Annapolis, page 22
“Anything to say for yourself, sailor?” asked Porter.
“It was a long night, sir. We be hungry. I was pointin’ to my belly and sayin’ that was where the glory was.”
A smile crossed Porter’s face. “Belly and balls are close by, Reverend.”
“My belly was rumblin’, Captain, and disturbin’ the men. I’m a hungry man.”
Porter looked at Jason. “He’s your watch. Recommend punishment.” Then Porter turned to check the binnacle.
“Stripes,” said Adams to Jason. “Men must be made to respect the Lord.”
“They must be made to respect their officers first,” said Gideon. “Leniency.”
Jason fixed his eyes on Hazen. Here was a test of a man’s ability to command. As always, Jason settled on a matter of honor to see him through. “You lied to the captain, Hazen. It was your balls you were pointing to. But for that, I’d consider leniency.”
“Then stripes it is,” said the chaplain.
“No,” said Jason. “A flogged sailor is no good to his mates. He’ll wear the yoke instead, like a berthing deck thief.”
The yoke was a nagging misery, a heavy wooden collar that the sailor wore whenever he was not on watch. A misery, but better than having no back skin.
“Next time, Hazen, we’ll yoke your balls.” Jason dismissed the sailor to the custody of the marine guard. Then he looked at the chaplain and Gideon Browne. “Not an offense that calls for stripes, nor one that deserves leniency.”
The chaplain stalked off.
Gideon restrained himself from muttering a few words of compliment on his friend’s growing wisdom.
But Captain Porter looked up from the binnacle and said, “Mr. Stafford, it seems that you are learning to remember your shrouds.”
AND ON THEY sailed.
Day after day, the wind whipped, and the sea struck bow with a steady and simple rhythm, the misery of it made all the worse by the monotony. Water pounded up and over the bows, up and over and across the spar deck, up and over the hatch coamings and down the companion-ways, down to the gundeck and the berthing deck, down to where men sought escape by the warmth of the galley stove or in the tight-wrapped dampness of their hammocks.
Porter had planned for the worst—a month to round the Horn, a month to run up the coast to Valparaiso. His purser’s report for February 1 had shown 184 barrels of beef, 114 barrels of pork, 21,763 pounds of bread, 1,741 gallons of spirits, 201 gallons of vinegar, 108 gallons of molasses. On that day he had ordered half rations on beef, two-thirds on everything else, so that he would be certain to feed his sailors all the way to the next stop.
By February 20 the reduced rations and the pounding miseries had drained the men of spirit. Some sailors had even begun to augment their diet with the only fresh meat left aboard: their pet monkeys and the ship rats. So Porter ordered a barrel of peas opened. The cold weather had tamped down the men’s thirst, leaving fresh water for boiling, and the sweet taste of boiled peas might bring some cheer.
Gideon went below with a quartermaster and Midshipman Farragut, who seemed curious, serious, more than willing to assume any task, even command, if it was offered.
Gideon offered him a pinchbar and told him to open the barrel.
A dozen sailors drew closer. The crew was divided into eight-man messes, and each mess elected a man who saw to the rations for his mates. These twelve had come with pots and buckets to take their share of peas for their messmates.
“Peas is what we wants, lads,” said Seaman Reuben Marshall, a brawny brute with a sloping brow and a penchant for philosophical pronouncements that were hard to understand because he had lost his upper teeth in a Boston bar fight. “Peas’ll make us fart sweet parfum the whole night through. Green peas to remind us of the green fields of home. Sweet farts and sweet thoughts, eh, lads?”
“You wants peas ’cause they make good mush,” said Crab Louse Tom Brannock, oldest seaman on the ship, whose nickname derived from his filthy clothes and scrofulous beard, his crabbed gait, and his ability to anger his mates over anything. “A toothless sailor needs baby’s mush more ’n meat.”
“I’m more man than you—” Marshall raised his pot at the Crab Louse.
“Stand down,” snapped Gideon, “and look on a treat for a hungry crew.”
The lid of the barrel squeaked open. The sailors leaned forward. And Gideon almost retched.
Instead of dried green peas, awaiting water to boil them back to life, the barrel was alive already… with worms. No more of the peas remained than hulls and chaff. The rest of the barrel was squirming with inch-long black-tipped white worms, worms grown fat on food that would have filled many bellies.
“Sweet farts and sweet dreams, is it?” growled the Crab Louse. “Maggots is what it is.”
Reuben Marshall plunged his pot into the seething mess. “Maggot soup, lads.”
“Maggot soup?” said young Farragut, eyes widening.
“Aye.” Marshall laughed. “A little salt, a little pepper—”
“Over the side with it,” ordered Gideon Browne.
Marshall looked down at the worms in his pot. “Even these?”
“Even those,” said Gideon.
And the big, brawny seaman began to cry. His eyes filled with tears, and he said, in a soft voice that made his desperation all the more convincing, “I ain’t sure how long I can handle it, lads.”
“We’ll weather it.” The Crab Louse spat into the barrel. “We don’t, we dies. And I’m for livin’ and prizin’ and wettin’ me pecker in them Sandwich doxies.”
“I ain’t sure.” Reuben Marshall pressed a finger to one nostril and blew out the contents of the other. “I ain’t sure about any of it.”
“None of us is,” said Seaman Will Whitney, a slender and delicate young man who struck Gideon as altogether too gentle for the berthing deck.
Just then the ship lurched and a voice from above cried for all hands.
Reuben Marshall shuddered as mightily as the ship itself. “All hands” meant the captain sensed an emergency, and men would be sent aloft, into danger that a landlubber would find inconceivable.
From Gideon Browne’s Journal, February 22:
Brawny sailors cry at the sight of worms. The skin peels from my feet, which are constantly wet. And the ship rides like a cork in the Kennebec. After four days of beating to westward, clearing skies enabled us to to take a lunar sighting and showed that for all our suffering, the easterly set of the current left us a full degree worse than we were on the eighteenth.
The captain took pains to hide his disappointment from the crew. He told the officers that no information about our position should be given, as it is now established fact that depressed spirits can bring on the scurvy.
Two days later, they had battled their way back to eighty degrees, and the wind shifted at last to the southwest.
So Porter mustered the crew and told them that their ordeal had come to an end. They had weathered the Horn and were turning north. In celebration, he said, he was increasing the water ration to allow them tea twice a day.
Gideon and Jason stood behind Porter, who stood ramrod straight in his best blue uniform. Beyond him were nearly three hundred faces—haggard, surly, hungry, but every hard eye fixed on the man who had brought them this far.
“I commend you for your conduct during our boisterous passage.” Porter squared himself on the rolling deck. “And I promise you more than tea as reward in the Pacific.”
The girls. This was the dream that had kept many of them going. The mere mention of it brought a loud cheer.
Gideon glanced at Jason, who kept his eyes fixed on Porter’s back, as if he would not acknowledge the possibility of temptation.
“Now, then.” Porter’s voice rose above the wind. “As an indulgence in promise of future reward, I declare a general pardon on men wearing the yoke for petty offenses.”
The crewmen cheered again.
“On one condition!” Porter threw up his hands. “The first offender brought to the gangway from below will receive two dozen lashes, as an example.”
Jason looked down at his shoe tops.
The boatswain went to the gangway and called for the yoked sailors. The odds were good that Badmouth Ben would not appear first, but he did, and the captain ordered that he be grappled to the grate for flogging.
Two dozen lashes stripped the back of Badmouth Ben almost completely. The crew watched in silence, all knowing that it might as easily have been them. Chaplain Adams folded his arms and looked up at the heavens, as though God had delivered his opinion after all. Jason wished that he had been more lenient.
And Gideon wrote in his journal: “After punishment, I took Hazen to sick bay to have his wounds salted. He did not scream, as men often do when salt touches the pulpy flesh left after a flogging. Instead, he cursed. He cursed the surgeon’s mate, who salted him. He cursed Lieutenant Stafford, who yoked him in the first place. He cursed David Porter, once he knew why he had been flogged. And when I warned him against cursing the captain, he cursed me. The man can curse.”
FOUR DAYS LATER, the Essex reached a latitude of 50 degrees, several hundred miles up the Patagonian coast. To celebrate, Porter brought together the surgeon, the chaplain, and five of his lieutenants—Downes, Wilmer, Cowell, Stafford, and Browne—for a meal of salt beef, a few peas that had escaped the worms, a glass of port, and a round of cheese.
“We’re fairly out of danger, gentlemen. Tomorrow we bring up light spars and guns and become a warship again. We make for Valparaiso, then the Galápagos.”
“Then the Sandwich Islands,” said Lieutenant Downes.
Chaplain Adams made an irritated snort, like a sleeping dog whose tail had been stepped on.
“We won’t see them for some time,” said Porter.
Jason trimmed a small piece of cheese, a pungent cheddar that tingled on his tongue. “We could be six months in the Galápagos, sir.”
“It will take that long for word of us to reach the admiralty and for a squadron to come after us.” Porter leaned back and sipped his port, at ease with himself and the feat of seamanship he had accomplished. “That’s when we run for paradise.”
“May I say that you disciplined the right man the other day,” offered the chaplain. “I prayed that the Lord would send Hazen first. Justice was served.”
“Command was served.” Porter filled the chaplain’s glass. “Were I serving simple justice, I would have flogged them all. Flog a sailor and he’ll hate you. But he’ll respect you. When you order him aloft in a gale, he’ll go because he fears your discipline more than he fears the storm.”
“And the sailors you spare?” asked Gideon.
“They’ll remember their mate’s bloody back and your mercy. They’ll take to the masts like they’ll take to the Sandwich Islands.”
“To the Sandwich Islands,” said Lieutenant Downes.
Porter smiled indulgently at his second-in-command.
“Hear, hear!” Reverend Adams surprised them by raising his glass and forcing a smile up into his cheeks. “To bringing God’s faith to the heathens.”
Jason raised his glass, for a man of God deserved respect. “To God’s faith.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” said the chaplain. “I shall count upon your example when we reach the islands.”
“And I shall count upon all of you,” said Porter. “In doubling the Horn, we’ve shown that there is nothing too daring for men who are resolute yet flexible, aggressive yet wise. Now we’ll make history together.”
There was no bombast in his voice, no grasping for drama in his delivery. The captain’s calmness, thought Gideon, made his words all the more potent.
v
Into Hell
But Porter’s words were premature, for that afternoon, the southwest wind freshened, then swung around to the west, and the Essex entered what Gideon Browne described in his journal as “a hell of wind and water.”
There was no man aboard who could remember anything as terrifying, no man aboard who ever felt more insignificant beneath the ranges of ocean that slammed again and again onto the Essex.
The earlier storms were like July days by comparison. It blew so hard they thought it might blow itself out on the second day, but it blew harder instead, blew so hard that the ship would have been torn apart if she’d carried too much canvas.
But she had to carry some, or she would lose headway and the wind would pound her onto the Patagonian coast, which lay to the east, where the scudding clouds stopped and boiled against the great wall of the Andes. So the Essex went with storm staysails and close-reefed maintops and steady prayers from Chaplain Adams.
Jason was slammed against the rail on the second day and bruised his hip. His eyes burned constantly from the unceasing salt spray. He shivered from the water that found its way down his neck. But he stood every watch with his men.
Gideon was miserable, but he was not bored. Ugly boils sprouted at his cuffs and in a ring around his neck, where the skin had been rubbed by the collar of his sea cape. And he came to dread his watch only a bit more than the strange hours of soaked sleep, when he dreamed he saw the ship from afar, as God might see it, a collection of nailed-together trees, string, and canvas, a tiny vessel lost and alone, orbiting the continents in the immensity of the sea, a vessel that each night diminished to no more than a dot, then disappeared forever into the endless waves.
On the third night, his dream took life.
By then the pumps could barely keep up. And neither could the men. Contused legs and skulls, sprained wrists and ankles, joined the usual diarrheas and venereal diseases of sick bay. Porter himself had been thrown to the deck, wrenching his knee so badly that he was forced to his cabin, where he made plans for throwing over his guns, a last resort if the ship should founder. Jason’s hip pained him like a knife. But by some miracle of training, skill, and instinct, not a single man had been lost.
Around six bells—two-thirty—Gideon was awakened by the pitching of the ship, or maybe by the throbbing pain of his boils. So he thought about Antonia. He tried to remember the perfumes of her body, tried to recall the feel of her smooth, warm skin. But for all his conjuring, she did not appear, clothed or unclothed, to take him back to sleep.
So he rolled to the deck and pulled on the pair of socks he had dried at the galley stove during the last watch. Then he slipped his feet back into his wet boots and left his tiny stateroom, feeling his way past the swinging hammocks until he reached the sick bay. He found the surgeon and his mates asleep, a state that he would have paid handsomely to enter, so he left them to their dreams and went staggering up to the gundeck.
There, Reuben Marshall, philosopher seaman, was tending the big Brodie stove, which was kept lit through every watch so that the men could have someplace in this horror of wind and sea to find a bit of warmth.
A dozen sailors and a few prisoners from prizes taken in the Atlantic were clustered around the stove. The prisoners were not confined, as some helped to sail the ship, and all knew that escape or rebellion were impossible. Many, in fact, rebelled only when Porter tried to put them ashore, because they preferred life in the American navy to their own.
All of them stiffened at the approach of an officer.
“At ease,” grumbled Gideon.
“So damn tired you can’t sleep, eh, Lieutenant?” Reuben pointed to the sailors, hollow-eyed skeletons in the swinging lanternlight. “Join the crew.”
Gideon held out his left wrist and pointed to the throbbing red mound beside the knucklebone. “I’ve heard that you’re good with a knife.”
“That I am, sir. That I am.” Reuben pulled a splicing knife from his belt. “It does a man good to bring another man relief from the pain we’re in.”
“Well said.” Gideon rolled up his sleeve. “Now lance the boil.”
ON THE QUARTERDECK, not even Jason Stafford could stand watch near the stern lights, for anyone near the rail might be swept away in an instant. So he tied a lifeline around his waist and stood by the helm, where he could shout orders to the two sailors steering the ship.
Normally, one man could handle the helm, but it was a double wheel for a reason: in dirty weather, when wind pulled one way and water pulled the other, two strong seamen were needed to hold the ship on point, two strong seamen like Jasper Reed, freed slave from Annapolis, and Badmouth Ben.
It had been a hard watch. The wind was no longer consistent in direction or intensity. The storm was entering what Jason hoped would be a final phase, and he meant to outlast it, just as he meant to follow orders and hold his course.
“You’re falling off!” he cried at Hazen for the fourth time that night.
Hazen gritted his teeth. “I’ll give up the wheel in a second, if you want. Go below and stand by the Brodie, ’stead of weatherin’ this shitfuck night!”
Jasper Reed’s eyes widened. “Better say ‘sir,’ Badmouth Ben.”
“Aye, Lieutenant, sir. It’s a shitfuck night, Lieutenant, sir.”
“Just stay on point.” Jason turned away, stood by the mizzenmast pinrail. He would give no embittered seaman a chance to vent his anger.
Then he noticed a strange smoothing of the waves. Later he would recall it as the sea taking a breath, sucking in all its power for a single blast.
He looked down the length of the ship, marked by dots of light where lanterns hung amidships and at the bow, and by shafts of light that rose feebly from the gangways. He never considered the insignificance of the lights in the consuming blackness around them. His job was simply to keep those lights moving steadily and smoothly, illuminating the blackness as they sailed through it.
And so he was utterly shocked when the blackness consumed the lights all at once.
AT THE SAME moment, the tip of Reuben’s knife touched Gideon’s boil—a little blood, a little fluid, and then the tallow-colored core popped out.
An instant later, the larboard gunports were burst in.
A broadside of water all but crushed the Essex from close range.
It exploded into the gundeck, slammed Gideon Browne against a timber, then lifted the deck and tilted it in a sickening roll.
“It was a long night, sir. We be hungry. I was pointin’ to my belly and sayin’ that was where the glory was.”
A smile crossed Porter’s face. “Belly and balls are close by, Reverend.”
“My belly was rumblin’, Captain, and disturbin’ the men. I’m a hungry man.”
Porter looked at Jason. “He’s your watch. Recommend punishment.” Then Porter turned to check the binnacle.
“Stripes,” said Adams to Jason. “Men must be made to respect the Lord.”
“They must be made to respect their officers first,” said Gideon. “Leniency.”
Jason fixed his eyes on Hazen. Here was a test of a man’s ability to command. As always, Jason settled on a matter of honor to see him through. “You lied to the captain, Hazen. It was your balls you were pointing to. But for that, I’d consider leniency.”
“Then stripes it is,” said the chaplain.
“No,” said Jason. “A flogged sailor is no good to his mates. He’ll wear the yoke instead, like a berthing deck thief.”
The yoke was a nagging misery, a heavy wooden collar that the sailor wore whenever he was not on watch. A misery, but better than having no back skin.
“Next time, Hazen, we’ll yoke your balls.” Jason dismissed the sailor to the custody of the marine guard. Then he looked at the chaplain and Gideon Browne. “Not an offense that calls for stripes, nor one that deserves leniency.”
The chaplain stalked off.
Gideon restrained himself from muttering a few words of compliment on his friend’s growing wisdom.
But Captain Porter looked up from the binnacle and said, “Mr. Stafford, it seems that you are learning to remember your shrouds.”
AND ON THEY sailed.
Day after day, the wind whipped, and the sea struck bow with a steady and simple rhythm, the misery of it made all the worse by the monotony. Water pounded up and over the bows, up and over and across the spar deck, up and over the hatch coamings and down the companion-ways, down to the gundeck and the berthing deck, down to where men sought escape by the warmth of the galley stove or in the tight-wrapped dampness of their hammocks.
Porter had planned for the worst—a month to round the Horn, a month to run up the coast to Valparaiso. His purser’s report for February 1 had shown 184 barrels of beef, 114 barrels of pork, 21,763 pounds of bread, 1,741 gallons of spirits, 201 gallons of vinegar, 108 gallons of molasses. On that day he had ordered half rations on beef, two-thirds on everything else, so that he would be certain to feed his sailors all the way to the next stop.
By February 20 the reduced rations and the pounding miseries had drained the men of spirit. Some sailors had even begun to augment their diet with the only fresh meat left aboard: their pet monkeys and the ship rats. So Porter ordered a barrel of peas opened. The cold weather had tamped down the men’s thirst, leaving fresh water for boiling, and the sweet taste of boiled peas might bring some cheer.
Gideon went below with a quartermaster and Midshipman Farragut, who seemed curious, serious, more than willing to assume any task, even command, if it was offered.
Gideon offered him a pinchbar and told him to open the barrel.
A dozen sailors drew closer. The crew was divided into eight-man messes, and each mess elected a man who saw to the rations for his mates. These twelve had come with pots and buckets to take their share of peas for their messmates.
“Peas is what we wants, lads,” said Seaman Reuben Marshall, a brawny brute with a sloping brow and a penchant for philosophical pronouncements that were hard to understand because he had lost his upper teeth in a Boston bar fight. “Peas’ll make us fart sweet parfum the whole night through. Green peas to remind us of the green fields of home. Sweet farts and sweet thoughts, eh, lads?”
“You wants peas ’cause they make good mush,” said Crab Louse Tom Brannock, oldest seaman on the ship, whose nickname derived from his filthy clothes and scrofulous beard, his crabbed gait, and his ability to anger his mates over anything. “A toothless sailor needs baby’s mush more ’n meat.”
“I’m more man than you—” Marshall raised his pot at the Crab Louse.
“Stand down,” snapped Gideon, “and look on a treat for a hungry crew.”
The lid of the barrel squeaked open. The sailors leaned forward. And Gideon almost retched.
Instead of dried green peas, awaiting water to boil them back to life, the barrel was alive already… with worms. No more of the peas remained than hulls and chaff. The rest of the barrel was squirming with inch-long black-tipped white worms, worms grown fat on food that would have filled many bellies.
“Sweet farts and sweet dreams, is it?” growled the Crab Louse. “Maggots is what it is.”
Reuben Marshall plunged his pot into the seething mess. “Maggot soup, lads.”
“Maggot soup?” said young Farragut, eyes widening.
“Aye.” Marshall laughed. “A little salt, a little pepper—”
“Over the side with it,” ordered Gideon Browne.
Marshall looked down at the worms in his pot. “Even these?”
“Even those,” said Gideon.
And the big, brawny seaman began to cry. His eyes filled with tears, and he said, in a soft voice that made his desperation all the more convincing, “I ain’t sure how long I can handle it, lads.”
“We’ll weather it.” The Crab Louse spat into the barrel. “We don’t, we dies. And I’m for livin’ and prizin’ and wettin’ me pecker in them Sandwich doxies.”
“I ain’t sure.” Reuben Marshall pressed a finger to one nostril and blew out the contents of the other. “I ain’t sure about any of it.”
“None of us is,” said Seaman Will Whitney, a slender and delicate young man who struck Gideon as altogether too gentle for the berthing deck.
Just then the ship lurched and a voice from above cried for all hands.
Reuben Marshall shuddered as mightily as the ship itself. “All hands” meant the captain sensed an emergency, and men would be sent aloft, into danger that a landlubber would find inconceivable.
From Gideon Browne’s Journal, February 22:
Brawny sailors cry at the sight of worms. The skin peels from my feet, which are constantly wet. And the ship rides like a cork in the Kennebec. After four days of beating to westward, clearing skies enabled us to to take a lunar sighting and showed that for all our suffering, the easterly set of the current left us a full degree worse than we were on the eighteenth.
The captain took pains to hide his disappointment from the crew. He told the officers that no information about our position should be given, as it is now established fact that depressed spirits can bring on the scurvy.
Two days later, they had battled their way back to eighty degrees, and the wind shifted at last to the southwest.
So Porter mustered the crew and told them that their ordeal had come to an end. They had weathered the Horn and were turning north. In celebration, he said, he was increasing the water ration to allow them tea twice a day.
Gideon and Jason stood behind Porter, who stood ramrod straight in his best blue uniform. Beyond him were nearly three hundred faces—haggard, surly, hungry, but every hard eye fixed on the man who had brought them this far.
“I commend you for your conduct during our boisterous passage.” Porter squared himself on the rolling deck. “And I promise you more than tea as reward in the Pacific.”
The girls. This was the dream that had kept many of them going. The mere mention of it brought a loud cheer.
Gideon glanced at Jason, who kept his eyes fixed on Porter’s back, as if he would not acknowledge the possibility of temptation.
“Now, then.” Porter’s voice rose above the wind. “As an indulgence in promise of future reward, I declare a general pardon on men wearing the yoke for petty offenses.”
The crewmen cheered again.
“On one condition!” Porter threw up his hands. “The first offender brought to the gangway from below will receive two dozen lashes, as an example.”
Jason looked down at his shoe tops.
The boatswain went to the gangway and called for the yoked sailors. The odds were good that Badmouth Ben would not appear first, but he did, and the captain ordered that he be grappled to the grate for flogging.
Two dozen lashes stripped the back of Badmouth Ben almost completely. The crew watched in silence, all knowing that it might as easily have been them. Chaplain Adams folded his arms and looked up at the heavens, as though God had delivered his opinion after all. Jason wished that he had been more lenient.
And Gideon wrote in his journal: “After punishment, I took Hazen to sick bay to have his wounds salted. He did not scream, as men often do when salt touches the pulpy flesh left after a flogging. Instead, he cursed. He cursed the surgeon’s mate, who salted him. He cursed Lieutenant Stafford, who yoked him in the first place. He cursed David Porter, once he knew why he had been flogged. And when I warned him against cursing the captain, he cursed me. The man can curse.”
FOUR DAYS LATER, the Essex reached a latitude of 50 degrees, several hundred miles up the Patagonian coast. To celebrate, Porter brought together the surgeon, the chaplain, and five of his lieutenants—Downes, Wilmer, Cowell, Stafford, and Browne—for a meal of salt beef, a few peas that had escaped the worms, a glass of port, and a round of cheese.
“We’re fairly out of danger, gentlemen. Tomorrow we bring up light spars and guns and become a warship again. We make for Valparaiso, then the Galápagos.”
“Then the Sandwich Islands,” said Lieutenant Downes.
Chaplain Adams made an irritated snort, like a sleeping dog whose tail had been stepped on.
“We won’t see them for some time,” said Porter.
Jason trimmed a small piece of cheese, a pungent cheddar that tingled on his tongue. “We could be six months in the Galápagos, sir.”
“It will take that long for word of us to reach the admiralty and for a squadron to come after us.” Porter leaned back and sipped his port, at ease with himself and the feat of seamanship he had accomplished. “That’s when we run for paradise.”
“May I say that you disciplined the right man the other day,” offered the chaplain. “I prayed that the Lord would send Hazen first. Justice was served.”
“Command was served.” Porter filled the chaplain’s glass. “Were I serving simple justice, I would have flogged them all. Flog a sailor and he’ll hate you. But he’ll respect you. When you order him aloft in a gale, he’ll go because he fears your discipline more than he fears the storm.”
“And the sailors you spare?” asked Gideon.
“They’ll remember their mate’s bloody back and your mercy. They’ll take to the masts like they’ll take to the Sandwich Islands.”
“To the Sandwich Islands,” said Lieutenant Downes.
Porter smiled indulgently at his second-in-command.
“Hear, hear!” Reverend Adams surprised them by raising his glass and forcing a smile up into his cheeks. “To bringing God’s faith to the heathens.”
Jason raised his glass, for a man of God deserved respect. “To God’s faith.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” said the chaplain. “I shall count upon your example when we reach the islands.”
“And I shall count upon all of you,” said Porter. “In doubling the Horn, we’ve shown that there is nothing too daring for men who are resolute yet flexible, aggressive yet wise. Now we’ll make history together.”
There was no bombast in his voice, no grasping for drama in his delivery. The captain’s calmness, thought Gideon, made his words all the more potent.
v
Into Hell
But Porter’s words were premature, for that afternoon, the southwest wind freshened, then swung around to the west, and the Essex entered what Gideon Browne described in his journal as “a hell of wind and water.”
There was no man aboard who could remember anything as terrifying, no man aboard who ever felt more insignificant beneath the ranges of ocean that slammed again and again onto the Essex.
The earlier storms were like July days by comparison. It blew so hard they thought it might blow itself out on the second day, but it blew harder instead, blew so hard that the ship would have been torn apart if she’d carried too much canvas.
But she had to carry some, or she would lose headway and the wind would pound her onto the Patagonian coast, which lay to the east, where the scudding clouds stopped and boiled against the great wall of the Andes. So the Essex went with storm staysails and close-reefed maintops and steady prayers from Chaplain Adams.
Jason was slammed against the rail on the second day and bruised his hip. His eyes burned constantly from the unceasing salt spray. He shivered from the water that found its way down his neck. But he stood every watch with his men.
Gideon was miserable, but he was not bored. Ugly boils sprouted at his cuffs and in a ring around his neck, where the skin had been rubbed by the collar of his sea cape. And he came to dread his watch only a bit more than the strange hours of soaked sleep, when he dreamed he saw the ship from afar, as God might see it, a collection of nailed-together trees, string, and canvas, a tiny vessel lost and alone, orbiting the continents in the immensity of the sea, a vessel that each night diminished to no more than a dot, then disappeared forever into the endless waves.
On the third night, his dream took life.
By then the pumps could barely keep up. And neither could the men. Contused legs and skulls, sprained wrists and ankles, joined the usual diarrheas and venereal diseases of sick bay. Porter himself had been thrown to the deck, wrenching his knee so badly that he was forced to his cabin, where he made plans for throwing over his guns, a last resort if the ship should founder. Jason’s hip pained him like a knife. But by some miracle of training, skill, and instinct, not a single man had been lost.
Around six bells—two-thirty—Gideon was awakened by the pitching of the ship, or maybe by the throbbing pain of his boils. So he thought about Antonia. He tried to remember the perfumes of her body, tried to recall the feel of her smooth, warm skin. But for all his conjuring, she did not appear, clothed or unclothed, to take him back to sleep.
So he rolled to the deck and pulled on the pair of socks he had dried at the galley stove during the last watch. Then he slipped his feet back into his wet boots and left his tiny stateroom, feeling his way past the swinging hammocks until he reached the sick bay. He found the surgeon and his mates asleep, a state that he would have paid handsomely to enter, so he left them to their dreams and went staggering up to the gundeck.
There, Reuben Marshall, philosopher seaman, was tending the big Brodie stove, which was kept lit through every watch so that the men could have someplace in this horror of wind and sea to find a bit of warmth.
A dozen sailors and a few prisoners from prizes taken in the Atlantic were clustered around the stove. The prisoners were not confined, as some helped to sail the ship, and all knew that escape or rebellion were impossible. Many, in fact, rebelled only when Porter tried to put them ashore, because they preferred life in the American navy to their own.
All of them stiffened at the approach of an officer.
“At ease,” grumbled Gideon.
“So damn tired you can’t sleep, eh, Lieutenant?” Reuben pointed to the sailors, hollow-eyed skeletons in the swinging lanternlight. “Join the crew.”
Gideon held out his left wrist and pointed to the throbbing red mound beside the knucklebone. “I’ve heard that you’re good with a knife.”
“That I am, sir. That I am.” Reuben pulled a splicing knife from his belt. “It does a man good to bring another man relief from the pain we’re in.”
“Well said.” Gideon rolled up his sleeve. “Now lance the boil.”
ON THE QUARTERDECK, not even Jason Stafford could stand watch near the stern lights, for anyone near the rail might be swept away in an instant. So he tied a lifeline around his waist and stood by the helm, where he could shout orders to the two sailors steering the ship.
Normally, one man could handle the helm, but it was a double wheel for a reason: in dirty weather, when wind pulled one way and water pulled the other, two strong seamen were needed to hold the ship on point, two strong seamen like Jasper Reed, freed slave from Annapolis, and Badmouth Ben.
It had been a hard watch. The wind was no longer consistent in direction or intensity. The storm was entering what Jason hoped would be a final phase, and he meant to outlast it, just as he meant to follow orders and hold his course.
“You’re falling off!” he cried at Hazen for the fourth time that night.
Hazen gritted his teeth. “I’ll give up the wheel in a second, if you want. Go below and stand by the Brodie, ’stead of weatherin’ this shitfuck night!”
Jasper Reed’s eyes widened. “Better say ‘sir,’ Badmouth Ben.”
“Aye, Lieutenant, sir. It’s a shitfuck night, Lieutenant, sir.”
“Just stay on point.” Jason turned away, stood by the mizzenmast pinrail. He would give no embittered seaman a chance to vent his anger.
Then he noticed a strange smoothing of the waves. Later he would recall it as the sea taking a breath, sucking in all its power for a single blast.
He looked down the length of the ship, marked by dots of light where lanterns hung amidships and at the bow, and by shafts of light that rose feebly from the gangways. He never considered the insignificance of the lights in the consuming blackness around them. His job was simply to keep those lights moving steadily and smoothly, illuminating the blackness as they sailed through it.
And so he was utterly shocked when the blackness consumed the lights all at once.
AT THE SAME moment, the tip of Reuben’s knife touched Gideon’s boil—a little blood, a little fluid, and then the tallow-colored core popped out.
An instant later, the larboard gunports were burst in.
A broadside of water all but crushed the Essex from close range.
It exploded into the gundeck, slammed Gideon Browne against a timber, then lifted the deck and tilted it in a sickening roll.
