December, and the one sure way to keep warm during those long, bitter hours was to wrap up inside thick woolen blankets and sleep through the night.
At the entry to his home he paused, listening. No sound. He creaked open the door and stepped inside. Still hearing nothing, he closed the door gently behind him. He removed his seaboots and struck a spark on a tinderbox to light a candle kept on a shelf near the door. A quick survey of the downstairs confirmed that his family had indeed gone upstairs to bed, although not long ago, judging by the low fires still burning in the parlor and kitchen. He tossed several fresh logs onto each hearth. Flames crackled up, adding warmth to the rooms downstairs and, to a lesser degree, those above.
He unbuttoned his sea coat and shrugged it off, placing it on a wooden peg in the foyer above his boots. Candle in hand, he climbed the stairs in stocking feet. On the second floor he paused outside the first room in the hallway to the right, cracked open the door, and peeked in. Will was curled up asleep on one bed, Jamie on the other. He was tempted to wake them but decided against it, imagining their surprise the next morning when they came downstairs for breakfast and found him at the kitchen table. He closed that door and clicked open the next one down the hall.
“Is that you, Mommy?” a sleepy voice called from the shadows.
Richard placed the candle in a sconce on a side table and sat down on the edge of the bed. “No, Poppet. It’s me.”
“Father!” Diana mumbled with sleepy delight. She sat up, now fully awake. “When did you get home?”
“Just now.”
“Does Mommy know?”
“Not yet.”
“Well you must go and tell her, Father. Right away.”
“Why, Poppet?” Richard asked with concern.
“She’s very upset, Father. I saw her crying this afternoon. I asked her what was wrong, but she wouldn’t tell me. I told Will, and he said to mind my own business. But she’s worried, Father. She’s worried sick, I just know she is.”
“Worried sick about what?”
“Why, I should think about you, Father.”
A lump formed in Richard’s throat. He swallowed hard. “Well,” he managed, “Mommy’s a very lucky mommy to have a daughter like you who cares about her so much. I’ll go see her right away, all right?”
“All right.” When she had settled back, Richard pulled the comforter up to her chin and kissed her forehead. As he did so, she reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Father?”
“Yes, Poppet?”
“I’m so happy you’re home. I’ve missed you. We all have.”
Another lump. Another hard swallow. “I’ve missed you too. Go to sleep now. Promise?”
“I promise. Good night, Father.”
“Goodnight, Diana. I love you.”
At his own bedroom at the far end of the hall to the left, he opened the door and crept inside. Katherine was asleep on the far side of the bed, her back to him, her chestnut curls flowing across the checkerboard coverlet. He set down the candle and watched her sleep as he stripped off his clothing, a hundred thoughts, memories, desires infusing a mind beset by what his daughter had told him. It was one thing for a man to face the dangers of the sea, but quite another for his family to suffer because of it.
He lifted the blankets and slipped in naked beside her, nestling close, savoring her body heat and feminine scent, allowing his body to warm before touching her. She stirred when she felt him nuzzling her ear and cheek.
“Mmm, Richard?” she murmured dreamily.
“Yes, my love. Were you expecting someone else?”
Her eyes flew open. “Richard!”
She turned about and was upon him in an instant, kissing him, running her hands over him, clawing at him with frantic intensity. “I thought you weren’t coming back,” she wailed. “I thought you were gone!” Weeping openly, she clutched him to her, squeezed him, touched him everywhere, her wild ministrations inspiring more pain than pleasure.
“Gone where? Don’t you know that I’ll always come home to you?”
She stopped short, as if slapped. Then, as though emerging from a hypnotic trance, she brought her hand to his cheek and gazed deep into his eyes, convincing herself that, yes, she was awake; yes, he was home; no, this was not a dream; yes, the nightmare was over. “I heard tell,” she half-whispered, “of a terrible storm south of here. I heard tell of many ships lost at sea.”
“Who told you that?”
“Captain Bennett,” she said in that same faraway tone. “I heard him talking to people in a village shop on Monday. He said it was the worst storm he had ever seen, by half. He said that his was the last ship to escape hell. And he said that no ship could survive such
a storm, that any ship caught in it must be presumed lost. I hurried home, but I didn’t say anything to anyone except Agee and Lizzy. I had to tell them, Richard. I know I shouldn’t have. Lizzy is so close to her time and mustn’t be made to worry. But I had to tell someone.”
He tucked a loose strand of chestnut hair behind her ear. “Well, Frank’s a good man, not one to spread panic. And he was right; there was a fierce storm off the Cape. But we were in no danger. We rode it out in Nantucket, which is why it took us so long to get home. We’ll set Agee and Lizzy straight in the morning, after I see to my crew.”
She let out a long, heartfelt sigh that sounded more like a lament. “Oh, dear God, Richard, you must forgive me. I don’t know what possessed me. I’ve never reacted this way with you away at sea. I—”
He brought a finger to her lips. “Ssh, Katherine. It’s all right. It’s all right, my love. We’re together now. We shall always be together, you and I.”
“Oh yes, my dearest, my darling! Oh yes!”
She closed her eyes and brought her lips softly to his as her hand slid down to fondle him with a gentle, willful touch born of carnal knowledge and a thousand nights as his lover. They held each other, pleasured each other, loved each other until long after the candle had guttered into darkness, and the warmth that sustained them through the cold of that long December night was theirs and theirs alone.
Six
Hingham, Massachusetts Winter 1798
THE CUTLERS celebrated the Yuletide of 1797 in customary fashion. Thomas Cutler invited friends and neighbors to come to his home on Main Street early on Christmas Eve to enjoy a round of spiced punch and seasonal tunes orchestrated by Anne and Lavinia, who were holding forth at the piano. Later that night, their guests gone, the Cutler family settled in to listen to the family patriarch read Scripture by the light of red Christmas candles. At ten o’clock they gathered close by the fire and went around the room, each adult in turn relating his or her best memory, first, of Elizabeth Cutler, then of Will Cutler, the eldest son who had been brutally flogged and hanged on board a Royal Navy frigate in 1775 for striking a king’s officer. It was an emotional ordeal for those who spoke, the passage of years notwithstanding. But it was a meaningful way to hold the family matriarch and her eldest son in the sacred light of Christmas, and for the budding branches of young Cutler cousins to learn more about their family tree.
The Power and the Glory Page 8