Lone Star Rising: T.S. Wasp and the Heart of Texas

by Jason Vail

  Then the two of us spent a pleasant hour smoking in the forecastle, gazing at the phosphorescent lights tossed up by our wake, and the stars, which blazed through scattered clouds, the Milky Way a great smear across the vault.

  As I shook out the ashes from my pipe, I caught the odor of dust from the west.

  A hand shook my shoulder. I sat up in the dark as the sound of the ship’s bell announced that it was six bells in what had to be the middle watch. Normally, I am groggy when wakened in the night, except at sea, for it had to be trouble.

  “What is it?” I demanded of the man who had disturbed my rest. “Have you sighted land?”

  “I’m not sure,” Willie said.

  I was surprised it was him, as this was his watch and that he had not sent a seaman to fetch me.

  “You need to have a look,” he added. His voice was calm, but I could hear the undercurrent of concern and anxiety. That had me worried. It was hard to rattle Willie.

  I threw on a coat, as it was chilly, and we climbed hastily to the quarterdeck.

  “There,” Willie pointed off the starboard bow.

  I couldn’t see anything with the naked eye in the pitch dark, made worse by an overcast that reduced the lantern of a waning quarter moon to a faint unhelpful glow. I unlimbered my glass and scanned the horizon in the area he indicated. It took a few moments, but then I found it: a sail, or more accurately a stack of them, rough rectangles one atop the other indicating a ship with tops and topgallants flying. Quite large and close. It stood out against the dark line of the shore.

  “It shouldn’t be there this time of night,” Willie said. When I did not answer, he asked, “What is it, do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. In this light it was hard to tell. “If that’s Galvestown over there, she could be a merchantman waiting for light to get behind the island.” Galvestown’s port lay on the bay side of a barrier island, you see, and a vessel needed light to steer the channel leading through the shallows.

  “Maybe. But I have a bad feeling about her.”

  As we considered what to do, the ship turned in our direction and set her fore-course.

  I collapsed my glass. “That does it. We run.”

  Run is a figure of speech, for by dawn the wind had died to the merest sigh, and Wasp crept along even with all sail set, including headsails and sky sails. Crockett made the point succinctly standing at the stern as we regarded the fox behind us: “A drunk on his belly could move faster than this.”

  Willie reeled in the logline, wetting his coat and trousers. “Two and a half knots.”

  “It will take a year to reach New Orleans at this rate,” Crockett said, for we were running in the general direction of that city on the hope we would reach the Mississippi and the sanctity of French waters before we were caught.

  Not that I expected our troubles to be over. Given what had happened the last time we were on the river, I suspected that we’d have a race up to the city as well.

  “Not quite a year, but longer than I’d like,” Willie said.

  “How is it he knew we’d be here?” Crockett asked, looking again at the frigate behind us. It had been a shock to us all when, as the light had risen enough for the ships to see each other plainly, the frigate had raised the long yellow and red pennant that signified Vasquez was aboard.

  And on close inspection, we were able to tell that the long, sleek shape was indeed the same deadly frigate we had encountered in the North Sea.

  “There is only one way,” I said. “Our business has been found out. And if that’s so, the Spanish must know your plans for independence.”

  “The Spanish army could be marching already,” Austin said, dismayed.

  “Quite so,” I said.

  “We’re too late,” he said in anguish. “We’ve nothing to oppose it but hunting rifles and a few old muskets.”

  Crockett had not lost his smile at this thought, though the humor had got out of it. “Come on, Stephen, we’ve still got our teeth. We’ll gnaw them to death.”

  Austin was not amused.

  Then Crockett said the thing that preyed on all our minds. “He caught us before. He could do it again.” He looked again at the Spanish frigate through his glass. “Do you think he’s closer?”

  I looked again myself. The frigate’s black hull and brown sails more than filled the view. I guessed the distance as six-hundred yards at most. The features on the faces of the men in the forecastle, officers by the look of them with their tall hats regarding us with their glasses, now stood out plainly. Vasquez was there, identifiable by that natty V beard.

  “I’m afraid so,” I said. I had always liked to think of Wasp as the fastest creature on the water. It was hard accepting that she had to take second place.

  “I don’t fancy losing,” Crockett said.

  “I don’t fancy failure,” I said. When I said failure, Crockett and Austin thought I meant our mission and the guns, but I thought of the loss of Wasp. I could not bear losing her. She held all my hopes for the future. In those times when I had put her in danger, it was as though I had exposed my own flesh. Yet those risks always had seemed worth taking, because I had been confident that somehow I could see her through. This time, though, the hope had gone out of me. Vasquez’s frigate was bigger by fifty feet, and had almost twice our guns: not the same mismatch as last summer against the Victoria Rosa, but not a fight we could win in the end.

  In half an hour, the Neptuno had gained a hundred yards on us. Two puffs of white smoke burst from her bow, one slightly ahead of the other. One cannon ball was briefly visible against the gray sky as a black dot. It passed over our heads with a shriek, punching holes in the main and forecourses. The other ball, which we did not see, struck the gallery windows below our feet with a terrific jolt for a twelve-pounder.

  “See if anyone’s wounded!” I called over my shoulder without taking my eyes off Neptuno.

  After a minute or so, the voice of Heberly, who doubled as the ship’s chaplain, called out, “Two from splinters! Your cabin’s a wreck, though, Captain. And there’s a bite out of the mizzen mast!”

  I glanced up at the mizzen, worried that it might fall, for the wind abruptly had begun to pick up, gusty now from the northwest, increasing the strain. The Neptuno took in her skysails in response to the change. I left ours out a bit longer despite the risk to the rigging and masts. It bought us some distance, but soon I had to order them taken in, and shortly the Spaniard had made up the loss and gained more distance as well.

  The Neptuno closed to within two-hundred yards before her bow chasers fired again. Despite the building sea, the wave crests now frothing with whitecaps, her shooting was good. Both balls struck the stern. One low on the berth deck, no doubt making scrap of the wardroom and the officers’ cabins, the other finishing the wreck of the gallery window and my cabin.

  “Shit,” Crockett said. He rarely swore, so I knew he was greatly disturbed. “Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t intend to hang. Fucking victory or death, gentlemen. What do you say?”

  “Not much chance of victory,” Austin said.

  “Don’t be such a pessimist, Stephen,” Crockett said.

  “I’m being realistic,” he shot back. He stepped over to a stack of small arms clustered about the mizzen that had been brought up when we went to quarters. He came back with a cutlass and a set of pistols. “You’re so full of ideas, David. What do we do now?”

  “Mister Hammond!” I called to our elderly quartermaster. “Bring us into the wind!”

  “Aye, aye,” he muttered, not liking that order, hands quivering on the wheel as he spun it, as if he had a palsey.

  “Mister Halevy! Get the sail aback, and make sure all the guns are double shotted!”

  “They’re ready below,” Halevy said. He glanced at the stack of arms by the mainmast, fingers twitching.

  “Have the starboard watch and half the larboard on deck with small arms and grenades. Get them low against the rail, as
out of sight as you can manage.”

  “Right, sir!” He turned away, shouting the orders.

  “Mister Harper,” I said, “fast as you can, fetch a ten-pound keg of gunpowder and a fuse. And a keg of oil. Meet me at the gundeck middle gangway.”

  “A what?” he asked.

  “You heard me.”

  “If you say so,” he replied, turning away.

  “You there!” I called to one of the ship’s boys, who was crouched at the taffrail. “Strike our colors!” Then, as the crew poured on deck, I said, “The rest of you — stand by to repel boarders!”

  The boy brought down the French colors we had been flying and stood uncertainly with them in his arms.

  “You can put them in the flag locker, son,” I said. “Then go below. It’s going to get hot here in a few minutes. No place for a boy.”

  “I can fight,” he said.

  “Maybe so, but get below nonetheless.”

  Then we waited for the Spaniard to approach.

  He came up to windward with brash confidence, now that we’d struck, guns run out and the rails crowded with armed men. Many of them were laughing at us, and Vasquez himself had climbed to the rail and held on to the mainmast rigging, a great triumphant grin on his face, no doubt anticipating his revenge for the humiliations we had handed him. He ordered the Neptuno to back sail as it came along side, no more than thirty yards separating us, the ships pitching on the rising sea.

  “Do you yield?” Vasquez called to me in French.

  “We yield,” I replied.

  We drifted closer together, Neptuno pushed by the wind. Vasquez motioned for grapples to be thrown. Along the rail, men rose, twirled the grapple heads like lariats, and cast them across the gap. Then they pulled the ships together.

  I glanced upward, anxious that our yards not be fouled, though there was nothing I could do now if that happened, only hope for the best.

  “Now, Mister Crockett!” I ordered as our hulls bumped together.

  “Up!” Crockett shouted, and all our men along the larboard rail rose as one.

  “Fire!” he cried, and our men fired a volley into the faces of the Spaniards.

  “Mister Halevy!” I bellowed into the waist, where he stood waiting for orders. “Fire!”

  “Fire!” he shouted before I had got that single word out of my mouth.

  All our larboard guns fired at once into Neptuno’s side, seeming to rend the fabric of the universe itself.

  “Grenades!” Crockett called out, and men applied matches to the fuses and threw them onto the enemy’s deck. “Fire at will!”

  Incredibly, despite the fury of our onslaught, Vasquez had remained on the rail. Fury etched his face.

  I pointed a pistol at him at the same time as several of my seamen aimed with their muskets. We all fired together, yet providence drove the bullets wide, although one of the muskets had been close enough to singe his coat, and Vasquez was still standing there as the smoke blew away on the wind. He jumped down to his deck with measured confidence as if all the shot flying around was nothing. He was brave, I have to give him that.

  Rifles cracked from the mast tops, and grenades arched back and forth, the fuses foaming in the air, to detonate on our deck as well as theirs with paralyzing thumps and clouds of white smoke. Our larboard guns fired independently now, answered occasionally by a few in the Neptuno, a staccato hammering that wanted to knock us off our feet; in good time, I was pleased to note: our hard training had paid off again.

  Then a thicket of pikes rose on the Neptuno. I could hear the Spanish officers encouraging their men. They were getting ready to board, and try to overwhelm us with their superior numbers.

  “Steady, Mister Crockett!” I shouted to him even though he was only a few steps away. But the racket was so intense that no one could be heard otherwise. “All you have to do is hold them!”

  “We’ll do it!” he shouted back with more confidence than I felt myself.

  But I did not wait for his answer, for I had already jumped through the open waist to the gun deck.

  Chapter 29

  The Gulf of Mexico

  28 February 1821

  A captain should not desert the deck of his ship when under attack. But I could not in good conscience ask another to do what had to be done next.

  Austin, wondering what I was about, leaped after me. He landed at my side as Willie came up with a keg under his arm and a pair of fuses in the other hand. One of the Africans stood just behind him with a second keg.

  “Is that the oil?” I asked Willie, gesturing to the African and his keg.

  “What are we doing?” he asked.

  “You’ll see.” I turned to the remaining gun crews and shouted, “Cease fire!” I had to call out several times to be heard. The sound of the guns makes men deaf, and in what seemed like half an hour, but must have been only a few moments, our guns fell silent. The men looked at me.

  “Arm yourselves,” I said. “We’re going across. When you hear my whistle I want you to disengage and get back across as quick as you can. Understand? Mister Harper, you and that fellow there, stay close behind me.”

  As the men gathered up cutlasses, muskets, pistols, axes — whatever was at hand and suited their fancy — I bent to a gun port and looked across at the Neptuno. I had ordered the guns to aim at those of the enemy rather than merely at her hull, and the men had minded well. The enemy port across the way was empty and the port itself had been widened by our shot.

  I fingered the toy horse in my pocket, asked my dead wife and children to watch over me, and stepped through our gun port into the enemy ship. No slaughterhouse ever conceived by man was as terrible. The enemy gun that had occupied the port had been cast on its side, the tube lying upon two men. One was dead, the other still alive, hands moving weakly, mouth opening and closing like a fish. Blood, bodies, parts of bodies — a mangled head unrecognizable as having come from a human being except for the scrap of hair like a wig tossed carelessly away — corpses shredded and dismembered, lay strewn about as if they were bunches of discarded rags. An officer’s body hung upside down upon the stairs of the after ladder, his leg caught on one of the rungs, a slack expression on his face. All along the enemy hull, their guns were upended, the carriages splintered, the crews dead around them.

  Yet there was life here. Toward the bow, men still moved and a few worked their guns, pouring shot into poor Wasp. I grieved for her and worried how much more she could take of this pounding, as intermittent as it was.

  At the sight of our mob pouring onto the enemy gun deck, they left their cannon and, snatching up whatever small arms lay within reach, rushed us, a howling crowd of fury. Our men with firearms had time for a single volley. No one failed to miss at such short range, and enemy sailors collapsed, disappearing as if lost in a wave.

  The two mobs met just forward of the midship ladder, a shrieking whirlwind of slashing cutlasses, pounding axes, of detonating guns, of pushing and shoving, the men locked so closely together that they could often hardly use their weapons and were reduced to clawing and biting, men rolling on the deck to be trampled beneath those who surged up behind them. Our men found their measure, though, and here and there along the line, cutlass blades, tinged with red, rose and fell like a monster scythe. There was nothing fancy about it, nothing of the art we had practiced for so many months. It was just plain butchery all around.

  As the leader of this disaster, my place should have been in the forefront of the line, where the play was hottest, but I had things to do yet. I slipped around the after ladder, leaving two men to watch it in case the enemy above sent reinforcements. We worked ourselves to a place between two guns on the larboard side.

  “Here!” I said, pointing between the guns. “Spread the oil all about!”

  The African did not seem to understand at first, and I had to take the keg from him and remove the bung. But he caught on immediately and poured oil all about the deck at our feet.

  “Now the po
wder!” I said to Willie. “By the gun, where it can’t be seen!”

  As Willie put the powder keg on the deck against the gun carriage, three enemy sailors broke through our line on this side of the ship and came toward us.

  I turned to face them, but Austin got there before me. I have seen many amazing things in my life — a whale ramming and sinking a brig; a three-decker ship-of-the-line blowing up with all hands; a steam-powered warship made entirely of iron; something called a telephony — but to see such a little man take on three brawny sailors topped them all. He traded blows with them so furiously that his blade was a blur of motion. And before I could step to his side, he cut the last man down, taking the fellow’s blow on the St. George and returning his own which cleaved the poor man’s head to his eyebrows.

  “Well,” Austin panted, “how about that?”

  “Crockett won’t believe it when I tell him,” I said.

  “He had damned well better!”

  I glanced back to see that Willie had stuffed a match cord fuse into the top of the keg. He fumbled with matches. Once he lit the fuse, there wouldn’t be much time left.

  “Grenadiers!” I shouted, hoping that I could be heard over the storm of battle. “Let ’em have it!”

  The few men I had ordered to hang back lit their grenades and lobbed them into the press of the enemy. The grenades exploded with puffs of white and detonations that struck us a series of hammer blows.

  Willie lit the fuse. He threw a coat over the keg.

  I said a little prayer that this deception would hide the thing in the confusion, for our lives depended on this frail artifice.

  I blew the whistle to sound the retreat.

  It was a fighting retreat all the way. The enemy still on their feet — a considerable number, more than our twenty or so, certainly — pressed closely as our men clambered through the ports one at a time to Wasp. The rearguard formed a ring that shrank rapidly as its numbers diminished, those of us in it fighting desperately to enable the others to escape. Here and there our people went down under the blows of the enemy. I would like to say that I grieved for them, but at the time, I was too busy parrying and delivering blows of my own. In a fight, there are times when you reach a plane when your mind seems to soar above the action, when you see and even anticipate an enemy’s move almost before he begins it, where your parries and blows are perfect, where you feel no fear and experience no pain or even any sense of exertion. I was there at that moment, knowing that I would have to die, and not even caring; consumed with meeting this blow with the inside guard and responding with as perfect a thrust as I have ever delivered; pulling back immediately to take a cut 7 from the man to the left on the St. George and giving back one of my own, which he slipped, but being so perfect I turned my cut into a thrust which took him in the throat; turning away a thrust from the man who replaced one of those who had fallen with an inside hanger and promptly cutting around to cut 2 with a bare twitch of the wrist, yet the man’s head nearly separated from his body, only a flap of skin holding it in place.