Skeletons On The Zahara (4 page)

As Riley later stated in a petition to Congress, he found his nation's commerce “languishing and restricted; many of her mercantile establishments ruined; and individual capital, credit, and resources quite exhausted or paralyzed by the continual hostility of the powers at war, and by measures resorted to by the United States to counteract the English and French policy.”2 Legitimate trade was impossible.

As Riley's debts piled up, Josiah Savage lent him $500 against his Prospect Hill property and house. Riley owed New York merchants N & D Talcott $2,200 and Middletown merchants Eells Child Co. and other creditors hundreds of dollars more. All took him to court and had judgments passed against him. He was under constant threat of having his house foreclosed on. The sheriff of Middlesex County delivered the judgments to his door and threatened to take him to debtors' jail in Hartford.

Riley scrambled to find a way to make money and to keep his prized home. Having sent mineral water from a spring at the base of his property to the renowned Yale chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman to gauge its restorative qualities, he had laid out on paper his vision of a grand spa with a bathhouse. He had confidently planted forty-two poplar trees to adorn his future establishment, which he imagined would rival the famous Stafford Springs Hotel on the Willimantic. But it was not to be. He could not get ahead of his debts. He leveraged his home and his property until he lost them. Riley had since rebuilt some of his credibility, but he remained haunted by his earlier failure.

On Wednesday, May 4, the rain let up and the clouds lifted, but the wind came from the south, heading the Commerce's square-rigged sails. They were near Potapaug, a shipbuilding center that was still reeling from the so-called Good Friday blaze set by the British in 1814. Two hundred thousand dollars' worth of vessels had incinerated, by some estimates the worst financial loss of the war. The charred spine and ribs of the massive 344-ton Osage still jutted out of the mud at Williams Shipyard in North Cove, a grim reminder of the night.

As they passed the renowned Hayden Yard and a slew of smaller yards, it was obvious that the business of building ships from raw materials carried on. Fortified against the spring chill by the customary daily tot of shipyard rum, men worked crosscut pit saws, turning timbers into long planks. They hewed pins with broadaxes and hammered spikes that had been forged by smiths on site. Others stitched canvas in sail lofts and made cordage at ropewalks.

On May 5, the breeze shifted favorably to the northwest, and the next day, the Commerce reached the last stretch of the river with the wind gusting over her starboard beam.

At Lyme, the men watched out for the Tilleye's Point ferry as they prepared to pass through the Connecticut's shallow mile-wide mouth. Choked by sandbars, this was the trickiest passage on the river. The Commerce, like all deep-bottomed traffic, stuck to the navigable channel on the western side by Saybrook until she passed the wooden lighthouse at Lynde Point, which marked the beginning of the Sound. Once she was clear of the sandbars and in deep water, the brig jogged some forty miles east across the Long Island Sound and rounded Montauk Point into the Atlantic.

Riley was at sea again. He was back in his element, where, like many Rileys before him, he had made his name, where he had garnered a small though temporary fortune, and where he would die.

Riley had made his maiden voyage in the role Horace Savage now filled, cabin boy, on board a West Indies-bound sloop. Since then, few things had been more meaningful to him than the fraternity of seamen and merchants on the Connecticut River. He was pleased that he could stand in for his old friend William Savage and looked forward to giving his son a start in the life his father had loved.

Omens

The year 1815 marked a historical watershed for the burgeoning United States. With the end of the War of 1812, the country entered a phase of transformation fueled by revolutions in transportation and industry. Robert Fulton's steamboat had debuted on the Hudson in 1807. In 1811, the New Orleans had steamed from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. Steam would power a new generation of commercial vessels on America's rivers, and industrial workshops would spring up throughout the Connecticut River Valley.

Still, the change would be gradual, and sailing ships would remain in commercial use throughout the century. For the Commerces, whose plight would in many ways symbolize the beginning of the end of the age of the sailing ship, this looming obsolescence was not apparent.

To Riley, sailing on the open sea would always mean freedom and opportunity. As a boy, he had watched his father scratch out a living for his thirteen children on the farm and had helped him and later his neighbor plant and harvest when he should have been in school like other children his age. He would never go back to farming if he could help it. Neither the recent return of Napoleon from his brief exile on the island of Elba, which the newspapers had announced just before the brig's departure, nor the threat of attack by Barbary corsairs off the coast of North Africa would dampen his enthusiasm to voyage across the sea again.

While the Treaty of Ghent had brought the War of 1812 to a close, it had not resolved many of its root issues. American merchant mariners remained wary. The result of the “expensive and bloody” war, complained a February 1815 editorial in the Connecticut Courant, the Lower Valley's chief voice, was the loss of trading rights to the British colonies in the East and West Indies, which had never been a sure thing anyway since independence. “An American vessel going within a marine league of the coast of any British colony,” it warned, “will be liable to be fired on and captured.”

Yet during the war, Britain's indisputable rule of the waves had been shaken. Although the United States had had no answer for the blockade that locked up its shores, the heavy frigates of its underdog navy had won battles that stunned the Royal Navy, and the world. As novelist and naval historian James Fenimore Cooper saw it, “The ablest and bravest captains of the English fleet were ready to admit that a new power was about to appear on the ocean.”

The war had given the young nation “a confidence in itself that had been greatly wanted,” Cooper allowed, “but which, in the end, perhaps, degenerated to a feeling of self-esteem and security that were not without danger.” Britain had built its mercantile empire on the strength of the mightiest navy ever known. What U.S. merchants lacked in infrastructure and experience, they made up for by taking advantage of America's wealth of fertile soil, raw materials, and enterprising spirit. But to compete around the world, American commerce had to be protected.

During the War of 1812, the navies of the Barbary states of North Africa— encouraged by the British, who had promised to destroy the fledgling American Navy— had attacked and plundered Yankee merchantmen, enslaving their crews. A few weeks after the Commerce set sail, Congress dispatched Captain Stephen Decatur at the head of a squadron of warships to subdue the Barbary States: Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. Before the war, the Americans had reluctantly accepted the Old World system of tributes for peace. Now they were out to change the system.

Two weeks after leaving the mouth of the Connecticut, the Commerce reached the Bahamas, sighting Great Abaco Island and passing Hole in the Wall, a “remarkable perforated rock” at the island's south end, the next day. The blue-water sailing in the Atlantic had been uneventful, the men content to be at peace and at sea again.

The brig now entered the pellucid waters of the Great Bahama Bank, which in places is no deeper than twenty feet. Disarmed by the beautiful view of the bottom, many a ship had run afoul of the area's dangerous crosscurrents and hazardous shoals. As the 1819 Colombian Navigator warned mariners, the principal occupations of the region's small craft were coastal trading, fishing, turtling, and searching for wrecks. The locals were licensed by the governor to salvage. They received a percentage of anything they recovered, and quite a few made a living this way.

Riley, who had sailed to New Orleans many times before, crossed the swift-flowing Northwest Providence Channel to the Berry Islands, passing to the leeward of Great Stirrup Cay, the northernmost of this cluster of cays and small islands, and steering west southwest for 36 miles, then south southwest for 120 miles. According to the authoritative Navigator, this was more or less a standard route as laid down by a Captain Ferrer in 1800 and appropriate for small vessels. On May 22 the Commerce sighted the next landmark, the Orange Cays— a collection of four small bush-covered islands along with two bald rocks— to starboard.

Riley navigated the brig off the bank at about three miles' distance. He now steered west southwest for the Double Headed Shot Cays. The Navigator put them at about forty-five miles away and instructed mariners to steer “S.W. by S.,” meaning Riley's course was a bit northerly of what the editors recommended.

In the afternoon, the Commerce was becalmed at the intersection of the Bahama and Santaren channels, though the day's heat and frustration faded as the breeze picked up toward evening. Riley was intent on taking advantage of this favorable wind and cracked on to make up for lost time. Approaching the Double Headed Shot Cays at night was a dodgy business. These islets south of the Biminis were not well charted. “Should you sail for those kays in the night,” the Navigator warned, “by all means keep clear of them: there are a number of bare rocks, perhaps . . . an hundred and twenty, about the size of a vessel, and some less.” It recommended delaying an approach until dawn.

But it would be a bright and glorious night. The moon, only a day short of full, rose as the sun set. Riley remained on deck, scanning the horizon all night, anxiously watching, unaware of the extent to which the strong north-northwest current had changed his position that afternoon. He was sure that they should have seen the cays by now. At four in the morning, he concluded that they must have safely passed them. Although he felt a lingering dissatisfaction at not having sighted the flotilla of small islands forming an unpassable trench in the sea, he was dog-tired. Reluctantly, he turned the deck over to George Williams while he went below to get some sleep. Before descending to his cramped private quarters, where his bed held a feather mattress (one of the few indulgences on board), he reminded Williams to keep a careful lookout on all sides for land, breakers, or white water, and he told the watch to look alive.

About an hour later, a shock to the keel awakened Riley from his uneasy slumber. The shriek of wood on coral turned his sweat cold as he flung his legs out of bed. In the next instant, he was up the ladder and rushing onto the deck, where it was now light. “Starboard the helm,” he yelled to the man at the wheel. This checked the brig's speed. “All hands on deck,” he shouted. With nerves alive and trembling, he took in the crucial data: brig making ten knots to the southwest, land to the north, breakers dead ahead and to the south. He seized the helm and turned it hard to port. At the same time, he commanded the men to let the sails run, in effect turning off the engine, and to ready the anchors for dropping.

Again the coral reef beneath them screeched against the brig's hull and, after an agonizing silence, yet again. The Commerce was floating over the reef in about fifteen feet of water. Mercifully, it was calm. In rising and falling seas, her hull would have been slammed against coral heads as hard as stone and as sharp as a razor. “Drop anchor,” Riley bellowed. The Commerce came to a rest. The men took in her sails. Riley ordered a small boat lowered. In it, he and four men searched for an opening in the reef. Finding greater depth to the reef's leeward side, they sounded out a passage. Riley returned to the brig, ordered her head turned, and got under way again. By seven in the morning, the emergency was over, and the brig was sailing toward New Orleans, but Riley was rattled. In all his long experience at sea, he had never navigated a vessel into such a scrape. Furious, he pored over the chart and the log, astonished to see that the only possible explanation was that the current had forced— as he put it, “horsed”— the brig no less than sixty miles to the lee in sixteen hours, nearly four miles an hour, so far that she was about to be swept onto the menacing Carysfort Reef, a shipping graveyard on the edge of the Gulf Stream, about six miles from Key Largo. Two minutes more, he calculated, and the Commerce would have been dashed on the reef's southwest corner.

Yet Riley did not reprimand his crew, nor did he blame himself. “I mention this incident,” he later wrote, “to warn the navigator of the danger he is in when his vessel is acted upon by these currents, where no calculation can be depended upon, and where nothing but very frequent castings of the lead, and a good look out, can secure him from their too often fatal consequences.” This was the first stroke of bad luck for the men of the Commerce.

The brig now ran southwest along the Florida Keys, keeping off them by a dozen or so miles and staying at comfortable depths of some thirty fathoms (180 feet). At noon on May 24, she rounded the Dry Tortugas, the cluster of islets that mark the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico, in sixty feet of water.1

Two days later the Commerce reached the mouth of the Mississippi River, arriving at Balize, a low, marshy island. Balize was so flat that distant mariners first saw it as an American flag flapping on a pole rising directly out of the sea. Here the brig was met by the pilot boat, which placed her on the official “arrived” list.

Thirty-three miles farther on, Riley presented her papers, as required, to the commanding officer of Fort St. Philip, beside the brackish swamps of the Plaquemine Bend. The Commerce proceeded past the tricky shoals seven miles north, where the land was so narrow that at a height of just a few rungs up the shrouds, Riley could see the sea less than a musket-shot away.

Having considerable experience navigating the mighty river, Riley assuaged his ego somewhat on the ninety-five-mile approach to New Orleans. There was an art to swimming against the combined currents of the Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and dozens of other rivers that formed the Mississippi, especially in the full flow of spring. With a fair wind, the key was to travel from point to point, avoiding the bends as best as possible, and thus not only shortening the distance traveled, but minimizing the effects of the current and avoiding the sunken trees along the murky banks that could puncture a ship's bottom and foul her anchors.