by Ron Carter
“I’m Major Waldrup,” the man said. “I got a few questions.” He laid the map before them. “Any idea what street or house this is?”
All three of them studied it again. “No.”
He turned the map and laid it face down. “Does that little ink dot on the back mean anything to you? We think it’s a mistake—a spill.”
“No, nothing.”
He shook his head in frustration. “We’ve laid that diagram over every place on every map we can find of Boston and Charlestown, and it doesn’t fit anything.”
He laid one of the written documents before them. On it, parallel straight lines were lightly drawn through the center of the written message, corresponding to the parallel lines on one of the other sheets of paper. “Read what’s between those two lines,” he said.
As they read, their eyes opened wide in astonishment. While the parallel lines embraced only the center three inches of the letter, nonetheless the words inside the lines read as sentences, with a complete, clear message. Twelve hogsheads of salt cod from Nova Scotia would arrive in port on June twentieth, freight paid by receiver, same price as before. No price was stated, nor was the port.
He narrowed his eyes and spoke in his gravelly voice. “Know what salt cod has to do with all this?”
“No.”
“May be code for something else. Any idea which port?”
“No.”
He laid a second written document before them, this time with the curved parallel lines isolating words through the center of the page. “Read this.”
Again the isolated words made complete sentences, and the message was clear. Two men would be in port with twenty additional hogsheads of fish, same price, freight paid by receiver, sometime on June twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth. If the fish was acceptable they would make a contract for another one hundred hogsheads for delivery in July and August.
“Mean anything to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Those are signed T. Horton. Recognize the name?”
“No.”
Major Waldrup carefully assembled the documents, then stood. “We have no idea what all this means, but we’ll keep working on it. If you learn anything more, come tell us. We don’t know how critical this is, so we must treat it as being very important. Understand?” He stared at them intently.
“Yes.”
He gathered all the documents back into a bundle and handed them to Dorothy. “You wanted those back. Take care of them. We’ve made copies.”
“There was one letter you didn’t mention,” Brigitte said.
“No part of that one could be isolated and still make sense. We’ll keep working.”
He looked at Colonel Pearlman. “Anything else, sir?”
“Nothing. Thanks for your help.”
Major Waldrup slipped his copies into a folder while Silas led the two women out of the room, Pearlman following. At the front door, Pearlman offered Silas his hand. “Thank you. If we need you we’ll send someone.”
The three walked back to the South Church together, saying little, unaware they were watching the street traffic intently for a tall man with a full beard, in a black cap, and a shorter man with reddish hair dressed in the garb of a dockworker.
At the chapel doors, Silas spoke. “Be careful with those letters, and watch for those men.” He pondered for a moment before he raised his eyes. “There is too much we don’t know.”
Three days later Brigitte hurried home from the bakery, changed clothes, and walked rapidly to the Provincial Congress office. Ten minutes later she sat opposite Colonel Pearlman.
“Sir, have you learned any more from the letters or the map?”
Pearlman drew and exhaled a deep breath, and Brigitte watched a decision forming. “Nothing.” He paused a moment. “The question we couldn’t answer was, which port did the letters refer to? Putting it all together, we knew that McMurdy was going to New York, that General Howe has the British army there, and that General Washington is gathering the Continental army there to meet Howe. It made sense that the port talked about in those letters would be New York port.”
He paused for a moment. “So we sent those documents to General Washington in New York. I hope he can get to the bottom of it.”
After the supper dishes were finished and Adam and Prissy were in bed, Brigitte sat at the dining table with quill, ink bottle, and paper.
My dear Billy:
She paused to look at what she had written, and her face clouded in wonder for a moment before she wadded the sheet and brought another into position.
Dear friend Billy:
I take pen in hand to tell you of strange occurrences that have happened since arrival of your letter concerning Darren McMurdy . . . I enclose copies of letters, a map, and keys to coded messages . . . delivered by Beatrice McMurdy . . . mother of Darren McMurdy . . . home was burned to the ground by two evil men who were searching for these papers.
We took these to Colonel Pearlman . . . local militia . . . concluded that the port mentioned in the letters must be New York . . . sent copies to the military command there, and I send these to you hoping they may somehow be of value to you or to your regiment.
I now explain how to use the keys to read the coded message. The keys are numbered, as are the letters. Lay the key on the corresponding letter . . .
______
Notes
The designation of Monday as wash day had become a Boston custom by 1776. Most households also made their own soap. From fireplace ashes the colonists leached lye, which they then mixed with grease and boiled into soap (see Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days, p. 254; see also Ulrich, Good Wives, p. 28).
Letters were not usually placed in envelopes. The four corners were folded to the center, and a large lump of sealing wax was used to seal them together. The address was written on the reverse side. For an illustration, see Wilbur, The Revolutionary Soldier, p. 83.
Beatrice McMurdy, the tall man with the beard and black cap, and the shorter man are fictional.
A “hogshead” was a measurement common in 1776, and when used to measure liquid, it contained 54 gallons, the equivalent of about 1.5 barrels (see Pool, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, p. 24).
The hiding of secret messages within written documents—represented fictitiously here by the story of the McMurdy documents—was among the practices employed by spies during the Revolution.
Falmouth was on the coast of what was then Massachusetts, later to become part of the state of Maine. In 1775, Patriots of Falmouth tried to seize a British man-of-war lying at anchor. In retaliation, the British burned more than half of the town (see Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, p. 332).
The American officers Waldrup and Pearlman at the Provincial Congress office are fictional characters.
New Jersey
Mid-June 1776
Chapter V
* * *
In a forgotten millennium near the dawn of creation, a trillion tons of ice grinding its way south formed land masses and sculpted mountains and valleys before it melted to become the seas and oceans of this world and leave continents broken, fragmented. When the Dutch dared venture across the uncharted reaches of the Atlantic early in the seventeenth century, they discovered three islands broken from the mainland in the New World, clustered close together, each emerald green with nearly impenetrable growth of oak and maple and foliage.
One island was a twelve-mile long narrow finger of land that lay north-south, dividing the mouth of a great river so broad the incoming Atlantic tides reached 150 miles upriver; hence the native Indians called it Manituck, which means “The River That Runs Two Ways.” The great river became the Hudson, or North River; the island, Manhattan; the east leg of the Hudson River that ran down the east side of Manhattan Island, the East River.
The mainland west of the Hudson River became New Jersey; the island and mainland to the east, New York.
The north end of Manhattan Island, facing New Jers
ey three miles across the river, rose steeply to a ridge one hundred fifty feet above the Hudson. Opposite, the New Jersey shore was sheer granite cliffs that rose to three hundred feet and were called the Palisades. Realizing that strategically the Hudson was the great highway to the northern reaches of the continent, the colonial Patriots built Fort Charles Lee at the south end of the Palisades on the New Jersey side and Fort Washington on the Manhattan side. The two forts faced each other, with cannon batteries covering all approaches, but particularly the river. Anything moving up or down the Hudson would have to come under the muzzles of the deadly colonial cannon on both shores. The result was, with both forts planned and under construction, in June of 1776 General George Washington and his army felt secure in the certainty that the two thick-walled forts, dominating the skyline on both sides of the water, could control the Hudson River.
Very close to the south of Manhattan Island, a second island, irregular and oblong, became Staten Island, with the smaller Governor’s Island nearby.
To the east, and close to both Staten Island and Manhattan Island, was the great island called Long Island, lying east-west for 110 miles just off the mainland. The Dutch named their most prominent settlement on Long Island Breukelen, meaning “marshland,” because of Gowanus Creek, which rose on the island to flow westward, making a large, marshy bog where it emptied into the waters of the Hudson. Breukelen later became Brooklyn. Nearby to the southeast, another lesser settlement grew on Long Island, Flatbush, and further south, on the coast, Gravesend, on Gravesend Bay.
By 1776, the city of New York, on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, boasted twenty-five thousand inhabitants, four thousand buildings, and the most prominent, busiest, and best deep-sea harbor in the colonies. And it had the frightening honor of being the city that the British had concluded to take first in their plan to crush the American rebellion. Being completely surrounded by water deep enough to accommodate the largest men-of-war in existence, each of the three islands was totally vulnerable to assault by sea. Thus, a naval blockade could strangle any of them. Clearly, he who had the dominant navy could take any or all of the islands at will. June of 1776 found Great Britain with the most powerful navy in the world, and America with not one gunboat in the New York navy. No one was more keenly aware of the fatal imbalance in naval power than the two opposing forces, the British and the Americans.
The five a.m. banging of reveille by the Boston regimental drummer rang clattering across the clearing where men had gathered to begin the endless digging for the foundations of Fort Lee atop the granite cliffs that fell sheer to the water on the New Jersey side of the Hudson. It rolled west across the river to echo from the bluffs on the Manhattan side, where men were trenching for the building of Fort Washington on the gray skyline.
Billy opened weary eyes as the camp began to stir, and he struggled for a few moments to remember where he was, how he got there, and why. He threw back his blanket, damp with heavy morning dew, and gritted his teeth as he stretched arms and legs stiff and kinked from sleeping on the rough ground. He was in a great clearing they had hacked out of the thick scrub oak and maple trees and foliage so dense a man could not be seen on the ground five feet away.
He swallowed against the sour morning taste and reached for dirty socks as he glanced out over the campground, calculating how many men remained. Two dead back where the cannon blew eleven days ago, another shot for spying, six wounded sent back to Boston with a ten-man escort, four sent home with dysentery, four more from heat exhaustion, five known deserters, and one man—Eli Stroud—joined. With the mental habits and instincts of an accountant, Billy made the calculations without thought, and then the deduction from the 513 who had set out from Boston thirteen days earlier amid shrilling fifes, banging drums, the cheers and shouts of the crowds, and the tears of wives and mothers. Four hundred eighty-two of us remaining.
He pulled on his socks, stiff from sweat and road dust, then his shoes, with the soles beginning to separate from the uppers and so thin he could feel the wet morning grass. He stood, and his nose wrinkled at the smell and appearance of his clothes, sweat-stained, filthy, wrinkled from living in them for six days and nights. He brushed them with his hands, then tucked his shirttail inside the waistband of his trousers and smoothed his shirt as best he could.
While he worked rolling his blanket he ruefully surveyed the campsite and the men of the regiment, and shook his head in wonder. There were two tents for the officers, but the remainder of the regiment cast their blankets on the ground at random, with no sense of organization or coherence. Rope lines were strung between poles and bushes wherever whim dictated, with an occasional blanket tied to form a lean-to or makeshift shelter. They had no military uniforms and had worn light summer clothing of every color and description, and it was draped everywhere on lines, or bushes, or trees, as though a hurricane had struck.
He studied the men for a moment. Very few had ever been more than thirty miles from Boston in their entire lives. There were fourteen officers and ten sergeants, two doctors, himself a keeper of accounts, but from there the men of the regiment came from every walk of life and every trade known in the colony of Massachusetts, the largest single segment being farmers. Those from farms came in all ages, from smooth-faced fifteen-year-old boys who whimpered in their sleep at night for mother and hearth and home, to grizzled old men with gray beards and leathery faces and hard hands. All were certain the war would be over and they would be home in time for harvest. A few men with sullen, shifty eyes spread their blankets alone and spoke to no one, and Billy understood they had joined to escape sheriffs and criminal arrest warrants.
Billy shook his head at the thought of the daily mandated drill. Almost no one in the regiment had even the beginnings of an understanding of military protocol, and Billy had to grit his teeth to endure the drill commands shouted by angry sergeants at men who looked back with blank faces while their brains struggled to conform action to command and their formations disintegrated. Disgusted officers walked among the frustrated companies carrying pebbles in their pockets, which they jammed into the left hands of men who could not remember their left foot from their right.
Billy tied his bedroll and sat on it, and reached for his wooden canteen. While he pulled the wooden stopper he noticed Eli Stroud thirty feet away, rifle across his lap, studying a small, thick leather-bound book held between his knees, and for a moment Billy stopped in surprise when he recognized the Holy Bible. He sipped at tepid water that tasted of pine pitch, rinsed his mouth, and spat onto the dusty ground. His eyes wandered over the rest of the regiment. What will happen when the cannon shot and musket balls come hitting? Will they break? Will they? He shook his head, fearful of the answer.
He glanced eastward across the smooth black waters of the Hudson, where a cloudless sky was bright with a sun not yet risen, and the men working on Fort Washington were etched in vivid detail. Today we cross. Today we see New York. He felt a nervous eagerness at the thought of the long march being finished and of finally confronting the British—as well as his own inner torments—in the great and final battle of the war.
“All right, you lovelies!”
Billy turned to see dour, bandy-legged little company sergeant Alvin Turlock, hands on his hips as he bawled, “Flag in five minutes. Then we go to the creek to wash. The colonel expects you to look like men from Boston when we march into New York. We strike camp and march at nine o’clock sharp. Get yer hardtack and pork cracklin’s from the commissary, and be glad yer gettin’ any breakfast at all.”
Three minutes later, four uniformed soldiers from the Vermont regiment, camped near the digging with a regiment from North Carolina, marched to the flagpole. Two clipped the flag to the rope, the bugler raised his bugle, and the fourth man began the raising of the colors in the golden glow of the first arc of the rising sun. The red and white and blue of the Grand Union flag were radiant, and an unexpected feeling came stealing as Billy watched the colors climb into the clear sky. Every
man in the regiment was at attention, saluting, and in the eyes and the raised faces of these citizens who were not soldiers was a strength and a commitment that humbled Billy.
The flag reached the top of the pole, the regiment dropped their salute, and Billy walked back to his bedroll and knapsack and rummaged for soap before he moved with the men of Company Nine to the large creek, 120 yards south and west of the timber stacked nearby for the walls of the fort. He took off his shoes and walked into the stream to his waist, gasping at the bite of the icy waters from the June snowmelt in the higher mountains, then stripped to his underwear and worked the soap into his shirt and trousers and socks. He rinsed them and hung them on the bushes lining the bank, then waded back in to lather his chest and face and hair. He ducked his head under and then threw a million droplets sparkling in the sun when he broke the surface, gasping, grinning, and he dug water from his eyes. He blew through rounded lips and was starting for his clothes when he saw that the man next to him was Eli Stroud.
Eli’s weapons belt was on the bank with his rifle, and he was stripped to the waist, working water into his leather hunting shirt, without soap. Billy stopped, dripping, and turned to him, and Eli looked up. Without a word, Billy tossed the bar of brown homemade soap to him and he caught it, lathered his shirt, rinsed it, and slogged out of the creek to hang it on the bushes next to Billy’s clothing. He waded back in to soap himself and duck under, and he came up throwing and spouting water. He walked sloshing to the bank and handed Billy the soap, nodded his thanks, and moved back to his hunting shirt and his weapons belt and rifle, still wearing his breeches and moccasins.
Billy laid the soap on a rock to dry and wiped his hand on his wet underdrawers. He was reaching to turn the wet underside of his shirt to the sun when the sound of the voices of five hundred men of the North Carolina regiment reached him as they came striding towards the creek.
The men of the Boston regiment watched them coming, and Eli’s eyes narrowed as he spoke. “Looks like every man in that regiment has a belt knife. I hope all they want is a bath.” He dropped to his haunches beside his weapons belt and rifle.
