The War of Knives

by Broos Campbell

  Howsomever it was, the circumstance of my birth was much on my mind as we rolled northwest to clear Tortuga and turned south into the Windward Passage. I watched the colored foremast jacks as they went about their business, but if they felt themselves to be any different than their white shipmates, they showed little sign of it. They were seamen first and black men a long way second.

  We made our westing around Cap du Môle, the far northwestern tip of San Domingo, and John Rogers, the sailing master, turned the Rattle-Snake south into the Bight of Léogâne. We were coming up on the patch of sea where my cousin Billy, our former captain, had disgraced himself in January. It’d been dead calm on that day, little more than a month ago, with a sea as flat and hot as an anvil. We’d been attacked by hundreds of Rigaud’s picaroons who’d mistook us for one of the merchantmen we were escorting down to Port Républicain. Billy had left the deck after we scorned his demand that we surrender to the picaroons without a fight, and it was Peter Wickett who’d saved our bacon for us in the scrap that followed. Blair, who had been on his way to take up his office in Port Républicain, had spent the battle getting drunk with Billy below stairs.

  “A fair and steady breeze today,” said Peter. It was a soldier’s wind on our larboard beam, course southeast by east to allow for leeward drift, and we skipped along with the whitewater creaming at our bows. It was the master’s watch, and Peter and I were drinking coffee on the quarterdeck. “And yet you seem indifferent to its glory.”

  Peter was so tall that it near about gave me the vertigo to look up at him, and he wasn’t what you’d call a handsome man, anyway. He had a pink scar on his cheek that looked like something had crawled off the seafloor and rooted itself there, and a long nose and chin that seemed to reach for each other at the tips. He also had an Africa-shaped port-wine stain on his forehead. The skin around it paled when he was angry, making him look like a Cyclops. But the mark was quiescent today, the skin around it smooth and brown.

  “Peter,” I said. I kept my voice low, and glanced around before I spoke again. “Peter, what would you do if you woke up one morning and discovered you was a Negro?”

  He blew on the coffee in the cup that he held in his bony fingers and cast an eye toward the master. Sailing Master Rogers was a brown-eyed, brown-haired, medium sort of man, with a long queue that whipped in the breeze—nothing remarkable about him, in short—and he stood next to the quartermaster and the tillerman, with a sextant in his hand as he took a bearing on a barren peak of Guanabo Island to the southeast. Satisfied that they all had their thoughts on their duty and were paying us no mind, Peter finally murmured, “What if I were to discover I were a Negro . . . Well, I shouldn’t tell anyone, for starters. Why should I be an accomplice to my own ruin?”

  “But what if somebody asks?”

  “No one of quality would ever ask such a thing.” He sipped his coffee, his long nose nearly dipping into it as he looked at me over the rim of his cup. “That sort of calumny is spread clandestinely, behind one’s back where one has no chance of circumventing it. Once one becomes aware of such a thing, it is far too late. One might as well run away to sea. Speaking of which,” he said as Rogers turned the glass and sent a man to the belfry to strike the bell, “the first dogwatch has begun and you have the deck.”

  He set his cup on the rail and strode off, twining his long fingers together behind his back and aiming his beak at this man and that, like a heron hunting for minnows.

  “What do you make of her, Mr. Graves?”

  “A French ship-sloop, Mr. Rogers.” I handed him back his glass. The Rattle-Snake dipped to leeward with the roll, and I ducked down to peer out from under the topsail. “What they call a corvette.”

  “Could be, aye.” Rogers was in the lee shrouds below me, hooked in with an elbow. He raised the glass to his eye. “Could be a frigate, too—a small one,” he said, before I could argue. “A twenty-eight, maybe. Hard to tell at this distance.” She lay about two leagues west of us, shaking out canvas as she emerged from the lee of Guanabo Island, the mountainous hump that divides the approaches to Port Républicain. “But the cut of her jib’s got ‘Johnny Crappo’ wrote all over it, I give ye that.”

  “I don’t like her, Mr. Rogers . . . She ain’t trying to catch us, though.”

  “Maybe they ain’t spotted us yet.” He spat a brown arc of tobacco juice.

  “Maybe they just know we can walk away from ’em to windward,” I said, watching the tobacco juice to make sure it didn’t land on my nice white deck.

  He shifted his chaw to his other cheek. “A dog don’t chase a cat that don’t run.”

  I looked down again. “Here’s the skipper.”

  “Where away the sail?” called Peter as he came up the after hatch.

  “Starboard quarter, sir,” said Rogers and I together, pointing.

  Peter studied the stranger’s sails from the quarterdeck rail and then looked forward toward the Princes, the islets that had given the harbor its prerevolutionary name of Port-au-Prince. He swung himself back down to the deck.

  “Come alow from aloft, if you please, I need you,” he called up to us. “Mr. Klemso,” he said to the bosun, “I’ll have chains and preventer stays. Mr. Graves,” he said as I lit on the deck by way of the backstay, “clear for action and beat to quarters, please.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” I stepped to the quarterdeck rail. “All hands,” I bellowed. “All hands on deck! D’ye hear the news there? Clear for action!” That was the kind of thing I liked. Maybe I was only five-foot-threeand-a-fart, as my father used to say, but big men jumped when I raised my voice.

  The watch below came pouring up on deck, and Mr. Schmidt, our German master gunner, came to me for the key to the magazine. I nodded at the Marine drummer boy, and he raised his sticks in a flourish and began beating “To Quarters.”

  “Mr. Jeffreys,” said Peter to the signal midshipman, “hoist our private signal of the day.” Jeffreys was one of our two boy midshipmen on loan from the Columbia.

  While we waited for her reply, I said, “Think she’ll catch us up, sir?”

  “The question,” said Wickett, “is, ‘Ought I to let her?’ What is she?”

  “I think she’s a French corvette, sir. No more’n twenty guns.” I glanced at the sailing master, who’d resumed his place at the conn. “Mr. Rogers thinks she’s a small frigate.”

  “Too far away to count her guns yet, sir,” said Rogers.

  “It hardly matters,” said Wickett. A small frigate, a corvette—she’d have us outgunned regardless. “Was she wearing her colors, Mr. Graves?”

  “No, sir.” Not that you could trust anyone’s colors till he fired at you. “But we’re both of the mind that she’s a Frenchman.”

  “Please, sir,” said Jeffreys, “she don’t answer.”

  “Try the British signal, then.” After a few unhappy incidents, the Royal Navy had agreed to supply our Caribbean squadrons with copies of its codebooks.

  She was hull-up from the deck now, wearing all plain sail and shaking out her topgallants and royals. She gave every impression of having plenty of speed in her, should she care to use it. Surely she was French-built—and French-handled, too, from the amount of time she took to set her cloth.

  “If you please, sir,” said Jeffreys, “she’s hoisted last month’s reply.”

  “Very well.”

  There was a squawking forward as Jimmy Ducks, the poultryman, snatched up the chicken coops to send them below. Some of the hands looked up and laughed.

  “Silence on deck there, you chickens,” I bellowed, and the men obliged me by grinning as they went about their work. The Marines were ready, assembled in full kit and with Corporal Haversham walking along their line, tugging a belt into place here and telling a man to put a new flint in his musket there. The gun captains were bent over the six-pounders, screwing the flintlocks into place that Mr. Schmidt had sent up, and the powderboys were taking seats on their wooden cartridge boxes behind the guns. Mr. Jeffrey
s busied himself directing the crews of the murdering-pieces, the ten swivel guns mounted on pivots along the quarterdeck rail. Mr. MacElroy, the other midshipman, stood in the waist, adjusting and readjusting his hat on his golden curls as he tried to look commanding and keep out of the way both at once.

  I raised my hat in the formal salute. “Cleared for action, sir. Permission to run out the guns?”

  Wickett glanced again at the fast-approaching Princes and then back at the strange ship. She was spilling her wind from time to time, seeming in no hurry to close the distance. “Not just yet, thank you. Mr. Rogers, let us stand in his road and see what he makes of it.” When we’d settled on our new course, running south by southwest with the wind just abaft our larboard quarter, he turned to Jeffreys and said, “Hoist our colors where he may see them.”

  “Aye aye, sir!” Jeffreys was all elbows and Adam’s apple, nearly as tall as Wickett and even skinnier, but a likely lad for all that. He jumped to the flag box and broke out the Stars and Stripes. As the azure and crimson and unsullied white rose snapping in the breeze, I felt that stirring in my breast that I could never quite fathom. It was just fifteen red and white stripes, and fifteen stars set in threes and twos across the blue field—just a pleasant arrangement of brightly colored silk—but I felt about it the way I suppose a parson must feel when gazing upon two pieces of wood crossed one upon the other. I saluted the colors and said, “I’ll take my station, sir.”

  Peter nodded. The corvette—if corvette she was—kept her course. Peter would have to raise the stakes pretty soon unless he truly intended to close with her.

  Young Mr. MacElroy tensed as I stepped down into the waist, where he stood by to assist me at the main battery. In spite of his boots and dirk, he looked more like a cherub than a sea officer. “All present and accounted for, sir,” he squeaked, doffing his hat.

  “Good afternoon,” I said, touching my hat in return. “Beautiful day, don’t ye think?”

  He blinked up at the blue sky dotted with little white puffs of cloud. “Why, yes, sir, I suppose it is.”

  We all waited then in silence—not talking, I mean, for no ship at sea is ever silent—with the gun crews standing easy at their stations, and Bosun Klemso and his mates, Horne and Elwiss, aloft rigging the preventers to keep the spars from falling to the deck were the slings to be shot away.

  The crews stood easy, but MacElroy looked stiffer than a parson’s collar on Sunday morning. I thought he was about to piss his trousers, but with my eye on him, and maybe encouraged by my not glaring at him, he whispered, “Do you think there’s going to be a fight, sir?”

  “Watch and learn, Mr. MacElroy,” I said, which is a handy thing to say when you don’t know the answer. “Meantime, keep your mouth shut and your ears open. D’ye think you can manage that?”

  “Aye aye, sir.” He bit his lip. “I mean, ‘Yes, sir.’ Hang it, I can’t never get ’em straight.”

  “When I give you an order, you must say, ‘Aye aye, sir.’ When I ask you a question, you must say, ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir,’ whichever’s appropriate.”

  He thought about that. “But you gave me an order and asked me a question, both.”

  I held up a finger. “‘Aye aye’ means ‘I hear and obey.’”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Good lad.”

  I looked over at the strange sail. She’d come about on a parallel course, maintaining the distance between us. I put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, the way my brother Geordie used to do with me. “This is just for show, Mr. MacElroy. No need to be scared.”

  “Oh, no, sir,” he said, looking at me in surprise and then looking away again. “I ain’t scared. I’m not.”

  “Good. Mind your hat.” I tipped it over his eyes and made him giggle.

  “I’ll have silence on deck, please, Mr. Graves.”

  “Aye aye, sir!” I winked at MacElroy.

  Wickett didn’t take his eye from the chase. “Come sta’board a point, Mr. Rogers, I pray you. That’s well, thus. Keep her there.”

  “To the braces, you sail handlers,” I said. “Mind her trim.”

  “Please, sir,” said Jeffreys. “She’s hoisted American colors.”

  “Aye, an’ Oi’m a hadmiral of the facking Russian navvy,” laughed the swabber at Number Three gun. He was one of four British deserters aboard that I knew about.

  “Put a stopper in it, you,” I said. He was right, though—she could be from any of the navies operating in the area but our own. She’d have been smarter to try her luck with the British ensign.

  “Mr. Graves, I should like the guns run out. Both sides, if you please.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Tail on, boys.”

  The men jumped to the tackles, running out the six-pounders with a thrilling rumble. I looked over at the stranger. She kept her gunports shut, but her mainsail came a-shiver.

  “She wavers, sir,” said Rogers. “He don’t know whether to shit or say howdy.”

  “Let us help him decide, then. Heave us to, please.”

  Rogers brought us up into the wind, where we balanced with the backed fore-topsail trying to push us down to leeward and the main course nudging us forward.

  “Mr. Graves, there,” called Wickett. “Give her a gun to windward.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Number One gun—fire!”

  Every navy has its own way of communicating at sea, but some signals are universal. With smoke billowing across the deck from the forward gun on the starboard side, we had as much as put a chip on our shoulder and dared the other fellow to knock it off.

  He came about on the starboard tack, heading away from us.

  “He fills and flies, sir,” said Rogers. “That dog won’t fight.”

  “Perhaps he merely has somewhere else to go,” said Wickett. “As do we. Get us underway again, if you please.”

  If the stranger had somewhere else to go, he wasn’t in a hurry about it. We could see his topgallants peeping above the horizon as we made the outer approaches of the harbor.

  Three

  A toad-choker of a spring rain sluiced down the filthy streets of Port Républicain as I presented myself that evening at the walled and gated house of Mr. P. Hoyden Blair, our man of business in southern San Domingo. I’d brought only two sailors with me, having had to leave the rest of my men to guard the boat. Samuels was a tall black quarter-gunner and Brodie was a sawed-off Irish quartermaster’s mate. When no one answered the jangling of the bell, I let the pair have a go at the ironbound wooden gate. They were a good way toward at least denting it aloft and alow when I heard footsteps splashing toward us from the far side of the gate.

  “Ki moun ki la-a?” a voice demanded in Creole, and then in French: “Qui c’est?” And yet again, as he remembered his manners: “Qui est la?”

  “Je m’appel monsieur le lieutenant Graves,” I said. “I’m here on official business. Open this gate at once!”

  A Judas port opened in the gate, and a pair of black eyes in a black face peered out at us.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m here to see the assistant consul.” I opened my cloak and let the lantern in my hand play across my uniform. “What I want is between him and me.”

  “Very well, very well,” he grumbled. I heard the scrape of bolts being drawn, and a moment later a black man in damp livery and a soggy white wig swung the gate open. “Your servants must wait in the yard,” he said, standing aside as we came in through the gate. He slammed it shut and locked it up again. “You will follow me.”

  He gave me a fair dose of grumbling and dirty looks as he let me into the house. The sailors got the better part of the bargain, lounging in the fresh air under the shelter of the balcony: with the shutters closed, Blair’s front parlor was as hot and damp as the inside of a barber’s towel. It was near about as dark, too, as there weren’t but a single candle burning.

  Blair had changed in the few weeks since I’d seen him last. He had the same calculating glint in his eyes behin
d the square gold-rimmed spectacles, the same peevish tremolo in his voice, the same hunch to his scrawny shoulders as if he lived in dread of getting what he deserved—but something in him was different. He looked both shiftier and more arrogant; I didn’t know yet where it come from, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it once I figured it out. Although he was old enough to know better, perhaps thirty, he neither bowed nor offered his hand as he stood looking down at me.

  As he was my social superior I took my cue from him. I dropped my sodden hat and cloak on a chair, hoping to ruin the damask upholstery, but the white-wigged footman gave me a nasty look and took them away.

  At last Blair stirred himself. “How is the night, Mr. Graves?”

  “Coming down like a cow pissing on a flat rock, sir.”

  “You got good and soaked, I hope?”

  “You’ll be happy to know I did, Mr. Blair, but this ain’t a pleasure visit. I’m here on the say-so of Commodore Gaswell.” I held out my papers.

  He ignored them. Instead, he clutched his dressing gown across his sunken chest and looked at the muddy bootprints I’d left on his carpet. The reflected flame of the candle writhed in his spectacles as he returned his glance to me. His eyes came to rest on my single epaulet.

  “You are a lieutenant now, I see, Mr. Graves.”

  “Acting-lieutenant, Mr. Blair. The president has to sign my commission before it’s official.”

  “And a long time you shall wait, too, should anyone bother to ask my expert advice.” He took my orders over to the candle, where he held them too damn close to the flame for my comfort. At last he slipped his specs into a pocket of his gown and looked me over again.