The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

give the ship her morning scrub. Saltonstall was newly appointed to the Warren and he was determined she should be a neat ship.

“As I thought,” Saltonstall said again. The midshipman, standing respectfully beside the larboard aft gun, braced his leg against the gun’s carriage and said nothing. The wind was fresh enough to jerk the Warren on her anchor cables and make her shudder to the small waves that flickered white across the harbor. The Warren, like the two nearby vessels that also belonged to the Continental Navy, flew the red-and-white-striped flag on which a snake surmounted the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” Many of the other ships in the crowded harbor flew the bold new flag of the United States, striped and starred, but two smart brigs, both armed with fourteen six-pounder cannons and both anchored close to the Warren, flew the Massachusetts Navy flag, which showed a green pine tree on a white field and bore the words “An Appeal to Heaven.”

“An appeal to nonsense,” Saltonstall growled.

“Sir?” the midshipman asked nervously.

“If our cause is just, Mister Coningsby, why need we appeal to heaven? Let us rather appeal to force, to justice, to reason.”

“Aye aye, sir,” the midshipman said, unsettled by the captain’s habit of looking past the man he spoke to.

“Appeal to heaven!” Saltonstall sneered, still gazing past the midshipman’s ear towards the offending flag. “In war, Mister Coningsby, one might do better to appeal to hell.”

The ensigns of other vessels were more picaresque. One low-slung ship, her masts raked sharply aft and her gun ports painted black, had a coiled rattlesnake emblazoned on her ensign, while a second flew the skull and crossbones, and a third showed King George of England losing his crown to a cheerful-looking Yankee wielding a spiked club. Captain Saltonstall disapproved of all such homemade flags. They made for untidiness. A dozen other ships had British flags, but all those flags were being flown beneath American colors to show they had been captured, and Captain Saltonstall disapproved of that too. It was not that the British merchantmen had been captured, that was plainly a good thing, nor that the flags proclaimed the victories because that too was desirable, but rather that the captured ships were now presumed to be private property. Not the property of the United States, but of the privateers like the low-slung, raked-masted, rattlesnake-decorated sloop.

“They are pirates, Mister Coningsby,” Saltonstall growled.

“Aye aye, sir,” Midshipman Fanning replied. Midshipman Coningsby had died of the fever a week previously, but all Fanning’s nervous attempts to correct his captain had failed and he had abandoned any hope of being called by his real name.

Saltonstall was still frowning at the privateers. “How can we find decent crew when piracy beckons?” Saltonstall complained, “tell me that, Mister Coningsby!”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“We cannot, Mister Coningsby, we cannot,” Saltonstall said, shuddering at the injustice of the law. It was true that the privateers were patriotic pirates who were fierce as wolves in battle, but they fought for private gain, and that made it impossible for a Continental warship like the Warren to find good crew. What young man of Boston would serve his country for pennies when he could join a privateer and earn a share of the plunder? No wonder the Warren was short-handed! She carried thirty-two guns and was as fine a frigate as any on the American seaboard, but Saltonstall had only men enough to fight half his weapons, while the privateers were all fully manned. “It is an abomination, Mister Coningsby!”

“Aye aye, sir,” Midshipman Fanning said.

“Look at that!” Saltonstall checked his pacing to point a finger at the Ariadne, a fat British merchantman that had been captured by a privateer. “You know what she was carrying, Mister Coningsby?”

“Black walnut from New York to London, sir?”

“And she carried six cannon, Mister Coningsby! Nine-pounder guns! Six of them. Good long nine-pounders! Newly made! And where are those guns now?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“For sale in Boston!” Saltonstall spat the words. “For sale, Mister Coningsby, in Boston, when our country has desperate need of cannon! It makes me angry, Mister Coningsby, it makes me angry indeed.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Those cannon will be melted down for gew-gaws. For gew-gaws! It makes me angry, upon my soul, it does.” Captain Saltonstall carried his anger to the starboard rail where he paused to watch a small cutter approach from the north. Its dark sails first appeared as a patch in the fog, then the patch took shape and hardened into a single-masted vessel about forty feet long. She was not a fishing boat, she was too narrow for such work, but her gunwales were pierced with tholes showing that she could ship a dozen oars and so be rowed on calm days and Saltonstall recognized her as one of the fast messenger boats used by the government of Massachusetts. A man was standing amidships with cupped hands, evidently shouting his news to the moored vessels through which the cutter slid. Saltonstall would dearly have liked to know what the man shouted, but he considered it beneath his dignity as a Continental Navy captain to make vulgar inquiries, and so he turned away just as a schooner, her gunwales punctuated by gunports, gathered way to pass the Warren. The schooner was a black-hulled privateer with the name King-Killer prominent in white paint at her waist. Her dirt-streaked sails were sheeted in hard to beat her way out of the harbor. She carried a dozen deck guns, enough to batter most British merchantmen into quick surrender, and she was built for speed so that she could escape any warship of the British navy. Her deck was crowded with men while at her mizzen gaff was a blue flag with the word “Liberty” embroidered in white letters. Saltonstall waited for that flag to be lowered in salute to his own ensign, but as the black schooner passed she offered no sign of recognition. A man at her taffrail looked at Saltonstall, then spat into the sea and the Warren’s captain bridled, suspecting an insult. He watched her go towards the fog. The King-Killer was off hunting, going across the bay, around the northern hook of Cape Cod, and out into the Atlantic where the fat British cargo ships wallowed on their westward runs from Halifax to New York.

“Gew-gaws,” Saltonstall growled.

A stub-masted open barge, painted white with a black stripe around its gunwale, pushed off from the Castle Island quay. A dozen men manned the oars, pulling hard against the small waves, and the sight of the barge made Captain Saltonstall fish a watch from his pocket. He clicked open the lid and saw that it was ten minutes past eight in the morning. The barge was precisely on time, and within an hour he would see it return from Boston, this time carrying the commander of the Castle Island garrison, a man who preferred to sleep in the city. Saltonstall approved of the Castle Island barge. She was smartly painted and her crew, if not in real uniform, wore matching blue shirts. There was an attempt at order there, at discipline, at propriety.

The captain resumed his pacing, larboard to starboard, starboard to larboard.

The King-Killer vanished in the fog.

The Castle Island barge threaded the anchorage. A church bell began to toll.

Boston harbor, a warm morning, June 23rd, 1779.

*    *    *

The paymaster of His Majesty’s 82nd Regiment of Foot strode west along Majabigwaduce’s ridge. From behind him came the sound of axes striking trees, while all around him was fog. A thick fog. Every morning since the fleet had arrived there had been fog. “It will burn off,” the paymaster said cheerfully.

“Aye, sir,” Sergeant McClure answered dully. The sergeant had a picquet of six men from the 82nd Foot, the Duke of Hamilton’s regiment and so known as the Hamiltons. McClure was thirty, older by far than his men and twelve years older than the paymaster, a lieutenant, who led the picquet at a fast, enthusiastic pace. His orders were to establish a sentry post at the peninsula’s western heights from where a lookout could be kept on the wide Penobscot Bay. If any enemy was to come, then the bay was their likeliest approach. The picquet was in thick woodland now, dwarfed by tall, dark, fog-shrouded trees. “The brigadier, sir,” Sergeant McClure ventured, “said there might be rebels here.”

“Nonsense! There are no rebels here! They have all fled, Sergeant!”

“If you say so, sir.”

“I do say so,” the young officer said enthusiastically, then stopped suddenly and pointed into the underbrush.