The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

Lovell’s head crowned with a pair of blood-dripping horns out of a nightmare. He finally sat with his back against a tree and a blanket about his shoulders, and watched the dark river swirl slow and silent towards the sea. To his left, to seaward, there was a glow in the sky and he knew that red light was cast by the ships still burning in Mill Cove. It looked like an angry dawn, and it filled him with an immense lassitude, so he closed his eyes and prayed to God that he was given the strength to do what was needed. There was still a fleet and an army to rescue, and an enemy yet to be defied, and long before first light he roused James Fletcher and his other companions. Those companions were now Johnny Feathers and seven of his Indians who possessed two birch-bark canoes. The canoes slipped through the water with much greater ease than the heavy longboats and the Indian had happily agreed to let Wadsworth use the canoes in his attempt to organize a defense. “We must go downriver,” he told Feathers.

The tide was flooding again and the ships were using that tide to escape upriver. Their topsails were set, though no wind powered the vessels, which either floated upstream on the tide or were being towed by longboats. The canoes passed six vessels and Wadsworth shouted to each crew that they should take their ship past the place where the river turned sharply eastwards and then anchor. “We can defend the river there,” he called, and sometimes a captain responded cheerfully, but mostly the sullen crews received his orders in silence.

Wadsworth found the Warren aground where the river widened briefly to resemble a lake. Three other warships were anchored nearby. The frigate was evidently waiting for the tide to float her free of a mud bank.

“You want to go on board?” Johnny Feathers asked.

“No.”

Wadsworth had no stomach for a confrontation with Commodore Saltonstall, which, he suspected, would be fruitless. Saltonstall already knew what his duty was, but Wadsworth reckoned pointing out that duty would merely provoke a sneer and obfuscation. If the fleet and army were to be saved it would be by other men, and Wadsworth was looking for the means of that salvation.

He found it a quarter mile downstream of the Warren where the Samuel, the brig which carried the expedition’s artillery, was being pulled northwards by two longboats. Wadsworth’s canoe went alongside the brig and he scrambled up and across the Samuel’s gunwale. “Is Colonel Revere here?”

“He went away in his barge, sir,” a seaman answered.

“I hope that’s good news,” Wadsworth said, and walked aft to where Captain James Brown stood by his wheel. “Did Colonel Revere ship a cannon onto the lighter?” he asked Brown.

“No,” Brown answered curtly, nodding to the ship’s waist where the cannons were now parked wheel to wheel.

“So where is he?”

“Damned if I know. He took his baggage and left.”

“He took his baggage?” Wadsworth asked.

“Every last box and bundle.”

“And his men?”

“Some are here, some went with him.”

“Oh dear God,” Wadsworth said. He stood irresolute for a moment. The Samuel was inching upstream. The river was so narrow here that branches of trees sometimes brushed against the brig’s lower yards. Wadsworth had hoped that Revere’s one cannon, placed at Spider Bend, would be a marker for the rest of the fleet and the first of many cannon that could hold the British pursuers at bay. “You’ll keep going upstream?” he suggested to Brown.

The Samuel’s captain gave a mirthless bark of laughter. “What else do you suggest I do, General?”

“Ten miles upstream,” Wadsworth said, “the river turns sharply to the right. I need the guns there.”

“We’ll be lucky too make two miles before the tide turns,” Brown said, “or before the damned English catch us up.”

“So where is Colonel Revere?” Wadsworth demanded and received a shrug in answer. He had not passed Revere’s white-painted barge as he descended the river, which meant the colonel and his artillerymen must be further downriver, and that gave Wadsworth a glimmer of hope. Had Revere decided to fortify a place on the Penobscot’s bank? Was he even now finding a place where a battery could hammer the British ships? “Did he give you instructions for the cannon?” Wadsworth asked.

“He asked for his breakfast.”

“The cannon, man! What does he want done with the cannon?”

Brown turned his head slowly, spat a stream of tobacco juice onto the portside scupper, then looked back to Wadsworth. “He didn’t say,” Brown said.

Wadsworth went back to the canoe. He needed Revere! He needed artillery. He wanted a battery of eighteen-pounder cannon, the largest in the rebel army, and he wanted ammunition from the Warren, then he wanted to see the round shot crunching into the bows of the British frigates. He thought briefly of returning to the Warren, which also had the big guns he needed, but first, he decided, he would discover what Colonel Revere planned. “That way, please,” he told Feathers, pointing downstream. He would go to the Warren afterwards and demand that Saltonstall give the artillery all the eighteen-pounder shot they needed.

The sun was up now, the light clear and crisp, the river sparkling, and the sky spoiled only by the smear of smoke from the ships still burning south of Odom’s Ledge. A quarter mile beyond the Samuel there was a whole group of anchored ships, both transports and warships, all chaotically clustered where the river divided around the northern tip of Orphan Island. On the eastern bank, just upstream of the island, was a small settlement about half the size of Majabigwaduce. “What’s that place?” Wadsworth called to James Fletcher who was in the second canoe.

“Buck’s plantation,” James called back.

Wadsworth gestured that the Indians should stop paddling. The river bent here, and Wadsworth wondered why he had not chosen this as a place to defend. True, the curve was not so pronounced as the sharp turn higher up the river, but in the early-morning light the river’s twist looked sharp enough and on the western bank, opposite Buck’s plantation, was a high bluff about which the Penobscot curled. He needed a place on the western bank so that supplies could come from Boston without being ferried across the river, and the bluff looked a likely enough spot. There were already men ashore at the bluff’s foot, and there were plenty of guns aboard the nearby ships. Everything Wadsworth needed was here, and he pointed to the narrow beach at the base of the bluff. “Put me ashore there, please,” he said, then called across to James Fletcher again. “You’re to go back upstream and find the Samuel,” he shouted. “Ask Captain Brown to bring her back downriver. Tell him I need the cannons here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And after that go to the Warren. Tell the commodore I’m making a battery here,” he pointed at the western bluff, “and say I’m expecting his ship to join us. Tell him we need his eighteen-pounder ammunition!”

“He won’t like me saying that.”

“Tell him anyway!” Wadsworth called. The canoe scraped onto the beach and Wadsworth jumped ashore. “Wait for me, please,” he asked the Indians, then strode down the beach towards the men who sat disconsolate at the high-tide line. “Officers!” he shouted. “Sergeants! To me! Officers! Sergeants! To me!”

Peleg Wadsworth would pluck order from chaos. He was still fighting.

Lieutenant Fenwick was obeying Commodore Saltonstall’s orders, though with a heavy heart. The Warren’s main magazine had been half-emptied, and the powder charges were being carried down to the bilge and up to the maindeck. There was a growing pile of powder bags on the ballast stones at the foot of the main mast in the bilge’s darkness, another under the forecastle and a third beneath Saltonstall’s cabin. On deck there were heaps of bags around each mast. White trails of slow-match were laid from each pile, the snaking canvas ropes meeting in a tangle on the foredeck. “What we cannot do,” Saltonstall told Fenwick, “is allow the enemy to capture the ship.”

“Of course not, sir.”