The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

high into the air where, like sky rockets, they flew to leave myriad smoke trails curving far above the river. The noise was physical, a pounding of sound that was heard in Fort George, and then other magazines exploded, as if copying the Sky Rocket’s example, and the hulls lurched, steam mixed with the churning smoke, and rats screamed in the filthy bilges as the consuming fire roared like furnaces run wild. Men ashore wept for their lost ships, and the oven-heat of the blaze touched the faces of the seamen staring in wonder from the Galatea’s foredeck. Flaming yards, their halliards burned through, dropped onto fiery decks and more hulls shattered as more gunpowder caught the fire and ripped the wooden ships apart. Anchor rodes parted and fire ships drifted and hulls collided, their flames mingling and growing, the smoke thickening and rising ever higher. Some ships had left their guns charged with shot and those guns now fired into the burning fleet. Gun-barrels collapsed through burning decks. The furnace roared, the cannon hammered, and the river hissed as the wrecks sank in ash-filthy water where charred debris drifted.

Beyond the bluff, still anchored even though she was well afloat now, the Warren was abandoned. She was bigger than either the Galatea or the Camille. She carried thirty-two guns to their twenty each, though she had no naked nymph protecting her bows. She had been built at Providence, Rhode Island, and was named for Joseph Warren, the Boston doctor who had sparked the rebellion by sending the horsemen to warn Lexington and Concord that the British were coming. Warren had been a patriot and an inspiration. He was appointed a general in the rebellious militia but, because his commission had not arrived, he had fought as a private at Bunker Hill and there he had died and the frigate was named in tribute to him, and since her launch she had captured ten rich British merchantmen. She was a lethal machine, heavily armed by the standards of other frigates, and her big eighteen-pounders were larger than any cannon aboard the smaller British frigates.

But now, as the last of her crew rowed ashore, the Warren burned. Dudley Saltonstall did not look behind to see the smoke and, once ashore, he struck straight into the woods so that the trees would hide the sight of the burning frigate, of the flames rippling fast up her rigging, of the furled sails bursting into fire, of the sparks flying and falling.

All along the river the ships burned. Not one was left.

Peleg Wadsworth watched in silence. The guns that should have kept the British at bay were being sunk to the river’s bed and the men who should have rallied and fought were scattered and leaderless. Panic had struck before Wadsworth could inspire resistance and now the great fleet was burning and the army was broken.

“What now?” James Fletcher asked. Smoke covered the sky like a pall.

“Do you remember the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego?” Wadsworth asked. “From the Bible?”

James had not expected that answer and was puzzled for a moment, then he nodded his head. “Mother told us that tale, sir,” he said. “Weren’t they the men who were thrown into the fire?”

“And all the king’s men watched them, and saw they were not harmed by the fiery furnace,” Wadsworth said, remembering the sermon he had heard in Boston’s Christ Church the day before the fleet sailed. “The scripture tells us the fire had no power over those men.” He paused, watching the frigate burn. “No power,” he said again and he thought of his dear wife and of the child waiting to be born, then smiled at James. “Now come,” he said, “you and I have work to do.”

The remaining powder in the Warren’s magazine exploded. The foremast flew upwards, spewing smoke and sparks and fire, the hull burst apart along its flame-bright seams, the sudden light seared the shivering river red and the frigate disappeared. It was over.

From an Order in Council, Boston, dated September 6th, 1779:Therefore Ordered that Lieutenant Colonel Paul Revere be and he hereby is directed Immediately to Resign the Command of Castle Island and the other Fortresses in the Harbor of Boston to Captain Perez Cushing, and remove himself from the Castle and Fortresses aforesaid and repair to his dwelling house in Boston and there continue untill the matter complained of can be duly inquired into. . . .

From a Petition of Richard Sykes to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, September 28th, 1779:Your Petitioner was . . . a Sergeant of Marines on board the Ship General Putnam when an attack was made on one of the Redoubts . . . your Petitioner was made a Prisoner and was carried from Penobscot to New York in the Reasonable Man of War was stript of almost all his Clothing . . . Your Petitioner prays your Honors would allow him Pay for the cloathing he lost . . . viz 2 Linnen Shirts 3 Pair Stockings 1 pair Buck Skin Breeches 1 pair Cloth Breeches 1 Hat I Knapsack 1 Handkerchief 1 pair Shoes.

Historical Note

The Penobscot Expedition of July and August 1779 is an actual event and I have tried, within the constraints of fiction, to describe what happened. The occupation of Majabigwaduce was intended to establish a British province that would be called New Ireland and would serve as a naval base and as a shelter for loyalists fleeing rebel persecution. The government of Massachusetts decided to “captivate, kill, or destroy” the invaders and so launched the expedition which is often described as the worst naval disaster in United States history before Pearl Harbor. The fleet which sailed to the Penobscot River was the largest assembled by the rebels during the War of Independence. The lists of ships in the various sources differ in detail, and I assume that two or three transport ships must have left before Sir George Collier’s arrival, but the bulk of the fleet was present, which made it a terrible disaster both for the Continental Navy and for Massachusetts. The fourteen-gun brig Pallas had been sent to patrol beyond the mouth of the Penobscot River and so was absent when Sir George Collier’s relief ships arrived, and she alone survived the debacle. Two American ships, the Hunter and the Hampden, were captured (some sources add the schooner Nancy and nine other transports), and the remaining ships were burned. Doctor John Calef, in his official position as the Clerk of the Penobscot Council (appointed by the British), listed thirty-seven rebel ships as taken or burned, and that seems broadly correct.

The blame for the disaster has been almost universally placed on the shoulders of Commodore Dudley Saltonstall. Saltonstall was no hero at Penobscot, and he appears to have been an awkward, unsociable man, but he certainly does not bear the full responsibility for the expedition’s failure. Saltonstall was court-martialed (though no record of the trial exists, so it might never have convened) and dismissed from the Continental Navy. The only other man to be court-martialed for his conduct at Majabigwaduce was Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Revere.

It is an extraordinary coincidence that two men present at Majabigwaduce in the summer of 1779 were to be the subjects of famous poems. Paul Revere was celebrated by Henry Longfellow, and it is Revere’s presence at Majabigwaduce that gives the expedition much of its interest. Few men are so honored as a hero of the American Revolution. There is a handsome equestrian statue to Revere in Boston and, in New England at least, he is regarded as the region’s paramount patriot and revolutionary hero, yet he does not owe his extraordinary fame to his actions at Majabigwaduce, nor even to his midnight ride, but to Henry Longfellow’s poem, which was published in The Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1861.Listen, my children, and you shall hearOf the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

And Americans have been hearing of the midnight ride ever since, mostly oblivious that the poem plays merry-hell with the true facts and ascribes to Revere the heroics of other men. This was deliberate; Longfellow, writing at the outbreak of the American Civil War, was striving to create a patriotic legend, not tell an accurate history. Revere did indeed ride to warn Concord and Lexington that the British regulars were marching from Boston, but he did not complete the mission. Many other men rode that night and have been forgotten while Paul Revere, solely thanks to Henry Longfellow, gallops into posterity as the undying patriot and rebel. Before the poem was published Revere was remembered as a regional folk-hero, one among many who had been active in the patriot cause, but in 1861 he entered legend. He was indeed a passionate patriot, and he was vigorous in his opposition to