Captain Putnam for the Republic of Texas

by James Haley

  During his days there he offered passage home to several of the former Americans, but as a body they refused, clinging to each other and their fears. Never was Bliven Putnam so relieved to quit a place in his life. In Haiti he had seen a side of the human condition so dark and disturbing that he determined, even as he set his course up the Canal de Saint-Marc, never to relate it to Clarity. One day to relieve his own mind he might write about the horrors there, of the predation of human beings one upon another, of the sorceress who used the diluted poison of the puffer fish to reduce her victims to her own malevolent will, of this nationwide reduction of human beings into jungle creatures. It would be years into his future, however, before he would desire to recall these events.

  The British islands offered a different example. No doubt, when they decreed the manumission of their slaves, their design in doing so was humanitarian and laudable, but what he observed in Jamaica and Haiti laid bare how little thought they had given to the consequences. It left Bliven in a quandary of how he should feel about this institution that he had come to loathe as much as his wife did, but whose economic and social realities were forcing him to examine his conscience more closely than perhaps she had done, how it could be ended with the least suffering to everyone.

  Now for two hundred miles he must navigate the shallows of the southern Bahamas on his way to Nassau. His orders were to seek an interview with Governor Townley-Balfour and express gently, without raising it to a diplomatic level, America’s growing disquiet over the Bahamas’ sympathy for harboring runaway slaves from Georgia and Florida.

  He threaded a passage through the aptly named Ragged Island chain of cays and sandbars, through which a chart was useless because the bottom was reconfigured by every hurricane. He was relieved on their far side to encounter the deep blue of the Tongue of the Ocean and the straight shot of another two hundred miles to New Providence. Strange islands these were, seven hundred of them stretching some five hundred miles in total from southeast to northwest, but with an aggregate land area smaller than Connecticut. In the previous century they had harbored by rough count a thousand pirates, of sufficient strength that they overthrew British rule and reveled in a Republic of Buccaneers for a dozen years, governed by the pirate code of pure democracy within, and rape and pillage without. Race and class were meaningless to them. Order was restored in large part by offering a royal pardon to the pirates, most of whom accepted it and remained. The Bahamas retained therefore a different complexion of relations between the races, more egalitarian, less tolerant of self-elevated pretense.

  Safely anchored in Nassau, what he discovered in the governor was a man ten years younger than himself and not unacquainted with the dubious morality of conquest and subjection, for the Townley-Balfour family were wealthy scions of the Protestant Ascendancy, their fat income produced on estates seized from Irish owners and worked by Irish tenants. Bliven felt his temper rise at the memory of the English captain, Lord Kington, who had slashed him in Naples, and upon whom he had wrought a terrible revenge off the coast of Brazil. That family had also grown rich with their boots on Irish necks.

  The governor received him cordially with tea on a sun-splashed veranda. They discussed the wreck of the American ship Encomium on Abaco Island the previous February, with a cargo of forty-eight slaves within the legal domestic trade. Captain and crew had been returned to the United States, but the slaves were welcomed and granted their freedom. Along with 165 slaves from the American ship Comet, wrecked earlier, and various Seminole Indians who fled the unending violence in Florida, the Encomium’s black survivors were settled on the northern tip of Andros Island to build up the new town of Red Bay.

  Townley-Balfour frankly admitted the diplomatic morass in which they found themselves on this issue but sought refuge in the fact that it was a matter for the Foreign Office. He was himself merely an officer of the Crown who carried out policy. If a decision should be made to return those people to America, and bondage, he assured Bliven that he would comply, but he had no authority to act without instruction. That was all Bliven needed to hear, and after thanking the governor for his hospitality he set all sail for home.

  Rounding West End of Grand Bahama

  June 20, 1834

  My ever dear Love,

  I am happy that there are none here to ask me why I am writing to you, when we have raised every stitch of canvas in a taut southeast wind, and are flying home just as fast as this poor tired ship can manage. It seems possible that we will nose into Charlestown even as I write an affectionate closing to this missive, and I can carry it home with me. Or perhaps we can make a call, and I can post it, at that Southern Charleston, in South Carolina, and race it home. Who would win, do you think?

  In honesty, I write you because in doing so I find a small measure of the solace I take in conversing with you, and in these last months I have learned much that you will find of the greatest interest, for in about six weeks’ time slavery will be abolished in the British Empire. While most admit the humanity of this act, I have found a much wider variety of opinion expressed than we in the U. States might think they have. Some foretell of horriferous consequences as a result, where the more high-minded insist that the right thing must be done, regardless of its results.

  I did not think to find—

  With no warning whatever Bliven felt and heard a tremendous jolt in the body of the ship, throwing him from his chair into the table and causing a bright black jagged streak of ink that trailed to the edge of his writing paper. The Rappahannock seemed to both slam to a halt and leap upward at the same instant and then come down and wallow, heavy but free. It felt as though the very fist of God had fetched them a terrific blow under the starboard bow. Ross was in the act of crossing the great cabin, carrying fresh linen to Bliven’s berth, when he was thrown from his feet, crashing first into the bulkhead and then to the deck.

  “Mr. Ross!” Bliven cried out, vaulting across the room and kneeling over him. “Are you hurt?”

  “No, I am all right. Jesus!” Ross got to his feet and arranged his clothing. “Thank you for your attention, sir, but surely you should get topside and see what has happened.”

  In the instant, Bliven was racing forward down the gun deck to the ladder and grateful to find his bosun waiting for him at its head. “Mr. Yeakel, what in hell has happened?”

  He pointed forward. “A wave, Captain! A great giant bastard of a sea came out of nowhere, struck us on the starboard bow.”

  “But that can’t—”

  “Sir! It took away our sprits’l and its yard, and when the bow came up out of the trough, the weight of so much water has broken the bowsprit extension. It is still clewed to the jib and forestays’l, and the whole mess has folded back and is hammering the anchor and the cathead. We must cut it all free!”

  “Yes, I agree! Bring in all your canvas, quick as you can, and get men—”

  Even as they spoke, they heard high above them a sickening, deafening crack. With the forward staysails still clewed up, the weight of the whole wreckage, including the tons of water that the spritsail carried up every time the bow lifted, was too much for the foretopmast. Bliven’s and Yeakel’s twin gaze shot up at the sound of the explosive split, in time to see it fall the hundred feet to crash onto the bow, smashing the railing and wrecking the camboose’s smokestack.

  “Damn it!” spat Bliven. “Bring in all your sails. Have the carpenter’s mate take a sounding, make sure we are in deep enough water to drift. Make sure no one is hurt; get any injured down to the sick bay.”

  The entirety of the mayhem had taken moments—seconds, really—turning the slightly clumsy but stable Rappahannock into a cripple that they would have to fight to control in any but a following wind. Bliven made his way back to the helm, where he found his third lieutenant at the wheel. “Mr. Coleman, you have seen our predicament.”

  “Yes, sir.” He was a redheaded young Vermonter
, small but muscular.

  “We are bringing in the sails until we get organized again. The wind is southeast. There is little for you to do; just use the rudder to keep the stern into the wind and we will drift to the northwest.”

  A new thought suddenly seized him. “Mr. Yeakel!” He loped back forward. “Don’t let anyone cast the foretopmast overboard. We can do without it better than we can do without a full bowsprit. Once we put in somewhere to make repairs, perhaps you can cut it down to size for a new extension.”

  “Yes, sir, that is how we will do it.”

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “No, sir. There was one man crapping at the head, but he doesn’t have to anymore. The sight of the mast coming down at him took care of that.”

  Bliven sought refuge in a thunderous laugh. “Bless his heart! Good for him!” Bliven looked through the rigging as the main topgallant yard was lowered and the courses reefed. “Mr. Yeakel, when you get the bow cleared away, you might set the tops’ls again so we can have a little steerage.”

  “Very good, Captain.”

  “Come below and get me if you need me. Oh, and set some men to get the cooking stack back up. The least we can do is feed the men on time.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Who knew where such destructive waves come from? The sounding came in at only twenty fathoms as they rounded Grand Bahama. Perhaps it was storm-driven, from far away, and piled up in the shallows. He disliked, after a third of a century at sea, to encounter some phenomenon that was new to him, whose cause eluded him.

  Back in his sea cabin he discovered that Ross had set out charts of the Florida and Georgia coasts, knowing that they would want to search out a place to put in for repairs. They could never tack back to Nassau in their crippled condition, for the southeast wind would be hard against them. Besides, every mile they covered, he wanted it to be a mile toward home. He decided to make north northwest for St. Augustine, that venerable and almost ancient port city in the northeast of Florida, to effect repairs. After twenty minutes he felt the ship begin to move again and knew that the debris had been cleared from the bow and enough canvas set to get them going.

  The door to his sea cabin was open, and an hour later Yeakel knocked as he entered. “Excuse me, Captain, there is something you should see.”

  Bliven rose and followed him. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, sir. You must see it.”

  They went up the ladder and Yeakel strode straight to the starboard beam. “Sir, what do you make of this?”

  “Jesus in heaven!” Around them the sea had gone flat but for a long, low, rolling swell that was the color of tea with milk. Everywhere was the hiss of bubbles breaking the sea’s surface, and the smell of rotten eggs. “This is unnatural.”

  Yeakel put a handkerchief over his nose. “Have you any idea what could cause this?”

  “No. Is it shallow?”

  “No, sir. Carpenter’s mate reports no bottom. I thought you should see it, to enter into the log.”

  Bliven shook his head at the mystery. “You thought rightly. The Sargasso Sea has its mats of floating seaweed, but that is northeast of here, and the currents would keep anything from drifting this way. I have no idea. But I don’t like it. Is your bow free of wreckage?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then make all the sail you can; get us out of here. Helm!”

  “Sir?”

  “We are raising sail again. Continue northwest. We will make our repairs in St. Augustine.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  It took two days to reach there, and Bliven was uncertain as he threaded the inlet, past the Salt Run, and dropped anchor at the mouth of the Matanzas River just off the walls of the looming Spanish fortress, whether the Navy would even approve repairs on a vessel that was going home only to be broken up, or else to have a village built on her weather deck and enter into the lugubrious limbo of a receiving hulk.

  The American flag fluttered over the walls of this gray-white castle that showed on the old charts as the Castillo de San Marcos, Anglicized since the British assumption in 1763 to Fort St. Mark. Upon being rowed ashore in his gig, he quickly learned that it was now named Fort Marion after the revolutionary “Swamp Fox.” He also learned that there was no naval presence in the town; the Navy had determined to establish its Florida base farther north, in the raw lumber of the new village on the St. Johns River just named for the ridiculous Andrew Jackson, that conqueror of an unaware enemy. The garrison commander within the old castle would be able to advise him about any repairs.

  He found himself smiling as he approached its cream-white walls. New Englanders like himself were so proud of their aged Pilgrim heritage that began in 1620. Most of them were unaware, and the well-read gallantly declined to recognize, that the Spanish had preceded them on the Atlantic shore by more than a generation. This town dated from 1565, although in this climate nothing could be expected to survive the bugs and decay for so long.

  The fort dated from a century later, looming larger as he approached its entrance in the south wall, through a medieval barbican plainly once set off by moats and drawbridges. The whole edifice seemed to have been dropped onto the beach from the Middle Ages: grooves in the walls for a portcullis, a murder hole in the ceiling through which to pour boiling oil or molten lead onto the heads of invaders. The outer walls appeared to be about twelve feet thick, of a rather poor-quality limestone, and the passageway ran about forty feet into a courtyard that looked to be perhaps a hundred feet square. As he passed through the wall he saw on his left what he took for guardrooms and asked a lazy-looking sentry, “Where will I find your commanding officer?”

  He saluted and pointed within. “Into the courtyard, Captain. Turn immediately left; his office is in the first casemate.”

  Bliven returned the salute. “Thank you, Corporal.” He continued into the daylight of the court, where to his right an ascending ramp led up to the broad terreplein with its file of heavy cannons along the ramparts. The first door on his left was made of crude vertical planks, with a sign that read henry parkins, capt. u.s.a. commdg.

  He knocked twice quickly and entered. He saw no adjutant on duty, but an officer entered from a rear room, muscular and very tan, with black hair above dark eyes. “I am Captain Parkins. May I be of assistance?”

  Bliven saluted and they shook hands. “Bliven Putnam, Captain, United States sloop of war Rappahannock, just now in your harbor.”

  “Yes, we saw you come in. Please come take a chair.” He led the way back into his office, pausing to pour two glasses of wine. “You are welcome, but you know, we have no naval facility or yard or staff.”

  “I was aware. We were damaged at sea and put in here to make repairs.”

  “We thought you looked a little snub-nosed. What happened?” Parkins handed over a glass of tawny-colored Madeira.

  “Thank you. We were hit by a great, huge sea swell. No idea where it came from; its origin is a mystery.”

  “I see. How long do you think your repairs will take?”

  “Just a few days, I think. We would require a docking facility to repair the foretopmast, but we can do without it. We saved the one that fell to pare down into a new bowsprit. Then we must set new rigging.”

  “And your men would perhaps enjoy some time ashore, if you are in no great hurry? Your good health.” Parkins raised his glass and took a sip.

  “That is very kind of you to mention. I am certain that they would.”

  “Actually, Captain Putnam,” he began slowly, “I was not being kind altogether. Your arrival catches us at a particularly acute time, in fact, and I am in need of assistance.”

  Bliven sat straighter and paid greater attention. “How can we help?”

  “You have been at sea for some time?”

  “Six months—not long as sailors measure time.”

 
“But a lot can happen on land in six months. Have you heard of our problem with the Seminoles?”

  “I have read enough only to know that you have one. My impression is that the Seminoles have been a problem for a long time.”

  “Indeed, they have, but now the danger of a war has suddenly become very acute and very dangerous.”

  “Perhaps they want their land back.”

  “On the contrary, we sent a delegation of their chiefs west to the Creek lands on the Arkansas. These Seminoles are really just Creeks by another name, anyway. We told them we would not make them move if they found those lands objectionable. All those chiefs signed an affidavit as to the quality of the land and their willingness to move. It is the ones who did not go see; they have got their backs up. They have been abusing the Indians who are willing to move, and now we learn they have secretly been purchasing and concealing arms and ammunition and encouraging slaves to flee their plantations and join them in the swamps. Whatever grievance they imagine they have against the government, we cannot brook such defiance on the part of savages.”

  “Is that the foundation of our objection to them: that they are savages?”

  “Of course.”

  “So that, if they moved into houses, started plantations of rice and cotton, even bought slaves, they would be accepted into society?”

  “Well, that is so unlikely that I never entertained the notion.”

  “That is what the Cherokees have done. Some of them have become whiter than the white people and still they are losing their lands.”

  “That is different. There is, I believe, known to be gold in Cherokee-held land.”

  “Oh, well, certainly that does make all the difference, yes indeed.”

  Parkins ignored this. “Fort King has been reactivated and must be supplied, and quickly. A new agent has been appointed for them, a Mr. Wiley Thompson—perhaps you have heard of him—and the garrison there must have supplies with all speed to protect him and the settlers in that area.”