Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel: And Other Stories of a Young Nation (23 page)

“If all that is so,” the beadle temporized, being taken somewhat aback by Johnny's Hebrew, “put on a tallith and pray, for as you have just pointed out, there is a time for praying and a time for doing, and this is prayer time, and if you sin any further, though you be the son of a hundred Cohanum, it will not help.”

And Johnny Ordronaux prayed that night at the old synagogue in Philadelphia, and after the prayers he gathered the men together and told them his dream of a boat. So well did he speak, that they gave him money and he built the
Prince de Neufchâtel
in Baltimore, the wonder-town of all clippers. That was in 1812, when the war had just begun.

Or, at least, so some say. It is hard to tell exactly, after all this time; others say that the great John Paul Jones himself made the drawing for the
Prince
, and Johnny found them in an old book-stall in Paris. Whatever the way, he built himself the boat, and then he put up his bills in Philadelphia.

A bill was a throwaway plea or advertisement. Remember that in those times, the land was in a bad way, the ports blockaded, commerce gone, and there were traitors everywhere you turned. The only hope lay in the speedy privateers, since they could, very often, run the blockade; give it the wind and nothing on water could catch a Baltimore clipper.

The trouble was to get a crew, for a privateer needed men who were heroes, devils, pirates and revolutionists, all rolled into one; come back a rich man or not at all, and more likely end up under the water or in the hold of an enemy warship. How many men would take a chance like that? That's why the bills, posted and given away, would plead for recruits. Here is what Johnny Ordronaux's bill said:

I AM JOHNNY ORDRONAUX
A JEW FROM FRANCE BUT AN AMERICAN
THIS IS THE LAND OF BRAVE MEN
FREE MEN BOLD MEN
I SAIL FOR LIBERTY EQUALITY
INDEPENDENCE
I OFFER SHARES OR WAGES
I WILL TAKE IRISH
JEWS NEGROES GERMANS
PORTUGEE FRENCHMEN
ANY WHO OWN THE NAME
AMERICAN
FILL YOUR HAT WITH GOLD
STRIKE FOR LIBERTY
I SAIL FOR A YEAR
AND A DAY

That was the bill he posted, and some said they opened the jails to find him a crew; but others, who loved liberty and made songs after his great fight, said that perhaps a few of the old graves of the revolution were opened to find him the men he wanted. He put to sea with less than a hundred men and three slim cannon on his beautiful clipper. Of black men, he had no less than twenty-four, of whom eleven were escaped slaves; of Jews, he had twelve, and four were pale scholars from Poland, but Johnny smiled grimly and said, “They will be more than scholars when I finish with them.” Nine were Irish from the northern counties, and seven were Irish from the south. And the rest—all shades, all lands, all tongues.

There would have been fighting enough on that clipper before they ever met an enemy, had not Johnny, with his two ham-like fists, emphasized and re-emphasized that they would fight when he ordered them to, and not sooner.

So he kept order in his crew, drilled them and trained them, sent them running aloft and back down, gave them target practice with the trifling cannon, until they handled the lovely little clipper with ease and grace. Indeed, Johnny's voyage promised to be like that of any other successful privateer; they sailed for many months and many thousands of miles, and they took prizes all the way. When they sighted a sail, they would creep up close; if it was one of the King's warships, they would dip their colors in derision, fire a salute, perhaps tack a loop or two to show what they thought of the lumbering dreadnoughts, and then race merrily away; but if it was a fat enemy merchant ship they raised, they would run it down, board it, put a prize crew on it and send it sailing to Bordeaux or Philadelphia or Nantucket, depending on where they were, to be sold on the market and converted into good solid cash, part for the country, part for the owners, part for the crew.

The story goes that Johnny Ordronaux took eighteen vessels valued at over a million dollars in prize money before he decided to turn back to America. He had been cruising for many months; his crew, by now, was a tough, synchronized fighting machine, although so many had gone aboard the prizes that he had only thirty-six left on his little clipper: but his bottom was fouling; he needed to go into drydock, and he thought longingly of coming to the old synagogue before the high holidays. He recalled how he had said that there was a time for doing and a time for praying; and he had been doing for long enough.

So he ran north through the English Channel, flaunting his sails at all the watchers on the high cliffs. He ran through the North Sea and danced around the Shetlands, and then he ran on the wind to the North American coast. And it was off Nantucket that he saw the British frigate.…

Maun Caloway, a giant, coal-black Negro, second mate on the
Prince
, raised up the frigate's sails first from his place in the tops, and he called down, soft but ringing:

“Look a-ho, look a-ho, Johnny—she a forty-four gun devil with the Union Jack!”

Johnny ran into the shrouds himself to see, and everyone else on deck climbed up as far as he could, shouting and hooting at the great British warship. The
Prince
eased off the wind, and Johnny said, enviously and sadly, “By God, some day I like to command one like that.”

“What you say we take her, huh?” Portugee Joe, the first mate, grinned.

“That big one, she blockade off Nantucket, huh, Johnny?” the Negro called.

Isaac Gil, the Polish Jew who was both purser and gunner, said, “We'll have some fun with her, Johnny?”

It had been a good voyage, a successful voyage, and only a fool stretches his luck. But what could the little clipper fear from the big, lumbering hull and its forty-four guns?

“We'll have some fun,” Johnny agreed.

By now the lookout on the frigate had raised the clipper's sail, and the warship started a tack that would bring it up. Closer and closer she came, until her long bow gun thundered a warning shot that fell a hundred yards short. Then Johnny gave a signal, and the
Prince
danced off.

That was in the morning; there was a brisk breeze then, and for the next two hours the frail clipper played games with the lumbering frigate; she tacked around her, ran before her, cut across her bow, came within yards of gunshot and then danced merrily out of range. Johnny, watching through his glass, could make out the figures on the warship's rigging; he could sense the growing rage of the British captain, a rage based on the fact that any one of the frigate's forty-four guns could blow the little Baltimore clipper out of the water.

Bit by bit, Johnny drew the warship to sea. A day of this, and he might release the port of Nantucket, at least for twenty-four hours. And meanwhile, what better sport than this?

And then, at mid-day, the wind suddenly stopped; both vessels lay motionless on the sea, some two miles apart.

At first, Johnny Ordronaux was not unduly alarmed by the calm. They were beyond the range of the frigate, and sooner or later the breeze would pick up. Yet because he was a methodical captain, he had the decks cleared for action, and he sent four men below to issue muskets and pikes and cutlasses. He didn't know just what might happen, but if the British commander were angry enough, something certainly would transpire.

For the next hour, nothing happened at all. The Americans crowded the deck, shouted across the water, and critically picked the big warship to pieces. They had a gallery view, and this would certainly be worth telling. And Johnny looked at her longingly and thought of the things he could do with a craft like that under him.

He thought of the great battles a frigate captain might have to his credit, the epic glory, such as surrounded the
Constitution
or the
United States
or any one of the other proud warships of the tiny American fleet. The captain of such a ship might well go down in history, but what more than patriotic piracy lay in store for the skipper of a little Baltimore clipper, beautiful vessel though it might be? Well, he considered to himself, a Jew is still a Jew, and who was he to complain? He at least commanded a clipper under the Stars and Stripes, and how many Jews lay in the ghettos with neither hope nor future?

And then, at an hour past noon, the events began which would give Johnny Ordronaux and the crew of the
Prince de Neufchâtel
at least a small place in the history of this nation. There was bustle and movement on the British warship, and Johnny, putting his glass to his eye, saw that they were launching the ship's boats. One by one, they settled in the water, all of them, the big captain's barge, the longboats, the storming barges, the life-boats. Files of red-coated marines formed on the gun-deck and then climbed over the side into the boats. Brass two-pounders were lowered and clamped into place, and then the men of the British crew, gunners, rammers, seamen and pikemen swarmed into the boats until it seemed there would never be an end to them. Then oars bit at the smooth water, and the little armada crept toward the clipper.

Johnny leaped into action. His three pop-gun five-pounders were swiveled around, loaded, and aimed. He ordered all men to the bulwarks with muskets and pikes to repel boarders—except the cook, who was told to blow up his fires and heat to the boiling point whatever pitch he could lay hands on.

The
Prince
was well-stocked with small arms, and they streamed up from the hold until every man had powder and ball for twenty rounds, bird-shot for close quarters, pistols, knives, and even tarry fire grenades to use if there was a chance. For all of that, no one, including Johnny, had any real idea of what the British were up to. Everybody counted the enemy, and it was the consensus of opinion that a hundred and thirty to a hundred and sixty men were on their way to attack the clipper. But Johnny, thinking back, could not recall that he had ever heard of such an attack before; in some ways it was bold, yet how could such an attack fail to succeed when the captain's barge alone was almost as large as the little privateer, and when the Americans were outnumbered four to one? Johnny looked at his men, who were, as I said before, both black and white and Jew and Gentile, and even a heathen or two thrown in; his fears struggled with glory, and back of his mind, perhaps, was the old courtly French phrase: “How, more worshipfully, may honor be conceived?” He leaped on top of the deckhouse, barefooted, as most of his crew were, the better to have their footing, red-sashed with bell pantaloons, two pistols in his waist and an eight-foot pike in his hands, and he called out:

“By God, this going to be one damned fight! Keep the flag up and fire the cannon when I whistle!”

He had a set of heavy pipes, his one conceit, and his men cheered him and the pipes; then silence settled, men breathing hoarsely, spitting on their hands, seeing to their guns—until at three hundred yards Johnny blew. The three small cannon, the babies of Isaac Gil, belched smoke; a ball cut a swath through the red-coated marines in the captain's barge; another splintered the prow of a small boat; but the third churned the water. One miss was not bad with those tiny targets, although Johnny muttered, “By God, you take a scholar from the ghetto, and he shoots like that, as if we sit here and pop away 'til tomorrow—” The British bo'suns were singing out the stroke, clear and bold, two hundred yards, one hundred and fifty, the green sea foaming away from the boats' prows, when Johnny called for small-arm fire; and in the crash of muskets, the little cannon boomed again, to be answered by the swivel guns from the British barges. A man went down with blood gushing from the stump of his neck—Nick Kelly, Johnny thought, but there would be more and more now that hell had broken loose—and the cook rushed up with two pots of boiling pitch just as Johnny roared:

“Repel boarders!”

Then the captain's barge smashed into the clipper's side, disgorging seamen and marines, and then one after another, more and more of the frigate's boats. The thirty-six fought screaming wild, shouting, clubbing their muskets, jabbing with pikes where there was room, using knives to better effect, belaying pins, bare fists, teeth, shoulder to shoulder, the whole of the clipper's narrow deck packed with men, Johnny in the center on the deckhouse, jabbing like a devil with his pike, and blood, ankle-deep, running like water.

The marines and British seamen surged up onto the deck, and for one long, terrible moment it seemed that the clipper was theirs. And then, with Johnny like the head of a ram, the Americans cut them in two; big Maun Caloway, flailing a five-foot link of chain, freed the stern, and Isaac Gil led a charge that cleared the prow.

The British lost the inch of footing they needed to carry the day, and a moment later the deck belonged to the panting, sobbing Americans, and the enemy was back in his boats, pulling out of range. One last shot Isaac Gil managed, and then the British boats lay on the swell, five hundred yards off, grim and angry, like growling dogs with bare teeth; beyond them, on the windless sea, the great frigate silently rose and fell.

And Johnny Ordronaux, trembling with the exertion, the wonder and terror of the fight, looked about at the damage that had been done.

Sixteen English seamen and marines lay dead on the clipper's slippery deck; four more were wounded, one so badly that he would not live long—and there were more wounded and dying who had been borne away in the boats. But the Americans had paid dearly. The two Mara brother, Jews from Charleston, were dead. Nick Kelly, Frank Lee, and January Fernandez, a Portugese, were dead. Kenton Bull, an escaped slave, who made a fiddle sound like a woman singing, was also dead. And seven more were so badly wounded that they could play no more part in that day's work—although later it so turned out that they had enough strength to pull a trigger.

Isaac Gil, although his own scalp was torn open, did for the wounded, gently, competently; it was such a store of trades the man owned. The English wounded and the worst of the Americans were laid below on the ballast; the dead were dropped overside. Some wanted prayers, but Johnny muttered, “There is a time for praying—” thinking that maybe this was such a day as not many frigate captains had known, and trying to smile as he looked at his men, at little Jimmy Cadwalder, thirteen years old and crying now that it was done, at the blood-covered black giant, Maun, at all the rest, wanting to say a lot, but only telling them: