Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival

by Dean King

  Riley navigated the brig off the bank at about three miles’ distance. He now steered west southwest for the Double Headed Shot Cays. The Navigator put them at about forty-five miles away and instructed mariners to steer “S.W. by S.,” meaning Riley’s course was a bit northerly of what the editors recommended.

  In the afternoon, the Commerce was becalmed at the intersection of the Bahama and Santaren channels, though the day’s heat and frustration faded as the breeze picked up toward evening. Riley was intent on taking advantage of this favorable wind and cracked on to make up for lost time. Approaching the Double Headed Shot Cays at night was a dodgy business. These islets south of the Biminis were not well charted. “Should you sail for those kays in the night,” the Navigator warned, “by all means keep clear of them: there are a number of bare rocks, perhaps . . . an hundred and twenty, about the size of a vessel, and some less.” It recommended delaying an approach until dawn.

  But it would be a bright and glorious night. The moon, only a day short of full, rose as the sun set. Riley remained on deck, scanning the horizon all night, anxiously watching, unaware of the extent to which the strong north-northwest current had changed his position that afternoon. He was sure that they should have seen the cays by now. At four in the morning, he concluded that they must have safely passed them. Although he felt a lingering dissatisfaction at not having sighted the flotilla of small islands forming an unpassable trench in the sea, he was dog-tired. Reluctantly, he turned the deck over to George Williams while he went below to get some sleep. Before descending to his cramped private quarters, where his bed held a feather mattress (one of the few indulgences on board), he reminded Williams to keep a careful lookout on all sides for land, breakers, or white water, and he told the watch to look alive.

  About an hour later, a shock to the keel awakened Riley from his uneasy slumber. The shriek of wood on coral turned his sweat cold as he flung his legs out of bed. In the next instant, he was up the ladder and rushing onto the deck, where it was now light. “Starboard the helm,” he yelled to the man at the wheel. This checked the brig’s speed. “All hands on deck,” he shouted. With nerves alive and trembling, he took in the crucial data: brig making ten knots to the southwest, land to the north, breakers dead ahead and to the south. He seized the helm and turned it hard to port. At the same time, he commanded the men to let the sails run, in effect turning off the engine, and to ready the anchors for dropping.

  Again the coral reef beneath them screeched against the brig’s hull and, after an agonizing silence, yet again. The Commerce was floating over the reef in about fifteen feet of water. Mercifully, it was calm. In rising and falling seas, her hull would have been slammed against coral heads as hard as stone and as sharp as a razor. “Drop anchor,” Riley bellowed. The Commerce came to a rest. The men took in her sails. Riley ordered a small boat lowered. In it, he and four men searched for an opening in the reef. Finding greater depth to the reef’s leeward side, they sounded out a passage. Riley returned to the brig, ordered her head turned, and got under way again. By seven in the morning, the emergency was over, and the brig was sailing toward New Orleans, but Riley was rattled. In all his long experience at sea, he had never navigated a vessel into such a scrape. Furious, he pored over the chart and the log, astonished to see that the only possible explanation was that the current had forced—as he put it, “horsed”—the brig no less than sixty miles to the lee in sixteen hours, nearly four miles an hour, so far that she was about to be swept onto the menacing Carysfort Reef, a shipping graveyard on the edge of the Gulf Stream, about six miles from Key Largo. Two minutes more, he calculated, and the Commerce would have been dashed on the reef’s southwest corner.

  Yet Riley did not reprimand his crew, nor did he blame himself. “I mention this incident,” he later wrote, “to warn the navigator of the danger he is in when his vessel is acted upon by these currents, where no calculation can be depended upon, and where nothing but very frequent castings of the lead, and a good look out, can secure him from their too often fatal consequences.” This was the first stroke of bad luck for the men of the Commerce.

  The brig now ran southwest along the Florida Keys, keeping off them by a dozen or so miles and staying at comfortable depths of some thirty fathoms (180 feet). At noon on May 24, she rounded the Dry Tortugas, the cluster of islets that mark the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico, in sixty feet of water.1

  Two days later the Commerce reached the mouth of the Mississippi River, arriving at Balize, a low, marshy island. Balize was so flat that distant mariners first saw it as an American flag flapping on a pole rising directly out of the sea. Here the brig was met by the pilot boat, which placed her on the official “arrived” list.

  Thirty-three miles farther on, Riley presented her papers, as required, to the commanding officer of Fort St. Philip, beside the brackish swamps of the Plaquemine Bend. The Commerce proceeded past the tricky shoals seven miles north, where the land was so narrow that at a height of just a few rungs up the shrouds, Riley could see the sea less than a musket-shot away.

  Having considerable experience navigating the mighty river, Riley assuaged his ego somewhat on the ninety-five-mile approach to New Orleans. There was an art to swimming against the combined currents of the Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and dozens of other rivers that formed the Mississippi, especially in the full flow of spring. With a fair wind, the key was to travel from point to point, avoiding the bends as best as possible, and thus not only shortening the distance traveled, but minimizing the effects of the current and avoiding the sunken trees along the murky banks that could puncture a ship’s bottom and foul her anchors.

  As on the Connecticut River, the bow lookout had to keep a sharp watch for potential hazards. An alert captain took frequent soundings as his vessel approached each point. In light wind, he kept a boat’s crew on the ready to carry a hawser, a five-inch-thick rope, to the bank for tying up to trees, which was preferable to anchoring, since it allowed for faster reaction to favorable winds and eliminated the possibility of fouling the anchors.

  The crew of the Commerce were rivermen, after all, and the Connecticut could be tricky to climb too, requiring towing from the bank at its worst. As the Commerces worked their way up the Mississippi, they passed outward-bound vessels headed for all parts: Mobile, Pensacola, Bay St. Louis, Liverpool. Riley worked the crew hard, out-sailing dozens of vessels heading north and arriving at New Orleans on the first of June.

  The city, only recently acquired by the United States from France after four decades under the Spanish flag, bustled with 25,000 people, a population so diverse that the Navigator declared no city of its size anywhere in the world had a “greater contrast of national manners, language, and complexion.” It also noted that few places could match it for the pursuit of “pleasure or . . . profit.”

  For three weeks, the Commerces had the run of the waterfront, where sailors bathed at the newly opened Navy Hotel, dined for a dollar at the Irish Coffee House, and for five dollars took home souvenir engravings of General Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, the last battle of the war and an unnecessary one since it took place after the signing of the Treaty of Ghent but before the news could cross the Atlantic.2 They could buy fashionable Cossack boots from Pittsburgh, the latest hats from Leghorn, or old Cognac straight from France. The more reserved Connecticuters could sit back and watch the free-for-all. New Orleans was a magnet for riffraff, drifters, wanted men, and refugees from all over. Two days after they arrived, a Louisiana Gazette and New-Orleans Mercantile Advertiser editorial excoriated the city’s “wretched police”: “The bridges almost at every square are broken, and the accumulated filth in the streets and gutters exceeds any thing of the kind exhibited in [any other] city under the United States government:—In fact, every other part of the police is equally bad,” complained the editor. “Licentiousness and riot (if paid for) is granted—and the city guard protects the rioters, by imprisoning all civil citizens who may interfere.”


  Adding to the city’s air of lawlessness were the Gazette’s not infrequent advertisements for fugitive slaves and sailors on the lam. The reward for runaway slaves was roughly $30, the reward for Navy deserters $15. Riley might have seen a notice by one plantation owner admonishing captains against shipping a handsome, thickset escaped slave named Shadrack, who could be identified by a small scar on his forehead and burns on the back of his hand. Another of the Gazette’s announcements warned that a fugitive mulatto named Tom might pose as a white man.

  Slaves could be bought at the auctions that were held frequently at various coffeehouses. Ads, such as one for a “negro house wench, about 19 years of age, and her child about 15 months old” and another, with apparently unintended irony, for a “negro boy named Liberty,” alerted potential buyers to public sales.

  Riley notified Talcott & Bowers, a well-known merchant house, of his arrival, and two days later the firm placed an advertisement in the part-English, part-French Louisiana Gazette, whose banner—“America, Commerce, and Freedom”—exemplified the spirit of the day. The ad, situated in the prime upper-right-hand corner of the newspaper’s front page, billed the Commerce as a “staunch fast sailing brig” able to stow sixteen hundred barrels and ready to receive cargo in three days.

  In the meantime, Riley discharged his hold full of bricks and hay, which Talcott & Bowers also advertised. In New Orleans, captains could fill their vessels with every kind of commodity imaginable, including a batch of two hundred bear skins available when Riley was there. As an experienced supercargo, Riley would have been given loose parameters as to what to carry on the middle passage of his triangular route. He would have been equipped with introductions in New Orleans and a number of European ports, based on the good reputations of Justus Riley and Josiah Savage. Though the owners would rely on Riley’s discretion to make the best possible deal here, they presumably gave him more detailed instructions regarding what to bring back for their stores in Hartford and Middletown. Talcott & Bowers lined up a cargo of tobacco and flour for him to carry to Gibraltar, “principally on freight,” according to Riley, meaning the brig owners were compensated for hauling the goods and did not share in the risk or profit of selling them at the other end.

  Rugged and raw but eminently stylish, half cosmopolitan, half frontier, New Orleans was nothing if not a place of opportunity. The two ordinary seamen, Francis Bliss and James Carrington, asked to be discharged so that they could seek theirs. Archie Robbins recorded only that they “objected to going a voyage to Gibraltar, to which place the vessel was bound.” In their stead, John Hogan and James Barrett, two ordinary seamen from Portland, Massachusetts (now Maine), decided to try their luck in the Commerce. Riley gave the command to set sail for Gibraltar on June 24, six days after Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, a fact that had not yet reached America.3

  On the Atlantic crossing, the men had time to become familiar with one another’s habits, quirks, and skills. Porter and Robbins became close friends. Burns put his musical talents to good use. Clark and Deslisle entertained the crew with war stories. At Chippawa, two miles above Niagara Falls, Ketchum’s company had held out against three times its number of redcoats in fierce fighting in the woods. At the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, the bloodiest battle ever fought on Canadian soil and one that ended the American offensive in the Loyalist British colony, they had laid a trap at Portage Bridge and captured British General Phineas Riall and part of his staff, wounding Riall in the right arm in the process and stunning the enemy.

  The old-line Connecticuters had a reserve of family tales to fall back on. Just as the Savages and Rileys had a history of going to sea together, so did the Rileys and Robbinses. One story was always sure to produce hearty laughs. When Frederick Robbins, Archie’s uncle, had decided to further serve his country by outfitting and sailing on board a privateer, he asked his neighbor Captain Jabez Riley to take command. Two men more unalike are hard to imagine. A wealthy farmer and veteran of Bunker Hill, Frederick was an erect military man, who in later years took to dressing in a velvet-collared indigo coat and ruffled shirts, riding in fancy carriages, and drinking French wine in crystal goblets. Jabez Riley, a chuff seaman not given to extravagances, buried his savings in an orchard on his property, hidden even from his wife.

  To no one’s surprise, their partnership was short-lived. Early on their first cruise out of New London, they dropped anchor in a hopeless fog, only to find themselves, when the veil lifted, practically kissing a British frigate. The two had plenty of time to hash out their disappointment on board the infamous death-ship Old Jersey, where they rotted for months before being exchanged for Hessians taken by Washington.

  The Commerces could further amuse themselves in hearing again the result of Jabez’s monetary prudence. During a later storm at sea, certain that his vessel would founder, Jabez put a note with the location of his buried cash in a bottle and threw it overboard, regretting his extreme secrecy and trusting that an honest person would find it and deliver it to his wife. The vessel somehow survived the storm, however, and Jabez rushed home, dug up his money, and deposited it in a chartered bank. When the bank promptly failed, the captain bitterly cursed the fact that he had survived only to make his wife poor.

  During quiet times on deck, in the evening or at dawn, Riley had the leisure to reflect on his own experience. He thought back to the debacle of the Two Marys. Getting tangled up in the European war had been most unfortunate for him. Chased by one side, he had been robbed by the other and stranded on the Continent. Although he witnessed “many important operations in the science of war” there, his most lasting souvenirs were a facility with French and Spanish and, as he put it, “lessons in the school of adversity, which tended to prepare and discipline my mind for future hardships.”

  The Commerce crossed the Atlantic in good time, about six weeks, and knifed into the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar, the thirty-six-mile gap that separates two continents and two cultures.4 At the eastern end of the Strait, the men of the Commerce looked upon two mighty promontories, the mythic Pillars of Hercules, which were said to have once been part of the same mountain range until the fabled strongman wrenched them apart, thus joining the two seas. The sailors would have two weeks to explore the fourteen-hundred-foot Rock of Gibraltar on the European side, while they would only view the almost-three-thousand-foot African promontory Jebel Musa from the sea.

  On August 13, four days after reaching Gibraltar, the Commerce landed her cargo of flour and tobacco. On shore, Riley conducted business with a Gibraltar merchant, Horatio Sprague, who entertained him at his home. Sprague, a bachelor who hailed from Boston, was a stout, vivacious man with wavy, slightly disheveled hair, a broad face, and owlish eyes. He and Riley got on famously. It was a heady time for Americans in the Mediterranean. In June, Decatur’s squadron had captured the forty-six-gun frigate Mashouda, killing the Algerian admiral who had terrorized the Mediterranean, and prompting the Dey of Algiers to agree to return his American captives, make reparations, and establish normal relations—thus renouncing the right to tributes from the United States. In July, the thirty-six-year-old Decatur gave the Bey of Tunis twelve hours to accept similar terms. Before accepting, the exasperated potentate exclaimed, “Why do they send wild young men to treat for peace with old powers?”

  Horatio Sprague, Esq.

  (from Sequel to Riley’s Narrative, 1851)

  Decatur’s squadron proceeded to Tripoli, where in 1804, as lieutenant, Decatur had made his name in a daring raid to burn the U.S. frigate Philadelphia, which had run aground and fallen into the hands of the Tripolitans. Then Decatur had saved face for the U.S. Navy; now he brought the Bashaw of Tripoli to his knees, capping off a campaign that ushered in a new era of free trade in the Mediterranean.

  The acting U.S. consul in Gibraltar took advantage of the high spirits generated by these events to beg Riley to accept a passenger, a penniless old sailor who was anxious to work his passage across the At
lantic. Antonio Michel, a native of New Orleans, had recently been wrecked on Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. Riley agreed, and Michel came on board with little more than the clothes on his back.

  Riley also met Captain Price of the American schooner Louisa, which had just arrived from New York City. She was bound for Barcelona and was standing off and on in the bay waiting for Price to return to proceed east. He told Riley that if he accompanied him out to the schooner, he would give him a copy of the New York Price Current and some newspapers.

  In need of the latest information for gauging his purchases, Riley took the longboat with Porter, Robbins, Barrett, and Hogan out into the bay.5 It was a windy afternoon, and the schooner was far out, three miles into the Strait, or Gut, as it was then known, where a stiff current ran to the east. By the time Riley retrieved the items Captain Price had promised him, it was dusk, and Price was as eager to proceed to Barcelona as Riley was to return to port.

  As Riley and his men prepared to step the longboat’s mast and hoist her sail, they were hit by a rogue wave; Riley later called it a “toppling sea.” They all jumped overboard in a vain effort to keep the boat from filling. With the light fading and the Louisa speeding off and already a mile away, the situation suddenly looked dire. Bobbing in the choppy sea, the sailors shouted and waved their hands in a last-ditch effort to attract the attention of the Louisa’s lookout.

  By a fortunate stroke, the wind carried their voices. Captain Price heard them and turned the schooner around. In the dark, he sent out a boat. The rescuers hauled up the Commerces and righted their boat. Soaked and shivering but thankful to be alive, Riley and his crew returned to the Commerce around ten o’clock.