New York

by Edward Rutherfurd

  The war seemed to have entered a period of stagnation. Down in Philadelphia, after the departure of poor Howe, General Clinton had taken over, and now that there was danger of invasion from a French fleet, the British decided to pull out and return to New York. It wasn’t only the troops. Several thousand Loyalists had to ship out too. “Poor devils,” Master remarked to Abigail. “The British ask for Loyalist support, but then they can’t protect them.”

  As the main British force returned by land, Washington shadowed them. News came that there had been an engagement at Monmouth—a Patriot force under Lee and Lafayette had attacked the British rearguard under Cornwallis, with considerable success, and might have done more damage if Lee had not pulled back. But the British had eventually returned safely to New York, and young Albion with them.

  So once again, Congress was back in Philadelphia, and New York, under General Clinton now, remained a British base, but with huge territories, from White Plains above the city, to the tracts of New Jersey across the Hudson, dominated by the Patriots. In July, Washington moved up the Hudson Valley to the great lookout fortress of West Point, fifty miles upriver. An affectionate letter came from James, delivered through Susan in Dutchess County, to let the family know that he was safe at West Point, and to ask his father to attend to some small matters for him. But he gave them no other news.

  Soon after that, as if to confirm how the military situation had changed, Admiral d’Estaing arrived with a powerful French fleet at the entrance to the harbor. For a while he stayed there, blocking off the ocean. Then British naval reinforcements arrived and he moved, for the time being, to safe anchorage up the coast at Newport, Rhode Island. But the message was clear. The French were in the war, and the British no longer controlled the sea either.

  Two other vexations depressed John Master. In August, another fire broke out in the city and destroyed a pair of houses he was renting out. More worrying was a threat to his land in Dutchess County.

  It was a curiosity of New York that year: the city was now ruled by the British General Clinton, while the great New York hinterland, under Patriot control, had a Patriot governor of the same name—though certainly no relation. And Patriot Governor Clinton was eager to confiscate the lands of any and all known Loyalists in his territory. “Since we manage it, we’ve given out that we own the land,” Susan told him. But it seemed to Master that it would only be a matter of time before the Patriot governor took his land away.

  At the end of August, an unexpected visitor came to the house: Captain Rivers. But the news he brought was bleak. He was giving up.

  “South Carolina has been in Patriot hands for two years now, but in North Carolina, many Loyalists like myself have held on. Since spring, however, life’s become impossible. My wife and children have already left for England. And there’s nothing I can do except surrender my plantation into your hands, in the hope that you can recover your debt one day.”

  “The slaves?”

  “The main value lies there, of course. I’ve transferred them to the estate of a friend, who’s in a safer area. But how long he’ll be able to stay I don’t know.” He gave Master a detailed inventory of the slaves. “Many are skilled, and therefore valuable. If you can find a buyer for them, they’re yours to sell.”

  “You can’t hold out a little longer?” Master asked. “Relief may be at hand.”

  For with Philadelphia abandoned, the latest British talk was of a big strike against the South. General Clinton had already announced he was sending an expedition to seize one of the French Caribbean islands, and another to Georgia, where the Patriot garrisons were small, and the Loyalists many. But Rivers shook his head.

  “Diversions, Master. We can split our forces as many ways as we like, and run around in the huge wilderness of America, but in my opinion, we’ll never tame it. Not now.”

  At dinner that evening the conversation was frank. They were all old friends—John Master and Abigail, Rivers and Grey Albion. At one point, Rivers turned to Master and asked: “I once asked if you’d think of retiring to England. You weren’t interested then, I think. But might you consider it now?”

  “My father will gladly serve you, sir,” Albion chipped in, “if you care to send funds to England for safe keeping. He already holds balances of yours.”

  “Let’s not think of that yet,” Master replied. But it was significant to him that both Rivers and young Albion should be suggesting such an abandonment. It was discouraging.

  Yet his real agony of mind came not from causes military or financial. It was moral.

  In the spring, the British government, alarmed by the entry of France into the war, had sent commissioners to New York to try once more to reach a settlement with the colonists. Master had met them before they went down to try their luck with the Congress. The best of them, in his opinion, was a man called Eden. Yet having enjoyed a lengthy talk with him, Master had returned home shaking his head.

  “It seems,” he told Abigail, “that their instructions from King George are to bribe the members of the Congress. I had to tell him, ‘They aren’t the British Parliament, you know.’”

  Only a day or two afterward did he reflect with some irony that, without even considering the matter, he had rightly assumed that the Congress he opposed would have higher moral standards than the government he loyally supported.

  But the discovery that shook him came at the end of August.

  James’s letter from West Point had asked him to perform one service which his father had put off for some weeks now—only because he feared it might be time-consuming. At the end of August, feeling a little guilty, he decided he really must attend to it.

  One of James’s men had a brother who had been captured by the British. The family having received no word of him for more than a year, but believing he was in prison in New York, James asked if his father could discover what had become of the fellow. His name was Sam Flower.

  It took Master a whole day to find out that the unit to which Flower belonged had first been kept in a church building in the city, but then they had been sent across the East River. No other information was available.

  The next day was hot and sultry, so Master was quite glad to escape the unpleasantness of the city streets and take the ferry across the water to Brooklyn. The ferry dock lay across the water from the northern part of the town. From this point, the river made a turn eastward. On the Manhattan side, the buildings along the waterfront petered out. On the Brooklyn side, one came around the river’s corner to a great sweep of salt meadows, cordgrass, open water and mudflats whose Dutch name had long ago been transmogrified to Wallabout Bay. And there in Wallabout Bay lay the prisons Master was looking for.

  The hulks. Disused ships. Animal transports mostly. Huge, blackened, decrepit, dismasted, anchored with great chain cables in the muddy shallows, the hulks lay not a mile and a half from the city yet, thanks to the river bend, out of sight. There was the Jersey, a hospital ship, so-called. And the Whitby, an empty carcass since it had burned last year, its charred and broken ribs pointing sadly to the sky. But there were several others, and they were all crammed with prisoners.

  It was easy enough to hire a waterman to take him out to the ships. At the first vessel the fellow in charge, a burly, heavy-jowled man, was reluctant to allow him on board, but a gold coin changed his mind, and soon Master was standing with him on the deck.

  With the bright morning sun, and the line of Manhattan Island less than a mile away across the water, the outlook from the deck might have been pleasant. But despite the gold coin, the attitude of the custodian was so suspicious and surly that, as soon as he set foot on deck, Master felt as if a grim cloud had suddenly settled over the day. When Master asked for Sam Flower by name, the fellow shrugged contemptuously.

  “I’ve two hundred rebel dogs below,” he answered. “That’s all I know.” When Master asked if he might go below to make inquiries, the fellow looked at him as if he were insane. He took him to a hatch, though,
and opened it. “You want to go down there?” he said. “Go.” But as Master moved forward he was assailed by such a stench of urine, filth and rottenness that he staggered back.

  At this moment, from another hatch, an ill-kempt soldier with a musket appeared, followed by two figures. As soon as these two were on deck, the soldier banged the hatch closed behind them.

  “We let ’em up two at a time,” their custodian remarked. “Never more than two.”

  But Master hardly heard. He was staring at the men. They were not just thin, they were walking skeletons. Both were deathly pale; but one of them, with sunken eyes, looked feverish and seemed about to fall at any moment.

  “These men are starving,” said Master.

  “Course they’re starving,” said the custodian. And with the first trace of a change of expression since their conversation began, he actually smiled. “That’s because I don’t feed ’em.”

  “I think that man is sick,” Master said.

  “Sick? I hope he’s dying.”

  “You wish this man to die?”

  “Makes room for the next one.”

  “But are you not given money to feed these men?” Master demanded.

  “I am given money. They live or die as they please. Mostly die.”

  “How can you deal in such a manner, sir, with prisoners under your charge?”

  “These?” A look of disgust formed on the man’s face. “Vermin, I call them. Traitors that should’ve been hung.” The fellow nodded toward the city. “You think it’s any better over there?”

  “I wonder, sir, what your superiors would say about this,” Master said threateningly.

  “My superiors?” The man put his face very close to Master’s, so that the merchant could smell his stinking breath. “My superiors, sir, would say: ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ Why don’t you go and ask them, sir, if you really want to know?” And with that he told Master to get off his ship.

  At the next hulk, a young officer poked his head over the side and informed Master, politely enough, that he could not come aboard because half the prisoners had yellow fever.

  At the third, however, he had more luck. The hulk itself appeared to be rotting away, but the tall, thin, hard-faced man who allowed him up was dressed as an officer, and responded to his inquiries precisely. Yes, he had a record of every prisoner who had been on the ship. Sam Flower had been one of them.

  “He died, sir, six months ago.”

  When asked where Flower was buried, the officer waved in the direction of the salt meadows. The bodies were tipped into trenches there and all around, he explained. There were so many of them, and besides, they were only criminals.

  Master said nothing. At least he had his information. Before leaving the vessel, however, he noticed signs that there had recently been a fire in the fo’c’sle. It clearly hadn’t spread far, and he couldn’t imagine the stern officer at his side letting such a thing get out of hand, but he thought to ask: “However would you get the prisoners off, if a fire were to take hold?”

  “I shouldn’t, sir.”

  “You’d let them get to the water, though, surely?”

  “No, sir. I’d batten down the hatches and let them burn. Those are my orders.”

  John Master returned to the city in a somber mood. In the first place, he was shocked that Englishmen, his fellow countrymen, could behave in such a way. The Patriots might or might not be legal prisoners of war, there was an honest legal quarrel over that—but whatever their status, what did it say of the humanity of his own government that they could treat these men in such a way? You may call a man a rebel, he thought, you may call him a criminal, you may say he should be hung—especially when he is a stranger and not your own son. But faced with farmers, small traders, honest laborers, decent men as the Patriots so clearly were, what kind of blindness, what prejudice or, God save us, what cruelty could induce the British authorities to lock them up in hulks and murder them like that?

  Of course, he told himself, he had not known such things were going on. The hulks were out of sight. True, Susan on her visits had told him of Patriot newspapers that railed against the prisoners’ treatment. But these were gross exaggerations, he had assured her, stoutly denied by such men as his good friend General Howe.

  Yet had he ever gone into the city prisons, only a few hundred yards from his door? No, he had not. And as he considered this circumstance another, and most unpleasant, phrase began to echo in his mind: the words of the loathsome fellow on the first hulk. “You think it’s any better over there?”

  During the next week, he began to make his own discreet inquiries. He said nothing to Albion—it might put him in a difficult position—but there were plenty of people in the town from whom he could get information. A friendly chat with a prison guard; a conspiratorial word or two with an officer. Quietly and patiently, using all the skills at drawing people out that he’d mastered in the taverns of the town so long ago, he gradually found out all he wanted.

  The guard from the hulk was right: the city prisons were practically the same. Behind the walls of converted churches and sugar houses, the prisoners had been dying like flies, their bodies loaded on carts and, often as not, taken away in the darkness. Loring, whose wife had been old General Howe’s companion, had stolen their possessions and the money for their food. And for all his denials, there could be no question: genial General Howe, with whom he had so often dined, had known about it all.

  He felt sadness, shame, disgust. Yet what could he do? Others might raise the issue, but if he did, what would people say? Master has a Patriot son—his loyalty would be in question. There was nothing he could do. For the sake of Abigail and little Weston, he must keep silent.

  It was no small agony to him therefore when, early in September, his grandson came to ask for guidance. To give him company, they had sent Weston to a small school nearby, where he was taught with other Loyalist children. Foreseeing that the subject of his father James must sooner or later arise, Master had told the little boy most carefully what to say. And now it had come up.

  “So what did you say?” his grandfather asked.

  “That my father was persuaded by the Patriots that they were still loyal to the king, and that we hope he will now return.”

  “Good.” It was a mediocre argument, but the best Master could come up with.

  “They say he is a traitor.”

  “No. Your father has an honest disagreement, but he is not a traitor.”

  “But the Loyalists are right, aren’t they?”

  “They believe so. But the quarrel is complex.”

  “But one side must be right and the other wrong,” said Weston, looking confused.

  Master sighed. What could one say to a little boy?

  “I am a Loyalist, Grandfather, aren’t I?” Weston pursued. “You told me so.”

  “Yes.” Master smiled. “You are very loyal.”

  “And you are a Loyalist, Grandfather, aren’t you?” asked Weston, wanting confirmation.

  “Of course,” Master replied. “I am a Loyalist.”

  Only he could not say the truth. That he was a Loyalist who’d lost his heart.

  But he was still a businessman. General Clinton liked him. And so, that September, when Master suggested it might be time to fit out another privateer, Clinton was delighted. “Take from the French and the Patriots as much as you like,” the general encouraged him, “and I shall be vastly obliged to you.”

  The preparations for the voyage were advancing well when a small incident occurred which took him by surprise. He was working quietly in his little library one morning when Hudson entered and requested a private interview.

  “I was wanting, Boss,” he began, “to speak about Solomon. He’s been twenty-five a while now.”

  Of course. Master felt a pang of guilt. He had always promised that Solomon should be free when he was twenty-five, and the distraction of the war was no excuse for his omitting to deliver on his promise.<
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  “He shall be free today,” he told Hudson at once. But to his amazement, Hudson shook his head.

  “I was hoping, Boss,” he said, “that you’d keep him a slave for a while.”

  “Oh?” Master looked at him with some bewilderment.

  “The fact is,” Hudson confessed, “he’s been keeping some bad company.”

  There was no need, Hudson considered, to tell Master about the arguments he and Solomon had been having. And certainly no need to allude to his suspicions as to what his son might have got up to with Sam and Charlie White. Solomon was just an impatient young fellow in search of adventure. His father understood that well enough. But he also understood something else equally clearly.

  If you were a black man, there was nobody you could trust. Yes, the British offered slaves their freedom, but they only did it to weaken the Patriot slave owners of the South. If the British won this war, he doubted they’d be helping the black man any more. As for the Patriots, if they could beat the British, they’d be wanting to get as many slaves back as they could.

  Nothing was certain, but it seemed to Hudson that the nearest thing to security that his family had, whether slave or free, was the protection of John Master. So the last threat Solomon had uttered had filled his father with horror.

  “I’m due my freedom now,” he’d said, “and when I get it, maybe I’ll be going off to join Captain Master.” And if he didn’t get his freedom, Hudson had inquired sarcastically, what then? “Then maybe I’ll run away to join the British Army and get it that way.” Whichever of these harebrained solutions his son attempted, Hudson could see nothing but trouble.

  “Solomon don’t mean any harm, Boss,” he told Master, “but you might say he’s restless, and I’m afraid of him getting into all kinds of trouble if he’s free. Fact is,” he admitted mournfully, “I don’t know what to do with him.”

  “In that case,” Master suggested with a smile, “I may have a solution. Let him serve on board the new privateer. That should give him some adventure and keep him out of trouble. Any prizes they take, as crew he may have his share. And the day this present conflict is over, he shall be free. Will that do?”