The Tempest--Commander Putnam and Mr. Madison's War

by James L. Haley

  Mr. Chance, thought Bliven. How wonderfully appropriate.

  A shouted affirmation came back. Powder monkeys had just deposited charges of grape in the garlands beside the carronades, and now they were sent scurrying below to return with bar shot.

  “Look there, Putnam”—Bainbridge pointed—“she’s coming ’round for more, she’s not done. That is most obliging.”

  Suddenly Bliven noticed something terribly amiss. “Captain, where is your wheel?”

  “Shot away,” answered Bainbridge. “Luckily, we were already where we wanted to be. I’ve got men below, wrestling the tiller.”

  In a rush, the enormity of this calamity seized him, and Bliven realized why Bainbridge had positioned the bosun where he had and was barking orders rapid-fire to brace up the port or starboard topsail yards to catch or spill the wind—he was guiding the ship in a way to make it easier on the men below who were working the tiller, steering the ship by the sheer power of their muscles. Bliven found his earlier critical opinion of Bainbridge diluted in his wash of admiration for such seamanship.

  Suddenly from the gun deck beneath them, the Constitution rocked with a deep, roaring broadside from the twenty-fours. Almost simultaneously Bliven saw a brown wooden shower rise from the Java, splinters large and small, bits of hull and railing, before the scene was obscured by the pungent hanging pall of smoke that the wind began only slowly to clear.

  From this white cloud came a singing spit; a small splinter of wood twirled up from the pine deck between them where a musket ball had bit into the wood. Involuntarily, Bliven jerked to the side, but Bainbridge stuck fast on his two feet. “Lieutenant of Marines!” Bainbridge’s voice was loud but he was not shouting.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “It is bad enough that I stand here with a British ball in my ass, I do not propose to have my toes shot off as well. Direct your men in the tops to fire on their tops. Clear their sharpshooters out of there. They will have to take their shots through the tops’ls, but they must manage best they can.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A sheet of flame erupted from the carronade farthest forward, followed instantly by a spray of railing, and a hole popped open in Java’s spanker but did not seem to catch the mizzenmast. Constitution was passing her only slowly, giving the guns time to sight individually on the target and each try their luck. In the course of the slow, rolling broadside, they shivered Java’s mizzen twice before a third hit caused it to split. The wind that filled the spanker caused the mizzen to lay over to starboard, creating confusion on the quarterdeck.

  Bainbridge loped forward a few steps, one hand pressuring against his wounded hip, the other gesturing with his telescope. “Huzzah, boys! That’s good shooting! Well done!”

  He was answered by a cheer from the crews at the carronades.

  “Bosun!” barked Bainbridge.

  “Sir!”

  “We are going to lay off for a while. She cannot go anywhere and cannot run up on us. She has cut up our rigging something fearful. Get to work on it, fast as you can. Ha! And look here, gentlemen.” He pointed to their own mizzenmast, indicating a hole where an eighteen-pound ball had smashed clean through. “Look here. Hit it dead center but didn’t bring it down. That is wondrous. Have the carpenter splint it; think of Dr. Cutbush working a broken leg.”

  “Right away, Captain.”

  As the Constitution sheared away, the Java ventured one more broadside with the half of her guns that remained in action but managed only to set their own fallen canvas afire. Dismasted and wallowing, it was apparent that she was going nowhere. Slowly the Constitution wore off and hove to, as the bosun, his mate, and four of the most able seamen fanned out, armed with marlinspikes and a deep knowledge of the lines and knots required. Others paid them lengths of new line from below as the damage was cut away. They began with the standing rigging, for if without their support the masts became overburdened, they could snap as surely as if they had been felled by shot; they moved on to the running rigging to regain controls of the sails, and slowly the whole vast web of rigging reappeared as though woven by a great invisible spider. Yet, it was the hole just breezed through the mizzen that became the talk of the weather deck as men wondered aloud if the ship was charmed with invulnerable masts as well as an impenetrable hull.

  “Lieutenant Putnam.” Bainbridge turned to speak to him, and Bliven saw a streak of red blood on the captain’s upper trousers that had been hidden by his coat, and realized that Bainbridge had indeed been shot in the hip.

  “Your pardon, sir, I am now master commandant.”

  “Oh? I was not aware. Well, good. We have things in hand here. Would you care to go below and see to your friend?”

  “You are most considerate, sir, yes, I would.” He had just started toward the after ladder when Java’s side erupted with an explosion, not a large one, which they concluded must have been a powder charge intended for a gun, touched off by the deck fire. Bliven clattered down the ladder, past the gun deck to the berth deck, and down again to the orlop, where he saw the cockpit brightly lit forward.

  “Well, bless my soul!” Cutbush smiled, excited but quiet. “I saw Mr. Bandy and wondered if you could be far behind.”

  Cutbush snatched impatiently at Sam’s too-tight trousers. “Get these off him,” he said urgently to the surgeon’s mates, even as he turned his own attention to opening a beat-up cabinet and extracting a small mahogany chest with brass fittings. He turned back around, hefting the mahogany box, to find the mates struggling to peel the trousers around Sam’s ample butt. “No, no,” he snapped, “you’ll pull him in two! Cut them off! Mr. Putnam, I can use you. We must raise his feet and lower his head. Here, raise the plank where his feet are.” Bliven did as he was bidden, as Cutbush wedged a small medicine box under it, leaving Sam’s head about eight inches lower than his feet. “Now pull his shirt off over his head, quickly, and begin pressing on his back. We want to work his lungs.”

  Bliven peeled the tail of the soaked shirt upward over Sam’s back and his sodden hair, stretching his arms out and pulling the sleeves until the shirt fell to the deck with a soggy splat. In the illumination of the battle lamps Bliven saw the still-livid red scars on Sam’s white back and understood that he had been lashed with a cat, even as he realized that the wounds were likely old and since healed. Bliven pressed and released, slowly and forcefully, and pressed and released. “Like this? Correct me!” His fear for Sam’s life was surfacing despite his knowing that there was a reason for Cutbush’s determined calm.

  Cutbush did not look up from what he was doing to ask, “How on earth did you come to be here?”

  Bliven stared at him as he compressed Sam’s back. “We swam!”

  Cutbush erupted in laughter. “All the way from home?”

  “No, sir, we were prisoners on the Java. We jumped overboard after the ships became entangled.”

  “Well, there is a story there, I expect. You must tell it to me when we have leisure.”

  With Sam’s trousers cut away, one of the mates was scrubbing him vigorously with dry toweling as Cutbush removed a tightly woven tube from the mahogany case. At its terminus he rubbed a brownish sort of grease, nodding at the other mate. “Spread his cheeks.”

  The orderly did as he was bidden, and Cutbush flinched up and away for an instant. Captive sailors held as virtual galley slaves he knew could not be too particular in their hygiene. He inserted two inches of the tube before telling the mate to release his hips, whose own pressure would keep it in place. From the same mahogany case he removed a cork from a small ceramic jar and took out a large measure of tobacco. With no wasted motion he packed the tobacco into a tiny glass jar with a tube coming out its bottom, lit it with a brand that he had held over a lamp, and fitted it under a glass bell. With his surgeon’s precision, Cutbush fitted the free end of the first tube from Sam’s anus to the front exit of a small bellows a
nd attached the second tube from the glass bottle now filling with smoke to a round fitting at the rear of the bellows.

  “All right, now,” he breathed. Slowly he spread the handles of the bellows apart, which sucked air through the burning tobacco even as a smoker would inhale. When the bellows would open no farther, Cutbush slowly began to close it; a valve shut the smoke from returning backward and forced it into Sam’s backside. He repeated the procedure slowly and gently, reciting quietly,

  Tobacco glyster, breathe and bleed,

  Keep warm and rub till you succeed.

  And spare no pains, for what you do

  May one day be repaid to you.

  “Do you see how this works?” he asked the first surgeon’s mate.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You keep doing it, very slowly, until the tobacco is burnt down.” Then, to the other one, he ordered, “Bring me that bowl.”

  With practiced precision Cutbush extended Sam’s right arm, opened a vein with a scalpel, and doggedly recited the poem again as Sam’s blood dribbled into the bowl. When he had taken a pint he bound the wound tightly and gave the bowl to the second mate to remove.

  Cutbush noted a thin stream of water and drool issue from Sam’s mouth. “Good. Putnam, keep at it until I tell you to stop.”

  Two decks above them they heard the deep, rolling broadside of each twenty-four in turn, and realized that they must have come about and returned to the fight. It was followed by the increasing rattle of musketry from the fighting tops as the Marines began dueling with their English counterparts. Bliven hoped that, as in the Revolution, the New World marksmanship of lifelong hunters would carry the day.

  Suddenly all the men on the orlop ducked and caught their breath as a tremendous crash broke above and beside them, not the reports even of the twenty-fours but something louder and closer, a deafening, whacking bang that shook the hull planks beyond the diagonal scantling and sent a cloud of dust filtering down from where the oak knees supported the pine of the berth deck.

  “God Almighty!” spat Cutbush.

  “We have taken a hit,” hushed Bliven. “They are going for our waterline. I can’t see.” He took up one of the lanterns and gave it to the second surgeon’s mate. “Hold this up there.” He pointed to the join at the top of the knee, as close as he could judge to where the noise came from. Bliven peered as best he could into the flickering shadows. Constitution’s waterline was just about opposite them, but he could discern no leak, nor even a distension. “Amazing,” he whispered. He saw that a surgeon’s mate had taken over pressing Sam’s back, and Bliven went forward two more steps and held the lantern up to the other side of the knee that had been hidden in shadow, but found it equally undamaged. “I can’t believe it,” he said back to Cutbush. “No breach at all, thank God.”

  Then all was drowned out by another rolling, roaring broadside from the carronades farther above them. Those echoes had almost died away when their eardrums were all but crushed by a louder rolling broadside from the twenty-fours immediately above. “God,” said Bliven, “Bainbridge is really letting them have it.”

  With intense attention Cutbush held a small mirror before Sam’s nose and mouth, heaving an immense sigh as a light fog spotted it. “He breathes,” he said. “Oh, he breathes.” From his professional bearing one would have thought that he had no emotional investment in whether Sam lived or died, but now he gave himself away. He smiled wanly and relaxed. “He breathes.”

  A midshipman walked quickly over and made his respects. “Commander Putnam?”

  “Yes?”

  “Captain Bainbridge’s compliments, you are wanted on the quarterdeck.”

  “Very well”—he returned the salute—“I will be along immediately.”

  He ascended the after ladder so quickly that his eyes had not enough time to adjust to his return to daylight, and he squinted as he approached Bainbridge, even as hard by he saw the Java, standing off and smoldering, her mizzenmast fallen over the starboard railing, the spanker blanketing much of the quarterdeck. “Captain?” Bliven saluted.

  “Commander, she is wounded but has not struck. My chase gunner is killed. Get forward and take over. Continue firing as you can bring the chasers to bear, until you are ordered to cease.”

  “Aye, sir!”

  Bliven sprinted forward, from the quarterdeck to the bow chasers, almost the entire length of the ship, thinking as he ran that Bainbridge had altered their configuration with two eighteens forward. He stopped and seized by the shoulders a boy whose hands were at that moment empty. “Bow chasers, eighteens, bring me powder and grape! Hurry!”

  At the farthest point forward on the spar deck, past the smear of blood that showed where the previous officer’s body had been dragged to the forward ladder, the two eighteens loomed over the gates that dropped down to the heads. He glanced down at the open toilet holes that lined either side of the bowsprit to make sure no one would be incinerated in the guns’ muzzle blasts.

  Out of the corner of his eye he observed the gun crews sponging the barrels, which they completed as the boy emerged up the forward ladder laden with a six-pound lead canister of powder and charge of grape. He was followed by a second boy similarly laden, and Bliven realized the boy had shown the initiative to snatch him in tow so that both guns could be loaded. As soon as the burdens were deposited in the garlands Bliven ordered, “Load!” and then aside said, “What is your name, son?”

  “Ward, sir. Thomas Ward.”

  “Well done, Ward. Now get below and bring me another round, quick!” He sent him off with a push and a slap on the butt. “You, too!”

  He turned to see the gun crews had quoined the guns up level, rammed home the lead cans of powder and the charges of grape, removed the quoins and had taken up the lanyards to run the guns out. “Wait! You have taken out the quoins. Put them back in!”

  “Sir,” protested the chief of the gun crew, “the barrel is elevated to cut up her sails and rigging.”

  Bliven was silent for a second, shocked at being disputed. “Don’t argue with me, she has no sails left. Crow up the guns and place the quoins! Bring them level!”

  “Yes, sir.” The crew chief directed the operation but did not seem to have his heart in it.

  Happy for the advantage of firing lanyards, Bliven took up the first one and began gauging the ships’ respective rise and fall in the swell. On the Java’s quarterdeck he descried blue-coated officers gesturing the sailors, trying to organize some order from their chaos. They had extinguished the deck fires and cut some of the fallen canvas overboard. Bainbridge was wearing ship to starboard to bring the vessel back into the fight, and the range was still extreme for eighteens.

  He knelt at the sights, waiting and calculating. Bliven heard Bainbridge roaring from the opposite length of the ship. “Putnam, why aren’t you firing?”

  Bliven raised his left hand behind him to indicate that he had heard while sighting steadily down the eighteen’s barrel. He could not fire willy-nilly, he was dependent upon the swell. With his right hand holding the lanyard high, he had to wait for his own deck to level, at a time when Java’s stern rose on a crest. “This,” he hissed to himself, “will mark paid to you—you—arrogant—British—”

  After repairing her rigging and set to fighting sails, Constitution’s starboard turn brought her to a heading west-southwest toward the immobile Java’s port bow. On this heading shots from the bow chasers would pass down Java’s port quarter and miss her entirely. Bliven could not tell whether Bainbridge meant to pass down her port side and smother her with their own port broadside or turn across her bows and deliver an even more devastating bow rake from their starboard broadside.

  Only when he heard Bainbridge shout, “Port your helm,” and the order repeated down the after ladder to the tiller room was he certain that the sight from his bow chasers would sweep forward from Java’s stern to
bow. As the sight crept from open sea horizon onto Java’s quarterdeck, he leapt to the side and yanked the lanyard. The eighteen-pounder erupted with a deafening roar and the tremendous kick of its six-foot recoil that would have crushed him had he stayed where he was. In a second he had vaulted over the housing that covered the bowsprit’s insertion to its footing and fired the second chaser as well.

  The wind blew the gun’s smoke quickly off to larboard, allowing Bliven to witness three men in blue coats spin and fall as the charge of grape sprayed across Kington’s quarterdeck. “Confusion to you, you bastards,” he whispered.

  Constitution’s port turn brought her starboard broadside close upon Java’s bow, and Bainbridge was seconds from ordering a horrific rake from carronades and twenty-fours alike. Suddenly a large white sheet unfurled from her bow toward the water, and in the moment that Bainbridge hesitated to deliver his coup de grâce a second white sheet was raised from a jury-rigged spar.

  “Hold your fire!” roared Bainbridge. “Hold your fire!” The order was relayed below to the twenty-fours on the gun deck and the officers gathered on the quarterdeck, watching the activity on their wrecked enemy. The battle had lasted for just over two hours, from shortly before two in the afternoon, and it was now after four.

  “Mr. Putnam, I need my lieutenants here, and you are senior anyway. Take a boat over and ascertain their intentions.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll want to take a Marine with me.”

  “Of course. Bosun, lower my gig. And Putnam?”

  “Sir?”

  “Put on a fresh shirt and coat, you are still wet. We are close enough the same size, get down to my cabin and supply yourself from my wardrobe.”

  The gig was bobbing gently at the foot of the ladder by the time he came back on deck, and it was a short pull over to the wrecked Java. He felt his hackles rise as they approached, for the water around her was tinged red, as though the floor of an abattoir had been washed down, and as they tied up he could see chunks of flesh and body parts slowly sinking. Entering her open waist, he was helped aboard by a non-com and escorted to the quarterdeck. The carnage was less than he witnessed on the Guerriere, but still enough to make him wish never to see such horrors again.