by Ron Carter
Caleb squinted up at the crow’s nest. “Any ships moving?”
“Far to the west. None towards us, sir.”
Caleb walked to Tunstall. “Can you calculate when we should see the island where the Belle is beached?”
“Sometime after ten o’clock. Ever searched for a ship wrecked on rocks or a reef?”
Caleb shook his head. “No.”
“Sometimes you’re right on top of them before you see them. We’re going to have to move closer to the islands.”
“How close?”
“As close as the reefs and the rocks and the sandbars will let us. The man in the nest is going to have to look sharp.”
“Shouldn’t be hard to see rocks and reefs and sandbars in this water. Why is it so clear?”
“There are no rivers on these islands. Nothing to wash silt down to the sea to dirty it.”
Caleb’s eyes widened in surprise. “No rivers? How do the people get fresh water?”
“Dig cisterns and put out barrels and canvas to catch rain. Distill seawater. Any way they can. Ships bring water to some islands and sell it.”
Caleb asked, “What do we do about other ships while we’re close to the islands?”
Tunstall shrugged. “We take our chances.”
Caleb sobered and paused for a moment. “Better mount our cannon?”
“Your decision. Speed’s your best weapon. Speed and maneuverability.”
Caleb took a deep breath. “No cannon. When do we start?”
“Now.”
“All right. I’ll get the crew to their posts. You take your charts to the helmsman and give him his heading. The ship is yours. Who do you want in the nest?”
“Bartolo.”
Caleb gave orders, and every crewman took his place on the railing, some scanning the beaches and inlets for ships, others for any sign of life in the tangle of lush growth on the land. Tunstall charted her course, the helmsman spun the wheel, and the Zephyr cut sharply to starboard and bore in toward the islands with Bartolo sixty feet up the mainmast, watching every riffle, every change of color in the clear blue-green water, every rock or spine of coral beneath the surface, judging depth, calculating whether the small schooner could pass over them or must avoid them, shouting down orders to the helmsman who made instant adjustments.
The bowsprit of the ship was a scant forty yards from the white-sand beach of a small, uncharted island when Tunstall gave orders and the helmsman brought her hard to port. She leaned, then straightened on a course that took her south, parallel to the white strip of sand and the deep emerald green of the forest behind.
Caleb gave orders, and seamen climbed the ropes to the spars and furled all the sails on the aftermast and the top sails on the mainmast. The ship slowed and continued south, with the crew studying every outcrop of rock, every reef for anything that resembled a wrecked, burned ship. They cleared the south tip of the small island and continued on, Bartolo guiding them through the tricky jumble of coral and volcanic rocks that lay submerged, leading to the next small rise of land. The crew stared in silence as they passed the ancient remains of two ships that had been driven onto the sharp, jutting death traps. All that remained were the blackened pieces of their broken keels, and the stubbed ends of a few of the ribs, covered with two hundred years of coral growth and sea slime. Few things affect men of the sea like a ship, once alive and proud, now dead with its back broken and its naked ribs crumbling.
They had passed the second small island when Caleb came to Tunstall’s side. “Which of these islands are we looking for?”
Frustration showed in Tunstall’s face as he tapped the chart. “Right where we are. McDaris couldn’t say which one—only that it was here among the others.”
Caleb drew a breath. “We keep looking.”
It was past one o’clock, with the sun directly overhead and beating down to sweat every man dripping, when they approached the north end of the third island. Forty minutes passed before Bartolo’s voice sang out, high, excited.
“There!” His arm was stretched, pointing. “Past the cove! The mast! See the mast!”
Within seconds every man on deck was at the starboard rail, hands shielding their eyes as they squinted to the left of a tiny cove. There on the rocks was the broken, shattered mast of a ship, partially hidden.
Young shouted up, “Can you see the ship?”
“Not yet but it must. . . . NO . . . There! It is there, further down, south, in the rocks. Do you see the quarterdeck? And the bow?”
Instantly all eyes shifted left and strained and then arms shot up, pointing, and excited voices exclaimed, “There! I see it. There!”
Within minutes they were thirty yards from the broken remains of a ship, and while some crewmen dropped the anchor, others jammed their shoes on and worked to launch a longboat. Caleb and Young took their places, and six crewmen settled onto the plank cross-members, shoved the oars into the oarlocks, and bent their backs to drive the blades deep. They beached the boat, then worked their way through the rocks to the wreck.
She had been demasted by cannon and the storm before she slammed into the volcanic lava, hard enough to shatter the keel at midship, where the notch had been cut for the mainmast. With her spine broken, the hull had cracked amidship, to let the bow and the stern thrust upward, leaving the deck at the center of the ship awash. They saw the three black, gaping holes in the hull where cannonballs had passed through. The fourth was below the waterline. She lay in the rocks, the grotesque remains of a once proud thing.
Men of the sea spend their years locked within the sure laws of nature. The monstrous power of a hurricane has taught them of their own awful smallness. Cholera, or dysentery, or the black plague that can kill the entire crew of a ship at sea has taught them the frailties of all living things. Strange and unexplainable happenings in exotic places, of men driving knives into their bodies without blood, and others dropping dead in their tracks with no wound, has brought images of evil spirits lurking. Tales of ships swallowed by monsters of the deep, and of entire fleets that have disappeared without a trace, have created in their minds a world in which surviving the evils around them is by the grace of a power higher than their own. They are reluctant to mix with wrecked ships, where spirits of the dead crews might be lingering, to trouble the living.
Caleb led his men to the bow of the dead ship, where the bowsprit had been smashed away. Silent, reluctant, they carefully studied the outside hull on both sides of the splintered stump. The paint was peeled and faded, but the engraving in the heavy oak was intact. The name Belle was unmistakable.
“We found her,” was all Caleb said before he led his men scrambling onto the tilted deck of the forward half of the ship. They saw the places where cannonballs had blasted the railings and the hatches, and musketballs had punched into the wood. The hatch covers had been ripped away, and they peered down into the blackness of the forward hold. It was flooded. They waded past the water that swamped the deck amidship, to the quarterdeck, where the passage down to the officer’s quarters had been smashed by cannon shot, and then worked their way to the captain’s compartment. The door was cracked, top to bottom, and hung inward at a deep angle, on one hinge. The small room inside was wrecked, with everything of value gone. They found the room where Adam had bunked, with his charts and navigation equipment, and it too had been sacked and smashed.
They climbed from the gloom back onto the deck, to the nearest hatch. The cover was gone, and the hold was filled with salt water. There was no way to go down to search for bodies, nor were there any signs of one. If men had died in the fight, they had gone to their graves in the sea.
Caleb turned to Young and Tunstall, standing on the tilted deck, sweating. “There are no longboats here. We’ve got to look on the beach.”
They went ashore and divided the men. Caleb led his group south on the strip of white sand while Tunstall and Young worked their way north, walking slowly, heads turning from side to side searching for anything t
hat would suggest a longboat had been there. Ninety minutes later they met back at the wreck of the Belle.
“See anything?” Caleb inquired.
Tunstall shook his head. “No sign.”
“Is there anything else we can do here?”
“Nothing.”
Within minutes they were back on the deck of the Zephyr, and Caleb gathered the crew on the quarterdeck. He pointed at the wreck of the Belle as he spoke.
“No sign of the crew, or the longboats. It makes sense that the crew, or what was left of them, took the longboats and tried for land. If they did, where are they, and how do we find them?” He studied the faces of the men and waited.
Abel Hedquist, aged, round-shouldered, craggy face wrinkled and burned brown by a life on the sea, was the first to speak. “I seen this before in these islands. If they got ashore and the British found ’em, they’re in a British port right now, in a prison. The British will find out that the Belle is out of Boston, and they’ll send a demand to the harbor master up there. We got a Boston crew from the Belle down here in prison because they was taken in the act of piracy. We’ll hold ’em for ninety days and then hang ’em for pirates unless you want ’em back. If you do, deliver five thousand pounds British sterling to us here to pay for the damages they done and we’ll consider letting them go.”
Caleb turned to Young in disbelief. “The British would do that?”
Young bobbed his head. “They’ve done it before. So have the French. Legal piracy.”
Both Tunstall and Young watched Caleb’s eyes narrow and they could not miss the light that came into them, nor the purr in his voice as he spoke.
“We’ll see about that. Where do we start? Which British port?”
Tunstall thought for a moment. “The two biggest ones close by are south of here, on the next big island.”
“What name? The island?”
“Cat Island.”
“Is that where you’d start looking?”
Tunstall looked at Young before he answered. “That’s where I’d start.”
Caleb said, “Chart your course, Mr. Tunstall.”
Notes
For maps of the islands referenced in this chapter see Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783, page facing 227; National Geographic Society, The National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our World, pp. 64–65; and see also the description of the Bahamas, including the fact there are no fresh water rivers, the water is clear and blue-green in color.
For an explanation of spanker sails, jib sails, and the detail of ships of sail as referenced in this chapter, see Jobe, The Great Age of Sail, pp. 2–155.
The Bahamas, Windward Channel
Early July, 1787
CHAPTER XIX
* * *
Miles Young climbed from the hold of the Zephyr, dropped the cover banging on the hatch, and walked barefooted toward the tiny quarterdeck of the small schooner, with the sun hammering down from directly overhead, and a strong, blistering east wind at his back, blowing his long hair and moving his dark beard. He wore nothing but a pair of frayed gray cotton pants that reached just below his knees. From his waist up and his knees down, he was burned brown. He moved on the smooth, worn deck with the easy, rolling gait of men who had learned the rise and the fall and the roll of the deck of a ship running with the wind. He took the four steps up to the quarterdeck two at a time and stopped where Caleb and Nathan Tunstall were standing next to the helmsman and the big wheel that controlled the ship, holding a chart down in the wind while they pored over the markings.
Caleb spoke without looking up. “How do we stand?”
Young looked at the written list he had made belowdecks in the commissary and answered, his British accent prominent, and his fourteen years of training as a midshipman and first mate in the British navy limiting him to as few words as possible.
“Two days fresh water, four days flour, four days salt fish, one day salt beef, no potatoes, no carrots. All rotted. We can eat fish from the sea for a while, and maybe get coconuts or bananas from one of these islands for a little milk and meat and fruit, but we can’t get fresh water unless we stop to resupply in the next few days. This heat sucks water out of a man. We’ve got to have fresh water.”
Caleb considered for a moment, then spoke to Tunstall.
“How far?”
Young hunched over the chart with them to watch Tunstall trace a course with his finger.
“We’re here, about center in the Windward Channel. One of the few good passages from the Atlantic to the Caribbean.” He shifted his pointing finger. “Here, about thirty-five miles to the east, is Haiti. French. Their biggest port is St. Nicholas, right here. The eastern half of the island is Hispaniola. Some call it Saint Domingo. Santo Domingo. Spanish, not French.” Again he shifted his finger. “Here, about thirty-five miles west of us, is Cuba. Spanish. No regular ports here on the east end but a lot of little coves and inlets where ships put in for water or fruit or tubers.” He made a circular motion with his hand. “This whole spread of islands is called the Greater Antilles.” He moved his hand south and west. “We’re headed here to Jamaica, dead ahead. In the Caribbean. British. Their biggest harbor is here, on the leeward side. Called Port Royal. The town of Port Royal—what’s left of it—is here, and across the harbor, here, is Kingston.”
Caleb studied the chart and repeated the question. “How far?”
“The harbor? From here, a little over three hundred miles. We’ve got to go around the southeastern tip of the island, here, then back west about fifty miles, here.”
Both Caleb and Young peered at the chart and the markings Tunstall had made in the past fifteen days, carefully charting their headings, and identifying the eight islands among the hundreds of the Bahamas, great and small, where they had dropped anchor in a few scattered, tiny ports and harbors. They had gone ashore to inquire in the squalor-ridden villages about a missing crew from a ship named the Belle, out of the port of Boston in the state of Massachusetts, far to the north in the United States. Some of the natives had rolled their white eyes in their black faces and shook their heads, while others shrugged and turned away. A missing ship crew? From America? The islands were steeped in wrecked ships and missing crews from every port in the civilized world. One more from America meant almost nothing.
Caleb, stripped to the waist, scratched at his three-week’s beard and looked at Young. “You think Port Royal is the next place to look? Not Haiti or Cuba?”
Young shrugged. “Who knows? It makes sense to me. We found the Belle in the Bahamas, and they’re British. We never found the longboats. I think the crew got off the ship before she wrecked. If they did, there are a lot more British ships in the Bahamas than either French or Spanish, so the chances are strong that a British ship picked them up. If it was a British ship, they would most likely put them ashore at some British port in the Bahamas. We’ve been there and no one’s seen them. So where would a British ship be heading if not in the Bahamas? A French port in Haiti? A Spanish port in Cuba?” He shook his head. “They’d be heading to a British port, and the biggest one in the Caribbean is right there.” He pointed. “Port Royal on Jamaica island.”
Caleb turned to Tunstall. “Your opinion? Do we go there looking?”
The navigator ran his hand through his blowing hair and slowly shook his head. “I don’t know. Young’s been down here more than me. Maybe the longboats sank and the crew with them. Maybe the French have them, or the Spanish, but I doubt it. I don’t think either of them want to risk trouble with the United States, at least not right now. That leaves the British. If the crew survived up in the Bahamas, then Young’s reasoning is the best chance we’ve got. If the British have them at Port Royal under authority of their Orders in Council, they could be holding them in a prison, waiting for the United States to meet their demand that we pay to get them back. But, who knows?”
Caleb stared long and hard at the chart before he spoke.
“What does Port Royal amount to?”
Young shook his head and blew air. “The port? Pretty big. Deep water. The town? Bad. A hundred years ago, pirates everywhere. A big earthquake hit sometime in the 1690s and sank about half the town into the Caribbean, along with half the people. That’s when Kingston started to grow across the bay. Hurricanes finished what the earthquake didn’t. Had another earthquake about ten years ago. What’s left is old buildings and sugar and rum and bad women and taverns and people of mixed blood from all over the world, mainly slaves or their descendants. In one hour you can find twenty men down there who’ll cut anybody’s throat for a pint of rum. Bad.”
Caleb asked, “Are we likely to get hit by a hurricane?”
“Not likely. Maybe a squall. A storm. They come any time. Hurricane season down here is in the fall. October, November.”
“If we go there, what flag do we fly?”
“British. England still claims Jamaica.”
For a time Caleb peered over the bow of the ship as though he could see Jamaica and the Port. He broke it off and said, “We go on. If we don’t find something at Port Royal we better decide whether we keep looking or turn back. There are too many islands down here—thousands—and we can’t keep this up forever.” He paused for a moment. “It sounds like Port Royal could be trouble. We better have a plan. We’ll have to work it out with the crew.”
For two days and two nights the little schooner sped on, first west until Bartolo sighted the windward side of the island of Jamaica, then south, around the tip, then back nearly due north, keeping the coastline in the distance. The crew went about their daily duties with few words, constantly raising their eyes to peer ahead, searching for sails. After evening mess they gathered in the empty hold of the small ship with Caleb, Young, and Tunstall, and under yellow lantern light worked into the night in the give and take of creating a simple plan to get into Port Royal, find the missing crew if they were there, and get out.