Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
One - Mary Beth, off Matanzas, Cuba June 1797
Two - Boston, Massachusetts September 1797
Three - Hingham, Massachusetts October 1797
Four - Baltimore, Maryland November 1797
Five - Nantucket Sound December 1797
Six - Hingham, Massachusetts Winter 1798
Seven - USS Constellation, at Sea July–August 1798
Eight - Port Royal, Jamaica August 1798
Nine - Saint Kitts October 1798
Ten - Île de la Gonâve, Saint-Domingue December 1798
Eleven - USS Constellation, 17.11° N, 62.30° W February 1799
Twelve - Barbados Spring–Summer 1799
Thirteen - Marie-Galante, French West Indies September–October 1799
Fourteen - In the Atlantic, Northeast of Guadeloupe February 1800
Fifteen - Hingham, Massachusetts April 1800
Glossary
About the Author
Copyright Page
In loving memory of my parents,
BILL AND TRUDY HAMMOND,
and of my parents-in-law,
LAMBERT AND VLASTA KAREL
Act well your part; there all honor lies.
ALEXANDER POPE
Prologue
THE APRIL 22, 1793, proclamation notifying the world that the United States would remain neutral in the gathering storm between Great Britain and France was, at its core, a meaningless decree. President George Washington had to deliver it nonetheless. The government over which he presided had few systems in place and a laughable presence on the world stage. What is more, it had no credit abroad and scant enforcement capabilities. A small band of ill-trained, ill-equipped soldiers served, in effect, as a glorified police force, and a few lightly armed cutters of the U.S. Treasury did their best to guard the coast against smugglers, pirates, and other maritime miscreants. So puny was America’s military presence that Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton was prompted to comment in disgust: “A nation, despicable in its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral.”
At sea, European maritime nations preyed on America’s carrying trade under the pretext of blocking shipments of wartime contraband to enemy ports. On land, the recalcitrant British retained possession of valuable fur trading posts in the Northwest that under the Treaty of Paris belonged to the United States. Along the western frontier, British and Spanish agents stirred up the Creeks and Cherokees to hinder inland migration from the seaboard states and to harass American shipping on the Mississippi. America was a country rich in resources with a promising future and a mercantile fleet to rival any in the Old World. But like a stricken beast bobbing on a perilous sea, its wounded corpus was beset time and again by the savage forays of human sharks feeding in a frenzy of ripe pickings.
Internally, the situation was not much better. From its birth, the United States had been a divided nation. In the North, the Federalists held sway under the auspices of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and other proponents of commercial enterprise. Advocating a strong central government with the power to tax its citizens, they called for a standing army and, more important, a strong navy to convoy the lifeblood of the infant republic to Europe and the West Indies. Such commerce involved great risks and skyrocketing insurance rates, but it was also, potentially, the source of enormous profits because the belligerent powers desperately wanted to buy what America had to sell. Decidedly pro-British in their outlook and dress, the Federalists disdained their political opponents, who regarded powdered wigs, silk neck stocks, and other trappings of wealth as symbols of elitism, patronage, and decadence.
The Republicans were concentrated in the South and were led by such heroes of the Revolution as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. They trumpeted the frontier spirit on which their country was founded, advocating not the banks and bonds and privileges of the elite, but the principles of limited federal powers; the inherent rights of Man as espoused by Rousseau, Locke, and their own Bill of Rights; and, as economic policy, minimal levels of taxation and national debt. Most detestable to Federalists, the Republicans were decidedly pro-French in their outlook and dress. They continued to idolize the principles of the French Revolution long after King Louis XVI had lost his head to the guillotine and the Great Terror had dragged countless others to their death. Those aristocrats who managed to escape the bloody blade—including such ardent patriots as the marquis de Lafayette—did so by fleeing their homeland for a foreign sanctuary, there to fade into the mists of history.
Such was the pro-French sentiment of the citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, that they allowed French privateers to use their seaport as a base from which to attack British shipping along the Atlantic sea-lanes. Even after a tax uprising in western Pennsylvania known as the Whiskey Rebellion had spread fears of a Jacobin nightmare appropriating the American dream, Virginians and Carolinians and Georgians continued to wear the tricolor cockade in their hats and to toast the success of Robespierre in Paris—though perhaps with less enthusiasm than in former days.
President Washington was not a man easily intimidated. He stood firm when Citizen Edmund-Charles Genet, the French ambassador in Philadelphia, threatened to appeal directly to the American people to repeal the Neutrality Act if the U.S. government did not suspend its pro-British policies. In 1794 he sent Genet packing and commissioned Chief Justice John Jay as special envoy to the Court of Saint James to repair relations with the former Mother Country and to reopen vital trade routes between America and the British sugar islands of the West Indies—trade that had been crippled by an embargo imposed by Parliament several years earlier and vigorously enforced by the Royal Navy. Jay succeeded in his mission, to the satisfaction of the Federalists if not the Republicans, but the signing of the Treaty of London had immediate consequences. Once its pro-British terms were aired in Paris, the Committee of Public Safety, which now constituted the government of the Republic of France, abrogated the Treaty of 1778, expelled U.S. ambassador Charles T. Pinckney, and declared what amounted to a guerre de course—a worldwide commercial war—against its former ally. In the West Indies, French warships based in Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue seized American vessels and impounded their cargoes of southern cotton and tobacco. Too often the Frenchmen slew the innocent crew and heaved their bodies overboard, thereby blurring the lines between privateers operating under official letters of marque and outright piracy. Throughout the South, toasts to revolutionary France became less frequent and less fervent in tone. And French privateers were no longer welcomed in Charleston.
All was not doom and gloom, however. By September 1796 a few threads of encouragement had managed to weave their way into the complex fabric of international diplomacy. The Mediterranean Sea had by now become a relatively safe haven for American enterprise, with fewer American merchantmen falling into the clutches of Barbary corsairs. True, the Barbary States of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli continued to hold American sailors in their dank prisons, as they had for more than a decade, but the seeds of American mediation in North Africa were finally beginning to bear fruit. Interrupted by the French Revolution and stalled by the untimely death of John Paul Jones, America’s chief envoy to the Barbary States, negotiations with the dey of Algiers were under way and fast approaching a satisfactory conclusion. For the price of one million U.S. dollars, an amount approximating 13 percent of the nation’s annual expenditures in 1795, plus the promise of a newly built warship in the future, Algiers and its Arab neighbors promised to release the hostage American seamen.
In response to the rape of the nation’s carrying tr
ade in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, and sick to death of America being the plaything of Europe, Congress in 1794 voted 50 to 39 to build six frigates under the auspices of a new cabinet-level Navy Department, itself a subset of the newly created War Department. President Washington chose the names of the warships while his successor, John Adams, a strong proponent and organizer of the Continental navy during the war with England, took a more active role, to the point of personally selecting certain of the ships’ commissioned officers.
These six men-of-war bore little resemblance to the ships of the Continental navy, or to the warships of the European powers. Designed by Joshua Humphreys, a Quaker shipwright from Philadelphia, they were longer, heavier, and narrower than other men-of-war in their class—hybrids, really, between a traditional 36-gun frigate and a third rate of 74 guns, the standard line-of-battle ship deployed by the Royal Navy.
The officers who commanded the U.S. Navy’s new frigates would soon discover that they possessed a secret weapon that had nothing to do with ordnance. It was, rather, the wood used for key pieces of the ship’s frame. Called Quercus virens by botanists, this wood came from a live oak with olive-green leaves that grew along a narrow swath of the Coastal Plain extending from Virginia to Georgia and across northern Florida. It could be found only in the American South, and its texture was far stronger than New Hampshire white oak, stronger even than English oak, which for centuries had been the mainstay of British hegemony at sea. Enemy shot directed at the hull of one of these newly built frigates bounced off as though it had struck not wood but iron.
One
Mary Beth, off Matanzas, Cuba June 1797
THE MASTER of the schooner Mary Beth, out of New York, was suspicious the instant he noticed the full press of sail sweeping toward him from the north coast of Cuba. That the two-masted brig was flying Spanish colors mattered not at all. Cuba was Spain’s principal colony in the West Indies, and the only beef Spain had with the United States these days involved shipping rights on the Mississippi River. Nonetheless, Tobias Taylor knew that for the past year Spain had again been an ally of France, the residue of what two decades earlier had been a powerful military alliance between the two Bourbon kings. And France, he also knew, was no longer a friend of the United States. That brig, Taylor was convinced, was flying the red and gold of Spain as a ruse de guerre.
The likelihood of encountering such a vessel was why he had shaped a course to Jamaica around the western tip of Cuba. Pirates and privateers were known to prowl the Windward Passage, a fifty-mile stretch of water separating the eastern shore of Cuba from the western shore of Saint-Domingue. These cutthroats and marauders operated with the tacit approval—if not the outright support—of the colonial governor of the French West Indies. And the colonial governor of the French West Indies took his orders from the National Directory in Paris.
The brig was closing too quickly for Taylor to consider flight. Besides, where in these waters would he go? He glanced up at the ensign fluttering abaft the schooner’s mainmast. She was flying the Stars and Stripes, and why not? She could hardly be mistaken for anything other than an American merchantman. The unique design of a Baltimore-built schooner was familiar to anyone engaged in international commerce.
Taylor scoured the horizons with a long glass, hoping against hope to find a Royal Navy vessel out on patrol from the British base at Fort Montego. But the sea was empty save for the brig, now closing fast and less than two miles away.
“Mr. Pate!” he shouted to his mate. “Heave to and run out the guns!”
Billy Pate hesitated before giving the order. Mary Beth was a merchant vessel, and like many American merchant vessels she was armed: three guns on her starboard side, another three to larboard. But these were 3-pounders, popguns compared with the long 9s the brig likely carried, six per side. Fighting off a small pirate barque was one thing; challenging what amounted to a brig of war was another. Not only was Mary Beth seriously outclassed in weight of broadside, but her crew of fourteen, master and mate included, would be no match for the much larger crew on the brig should they grapple and board the schooner.
“Mr. Pate!” Taylor cried again, his voice laced with frustration and anger. The redoubtable privateer captain he had been during the war with England would not permit him to give up the ship without a fight. “Obey my order, damn your eyes!”
Reluctantly, Pate complied. With her sails set to counteract each other, Mary Beth drifted to a standstill as her crew, freed from their sailing duties, loaded and ran out her guns. Presenting her puny broadside to the oncoming brig, she bobbed up and down on the dazzling blue sea like a tiny cork of defiance.
The brig’s captain dispensed with the formality of demanding surrender. Veering off the wind, he brought his larboard guns to bear and opened fire in rapid sequence. Mary Beth answered, the high-pitched bark of her guns drowned out by the ominous roar of her tormentor’s. Iron balls and grapeshot shrieked into the schooner, smashing through bulwarks, chewing up rigging, butchering anyone caught in their path. A sailor stationed by the foremast was struck full in the chest by a round shot. In a fraction of a second his tanned and sinewy torso was pulverized into splinters of bone and flecks of gore.
“Sweet Jesus, Captain!” Pate implored as the brig swept on by, wore ship, then made ready her starboard guns to deliver another glimpse of hell. “We must strike!”
Realizing the hopelessness of further resistance, Taylor nodded his agreement. He ordered the American ensign hauled down and watched helplessly as the brig backed her topsail and maneuvered into position alongside his schooner. Bare-chested sailors heaved over ropes, the iron claws at their ends banging onto the schooner’s deck. The claws gripped the bulwarks and the two vessels were pulled close together. As the brig’s captain stepped on board Mary Beth, Taylor prayed silently that these pirates would somehow be different from others of his experience.
His prayer went unanswered. Furious at being shot at by these upstart Americans, the pirate captain ordered Taylor sent below under guard. Taylor sat in the dank hold, his back against the hull, teeth clenched and eyes closed, but unable to escape the horror of the screams erupting from up on the weather deck. The screams were followed by the sound of bodies splashing into the sea just a few feet away from where he was sitting, to be followed by more screams and then horrible gurgles as the waiting sharks circled in and struck, drawn by their keen sense of smell to waters made bloody, Taylor suffered no doubts, by jugular veins slashed open with a knife.
When all was quiet and Taylor had fought back the urge to shriek like a madman at the inhumanity of it all, he began to contemplate his own fate. He was to learn that fate some time later when he was seized by guards and strong-armed topside. At the larboard entry port he was dispatched below into a boat in which four pigtailed sailors sat waiting with oars raised before a heavily armed coxswain at the tiller. Once Taylor was secure on the after thwart, his hands were tied loosely behind him.
As he was rowed ashore to what appeared to be a small, deserted island, he tried to determine, based on approximate time elapsed and probable speed, where he was. His best guess was somewhere within one of the southern archipelagos of the Bahamas—the Exumas, perhaps. Wherever he was, he could bet it was far removed from the Old Bahama Channel and other well-traversed sea-lanes.
When the bow of the boat hissed onto the sand, he was summarily dumped overboard. He splashed onto the wet sand and shallow water, then battled himself to his knees and upright to face his captors, to stare them in the eye.
“Au revoir, Capitaine,” the coxswain sneered. “Appréciez votre séjour sur cette belle île.” That remark set the four oarsmen to laughing. The American captain was very unlikely indeed to enjoy his sojourn. Before shoving off, the coxswain gently lobbed a dirty canvas bag up onto dry sand.
Taylor’s gaze never left the boat as he slowly twisted his hands free of their binding. Only after the boat had been hauled on board the brig and the brig was making sail in company wit
h Mary Beth did he turn to look about him. What he saw was not encouraging. The island was indeed small, a mere speck of land surrounded by a vast expanse of glittering blue sea. At first blush it appeared bereft of anything to sustain life.
He picked up the canvas bag and pulled apart the opening. Inside he found a half bottle of dark rum wrapped in rags. A further search revealed a small pistol, together with powder and ball to fire one shot.
Two
Boston, Massachusetts September 1797
YOUNG WILL CUTLER saw them first: two glints of white on the distant horizon beyond Outer Brewster Island, the massive outcropping of bedrock at the entrance to Boston Harbor. He turned the lens of his long glass to bring the glints into sharper focus. She was a double-topsail schooner—that much he could determine from the two massive fore-and-aft sails now beginning to take shape beneath the furled topsails—but he could not yet see her hull despite his elevation on the roof of his family’s counting house on Long Wharf. He could see that her course was north-northwesterly and that she was making for the Graves, as though intending to bypass Boston. But the sailor in Will knew that counted for naught. Although the fifteen-knot southwesterly breeze hit squarely abaft her beam, the schooner had taken in her topsails, which she would not have done had she intended to carry on to some farther destination. Boston was her destination. Will was convinced of that. Once she sailed past the Graves up toward Nahant, she would swing her bow through the wind on a new course that would take her southward between Deer Island and Long Island Head.
As the schooner rose higher on the horizon, Will waited in agonizing suspense. He had a strong hunch, but it was only a hunch. He would not know for certain until he saw her hull, more specifically the color of her hull. When the mainsail took full form just above her deck, he held his breath and stood on tiptoes, as though those extra few inches might make all the difference. Almost there . . . almost there . . . yes! A brilliant flash of yellow reflected the sun, and Will whooped for joy. He knew of only one yellow-hulled, double-topsail schooner sailing in these waters, and that beautiful and graceful vessel sailed in the employ of his family.
The Power and the Glory Page 1
