The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

foresail, were furled onto their yards so that their canvas would not block the view forrard. He had kept the staysail furled for the same reason, so the Warren was being driven by flying jib, jib, and topsails. She went slowly, creeping ever closer to the narrow entrance between Cross Island and Dyce’s Head, which was now in American hands. Saltonstall could see the green coats of his marines on that height. They were watching the Warren and evidently cheering because they waved their hats towards the frigate.

The three British sloops had been shooting towards the rebel battery on Cross Island until they saw the topsails loosed on the enemy ships, when they had immediately ceased fire so that their guns could be levered round to point at the harbor mouth. Every cannon was double-shotted so that two round shots would be fired by each gun in the first broadside. The Warren, by far the largest warship in the Penobscot River, looked huge as she loomed in the entrance narrows. Captain Mowat, standing on the Albany’s afterdeck, was surprised that only three ships were approaching, though he was more than sensible that three ships were sufficient. Still, he reckoned, if he had commanded the rebel fleet he would have sent every available vessel in an irresistible and overwhelming attack. He trained his glass on the Warren, noting that there were no marines on her forecastle, which suggested the frigate was not planning to try and board his sloops. Maybe the marines were hiding? The frigate’s cutwater appeared huge in his glass. He collapsed the tubes and nodded to his first lieutenant. “You may open fire,” Mowat said.

Mowat’s three sloops had twenty-eight guns in their combined broadsides, a mix of nine- and six-pounders, and all of them shot two balls at the Warren. The noise of the guns filled the wide basin of Penobscot Bay while the Half Moon Battery, which had been dug into the harbor slope west of the fort, added her four twelve-pounders. All of those round shot were aimed at the Warren’s bows, and the frigate shuddered under their massive blows. “You will return the fire, Mister Fenwick!” Saltonstall shouted at his first lieutenant, and Fenwick gave the order, but the only guns that the Warren could use were its two nine-pounder bow-chasers, which fired together to shroud the rearing bowsprit with smoke. The Warren’s bows were being splintered by round shot, the impacts sending shock waves through the hull. A man was screaming in the fo’c’sle, a sound that irritated Saltonstall.

His ship palpably slowed under the constant blows. Dudley Saltonstall, standing next to the impassive helmsman, could hear timbers splintering. He was not an imaginative man, but it suddenly struck him that this vicious, concentrated gunfire was an expression of British anger against the rebels who had captured the high ground of their peninsula. Defeated on land they were revenging themselves with cannon-fire, well-aimed, brisk and efficient cannon-fire, and Saltonstall seethed with anger that his fine ship should be its victim. A twelve-pounder ball, fired from the harbor shore, struck a forrard nine-pounder, shearing its breech lines, shattering a trunnion, and slaughtering two crewmen whose blood spattered twenty feet across the deck. A spew of intestines lay like an untidy rope in the ugly bloodstain. The nine-pounder sagged in its carriage. One man had lost half his head, the other had been eviscerated by the ball, which had lost its volition and come to rest by the starboard gangway.

“Swab the deck!” Saltonstall shouted. “Be lively!” A lieutenant called for seamen to fetch buckets of water, but before they could wash the sprawling blood from the scrubbed planks, the commodore shouted again. “Belay that order!”

Mister Fenwick, the first lieutenant, stared at Saltonstall. The commodore was famous for keeping a spanking clean ship, yet he had reversed the order to swab the deck? “Sir?” Fenwick called uncertainly.

“Leave it be,” Saltonstall insisted. He half-smiled to himself. An idea had occurred to him and he liked it. “Throw that offal overboard,” he gestured to the spilled intestines, “but leave the blood.”

A twelve-pounder ball struck the mainmast with enough force to make the canvas of the big maintopsail quiver. Saltonstall watched the mast, wondering if it would fall, but the great spar held. “Summon the carpenter, Mister Coningsby,” he ordered.

“Aye aye, sir,” Midshipman Fanning, resigned to being called Coningsby, answered.

“I want a report on the mainmast. Don’t just stand there! Look lively!”

Fanning ran to a companionway to find the ship’s carpenter who, he suspected, would be somewhere forrard surveying the damage that was being done to the Warren’s bows where most of the enemy shots were slamming into the frigate. A nine-pounder ball slashed the shrouds of the spritsail yard so that it dangled into the water, though luckily the spritsail itself was not bent onto the spar and so the canvas could not drag in the water to slow the Warren even more. The jibboom was cut through and the remnant of the bowsprit was being held by only one shroud, and still the cannon-balls crashed home. Lieutenant Fenwick had six men retrieving the spritsail yard and one of them suddenly turned with an astonished expression and no left arm, just a ragged bloody stump that was gushing blood. The wind of the ball buffeted Fenwick and spattered him with blood. “Put a tourniquet on that,” he ordered, marveling that he sounded so calm, but the wounded man, before anyone could help him, fell sideways into the water and another six-pounder ball gouged along the gunwale to plow out long, sharp splinters that flickered across the deck. The ship shuddered again and blood oozed along the seams between the deck planking. A shot struck the waterline, spraying the forecastle with cold seawater, and then Fenwick was aware that the Warren was turning, turning so slowly, lumbering around to starboard so her larboard broadside could be brought to bear on the enemy. Marines were cheering the frigate from Dyce’s Head, but that was small consolation as two more shots ripped into her hull. One of the big elm pumps was working now, its crew working the long levers so that water gushed rhythmically over the Warren’s side. A man was whimpering somewhere, but Fenwick could not see him. “Throw that overboard,” he snapped, pointing to the severed arm.

The frigate was turning with agonizing slowness, but her bows were at last pointed at the harbor’s southern side and her powerful broadside could return the British cannonade. The commodore ordered the frigate’s big guns to open fire as soon as the slow turn brought the Half Moon Battery abreast of his broadside, and the noise of those cannons drowned the universe as they roared at the British emplacement. Smoke billowed as high as the furled mainyard. The guns recoiled, their trucks momentarily leaving the deck until the breech ropes took the strain. Water hissed into steam as gunners swabbed barrels. A twelve-pounder shot slashed across the poop deck, miraculously doing no damage except to a bucket that was shattered into a thousand pieces. “Fire as you bear!” Saltonstall called, meaning that his gunners should fire as soon as the ship had turned sufficiently to bring the guns to bear on the enemy sloops, though the gunners were so obstructed by their own smoke that they could scarcely see the enemy, who, in turn, were smothered by their own powder smoke, which constantly renewed itself as the flames spat through the cloud to punch more shots at the frigate.

“The carpenter says he’ll look at the mainmast as soon as he can, sir!” Midshipman Fanning had to shout to make himself heard over the gunfire.

“As soon as he can?” Saltonstall repeated angrily.

“The bows are holed, sir, he says he’s plugging it.”

Saltonstall grunted and a six-pounder shot, fired from HMS Albany, hit Fanning in the groin. He screamed and fell. Bone was showing ivory-white in the mangled remnants of his hip. He was staring up at Saltonstall, teeth bared, screaming, and his blood was sticky on the ship’s wheel. “Mother,” Fanning whimpered, “Mother!”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Saltonstall muttered.

“You two!” the helmsman called to two crewmen crouching by the portside rail. “Take the boy below.”

“Mother,” Fanning was crying. “Mother.” He reached out a hand and gripped the lower wheel. “Oh, Mother!”

“Fire!” Saltonstall shouted at his gun crews, not because they needed the order, but because he did not want to listen to the boy’s pathetic crying, which, thankfully and abruptly, faded to nothing.

“He’s dead,” one of the crewmen said, “poor little bastard.”

“Watch your tongue!” Saltonstall snarled, “and take Mister Coningsby away.”

“Take him away.” The helmsman pointed at Fanning, realizing that the seamen had been confused by the commodore’s order. He stooped and prised the dead boy’s grasp from the wheel.

The Warren’s guns were firing at the enemy sloops now, but the frigate’s crew was raw. Few of the men were regular sailors, most had been pressed from the wharves of Boston and they served the guns much more slowly than the British sailors. The frigate’s fire did more damage because her guns were heavier, but for every shot the Warren fired she received six. Another ball hit the bowsprit, almost splintering it into two long shards, then a twelve-pounder hit the mainmast again and the long spar wavered