The Devil in Paradise--Captain Putnam in Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  “Mr. Miller, my gunnery manual has not been written yet.”

  “What about his fire?” asked Miller.

  “He can’t mount anything heavier than twelves. He will get one salvo before I clear his deck with the carronades.”

  “What if he turns unexpectedly?”

  “It won’t be a fast or pretty turn if you do your job with the bar shot!” Bliven seized Miller’s hand. “Now, below with you, and good luck.”

  “You, too.”

  “Mr. Yeakel!”

  “Sir!”

  Bliven held his arms straight before him, pointing them right and then left. “I am going to box him as I go in, starboard and then port. Be nimble, now. Be ready to brace up or ease off to match my turns.”

  “Never you worry, sir.” He sprinted forward to relay the orders.

  Then came the silence, the hair-rising silence before a sea battle, when all that was audible was the hiss of bows slicing through waves and the whisper of wind through the rigging. There was ample time for Miller to finish loading the guns. Bliven knew they were ready when he heard the starboard ports snap open and the carriage wheels squeal as they were rolled out.

  The somewhat slovenly brig made no move; he could see that their guns were all on the weather deck—no surprise in a smaller ship, but convenient when it came to the effect that his carronades would have.

  “Steady, Mr. Rippel, well done, now.” They were eighty yards astern of the brig and off its port quarter; this course would bring them thirty yards abeam.

  “Ready starboard, Mr. Rippel, starboard now!” The tall young lieutenant put all his weight on the great double wheel. They began to feel the bite of the turn, which really dug in as Yeakel braced up the yards to keep the wind behind them.

  Bliven almost feared they had turned too far, when the twenty-fours beneath him one after another thundered to life, shaking the deck beneath their feet, and plainly they could see the brig’s sails stretch and pop in spasms and they began spilling wind through the holes, as rigging snapped and curled crazily into the air. One lucky shot shivered the brig’s mizzen, which lay slowly over, taking its spanker with it.

  “Oh, what a godsend,” roared Bliven. “Good for Miller! Hard aport, Mr. Rippel! Port, now! Mr. Yeakel, ease off your yards!”

  Inexplicably, the brig made no attempt to turn or evade in any direction. Rappahannock’s bowsprit came even with the brig’s stern but in her port turn was veering away so they could not fight beam to beam. “Bring your rudder amidships, Mr. Rippel! We—”

  Bliven’s voice was lost in a deafening roar from the gun deck beneath them. Their turn had brought all the starboard twenty-fours to bear at once; thus there was no rolling broadside, just one shattering salvo that holed the brig’s hull, taking out chunks of railing and deck cabin.

  “Carronades!” screamed Bliven. “Hold! Hold!” It was obvious that Rappahannock’s higher freeboard would send the grape whistling through the rigging, and he must wait for the down roll for them to have the needed effect. After several seconds they felt the port side lift in an oncoming swell, and suddenly they were looking down at the brig’s deck. “Fire!”

  They heard screams and saw men fall, but there answered back a salvo from three twelve-pounders. One ball missed forward; the second crashed into the starboard cathead, releasing the anchor, which dangled into the water without falling farther. The third crunched through the starboard railing and knocked a wheel off one of the three carronades’ carriages, dislodging its barrel, which knocked the gun captain to the deck as it dropped onto his legs.

  In a moment there was a second crushing broadside from the starboard battery, which caused the brig’s port side to burst into a shower of wooden splinters. Without warning, her remaining sails came fainting down as the shrouds were cut and a white sheet ran aloft on its mainmast.

  “Cease firing! Cease your firing! Marines to the deck! Get the wounded down to the cockpit! Mr. Ross, my speaking trumpet!”

  In a moment it was in his hands. “This is United States sloop of war Rappahannock. Do you surrender?”

  In a moment a similarly amplified voice came back. “Of course we surrender, you idiot. What does it look like?”

  Miller was back beside Bliven and began to shake with laughter.

  “What are your casualties?” Bliven shouted through the trumpet.

  “Nine dead, six injured.”

  “How many are not hurt?”

  “Twenty!”

  “You, lower a boat and bring over your injured; we will do what we can for them.” Bliven set aside the speaking trumpet. “Mr. Yeakel, lower the captain’s gig: the marines will go over and take possession of the vessel. I claim her as a prize; we will all share in the proceeds. Send your bosun’s mate over and start repairing what rigging you can. All her crew are to be placed in irons. Once their wounded are aboard, make all sail to chase down that barkentine.”

  Once they overhauled the barkentine, she dropped her sails without a protest, and proved to have forty-five Africans in her hold. It required until evening to place that crew also in irons and select a prize crew to follow them. Mobile was now a necessity, and there was no help but to turn the forty-five over to the Customs Service, after which they would meet their fate on the cotton plantations. But by turning over a fully laden slave ship, their attention would be diverted and there would be no need to know about the nine in his sail room. He would keep anchored far out in the bay and sequester the crew.

  It was after dinner when Bliven held an examination of the pirate captain, a Frenchman, swarthy and theretofore not communicative. A table and chair were brought up to the quarterdeck. Bliven sat, with paper weighted before him, and an inkwell, and quill in hand, with Miller and Rippel standing behind and flanking him, and Dr. Berend to attest that the prisoner was not mistreated. He was led up from the hold, hands and feet shackled.

  “What is your name?” asked Bliven.

  “I am Henri Juchereau.”

  “What is your nationality?”

  “Ha! I am Chinese! Haa-ha-ha!”

  “Bosun, if you please, have the carpenter tie up a noose and cast it over the main course yardarm.” Yeakel saluted, stepped away, and disappeared.

  “All right, all right, I am French, but sailing in the service of Spain.”

  “Are you under the command of Lafitte?”

  The Frenchman looked at him sourly. “Yes. He also sails in the service of Spain.”

  “What is your ship?”

  “You have my ship. You know her name.”

  “What . . . is . . . your . . . ship?”

  “La Belle Hélène.”

  “You are a pirate?”

  “I am a privateer.”

  “Have you a letter of marque?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was lost in a battle.”

  “Why were you even in these waters?”

  “Ah, American ships, they look for us, come from Mobile, maybe New Orleans. We went west to miss them. You came from the south. Bad luck.”

  “Why did you oppose me when all you had were a few twelve-pounders against my long twenty-fours?” There was an echo in his mind of having been asked a similar question after he lost the Tempest to the Java six years before.

  Juchereau shrugged. “My life is over. It does not matter.”

  Bliven set the quill down. “Man, you look alive enough to me. What do you mean, your life is over?”

  He sighed wearily. “If I fight you, I may die; my life is over. You catch me and hang me, my life is over. I cannot keep you from taking the barkentine and the slaves. If I escape and get to Galveston without them, the boss will mount my head on a harbor piling; my life is over. All comes to the same end, no?”

  “We killed nine of your men and severely wounded six others. Did
you have no consideration for them?”

  “Their lives were over.”

  “Oh, hell, I’m not going down that road again. Monsieur Juchereau, your life may be over, but it will not be by my hand. I will take you to Mobile, and there you will be tried for piracy. Whether or not you hang will not be my affair.”

  * * *

  * * *

  RAPPAHANNOCK’S LEAK GAVE them no worse trouble during their northerly run to Mobile, but it gave them comfort to stay in company with their two prizes in case her predicament suddenly became dire. They entered Mobile Bay looking like a squadron, and as Bliven planned he anchored his sloop in deeper water, aloof, and conducted his business with the Customs Service from the deck of La Belle Hélène. After the slaves were taken off the barkentine, he handed Juchereau over in irons, but as he suspected from the lazy Southern drawl of the officer who took charge from him, he escaped within a few days. He might well have been finished with Lafitte, but that pirate’s American partner, James Bowie, would surely find a job for him in one or another of his cutthroat enterprises.

  In sum, Bliven could not be quit of Mobile fast enough. He registered his prizes, calculating that his share might be as much as four thousand dollars, which salved his feelings a little. Cautioning the slaves in his sail room to make no sound, he took on food and water enough to get home to Boston before the winter storms became likely.

  November was half spent as Rappahannock eased into the familiar environs of the Boston Navy Yard. Bliven and Miller walked in silence to the port rail, their eyes wide.

  “What in bloody hell?” gasped Bliven.

  Miller pointed blankly. “Is that not the Constitution?”

  “It is. Or at least it used to be.” They drew closer and beheld the beloved frigate, her clean line now marred by the round humps of gigantic paddle wheels rearing above her midships.

  Bliven and Miller washed and put on fresh uniforms, then descended into the captain’s gig, to deposit Miller on the wharf. “Call first at Harvard College,” Bliven suggested. “They will be the first to know of Jonah’s whereabouts. But if that doesn’t work, try the Unitarian Church. But do not fail to find him. When I finish my business, I will send the gig back to this spot to wait for you.”

  He was then rowed to the Constitution, and after receiving permission to board he was conducted down to the captain’s cabin, where he was surprised by who greeted him. “Commodore Jones, how are you?” Bliven said. They advanced and shook hands warmly.

  Jacob Jones was an anomaly in the American navy, not to say a marvel. He was a Delaware man, well moneyed and well connected. He had married the governor’s daughter but was soon widowed; he never spoke of it, but there was a wide assumption that he joined the Navy to escape his grief. At thirty he must have been by far the oldest midshipman in the service, a station that would have humiliated any other man his age, but he learned his craft. He was a lieutenant on the Philadelphia when Bainbridge grounded her at Tripoli, and he spent a year in bondage with the rest of her crew. He rose to command the Wasp, and in 1812 he captured two British vessels before, dismasted, he surrendered to a seventy-four, and after a prisoner exchange he commanded the frigate Mohawk on Lake Ontario. He was a heartily respected officer, and having once commanded a squadron was entitled to the honorific of “commodore.”

  “I am well, Captain Putnam, and your good self? Are you yet accustomed to hearing yourself addressed as ‘Captain’?”

  “Not entirely, but I find it agreeable.” He gazed about the once-familiar environ of the Constitution, where he had known Preble and Hull and Bainbridge. “I somehow expected to find Hull still in command. Where is he?”

  “He now commands the Navy Yard here. I am only recently brought over from the Guerriere.”

  “I see. Now, Jones, what in blazing hell have you done to your ship?”

  “Not I, Putnam. Don’t lay this on me.”

  They walked together back up to the weather deck, to where the port paddle wheel arced to twice their height above them as Bliven grasped the rail and peered over the side. The wheel had to be set out far enough to clear the ship’s flaring tumble home. “Look at this: they must have taken out eight guns on each side.”

  “Ten,” scowled Jones.

  “But why, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Don’t you know? As I understand, you were part of the reason.”

  “Never!”

  “Well, you took part in the reason. Were you not serving on this vessel in 1812, when you were becalmed even as you were beset by a whole British squadron? You rowed and towed the ship, and then set kedge anchors and pulled yourself out of danger.”

  “True—” Bliven opened his palms upward in expectation.

  “Well, the Board of Navy Commissioners took note of your narrow escape and made a decision to outfit the frigates with paddle wheels attached by gears to the capstan. By their dead reckoning—although not dead enough for my money—the ship can make a three-knot headway in no wind at all.”

  “But look there!” Bliven pointed down. “The drag they create must cost you three knots or even four when under sail.”

  “I know, I know! And clumsy to turn besides. But this was the decision of our vaunted Board of Navy Commissioners, and no one can tell them anything.”

  “But Hull is on the Board, and he was the one they chased! He would know better than this, surely.”

  “Yes, well, the Board has turned into a rather convoluted story. Hull and Rodgers and Porter are used to giving orders. They have had to adjust to placating politicians and making allowances for civilian contractors and awarding them deals to keep them away from the politicians.”

  Bliven threw his head back. “Augh! Well, that tells the story, does it not?” After the Second Barbary War, when the government decided to maintain a viable navy, the Congress could not be bothered to have its affairs overseen by its own committees, and instead created this Board of Navy Commissioners, which was not gaining fame for the strength of its foresight. The three officers that formed the commission were among the Navy’s finest, but found themselves out of their depth, as it were, when out of the water.

  “And this is not even the worst of it,” spat Jones. “I hesitate to even show you the worst of it.”

  “No, I want to see.”

  “Come, then.” Jones strode toward the after ladder and clattered down it, so quickly that Bliven had difficulty keeping up with him, past the gun deck and berth deck, which Bliven could only survey with the fastest glance, and on down to the orlop deck. They moved forward in a stoop, past the storerooms where Commodore Preble in former days had locked up the more precious of his foodstuffs, and down to the hold. “There, now.” Jones gestured with ample headroom suddenly above them. “What do you think of these?”

  Bliven beheld two huge iron containers, one to port and one to starboard, rising vertically inboard where they stood, but apparently conforming to the curve of the bottom. “What in the world . . . ? Are these water tanks?”

  “Exactly. No more freshwater casks for us.”

  Bliven nodded slowly. “I have heard things are headed this way. Well, I suppose they do save the cost of a cooper making all those barrels.”

  “Yes. But how do you propose to limit the loss of water if one of them is damaged?”

  “Oh.” That was not the first contingency that came to Bliven’s mind. “Oh, yes, I see.”

  Jones was not placated. “Yes, you see. Now, what do you not see?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Look around you, man! What do you not see?”

  Bliven peered into the recesses of the hold in the dim light of its scattering of battle lanterns. Nothing seemed amiss as he tried to remember its configuration from previous years, and when the discrepancy finally came it hit him like a punch. “My God, where is your scantling? Where are your braces?”

 
“Gone!” shouted Jones. “Gone, to make room for these things!” He struck one of the tanks, which resonated deeply like a Chinese gong.

  “Why, she will hog within two or three years.” They both knew all too well that ships that were too buoyant amidships were pulled deeper at bow and stern, until her keel be it ever so stoutly made must snap and her back be broken.

  “Ah, but no! Our Board tells us that the weight of the fresh water here will prevent that happening.”

  “But how will you replenish fresh water in the middle of the ocean? They cannot remain full at all times.”

  Jones folded his arms, done and defiant.

  Bliven sank down to seat himself on a stray locker, and Jones sat upon the solid oak footing of the mainmast. “They’ve doomed her, haven’t they? Jones, you may be the last captain of this ship.” They sat together in the gloom of the lanterns for some moments. “Well, now, look here,” said Bliven suddenly. “If they want to go all modern with paddle wheels, why not go all in with a steam engine, too?”

  “They are not judged to be reliable.”

  “Nonsense. That Fulton fellow carried passengers up and down the Hudson for years on his North River. Steam power is well proven.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know about it. But listen, you had best get ashore: Hull is waiting to see you.”

  “What! Why didn’t you tell me straightaway?”

  “He knew you would have some opinions to vent about our ‘improvements.’”

  They headed back to the ladders. “He shares our opinions?”

  “Oh, Lord, don’t even get him started. He went out with us to test out the paddle wheels. Some of the words he used I’m not even sure what they meant.”

  “Ha! Good old Hull.”

  Jones emerged first onto the weather deck. “I think the game may be, at our next cruise, to just break up the paddle wheels and stow them in the hold. What the secretary doesn’t know won’t hurt him. But look here, now, tread carefully with Hull. He is laboring in heavy seas these days. I am certain he must regret letting himself ever get talked into shore duty.”

  “Good Lord, it’s been”—Bliven paused to calculate—“six years or more. He has been ashore all this time?”