The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

“Which means you have to destroy those guns in the fort,” Williams said, “and there’s another thing. The fleet is running short of men.”

“We impressed men in Boston!” Lovell complained.

“And they’re deserting, sir,” Williams said. “And the privateer captains? They’re not happy. Every day they spend here is a day they can’t capture prizes at sea. They’re talking of leaving.”

“Why did we bring all these ships?” Wadsworth asked. He had put the question to Williams, who just shrugged. “We brought a fleet of warships and we don’t use them?” Wadsworth asked more heatedly.

“You must put that question to the commodore,” Williams said evenly. There was silence, broken only by the endless clanking of the Hazard’s pump. The damage the brig had taken when Lieutenant Little had sailed her so close to Mowat’s sloops was still not properly repaired. The brig would need to be hauled ashore for those timbers to be replaced, caulked, and made tight, but the pump was keeping her afloat easily enough.

“So we must capture the fort,” Peleg Wadsworth said, breaking the gloomy silence, and then overrode the chorus of voices which complained that such a feat was impossible. “We must take men to the rear of the fort,” he explained, “and assault from the south and east. The walls there are unfinished and the eastern rampart, so far as I can see, has no cannon.”

“Your men won’t attack,” Revere said scornfully. For a week now, in every council of war, Lieutenant-Colonel Revere had urged abandonment of the siege, and now he pressed the point. “The men won’t face the enemy! We saw that yesterday. Three quarters of the small-arms cartridges have gone and half the men are hiding in the woods!”

“So you’d run away?” Wadsworth asked.

“No one accuses me of running away!”

“Then, damn it, stay and fight!” Wadsworth’s anger at last exploded and his use of a swear word alone was sufficient to silence the whole cabin. “Goddamn it!” he shouted the words and hammered Captain Williams’s table so hard that a pewter candlestick fell over. Men stared at him in astonishment, and Wadsworth surprised even himself by his sudden vehemence and coarse language. He tried to calm his temper, but it was still running high. “Why are we here?” he demanded. “Not to build batteries or shoot at ships! We’re here to capture their fort!”

“But’” Lovell began.

“We demand marines of the commodore,” Wadsworth overrode his commanding officer, “and we assemble every man, and we attack! We attack!” He looked around the cabin, seeing the scepticism on too many faces. Those who favored abandonment of the expedition, led by Colonel Revere, were fervent in their view, while those still willing to prosecute the siege were at best lukewarm. “The commodore,” Wadsworth went on, “is unwilling to enter the harbor while the guns are there to harass his shipping. So we assure him that we will silence the guns. We will take men to the rear of the enemy’s work and we shall attack! And the commodore will support us.”

“The commodore’” Lovell began

Wadsworth again interrupted him. “We have never offered the commodore our wholehearted support,” he said emphatically. “We’ve asked him to destroy the ships before we attack and he has asked us to destroy the fort before the attacks. Then why not make a compromise? We both attack. If he knows our land force is making an assault then he will have no choice but to support us!”

“Perhaps the regular troops will arrive,” McCobb put in.

“The Diligent has sent no word,” Lovell said. The Diligent, the fast Continental Navy brig captured from the British, had been posted at the mouth of the Penobscot River to serve as a guard boat that could give warning of the approach of any shipping, but her captain, Philip Brown, had sent no messages which suggested to Lovell that any reinforcements, for either side, were at least a day away.

“We can’t wait to see if Boston sends us troops,” Wadsworth insisted, “and besides, British reinforcements are just as likely! We were sent here to perform a task, so for God’s sake, let us do it! And do it now before the enemy is strengthened.”

“I doubt we can do it now,” Lovell said, “tomorrow, maybe?”

“Then tomorrow!” Wadsworth said, exasperated. “But let us do it! Let us do what we came here to do, to do what our country expects of us! Let us do it!”

There was silence, broken by Lovell who looked brightly about the cabin. “We certainly have something to discuss,” he said.

“And let us not discuss it,” Wadsworth said harshly, “but make a decision.”

Lovell looked startled at his deputy’s forcefulness. For a moment it seemed as if he would try to wrest back the command of the cabin, but Wadsworth’s face was grim and Lovell acceded to the demand. “Very well,” he said stiffly, “we shall make a decision. Would all those in favor of General Wadsworth’s proposal please so indicate now?” Wadsworth’s hand shot up. Lovell hesitated, then raised his own hand. Other men followed Lovell’s lead, even those who usually supported an end to the siege. All but one.

“And those opposed?” Lovell asked. Lieutenant-Colonel Revere raised his hand.

“I declare the motion carried,” Lovell said, “and we shall beg the commodore to support us in an attack tomorrow.”

The next day would be Friday, August the thirteenth.

Friday the thirteenth dawned fair. The wind was light and there was no fog, which meant the rebel battery on Cross Island opened fire at first light, as did the more distant eighteen-pounder on the northern shore beyond the peninsula. The balls slammed hard into the hulls of the British sloops.

Captain Mowat was resigned to the bombardment. He had moved his ships twice, but there was no other anchorage to which he could retreat now, not unless he moved the sloops far away from the fort. The pumps on all three sloops worked continually, manned by sailors who chanted shanties as they drove the great handles up and down. The Albany’s carpenter was patching the hull as well as he was able, but the big eighteen-pounder shots tore up the oak planking with savage force. “I’ll keep her afloat, sir,” the carpenter promised Mowat at dawn. He had plugged three horrible gashes at the sloop’s waterline, but a proper repair would have to wait till the sloop could be beached or docked.

“Luckily they’re still shooting high,” Mowat said.

“Pray God they go on doing that, sir.”

“I hope you are bloody praying!” Mowat said.

“Day and night, sir, night and day.” The carpenter was a Methodist and kept a well-thumbed copy of the Bible in his carpenter’s apron. He frowned as a rebel ball struck the taffrail and showered splinters across the afterdeck. “I’ll mend the topsides when we’ve done the lower strakes, sir.”

“Topsides can wait,” Mowat said. He did not care how ragged his ship looked so long as she floated and could carry her guns. Those guns were silent for now. Mowat reckoned his nine-pounders could do little damage to the battery on Cross Island and none of his guns was powerful enough to reach the new battery to the north, and so he did not waste powder and shot on the rebels. One of Captain Fielding’s twelve-pounders, up at the fort, slammed shots into Cross Island, a fire that merely served to keep the rebels hidden deep among the trees. A crackle of muskets sounded ashore. In the last few days that noise had been constant as McLean’s men infiltrated the trees by the neck or else hunted through the fields and barns of the settlement in search of rebel patrols. They were doing it without orders and McLean, though he approved the sentiments behind such rebel hunting, had commanded that it be stopped. Mowat guessed that the flurry of shots came from Captain Caffrae’s Light Company, which had kept up its harassment of the enemy lines.

“Deck ahoy!” a lookout called from the foremast. “Swimmer!”

“Do we have a man overboard?” Mowat demanded of the officer of the watch.

“No, sir.”

Mowat went forrard to see that a man was indeed swimming towards the Albany from the direction of the harbor mouth. He looked exhausted. He swam a few strokes, then trod water before feebly trying to swim again, and Mowat shouted at the bosun to heave the man a line. It took a moment for the man to find the line, then he was hauled to the sloop’s side and dragged up on deck. He was a seaman with a long pigtail hanging down his bare back and pictures of whales and anchors tattooed onto his chest and forearms. He stood dripping and then, exhausted and shivering, sat on one of the nine-pounder trucks. “What’s your name, sailor?” Mowat asked.