The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

Remember all those evenings on the training field? Some of you groused about that, you’d rather have been drinking Ichibod Flander’s spruce beer, but you’ll thank me when we’re ashore. You’re trained! And you’re better than any damned redcoat! They’re not cunning like you are, they don’t shoot as straight as you do, and they’re frightened! Remember that! They’re frightened young boys a long way from home.” Littlefield grinned at his men, then pointed at a bearded giant who crouched in the front row of his assembled troops. “Isaac Whitney, you tell me this. Why do British soldiers wear red?”

Whitney frowned. “Maybe so the blood don’t show?”

“No!” Littlefield cried. “They wear red to make themselves easy targets!” The men laughed. “And you’re all good shooters,” Littlefield went on, “and today you shoot for liberty, for your homes, for your wives, for your sweethearts, and so that none of us has to live under a foreign tyranny!”

“Amen to that,” a man called.

“No more taxes!” another man shouted.

“Amen to that!” Littlefield said. The York County captain exuded confidence, and Wadsworth, watching and listening, felt immensely cheered. The militia was understrength and too many of its men were graybeards or else hardly men at all, yet Daniel Littlefield was inspiring them. “We’re going ashore,” Littlefield said, “and we have to climb that rare steep slope. See it, boys?” He pointed to the bluff. “It’ll be a hard enough climb, but you’ll be among trees. The redcoats can’t see you among the trees. Oh, they’ll shoot, but they won’t be aiming, and you just climb, boys. If you don’t know where to go, follow me. I’ll be going straight up that slope and at the top I’m going to shoot some of those red-coated boys all the way back across the ocean. And remember,” he paused, looking earnestly at his men one by one, “remember! They’re much more frightened of you than you are of them. Oh, I know they look very fine and fancy on parade, but it’s when you’re in the woods and the guns begin to speak that a soldier earns his pay, and we’re the better soldiers. You hear that? We’re the better soldiers, and we’re going to kick their royal backsides from here to kingdom come!” The men cheered that sentiment. Littlefield waited for the cheer to stop. “Now, boys, go clean your guns, oil your locks, and sharpen your bayonets. We have God’s great work to do.”

“A fine speech,” Wadsworth congratulated the major.

Littlefield smiled. “A true speech, sir.”

“I never doubted it.”

“Those redcoats are just frightened boys,” Littlefield said, looking towards the bluff where, he assumed, the British infantry was waiting among the trees. “We magnify the enemy, sir. We think because they wear red coats that they must be ogres, but they’re just boys. They march very prettily, and they know how to stand in a straight line, but that doesn’t make them soldiers! We’ll beat them. You were at Lexington, I think?”

“I was.”

“Then you saw the redcoats run!”

“I saw them retreat, yes.”

“Oh, I don’t deny they’re disciplined, sir, but you still beat them back. They’re not trained for this sort of fight. They’re trained to fight big battles in open land, not to be murdered in the undergrowth, so don’t you have any doubts, sir. We shall win.”

And the major was right, Wadsworth reflected, the redcoats were trained to fight great battles where men had to stand in the open and exchange musket volleys. Wadsworth had seen that at Long Island and he had reluctantly admired the enemy’s iron discipline, but here? Here among Majabigwaduce’s dark trees? The discipline would surely be eroded by fear.

The British battery atop the bluff bellowed noise and smoke. It was invisible from the Bethaiah because the redcoats had positioned it to fire south towards the harbor entrance rather than west towards the anchored transports. The guns were shooting towards the Hampden, which was again cannonading the British sloops. The Tyrannicide and Black Prince sailed behind the New Hampshire ship, their job to distract the British and keep the Royal Marines on board the sloops. Wadsworth wondered how well the guns on the heights of Dyce’s Head were protected. “Your task,” he said to Littlefield, “is merely to threaten the enemy. You understand that?”

“A demonstration, sir, to dissuade the enemy from reinforcing Cross Island?”

“Precisely.”

“But if we perceive an opportunity?” Littlefield asked with a smile.

“It would certainly be a blessing to the commodore if we could destroy those guns,” Wadsworth said, nodding towards the fog of powder smoke lingering around the bluff.

“I make no promises, sir,” Littlefield said, “but I reckon my men will feel happier with God’s good earth under their feet. Let me sniff the enemy, sir. If they’re few, then we’ll make them fewer still.”

“But no undue risks, Major,” Wadsworth said sternly. “We’ll land in force tomorrow. I don’t want to lose you this evening!”

“Oh, you won’t lose me!” Littlefield said with amusement. “I intend to watch the very last redcoat leave America, and I’ll help him on his way with a boot up his royal backside.” He turned back to his men. “Right, you rogues! Into the boats! We’ve got redcoats to kill!”

“Be careful, Major,” Wadsworth said, and immediately regretted the words because, to his ears, they sounded weak.

“Don’t you worry, sir,” Littlefield said, “we’re going to win!”

And Wadsworth believed him.

That afternoon as the American ships again closed on the harbor mouth and opened fire against the three British vessels, Marine Captain Welch was on board the Continental sloop Providence, which was leading the two Massachusetts Navy brigs, the Pallas and Defence. The wind was light and the three small ships were all under oars. “We call it the white ash wind,” Hoysteed Hacker, the captain of the Providence, told Welch.

The ash oars were monstrously long and very awkward to pull, but the navy crew worked enthusiastically to drive the sloop southwards against the flooding tide. They were rowing towards the channel which ran south of Cross Island. “There’s a rock right in the damned center of the channel,” Hacker said, “and no one knows how deep it lies. But the tide will help us once we’re in the channel.”

Welch nodded, but said nothing. He was gazing back north. The American ships were again bombarding the three British sloops who were now firing back, blanketing their hulls in gray-white smoke. More smoke shrouded the northern side of Cross Island where the British battery was hammering its shot at the attacking Americans. Further north Welch could see the longboats pulling away from the transport ships. Good. The British must know why the Providence, Pallas, and Defence were working their way around Cross Island, but they dared not send reinforcements across the harbor, not while a major attack threatened the bluff. “We land soon,” Welch growled at his men as the oarsmen turned the sloop into the narrow channel, “and we fix bayonets, and we go fast! You understand? We go fast!”

But just then a grinding noise sounded deep in the Providence’s hull and the sloop jarred to an instant stop. “Rock,” Hoysteed Hacker explained laconically.

So the marines, over two hundred of them, could not go fast, because they had to wait while the tide lifted the Providence’s hull over the sunken rock. Welch simmered. He wanted to kill, he wanted to fight, and instead he was stranded in the channel and all he could see now was the wooded hump of Cross Island with the smoke discoloring the sky above. The sound of the guns was incessant, a melding thunder, and sometimes amidst that devil’s drumroll would come the crunch of a shot striking timber. Welch fidgeted. He imagined redcoats being ferried across the harbor, and still the Providence could make no headway.

“Damn it!” Welch burst out.

“Tide’s rising,” Hoysteed Hacker said. He was a large man, as tall as Welch, whose broad shoulders strained the seams of his naval uniform. He had a heavy face, thick-browed and lantern-jawed, with a ragged scar on the left cheek. The scar had been caused by a boarding pike wielded by a British sailor on HMS Diligent, the brig Hacker had captured. That sailor had died, gutted by Hacker’s heavy cutlass, and the Diligent was now anchored in Penobscot Bay and flying the ensign of the Continental Navy. Hoysteed Hacker was not going to be intimidated by Welch’s impatience. “Can’t hurry the tide,” he said.

“How long, for God’s sake?”