From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Johnny was drifting in the river of heat behind his closed eyelids again when he was jerked into wakefulness by shouts coming from somewhere and clattering sounds like wood against wood. “Guards!” someone was shouting. “Guards!” There were footsteps thundering on the deck and Johnny opened his eyes to see a red blur go between himself and the taffrail: a running Redcoat with his musket. “To the gangway!” cried a voice. The thumping sounds continued and then, through his confused stupor, Johnny heard the pam of a pistol shot, more scuffling, and a strange, rising growl of savage voices, hundreds of voices. A British officer of guards ran by, sword in hand. “He-hey! He-hey!” came a distant voice, as if from down on the water. A musket banged then, followed by a louder mob-growl. Johnny was trying to get the strength to rise.

  Then there were Redcoats running in the other direction, clambering up ladders onto the quarterdeck. The ragged figures of Yankee prisoners ran and shuffled and leaped among them, getting in their way, it seemed, deliberately, yelping and laughing and cursing. Twice Johnny tried to rise, his heart thumping; twice he was tripped over by running legs and knocked flat on the hot deck, while those who had tripped over him thumped to the deck and were trampled and stumbled over by others. At last Johnny got to all fours and climbed through limbs and torsos to the taffrail, where he pulled himself up to look over the side.

  At first it made no sense, what he saw: there was the dead-boat being rowed away, as it was every day; it was about forty feet out, pulling steadily away on the sun-blazing blue-gray water.

  And then, while the commotion continued around him on the quarterdeck, Johnny began to comprehend.

  The men in the boat, rowing, were not the dead-boat crew, they were prisoners—the same filthy scarecrows who, minutes earlier, had been carrying corpses down the gangplank. Johnny’s heart leaped. Somehow they had got the boat; they were escaping! Down forward on the docking raft at the foot of the gangplank lay six or seven bodies, but only four of them were in shrouds. The others were the crew of the boat, hurt or dead; one was propped on an elbow with his hand over his eyes.

  Escaping! A wave of joy surged in Johnny’s breast—but then a prickling of dread helplessness. The fugitives were still within musket range, and so plain and vulnerable in the slow, open boat. He expected any moment to hear gunfire, to see those brave desperadoes crumple up, stopped by musketballs.

  The rowers pulled with a dreamlike slowness; the boat seemed to be almost standing still, holding them there as perfect targets, giving the Redcoat guards all the time in the world to take aim.

  But moment after moment went by, dip after dip of the oars, while the mob-shouting everywhere on the deck began to turn more and more to cheering.

  Johnny turned from the rail and looked up. And at last he saw why the guards were not shooting at the boat.

  They were surrounded by prisoners, by unarmed but jeering, cheering, taunting prisoners.

  Some of the British guards and crew were hemmed in up on the quarterdeck by Rebel officers; another group of Redcoats stood at bay on the maindeck, bayonets leveled at the horde of gaunt, dirty, grinning, furiously happy American prisoners of war, who surrounded them, taunting and spitting.

  It was obvious now why the guards dared not discharge their guns at the escaping boat. If they emptied them, they would be mobbed and torn apart by a hundred bare hands before they could reload.

  The guards stood, sweating, back to back. Even their officers were at a loss how to command them.

  For a taut minute Johnny felt that anything might erupt—that the mob might rush the guards in a general mutiny, or that the guards, in their tense state, might shoot into the mob or charge them with steel. It was a moment exactly like this, on King Street in Boston eight years ago, which had exploded into a fracas killing five citizens and had come to be known as the Boston Massacre. It would be bloody pandemonium if either faction moved first, Johnny realized. And now some voices up on the quarterdeck were beginning to debate the possibilities, to make suggestions.

  “Kill the God-dang gaolers!” sang out a voice twangy with Virginian accent.

  “Aye!” shouted another.

  “That lieutenant there, with a face like a turd-pie! I want to put his head in th’ swill-pot!” There was a wave of jeers and whistling. Johnny balled his fists, his soul screaming for that kind of revenge. But his reason prayed nothing would happen. A riot would be a waste of blood, even if it succeeded. Even if the prisoners killed their keepers and took over the ship, they would still be prisoners. The vessel could go nowhere. There were no smallboats to go ashore in. More likely the Royal Navy would just sail a warship up alongside and sink us, Johnny thought. Or just let us starve.

  But the hubbub on deck was subsiding now. Johnny turned to look after the fugitives, whom he’d almost forgotten in the tension.

  The boat was more than a hundred yards away now, and the escapees within it were going easy on the oars, gazing back apparently for a farewell look at the dungeon-ship. One of them stood up in the stern and waved. Many voices cheered from the ship, many arms were waved in reply, and there were more smiles than Johnny had ever seen on the Jersey. It was obvious now that the mob on the ship was not going to riot, but had only been buying time for the men in the boat. Now the boat was safe out of musket range and the event was nearly over, and every American still aboard the Jersey was a bit more free, in his spirit, because of them.

  The man standing in the boat was yelling something through cupped hands. His voice came faint into the wind, but Johnny heard the words:

  “July the fourth! It is …”

  Is it? Is it? Johnny thought. By heaven, it is! Two years since independence!

  And from the throats of the hundreds of prisoners holding their captors captive, three brave cheers burst forth; a seagull soaring over veered off in fright.

  THAT NIGHT THE OFFICERS IMPRISONED IN THE GUN ROOM could not keep from smiling at each other, laughing wistfully. Even though the air was so hot and dense that the lantern scarcely burned, they were happy.

  “Didn’t I say so?” Lieutenant Hoag burbled. “The one way off this Jersey is by way o’ the dead-boat! Ha, ha!”

  “Lord in Paradise,” Johnny groaned, looking misty-eyed, “I wish I was with ’em! Independence! God Almighty! What a day!”

  “Independence, you say?” Hoag snickered now. “Why, friend Clark, if you escaped off this boat, you’d be married, by a deathbed promise, to a shrew you can’t even abide! You’d call that independence? Ha, ha!”

  “THERE SHE LAYS, JOE,” GEORGE SAID. “KASKASKIA.”

  “Perty as a virgin,” said Bowman. “And little does she know.”

  It was the evening of July fourth. The blood-red sunset on the far side of the Mississippi Valley reddened their flushed faces. George was awestruck by his first sight of the great river.

  The Illinois Regiment was lying, legs burning with exhaustion, stomachs gnawed by two days’ marching without food, in the waving meadow grass on a bluff overlooking the angle where the Kaskaskia River flowed into the gigantic Mississippi. In the angle was the town, a cluster of gardens and streets and well-built houses of stone, timbers, and plaster. Above the village were grainfields, pastures dotted with cattle and sheep, an Indian village of dome-shaped huts, a quaint and massive Old World Windmill, and the river road fading northward up the Mississippi through the evening haze toward the smaller villages of Prairie du Rocher and Cahokia. Across the Mississippi from Kaskaskia, on the Spanish side, barely visible at this distance, lay the tiny village of St. Genevieve.

  The whole valley was lavender, red, gold; the Mississippi was a broad brassy ribbon with a red path of sunflecks coming across it. And beyond were the low purple bluffs of Spanish Louisiana. “Imagine it, a pocket o’ civilization out here ’twixt Noplace and Nowhere,” George said.

  “Yup. And imagine: It’s a-gonna be our’n, ’fore the day of independence is over.” Joe Bowman was one of that brotherhood who called themselves the Sons of Liber
ty, and he was deeply stirred by the timeliness of their arrival. To him it was another of George’s propitious arrangements, like the eclipse. It was useless for George to protest that he had expected to invade the place a month earlier; Joe was convinced that George had worked it out for the Fourth of July.

  Leonard Helm lounged at George’s left, and he was studying the village through a spyglass. The troops, mostly stripped to their breechclouts to catch any breath of evening air on their sweaty bodies, lay or sat in the grass along the brow of the bluff, kneading their leg muscles, tending their feet and their weapons, and looking down on Kaskaskia, light-headed, famished, rapacious, thinking their private thoughts of attack, plunder, revenge.

  “I feel like th’ wolf fixin’ to swoop down on th’ fold,” Helm murmured with a mean grin, still squinting through the glass. “That there,” he said, pointing to a large house fortified by a high stone wall, “so that’s their fort, eh? Don’t look like much of a fort t’ me. And the Sewer de Roachblob, he lives in that big house inside, eh? What I’ll do is I’ll haul that mother-scalpin’ skunk-fart of a French Tory whore’s son outer that house and I’ll nail his cock-bag to th’ big elm tree thar, that’s what I’ll do.”

  George shook his head and clucked his tongue at Helm’s language. This was the vengeful attitude he had nurtured in his men to get them down the Ohio and across the Illinois plains to this destination. You can get a lot of mileage out o’ hate, he thought. They were in a simple raiding and plundering mood. But what they had to do now was not going to be quite that simple, and it was time to tell them so. “Now, fetch me all the officers. I need to talk to ’em before we go down there,” he said.

  They came and knelt around him on the slope. He pointed to a solitary farmhouse on the near bank of the Kaskaskia River, where, according to his spies, boats were available for ferrying the troops across the Kaskaskia to the town. They would sneak down the slope and capture the house as soon as darkness had fallen, he said. Then they would try to ferry all the troops across to the town before midnight. Bowman would take part of the force to surround the town, while George would lead the rest straight through the streets to the fort, which he expected he could seize by surprise. “If I do, I’ll signal with a pistol shot and one hellacious yelp,” he said. “If not, and ye hear battle, then you’ll come in and help me storm the fort.

  “Now,” he said. “Here it is about Kaskasky, once we’ve got ’er, and listen damn good to this, my boys, ’cause we fly or we fall, on what I tell ye now:

  “Make every man understand that I’ll not tolerate one act of plunder or savagery of any kind. There’ll be no scalping, there’ll be no looting, there’ll be no raping, or even an ungentle gesture at any woman, girl, sheep, or even bitch dog in that town. We’ll use only what force we need to keep the civilians out of our way, and there’ll be no intercourse of any kind with the inhabitants until I say so.”

  The captains were flabbergasted. “No looting?” exclaimed Helm. “Th’ boys won’t like that! Takes th’ fun out of it. Not to mention th’ profit.”

  “Fun enough later. And profit’s for merchants, not soldiers,” George said. “One other caution, most important: we’ll take pains never to reveal how few we are. We must never bunch together where we could be counted. If we can, we must seem a thousand. We can negotiate only from a dominant posture—and that’ll be no mean trick where we’re outnumbered ten to one.”

  The officers looked at each other. They hadn’t talked much about numbers, but they had thought vaguely about them.

  “What d’ye mean, ‘negotiate,’ George?” Bowman asked.

  “I mean, first, their surrender. Then, this.”

  He reached inside his pouch and drew out a handbill about the alliance with France. It had come by courier to the island last month.

  “It means,” he explained as they studied it with curiosity in the waning light, “we invade them as enemy. Then with the help of God, and that news there, and what wisdom and humanity we have, we turn their loyalty around. Then we won’t be outnumbered by enemies, y’ see? Simple: we just make friends of ’em.”

  They looked at him in the twilight, looked at him perplexed and astounded, squinting and scratching their jaw-stubble, digesting this new and complicated responsibility he had put upon them. This was no plain old raid; it was like some fancy diplomatic jiggery-pokey as well, as Helm put it.

  This Clark was the damnedest thing, as they had been saying aside to each other all the way along this thousand-mile beeline. He always knew more than they did and he was always making things bigger and more interesting than anything they’d ever done before. It was confounding. But it gave them shivers, and for some strange reason it made them all feel more important than they had ever felt before.

  “In about ten minutes we’ll start moving down to the farmhouse,” he said. “So tell your boys what I said, and warn ’em any breach o’ those orders is on pain o’ death. And …” Now his voice went softer, vibrating with that warmth he could turn on at just the right times, like a smile you could hear in the dark. “Thankee, gents. I sure picked my people right. Let’s be about it, now.”

  BOWMAN’S MEN HAD ENCIRCLED THE TOWN AND WERE crouched, mostly naked and still wet from the river crossing, in the dark fields and along the roads, waiting in the dew-damp midnight air, hearing the creaking and croaking of katydids and frogs and the whine of the mosquitoes that were thick in the air around them. They waited and wondered whether anything at all was happening. So far they had not heard even a dog bark.

  Suddenly a pistol shot rang out from amid the dark silhouettes of the village houses, followed by Colonel Clark’s great voice yodeling:

  “Eeeeeeeeeyaaaaaa, hoooey! Rocheblave is ours! Come to town, and make some NOISE!”

  JOHNNY CLARK SAT WITH LIEUTENANT HOAG AND CAPTAIN Coffin at the table under the smoky lamp, eyes cocked toward the ceiling, sweating in the airless heat, listening to the angry voices of the British officers in the quarters above. They could not make out the words through the thick planking, but they could hear in the inflections that much scolding was going on; they could hear in the tromp of boots and the creaking of boards that many men were coming and going, and that a great deal of floor-pacing was being done by the staff officers of the Jersey.

  All this had gone on through the night of July 4 and into the wee hours of the morning of the fifth, and now it was midmorning, and the activity had resumed. In the meantime, the mood of the prisoners had been just the opposite. Almost all night long, songs of liberty had been heard coming from the enlisted men’s confines. The prisoners had stayed awake most of the night singing, and telling and retelling the wonderful story of the escape, each witness relating what he had seen and heard of it from where he had stood, until a detailed picture of the whole incident had been assembled, and then that whole story had made the rounds several times. It was that the men of the corpse detail—a sergeant from a Maryland regiment, and the rest privates from various states—had been talking about the Day of Independence while carrying the corpses across the deck, and when they had descended the ladder to the docking raft, their heads still full of the word “Independence,” they had found the dead-boat crew quite off guard. The privates, as if by some wordless mental message, had glanced at each other and at the crew, then at the sergeant. The sergeant, looking up and seeing that no sentries were watching, had given a nod, and at once the prisoners had grabbed the boat crew, choking them and taking their knives and cudgels and using these on them, then had leaped into the boat, taking the oars and shoving away. Two sentries on deck had heard the scuffle, and had called for help and aimed their weapons at the boat, only to find themselves pressed back from the rail by a mass of prisoners. A guard officer then had aimed his pistol down at the boat, but his shot was deflected when Americans on deck lurched against him. And then most of the prisoners had joined to create the diversion that had tied up the whole guard detail until the boat was out of range.

  The questio
n whether the fugitives had reached shore safely in their little boat had never been answered, but, said Johnny:

  “Unless they’re brought back aboard this stinkpot and seen by our own eyes, there’s not a man aboard will believe they didn’t make it. A man believes what he wants to believe, and by heaven, I choose to believe they’re safe and happy right now in some patriot’s kitchen, feeding for the first time in a year on something other than Royal swill an’ shoddy!”

  “That I choose to believe too,” said Captain Coffin. “Hey! Liberty! Ha! By th’ powers, my soul is free, going thither and yon with those spunky boys!”

  “Well and good,” said Hoag. “But I wish our Royal keepers upstairs there would finish puttin’ blame, and get about the business o’ running this jail. It’s three hours since they should have let us on deck for air, and I for one am about to suffocate.”

  There followed a long, thoughtful pause. Johnny said at last:

  “Now, y’ don’t suppose they’d …”

  “Don’t even say it,” warned Coffin. “Absit nomen, absit omen.”

  But the word of it came down an hour later, in the form of a proclamation from the ship’s captain: as punishment for yesterday’s incident, and to maintain a better degree of security aboard H.M.S. Jersey, said the proclamation, all prisoners, officers and men, would be forbidden henceforth to go above decks. Johnny thought of the sunshine and the gulls against the blue sky, and felt as if a vise were closing on his chest. No more sunlight and fresh air to cure his lungs.

  Hoag mopped his face with an already sodden rag and looked about at the sweat-slick faces around the table.

  “It’s July, gentlemen,” he said. “After July comes August.”

  15

  CAROLINE COUNTY, VIRGINIA

  September, 1778