Brig of War Read online

  The tour went well. Decatur could hardly avoid the realization that while he was liked and respected by his officers, he was loved by the people. Dressed in his homespun coat and straw hat, he looked as much a foredeck hand as any of them, and he mixed well, while Favian, uniformed, with his presentation sword, pistols stuffed into his waistband, and collar open in the fashion set by Lord Byron, followed him over the deck, smiled obediently at his jokes, and glared with eagle eye to make absolutely certain the captain was not disturbed by the sight of gear not properly stowed or lashed down, rust spots not scoured out of cannonballs, or side tackles not overhauled and clear for running.

  Toward the end of his procession Decatur was approached by one of the ship’s boys, Jack Creamer, asking to be placed on the ship’s rolls. He was only ten years of age, and the legal limit was twelve; young Creamer, the orphaned son of a dead crewman, had been put aboard unofficially after artfully pleading his way on board.

  “Why d’you want to be on the muster roll, my lad?” Decatur asked.

  “So I can draw my share of the prize money when we take the enemy, sir.”

  Cheeky little banker, Favian thought; but Creamer’s reasoning provoked a laugh, and any laugh in the tense moments before battle was a good sign, so Decatur airily acceded to the request. Favian, as he made a mental note to record the boy’s age as twelve on the muster roll, knew full well that it would not be Decatur who would have to answer the inevitable inquiry from the Secretary of the Navy as to why and how a small boy had suddenly appeared aboard the United States, in mid-Atlantic, in the moments before a battle. Such correspondence was entrusted to the executive officer as a matter of course, and Favian, anticipating the volumes of paperwork this little patriotic tableau would generate, ground his teeth and tried not to think of how much his life would be simplified if, in the ensuing action, little Creamer’s head were knocked off by a cannonball.

  Decatur went up the companion to the spar deck, joked with the marines, the trimmers, and the crews of the spar deck carronades, and then returned to the roundhouse, peering at the Macedonian through his glass. The British frigate was still about three miles off, edging down slowly; she had raised three battle flags— spots of color against the white sails, the blue sky— visible to Favian without the use of a telescope.

  “I don’t like her having the weather gage,” Decatur said, his eye fixed to the long glass. “I’d like to try our rates of speed.”

  “We could go about and try to take the weather position, sir,” Favian offered.

  “Ye-es,” Decatur said slowly. “Wear ship. We’ll see if Carden wants to keep the weather gage.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Mr. Sloat, stand by to wear ship!”

  Sloat, the sailing master, nodded and sent the trimmers running to the sheets, tacks, and braces. “Manned and ready, sir,” he reported.

  “Rise tacks and sheets.” As Favian gave the order, he could see Decatur out of the corner of his eye, standing with the long glass tucked under one arm, staring pensively at the enemy ship, paying no attention to the efficient work of the sail trimmers as they clewed the big mainsail up to the yard. Favian wondered if Decatur was remembering the discussions in Constitution’s wardroom, years ago, off Tripoli, where Favian, the young Decatur, Favian’s friend William Burrows, Thomas MacDonough, and others of the youthful junior officers later known as “Preble’s boys” would hold forth endlessly about naval tactics and the best methods of matching ship against ship. Burrows, perhaps the best technical seaman among them, had always held that it was foolish to engage a single enemy without a trial of sailing first, in which an acute officer could discover his enemy’s strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps Decatur was remembering Burrows now, that awkward, eccentric, misanthropic young man from South Carolina, Favian’s only real friend in the service— perhaps Decatur was remembering Burrows’s advice as he commanded the sluggish United States against a weaker, but swifter and more maneuverable, enemy. It might become important to know just how much swifter, and how much more maneuverable.

  “Wear-oh!” Favian shouted.

  “Port yer helm!” Sloat roared. “Brace the yards square to the wind!”

  United States rocked uncertainly as her bow fell from the wind, spray curling up over her stem. From a position with the wind coming over her larboard side. United States would swing through an arc of perhaps two hundred twenty degrees to come up close-hauled on the starboard tack, with the wind coming forward of the starboard beam. United States and Macedonian would then be heading in nearly opposite directions, and unless Macedonian wore as well, she would let the American frigate get upwind of her and take the weather gage, seizing the initiative for the upcoming battle.

  “Shift the heads’l sheets! Set the spanker!”

  The big American ship lumbered through her turn, the yards being progressively braced around as the wind shifted. “Careful there! You on the t’gallant braces!” Favian called, and Sloat barked out a reprimand. Because of the difference in the purchase of the braces, the topgallants tended to get a little ahead of the rest.

  “Set the mains’l!” United States was on her new tack, plunging into the waves, the brisk, warm Atlantic wind blowing into Favian’s face as he cast his eyes over the braces, the buntlines and clewlines, making certain all was coiled down properly.

  “D’you have your watch, Markham?” Decatur asked, his eye once again glued to the long glass.

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Let’s see how long it takes Carden to respond to our maneuver.”

  Favian glanced at his watch, then followed carefully with his eyes the black sliver of British oak being driven along under its cloud of canvas; the black sliver seemed to hesitate, then swept slowly around in its turn until it looked like a mirror image of itself a few minutes before, edging down on the wind with studding sails set, yet still anxious to keep the weather gage.

  “Twelve minutes, sir.”

  Decatur’s smile affected laziness, but Favian saw triumph in his black eyes.

  “Very well,” Decatur murmured, for once more to himself than to any hypothetical audience. “Very well, in truth.”

  Favian saw a fore royal blossom on the enemy yards as the British frigate, eager to regain lost ground, added to her spread of canvas. She was still two miles off. Favian calculated relative positions, speeds, angles, and with a sudden shock realized why Decatur was so pleased.

  “We’ll wear again presently,” Decatur said, his eyes bright with calculation. “Not yet. I’ll give the word.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Mr. Sloat, keep the trimmers at their stations.”

  Favian repeated his mental calculations, his mind filled with angles, surfaces, wind strengths. By God, he’d been right: United States’s maneuver had caught Carden by surprise, and it had taken him a long time to decide upon an adequate response. In another fifteen minutes or so, unless Macedonian changed her angle of approach, Decatur could wear again, and Macedonian would again be forced to follow suit, but this time the British frigate would put herself in an awkward position. Any attack made on Decatur would come slowly, allowing United States’s lower battery of twenty-four-pounders to hammer at the British frigate at long range before Macedonian’s eighteen-pounders could be expected to enter the fight successfully. Favian smiled. Burrows, discoursing long ago in Constitution’s wardroom, had been right. The trial of sail preceding the combat would be critical, unless Carden saw his danger— and when Favian had met Carden and his officers a few months before in Norfolk, none of them had struck him as an acute

  The minutes crept by. Macedonian sailed her way into the trap, none the wiser.

  “Wear her again, Mr. Markham,” Decatur said, his eyes glowing.

  “Aye aye, Captain. Mr. Sloat, stand by to wear ship!”

  “Manned and ready, sir.”

  “Rise tacks and sheets!”

  “What wouldn’t our fathers give to be here, eh?” Decatur asked, and then his eyes saddened. “And poor James, of course.”

  “Aye, sir,” Favian said. “It’s what they’d all fought for.”

  His words were diplomatic, but Favian knew his own father too well ever to think that old Jehu Markham would wish to stand here by his son. Both Jehu and Decatur’s father, Stephen the elder, had been privateers in the Revolution; Jehu, with his brothers, Josiah and the legendary Malachi, had made himself a tidy fortune in property and prize money with their squadron of privateers, and even now Favian’s cousin Gideon Markham, Josiah’s son, was continuing the family tradition, commanding a New Hampshire privateer schooner against the British. Favian had been the first to break the tradition of a nautical but independent family and join the young Navy, the first naval man in the family since Tom Markham had deserted from a Royal Navy man-of-war in Boston generations ago; Favian’s had been an uninformed choice made at the patriotic, impressionable age of sixteen, and since regretted at leisure.

  But no, Jehu would not want to be here. He had turned his back on the sea, retired from his shipping interests about the same time young Favian had entered the service, and now lived the life of a squire some miles from his old home at Portsmouth. He had never shown signs of regretting his choice.

  But from what Favian had heard of Stephen Decatur the elder, he was certain the old captain of the Fair American and the Royal Louis would wish to be here with his son. And of course Favian had known the James whom Decatur had mentioned: James Decatur, the brother who had been treacherously killed at Tripoli, and whose life had been so bloodily avenged by his infuriated brother, by a maddened Favian, and by a host of ragged, wounded, but enraged American tars. It had been one of those rare moments, Favian remembered, when he had actually seemed transported, losing all consciousness save that of fury; he had become a living embodimen
t of vengeance, storming aboard the Tripolitan gunboat at the head of a party already weary with wounds and fighting, to hack with a cutlass at its perfidious commander and drive its crew howling into the sea. Decatur had gone mad as well, Favian remembered, but he’d gone after the wrong boat in the milling confusion of battle, and had a wrestling match with a formidable Tripolitan captain before managing to draw a pistol and shoot the Moor through the heart. That incident— the lucky shot while he was sprawled on the deck with a maddened enemy crouched over him trying to cut his throat with a curved knife— showed the reckless, youthful, and charmed Decatur as well as any. And it showed something characteristic of his admirers as well: In the same fight a seaman, Daniel Frazier, with both arms wounded and hanging helpless, had interposed his head between an enemy scimitar and the grappling Decatur, saving Decatur’s life at the cost of a vicious, and potentially fatal, wound. A man who inspired that kind of devotion was a man worth watching, many had concluded, but then, Decatur had been so marked from the start— unlike Favian Markham, and so many others.

  “Set the mains’l!”

  Sloat’s final command shook Favian from his memories, and he forced himself to recall the fact that the enemies he now faced were far more dangerous than the Tripolitans had ever proved to be, and that the kind of fighting madness that had fallen over him off the coast of North Africa would never work successfully here, not in the careful, precise maneuverings of a frigate action. Favian turned his eyes to the enemy, then took out his watch and made note of the time in case Decatur wanted it.

  Macedonian was not slow this time, evidence that she had expected United States to wear again, but even so she was late. Her approach would be long, and all of it in the deadly arc of the American frigate’s twenty-four-pound guns.

  “Very good, Mr. Markham.” Decatur returned his glass to the rack; he had learned all he needed to know. “We’ll shorten down to fighting sail and wait for them. Mr. Sloat, steer her rap-full.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  That would lay the mizzen topsail aback, slowing the ship but increasing its stability as a gun platform.

  “Captain,” Favian said, “unless you need me here, I’d like your permission to go below to the gun deck and supervise the firing.”

  Decatur looked upon Favian with an indulgent eye. “Aye, go down. I’ll probably join you by and by. Fire on my signal.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” He bared his head in salute and made his way to the gun deck.

  The guns had been given affectionate nicknames by their crews, and Favian had allowed them to paint the names on the port sills above the guns: Glory, Lion, Brother Jonathan, Jumping Billy, Nelson, Happy Jack, Long Nose Nancy ... the guns Favian had drilled for two years, day in and day out, until he knew each as well as— better, really, than— he knew his own hand. One of his chief jobs as first lieutenant was to supervise gun drill, and Favian had always made gunnery the subject of regular study; Decatur, finding their ideas in general agreement, had let Favian have almost a free hand in training the crews, and had supported him in his long-running skirmishes with the Navy Department, who could never understand how so much powder and shot could be expended in peacetime. The guns were tested, the men trained to be able to load and fire in their sleep, and Favian was immodest enough to know that he had done superbly.

  “All right, boys!” he bawled as soon as he’d made his way down the companion. “Larboard battery, out tampions, load, and run out! Round shot— the smoothest and roundest iron you can find!” There was a cheer of satisfaction and anticipated triumph as the gun crews bent to their work. The choice of shot had to he made with care, since not only did uncertain casting methods result in irregularities in the spherical shot, threatening to produce errant flight at long ranges, but American shot in particular tended to be short weight. Favian had discovered, and immediately had consigned to the hold as ballast, so-called twenty-four-pound shot that weighed less than eighteen pounds. As the battle would open at long range, it was especially critical that the best shot be used first.

  The gun deck filled with a menacing rumble as the men leaned on the side tackles, the long black iron guns thrusting themselves from the ports and into the bright sun. United States’s corkscrew motion through the water altered slightly as forty-two tons of broadside guns were hauled by main strength out the gun ports. Favian parked his round hat on a cutlass rack forward of the captain’s pantry and walked along the row of guns, stooped to avoid the deckhead beams, and peered through the ports at the British frigate coming down the wind toward them. Macedonian had shortened to “fighting sail,” topsails, jib, and spanker, and Favian grinned: Even now Carden hadn’t realized the trap into which Decatur’s maneuvers had lured him.

  The clatter of feet on the companionway announced the appearance of a midshipman. It was Archibald Hamilton, the young son of Paul Hamilton, current Secretary of the Navy. Hamilton hopped over the training tackles as he came forward, and doffed his hat in salute.

  “Captain Decatur will wear two points in a few minutes,” Hamilton reported. “His compliments, and he hopes you are ready to open fire.”

  “Tell Captain Decatur it’s too blasted early!” Favian almost roared, knowing the broadside was going to be wasted, but he bit his uncourteous reply back and simply nodded. The reckless Decatur had triumphed momentarily over the Decatur the Cunning; perhaps it was best that there be a whiff or two of powder to take the edge off the captain’s eagerness, even if the carefully chosen shot in the larboard guns were lost.

  “Very well. Tell the captain that the range is only a little less than a mile, but we’re ready to try it if he wishes.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Hamilton uncovered again— his fair hair, bleached almost white in the Atlantic sun, gleamed briefly in the dark confines of the gun deck— then he put his hat back on and turned to return the way he had come.

  The United States began to alter her motion even before Hamilton’s foot had touched the companionway. Favian frowned at Decatur’s impetuosity and called Hamilton back. “Take careful aim now, boys!” he told the gunners. He stationed himself behind the first gun in the third section, the one known as Nelson because its crew was composed of the crew of the famous admiral’s boat, all born Americans pressed into British service, and all deserted en masse sometime after Trafalgar to join the young American Navy. They were men who had served England unwillingly, but who still revered their former admiral and had named their gun after him.

  “The range is a bit long, Mr. Markham,” said the captain of the gun, Nelson’s former coxswain.

  “The captain wishes us to shoot, Timberlake,” Favian said simply, and the man nodded: What Decatur asked of his crew, they would try their best to perform.

  “Sir? You wanted me?” Hamilton, head bared in salute, had returned at Favian’s call.

  “In a moment,” Favian said impatiently. The frigate’s movement had settled to an easy roll as the waves came broadside; the gun captains knocked the quoins from their pieces to elevate them, trained them with the side tackles and handspikes, then each in turn raised a fist into the air to indicate he was ready.

  “Ready now, lads, on my signal,” Favian shouted. “On the uproll, lads! Wait for the roll... Larboard battery, fire!”

  The gun deck filled with smoke and flame and the roaring of giant beasts; there was a general impression of an iron stampede as the lunging guns recoiled to the limits of their tackles. The smoke poured back in the ports, carried by the wind, obscuring the results of the guns’ handiwork: the disadvantage of the leeward position.

  “Now, Hamilton,” Favian said to the midshipman, his ears ringing, and trying not to cough in the lung-scorching smoke, “tell the captain, with my compliments, that as that broadside missed, I respectfully suggest we wait for the range to close before firing another.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Hamilton said. He hesitated a moment. “How d’you know it missed, sir?” he asked finally, coughing. “We can’t see a thing.”

  “If it didn’t miss I’m a Turk,” Favian said. “Get along with your message now!” He turned to the gun crews. “Choose your shot carefully, boys! I’ll not ask you to waste them again!”

  Hamilton made his way over the training tackles to the companionway. The thick smoke gradually cleared as it poured from the lee ports, revealing the British frigate sailing as before, apparently unharmed, her flags like bright dabs of paint against her matchless white sails. United State’s gun deck filled with growling as the guns began to run out, darkening the white square of each gun port.