The French Prize

by James L. Nelson

  Ezra had sailed with Tillinghast and he knew he was that kind of tough. His age was harder to figure. Rumstick guessed it was a little less than his own, late forties, perhaps, but with these seamen, with their lean, hard bodies and weathered faces, it was a tricky thing to gauge.

  Rumstick continued to ponder the mystery of it all. With everything that had passed between Bolingbroke and Jack Biddlecomb, why would Bolingbroke call him out now, of all times? And for so minor an affront as a tavern brawl? “It don’t answer,” he said at length. “Bolingbroke just ain’t a dueling sort of cove.”

  Not that any of this was any of Rumstick’s affair. He had no official business in Philadelphia, or anywhere, for that matter. At the end of the war he had continued on with Stanton and Biddlecomb, Merchants, taking command of a series of ships on a series of voyages to the West Indies and beyond. But for Ezra, who had been part of that group of upstart Rhode Islanders who had begun fighting the Revolution before most others even knew there was a war, the merchant service was pretty small beer. After ten years of near constant armed conflict he found he could not muster much enthusiasm for haggling with merchants over bills of lading.

  The monotony of the carrying trade pushed him from the sea, and the fact that a new nation was being built on the foundation he had fought so hard to lay kept him ashore. The War for Independency had left the former colonies a smoldering ruin, and now architects of every stripe were struggling to design what new edifice would be built in its place. After all the suffering that he had endured, witnessed, and doled out over the years of fighting, he could not spend his days worrying about the price of molasses in Barbados and take no part in this creation.

  Lofty debate over the philosophy of governance was not for Ezra Rumstick and his ilk, and he knew it. The clever coves, the Adamses and the Madisons and the Jeffersons and Hamiltons, and, on another level, the Biddlecombs and the Stantons, were the ones who would build it up, who would make their long-winded arguments based on Cicero or whatever ancient worthy they were citing that week. They were the ones who would shape the United States to be the very thing for which so many had shed so much blood.

  Creating a government was a messy thing, that was one of those truths Rumstick had discovered, to his surprise. Questions of how much power a federal government would wield in relation to the states, whether the Federalists wished for an American monarchy or the Democratic-Republicans following in Jefferson’s wake would bring the nation down in chaos were not topics for effeminate debate in some salon, but issues that would genuinely determine what sort of a nation rose from the ashes.

  There was a place for Ezra Rumstick, and it was not arguing in the fancy halls where the tables were covered in green baize and laid with silver writing sets. And just as he was coming to understand that, the French burst into a revolution of their own, to the near universal delight of all Americans, their former compagnon d’armes. Rumstick, like most citoyens of the United States, had cheered them on at first, seeing, correctly, that the French Revolution was a continuation of the spirit born in America.

  But soon the glorious revolution in France devolved into a bloody, chaotic affair, and Rumstick, like many of his countrymen, felt his enthusiasm turn to wariness and disgust. His support for the revolutionaries of France fell by degrees with each head that dropped into a wicker basket.

  Could the heads start rolling down Market Street in Philadelphia? To most it seemed impossible, but Ezra Rumstick had seen quite a bit of the true nature of men, even Americans, and he was not so sure. There had already been rioting a’plenty in America, with Jefferson and his followers standing in unwavering support of the Frenchies no matter how deplorable and bloody their behavior. So when his particular friend Isaac Biddlecomb was elected to the House of Representatives as a delegate from Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Ezra understood where his place would be. On the streets. In the alleys. In the shadows. Making certain that the heads did not roll.

  Keeping young Jack Biddlecomb alive and out of prison had become something of a sideline to his main concern.

  “I don’t care for this, Tillinghast, I tell you, I don’t,” Ezra said at last. “This business with Oxnard’s promoting Jack never did smell right. And now you throw Bolingbroke into the pot.”

  “Jack’s a damnably fine seaman,” Tillinghast said. “Oxnard promotes him, he gets a good shipmaster, and gets to stick Isaac Biddlecomb’s nose in it. And some of that will splash onto Adams as well.”

  “I know,” Ezra said. “But it still don’t smell right. I think we better have a word with Master Bolingbroke.”

  Tillinghast smiled and stood. “Aye, aye, Captain,” he said, then turned and was gone. Bolingbroke, of course, would not come willingly. That was what accounted for Tillinghast’s smile, and his genuine enthusiasm for the task.

  7

  It had, in fact, been two years since Jack Biddlecomb and Jonah Bolingbroke trod the same deck, and bunked in the same forecastle, and gone at one another with fists and knives. Jack had not been a mate then. He had not even been Jack Biddlecomb then, and that was where the trouble had started, that time, at least.

  Jack had abandoned the name Jack Biddlecomb in Buenos Aires at the same time he had abandoned the leaking, half-rotten, hogging old bucket known as the Queen of the Sea, aboard which he had shipped in Charleston. He had not been overly optimistic about the Queeny, as she was known to those aboard her, based on the sight of her alone, the sagging and crooked ratlines, the white patches on her standing rigging where the cordage had been imperfectly tarred, like exposed bone on some sun-rotten corpse, the strands of oakum hanging like seaweed from her deck seams that all but assured a leaky, miserable time below.

  He was less enthusiastic still after meeting the mate, an inarticulate brute with one good eye and one wandering eye, neither of which would meet Jack’s when they spoke, so that Jack was not entirely certain which eye was which. The master was half drunk when they met and soon after achieved full drunkenness, and in their brief months together never seemed to be in any other state.

  But Jack needed to get out of town quickly following an unfortunate misunderstanding at a local brothel, and since Queeny was hove short in the stream and ready to make sail, and for some reason in desperate need of hands, he signed aboard, able-bodied.

  All of the shortcomings of the Queen of the Sea Jack might have overlooked, most of them being not particularly unusual for the carrying trade, including the near constant pumping he soon found was required to keep her afloat. And to be sure, she was blessedly free of rats, though that could have been construed as a bad sign. But two things pushed him beyond his endurance.

  One was the captain’s insistence, after they sailed, that he did not warrant the rating of able-bodied, or the concomitant pay, and so rerated him as ordinary. Such a thing was unusual to the point of being unheard of, and would have infuriated Jack in any case, he having by then sailed for more than a year with the rating of able-bodied. But when it became clear to him that he was by far the most active and skilled, if youngest, man in a forecastle full of broken drunks and skulkers and sea lawyers, it became more than he could tolerate.

  And just as he was making his displeasure known to the master, the old man saw far enough through a rent in the fog of rum to say, “Biddlecomb, is it? Unusual name. You must be relative to Isaac Biddlecomb, what made such a name for himself in the war. So what in hell are you doing in the fo’c’sle, eh, boy?”

  And that was that. From then on there was nothing that Jack could do that would not be referred back to his lineage. “Do you see how he spilled slush on the deck!” one might say, “the son of Isaac Biddlecomb!” (they having guessed at his relationship to the Great Man). “See what the son of Isaac Biddlecomb reckons passes for a proper long splice!” This, like the pumping and the water dripping from the deckhead, had long been one of the regular plagues of his seagoing career, but of all of them, this, he was finding, was the one he could not with equanimity endur
e.

  So, once the Queen of the Sea dropped her best bower in the harbor at Buenos Aires, and all was snugged down and the sun set and the anchor watch passed out drunk in the longboat on the main hatch, Jack lowered his dunnage and then himself into the captain’s gig floating alongside and pulled for shore. Abandoning the Queeny meant abandoning the meager pay that was due him, and since the misunderstanding in Charleston had left him without a sou, he knew he was in for a bit of a lean time until he could find another berth. But this was not the first time he had taken French leave of a ship he had signed aboard. Indeed his very first voyage had ended that way.

  And lean it was, for the few days he spent haunting the waterfront of that South American town, looking out for the main chance and keeping a weather eye cocked for any from the Queen of the Sea who might be looking out for him.

  He was in a tavern off an alley that shared a wall with a chandler, hoping that someone would abandon a meal with a tolerable amount of food still on the plate, when he fell in with two Yankee sailors off a Boston ship called the Hancock lying at anchor out in the roads.

  “The old Hardcock’s in want of hands,” one of the sailors said, sniggering at this, the apogee of the seaman’s sly, droll humor, though Jack could not imagine that he had made that witticism up on the spot, or, indeed, at all.

  “Is that true?” he asked. “Or do you practice on me?”

  “No, it’s God’s truth,” the other said. “We had one hand in the larboard watch break his leg and another got athwart the mate’s hawse and run once he got the chance. The old man hates your dagos and Frenchmen, and would soon shoot an Englishman as let him slush the t’gallant masts, so an American is always welcome, especially a fellow knows a head from a halyard, which you look to be. What’s your name?”

  “Tobias Harwood,” Jack said, extending his hand, “from Philadelphia.”

  The sailors, who were fully empathetic with the suffering of their brother mariner, ordered up breakfast for Tobias, and he in turn helped them load the boatswain’s stores they had been sent ashore to purchase, first into the rented cart and, after a bone-jarring ride to the stone steps by the quay, into the ship’s boat floating there. They rowed Jack out to the Hancock and introduced him to the mate. By that time Jack had entirely forgotten the name he had made up, but happily the older of the foremast jacks, whose name was Israel Ferguson, had not, and when he presented Tobias Harwood to the first officer, Jack took special care to commit it to memory.

  At that point Jack would have signed aboard any bucket short of a slaver or a pirate, but as luck would have it the Hancock was a well-run ship, with as happy a forecastle as any Jack had known. He signed on the books as Tobias Harwood, able-bodied, and made the passage to Kingston and then on to Tobago, from whence they caught the westerlies to Lisbon and then back on a more southerly route to the West Indies. Jack did his share of the work, more than his share, and his good humor, his willingness, his hard-earned skill, and natural ability made him popular with his shipmates.

  He was no cock of the forecastle, did not act the strutting, self-appointed master of that domain. He may have had an intemperate streak as wide as Narragansett Bay, which showed itself to ill effect whenever he had a run ashore, but he also had a native humility that prevented him from lording it over others and made him popular among his fellows, popular at first in the manner of a well-liked younger brother and then, as he became more of an integral part of the machine that was the ship’s company, popular as a valued and reliable foremast hand.

  Tobias né Jack had been eight months aboard Hancock when Bolingbroke came aboard. The merchantman was anchored in the wide stretch of blue-green sea between Nassau and Hog Island that passed for the chief harbor of New Providence Island, and waiting only for their water to get under way, when a bumboat hove alongside and the new hand came up the pilot ladder, sea chest balanced with practiced ease on his shoulder. Bolingbroke.

  Jack was up aloft patching broken service on the main topmast shrouds when he saw the man, and his heart sank. It had been two years since their paths had crossed, and Jack had thought himself rid of the son of a bitch, but here he was. He cursed his luck, but he knew that the world of the deepwater sailors was not so large. Such an unwelcome reunion as this was far from unlikely.

  Their last parting had not been amicable, not amicable at all, and now the chance for revenge was served up to Bolingbroke like a two-penny ordinary. Once Bolingbroke had had his laugh at the Tobias Harwood charade, and revealed that Jack had signed on under a false name, Jack figured he would be quickly signed off again and left on the beach, most likely with his pay forfeited. Ship’s masters did not care for subterfuge of any sort.

  It was not until near suppertime, with the sun dropping toward the western horizon, that Jack at last climbed down from aloft to face the inevitable. The foremast hands, finished with their day’s work, were gathered in the forecastle, sitting sprawled on their sea-chest seats, stretched out in bunks, or at the table that ran down the center of the space. Bolingbroke was there, at the table, already making himself quite at home when Jack climbed through the hatch and down the ladder to the cramped, smoky, wedge-shaped cabin in the Hancock’s bows.

  “Tobias,” said Israel Ferguson. “New hand, here for the starboard watch. Jonah Bolingbroke. Jonah, this here’s Tobias Harwood.”

  Bolingbroke turned with a look that suggested not the least interest in meeting another human being, but when his eyes lit on Jack’s face, and a veritable Saint Elmo’s fire of recognition and comprehension flashed over his features, a smile appeared and he extended a hand. Jack reckoned then that the cat was out of the bag, but Bolingbroke, he would soon realize, was far too skilled in the ways of torment to let so precious an opportunity go at the first blush.

  “Harwood, is it?” he said, the smile now in full bloom. “Tobias? Your servant, sir.”

  “Bolingbroke,” Jack managed to mutter as he shook the proffered hand.

  “Say, Tobias,” Bolingbroke continued, unable to wait for the fun to begin. “Which berth is yours, then?”

  “Lower one, starboard side, forward there,” Jack mumbled and the smile on Bolingbroke’s face just grew wider.

  “Here’s the thing, Tobias,” Bolingbroke went on. “The only berth left for me is the uppermost, aft there, and it won’t answer, what with the draft from the hatch above and the people going in and out and whatnot. Not to mention the awkwardness of having to climb into an upper bunk. I would reckon it a friendly gesture to a new shipmate was you to let me have your berth, and you take the one aft.”

  Jack’s berth was in fact a prime piece of forecastle real estate, one he had coveted since coming aboard. With each berth that came vacant as one hand or another left the ship, Jack had methodically improved his sleeping situation, until at last he had landed in that one, as far from the drafts and the noise as one could get in the forecastle. And so it was to the muted surprise of his shipmates that he agreed to Bolingbroke’s request without so much as a word of protest.

  If Hancock had been bound for some port in the United States, an easy run before the trade winds and the prevailing southwesterlies, with a convenient lift from the Gulf Stream, Jack might have been able to endure the brief tyranny of Jonah Bolingbroke. But instead, Hancock would be setting sail in the other direction, off to the Azores and then to Lisbon again before returning to Philadelphia, five months at least even if they were blessed with quick passages. Jack was all at sea as to what to do, whether to jump ship in Nassau or endure the torment Bolingbroke would dole out.

  He was still pondering the dilemma by the time they had brought their water aboard, won their anchor, and stood out of Nassau harbor, and so the decision was made for him.

  Bolingbroke, of course, did not relent, and he had a genius for pushing Jack right to the edge and no further. They were fortunately on different watches, Bolingbroke in the starboard watch and Jack of the larbowlines, so with their four-hours-on, four-off watch keeping at sea t
hey were not so often in one another’s company. But they were thrust together often enough that Bolingbroke could have his fun. Thus, on a particularly cold, wet, blowing night somewhere just past thirty-two degrees west longitude Jack found himself standing watch and watch, taking the place of Jonah Bolingbroke, who remained snug in his prime berth. Or Jack might find himself having to surrender to Bolingbroke his share of a plum duff, or patch a rent in his trousers, or put an edge on his knife.

  To the rest of the “Hardcocks” it was a mystery why young Tobias, perfectly able to care for himself, would tolerate such treatment. But in the ways of sailormen they minded their own business and contented themselves to look on with curiosity. Israel Ferguson alone made discreet inquiry into Jack’s behavior, and that went only as far as asking Jack if he and Bolingbroke had known one another before, to which Jack gave a vague and unhelpful answer.

  The Hancock was at anchor in the harbor of Funchal, on the island of Madeira, when Bolingbroke finally managed to push Jack beyond the edge. It was not a stop they had planned, but on leaving Lisbon the second mate, a Boston buck named Timothy Noddle, had come down with a fever, and the old man decided to put in to Madeira so the man might get proper care.

  That was what he said, in any event, though Jack was morally certain that he just wanted Noddle off the ship before the fever could spread. Jack liked Noddle quite a bit, reckoned him a friend, and so stepped up to be part of the boat crew that pulled him ashore and found the quarantine hospital at which to deposit him. There was nothing more he could do, and when he bid Noddle good-bye, he was not pleased about it. They would not wait on him, of course, but set sail on the next tide, and Noddle would have the devil of a time getting back to the United States.

  And so Jack was in a particularly ill humor when he returned to the Hancock, climbed the pilot ladder, and helped sway the boat back aboard. He climbed sullenly through the hatch and down the ladder to the forecastle, nearly blind in the dim light after the brilliance of the island sun. He could see the shapes of men in the gloom, the hands stood down to an anchor watch. It would be dinner soon, and the men of both watches were crowding below, enjoying a few free minutes out of the officers’ sight.