The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

by Bernard Cornwell

  It had been a shambles, he thought angrily. From start to finish, a goddamned shambles, and to the commodore’s mind the only successes had been achieved by the Continental Navy. It had been the marines who captured Cross Island and the marines who had led the fight up the bluff at Dyce’s Head, and after that Lovell had quivered like a sick rabbit and demanded that Saltonstall do all the fighting. “And what if we had captured the sloops?” the commodore demanded angrily.

  “Sir?” a sailor within earshot asked.

  “I’m not talking to you, damn your eyes.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Would Lovell have captured the fort if the sloops had been taken? Saltonstall knew the answer to that question. Lovell would have found another obstacle to prevent a fight. He would have whined and moaned and tarried. He would have demanded a battery on the moon. He would have dug more trenches. It was a shambles.

  The Warren trembled as the tide lifted her. She shifted a few inches, settled again, then trembled once more. In a moment she would swing her stern upstream and tug at her anchor rode. Lieutenant Fenwick looked at the commodore with a hopeful expression, but Saltonstall ignored him. Fenwick was a good officer, but he had little comprehension of what was at stake here. The Warren was a precious piece of equipment, a well-found, well-armed frigate, and the British would love to hang their damned flag from her stern and take her into their fleet, but Saltonstall would be damned to the deepest circle of hell before he allowed that to happen. That was why Saltonstall had declined battle the previous day. Oh, he could have sacrificed the Warren and most of the other rebel warships to give the transports more time to escape the enemy, but in making that sacrifice he might well have been boarded and then the Warren would become His Majesty’s frigate. And it was all very well for Fenwick to suggest sailing upriver, but the Warren had the deepest draught of all the fleet and she would not get far before she grounded again and the British, seeing her, would do their utmost to capture her.

  “Boat approaching, sir!” a bosun called from the Warren’s waist.

  Saltonstall grunted an acknowledgment. He went and stood by the ship’s wheel as the longboat pulled across the tide. He watched the Pidgeon, a transport schooner, being towed upstream and noted that the river’s current was fighting the tide and giving the oarsmen a hard time. Then the longboat banged into the frigate’s hull and a man climbed onto the deck and hurried aft towards the commodore. “Lieutenant Little, sir,” he introduced himself, “first lieutenant of the Hazard.”

  “I know who you are, Lieutenant,” Saltonstall said coolly. In the commodore’s opinion Little was a firebrand, an impetuous, unthinking firebrand from the so-called Massachusetts Navy which, so far as the commodore was concerned, was nothing but a toy navy. “Where is the Hazard?” Saltonstall asked.

  “Upstream, sir. I was lending a hand to the Sky Rocket, sir.” The Sky Rocket, a fine sixteen-gun privateer, was aground by the bluff and waiting for the tide. “Captain Burke sends his compliments, sir,” Little said.

  “You may return them, Lieutenant.”

  Little looked about the deck. He saw the powder bags, the slow-matches and the combustibles stacked around the masts. Then he looked back to the immaculate commodore in his black shining top-boots, white breeches, blue waistcoat, blue tailcoat, and with his brushed cocked hat glinting with gold braid. “Captain Burke wants orders, sir,” Little said in a curt voice.

  “Captain Burke is ordered to deny his ship to the enemy,” Saltonstall said.

  Little shuddered, then turned so suddenly that Saltonstall instinctively put a hand to his sword’s hilt, but the Lieutenant was merely pointing to the place where the river swirled around the bluff. “That’s where you should be, sir!”

  “Are you presuming to give me orders, Lieutenant?” Saltonstall’s voice was icy.

  “You haven’t even fired a gun!” Little protested.

  “Lieutenant Little’” Fenwick began.

  “Lieutenant Little is returning to his ship,” Saltonstall interrupted Fenwick. “Good day to you, Lieutenant.”

  “Damn you!” Little shouted and sailors stopped working to listen. “Put your ship at the bend,” he snapped, still pointing to where the river swirled around the western bluff. “Anchor her fore and aft. Put springs on the anchors so your broadside points downstream and fight the bastards!”

  “Lieutenant’” Saltonstall began.

  “For God’s sake, fight!” Little, an officer of the Massachusetts Navy, was now screaming into the commodore’s face, spattering it with spittle. “Move all your big eighteens to one side! Let’s hurt the bastards!” Little’s face was just two inches from Saltonstall when he bellowed the last four words. Neither Saltonstall nor Fenwick said anything. Fenwick plucked feebly at Little’s arm and Saltonstall merely looked disgusted, as though a turd had suddenly appeared on his holy-stoned deck. “Oh, for God’s sake,” Little said, struggling to control his anger, “the river below the bend is narrow, sir! A ship can’t turn in the width of that channel! The British will be forced to come single file, bows to our guns, and they can’t answer our shots. They can’t answer! They can’t bring their big ships up here, they have to send frigates, and if we put guns there we can slaughter the bastards!”

  “I am grateful for your advice, Lieutenant,” Saltonstall said with utter disdain.

  “Oh, you cowardly bastard!” Little spat.

  “Lieutenant!” Fenwick seized Little’s arm. “You don’t know who you’re speaking to!”

  Little shook off the lieutenant’s hand. “I know who I’m speaking to,” he sneered, “and I know where I am and I damned well know where the enemy is too! You can’t just burn this ship without a fight! Give her to me! I’ll damn well fight her!”

  “Good day, Lieutenant,” Saltonstall said icily. Fenwick had beckoned two crewmen who now stood menacingly close to the furious Little. James Fletcher had evidently come aboard during the argunment. “Get off my ship!” Saltonstall snarled at Fletcher, then turned back to Little. “I command here! On this ship you take my orders! And my orders are for you to leave before I have you put in irons.”

  “Come ashore,” Little invited the commodore, “come ashore, you yellow bastard, and I’ll fight you there. Man on man, and the winner takes this ship.”

  “Remove him,” Saltonstall said.

  Little was dragged away. He turned once and spat at Saltonstall, then was pushed down to his waiting longboat.

  The Warren lurched and came free of the sandbank. A breath of wind touched Commodore Saltonstall’s cheek and lifted the snake ensign at the frigate’s stern. The smoke in the clear sky wavered and started to drift northwest.

  Which meant the British were coming.

  The men on the beach beneath the bluff had come from the transports that were anchored or grounded in the river. They now sat disconsolate and leaderless on the shingle. “What are your orders?” Wadsworth asked one sergeant.

  “Don’t have any orders, sir.”

  “We’re going home!” a man shouted angrily.

  “How?” Wadsworth demanded.

  The man had hefted a haversack sewn from sail-canvas. “Any way we can. Walk, I guess. How far is it?”

  “Two hundred miles. And you’re not going home, not yet.” Wadsworth turned on the sergeant. “Get your men in order, we still have a war to fight.”

  Wadsworth strode down the beach, shouting at officers and sergeants to assemble their men. If the British could be stopped at this bend then there was a good chance to reorganize the army upriver. Trees could be felled, a camp made, and guns placed to deter any British assault. All it needed was a firm defense on this sun-drenched morning. As Wadsworth followed the bank further downstream he saw how the river narrowed into a valley that ran almost straight southwards to Odom’s Ledge about four miles away. The river itself was about three hundred paces wide, but that was deceptive because the navigable channel was much narrower and the British ships must creep up that channel in singl
e file, the leading ship’s vulnerable bows pointing straight at the bluff. Four guns would do the job! He ordered militia captains to clear a ledge on the bluff’s slope and when they complained that they had no axes or shovels he snapped at them to find a boat and search the transport ships for the necessary tools. “Just do some work! You want to go home and tell your children you ran away from the British? Have any of you seen Colonel Revere?”

  “He went downriver, sir,” a surly militia captain answered.

  “Downriver?”

  The captain pointed to the long, narrow valley where the rearmost American ship, a schooner, was trying to reach the rest of the fleet still gathered by the bluff. Her big mizzen sail was poled out to port to catch the tiny wind that had at last started to scurry catspaws across the river’s surface. Four of the schooner’s crew were using huge oars to try and hasten her passage, but the oars dipped and pulled pathetically slowly. Then Wadsworth saw why they were using the long sweeps. Behind the schooner was a much larger ship, a ship with more sails and higher masts, a ship that suddenly fired her bow-chasers to fill the valley with smoke and with the echo of her two cannon shots. The balls had not been aimed at the schooner, but rather to either side of her hull as a signal that she should haul down her ensign and let the pursuing British take her as a prize.

  Wadsworth ran down the beach. There were men on the schooner’s bows waving frantically. They had no longboat, no boat of any sort, and they wanted a rescue, and there, not fifty paces away, was Revere’s white-painted barge with its crew of oarsmen. It was rowing upriver ahead of the schooner, suggesting that Revere had gone downstream, maybe hoping to escape past the British ships, but, discovering the futility of such a hope, had been forced back northwards. Wadsworth could see Lieutenant-Colonel Revere himself in the barge’s sternsheets and he stopped at the water’s edge and cupped his hands, “Colonel Revere!”

  Revere waved to show he had heard the hail.

  Wadsworth pointed at the schooner which he now recognized as the Nancy. “The Nancy’s crew needs rescuing! Take your barge and pick them up!”

  Revere twisted on his bench to look at the Nancy, then turned back to Wadsworth. “You’ve no right to give me commands now, General!” Revere called, then said something to his crew who kept rowing upstream, away from the doomed Nancy.

  Wadsworth wondered if he had misheard. “Colonel Revere!” He shouted slowly and clearly so there could be no misunderstanding. “Take your barge and get those crewmen off the Nancy!” The schooner was lightly crewed and there was plenty of room in the barge’s bows for all of her seamen.

  “I was under your command so long as there was a siege,” Revere called back, “but the siege is over, and with it your authority has ended.”

  For a heartbeat Wadsworth did not believe what he had heard. He gaped at the stocky colonel, then was overcome with rage and indignation. “For God’s sake, man, they’re Americans! Go and rescue them!”

  “I’ve got my baggage here,” Revere called back and pointed to a heap of boxes covered by sailcloth. “I’m not willing to risk my baggage! Good day to you, Wadsworth.”

  “You . . .” Wadsworth began, but was too angry to finish. He turned and walked up the beach to keep pace with the barge. “I am giving you an order!” he shouted at Revere. Men on the beach watched and listened. “Rescue that crew!”

  The British frigate astern of the Nancy fired her bow-chasers again and the balls seared past the hull to throw up great fountains of river water. “You see?” Revere called when the echo of the gunfire had faded. “I can’t risk my baggage!”

  “I promise you an arrest, Colonel!” Wadsworth called savagely. “Unless you obey my orders!”

  “You can’t give me orders now!” Revere said, almost cheerfully. “It’s over and done with. Good day, General!”

  “I want your guns on the bluff ahead!”

  Revere waved a negligent hand towards Wadsworth. “Keep rowing,” he told his men.

  “I shall have you arrested!” Wadsworth bellowed.

  But the barge kept going and Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Revere’s baggage was safe.

  * * *

  HMS Galatea led the British frigates. At her bows was a figurehead of Galatea, her painted skin as white as the marble from which her mythical statue had been carved. In that myth she had sprung to life from the marble and now she came upriver, naked except for a wisp of silk covering her hips, and with her defiant head raised to look straight ahead with startling blue eyes. The frigate was flying topsails and topgallantsails only, the high canvas catching what small wind came from the south. Ahead of her was chaos, and the Galatea made the chaos worse. The schooner Nancy had been abandoned, but a British prize crew secured the vessel and used the captured schooner’s anchors to drag her to the eastern bank of the river so that the Galatea and HMS Camille, which followed the Galatea, could pass. The nymph and her blue eyes vanished in a sudden billow of smoke as the two long-barreled nine-pounder bow-chasers fired from the frigate. The balls skipped across the water towards the mass of rebel shipping. Red-coated Royal Marines on the Galatea’s forecastle waited for the cannon smoke to drift away, then began shooting muskets at the distant men on the river’s western bank. They fired at very long range, and none of the balls found a target, but the beach emptied fast as men sought shelter among the trees.

  And there was more smoke now, far more smoke. It did not come from British cannons, but from fires aboard the rebel ships. Captains struck flint against steel and lit their slow-matches, or else thrust fire into the kindling of the combustibles stacked belowdecks and around masts. Longboats pulled for the shore as smoke poured out of companionways.

  The Galatea and the Camille both dropped stern anchors and took in their topsails. No ship would risk itself by sailing into an inferno. Fire loved timber, tar, and linen, and every sailor feared fire much more than he feared the sea, and so the two frigates lay in the river, rising gently on the incoming tide, and their crews watched an enemy destroy itself.

  The proud ships burned. The sleek privateers and the heavy transports burned. Smoke thickened to a dense thunder-dark cloud which boiled into the summer sky, and amidst the smoke were savage tongues of flame leaping and spreading. When the hungry fire found new timber it would sometimes explode and the light would glimmer across the water and new flame would erupt into the rigging. That rigging was ablaze, each ship and brig and sloop and schooner outlined by fire until a mast burned through and then, so slowly, a blazing lattice would topple, sparks rushing upwards as the spars and lines arced downwards, and the river would hiss and steam as the masts collapsed.

  The Sky Rocket, a sixteen-gun ship-privateer, was aground just beyond the bluff and in the haste to evacuate the bluff she had taken the remainder of the ammunition from the abandoned rebel batteries. Her hold was filled with powder, and the fire found the hold and the Sky Rocket exploded. The force of the blast shivered the smoke from the other burning ships, it blew timber and burning sails high into the air where, like sky rockets, they flew to leave myriad smoke trails curving far above the river. The noise was physical, a pounding of sound that was heard in Fort George, and then other magazines exploded, as if copying the Sky Rocket’s example, and the hulls lurched, steam mixed with the churning smoke, and rats screamed in the filthy bilges as the consuming fire roared like furnaces run wild. Men ashore wept for their lost ships, and the oven-heat of the blaze touched the faces of the seamen staring in wonder from the Galatea’s foredeck. Flaming yards, their halliards burned through, dropped onto fiery decks and more hulls shattered as more gunpowder caught the fire and ripped the wooden ships apart. Anchor rodes parted and fire ships drifted and hulls collided, their flames mingling and growing, the smoke thickening and rising ever higher. Some ships had left their guns charged with shot and those guns now fired into the burning fleet. Gun-barrels collapsed through burning decks. The furnace roared, the cannon hammered, and the river hissed as the wrecks sank in ash-filthy water where ch
arred debris drifted.

  Beyond the bluff, still anchored even though she was well afloat now, the Warren was abandoned. She was bigger than either the Galatea or the Camille. She carried thirty-two guns to their twenty each, though she had no naked nymph protecting her bows. She had been built at Providence, Rhode Island, and was named for Joseph Warren, the Boston doctor who had sparked the rebellion by sending the horsemen to warn Lexington and Concord that the British were coming. Warren had been a patriot and an inspiration. He was appointed a general in the rebellious militia but, because his commission had not arrived, he had fought as a private at Bunker Hill and there he had died and the frigate was named in tribute to him, and since her launch she had captured ten rich British merchantmen. She was a lethal machine, heavily armed by the standards of other frigates, and her big eighteen-pounders were larger than any cannon aboard the smaller British frigates.

  But now, as the last of her crew rowed ashore, the Warren burned. Dudley Saltonstall did not look behind to see the smoke and, once ashore, he struck straight into the woods so that the trees would hide the sight of the burning frigate, of the flames rippling fast up her rigging, of the furled sails bursting into fire, of the sparks flying and falling.

  All along the river the ships burned. Not one was left.

  Peleg Wadsworth watched in silence. The guns that should have kept the British at bay were being sunk to the river’s bed and the men who should have rallied and fought were scattered and leaderless. Panic had struck before Wadsworth could inspire resistance and now the great fleet was burning and the army was broken.

  “What now?” James Fletcher asked. Smoke covered the sky like a pall.

  “Do you remember the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego?” Wadsworth asked. “From the Bible?”

  James had not expected that answer and was puzzled for a moment, then he nodded his head. “Mother told us that tale, sir,” he said. “Weren’t they the men who were thrown into the fire?”