Rork looked to Wake for a nod to join in the celebration but was given a shake of the head. “No need to waste the powder, Bosun. The boys’ll celebrate enough on liberty.”
Instead, the men tackled the anchor rode and halliards with a will and hauled away. Soon the schooner was sailing with the wind on her starboard beam. The trade winds of the winter dry season were starting up again, blowing clean and fresh from the southeast, having come all the way from the middle of the northern coast of Cuba hundreds of miles away. The breathless humidity of the summer months was gradually being displaced by those welcome winds that piped up and gave the air an energy that transferred to the men as well. Even the St. James seemed to feel the change in the atmosphere and showed what she was made of on the broad reach, her most favored point of sailing.
Other ships were doing the same, and in the way of sailors, a race quickly developed between the sailing vessels heading into port. The luxuries of the shore provided the prize, but they would have raced anyway. Whenever two sailing vessels were alongside each other the inevitable occurred, each bosun making small adjustments in the sail trim to exact every bit of speed out of his ship. A slow ship was considered an unlucky ship. And no sailor wanted to be on a slow ship.
Wake found himself smiling, even laughing, at the way the men gauged their progress against the competitors and shouted taunts over to them. Even without her hull being cleaned for six months, St. James held her own against the others. She didn’t win but came in as a respectable third place finisher out of eight schooners and sloops short tacking past the squadron offices and the naval wharf.
The wharf was already crowded with vessels moored alongside, so they anchored out in the harbor amidst a confusing swirl of ships coming up into the wind and backing down on their anchors, sails snapping and thundering as they luffed. Shouted orders and good-natured teasing rang throughout the anchorage as hundreds of men prepared to go ashore on liberty or supply parties.
Bumboats immediately surrounded them, plying everything imaginable to the hungry, thirsty, and lonely sailors. Rork caught Wake’s concerned glance and shouted a warning to the schooner’s crew not to deal with the men in the boats, knowing that the rum they sold was little more than watered-down fermented sugar at best, and at worst had impurities that could blind or kill. It didn’t matter that the sailors had not been paid yet and had no money on them. Those waterside vendors of pleasure would take any items as collateral or barter from the sailors, items that sometimes the men did not themselves own. Temptation was the ruin of many a sailor man, and it was the same in the cold waters of New England and the warm waters of the tropics.
Rork had the schooner’s launch swayed out and over with a hand-picked crew, trusted to row ashore for fresh provisions and not get in trouble. Wake decided to ride over to the naval station with the launch and report in to the squadron as soon as possible, in the hope that he would be told to restock the supply of food and water aboard and return up the coast with supplies and dispatches. With any luck, he could be back to Useppa Island and Linda within four days.
Wake had been through yellow fever epidemics before in Key West, but when he came ashore the people of the island looked gaunter this time, weaker and more exhausted. Even with the winds now changing into their invigorating seasonal steadiness and the dampness decreasing, the atmosphere on the island remained subdued. The sentry outside the faded whitewashed walls of the squadron’s offices looked as if he was about to fall down with weariness. Wake wondered for a moment if the quarantine had been lifted too soon, that perhaps the sickness was still spreading on the island and among the inhabitants.
A dozen other officers were waiting in the starkly furnished anteroom when Wake entered, looking up and assessing him not as an equal but as a competitor for the attention of the man who controlled their lives, Admiral Loethen. Wake noticed that most of them had an air of self-importance and were probably from larger ships just entered into the harbor, there to report on the events of the coasts and islands from Apalachicola to Cuba and the Bahamas. Self-conscious of the shabby state of even this—his best uniform—he settled into a dilapidated chair in the far corner to begin the long wait while the more senior officers had their audiences with the admiral.
A torn grimy newspaper from Trenton, New Jersey, lay on a table beside him and he picked it up to obtain the latest news of the war raging in Georgia and Virginia. It was dated September 1, 1864, just five weeks ago, and had a banner headline that proclaimed “Democrats Nominate McClellan for President!” with a smaller line underneath advising that a man named Pendleton was nominated for Vice President. Wake had heard of “Little Mac” McClellan, but the other was unknown to him. He wondered who the man was and what qualifications he possessed to help lead the nation during this war. Deciding that it really didn’t matter to a naval officer fighting in Florida, he ignored the attendant article on the politics of the presidential race and went to the war news lower on the front page.
The newspaper’s correspondents reported via fast telegraph that on just the day before, the Federal army was closing in around Atlanta and had cut the rail line from Macon and thus Confederate General Hood’s last supply route into the
