Daniel sighed. “This is the autumn equinox. Oh, yes … I can see her standing in a circle of salt like an idiot, hair unbound, cheeks reddened with roan, brows darkened with acorn mash….”
“Here.” Exhausted, I drew a folded and sealed paper from my breast pocket. “She told me to give it to you at a key moment. I believe this moment qualifies.”
Hardie looked over my shoulder. “More bird skin?”
Daniel opened the envelope, then parted his lips to answer. For a moment he seemed to see his mother’s face in the petals. A sorrowful grin tugged at him. “Moonwort … her lasting love.”
No matter how he might rave against his mother, a sentiment arose which he could not banish. I had timed this right.
“Accept her, Daniel,” I said, “for my sake.”
He looked up. “What’ve you to do with it?”
“Only that I’ve been … thinking, lately, of leaving the clergy.”
This seemed to distress him more than the enemy presence. His eyes creased with concern. “Adam, why?”
My throat tightened. “Your mother’s convictions made me question my own. They seem to be stronger than mine. I am supposed to believe in the miraculous, yet I have never seen it. Seven men died in my arms today, and I still found only confoundment. A minister should never have questions.”
“We all have questions,” he said gently. “Put aside your doubts. Tonight is no time to give up anything which comforts us.”
Seizing the opportunity, I said, “Glad you agree. Put this on.” I raised my fist, from which dangled the leather thong with the crane bag on its end, which I had cherished throughout the day.
Nearby, Rochon, Thorsby, and LaMay plugged a hole in our hull, but kept an eye on us. McCrae took a moment to bind Lavengood’s bleeding thigh with an oily rag, but he was listening too.
“Since you were born,” I continued, “your mother has shouldered the premonition that her beloved son would die—”
“In water, yes,” Daniel snapped. “All my life she pushed me away from every well and horse trough, wouldn’t let me swim, bathed me with a cloth and bucket—she even did her laundry in a bread kneader!”
I raised a finger in his face. “The Commandment charges, ‘Honor thy mother,’ not ‘Honor thy mother if you approve of her ways.’ Instead you ridiculed and tormented her. You swam in the pond. Went riding in rain. Rode in a canoe. Joined the merchant mariners. You became a privateer, all to mock something that embarrassed you. This is your first battle at sea, and she thinks this is it. She begged me to come here.”
With a wave of his hand he dismissed what he heard. “I come from a long line of silly fools, many who died at the stake from just this kind of trouble, more who suffered rejection later. My mother is one of these. The whole New Haven community avoids Mary Dickenson. As a boy I watched her suffer loneliness because of her twigs and stones. I was in torment to see her friendless. Only when I married Eloise did she have a companion, a little acceptance. If I die tomorrow, I will die with many men whose mothers saw nothing written in their bobbinlace.”
“If you die,” I attempted, “do you want me to go back and tell Mary you refused to do this last harmless thing for her? Is that the memory you want her to hold the rest of her life?”
Upon that challenge, I lay the crane bag on the rail beside the smoldering swivelgun, and draped the thong over it. I would not pick it up again. Either he would, or no one would.
He gazed at the bag. “Shall I shun a black cat and avoid the companionway ladder? I’ve floured her superstition all my life. You want me to accept it today?”
“I want you to accept that there are forces older and larger than ourselves at work in you. I want you to accept God and accept yourself. Whether you are the end of a line of spiritual channelers I cannot say, but I have seen traits of heightened perception in you. You see things others miss.”
“Noticing details is not supernatural. I simply pay attention.”
“It’s part of what makes you a good captain,” Hardie commented. Was he agreeing with me? Or was he simply amused?
“All you have to do is survive the premonition,” I finished. “Find a way not to die in the water. Once you’re through it, the premonition itself will die. That’s what I think.”
Daniel pointed at the bag, giving me a quizzical sidelong glance. “If I put this on, the British will not be able to see me or shoot me?”
It did sound silly. I smiled. “Your mother thought so.”
“What will the men think,” McCrae charged, “when they see their captain wearing a talisman? This talk is blasphemous! They’ll be afraid, lose their confidence—”
“Why, doctor?” I challenged. “Do they lose confidence when they see a holly wreath or mistletoe at Christmas? I am a man of God. I’ve looked into this, and it is not what the witch-hunters say. The old religion is what God let us have for comfort until He could reveal his Word to us. If only Daniel will accept God’s tapestry, he can have peace with himself.”
The deck fell quiet. Each man became a separate force, alone with his own doubts, demons, and fears.
Perceiving the distress around him, Daniel murmured, “Not the best time for a sermon, Adam.” But the acrimony had gone out of him. He seemed suddenly exhausted.
“Put it on, Daniel,” I said, “just to keep peace aboard.”
Hardie straightened up. “Yes, Daniel, put it on.”
“Throw it overboard,” Stephen McCrae countered.
The little bag of stuffed bird skin lay beside the swivelgun. Leaning forward toward Daniel, I spoke with subdued honesty. “You need not destroy your mother in order to prevail yourself.”
He stared at me, his eyes unrevealing, for long seconds. Something about this last statement made an impression.
“Henry,” he announced, “if I vanish, you’ll have to take command.”
Hardie threw his head back and laughed, the first sound of merriment we had heard. Taking this for a trigger, Daniel snatched up the crane bag and draped the thong over his head. The bag dropped into place on his filthy waistcoat, right over his heart.
He spread his hands. “There. I’m invisible!”
The men laughed. He did seem funny, standing there caked with gunpowder, the little bag hanging around his neck. “Henry, since I’ve disappeared, will you please send the men back to the repairs? We’ll be fighting again come morning light. Let’s not sink before then. Start hammering.”
“Very well. Let’s go, men. Work, work.”
His eyes crinkling, Daniel turned to me. “Are you happy now? This’ll keep me from dying in the water because I’ll catch it on a block and hang myself.”
“Boat on the lee side!” someone called.
As we turned, a hard clunk on the larboard side broke our communion. A moment later a powder-burned man with a nightcap of dark hair and a beard swung aboard and came to Daniel. “Arthur Cohn reporting from General Arnold, Captain. Philadelphia has just slipped under. She’s gone. Congress has twelve holes in her. She and Washington both have water coming on. On New York, every officer but the captain is dead. Our ammunition’s almost exhausted. Even if we wanted to keep fighting come morning, there’s trifle to shoot with. The general’s going from ship to ship, surveying damage. He says he’ll entertain all suggestions from his captains but surrender.”
Daniel’s face turned grim. Hopelessness set in deep.
“My compliments to the general,” he murmured. “I regret to have no suggestions.”
Cohn simply nodded and stumbled back to his rowboat, to go to the next in our line and spread this blighted news.
Sympathy for Daniel pierced us all. How daunting must it be for a captain to have no answers when his men are looking to him?
Sullen, he moved away from us to the bow of the sloop, climbed onto a gun truck, leaned forward over the flop of staysail, and simply gazed north, as if to implore the dying wind for one more favor. There he stood alone, and everyone stayed away from him. The sl
oop creaked around him, her draped headsails licking at his legs like pet dogs trying to ease his anguish.
“We’d better pick up the Savage’s survivors,” Hardie muttered. “Can’t let them be slaughtered by real savages.”
“Send them to the New York,” I suggested. “She needs a crew.”
They all looked at me. Had I said something wrong?
“Fine idea, Parson!” Hardie lauded. “Mighty fine. Go tell your brother. Get his permission.”
Beyond much more than a nod for their approval, I wearily trudged to the bow.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I began, framing my words carefully, “but we’ve had an idea about Royal Savage.”
Daniel didn’t respond, but continued looking northward, into the darkness, his hands clutching the sail canvas. His gaze etched the night.
“Daniel?”
In the faint dust of moonlight from beyond the clouds, his face was chalky, as if someone had sculpted him upon the sky.
I moved closer. “Daniel? Are you all right?”
He continued to stare north. “Shh … can’t you smell it?”
“Smell what?”
“The miracle you wanted!” He jumped down from the gun truck and gave me a cheery shake, then called, “Henry! Signal the general’s rowboat. Get him over here!”
“General, my compliments. We have a chance to get away.”
“Surrender?” Benedict Arnold looked up at Daniel from his rowboat. “I spit on you for that, sir. Are you afraid to die?”
“No, sir, no, not surrender. Imagine this!” As the crew gathered around us, Daniel’s enthusiasm brightening his eyes. “Dawn touches the spine of Valcour … the lake turns from black to gray. The British gunners light their linstocks, officers tighten formation … the fog parts … but the bay is empty. Like wraiths, our ships have dissolved with the mist. The night is gone. Precious hours lost. They scout the sound, but we’ve disappeared. The Royal Navy is deprived of its decisive victory. Imagine their rage, their confusion!”
“Make your point quickly, Sir, I have ships to repair.”
“Our duty is to show England that this is a war. We did that today. Tonight, our duty is to show them that the Colonies survived. You pointed out to me that they always choose strength over time. General, let me ask this—what would you do to have an extra month at this time of year?”
Arnold’s sharkish eyes flared beneath the tricorn. “A month in October is critical in these northern lands. Ticonderoga is garrisoned with ten thousand patriots and will take an extended siege for the British to break. If they lay siege, they’ll have a bitter winter-long experience for which they’re ill-prepared. If they elect not to storm Ticonderoga, they’ll have to give us Lake Champlain until next summer.”
“A year to prepare our Continental defenses. General, I can give you that year this very night.”
Arnold paused. The rowboat rocked, bumping the sloop’s shattered gunwales. “How?” he asked.
Daniel leaned over. “Royal Savage may yet prove a patriot. A burning ship is a seductive sight. And listen—do you hear the British hammers and saws? They’re busy making repairs. We’re trapped, and they’re overconfident, This gives us time to prepare the sweeps and tholepins, shroud our lanterns, confer with our captains, and make the men understand. With a light in the stern of each ship, we can hug the shoreline and follow each other out, right under their noses.”
General Arnold paused, his blue eyes fixed unforgivingly upon Daniel. Slowly a picture transferred from Daniel’s mind to his. “What will prevent their seeing us move? It’s a clear night.”
Daniel’s conviction was undeniable. “A fog is rising.”
“Fog? There’s not a wisp!”
“Believe me, it’s coming. It will hide us. We need not destroy them to win, General, we simply need deprive them of destroying us and we will have won.” Daniel looked at me now, a change that startled me. He placed a meaningful hand upon my arm. “The new needs not destroy the old in order to prevail.”
But Benedict Arnold no longer attended the communication between Daniel and me. He was off in his own mind, a plan spinning to life behind his eyes. “Hooded lanterns … a man to guard each light from the British eyes … grease every running block and sheave, bind the anchors and chains, grease the locks—or better, we tear our shirts and muffle the sweeps with cloth.”
“Cloth is better, yes.”
“Yes!” Abtuptly General Arnold smacked the side of Enterprise with the flat of his hand. “Colonel Wigglesworth can lead the way in Trumbull. I’ll call a council of war aboard Congress upon the half hour. Spread the word—quietly!”
When long fingers of mist came bleeding between the anchored Continental gunships from the north strait, we were ready. The fog rose so thick and white that we could scarce see our own bowsprit. Embracing the new plan, the patriot fleet quietly retrieved our anchors, put out long oar sweeps muffled with cloth, and lit lanterns on our transoms, shrouded so they could be seen only from dead astern. Thus began the ghostly row.
With Trumbull leading the way, we skimmed down the New York shoreline. Speaking not a word, huddled deep in our hulls, the spirit squadron smoked out onto Lake Champlain under the very noses of the Royal Navy. The British, preoccupied with repairs and watching the Royal Savage burn through the fog, never saw us.
For hours we rowed like that, in silence. Finally the order came to put up our tattered sails and try to make our way south. We were well away from Valcour Island, and the British were guarding an evacuated bay.
Daniel found me huddled in the stem of Enterprise, catching what little warmth I could from the lantern whose shroud I was tending. Astem of us, the gunboat Spitfire was only a smudge in the darkness.
“We did it,” he said as he knelt beside me. “They’ll be raving mad in the morning. They’ll waste time searching for us. They can’t come south until they’re sure we’re not at their backs. Meantime, we’ll put in at Schuyler Island and make repairs.”
“Brilliant, Daniel. You see? You try to resist the spirits running in your blood, but you can’t help but perceive things. You knew the Veil was coming. When it arrived, we were ready.”
He surveyed me in a mystical way. “The new and old ways find transition in you, Adam, not in me. You’re the one who had enough courage to embrace both ways. You are the Veil between old and new.”
Draping an arm around my shoulders, Daniel leaned against the Enterprise’s shot-pocked taffrail and gave the ship an affectionate pat. Then he plucked a sprig from the remnant of pine branch that had fallen on the deck from the wrecked canopy, and ran it across his lip to take whatever aroma still lingered.
“Do you think,” he asked, “mother would like me to bring her a branch of Valcour hemlock?”
Beneath his warmhearted embrace, I smiled. “And we can be home for Halloween.”
The young officer who climbed out onto Carleton’s bowsprit under fire was nineteen-year-old Midshipman Edward Pellew, later to become Vice Admiral Pellew, Viscount Exmouth, distinguished naval commander daring the Napoleonic Wars.
At dawn on October 12, the Royal Navy discovered Valcour Bay mysteriously evacuated. After a fruitless delay hunting for the rebel fleet, they chased the Americans down Lake Champlain. Israel Daniel Dickenson, Dr. Stephen McCrae, and the Enterprise sailed south with Benedict Arnold’s tiny fleet and were forced to engage the British a second time with great loss, destruction, and capture. Still Arnold refused to fold. The Americans scuttled several vessels, burned them, and defiantly left their flags flying to show that this was no surrender. They escaped overland, carrying their wounded, and joined the Enterprise sloop, Schooner Revenge, Galley Trumbull, and the Gunboat New York at Fort Ticonderoga, the only surviving ships of their squadron.
The Battle at Valcour Island displayed to the British that the Americans would fight. They now had a taste of what they would face during a siege of Fort Ticonderoga, Thinking twice, they went back to Canada. The long winter months gave
the Americans nearly a year to reinforce.
Though Benedict Arnold had displayed unprecedented leadership, the Continental Congress denied him a promotion, partially because several men from Connecticut had already been promoted.
Had the British punched down Lake Champlain without obstacle, the Crown forces would have sliced the Colonies and easily broken them. We owe a second look to the unyielding Arnold, who gave our nation its one and only chance, as well as our thanks to the heroic Captain Dickenson, who set a fine precedence for all Enterprise captains to come.
Let me die in my old American uniform, the uniform in which I fought my battles. God forgive me for ever putting on any other.
Benedict Arnold, in England shortly before his death, 1801
Captain Osborne B. Hardison
U.S.S. Enterprise
“Command requirements do not recognize personal priviledge.”
Commander Spock,Star Trek
DIANE CAREY
When this project first came up, Diane was originally scheduled to write the Captain April story. After all, she has written more about him than any other author, so it seemed natural. However, Diane also really wanted to write the two historical stories, the ones that inspired Gene Roddenberry to select Enterprise as the starship’s name. It wasn’t hard to see the logic of letting the sailor write about what it was really like on those famous ships.
Diane wants readers to know:
This story is dedicated with supreme respect to Hector Giannasca and Joe Liotta, veterans of the carrier Intrepid, whose hospitality I will always cherish, and to all the men who served the United States in the Pacific during World War Two, including my dad, Frank Carey, United States First Marines, veteran of the cave warfare on Peleliu Island.
For those of us less versed on naval warfare, Diane thoughtfully provides us with a glossary.
AA—Anti-aircraft
F4F-4—Grumman “Wildcat” fighter plane
Star Trek: Enterprise Logs Page 4