How Dark the Night (19 page)

“Who won?” one of them shouted out.

Will and Jamie each pointed at the other. “He did,” they shouted back in reply, igniting grins and chuckles.

Farther on, Jamie asked, “You're still thinking of joining the Navy, Will?”

Will kept his gaze dead ahead. “I am, for one stint; but only if I can sign on as a commissioned officer. I have no intention of serving as a midshipman. I'm too old for that.”

“And too experienced,” his brother observed. “You've circumnavigated the globe, and very few veteran naval officers can claim to have done that. Have you discussed it with Father?”

“I have.”

“And . . .?”

“He said that he'll oblige me with a letter to Secretary Smith. He can't promise results, of course. As you know, the Navy has tightened many of its systems and procedures, and the commissioning of officers is one of them. I'll have to wait and see.”

“The Navy
has
tightened its procedures,” Jamie said, “because it had to. Too many qualified junior officers were denied promotions when someone
un
qualified but with the right connections stepped in to fill an open position. I never saw that happen in my ship, but apparently
Constitution
is the exception, not the rule. As a result, an officer's commission is harder to come by these days. It has to be earned. That's the way it should be, of course. I take it that Father approves of your decision?”

“He doesn't disapprove,” Will replied. “He'd rather not have both sons in the Navy at the same time, but he certainly understands my desire to serve. After all, my reasons are the same reasons that led him to enlist.
He also accepts my argument that my naval experience will advantage Cutler & Sons in the future. Now that he has resigned his own commission, he will be devoting much more of his time to the family business. That gives me leave to do what I must, but I will delay until after the baby is born. Adele has asked me to wait until then, and I have agreed, barring unforeseen circumstances.”

“So you've discussed this with her as well?”

“I discussed it with her first,” Will said firmly. “And she's open to it as long as I don't make the Navy my life, which I have no intention of doing. But if—perhaps I should say
when
—push comes to shove and this country finds itself in a war, I don't want to be sitting on the dock twiddling my thumbs. Adele understands that.”

“If so, she's a rare woman.”

“That she is. And so, by the bye, is Mindy, in case you haven't noticed.”

“Of course I've noticed,” Jamie grinned. “But cut me some slack, brother dear. I'm just home from the Mediterranean. My sea legs still aren't used to land. And I'm not about to rush into anything. As you say, we'll have to wait and see.”

Eight

Chesapeake Bay

February 1807

Y
OUNG
S
ETH
C
UTLER
peered over the rim of his mug at a table three away from where he was sitting with two companions. The four men he held under scrutiny at that table were enjoying themselves immensely, and had been for quite some time. Now that the hour was getting late and multiple rounds of frothy ale had lubricated their speech, they had become more boisterous and less guarded, so much so that other patrons in the cozy public house were casting looks of disdain and indignation in their direction. That Seth could not make out what the men were actually saying to each other did not matter. What
did
matter was that their physical characteristics fit to a tee the description of four of the six tars who had recently run from HMS
Tigress
while she lay at anchor in Lynnhaven Bay. Their accents likewise made them worthy of attention.

Seth slid his eyes over to his two companions. Robert Larkin met his gaze and gave a brief nod, confirming his suspicions. Seth had been to England only once, as a boy traveling with his father, Robin Cutler, to the family's ancestral home in Fareham, north of Portsmouth. Larkin, however, was a Devon man, a West Country man, and he knew the dialects of that region like the back of his hand. As did Kenneth Duggan, the tall, burly man sitting between them sucking contentedly on a long-stemmed clay pipe.

“Steady, lads,” Larkin cautioned under his breath.

A waiter stepped up to the table and served three steaming bowls of the mutton stew that was advertised as the house specialty on the
hand-written menu, which offered four other entrées as alternatives. The three men ate in silence, occasionally dipping slabs of bread torn from a freshly baked loaf into the rich brown liquid, ever keeping a weather eye on the four men at the other table, ordinary seamen judging by the cut of their cloth. Each was wearing the loose-fitting slop-chest garb preferred by both merchant and navy sailors. Seth and his companions were wearing the same garb, their rank notwithstanding.

By the time the roaring fire in the hearth had burned down to flickers of blue flame, only five tables remained occupied. Waiters began cleaning and sweeping up, the cue for those who had lingered to pay their tab and be on their way. Robert Larkin reached into a side pocket and withdrew two U.S. gold quarter-eagles, placing them on the table and indicating with a small gesture to the waiter that he expected no change.

The waiter arched his eyebrows. “Why, thank you, sir,” he said earnestly. “That is most generous of you.”

“Think nothing of it, my good man,” Larkin asserted. “The food and the service were impeccable, and we have occupied this table for the entire evening. We'll be on our way shortly.”

“Stay as long as you please, sir,” the waiter insisted. “No need for you kind gentlemen to hurry off. May I offer a round of our finest ale, on the house?”

“Thank you, no,” Larkin said with a smile. “That is neither necessary nor advisable. We've drunk more than our fill.”

At length, the four men at the other table hauled themselves up and fumbled about in their clothing for the wherewithal to pay their tab. Coins tinkled onto the tabletop, several of them falling off and rolling along the floor. A waiter picked up the fallen coins and added them to the pile on the table. After he carefully confirmed that the total was sufficient to cover the tab and a modest tip, the four men tugged on their overcoats, giggling at each other's clumsiness, and set out unsteadily toward the front door. One of them, propped up by two of his shipmates, started bellowing an off-key sea chantey about a Spanish woman of voluptuous build, robust sexual appetite, and exotic sexual preferences. The few remaining patrons in the alehouse looked on distastefully.

As the four men were about to stumble by Seth's table, Seth stuck out his leg. Two of the three in front tripped over it and lurched forward, off balance. Kenneth Duggan was up in a flash, springing like a leopard at its prey. Before the two could hit the deck, the wide span of the boatswain's muscular arms broke their fall.

“'Ere then, mateys,” Duggan said, in a gentle, soothing tone. “That was a close one, it was. You're a right sorry sight, blotto as ye are. 'Ad a merry ole time of it t'night, did ye?”

The man who had been singing had gone silent. Struggling to his feet, he looked at Duggan with glazed eyes. “That we are,” he slurred. “That we did,” he corrected himself. With an effort he pulled himself away, struggling for balance, suddenly embarrassed by his drunkenness. “I be much obliged to ye, good sir. Me name's Cates, able seaman. Me and me mates 'ere are bound for Havana in the mornin' and was enjoyin' our last night ashore. We best be shovin' off so's we can sleep it off.” He giggled at his turn of phrase; nonetheless, he sounded a bit more sober when he said, “If you'll please excuse us.”

“We're shoving off ourselves,” Robert Larkin interjected in a friendly tone. “Me mates and me would be pleased to see ye to yer vessel. No telling what or who's lurking out there in the darkness, and we fo'c'sle types need to watch out for each other, eh? T'would be our honor. What say ye?”

“I say God's mercy on ye,” Cates replied, a blessing echoed by his three shipmates.

After exchanging brief introductions the group set out. The route they followed in the not uncomfortably cool air of late February took them from the alehouse on Orleans Street across Eastern Avenue and then across Fleet Street, the intersection a stone's throw from the Baltimore office of Cutler & Sons, and on to Lancaster Street. From there it was an easy walk to the shipyards on Locust Point Peninsula, located adjacent to a newly constructed, star-shaped fortress named in honor of James McHenry, a Scots-Irish immigrant who, as President Washington's secretary of war, had been a leading advocate of the need for such a fort to protect the commercial hub that defined Baltimore Harbor.

Along the route, the seven men engaged in loose chatter about the sorts of things sailors of all nations found important: ships, the sea, and women. Within the half hour they reached Locust Point, where an impressive array of merchant vessels of various sizes and rigs lay nested bow-out on the quays, their yards set a-cockbill to avoid entanglement. In those thirty minutes Cates and his three shipmates had sobered sufficiently to offer firm handshakes as they bid farewell to their newfound friends. Larkin and his two companions waited until the four sailors had trudged up a gangplank onto their vessel and all was quiet along the waterfront.

“You've taken note of that snow, Duggan?” Larkin inquired. He was referring to the vessel's rig. A snow was similar in design to a two-masted
brig but differed in that a square sail was furled on the lower yard of her mainmast while the gaff of her fore-and-aft trysail was secured to a shorter jack mast stepped a foot abaft the mainmast.

“That I 'ave, sir. Her name's
Dolphin
.”

“So I see. Anything to add, Mr. Cutler?”

“Only that she's lying low in the water, sir. Whatever her cargo may be, she has it on board.”

“Yes. And that cargo will slow her.” Larkin had also noticed, as certainly his shipmates had, that the snow carried three guns on each side of her weather deck. But they were small guns, 3- or 4-pounders judging by their muzzles, and the threat they posed to a fourth rate was so puny as to be laughable.

“Gentlemen,” he said with a smile, “let us return to our ship. Our captain is most keen to hear our report.”

A
LTHOUGH BRISK
northerly winds propelled the single-masted, double-banked cutter at a rousing clip, it took the balance of the night and much of the next morning to cover the one hundred sea miles separating Baltimore from the mouth of the Potomac River. Speed, however, was not essential. Whatever time
Dolphin
cast off her lines, she would plot a similar course down the Chesapeake, through the Thimble Shoals Channel west of Cape Henry, and out into the Atlantic; the cutter thus had a healthy lead on her. Robert Larkin nevertheless ordered the two-man auxiliary crew who had been standing by in the cutter to snatch every breath of air possible within the taut bellies of the mainsail and jib, sheeted out wing-on-wing so far that they lay nearly at right angles to the 24-foot craft. Not long after the morning sun had risen above the low-lying eastern shore of the bay and spread its meager warmth across the light chop, Larkin ordered Seth Cutler to relieve Seaman Paulus at the tiller, just as Paulus had relieved Seaman Kelliher three hours earlier. Larkin then shifted position from the stern sheets to the bow thwart, just aft of the cutter's collapsible bowsprit. From there he kept a wary eye ahead into the widening waters between the bay's eastern and western shores.

When the cutter entered the widest part of the bay, thirty miles from shore to shore, Larkin ordered her close in toward the Virginia coast. Ahead, in Tangier Sound on the Maryland side of the bay, two French frigates lay at anchor, and these he wanted to avoid. The two third rates had been bottled up for months, virtual prisoners of a Royal Navy squadron based in Lynnhaven Bay and prowling the waters off the Virginia Capes. That America's largest and most fertile estuary had become a potential
battleground for European belligerents galled Americans of every region and every political stripe. That the British squadron was based at the very doorstep of the American naval base at Hampton Roads galled the Navy Department no end. President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison, however, had done little in response beyond registering routine diplomatic protests in Paris and London. Navy secretary Robert Smith had ordered the U.S. Navy to stand down unless American lives and property were threatened. After all, Smith had noted, the United States had invited the British to use Lynnhaven Bay as a temporary base. Or at least it had not denied them the opportunity.

In due course the three masts of a significant ship loomed into view. She was anchored a half mile south of where the Potomac emptied into the Chesapeake, and any Virginia tobacco farmer could readily identify her as a British warship even without the red-crossed white ensign flying from the gaff peak of her mizzen. Although she was more or less the same size as a U.S. Navy superfrigate and had a similar top-hamper, her two tiers of guns set her apart: twenty-two 24-pounder guns on her lower gun deck and twenty-two 12-pounder guns on her upper gun deck, plus four 6-pounder guns on her quarterdeck, three to a side, and two 6-pounder bow-chasers on her forecastle. She was a 50-gun
Portland
-class fourth rate, designed by her Portsmouth shipwright in 1776 to be a ship of the line. Today, however, the British Admiralty considered her firepower too limited to engage in fleet actions against the 100-gun leviathans she would have to face.