Authors: Bernard Cornwell
“Which it must,” Saltonstall agreed. He forced himself to look into Little’s angry eyes. “Suppose twenty of your men are killed in an attack on the ships, and after the battle the fort still survives. To what purpose, then, did your men die?”
“We came here to kill the enemy,” Little said.
“We came here to defeat the enemy,” Saltonstall corrected him, and a murmur of agreement sounded in the cabin. The commodore sensed the mood and took a leaf from General Lovell’s book. “You all expressed your sentiments to me in a letter,” he said, “and I appreciate the zeal that letter displayed, but I would humbly suggest,” he paused, having surprised even himself by using the word “humbly,” “that the letter was sent without a full appreciation of the tactical circumstances that confront us. So permit me to put a motion to the vote. Considering the enemy positions, would it not be more prudent to allow the army to complete its success without risking our ships in what must prove to be an attack irrelevant to the expedition’s stated purpose?”
The assembled captains hesitated, but one by one the privateer owners voted against any attack through the harbor entrance and, once those men gave the lead, the rest followed, all except for George Little who neither voted for nor against, but just scowled at the table.
“I thank you, gentlemen,” Saltonstall said, hiding his satisfaction. These men had possessed the temerity to write him a letter which implicitly suggested cowardice, and yet, faced with the facts of the situation, they had overwhelmingly voted against the very sentiments their letter had expressed. The commodore despised them. “I shall inform General Lovell,” Saltonstall said, “of the Council’s decision.”
So the warships would not attack.
And General Lovell was digging earthworks in the woods to repel a British attack.
And General McLean was strengthening the fort.
Captain Welch was buried close to where he had died on Dyce’s Head. Marines dug the grave. They had already buried six of their companions lower down the slope where the soil was easier to dig, and at first they had put Welch’s corpse in that common grave, but a sergeant had ordered the captain’s body removed before the grave was filled with earth. “He took the high ground,” the sergeant said, “and he should hold it forever.”
So a new grave had been hacked on the rocky headland. Peleg Wadsworth came to see the corpse lowered into the hole and with him was the Reverend Murray who spoke a few somber words in the gray dawn. A cutlass and a pistol were laid on the blanket-shrouded corpse. “So he can kill the red-coated bastards in hell,” Sergeant Sykes explained. The Reverend Murray smiled bravely and Wadsworth nodded approval. Rocks were heaped on the captain’s grave so that scavening animals could not scratch him out of the ground he had captured.
Once the brief ceremony was over Wadsworth walked to the tree line and gazed at the fort. Lieutenant Dennis joined him. “The wall’s higher today,” Dennis said.
“It is.”
“But we can scale it,” Dennis said robustly.
Wadsworth used a small telescope to examine the British work. Redcoats were deepening the western ditch that faced the American lines and using the excavated soil to heighten the wall, but the farther wall, the eastern rampart, was still little more than a scrape in the dirt. “If we could get behind them . . .” he mused aloud.
“Oh we can!” Dennis said.
“You think so?”
A thunder of gunfire obliterated the marine lieutenant’s reply. The semicircular British battery on the harbor’s lower slope had fired its cannon across the harbor towards Cross Island. No sooner had the sound faded than the three enemy sloops began firing. “Is the commodore attacking?” Wadsworth asked.
The two men moved to the southern crest and saw that two privateers were firing through the harbor entrance, though neither ship was making any attempt to sail through that narrow gap. They fired at long range and the three sloops shot back. “Gun practice,” Dennis said dismissively.
“You think we can get behind the fort?” Wadsworth asked.
“Capture that battery, sir,” Dennis said, pointing down at the semicircle of earth that protected the British cannon. “Once we have that we can make our way along the harbor shore. There’s plenty of cover!” The route along the harbor shore wandered past cornfields, log piles, houses, and barns, all of which could conceal men from the guns of the fort and the broadsides of the sloops.
“Young Fletcher would guide us,” Wadsworth said. James Fletcher had rescued his fishing boat,
Felicity
, and was using it to carry wounded men to the hospital the rebels had established on Wasaumkeag Point on the far shore of the bay. “But I still think a direct assault would be best,” Wadsworth added.
“Straight at the fort, sir?”
“Why not? Let’s attack before they make that nearer wall any higher.” A cannon fired to the north, the noise sudden, close and loud. It was an eighteen-pounder of the Massachusetts Artillery Regiment and it fired from the trees on the high ground at the redcoats working to raise the fort’s curtain wall. The sound of the cannon cheered Wadsworth. “We won’t need to get behind them now,” he said to Dennis. “Colonel Revere’s guns will batter that rampart down to nothing!”
“So we attack along the ridge?” Dennis asked.
“It’s the simplest way,” Wadsworth said, “and I have a mind that simplicity is good.”
“Captain Welch would approve, sir.”
“And I shall recommend it,” Wadsworth said.
They were so close, the fort was unfinished, and all they needed to do was attack.
“I hate New York,” Sir George Collier said. He thought New York a slum; a fetid, overcrowded, ill-mannered, pestilential, humid hell on earth. “We should just give it to the bloody rebels,” he snarled, “let the bastards stew here.”
“Please stay still, Sir George,” the doctor said.
“Oh Christ in his britches, man, get on with it! I thought Lisbon was hell on earth and it’s a goddamn paradise compared to this filthy bloody town.”
“Allow me to draw your thigh?” the doctor said.
“It’s even worse than Bristol,” Sir George growled.
Admiral Sir George Collier was a small, irascible and unpleasant man who commanded the British fleet on the American coast. He was sick, which is why he was ashore in New York, and the doctor was attempting to allay the fever by drawing blood. He was using one of the newest and finest pieces of medical equipment from London, a scarifier, which he now cocked so that the twenty-four ground-steel blades disappeared smoothly into their gleaming housing. “Are you ready, Sir George?”
“Don’t blather, man. Just do it.”
“There will be a slight sensation of discomfort, Sir George,” the doctor said, concealing his pleasure at that thought, then placed the metal box against the patient’s scrawny thigh and pulled the trigger. The spring-loaded blades leaped out of their slits to pierce Sir George’s skin and start a flow of blood which the doctor staunched with a piece of Turkey cloth. “I would wish to see more blood, Sir George,” the doctor said.
“Don’t be a bloody fool, man. You’ve drained me dry.”
“You should wrap yourself in flannel, Sir George.”
“In this damned heat?” Sir George’s foxlike face was glistening with sweat. Winter in New York was brutally cold, the summer was a steamy hell, and in between it was merely unbearable. On the wall of his quarters, next to an etching of his home in England, was a framed poster advertising that London’s Drury Lane Theatre was presenting “
Selima and Azor
, a Musical Delectation in Five Acts written by Sir George Collier.” London, he thought, now that was a city! Decent theater, well-dressed whores, fine clubs, and no damned humidity. A theater owner in New York had thought to please Sir George by offering to present
Selima and Azor
on his stage, but Sir George had forbidden it. To hear his songs murdered by caterwauling Americans? The very thought was disgusting.
“Come!” he shouted in response to a knock on the door. A naval lieutenant entered the room. The newcomer shuddered at the blood smearing Sir George’s bare thigh, then averted his eyes and stood respectfully just inside the door. “Well, Forester?” Sir George snarled.
“I regret to inform you, sir, that the
Iris
won’t be ready for sea,” Lieutenant Forester said.
“Her copper?”
“Indeed, sir,” Forester said, relieved that his bad news had not been greeted by anger.
“Pity,” Sir George grunted. HMS
Iris
was a fine 32-gun frigate that Sir George had captured two years previously. Back then she had been called the
Hancock
, an American ship, but though the Royal Navy usually kept the names of captured warships Sir George would be damned and condemned to eternal hell in New York before he allowed a British naval ship to bear the name of some filthy rebel traitor, and so the
Hancock
had been renamed for a splendid London actress. “Legs as long as a spritsail yard,” Sir George said wistfully.
“Sir?” Lieutenant Forester asked.
“Mind your own damned business.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Copper, you say?”
“At least two weeks’ work, sir.”
Sir George grunted. “
Blonde
?”
“Ready, sir.”
“Virginia?”
“Fully manned and seaworthy, sir.”
“Write them both orders,” Sir George said. The
Blonde
and
Virginia
were also 32-gun frigates and the
Blonde
, usefully, had just returned from the Penobscot River, which meant Captain Barkley knew the waters. “
Grayhound? Camille? Galatea
?”
“The
Grayhound
is provisioning, Sir George. The
Galatea
and
Camille
both need crewmen.”
“I want all three ready to sail in two days. Send out the press gangs.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The
Grayhound
carried twenty-eight guns, while the
Camille
and
Galatea
were smaller frigates with just twenty guns apiece.
“The
Otter
,” Sir George said, “to carry despatches.” The
Otter
was a 14-gun brig.
“Aye aye, sir.”
Sir George watched the doctor bandage his thigh. “And the
Raisonable
,” he said, smiling wolfishly.
“The
Raisonable
, Sir George?” Forester asked in astonishment.
“You heard me! Tell Captain Evans she’s to be ready for sea in two days. And tell him he’ll be flying my flag.”
The
Raisonable
was a captured French ship, and she was also a proper warship fit to stand in the line of battle. She carried sixty-four guns, the heaviest of them thirty-two pounders, and the rebels had nothing afloat that could match the
Raisonable
even though she was one of the smallest ships of the line in the Royal Navy.
“You’re going to sea, Sir George?” the doctor asked nervously.
“I’m going to sea.”
“But your health!”
“Oh, stop twittering, you imbecile. How can it be bad for me? Even the Dead Sea’s healthier than New York.”
Sir George was going to sea, and he was taking seven ships led by a vast, slab-sided battleship that could blow any rebel warship clean out of the water with a single broadside.
And the fleet would sail east. To the Penobscot River and Penobscot Bay and Majabigwaduce.
Excerpts from Brigadier-General Solomon Lovell’s orders to his troops, Penobscot, July 30th, 1779:
The General is much alarm’d at the loose and disorderly inattentive Behaviour of the Camp. . . . As the Success of Arms under God depends principally on good Subordination the General expects that every Officer and Soldier who has the least Spark of honor left will endeavor to have his Orders put in Execution and that Colonel Revere and the Corps under his Command incamp with the Army in future on Shore, in order not only to strengthen the Lines but to manage the Cannon.
Excerpts from a letter sent by General George Washington to the Council of Massachusetts. August 3rd, 1779:
Head Quarters, West Point.
I have Just received a Letter from Lord Stirling stationed in the Jerseys dated yesterday . . . by which it appears the Ships of War at New York have all put to sea since. I thought it my duty to communicate this Intelligence that the Vessells employed in this expedition to Penobscot may be put upon their Guard, as it is probable enough that these Ships may be destined against them and if they should be surprised the consequences would be desagreeable. I have the honor to be with very great respect and esteem, Gentlemen Your Most Obedient Servant
George Washington
From the deposition of John Lymburner to Justice of the Peace Joseph Hibbert, 12th May 1788:
[I was]
taken prisoner by the Americans at the Siege of Penobscot, and was in close confinement . . . we were treated very severely for adhering to the British troops, called Tories and Refugees, was threatened to be hanged as soon as they had taken Fort George.
“Where the devil is Revere?” Lovell asked. He had asked the question a dozen times in the two days since he had captured the heights of Majabigwaduce and each time there had been increasing irritation in his usually calm voice. “Has he attended a single council of war?”
“He likes to sleep aboard the
Samuel
,” William Todd said.
“Sleep? It’s broad daylight!” That was an exaggeration, for it was only a few minutes since the sun had lit the eastern fog bright.
“I believe,” Todd said carefully, “that he finds his quarters aboard the
Samuel
more amenable to his comfort.” He was polishing his spectacles on the skirt of his coat and his face looked strangely vulnerable without them.
“We’re not here for comfort,” Lovell said.
“Indeed we are not, sir,” Todd said.
“And his men?”
“They sleep on the
Samuel
too, sir,” Todd said, carefully hooking the cleaned spectacles over his ears.
“It won’t do,” Lovell exploded, “it will not do!”
“Indeed it will not, General,” Major Todd agreed, then hesitated. Fog made the treetops vague and inhibited the gunners on Cross Island and aboard the British ships so that a kind of quiet enveloped Majabigwaduce. Smoke drifted among the trees from the campfires on which troops boiled water for tea. “If you approve, sir,” Todd said carefully, watching Lovell pacing up and down in front of the crude shelter made of branches and sod that was his sleeping quarters, “I could advert to Colonel Revere’s absence in the daily orders?”
“You can advert?” Lovell asked curtly. He stopped his pacing and turned to glare at the major. “Advert?”
“You could issue a requirement in the daily orders that the colonel and his men must sleep ashore?” Todd suggested. He doubted Lovell would agree, because any such order would be recognized throughout the army as a very public reprimand.
“A very good idea,” Lovell said, “an excellent notion. Do it. And draft me a letter to the colonel as well!”
Before Lovell could change his mind Peleg Wadsworth came to the clearing. The younger general was wearing a greatcoat buttoned against the dawn chill. “Good morning!” he greeted Lovell and Todd cheerfully.
“An ill-fitting coat, General,” Major Todd observed with ponderous amusement.
“It belonged to my father, Major. He was a big man.”
“Did you know Revere sleeps aboard his ship?” Lovell demanded indignantly.
“I did know, sir,” Wadsworth said, “but I thought he had your permission.”
“He has no such thing. We’re not here on a pleasure cruise! You want tea?” Lovell waved towards the fire where his servant crouched by a pot. “The water must have boiled.”
“I’d appreciate a word first, sir?”
“Of course, of course. In private?”
“If you please, sir.” Wadsworth said and the two generals walked a few paces west to where the trees thinned and from where they could gaze over the fog-haunted waters of Penobscot Bay. The topmasts of the transport ships appeared above the lowest and densest layer of fog like splinters in a snowbank. “What would happen if we all slept aboard our ships, eh?” Lovell asked, still indignant.
“I did mention the matter to Colonel Revere,” Wadsworth said.
“You did?”
“Yesterday, sir. I said he should move his quarters ashore.”
“And his response?”
Fury, Wadsworth thought. Revere had responded like a man insulted. “The guns can’t fire at night,” he had spat at Wadsworth, “so why man them at night? I know how to command my regiment!” Wadsworth chided himself for having let the matter slide, but at this moment he had a greater concern. “The colonel disagreed with me, sir,” he said tonelessly, “but I wished to speak of something else.”
“Of course, yes, whatever is on your mind.” Lovell frowned towards the topmasts. “Sleeping aboard his ship!”
Wadsworth looked south to where the fog now lay like a great river of whiteness between the hills bordering the Penobscot River. “Should the enemy send reinforcements, sir’” he began.
“They’ll come upriver, certainly,” Lovell interjected, following Wadsworth’s gaze.
“And discover our fleet, sir,” Wadsworth continued.
“Of course they would, yes,” Lovell said as if the point was not very important.
“Sir,” Wadsworth was urgent now. “If the enemy come in force they’ll be among our fleet like wolves in a flock. Might I urge a precaution?”
“A precaution,” Lovell repeated as if the word was unfamiliar.
“Permit me to explore upriver, sir,” Wadsworth said, pointing north to where the Penobscot River flowed into the wider bay. “Let me find and fortify a place to which we can retreat if the enemy comes. Young Fletcher knows the upper river. He tells me it narrows, sir, and twists between high banks. If it was necessary, sir, we could take the fleet upriver and shelter behind a bluff. A cannon emplacement at the river bend will check any enemy pursuit.”
“Find and fortify, eh?” Lovell said, more to buy time than as a coherent response. He turned and stared into the northern fog. “You’d make a fort?”
“I would certainly emplace some guns, sir.”
“In earthworks?”
“The batteries must be made defensible. The enemy will surely bring troops.”
“If they come,” Lovell said dubiously.
“It’s prudent, sir, to prepare for the least desirable eventuality.”
Lovell grimaced, then placed a fatherly hand on Wadsworth’s shoulder. “You worry too much, Wadsworth. That’s a good thing! We should be worried about eventualities.” He nodded sagely. “But I do assure you we shall capture the fort long before any more redcoats arrive.” He saw Wadsworth was about to speak so hurried on. “You’d require men to make an emplacement and we cannot afford to detach men to dig a fort we may never need! We shall require every man we have to make the assault once the commodore agrees to enter the harbor.”
“If he agrees,” Wadsworth said drily.
“Oh, he will, I’m sure he will. Haven’t you seen? The enemy’s been driven back yet again! It’s only a matter of time now!”
“Driven back?” Wadsworth asked.
“The sentries say so,” Lovell exulted, “indeed they do.” Mowat’s three ships, constantly battered by Colonel Revere’s cannon on Cross Island, had moved still farther eastwards during the night. Their topmasts, hung with the British flags, were all that were presently visible and the sentries on Dyce’s Head reckoned that those topmasts were now almost a mile away from the harbor entrance. “The commodore doesn’t have to fight his way into the harbor now,” Lovell said happily, “because we’ve driven them away. By God, we have! Almost the whole harbor belongs to us now!”
“But even if the commodore doesn’t enter the harbor, sir’” Wadsworth began.
“Oh, I know!” the older man interrupted. “You think we can take the fort without the navy’s help, but we can’t, Wadsworth, we can’t.” Lovell repeated all his old arguments, how the British ships would bombard the attacking troops and how the British marines would reinforce the garrison, and Wadsworth nodded politely though he believed none of it. He watched Lovell’s earnest face. The man was eminent now, a landowner, a selectman, a churchwarden, and a legislator, but the schoolmaster in Wadsworth was trying to imagine Solomon Lovell as a boy, and he conjured an image of a big, clumsy lad who would earnestly try to be helpful, but never be a rule breaker. Lovell was declaring his belief that Brigadier McLean’s men outnumbered his own. “Oh, I realize you disagree, Wadsworth,” Lovell said, “but you young men can be headstrong. In truth we face a malevolent and a mighty foe, and to overcome him we must harness all our oxen together!”
“We must attack, sir,” Wadsworth said forcefully.
Lovell laughed, though without much humor. “One minute you tell me to prepare ourselves for defeat, and the next moment you wish me to attack!”
“The one will happen without the other, sir.”
Lovell frowned as he worked out what Wadsworth meant, then shook his head dismissively. “We shall conquer!” he said, then described his grand idea that the commodore’s ships should sail majestically into the harbor, their cannons blazing, while all along the ridge the rebel army advanced on a fort being hammered by naval gunfire. “Just imagine it,” he said enthusiastically, “all our warships bombarding the fort! My goodness, but we’ll just stroll across those ramparts!”
“I’d rather we attacked in tomorrow’s dawn,” Wadsworth said, “in the fog. We can close on the enemy in the fog, sir, and take them by surprise.”
“The commodore can’t shift in the fog,” Lovell said dismissively. “Quite impossible!”
Wadsworth looked eastwards. The fog seemed to have thickened so that the topmasts of only one ship were visible, and it had to be a ship because there were three topmasts, each crossed by a topgallant yard. Three crosses. Wadsworth did not think it mattered whether the commodore attacked or not, or rather he thought it should not matter because Lovell had the men to assault the fort whether the commodore attacked or not. It was like chess, Wadsworth thought, and had a sudden image of his wife smiling as she took his castle with her bishop. The fort was the king, and all Lovell had to do was move one piece to acheive checkmate, but the general and Saltonstall insisted on a more complex plan. They wanted bishops and knights zigzagging all over the board, and Wadsworth knew he could never persuade either man to take the simple route. So, he thought, make their complicated moves work, and make them work soon before the British brought new pieces to the board. “Has the commodore agreed to enter the harbor?” he asked Lovell.
“Not exactly agreed,” Lovell said uncomfortably, “not yet.”
“But you believe he will, sir?”
“I’m sure he will,” Lovell said, “in time he will.”
Time was precisely what the rebels lacked, or so Wadsworth believed. “If we control the harbor entrance’” he began and was again interrupted by Lovell.
“It’s that wretched battery on the harbor foreshore,” the general said, and Wadsworth knew he was referring to the semicircular earthwork the British had dug to cover the harbor entrance. That battery was now the closest enemy post.
“So if the battery was captured, sir,” Wadsworth suggested, “then the commodore would take advantage?”
“I would hope he would,” Lovell said.
“So why don’t I prepare a plan to capture it?” Wadsworth asked.
Lovell stared at Wadsworth as though the younger man had just wrought a miracle. “Would you do that?” the general asked, immensely pleased. “Yes, do that! Then we can advance together. Soldier and sailor, marine and militia, together! How soon can you have such a plan? By noon, perhaps?”
“I’m sure I can, sir.”
“Then I shall propose your plan at this afternoon’s council,” Lovell said, “and urge every man present to vote for it. My goodness, if we capture that battery then the commodore . . .” Lovell checked whatever he might have said because there was an abrupt crackle of musketry. It rose in intensity and was answered by a cannon shot. “What the devil are those rogues doing now?” Lovell asked plaintively and hurried away eastwards to find out. Wadsworth followed.
As gunfire splintered the morning.
“You can’t give the enemy any rest,” Brigadier McLean had said. The Scotsman had been astonished that the rebels had not assaulted the fort, and even more surprised when it became clear that General Lovell was digging defenses on the high ground. McLean now knew his opponent’s name, learned from an American deserter who had crept across the ridgetop at night and called aloud to the sentries from the abatis. McLean had questioned the man, who, trying to be helpful, expressed his belief that Lovell had brought two thousand troops to the peninsula. “It may be even more, sir,” the man said.
“Or fewer,” McLean retorted.
“Yes, sir,” the miserable wretch had said, “but it looked like plenty enough at Townsend, sir,” which was no help at all. The deserter was a man in his forties who claimed he had been pressed into the militia ranks and had no wish to fight. “I just want to go home, sir,” he said plaintively.
“As do we all,” McLean had said and put the man to work in the hospital’s cookhouse.
The rebel guns had opened fire the day after the high ground was lost. The rate of fire was not high, and many of the balls were wasted, but the fort was a big target and a near one, and so the big eighteen-pounder balls thrashed into the newly made rampart, scattering dirt and timber. The new storehouse was hit repeatedly until its gabled roof was virtually demolished, but so far no shot had managed to hit any of McLean’s own cannon. Six were now mounted on the western wall and Captain Fielding was keeping up a steady fire at the distant tree line. The rebels, rather than mount their cannon at the edge of the woods, had emplaced them deep inside the trees, then cut down corridors to give the cannons avenues of fire. “You might not hit much,” McLean had told Fielding, “but you’ll keep them worried and you’ll hide us in smoke.”
It was not enough to just worry the enemy, McLean knew they had to be kept off-balance and so he had ordered Lieutenant Caffrae to assemble forty of the liveliest men into a skirmishing company. Caffrae was a sensible and intelligent young man who liked his new orders. He added a pair of drummer boys to his unit and four fife players, and the company used the fog, or else the trees to the peninsula’s north, to get close to the enemy lines. Once there the small band played “Yankee-Doodle,” a tune that for some reason annoyed the rebels. The skirmishers would shout orders to imaginary men and shoot at the rebel trenches, and whenever a large party of the enemy came to challenge Caffrae’s company he would withdraw under cover, only to reappear somewhere else to taunt and to shoot again. Caffrae, temporarily promoted to captain, danced in front of Lovell’s men. He provoked, he challenged. He would sometimes go at night to disturb the rebel sleep. Lovell’s men were to be given neither rest nor comfort, but be constantly harassed and alarmed.
“Let me go, sir,” Lieutenant Moore pleaded with McLean.
“You will, John, you will,” McLean promised. Caffrae was out in the ground between the lines and his men had just fired a volley to wake the morning. The skirmishers’ fifes were trilling their mocking tune, which always provoked a wild response of ill-aimed musketry from the trees where the rebels sheltered. McLean stared westwards in an attempt to discover Caffrae’s position among the wisps of fog that slowly cleared from the heights, and instead saw the rebels’ gun corridors choke with sudden smoke as the enemy guns began their daily fire. The first shots fell short, plowing into the ridge to throw up plumes of soil and wood chips.