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?”
“Well, it’s one or the other,” McLean said happily, “or maybe neither? But I do remember a nautical fellow assuring me of it.” And perhaps firing the two chasers on HMS Blonde had brought on a small wind because the British ships seemed to be making better speed as they approached the rebel fleet. “It will be bloody work,” McLean said. The foremost three frigates would be far outgunned by the rebels, though the big Raisonable was not that far behind and her massive lower guns were sufficient to blow each of the rebel warships out of the water with a single broadside. Even the Warren, with her eighteen-pounders, would be far outmatched by the two-decker’s thirty-two-pounders. “Mind you,” McLean went on, “sailors do tell us the strangest things! I had a skipper on the Portugal run who swore blind the world was flat. He claimed to have seen the rainbows at its edge!”
“The fellow who took us to Halifax,” Campbell said, “told us tales of mermaids. He said they flocked together like sheep, and that down in the southern seas it’s tits and tails from horizon to horizon.”
“Really?” Major Dunlop asked eagerly.
“That’s what he said! Tits and tails!”
“Dear me,” McLean said, “I see I must sail south.” He straightened on the stool, watching the three sloops. “Oh, well done, Mowat!” he said enthusiastically. The three sloops had laboriously used their anchors to haul themselves out of the harbor and now loosed their sails.
“And what does that signify?” Major Dunlop asked. His question had been prompted by a string of bright signal flags that had appeared at the Warren’s mizzen mast. The flags meant nothing to the watchers on the bluff who had now been joined by most of Majabigwaduce’s inhabitants, curious to watch an event that would surely make their village famous.
“He’s taking them into battle, I suppose,” Campbell suggested.
“I suppose he must be,” McLean agreed, though he did not see what the rebels could do other than what they were already doing. Commodore Saltonstall’s seventeen ships were in a line with all their broadsides pointing at the oncoming ships, and that gave the rebels a huge advantage. They could shoot and shoot, secure in the knowledge that only the bow-chasers on the three leading frigates could return the fire. The Royal Navy, the brigadier thought, must take some grievous casualties before the big two-decker battleship could demolish the American defiance.
Except the Americans were not defiant. “What on earth?” McLean asked.
“Bless me,” Campbell said, equally astonished.
Because the meaning of Saltonstall’s signal was suddenly clear. There would be no fight, at least no fight of the commodore’s making because, one by one, the rebel warships were turning away. They had loosed their sheets and were running before the small wind. Running northwards. Running away. Running for the safety of the river narrows.
Six ships and three sloops chased thirty-seven vessels.
All running away.
Three rebel ships decided to make a break for the open sea. The Hampden, with her twenty guns, was the largest, while the Hunter had eighteen guns and the Defence just fourteen. The commodore’s orders had required every ship to do its best to evade the enemy, and so the three ships tacked westwards across the bay, aiming to take the less used western channel past Long Island and so downriver to the ocean, which lay twenty-six nautical miles to the south. The Hunter was a new ship and reputed to be the fastest sailor on the coast, while Nathan Brown, her captain, was a canny man who knew how to coax every last scrap of speed from his ship’s hull. There was precious little wind, not nearly as much as Brown would have liked, yet even so his sleek hull moved perceptibly faster than the Hampden, which, being larger, should have been the quicker vessel.
Signal flags fluttered from a yardarm on HMS Raisonable. For a time it was hard to tell what those flags portended, because nothing seemed to change in the British fleet, then Brown saw the two rearmost British frigates turn slowly westwards. “Bastards want a race,” he said.
It was an unequal race. The two smaller rebel ships might be quick and nimble sailors, but they had the disadvantage of sailing closer to the wind and the two frigates easily closed the gap through which the rebels needed to tack. Two guns fired from HMS Galatea were warning enough. The shots were fired at long range, and both blew past the Defence’s bows, but the message of the two near misses was clear. Try to sail through the gap and your small ships will receive the full broadsides of two frigates, and to escape past those frigates the rebels needed to tack through the channel where the frigates waited. They would be forced to sail within pistol shot and John Edmunds, the Defence’s captain, had an image of his two masts falling, of his deck slicked with blood, and of his hull quivering under the relentlessly heavy blows. His guns were mere four-pounders and what could four-pounders do against a frigate’s full broadside? He might as well throw bread crusts at the enemy. “But I’ll be damned before the bastards take my ship,” he said.
He knew his attempt to sail the Defence past the frigates had failed and so he let his brig’s bows fall off the wind and then drove her, all sails standing, straight towards the Penobscot’s western shore. “Joshua!” he called to the first mate. “We’re going to burn her! Break open the powder barrels.”
The Defence ran ashore. Her masts bowed forrard as the bows grated on the shingle beach. Edmunds thought the masts would surely fall, but the backstays held and the sails slatted and banged on the yards. Edmunds took the flag from her stern and folded it. His crew was spilling powder and splashing oil on the decks. “Get ashore, boys,” Edmunds called, and he went forrard, past his useless guns, and paused in the bows. He wanted to weep. The Defence was a lovely ship. Her home was the open ocean where she should have been living up to her martial name by chasing down fat British merchantmen to make her owners rich, but instead she was caught in an enclosed seaway and it was time to bid her farewell.
He struck flint on steel and spilled the burning linen from his tinderbox onto a powder trail. Then he climbed over the gunwale and dropped down to the beach. His eyes were wet when he turned to watch his ship burn. It took a long time. There was more smoke than fire at first, but then the flames flickered up the tarred rigging and the sails caught the blaze, and the masts and yards were outlined by fire so that the Defence looked like the devil’s own vessel, a flame-rigged brigantine, a defiant fighting- ship sailing her way into hell. “Oh God damn the bastards,” Edmunds said, brokenhearted, “the sons of goddamned bitch bastards!”
The Hunter sought shelter in a narrow cove. Nathan Brown, her skipper, ran her gently aground in the tight space and ordered an anchor lowered and the sails furled and, once the ship was secure, he told his crew to find shelter ashore. The Hunter might be a quick ship, but even she could not outsail the broadsides of the two enemy frigates, and her four-pounder cannon were no match for the British guns, yet Nathan Brown could not bring himself to burn the ship. It would have been like murdering his wife. The Hunter had magic in her timbers, she was fast and nimble, a charmed ship, and Nathan Brown dared to hope that the British would ignore her. He prayed that the pursuers would continue north and that once the Royal Navy ships had passed he might extricate the Hunter from the narrow cove and sail her back to Boston, but that hope died when he saw two longboats crammed with sailors leave the British frigates.
Brown had ordered his men ashore in case the British tried to destroy the Hunter with cannon-fire, but now it seemed the enemy was intent on capture rather than destruction. The crowded longboats drew nearer. At least half the Hunter’s crew of a hundred and thirty men were armed with muskets and they began shooting as the longboats approached the grounded ship. Water spouted around the oarsmen as musket balls struck, and at least one British sailor was hit and the boat’s oars momentarily tangled, but then the longboats vanished behind the Hunter’s counter. A moment later the enemy sailors were aboard the ship and attaching towlines to her stern. The treacherous tide lifted her off the
