The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War - xaviantvision

Historical NoteThe Penobscot Expedition of July and August 1779 is an actual event and I have tried, within the constraints of fiction, to describe what happened. Theoccupation of Majabigwaduce was intended to establish a British province that would be called New Ireland and would serve as a naval base and as ashelter for loyalists fleeing rebel persecution. The government of Massachusetts decided to "captivate, kill, or destroy" the invaders and so launched theexpedition which is often described as the worst naval disaster in United States history before Pearl Harbor. The fleet which sailed to the Penobscot Riverwas the largest assembled by the rebels during the War of Independence. The lists of ships in the various sources differ in detail, and I assume that two orthree transport ships must have left before Sir George Collier's arrival, but the bulk of the fleet was present, which made it a terrible disaster both for theContinental Navy and for Massachusetts. The fourteen-gun brig Pallas had been sent to patrol beyond the mouth of the Penobscot River and so wasabsent when Sir George Collier's relief ships arrived, and she alone survived the debacle. Two American ships, the Hunter and the Hampden, werecaptured (some sources add the schooner Nancy and nine other transports), and the remaining ships were burned. Doctor John Calef, in his officialposition as the Clerk of the Penobscot Council (appointed by the British), listed thirty-seven rebel ships as taken or burned, and that seems broadlycorrect.The blame for the disaster has been almost universally placed on the shoulders of Commodore Dudley Saltonstall. Saltonstall was no hero atPenobscot, and he appears to have been an awkward, unsociable man, but he certainly does not bear the full responsibility for the expedition's failure.Saltonstall was court-martialed (though no record of the trial exists, so it might never have convened) and dismissed from the Continental Navy. The onlyother man to be court-martialed for his conduct at Majabigwaduce was Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Revere.It is an extraordinary coincidence that two men present at Majabigwaduce in the summer of 1779 were to be the subjects of famous poems. PaulRevere was celebrated by Henry Longfellow, and it is Revere's presence at Majabigwaduce that gives the expedition much of its interest. Few men areso honored as a hero of the American Revolution. There is a handsome equestrian statue to Revere in Boston and, in New England at least, he isregarded as the region's paramount patriot and revolutionary hero, yet he does not owe his extraordinary fame to his actions at Majabigwaduce, nor evento his midnight ride, but to Henry Longfellow's poem, which was published in The Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1861.Listen, my children, and you shall hearOf the midnight ride of Paul Revere.And Americans have been hearing of the midnight ride ever since, mostly oblivious that the poem plays merry-hell with the true facts and ascribes toRevere the heroics of other men. This was deliberate; Longfellow, writing at the outbreak of the American Civil War, was striving to create a patrioticlegend, not tell an accurate history. Revere did indeed ride to warn Concord and Lexington that the British regulars were marching from Boston, but he didnot complete the mission. Many other men rode that night and have been forgotten while Paul Revere, solely thanks to Henry Longfellow, gallops intoposterity as the undying patriot and rebel. Before the poem was published Revere was remembered as a regional folk-hero, one among many who hadbeen active in the patriot cause, but in 1861 he entered legend. He was indeed a passionate patriot, and he was vigorous in his opposition to the Britishlong before the outbreak of the revolution, but the only time Revere ever fought the British was at Majabigwaduce, and there, in General Artemas Ward'swords, he showed "unsoldierlike behaviour tending to cowardice." The general was quoting Marine Captain Thomas Carnes, who closely observedRevere during the expedition, and Carnes, like most others in the expedition, believed Revere's behavior there was disgraceful. Revere's presentreputation would have puzzled and, in many cases, disgusted his contemporaries.A second man at Majabigwaduce was to have a famous poem written about him. This man died at Corunna in Spain and the Irish poet Charles Wolfebegan his tribute thus:Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,As his corse to the rampart we hurried;Not a soldier discharged his farewell shotO'er the grave where our hero was buried.We buried him darkly at the dead of night,The sods with our bayonets turning . . .The poem, of course, is The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna . Lieutenant John Moore went on to revolutionize the British Army and is the manwho forged the famed Light Division, a weapon that Wellington used to such devastating effect against the French in the Napoleonic Wars. Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore died in 1809 defeating Marshal Soult at Corunna, but Lieutenant John Moore's first action was fought on the fogbound coast ofMassachusetts. Moore did leave a brief account of his service at Majabigwaduce, but I invented much for him. His extraordinary ability to load and fire amusket five times a minute is recorded, and he was in command of the picquet closest to Dyce's Head on the morning of the successful Americanassault. Lieutenant Moore, alone among the picquets' officers, attempted to stem the attack and lost a quarter of his men. I doubt that Moore did killCaptain Welch (though Moore was carrying a musket and must have been very close to Welch when the marine captain died), but it is certain that it wasMoore's bad luck to be faced by the American marines who were, by far, the most effective troops on the rebel side. Those first marines did wear greencoats and it is tempting, though unproven, to think that those uniforms influenced the adoption of green jackets for the 60th and 95th Rifles, regiments thatMoore nurtured and which served Britain so famously in the long wars against France. Welch's death on the heights was one of the strokes of ill-fortunethat beset the expedition. John Welch was an extraordinary man who had escaped from imprisonment in England and had made his way back across theAtlantic to rejoin the rebellion.Peleg Wadsworth, in his long statement to the official Court of Inquiry, offered three reasons for the disaster: "the Lateness of our Arival before theEnemy, the Smallness of our Land Forces, and the uniform Backwardness of the Commander of the Fleet." History has settled on the third reason andCommodore Dudley Saltonstall has been made to carry the whole blame. He was dismissed from the Continental Navy and it has even been suggested,without a shred of supporting evidence, that he was a traitor in British pay. He was no traitor, and it seems egregious to single out his performance as theprimary reason for the expedition's failure. In 2002 the Naval Institute Press (Annapolis, Maryland) published George E. Buker's fine book The PenobscotExpedition. George Buker served as a naval officer and his book is a spirited defense of a fellow naval officer. The main accusation against thecommodore was that he refused to take his ships into Majabigwaduce Harbor and so eliminate Captain Mowat's three sloops, and Saltonstall'sdescription of the harbor, "that damned hole," is often quoted as the reason for his refusal. George Buker goes to great lengths to show the difficultiesSaltonstall faced. The British naval force might have been puny compared to the rebels' naval strength, but they held a remarkably strong position, and anyattack past Dyce's Head would have taken the American ships into a cauldron of cannon-fire from which it would have been almost impossible to escapewithout the unlikely help of an easterly wind (which, of course, would have prevented them from entering). George Buker is persuasive, except that Nelsonfaced a roughly similar situation at Aboukir Bay (and against an enemy stronger than himself) and he sailed into the bay and won, and John Paul Jones(who had served under Saltonstall and had no respect for the man) would certainly have sailed into the harbor to sink Mowat's sloops. It is grossly unfair tocondemn a man for not being a Nelson or a John Paul Jones, yet despite George Buker's arguments it is still hard to believe that any naval commander,given the vast preponderance of his fleet over the enemy, declined to engage that enemy. The thirty-two naval officers who signed the round-robin urging