The French Prize

by James L. Nelson

  Mathematics alone took some hold, not out of any academic interest but because Jack understood that mathematics was central to navigation, and navigation was one of those things that separated the men who spent their lives heaving on capstan bars and hauling on braces from those who gave the orders to do so, and Jack knew enough to know he wished to be the latter.

  And so, at the age of eleven, with his father despairing of his ever pursuing a more gentlemanly life, Jack was apprenticed to a ship’s captain, a trusted friend of Isaac Biddlecomb. Virginia, despite being the daughter and wife of sea captains, or perhaps because of this, objected to the arrangement. Her objections manifested in her shrieking at her husband and hurling various objets d’art at him, weeping, and directing the same barrage at her father, who sided with Isaac on this issue. It was the only time before or since that Jack had seen such behavior from his mother, the only time he had ever seen her lose that composure and air of cold command that he would later come to admire in the better ship’s masters under whom he served.

  Eventually Virginia was convinced by Isaac and by William Stanton that Jack was of such a temperament that if he was not sent to sea with someone they could trust he would run away to sea and find himself in a situation far worse. This was true; Jack was already making alternate plans if his father should fail to win the day; and when Virginia saw the truth of it she relented.

  As his peers among the sons of the Rhode Island gentry were stuck with their amo, amas, amat, Jack and his three trunks of gear, his notebooks, sextant, portable writing desk, ditty bag, oilskins, envelopes, sealing wax, all the things that a mother deemed her young apprentice to the sea might need, were delivered up to the 354-ton merchant vessel City of Newport, tied to a wharf in her namesake town.

  The master of the vessel was a venerable man named Amos Waverly, whom Isaac had known for many years, they both being members of that exclusive fraternity of respected Rhode Island seafarers. Waverly stood on his quarterdeck as they approached, tall and rail thin, white hair like a dandelion in seed under a tall hat. His hands were clasped behind his back, his face was locked in an expression of serious intent. He looked more like the ship’s figurehead than its master. They went aboard, Isaac and Jack, at Waverly’s invitation, down the ladder to the great cabin, where a somewhat cowering young steward served the men wine and Jack a cider royal.

  The three of them, Isaac, Jack, and Captain Waverly, discussed the coming apprenticeship, the places to which they would voyage, the things that would be expected of Jack, the things he would learn. “We’ll see young Master Biddlecomb brought up to the sea as a gentleman should be,” Waverly assured Isaac, and both Biddlecombs knew that whatever their particular wishes might be, such an approach was very much what Virginia Biddlecomb wanted, and so there they were.

  The ship was Jack’s classroom, from the keelson to the truck of the mainmast, and there he would learn all the sailors’ arts. He would be taught to hand, reef, and steer, to long splice and short splice, to draw and knot yarns, make spun yarn, foxes, and sennit, to box the compass, to set, trim, and take in sail, to navigate with deduced reckoning and lead line and sextant. He would learn bills of lading and keeping a log and the fine art of negotiating for a cargo in a foreign port. His penmanship and table manners and clothing would be attended to as well. In short, all the things that would make him a competent mariner and a gentleman would be passed on in the time-honored tradition of master and apprentice.

  And Jack was a willing student. For all his bold talk he was as frightened as any eleven-year-old boy would be to leave everything he had known and sally forth into the world of men, ships, and the sea. Waverly made him less frightened. The idea of not being thrust into that world so much as ushered in by the likes of such a man as Waverly made the entire thing less terrifying.

  Being a ship’s master, Waverly lived a life removed, both physically and spiritually, from the men under his command. A captain sensitive to the moods of the men, the atmosphere of the ship, can know a great deal about how things are acting, even when no one will tell him what specifically is taking place, which is nearly always the case.

  But Amos, Jack would discover, was not a sensitive man. His only concern was that the ship’s work be done, done right, and done quick. He was exacting and he was a driver and he had shipped a mate who saw those wishes carried out, who made manifest Waverly’s philosophy that the men before the mast were not to be coddled in any way. Waverly had little sense for the attitude in the forecastle and cared even less. This much Jack would discover, months later, and to his profound regret.

  15

  The education of Jack Biddlecomb, ship’s boy, green hand, apprentice, began immediately, before the City of Newport even was under way, bound for Lisbon with salt cod, rum, ginger, and general merchandise. With a few words of encouragement and a manly handshake his father left him in the care of Captain Amos Waverly, who was still below. Isaac took his leave to return to the family home in Bristol, where Virginia remained, having made her tearful, thoroughly dramatic good-byes there, thus sparing her son the humiliation of doing so dockside.

  Jack was left alone on the quarterdeck, and he remained there, unsure of what to do, for a full twelve minutes before he decided a climb to the main topgallant would be in order.

  For all his lowly status as boy, his rating of apprentice, Jack was no stranger to ships. Indeed, he knew quite a bit for a boy of eleven, having made several short coasting voyages with his father and Uncle Ezra, both of whom had been eager teachers, and having sailed boats in Narragansett Bay and read whatever he could lay hands on, including Mountaine’s The Seaman’s Vade-Mecum and Falconer’s Universal Dictionary of the Marine. He had been aloft more times than he could ever count, but his familiarity with a ship’s rig had not been so obvious to the mate who ordered him down in a volume and tone of voice that made his displeasure clear. Waverly used the same tone, though quieter and thus more intimidating, when Jack reported to supper a few hours later in torn stockings and tar-stained clothes.

  “Master Biddlecomb,” Waverly said, his words were like those of a strict schoolmaster, not the kindly sort, “you have no business climbing aloft unless you are ordered aloft, and when you are quite ready you will be ordered aloft for work, not for skylarking. You are a gentleman and your place is aft and I’ll thank you to not forget that.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jack said, sensible enough to say no more.

  They were under way with the next tide, and with the boat away passing the warps to the warping posts, Jack was eager to lend a hand at the windlass, but Waverly restrained him. “You stay on the quarterdeck,” he ordered, “and see how this is done. Heaving on a handspike is not a gentleman’s work.”

  And so Jack remained on the quarterdeck and watched an evolution with which he was already quite familiar, and danced from one foot to another in his eagerness to jump in and lend a hand. But even when the order was given to loosen sail Jack was not allowed to the topgallants, which were boys’ work, but had to remain aft while the single boy in the forecastle, a biggish fellow a few years Jack’s senior named Jonah Bolingbroke, and another rated boy though he would certainly never see twenty again, made the long climb up to the light yards.

  As the City of Newport plowed her way east and south, so Jack’s education was also full under way, with Waverly driving that as hard as ever he drove his ship. As much as Jack would have wanted that education to include the most tarry, marlinspike aspects of seamanship, Waverly’s philosophy ran more toward navigation, mathematics, and even, to Jack’s chagrin, a smattering of Latin translation and literature.

  The days passed, and then the weeks, and the crew settled into their watches, and bit by bit Jack was able to find release from his books in the great cabin and engage in those lessons in which he had real interest. For this Waverly put him under the care of the boatswain, a Boston man named Henry Hacking who was everything Jack thought a boatswain should be; old for a seaman, gruff, generally unpleasant,
thoroughly competent with anything that fell under his purview; willing to teach if he did not have to even pretend to be kindly while doing so.

  Jack soaked it up with the enthusiasm of his youth. He had come aboard thinking he knew quite a bit. He soon learned that he knew practically nothing, but he worked hard to change that. Three weeks into the voyage he turned twelve, but he did not mention it to anyone because one of the things he had learned was that no one would much care.

  But for all the progress Jack was making in his seagoing education, he was still just a boy, one who had grown up in privilege, well sheltered from the worst that the world had to offer. He had no sense for how the company of the City of Newport felt about him. Since he generally liked everyone, he assumed everyone generally liked him, and it did not occur to him that he was looked on as the spoiled, pampered son of a great war hero and wealthy merchant, a silk-stocking little puke who spent most of his time on the quarterdeck or in the great cabin and played at being a sailor-man while they were worked near to death by Waverly, the hard driver, and the mate who enforced Waverly’s will.

  Indeed, Jack would have been shocked to know they felt that way, since he himself hated standing aloof on the quarterdeck or poring over Latin texts or trigonometry in the great cabin. The times he was most happy were those times he was doing the meanest or most dangerous tasks, side by side with the men.

  They were still a couple of hundred leagues shy of Lisbon when Jack came to understand the reality of his place aboard the ship. He had spent the morning with pages of Cicero and it was a great relief to take his ditty bag up into the foretop to replace ratlines that had become dangerously worn. There he found Bolingbroke, already at work.

  For some time now Jack had the idea that he should speak to Bolingbroke, seeing as they were near in age and were the only boys aboard, save for the one older green hand rated boy. They had had few interactions, because Bolingbroke was generally off doing some lowly job and Jack, by Waverly’s orders, was not allowed into the forecastle. Bolingbroke seemed to be shunned by the men forward—Jack had seen him cuffed and kicked on more than one occasion—and Bolingbroke never seemed as if he would welcome any sort of contact.

  Jack pulled himself into the foretop, hung his ditty bag from the stretcher, cut the seizing of the old ratline away, and worked the clove hitches loose with his marlinspike. “Are you from Rhode Island?” he asked Bolingbroke, by way of conversation.

  “No,” Bolingbroke said, and he said no more.

  Jack was seizing the new ratline on and trying to come up with some other approach when Bolingbroke spoke at last. “You are, ain’t you? From Rhode Island?”

  “Yes. Bristol.”

  “Of course,” Bolingbroke said, with a sneer in his voice that took Jack by surprise. “Son of the great Captain Biddlecomb, of the War for Independency.”

  Jack felt himself flush. “Yes. That’s right,” he said at last. He was not sure why he should be embarrassed by that, but he was.

  They worked in silence. Then Bolingbroke said, “Your father paying Waverly for you to be here?”

  “No,” Jack said, alert now to danger of some kind. In truth he did not know what arrangement his father had made.

  “But you ain’t a sailor,” Bolingbroke continued, “with your books and your white stockings and all.”

  “I’m a sailor,” Jack said. “I’m just not a dog, to be kicked and boxed around the deck.”

  Now it was Bolingbroke who flushed red. He turned from his work and looked Jack in the eyes. “Are you saying I am?”

  Jack shrugged. He turned and worked the new ratline into a clove hitch around the shroud. He heard Bolingbroke turn back to his own work. They were silent for some time, knotting, splicing, seizing, as the foretop moved through its easy sway and roll and the City of Newport made easting under all plain sail. Jack pulled a length of spun yarn from a ball he had carried aloft, ran his eyes over Bolingbroke’s work. “Where that clove hitch crosses, it wants to be outboard and slant up, aft to forward,” he said helpfully. But Bolingbroke was not looking for help, apparently.

  “Shut your mouth,” he said. That minor conflict, unpleasant as it was, might have been no worse if Henry Hacking had not chosen that moment to appear over the rim of the foretop, take one quick look around, then cuff Bolingbroke on the side of the head and explain to him, in a voice loud and studded with profanity, that the clove hitches had to slant up from aft forward. “Like Biddlecomb there done it.”

  Jack made no comment. He did not have to. And it would be some time before he understood how completely Bolingbroke’s enmity had been cemented at that moment.

  As Jack continued to subtly liberate himself from Waverly and the great cabin, so he came increasingly into contact with Bolingbroke. In the merchant service as well as the navy there were certain jobs that were designated as boys’ work. Those jobs—sweeping fore and aft, coiling down the lines, slushing the masts, loosening or furling the light sails, and a dozen other tasks—were too trivial or mean for the able-bodied men, or even the ordinary seamen, to bother with, at least if a boy was available when the work needed doing.

  More often than not Jack was not available, being in the care of Captain Waverly and set to more erudite tasks. But when he was about ship’s work, he and Bolingbroke might find themselves side-by-side in the slings of the yard while reefing topsails, or high aloft, laid out on the topgallant yards, loosening off those sails or wrestling the canvas back onto the yard, a job that called for a degree of cooperation that increasingly neither felt like giving.

  They worked high above the deck or deep in the hold, places where conversations could not be overheard, and Bolingbroke probed and pulled and worked his way into Jack’s spirit like a gale of wind tugging at a furled sail, looking for that flaw in the stow that would allow it, with relentless malice, to pull the canvas from its gaskets and shred it to ribbons. He needled Jack about his family’s wealth, about his father’s fame, about his education, about how easy Jack had it as a child. They cut Jack, each of these thrusts, but Jack turned them aside with his own verbal parries before the wound was deep.

  But when Jonah suggested that Jack was little more than a passenger aboard the City of Newport, that his place had been secured by privilege and not merit, that he was only playing at sailors, his blade found its mark. Bolingbroke, sensing as much, continued in that vein, waxing on about how he himself had been hired on with no assistance from anyone, having no one in the world interested in helping him, whereas Biddlecomb was aboard through the influence of his father and would never be able to shift for himself, were the apron strings cut free.

  Jack had little to say in response because secretly he worried that it was true. Certainly his father had secured his position aboard the ship, and he was not treated like a foremast hand or a typical ship’s boy. No one in the forecastle, or indeed any of the mates, would dare to cuff him as they cuffed Bolingbroke. Naïve and generally unaware as he was, this came as a startling revelation to Jack.

  Worse was when Bolingbroke assured Jack that he was despised by the foremast hands for the privileged place he held aboard the ship. And with that came Jack’s sudden appreciation for the subtle, muted disrespect, bordering on loathing, with which he was indeed held. Jonah had pulled a curtain back. Jack did not like to look at what was behind it.

  Years later, thinking back on that time, after the memory of his apprenticeship aboard the City of Newport had dulled enough that he no longer tried actively to forget it, Jack understood that it was Waverly the men hated, not him. It was Waverly, with discipline so taut it approached maniacal, and a mate who delighted in enforcing it. Waverly, who rarely gave a Sunday off at sea or a run ashore in port, who laid in food that was remarkable in its badness and paucity, who was never satisfied and not shy about saying so.

  Jack’s only experience with shipmasters up until that voyage had been with his father and Rumstick. Watching Waverly in command, thinking Waverly the very model of the ideal ma
ster, he had concluded that his father and Rumstick had been too easy on their men. It would take some years at sea, and the experience of serving many sorts of captains, before he understood that the opposite was true.

  But more than his hard driving, it was Waverly’s attitude that set the men off. Seamen could stand a driver, they could stand a screamer and a mean son of a bitch. Any man who had gone to sea for any length of time had seen all those and more. But Waverly’s imperious quality, his utter disdain for the forecastle, worked on them. No sailor expected to be treated as an equal, but neither would he tolerate being regarded as a slave. Aboard the City of Newport, however, the great cabin was very much the big house, Waverly was the master, the mate the overseer, and those forward little more than field hands.

  The same attitude that made Waverly seem the gentleman mariner ashore made him the insufferable tyrant afloat. And Jack Biddlecomb, in the eyes of the foremast hands, was Waverly’s boy, a young gentleman there to be molded in the image and likeness of the master.

  All this Jack would come to understand years later, but at the time it was a mystery to him, bewildering and heartbreaking that he was so shunned by the men he longed to join. And when his verbal sparring with Bolingbroke finally and inevitably turned to violence, there was no one there to stand with him.

  They were in the cable tier, sweeping. It was hot, the work was dusty, the dust clinging to the sweat on their faces, getting under their shirts. Bolingbroke was going on about the rotten food forward and asking Jack about the dinner he had enjoyed aft in the great cabin. Jack, done with the nasty insinuations, turned and hurled his broom at Bolingbroke, and had the satisfaction of seeing him flinch in the dim light, seeing the handle of the broom glance off his head.

  “You little shit!” Bolingbroke hissed. “You wait until we get a run ashore, I’ll do you for this!”

  “Why wait?” Jack asked. “You want satisfaction, well, come along and I’ll give you satisfaction!”