Authors: Bernard Cornwell
“Wasn’t it in the general’s tent?”
“It must be with the tent, I suppose,” Todd said.
The rain stopped altogether and a gray, watery dawn lit the eastern sky. “Time to go,” Wadsworth said. But where? He looked southwards, but the seaward reach of Penobscot Bay was shrouded by a mist that hid the enemy ships. A lighter waited to take away the missing twelve-pounder, but the only other boat on the beach was there to carry Todd and Wadsworth to the
Sally
. “Time to go,” Wadsworth said again. He stepped into the boat and left Majabigwaduce to the British.
No guns fired in the dawn. The night’s rain had stopped, the clouds had cleared, the sky was limpid, the air was still and no fog obscured Majabigwaduce’s ridge. Yet no guns fired from the rebel batteries and there was not even the smaller sound of rebel picquets clearing night-dampened powder from their muskets. Brigadier McLean stared at the heights through his glass. Every few moments he swung the glass southwards, but mist still veiled the lower river and it was impossible to tell what ships lay there. The garrison had seen the strange ships appear in the twilight, but no one was certain whether they were British or American. McLean looked back to the woods. “They’re very quiet,” he said.
“Buggered off, maybe,” Lieutenant-Colonel Campbell, commanding officer of the 74th, suggested.
“If those ships are ours?”
“Then our enemies will have their tails between their legs,” Campbell said, “and they’ll be scampering for the hills.”
“My goodness, and maybe you’re right.” McLean lowered the glass. “Lieutenant Moore?”
“Sir?”
“My compliments to Captain Caffrae, and ask him to be so good as to take his company for a look at the enemy lines.”
“Yes, sir, and, sir?”
“And yes, you may accompany him, Lieutenant,” McLean said.
The fifty men filed through the abatis and went west along the ridge, keeping close to the northern side where the trees were dark from the previous day’s rain. To their left were the stumps of the felled pines, many scarred by cannon shot that had fallen short. About halfway between the fort and the rebel trenches Caffrae led the company into the trees. They went cautiously now, still going westwards, but slowly, always alert for rebel picquets among the leaves. Moore wished he wore a green coat like the enemy marines. He stopped once, his heart pounding because of a sudden noise to his right, but it was only a squirrel scrabbling up a trunk. “I think they’ve gone,” Caffrae said softly.
“Or perhaps they’re being clever,” Moore suggested.
“Clever?
“Luring us into an ambush?”
“We’ll find out, won’t we?” Caffrae said. He peered ahead. These woods had been his playground where he came to alarm the rebels, but he had rarely advanced this far down the ridge. He listened, but heard nothing untoward. “Staying here won’t put gravy on the beefsteak, will it?” he said. “Let’s move on.”
They threaded the wet trees, still going at a snail’s pace. Caffrae now edged back to the left so he could see the cleared ground and he realized he had advanced well beyond the rebels’ foremost trenches, and those trenches were empty. If this was an ambush then it would surely have been sprung by now. “They’ve gone,” he said, trying to convince himself.
They went faster now, advancing ten or fifteen paces at a time, then came to a clearing that had plainly been a rebel encampment. Felled logs surrounded the wet ashes of three campfires, rough shelters of branches and sod stood at the clearing’s edges, and a latrine pit stank in the woods behind. Men peered into the shelters, but found nothing, then followed Caffrae along a track which led towards the river. Moore saw a piece of paper caught in the undergrowth and fished it out with his sword. The paper was wet and disintegrating, but he could still see that someone had written a girl’s name in pencil. Adelaide Rebecah. The name was written again and again in a round and childish hand. Adelaide Rebecah.
“Anything interesting?” Caffrae asked.
“Just mis-spelt love.” Moore said and threw the paper away.
At the side of the path between two of the encampments was a row of graves, each marked with a wooden cross and heaped with stones to stop animals clawing up the corpses. Names were written in charcoal on the crosses. Isaac Fulsome, Nehemiah Eldredge, Thomas Snow, John Reardon. There were seventeen names and seventeen crosses. Someone had written the words “for Liberty” after Thomas Snow’s name, except they had run out of space and the “y” was awkwardly cramped into a corner of the crosspiece.
“Sir!” Sergeant Logie called. “Sir!” Caffrae ran to the sergeant. “Listen, sir,” Logie said.
For a moment all Caffrae could hear was the water dripping from the leaves and the small susurration of feeble waves on the bluff’s beach, but then he heard voices. So the rebels were not gone? The voices appeared to come from the foot of the bluff and Caffrae led his men that way to discover a road hacked into the steep face. The road was rutted by wheels because this was how the guns had been hauled to the heights and then hauled down again, and one gun was still on shore. Caffrae, reaching the bluff’s edge, saw a boat on the shingle and saw men struggling with a cannon at the road’s end. “We’ll have that gun, lads,” he said, “so come on!”
A dozen rebels were manhandling the twelve-pounder onto the beach, but the ruts in the road were waterlogged and the gun was heavy, and the men were tired. Then they heard the noises above them and saw the redcoats bright among the trees. “Lift the barrel!” the rebel officer ordered. They gathered round the gun and lifted the heavy barrel out of its carriage and staggered with their burden across the shingle. The redcoats were whooping and running. The rebels almost swamped the lighter as they dumped the barrel on its stern, but the boat stayed afloat and they clambered aboard and the sailors pulled on the oars as the first Scotsmen arrived on the beach. One rebel stumbled as he tried to shove the boat offshore. He lost his footing and fell full-length into the water just as the oars bit and carried the craft away. His companions stretched arms towards him as he waded and thrashed his way towards the receding boat, but it pulled further away and a Scottish voice ordered the man back to the beach. He was a prisoner, but the cannon barrel was saved. The lighter was rowed still further offshore as the remainder of Caffrae’s men streamed onto the shingle where one of them, a corporal, raised his musket. “No!” Caffrae called sharply. “Let them be!” That was not mercy but caution because some of the transport ships carried small cannon and the beach was well inside their range. To fire a musket was to invite the reply of a grape-loaded cannon. The musket dropped.
Moore stopped by the abandoned gun carriage. Ahead of him was Penobscot Bay and the rebel fleet. There was no wind so the fleet was still anchored. The sun was well above the horizon now and the day was crystal clear. The dawn mist had vanished so that Moore could now see the second fleet, a smaller fleet, which lay far to the south, and at the heart of that smaller fleet was a big ship, a ship with two decks of guns, a ship far bigger than anything the rebels possessed, and Moore knew from the size of the ship that the Royal Navy had arrived.
And the rebels were gone from Majabigwaduce.
* * *
Peleg Wadsworth had pleaded with General Lovell to prepare themselves for just this emergency. He had wanted to take men upriver and find a point of land where gun batteries could be prepared and then, if the British did send a fleet, the rebels could withdraw behind their new defenses and pound the pursuing ships with gunfire, but Lovell had refused every such plea.
Now Lovell wanted exactly what Wadsworth had asked for so often. James Fletcher was summoned to the
Sally
’s stern-deck and asked what lay upriver. “There’s about six, seven mile of bay, General,” Fletcher told Lovell, “then it’s a narrow river after that. She goes twenty mile before you can go no further.”
“And the river winds over those twenty miles?” Lovell asked.
“In places she does,” James said. “There’s some straight channels and there are twists as tight as Satan’s tail.”
“The banks are hilly?”
“All the way, sir.”
“Then our objective,” Lovell said, “is to find a bend in the river that we can fortify.” The rebel fleet could shelter upriver of the bend, and every gun that could be carried ashore would be dug into the high ground to shatter the pursuing British ships. The fleet would thus be saved and the army preserved. Lovell gave Wadsworth a rueful smile. “Don’t chide me, Wadsworth,” he said, “I know you foresaw this might happen.”
“I hoped it would not, sir.”
“But all will be well,” Lovell said with sublime confidence. “Some energy and application will preserve us.”
Little could be done while there was no wind to move the ships. Yet Lovell was pleased with the night’s work. Everything that could be saved from the heights, all except for one gun carriage, had been embarked and that achievement, in a night of rain and chaos, had been remarkable. It boded well for the army’s survival. “We have all our guns,” Lovell said, “all our men and all our supplies!”
“Almost all our guns,” Major Todd corrected the general.
“Almost?” Lovell asked indignantly.
“The cannon were not recovered from Cross Island,” Major Todd said.
“Not recovered! But I gave distinct orders that they were to be withdrawn!”
“Colonel Revere claimed he was too busy, sir.”
Lovell stared at the major. “Busy?”
“Colonel Revere also claimed, sir,” Todd went on, taking some pleasure in describing the failings of his enemy, “that your orders no longer applied to him.”
Lovell gaped at his brigade major. “He said what?”
“He averred that the siege had been abandoned, sir, and that therefore he was no longer obliged to accept your orders.”
“Not obliged to accept my orders?” Lovell asked in disbelief.
“That is what he claimed, sir,” Todd said icily. “So I fear those guns are lost, sir, unless we have time to retrieve them this morning. I also regret to tell you, sir, that the pay chest is missing.”
“It’ll turn up,” Lovell said dismissively, still brooding over Lieutenant-Colonel Revere’s brazen insolence. Not obliged to accept orders? Who did Revere think he was?
“We need the pay chest,” Todd insisted.
“It will be found, I’m sure,” Lovell said testily. There had been chaos in the dark and it was inevitable that some items would have been carried to the wrong transport ship, but that could all be sorted out once a safe anchorage was discovered and protected. “But first we must haul those guns off Cross Island,” Lovell insisted, “I will leave nothing for the British. You hear me? Nothing!”
But there was no time to rescue the cannon. The first catspaws of wind had just begun to ruffle the bay and the British fleet was already hauling its anchors and loosing sails. The rebel fleet had to move and one by one the anchors were raised, the sails released and the ships, assisted by the flood tide, retreated northwards. The wind was weak and fickle, scarce enough to stir the fleet, so some smaller ships used their long ash oars to help their progress while others were towed by longboats.
The cannon on Cross Island were abandoned, but everything else was saved. All the rebel guns and supplies had been carried down the muddy track in the rainy dark, then rowed out to the transport ships, and now those ships edged northwards, northwards to the river narrows, and northwards to safety.
And behind them, between the transport ships and Sir George Collier’s flotilla, the rebel warships cleared for action and spread slowly across the bay. If the transports were sheep then Saltonstall’s warships were the dogs.
And the wolves were coming.
Redcoats gathered at Dyce’s Head to watch the unfolding drama. Brigadier McLean’s servant had thoughtfully brought a milking stool all the way to the bluff and McLean thanked the man and sat down to watch the unfolding battle. It would be a privileged view of a rare sight, McLean thought. Seventeen rebel warships waited for six Royal Navy vessels. Three British frigates led the way, while the big two-decker and the remaining two frigates came on more slowly. “I do believe that’s the
Blonde
,” McLean said, staring at the nearest frigate through his telescope. “It’s our old friend Captain Barkley!” Off to McLean’s right the nineteen rebel transports were inching northwards. From this distance it looked as if their sails hung limp and powerless, but minute by minute they drew further away.
The
Blonde
fired her bow-chasers. To the watchers ashore it looked as if her bowsprit was blotted out by blossoming smoke. A moment later the sound of the two guns pounded the bluff. A pair of white fountains showed where the round shots had splashed well short of the
Warren,
which lay at the center of the rebel line. The smoke thinned and drifted ahead of the British ships.
“Look at that!” Lieutenant-Colonel Campbell exclaimed. He was pointing at the harbor mouth where Mowat’s three sloops had appeared. They were kedging out of the harbor against the prevailing wind. Ever since he had heard that the rebels had abandoned the siege Mowat had been retrieving his ships’ guns from their shore emplacements. His men had worked hard and fast, desperate to join the promised fight in the bay, and now, with their portside broadsides restored, the three sloops were on their way to join Sir George’s flotilla. Longboats took turns to carry anchors far forrard of the sloops’ bows, the anchors were dropped, then the sloops were hauled forward on the anchor rode as a second anchor was rowed still further ahead for the next leg of the journey. They leapfrogged anchor by anchor out of the harbor and the
North
’s pumps still clattered and spurted, and all three ships showed damage to their hulls from the long rebel bombardment, but their guns were loaded and their tired crews eager. The
Blonde
fired again, and once again the shots dropped short of the rebel ships.
“They do say,” McLean remarked, “that firing the guns brings on the wind.”
“I thought it was the other way round,” Campbell said, “that gunfire stills the wind?”