by John Drake
“Do you yield, sir?” says he.
“I do, sir!” says I, after a moment’s thought, for I could feel his sword-point hovering just under my chin. He sheathed the blade and bellowed at a couple of his men to take me in charge, and I was roughly hauled to my feet for the blood to be wiped from my eyes and a bandage to be clapped on my head. Then it was across to the Yankee, which incidentally gleamed like a new pin, with snowy decks and shining metalwork that would have graced a flagship.
She was full of men, all of them grinning and reckoning up their shares. They pressed round to view their prisoner, and to have some fun.
“Hey, Limey,**The word “Limey”, used as a derisive term for an Englishman, comes from the use of lime juice as a preventative against scurvy. Americans seem to have found this amusing and a thing peculiar to the British. Official use of lime juice by the Royal Navy began in 1795, a year after the events described here, but presumably its unofficial use was well established. S.P.” says one of them, in his nasal Yankee honk, “how’s King Jarrrge? Still tokkin t’ th’ trees?”
By George they laughed. But I didn’t. Every Englishman knew that the King was mad but we didn’t like it pointed out to us by others. The grinning clown who made those remarks can consider himself very lucky that I was wounded and had a man hanging on each arm. So I ground my teeth and thought myself a much abused man. In fact I’d little to complain about from this sort of treatment. In later years I witnessed what happened to a Colonel of Turkish Police who fell into the hands of Greek pirates. The decks needed hosing down when they’d finished with that beauty.
Meanwhile, the clown got bolder. He stepped right up to me and jabbed his finger into my chest.
“Say, what’s the difference between a Limey and a seagull?” All hands awaited the denouement that never came.
“Belay that!” roared a voice; it was the officer who’d downed me, Commander Cooper he called himself, who’d come aboard that instant, “Get about your business, you men! This ship’s filthy — it looks like a hog-waller!” And all credit to him, the silly grins vanished and his men snapped to it like lightning (and left me wondering all these years what the answer to the riddle might be). “Get the surgeon to this man,” says he, looking askance at the steady drip of blood from me to his gleaming quarterdeck, “and take him below!”
To my surprise, “below” meant the great cabin, in the stern with its span of windows and shiny furnishings, rather than some pokey surgeon’s den under the waterline. I was joined in the cabin by the sawbones himself, one of his mates to hold his tools, and by Commander Cooper and Lieutenant Hunt, his second-in-command.
While the surgeon did his work, the officers fired stern questions at me on the movements of other British ships. But with a needle going in and out of my face at regular intervals, I paid them less than full attention. I began to regret not having been left on Bednal Green, now on her way to Boston under a prize crew, and I thought I was in for rough treatment, but once the surgeon had done, he took himself off and Cooper called for food and drink, and I had the chance to look about me a bit. I even asked a few questions of my own, and learned the basics about my captors.
In the first place, John Stark was something odd for a privateer, as Commander Daniel Cooper and Lieutenant Eustace Hunt both regarded themselves as officers in the newly reformed American Navy (the Yankees wound up their navy at the end of the Revolution, and didn’t re-form it until ’94) and they ran the ship service-style. For instance, they used their navy titles and they wore their service uniforms. They’d seventy men on board, all prime seamen, they’d provisions for a six-month cruise and they’d twenty-four guns, not counting carron-ades. John Stark was something precious close to being a small frigate.
But she was legally a privateer. Cooper and Hunt might have been officers, but the Yankee Navy had no ships, so both men had joined a venture financed by a group of Boston merchants, who’d taken advantage of the political situation to fit out a private cruiser as an investment. The Yankees had a long-established tradition of privateering, with each merchant receiving a share of two-thirds of the value of any vessel captured by their ship. That’s Yankee enterprise for you.
The remaining third, of course, went to Long Island’s crew: three shares to each of the officers and equal shares to every other man jack. That’s Yankee democracy for you.
So that’s the ship I’d come aboard of. And strange as it may seem, I never was better treated in any ship in my career. Once the actual fighting was done, the John Stark’s were as merry as could be, and bore me not the least ill-will. Quite the reverse in fact, as I will explain. They kept me aboard because of my wound while the rest of Bednal Green’s crew went locked under their own hatches to Boston under a prize crew. The wound ran across my forehead and round to one ear and Cooper said he felt responsible, as the inflictor of it, and thought his own surgeon should have charge of me.
Well, it was a Christian act undoubtedly, and I’d be the last to complain, but I’ve had worse wounds than that and recovered — with or without a surgeon’s aid. So I don’t believe that was really why I was kept on board. The truth was more complicated and very interesting too, for it shows how folk will say one thing and believe another.
Commander Cooper and his Lieutenant were two peas out of the same pod. Smart young men, keen as mustard and mightily proud of their ship. They were delighted to have taken a prize so early in their cruise, and as regards myself, at first they were like their men, only more genteel.
They’d got themselves a genuine Limey prisoner and they wanted to tell him what was what. That was the first reason I was in their ship. They were full of defiance of Kings and Tyrants and they drank to the downfall of the “BriDish” Navy and the martyrs of the Revolution (theirs, that is, not the Froggy one).
“I’ll tell you, sir,” says Cooper, “now I’ve seen my men stand firm under such fire … why, damned if I don’t hope the next ship we encounter’ll be one of your frigates!”
“I drink to that, sir!” says Lieutenant Hunt and raised his glass.
“Good luck to you both, me boys,” thinks I to myself, “and I hope you get your wish.”
“By Heaven!” says Cooper, “wait till we tell those fellows at home,” and he grew so benign that he turned his smile on me and raised his glass. “Your health, sir,” says he, “for a noble enemy!”
“And to our own noble dead,” says Hunt.
So they toasted again and refilled. They were getting happier by the minute. Hunt leaned across and slapped my shoulder.
“Damned if I shouldn’t’ve liked to have shook the hand of your gunner, sir. The man who kept us under such a deadly fire, and hit our bow-chaser with a single shot.” He shook his head seriously and I noticed that Cooper did too. “Never seen such a thing!” says Hunt.
I was taken aback. What “noble enemy”? What “deadly fire”? They’d fought a merchantman armed with pop-guns and they were blathering on as if they’d sunk the Spanish Armada. And surely the silly devils knew it was only chance that I’d hit their gun. And then the light shone upon me. I’d been taken in by the uniforms and all the smart seamanship. These were really youngsters like me. But they’d never been in action before. It was their first time. They’d seen shot come aboard and men killed, and in their innocence, they thought they’d been in a real battle.
At once, I saw an advantage here waiting to be taken.
“Sir,” says I to Lieutenant Hunt, sitting straight in my chair with all the dignity I could assume, “my gunner offers you his hand,” and I shoved out my paw.
“Goldarn it!” says Hunt with shining eyes, pumping my arm with all his might. “Where d’you learn such gunnery, sir?” He’d won you see, so he could afford to be gracious. When you praise the skill of your vanquished enemy, you are praising yourself twice over.
“I learned gunnery aboard His Majesty’s Ship Phiandra,” says I, which as you know, was the simple truth. But the effect upon the pair of them was el
ectrical. They nearly shot out of their chairs.
“By cracky!” says Cooper, “not the same Phiandra that whopped the tar out of two French forty-gunners at Passage d’Aron?”
“The very same,” says I. “I had the honour to serve in that action.”
Clip! Clop! Their jaws dropped together.
“You mean you sailed under Captain Bollington, the gunnery genius?” says Cooper, and everything changed. You could see the envy and hero-worship oozing out of them. They’d have given an arm and a leg each to have done what I had. Their navy hadn’t fought an action since ‘85.
And so we passed a most congenial evening together. At first I was amazed at how well informed they were about events on the other side of the Atlantic. But I shouldn’t have been. Ships passed to and fro all the time, and carried newspapers in them for all to read who cared to. And educated Americans were following the European war with intense interest. They seized on every scrap of information and chewed it over among themselves. And I soon found that Cooper and Hunt were as familiar with the London Gazette as any British officer, and they could quote chunks of the despatches on Passage d’Aron. But they were hungry for more news, which was the other reason they’d kept me.
Immediately they had me give my account of Phiandra’s battle against Thermidor and Taureus.
During this interrogation, I realised that they’d assumed that I was a naval officer, temporarily unemployed, earning his crust in the merchant service. Much like themselves, in fact. It would have been a shame to disappoint them with the truth and I thought I’d get better treatment as an officer. So I let this misunderstanding pass as fact, and it serves me right for the troubles it got me into later.
As we talked I was intrigued to see their genuine, as opposed to their pretended, attitude to the British peeping out. Despite the fact that they’d swallowed all the French political rot, and they’d not forgiven us for making them fight for their liberty, they had an enormous respect for the Royal Navy, and an envy for its huge size and limitless opportunities for professional advancement. What’s more, they obviously thought the Royal Navy set the standards by which others were judged. In short, they were modelling themselves on the British Navy. Now, of course, they didn’t say any of this. Not in plain words, and they’d have spat in my eye if I’d put it to them, but those were the feelings hidden just under the surface.
And then, just when I was thinking that Americans were just like Englishmen, only with peculiar accents, Cooper did something that no English sea officer would have done in a thousand years.
He had me up on deck, mustered his men in the waist, and demanded that I give the whole story of Passage d’Aron right through again, for the benefit of the common hands! Don’t ask me how he kept discipline, indulging the men like that. I’m surprised he didn’t ask their opinions before giving an order. But that’s Americans.
He introduced me as “Lieutenant Jacob Fletcher, late gunnery officer of His Britannic Majesty’s 32-gun frigate, Phiandra”. I let that pass and definitively accepted the lie which led me to so much pain.
On the next day, however, pain of a more immediate kind fell upon me. My wound went bad, as wounds sometimes will. The side of my face swelled up like a red melon, I felt weak and ill and couldn’t get out of my hammock.
Cooper and his men made a great fuss of me and I’d not have got better treatment from my mother (if ever I’d had one). But I slipped into a delirium and there I stayed for some time. I suppose I must have been really dangerously ill, but I remember nothing of it.
I came to myself, sickly and ill, and with a fine scar, in the second week of March when Long Island was homeward bound for Boston after a rattling fine cruise (from their viewpoint, if not from ours). Cooper had taken no other prizes, but Bednal Green alone more than justified the voyage, and his backers would be delighted.
On 15th March 1794, we saluted the fort with fifteen guns as we came into Boston old harbour and tied up at the Long Wharf. Dozens of fishing boats followed us in and the town turned out to greet John Stark with flags and music. Which was splendid for Cooper and his men, but not for me. I was taken ashore to the Court House and prison in Queen Street, to be interned by the military authorities. That’s what I got for posing as a Naval Officer.
Lesser forms of Britisher the Yankees set free as harmless, and I learned that Bednal Green’s crew had all promptly signed on aboard American ships. You can’t blame them. They had no money, nowhere to go, and as I’ve said, it wasn’t as if it was the Frogs.
Knowing where I was bound, Cooper supplied me with clothes and other necessities, and some money too. And his men gave me three cheers as they swung me over the side in a bosun’s chair, for I was still too ill to climb over the side.
And so I was stuck in a pokey room with barred windows and a truckle bed. It was in fact the best available cell in the prison, for I was their prize exhibit. A genuine BriDish officer. The first they’d caught. It wasn’t a bad place for a gaol but for me it was a miserable time. I was so feeble that I had to spend most of the day in bed, which gave me endless hours to brood and troubled nights when I couldn’t sleep ‘cos I was never properly tired. Also, young as I was, my past was catching up on me.
My conscience was pricking for the men who’d died because I wanted to fight for my money. Much of it was nonsense that I should never have worried about, but not all, and anyway I was alone, and locked up and still sickly. And so I churned it all over and over in my mind: Matti the Braziliano Indian, who’d never see the jungle again; Horace with his chewed hat; and Welles with his leg blown off. None of them had wanted to fight, it was only my greed. Worse still, I started to fret over my shipmates from Phiandra. Particularly I did at night, when a black despair settled on me.
I missed Sammy Bone, who’d been a father to me, in place of the real father I’d never known: Sir Henry Coignwood the potteries millionaire, with his bags of gold, the very bags of gold I’d turned my back on. I even wondered about the servant-girl, Mary Fletcher, who’d died giving birth to me.
But worst of all, this got me thinking about Kate Booth (the girl I’d had aboard Phiandra) and I couldn’t get her out of my mind. And so I fretted and dreamed of her: a tiny, slender, little thing, so sweet and lovely even if she was a Portsmouth tart. I wondered if she’d ever cared for me, other than as a protector.
This happy state of affairs ran on for a week until one afternoon, all unannounced, Cooper came bustling into my room, with the Commandant of the prison and a document for me to read. It was a piece of a Yankee newspaper, some weeks old. Cooper chattered and smiled and apologised he’d not come sooner, but pleaded pressure of work and was friendly as could be. But I was reading what he’d given me and wondering whether to laugh out loud or struggle to my feet to see if I could manage to knock his teeth out.
7
The horrible murder of Mr Ivor Jones, a respectable Master Butcher of Old Street, reported in yesterday’s edition, is now alleged to have been committed by one Johnson, a meat porter.
(From The Morning Post of 9th September 1793.)
*
The thin, rickety door burst into ruin as Slym threw his weight on it and led his men into the room. The place stank of damp and human filth, and it was dark as a cellar. The only light came from a feeble sunbeam that had fought its way in through the grimy scraps of glass in a window that was mainly stuffed up with rags. A few wretched sticks of furniture were scattered about, and the “bed” was a heap of rags against one wall. In other words, the room was a perfectly ordinary example of the accommodation to be found in a Liquorpond Street tenement opposite Meux’s Brewery in the Parish of St Giles’s, where nine families lived in twelve rooms on four floors.
A thin wail came from the bed and one of Slym’s men started forward.
“Wait!” snapped Slym, and thrust him back with a heavy blackthorn stick. The three men blinked in the gloom and the dull forms on the bed took the shape of a woman with a pile of children clutched a
bout her. Slym went to the bed and was confronted with a familiar scene: the old-young face of the woman, marked by regular beatings and starvation, the skinny, half-naked children that had learned not to cry out even in their terror. Slym was used to such things.
“Mrs Johnson?” said Slym, and the woman nodded. “Where is he?” said Slym, and she shook her head, far too frightened to speak. But her eyes flicked upward.
“Ah!” said Slym. “Danny, you search the room; Jimmy, let some light in.”
Slym jabbed upward with his stick. “There’s a way up top somewhere,” he said.
Meanwhile, and with gusto, Jimmy took his cudgel to the window and noisily smashed it out: glass, frames, rags and all. Light flooded in and the search became unnecessary. In one corner was a half-open door leading to a steep, cramped stairway up to the roof space.
“Mister,” pleaded the woman, “for Gordsake don’t say I told. He’d kill me if he thought I told.”
“Huh!” said Slym. “I shouldn’t worry about him, missus. It don’t matter what he thinks now.” Danny grinned, and to interpret Mr Slym’s remark for the benefit of Mrs Johnson, he took the end of his grubby cotton cravat, and pulled on it like a noose, making rattling noises in his throat. Strangely, this did not comfort the lady but threw her into floods of tears. “Right,” said Slym, taking a grip of his stick, “with me, lads!” and he started up the stair.
“Mister,” cried the woman, desperately, “he’s got a knife. For pity’s sake don’t let him do for my Daisy.”
“What?” said Slym. “Get back there,” he said to Danny and Jimmy and pushed his way back into the room. “What’s this, missus?” he said to the pathetic creature.
“It’s my eldest, Daisy. He’s got her up there and he swears to slit her throat and then his own rather than be took.”
“Fire and shite!” said Slym and sighed heavily. He looked at Danny and Jimmy. Good lads, the pair of ‘em, for a scrap. But not an ounce of brain between ‘em. “Now then,” said Slym, “you two stay here and guard that door.” He pointed to the stairway. “And if he comes down without me, then he’s all yours and I don’t care what you do with him.”