He put his arm around her. “This bedraggled mass of flesh,” he said, “could arouse a dead man.”
She squeezed his hand at her waist. “Thank you for saying that, Richard, even if we both know it isn’t true.” Her tone turned suddenly grave. “You will be careful, won’t you, darling?” She was imploring him as much with her eyes as her voice. “Please, my love, be careful. I can bear the thought of you being away at sea. I’m used to that. But I cannot bear the thought of you in danger.” She forced a smile, as though reading his mind. “Don’t fret. I shan’t break down on the jetty tomorrow or cause a scene. I am a daughter of the Royal Navy, remember? But you must promise me that you will take no unnecessary risks and that you will do only what you must to bring everybody home safely.”
“That I can promise,” he assured her.
THE NEXT DAY WAS STORMY, though not fiercely so, the cold, sleetflecked rain persisting in a blustery wind gusting to twenty knots judging by the whitecaps rolling into Boston’s inner harbor. The foul weather had at least the benefit of providing a diversion from the stress of leavetaking. Will took it like a man, lingering only briefly in his father’s embrace at Long Wharf as Falcon’s crew labored with stay-tackle to transfer three heavy wooden chests from the Hingham packet into the schooner’s hold, storing the $20,000 worth of specie near the munitions brought aboard earlier in the week. Thomas Cutler was thinking as much of Caleb returning as he was of Richard leaving, and his handshake in farewell was firm, encouraging.
“Go with God, Richard,” he said simply. “Bring your brother home.”
Not surprising to Richard was the fact that Agreen and Lizzy were having the hardest time saying good-bye. Agreen had spent the previous night aboard Falcon with the rest of the crew, making final preparations for departure. During the early weeks of the past winter, when Falcon had been tethered against the quays in Hingham, he had spent most nights aboard her, preferring the Spartan accommodations of his cubicle-sized cabin to the goose-down bedding available to him in the spare room on Main Street. In more recent weeks he had been lured ashore not so much by the hospitality of Richard’s family as by the warmth and welcome he discovered in the company of Lizzy Cutler.
“Is she spoken for, Richard?” Agreen had asked him in February—and several times since—and Richard was certain he would ask it again now as they sat together at the table in his cabin. The oilskins hanging on hooks on the back of the door dripped rainwater mixed with salt spray onto the deck. The coastline of Massachusetts was disappearing astern as Falcon knifed her way eastward through the frigid waters of the Atlantic under shortened sail and the attentive eye of her mate, Micah Lamont.
But Agreen did not ask that or any other question. He sat brooding, his eyes transfixed upon the steam curling up from the tin mug of coffee brought aft from the galley by Abel Whiton.
“You did a fine job getting her ready,” Richard said, to break the silence. “She’s shipshape to satisfy an admiral. And I’m pleased to note that you haven’t forgotten how to properly bowse the guns.”
Agreen gave him a grin at that, and a mock salute. “Just lookin’ t’ make sure you get your money’s worth, Captain.”
Although Agreen was one of the highest paid employees of Cutler & Sons, Thomas Cutler had had no trouble justifying the amount. Trouble was, by Agreen’s own account, he had no notion of how to spend or invest such wages. So he had asked the Cutlers simply to hold his money for him, withdrawing enough to put some coin in his pocket and to purchase, for Lizzy, a bright red woolen scarf that he gave her the evening before he sailed Falcon to Boston to load supplies and munitions.
“Somethin’ t’ remember me by,” he had told her as he handed her the gift. She had smiled at that, closing her eyes and holding the delicate fabric warm against her cheek. Then, to his surprise and that of Richard and Katherine, who were watching them, she had taken hold of the scarf by its ends and flicked the middle over Agreen’s head, around his neck. She drew him to her and kissed him, her mouth open, her lips lingering on his.
“Something to remember me by,” she replied when at last she stepped back, her hand on his cheek.
Richard sipped his coffee, savoring the heat and taste of the bitter liquid as it coursed its way down his throat. When he looked up, Agreen’s momentary flash of humor had vanished, and his eyes had returned to the mug he held firmly in his hand on the table.
“Will Dr. Brooke be joining us?” Richard asked.
Agreen glanced up. “What?”
“Dr. Brooke,” Richard said, referring to Dr. Lawrence Brooke, the ship’s surgeon. Brooke had served in that capacity aboard Bonhomme Richard, and Richard had sought him out in Boston specifically for this cruise. Brooke, being on the brink of retirement with most of his patients referred elsewhere, had accepted. Although a reclusive and somewhat officious little man, Lawrence Brooke was an unusually gifted physician, one whose services would be sorely needed on this voyage. “Will he be joining us for coffee?”
“I doubt it. I invited him as you asked me to, but he told me he wanted t’ work some in his cabin.” Agreen revealed a hint of a smile. “The man ain’t much for small talk, is he, Richard? Then again, neither am I, today. I don’t know what the hell’s gotten into me.”
“I know what’s gotten into you,” Richard said, “and it’s something good. I suggest you accept it for what it is.”
“That’s easy for you t’ say, matey.” He sounded almost in pain.
“Anything I can do?”
“No,” Agreen replied, then reversed himself. “Yes, Richard, there is somethin’ you can do. For starters, you can tell me t’ slack off and change tack. You can tell me t’ stop livin’ in this goddamn fantasy world and get a grip on myself. You can tell me t’ remember who I am and where I come from and what a frickin’ fool I am t’ think a woman like that would have anything t’ do with a man like me.”
Richard shook his head. “I won’t tell you any of those things, Agee, because none of them is true.”
Agreen gave him a bewildered, exasperated look. “Hellfire,” he exclaimed. “Lizzy was born an’ raised in England. By your kin, Richard, in luxury. I’ve seen the place she hails from. It’s a frickin’ palace a hundred times over compared t’ the hovel I grew up in. An’ that was in Maine, for Chrissakes!”
Richard shrugged. “What’s wrong with Maine?”
Before Agee could answer, a shout from the weather deck forestalled him. Both men instinctively glanced up to the deckhead, their senses alert for the stamp of feet on the ladder leading below that would signal a message from a lookout.
When they heard nothing further, Richard continued: “You ask why a woman like Lizzy would want anything to do with a man like you? Maybe it’s because she’s a good judge of character. So is my father. He’s a wise man, Agee, as I’m sure you agree. He was the one who proposed doubling your wages.” That forced a weak grin out of Agreen. “My father once told Will and me something I will never forget. What he said was, ‘Boys, as you grow older and make your way in the world, you will meet what will seem like many different kinds of men. In reality, there are only two kinds: those who are decent and God-fearing—the majority—and those who are not. The way to tell the difference, and the way to take the true measure of a man, is to observe how he treats people he cannot possibly use to his advantage. The better he treats them, the better the man he is.’ A worthy observation, wouldn’t you say?”
Agreen sat in silence.
“Look at it another way,” Richard pressed. “Have you considered that what Lizzy sees in you is what I see in you? What my entire family sees in you? What every man-jack aboard this schooner sees? That night you gave Lizzy the scarf. She kissed you and you blushed as red as a lobster in a boiling pot. You, Agee, a man who’s had every inch of his body kissed by God knows how many women the world over. You blushed. And the point is, so did she. That, my friend, is when I knew. About you both. There’s feeling there. You know it and I know it. I can’t predict the future
any better than you, but it seems to me that you have every reason to be hopeful about Lizzy. Katherine agrees. And she’s rarely wrong in these matters.”
“You reckon so?” Agreen asked, at length, a flicker of optimism brightening his face.
“I reckon so.”
Apparently willing himself to leave the subject of Lizzy behind, Agreen leaned forward with a serious glint in his eyes. “Seeing as how you have all the answers, Captain Cutler, I have one more question to ask you: Where on God’s sweet earth did Dale find those fire-arrows we have in our hold? I’ve heard of ’em, but I’ve sure as hell never seen one before yesterday.”
He was referring to an odd piece of ordnance that Richard Dale had managed to secure for Falcon in addition to the more traditional round-shot, grape, and langrage. It was a four-foot-long, thick metal shaft with an iron arrowhead at its tip and a wasp nest–like mass attached to the shaft just behind the arrowhead. Dangling down from the shaft on each side of the wasp nest were two long silver chains capped with menacing double prongs in the shape of fishhooks. The mass itself was made of hemp fiber, its hollow center stuffed full with sulfur, gunpowder, paint, pitch, saltpeter, anything and everything combustible.
“My guess is North Carolina,” Richard replied, “somewhere along the Outer Banks. Ocracoke was home base for Blackbeard for a while. Dale only said in his message that these arrows were Blackbeard’s weapons of choice. One look at them and you can see why. I’m glad we have them, though since we only have three, we can’t test-fire one at sea. If it comes to that, we’ll just have to hope that Blackbeard knew what he was about. Which I suspect he did.”
He drained his mug and placed it back on the table. “We do have enough shot to exercise the guns, however. And we’ll start doing that on a daily basis. It’s been awhile since any of us has held a linstock.”
“When do you propose we start?”
“No time like the present, Lieutenant.”
Falcon WAS BUILT to accommodate a ship’s complement of thirty sailors in addition to her officers and surgeon housed in the four after cabins. Which is why she had fifteen bunks built in against her hull in the crew’s quarters forward, the assumption being that one watch would come on deck to sail the vessel while the other watch went below. That she had a crew of only twenty-five on this cruise was based on a second assumption: that on the homeward voyage she would have Eagle’s crew aboard, and several of them would be too ill or weak to stand watch or perform other shipboard duties.
A crew of twenty-five was sufficient to sail the schooner. It was barely enough, however, to sail her and service her guns. If they were forced to fight a battle in foul weather, things could, in Agreen’s words, get a mite fiddly. Falcon had six carriage guns mounted on her flush deck, three to a side, each calibrated to fire a 6-pound ball a distance of up to one mile. In addition, she had eight swivel guns mounted on Y-brackets on her bulwarks, four to a side; each of the tiny cannon was designed to fire a canvas bag crammed with grapeshot. When fired at close range, these cast-iron balls, each weighing a half-pound, could cause havoc on an enemy’s deck.
A 6-pound carriage gun normally required a crew of four. Richard had Falcon’s guns operating with crews of three, with a fourth man moving between guns to help out whenever possible. Three guns to a side, nine men total, plus one man at each of the four swivel guns per side left twelve men plus her mate and sailing master—and her captain when he was not at the guns—to sail the schooner during a battle, a bare minimum possible only in fair weather, on a relatively flat sea, and with fore-and-aft sails furled. The three gun crews thus served guns on both sides of the schooner, which meant that Falcon could fire her starboard battery or her larboard battery, but not both at once. The consequences of being trapped between two enemy ships at close range would be dire, especially since, without anyone available to haul munitions up from the area in the hold that served as a magazine, they would need to position much of their powder on deck, each flannel bag a potential bomb if struck by enemy shot.
“Captain Jones once said,” Richard had told the assembled crew before the first gun drill that first day out of Boston, “that you judge a man-o’-war not by the number of her guns but by the skill of her gunners. You know the story of Ranger. She was a small sloop-of-war, but she never lost a fight against a Royal Navy brig or frigate. Not with Captain Jones in command. Falcon, too, is small. But she’s as fine and fast a vessel as sails this ocean. And I say to you that she will never be outsailed, outmaneuvered, or outgunned by Barbary pirates—or anyone else, by damn!”
As the days blended one into another, daily life aboard Falcon settled into a predictable, time-consuming routine that would delay the ship’s arrival in the Mediterranean by as much as a week, but was nonetheless a routine that Richard believed was critical to master.
After breakfast at 8:30, both watches set about practicing man overboard drills and sail drills. The more experienced seamen who would be called upon to navigate the vessel in the event her small complement of officers was incapacitated had lessons in spherical trigonometry as well. Drills were performed under the watchful eye of Agreen Crabtree, whose blue-water experience exceeded that of everyone else on board, including the captain. Assisting him was Micah Lamont, the schooner’s mate, who worked side by side with the crew as he directed their efforts either on deck or aloft in the rigging.
After dinner at noon and a half-ration of rum, gun drills began under Richard’s direction. For the first week it was pantomime, conservation of round-shot and powder being deemed paramount until the guns could be run in and out rapidly and flawlessly. By the start of the third week Richard noted significant improvement in the time it took to free the guns from their breeching ropes, tamp down the flannel bags of powder into the barrel, insert the ball, tamp that down, then haul on the side-tackle until the muzzles of the guns had run outboard through the square ports cut through the bulwarks. The improvement came as no surprise to Richard. He had fully expected it. These Yankee sailors were bred to battle and needed only to get back into the natural rhythms of gun evolutions.
From 3:00 until supper at 5:30 the crew had free time, save for those on watch duty or the extra hands required in bad weather. Candles were extinguished at the start of the first watch at 8:00, which was also the start of the six-hour, off-on rotation for alternate watches during the night. The system was an innovation introduced to the Continental Navy by Captain Jones aboard Ranger, in defiance of the time-honored rotation of four hours on, four hours off. Captain Jones had found the new procedure more to his liking—as did his crew, who performed better with two extra hours of sleep.
AT THE CAPTAIN’S signal, Micah Lamont cast out two empty cooper’s barrels from the stern and watched them splash into the sea in Falcon’s wake.
“Barrels away, Captain,” he called back.
“You have the helm, Tremaine,” Richard said to the leathery-skinned, gray-haired sailor who was twice the age of anyone else aboard. Tremaine had signed on with the frigate Raleigh during the war, first as surgeon’s mate as a way to be mustered into the ship’s books, then switching to quartermaster’s mate when the opportunity arose. Unlike many sailors, Nate Tremaine did his job because he loved doing it. He had little expectation of promotion or bonuses, and lacked much desire for either.
“Aye, sir,” he said, taking hold of the long, horizontal tiller.
Agreen brought a speaking trumpet to his lips. He was standing beside the mainsail, which was tightly furled on its boom, its canvas dripping wet from a thorough soaking given it by Seaman Isaac Howland lest a stray spark from a recoiling gun waft over and set it ablaze. “All hands! Stations t’ wear ship! Stand by the lee braces! Step lively there, you men!”
Sailors sprang to action to bring Falcon’s topsails and a full set of foresails around and lay her on a reciprocal course. Richard divided his attention between the three gun crews to starboard and the watch he held in his hand. Today would be their third drill with live shot,
and he was challenging his gunners not only to hit the target, but to knock several more seconds off the time it took to fire, worm and sponge out, reload, and fire again. His goal: the deck cleared for action in three minutes, a gun firing every forty-five seconds, and two discharges per sixty seconds for the smaller swivel guns.
Almost as one, each of the three gun captains raised his right hand, indicating his gun was ready. Richard checked his watch. “Fire as they bear!”
At the forward-most gun, Tom Gardner dropped to a knee and sighted his target bobbing up and down thirty yards off to starboard. Not satisfied, he pushed the quoin a notch further under the breech to raise the barrel a notch. He rose to his feet, stepped to the side, and blew on the slow-match glowing at the end of his linstock. He dropped the tip to the vent, and a flame flashed out, followed a split second later by the roar of the gun. In a blaze of orange flame, the carriage crashed back until checked by its breeching ropes. All eyes on board searched the sea for the splash. There it was—a plume of water shooting up three feet to the right of the barrel and slightly short of it.
“The devil!” Gardner cursed aloud. He ordered his crew to reload.
Seconds later, Phineas Pratt fired his gun, overshooting the mark.
The third gun fired, dead-on. With a resounding crack! thick shards of oaken staves splintered into smithereens.
“Well done, Blakely,” Richard called out to the gun captain. “A direct hit, and record time running out your gun. You and your crew have earned an extra tot of rum this evening.” In a louder voice, directed at the entire ship’s company: “We shall splice the main brace for every man aboard do we repeat that performance on the next volley!”
A cheer went up, followed by laughter when a sailor standing by the jib sheets shouted out: “Is that Cutler rum you’ll be issuing us, Captain? Or are we finally getting the good stuff?”
“Very amusing, Hobart,” Richard shouted back. He cast a fond eye upon Increase Hobart, a red-bearded, broad-shouldered bull of a man who had sailed with Cutler & Sons from its earliest days. “That comment earns you an overnight in the brig, with naught to eat but the weevils shaken out from Whiton’s biscuits!”
For Love of Country Page 9