The Continental Risque (23 page)

‘Mr Rumstick, let's get some hands on the halyards,' he called out.

‘Aye, sir! You marines, bear a hand here. Clap on to that halyard there, this mainsail'll be heavy as a bastard!' Rumstick began to maneuver the marines into position, placing the halyards in their hands. There was an air of excitement aboard the sloop, a lighthearted quality that Biddlecomb had not felt aboard the
Charlemagne
for some time.

This was in part due to the fact that all of the men aboard were New Englanders. Not one of the men shipped in Philadelphia was there, nor any of the North Carolinians. Most of the men who had been with Biddlecomb since his merchant days were there as well. He had left it to Tottenhill to tell off the men who would be a part of the landing party, and the lieutenant had taken the opportunity to rid himself of as many Yankees as he could, and the Yankees seemed quite pleased to be gone.

‘Haul away, sir?' Rumstick called aft.

‘Yes, Mr Rumstick, haul away.' Biddlecomb pulled himself from his reveries.

Slowly the great mainsail peeled off the boom and spread out as the gaff was hoisted aloft. ‘Easy there on the peak, you motherless lubbers!' Rumstick shouted. ‘Keep it parallel with the deck, the poor bastards on the throat are doing all the work!' With that and sundry other curses the sail was hoisted, the halyards sweated taut and belayed.

‘Back the jib. We'll break out the anchor now, if you please,' Biddlecomb called, and a moment later a voice called out, ‘Anchor's a-trip!' and the bow of the sloop began to pay off with the nimble vessel free from the ground. ‘Meet her, steady as she goes, Ferguson,' he ordered from his perch on the quarterdeck rail, and Ferguson swung the tiller amidships.

The sloop heeled over and gathered way, close-hauled to weather the spit of land that protected Hole-in-the-Rock from the Atlantic Ocean, slipping past the anchored fleet. From one of the ships a voice called out, ‘See you in Nassau!' and then another shouted, ‘Save some rum for us, boys!' and then from every ship the men cheered.

The sun dipped below the horizon, and Biddlecomb's sloop, with the
Providence
and the other sloop in her wake, stood out from Hole-in-the-Rock and met the long, gentle swell of the open sea.

John Brown slept little that night, despite the two snifters of brandy and the cool, comforting winter weather.

He was concerned over his decision to change the governor's mind about alerting the militia. He had assumed that the American rebels would be a bit backward in their attack, that they would lie at Hole-in-the-Rock for some time preparing, voting, forming committees, whatever it was that American rebels did.

But what if they did not? A competent admiral would strike quickly, and Brown had no way of gauging the competence of the American commander, though from the news he had heard, from Concord and Ticonderoga and Bunker Hill, the Americans had been acquitting themselves with some distinction. It was not impossible that the fleet was on its way now, and his, John Brown's, options would be greatly reduced if the island was caught unaware.

He threw off his thick cover and climbed out of bed, fumbling around for his breeches. He dressed quickly in good, plain working clothes, slung his cartridge box and telescope over his shoulder, picked up his musket, and stepped quietly out of his house.

It was an hour before dawn and the streets of Nassau were deserted. The coral-brick houses that lined George Street were dark, their bright-colored shutters, gray looking in the faint light, closed over the windows. Brown took a deep breath. The air carried on it flowers, drying fish, and conch, a hint of the ocean.

He turned and looked south. Mount Fitzwilliam and Government House loomed over him like some ancient monolith. He could see a lantern burning in the kitchen; the house servants would have been awake for an hour already, preparing for the day, but the governor himself would not be awake until two hours after sunrise, if even then.

He walked down steeply sloped George Street, feeling the uneven cobblestones through the soles of his boots, hearing the crunch of the ubiquitous sand. The morning was beautiful, cool and moist and quiet, an atmosphere that did not lend itself to thoughts of imminent attack.

Brown turned left on Bay Street, walking along the waterfront. The smell of brackish water and moldering conch shells was stronger here than it was on the slopes of Mount Fitzwilliam, and the quiet was broken by the creaking of ships against the wooden piers.

Before him stood Fort Nassau, that odd-shaped, crumbling, largely indefensible fortification, framed against the darker sky. A wooden palisade twelve feet high formed the first line of defense against anyone who might bother to attempt a frontal assault. Brown walked along the palisade to the gate, where a bored guard stood half inside his guardhouse. No regular troops were left on the island; the men of the local militia took turns manning the fort, a dozen men at any one time. In the deep shadows Brown could not tell whether the guard was awake.

‘Who goes there?'

‘John Brown, President of His Majesty's Council.'

‘Oh, good morning, Mr Brown.' The guard laid his musket aside and lifted the heavy latch from the gate. ‘A bit early for an inspection. Are you expecting some trouble?' he asked as he swung the gate open. ‘I heard some rumors about a rebel fleet from America.'

‘We must be always prepared,' said Brown, the most non-committal statement he could think of. He stepped through the palisade and across the open stretch to the front gate of the fort proper.

The fort itself was a more substantial affair than the palisade. An impressive, castlelike main gate was the only break in the thirty-foot-high stone walls topped with forty-six heavy guns, twelve and eighteen pounders. Over the battlements of the main gate, which rose half again as high as the walls, flew an enormous, if a bit tattered, British flag. On paper the fort was quite formidable.

But in fact, over the past thirty years it had received only the most perfunctory maintenance, and the integrity of those massive walls and the heavy guns was dubious at best. Its poor repair, along with its vulnerable location, made Fort Nassau one of the last places President of His Majesty's Council Brown wished to be if the island were attacked.

The main gate was opened for him by another guard, who had also heard rumors of an American fleet and who received the same noncommittal answer.

Brown paused briefly and in the gray light of false dawn surveyed the inside of Fort Nassau. Around the perimeter of the fort the ground had been built up into wide, flat ramparts twenty feet high, leaving just ten feet of wall visible above them. These ramparts, extending out thirty feet from the walls like an earthen catwalk, had once been hard-packed dirt but now, from long neglect, were covered with a fairly even carpet of grass. On that built-up area the cannons rested, each peeking out of its embrasure, some looking out over the city, some looking out to sea.

The central area of the fort, the parade ground, was a great rectangle twenty feet lower than the rest, at the same level, in fact, as the land outside the fort. This too was covered with grass, and at either end a set of stairs led up to the ramparts. Nothing moved within those walls.

Brown stepped quickly along the western rampart to the crooked corner at the far end of the fort that jutted out over the harbor. A line of black guns, wet with the morning dew, stood staring out over the water. Brown turned and looked toward the east. The gray line on the horizon, the lessening of the blackness, was more pronounced now. In half an hour it would be dawn, and he would know if he had been needlessly worried, or if he had made a terrible mistake.

Biddlecomb felt ready for the dawn and the action that it heralded. The crowd of marines that had packed the wide flush deck of the sloop for the easy sail down from Abaco were now below, poor devils, jammed into the low, stinking hold. If anyone on shore bothered to look, they would see only six men aboard the sloop.

A ship's forecastle tended to contain the most heterogeneous assortment of men one was likely to find, with the possible exception of a prison, and the ships of the American navy were no exception. Biddlecomb had taken advantage of that to glean from the fleet a sufficient number of black sailors to man the sloops, as someone watching from the shore would expect to see aboard Bahamian vessels. They were dressed alike, deck hand and officer, black and white, in loose trousers and shirts, with the one distinction that he and Rumstick wore blue jackets, much battered, and the men did not.

The three vessels – the two sloops and the
Providence
– lay hove to. The wind had built during the night and was now blowing close to twenty knots from the northwest, blowing them into Nassau harbor faster than they cared to be blown.

The rest of the American fleet was somewhere to windward, hopefully ten miles or more to windward. When the sun came up, they would have to be below the horizon, out of sight from Nassau, so as not to create alarm in the city. Hopkins would have to be careful, with the wind blowing as it was, tending to drive his fleet toward the island. Biddlecomb hoped that Hopkins had hove the ships to hours before.

Now the sun was coming up, and the high point on the island that had been just visible at first light resolved itself into Mount Fitzwilliam and Government House, that familiar landmark to vessels approaching from the west. It was time to go in.

Biddlecomb picked up his speaking trumpet and stood on the leeward rail of the quarterdeck. The two other vessels were downwind of him and his voice carried on the breeze as he called, ‘Mr Weaver, Mr Hazard, do you hear?'

‘Aye!' he heard Weaver's voice, and then ‘Aye!' from John Hazard.

‘It's time to go in. Keep your marines hidden until we're alongside the dock. Keep astern of me, but don't make it look as if we're in formation. No hailing from this point on! Understood?'

Two more ‘Aye's' were returned, and the three vessels were put under way once more, turning off the wind, their long booms jutting out over their leeward rails. Biddlecomb leaned against the weather rail, arms folded across his chest, trying to enjoy the peace of the morning.

Rumstick stepped up and leaned against the rail beside Isaac, in the casual manner of the Caribbean merchantmen. It had been just over a year since the two of them had been arrested by the British marines, pulled from Sabine's Tavern in Providence, Rhode Island, and it had been a hell of a year. Biddlecomb could not image this situation, this calm before the fight, standing into danger, without Rumstick there.

Not that Biddlecomb felt particularly calm at that moment; his stomach had taken a round turn and the soles of his feet were tingling like mad. But he knew that if, say, Tottenhill were standing there, and not Rumstick, he would be feeling considerably worse.

When at last the sun peeked over the eastern horizon, New Providence Island was clearly visible off the starboard bow and Hog Island the larboard. The half-mile strip of water that separated the two and that constituted Nassau harbor opened up before them. Biddlecomb swept the shoreline with his telescope, but Fort Nassau was still lost in the deep shadows of the land.

The two other sloops were astern of his, in no particular formation and giving no indication that they were all sailing in company. They were just three little vessels that were waiting for daylight to enter the harbor. He could see the black deckhands moving slowly about, the officers lolling about the quarterdeck in a markedly unmilitary fashion. He could see no reason that anyone onshore would think things were in any way amiss.

He ran his eyes over the western horizon, now just revealing itself. Nothing was to be seen there, thankfully, and he was halfway turned around again when his eye caught something that it had long ago been trained to catch: a distant sail. He stopped and turned back. A ship was there, and behind it he could see another.

‘Here we go,' Rumstick said. They had passed the westernmost point of Hog Island and were now entering Nassau harbor. Fort Nassau, with its long battlement bristling with big guns, was visible now.

Biddlecomb put his telescope to his eye and trained it on the sails to the westward, growing more visible with each passing minute. He had hoped that he was wrong, but he knew that he was not, and the image in the glass confirmed it. It was the American fleet, hull up. He could see them as clearly as he could see Hog Island. There was no surprise now, and it would not take a great leap of imagination for the people onshore to guess that the three sloops were a part of that fleet.

He heard Rumstick give a short, quick intake of breath, and a second later he said, ‘That ain't … is that …?'

‘Oh, son of a bitch!' was all Biddlecomb could think to answer.

John Brown sat on one of the eighteen-pound guns and stared with his telescope over the battlement to the western approaches to the island. He had felt a moment's anxiety when the dawn had revealed three vessels standing into Nassau harbor; he had thought that they were under attack already. But he saw that they were just Bahamian sloops of the kind that one saw everywhere in the waters around the islands. The mixed crew, black and white, lolled around the deck in a way that no naval officer would tolerate.

‘What is it, sir, if I might ask?' asked the militia captain, whose name Brown could not recall, and who upon being made aware of the important visitor had hastily dressed and joined Brown on the rampart. ‘Is it them rumors of a rebel fleet that concerns you, sir?'

‘Well, that does not appear to be a fleet, rebel or otherwise,' Brown said, nodding toward the sloops. He hoped that the relief was not evident in his tone. To have Nassau captured without a fight due largely to advice that he had given the governor would would be utterly humiliating to him. But apparently he was safe for the moment.

He swept the glass farther west. The distant horizon was just coming visible, and he moved the telescope slowly, taking in each section of ocean as it was revealed. He looked at empty sea, then more empty sea, and then, to his complete surprise, his lens was filled with sails.