The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War - xaviantvision

The man had hefted a haversack sewn from sail-canvas. "Any way we can. Walk, I guess. How far is it?""Two hundred miles. And you're not going home, not yet." Wadsworth turned on the sergeant. "Get your men in order, we still have a war to fight."Wadsworth strode down the beach, shouting at officers and sergeants to assemble their men. If the British could be stopped at this bend then therewas a good chance to reorganize the army upriver. Trees could be felled, a camp made, and guns placed to deter any British assault. All it needed was afirm defense on this sun-drenched morning. As Wadsworth followed the bank further downstream he saw how the river narrowed into a valley that ranalmost straight southwards to Odom's Ledge about four miles away. The river itself was about three hundred paces wide, but that was deceptive becausethe navigable channel was much narrower and the British ships must creep up that channel in single file, the leading ship's vulnerable bows pointingstraight at the bluff. Four guns would do the job! He ordered militia captains to clear a ledge on the bluff's slope and when they complained that they hadno axes or shovels he snapped at them to find a boat and search the transport ships for the necessary tools. "Just do some work! You want to go homeand tell your children you ran away from the British? Have any of you seen Colonel Revere?""He went downriver, sir," a surly militia captain answered."Downriver?"The captain pointed to the long, narrow valley where the rearmost American ship, a schooner, was trying to reach the rest of the fleet still gathered bythe bluff. Her big mizzen sail was poled out to port to catch the tiny wind that had at last started to scurry catspaws across the river's surface. Four of theschooner's crew were using huge oars to try and hasten her passage, but the oars dipped and pulled pathetically slowly. Then Wadsworth saw why theywere using the long sweeps. Behind the schooner was a much larger ship, a ship with more sails and higher masts, a ship that suddenly fired her bowchasersto fill the valley with smoke and with the echo of her two cannon shots. The balls had not been aimed at the schooner, but rather to either side ofher hull as a signal that she should haul down her ensign and let the pursuing British take her as a prize.Wadsworth ran down the beach. There were men on the schooner's bows waving frantically. They had no longboat, no boat of any sort, and they wanteda rescue, and there, not fifty paces away, was Revere's white-painted barge with its crew of oarsmen. It was rowing upriver ahead of the schooner,suggesting that Revere had gone downstream, maybe hoping to escape past the British ships, but, discovering the futility of such a hope, had beenforced back northwards. Wadsworth could see Lieutenant-Colonel Revere himself in the barge's sternsheets and he stopped at the water's edge andcupped his hands, "Colonel Revere!"Revere waved to show he had heard the hail.Wadsworth pointed at the schooner which he now recognized as the Nancy. "The Nancy's crew needs rescuing! Take your barge and pick them up!"Revere twisted on his bench to look at the Nancy, then turned back to Wadsworth. "You've no right to give me commands now, General!" Revere called,then said something to his crew who kept rowing upstream, away from the doomed Nancy.Wadsworth wondered if he had misheard. "Colonel Revere!" He shouted slowly and clearly so there could be no misunderstanding. "Take your bargeand get those crewmen off the Nancy!" The schooner was lightly crewed and there was plenty of room in the barge's bows for all of her seamen."I was under your command so long as there was a siege," Revere called back, "but the siege is over, and with it your authority has ended."For a heartbeat Wadsworth did not believe what he had heard. He gaped at the stocky colonel, then was overcome with rage and indignation. "ForGod's sake, man, they're Americans! Go and rescue them!""I've got my baggage here," Revere called back and pointed to a heap of boxes covered by sailcloth. "I'm not willing to risk my baggage! Good day toyou, Wadsworth.""You . . ." Wadsworth began, but was too angry to finish. He turned and walked up the beach to keep pace with the barge. "I am giving you an order!" heshouted at Revere. Men on the beach watched and listened. "Rescue that crew!"The British frigate astern of the Nancy fired her bow-chasers again and the balls seared past the hull to throw up great fountains of river water. "Yousee?" Revere called when the echo of the gunfire had faded. "I can't risk my baggage!""I promise you an arrest, Colonel!" Wadsworth called savagely. "Unless you obey my orders!""You can't give me orders now!" Revere said, almost cheerfully. "It's over and done with. Good day, General!""I want your guns on the bluff ahead!"Revere waved a negligent hand towards Wadsworth. "Keep rowing," he told his men."I shall have you arrested!" Wadsworth bellowed.But the barge kept going and Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Revere's baggage was safe.* * *HMS Galatea led the British frigates. At her bows was a figurehead of Galatea, her painted skin as white as the marble from which her mythical statuehad been carved. In that myth she had sprung to life from the marble and now she came upriver, naked except for a wisp of silk covering her hips, and withher defiant head raised to look straight ahead with startling blue eyes. The frigate was flying topsails and topgallantsails only, the high canvas catchingwhat small wind came from the south. Ahead of her was chaos, and the Galatea made the chaos worse. The schooner Nancy had been abandoned, buta British prize crew secured the vessel and used the captured schooner's anchors to drag her to the eastern bank of the river so that the Galatea andHMS Camille, which followed the Galatea, could pass. The nymph and her blue eyes vanished in a sudden billow of smoke as the two long-barreled ninepounderbow-chasers fired from the frigate. The balls skipped across the water towards the mass of rebel shipping. Red-coated Royal Marines on theGalatea's forecastle waited for the cannon smoke to drift away, then began shooting muskets at the distant men on the river's western bank. They fired atvery long range, and none of the balls found a target, but the beach emptied fast as men sought shelter among the trees.And there was more smoke now, far more smoke. It did not come from British cannons, but from fires aboard the rebel ships. Captains struck flintagainst steel and lit their slow-matches, or else thrust fire into the kindling of the combustibles stacked belowdecks and around masts. Longboats pulledfor the shore as smoke poured out of companionways.The Galatea and the Camille both dropped stern anchors and took in their topsails. No ship would risk itself by sailing into an inferno. Fire loved timber,tar, and linen, and every sailor feared fire much more than he feared the sea, and so the two frigates lay in the river, rising gently on the incoming tide, andtheir crews watched an enemy destroy itself.The proud ships burned. The sleek privateers and the heavy transports burned. Smoke thickened to a dense thunder-dark cloud which boiled into thesummer sky, and amidst the smoke were savage tongues of flame leaping and spreading. When the hungry fire found new timber it would sometimesexplode and the light would glimmer across the water and new flame would erupt into the rigging. That rigging was ablaze, each ship and brig and sloopand schooner outlined by fire until a mast burned through and then, so slowly, a blazing lattice would topple, sparks rushing upwards as the spars andlines arced downwards, and the river would hiss and steam as the masts collapsed.The Sky Rocket, a sixteen-gun ship-privateer, was aground just beyond the bluff and in the haste to evacuate the bluff she had taken the remainder ofthe ammunition from the abandoned rebel batteries. Her hold was filled with powder, and the fire found the hold and the Sky Rocket exploded. The forceof the blast shivered the smoke from the other burning ships, it blew timber and burning sails high into the air where, like sky rockets, they flew to leavemyriad smoke trails curving far above the river. The noise was physical, a pounding of sound that was heard in Fort George, and then other magazinesexploded, as if copying the Sky Rocket's example, and the hulls lurched, steam mixed with the churning smoke, and rats screamed in the filthy bilges asthe consuming fire roared like furnaces run wild. Men ashore wept for their lost ships, and the oven-heat of the blaze touched the faces of the seamenstaring in wonder from the Galatea's foredeck. Flaming yards, their halliards burned through, dropped onto fiery decks and more hulls shattered as moregunpowder caught the fire and ripped the wooden ships apart. Anchor rodes parted and fire ships drifted and hulls collided, their flames mingling andgrowing, the smoke thickening and rising ever higher. Some ships had left their guns charged with shot and those guns now fired into the burning fleet.Gun-barrels collapsed through burning decks. The furnace roared, the cannon hammered, and the river hissed as the wrecks sank in ash-filthy waterwhere charred debris drifted.Beyond the bluff, still anchored even though she was well afloat now, the Warren was abandoned. She was bigger than either the Galatea or theCamille. She carried thirty-two guns to their twenty each, though she had no naked nymph protecting her bows. She had been built at Providence, RhodeIsland, and was named for Joseph Warren, the Boston doctor who had sparked the rebellion by sending the horsemen to warn Lexington and Concordthat the British were coming. Warren had been a patriot and an inspiration. He was appointed a general in the rebellious militia but, because hiscommission had not arrived, he had fought as a private at Bunker Hill and there he had died and the frigate was named in tribute to him, and since herlaunch she had captured ten rich British merchantmen. She was a lethal machine, heavily armed by the standards of other frigates, and her big eighteenpounderswere larger than any cannon aboard the smaller British frigates.But now, as the last of her crew rowed ashore, the Warren burned. Dudley Saltonstall did not look behind to see the smoke and, once ashore, he struckstraight into the woods so that the trees would hide the sight of the burning frigate, of the flames rippling fast up her rigging, of the furled sails bursting into