The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

The men on the beach beneath the bluff had come from the transports that were anchored or grounded in the river. They now sat disconsolate and leaderless on the shingle. “What are your orders?” Wadsworth asked one sergeant.

“Don’t have any orders, sir.”

“We’re going home!” a man shouted angrily.

“How?” Wadsworth demanded.

The man had hefted a haversack sewn from sail-canvas. “Any way we can. Walk, I guess. How far is it?”

“Two hundred miles. And you’re not going home, not yet.” Wadsworth turned on the sergeant. “Get your men in order, we still have a war to fight.”

Wadsworth strode down the beach, shouting at officers and sergeants to assemble their men. If the British could be stopped at this bend then there was a good chance to reorganize the army upriver. Trees could be felled, a camp made, and guns placed to deter any British assault. All it needed was a firm defense on this sun-drenched morning. As Wadsworth followed the bank further downstream he saw how the river narrowed into a valley that ran almost straight southwards to Odom’s Ledge about four miles away. The river itself was about three hundred paces wide, but that was deceptive because the navigable channel was much narrower and the British ships must creep up that channel in single file, the leading ship’s vulnerable bows pointing straight at the bluff. Four guns would do the job! He ordered militia captains to clear a ledge on the bluff’s slope and when they complained that they had no axes or shovels he snapped at them to find a boat and search the transport ships for the necessary tools. “Just do some work! You want to go home and tell your children you ran away from the British? Have any of you seen Colonel Revere?”

“He went downriver, sir,” a surly militia captain answered.

“Downriver?”

The captain pointed to the long, narrow valley where the rearmost American ship, a schooner, was trying to reach the rest of the fleet still gathered by the bluff. Her big mizzen sail was poled out to port to catch the tiny wind that had at last started to scurry catspaws across the river’s surface. Four of the schooner’s crew were using huge oars to try and hasten her passage, but the oars dipped and pulled pathetically slowly. Then Wadsworth saw why they were using the long sweeps. Behind the schooner was a much larger ship, a ship with more sails and higher masts, a ship that suddenly fired her bow-chasers to fill the valley with smoke and with the echo of her two cannon shots. The balls had not been aimed at the schooner, but rather to either side of her hull as a signal that she should haul down her ensign and let the pursuing British take her as a prize.

Wadsworth ran down the beach. There were men on the schooner’s bows waving frantically. They had no longboat, no boat of any sort, and they wanted a rescue, and there, not fifty paces away, was Revere’s white- painted barge with its crew of oarsmen. It was rowing upriver ahead of the schooner, suggesting that Revere had gone downstream, maybe hoping to escape past the British ships, but, discovering the futility of such a hope, had been forced back northwards. Wadsworth could see Lieutenant-Colonel Revere himself in the barge’s sternsheets and he stopped at the water’s edge and cupped his hands, “Colonel Revere!”

Revere waved to show he had heard the hail.

Wadsworth pointed at the schooner which he now recognized as the Nancy. “The Nancy’s crew needs rescuing! Take your barge and pick them up!”

Revere twisted on his bench to look at the Nancy, then turned back to Wadsworth. “You’ve no right to give me commands now, General!” Revere called, then said something to his crew who kept rowing upstream, away from the doomed Nancy.

Wadsworth wondered if he had misheard. “Colonel Revere!” He shouted slowly and clearly so there could be no misunderstanding. “Take your barge and get those crewmen off the Nancy!” The schooner was lightly crewed and there was plenty of room in the barge’s bows for all of her seamen.

“I was under your command so long as there was a siege,” Revere called back, “but the siege is over, and with it your authority has ended.”

For a heartbeat Wadsworth did not believe what he had heard. He gaped at the stocky colonel, then was overcome with rage and indignation. “For God’s sake, man, they’re Americans! Go and rescue them!”

“I’ve got my baggage here,” Revere called back and pointed to a heap of boxes covered by sailcloth. “I’m not willing to risk my baggage! Good day to you, Wadsworth.”

“You . . .” Wadsworth began, but was too angry to finish. He turned and walked up the beach to keep pace with the barge. “I am giving you an order!” he shouted at Revere. Men on the beach watched and listened. “Rescue that crew!”

The British frigate astern of the Nancy fired her bow-chasers again and the balls seared past the hull to throw up great fountains of river water. “You see?” Revere called when the echo of the gunfire had faded. “I can’t risk my baggage!”

“I promise you an arrest, Colonel!” Wadsworth called savagely. “Unless you obey my orders!”

“You can’t give me orders now!” Revere said, almost cheerfully. “It’s over and done with. Good day, General!”

“I want your guns on the bluff ahead!”

Revere waved a negligent hand towards Wadsworth. “Keep rowing,” he told his men.

“I shall have you arrested!” Wadsworth bellowed.

But the barge kept going and Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Revere’s baggage was safe.

*    *    *

HMS Galatea led the British frigates. At her bows was a figurehead of Galatea, her painted skin as white as the marble from which her mythical statue had been carved. In that myth she had sprung to life from the marble and now she came upriver, naked except for a wisp of silk covering her hips, and with her defiant head raised to look straight ahead with startling blue eyes. The frigate was flying topsails and topgallantsails only, the high canvas catching what small wind came from the south. Ahead of her was chaos, and the Galatea made the chaos worse. The schooner Nancy had been abandoned, but a British prize crew secured the vessel and used the captured schooner’s anchors to drag her to the eastern bank of the river so that the Galatea and HMS Camille, which followed the Galatea, could pass. The nymph and her blue eyes vanished in a sudden billow of smoke as the two long-barreled nine-pounder bow-chasers fired from the frigate. The balls skipped across the water towards the mass of rebel shipping. Red-coated Royal Marines on the Galatea’s forecastle waited for the cannon smoke to drift away, then began shooting muskets at the distant men on the river’s western bank. They fired at very long range, and none of the balls found a target, but the beach emptied fast as men sought shelter among the trees.

And there was more smoke now, far more smoke. It did not come from British cannons, but from fires aboard the rebel ships. Captains struck flint against steel and lit their slow-matches, or else thrust fire into the kindling of the combustibles stacked belowdecks and around masts. Longboats pulled for the shore as smoke poured out of companionways.

The Galatea and the Camille both dropped stern anchors and took in their topsails. No ship would risk itself by sailing into an inferno. Fire loved timber, tar, and linen, and every sailor feared fire much more than he feared the sea, and so the two frigates lay in the river, rising gently on the incoming tide, and their crews watched an enemy destroy itself.

The proud ships burned. The sleek privateers and the heavy transports burned. Smoke thickened to a dense thunder-dark cloud which boiled into the summer sky, and amidst the smoke were savage tongues of flame leaping and spreading. When the hungry fire found new timber it would sometimes explode and the light would glimmer across the water and new flame would erupt into the rigging. That rigging was ablaze, each ship and brig and sloop and schooner outlined by fire until a mast burned through and then, so slowly, a blazing lattice would topple, sparks rushing upwards as the spars and lines arced downwards, and the river would hiss and steam as the masts collapsed.

The Sky Rocket, a sixteen-gun ship-privateer, was aground just beyond the bluff and in the haste to evacuate the bluff she had taken the remainder of the ammunition from the abandoned rebel batteries. Her hold was filled with powder, and the fire found the hold and the Sky Rocket exploded. The force of the blast shivered the smoke from the other burning ships, it blew timber and burning sails