How Dark the Night Read online

  Naval Institute Press

  291 Wood Road

  Annapolis, MD 21402

  © 2014 by William C. Hammond

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hammond, William C., 1947–

  How dark the night : a novel / by William C. Hammond.

  1 online resource.

  Summary: “How Dark the Night continues the seafaring adventures of the Cutler family by picking up the action where the fourth volume, A Call to Arms, ends in 1805. The years leading up to the War of 1812 were devastating ones for the young republic. The life-and-death struggle between Great Britain and France caught the United States in a web of financial and political chaos as President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison labored to keep the unprepared United States out of the conflict without compromising the nation’s honor. On the home front, Jefferson’s embargo threatened the livelihood of the Cutlers and other New England shipping families as merchant ships rotted on their moorings and sailors sat on the beach, penniless”—Provided by publisher.

  Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  ISBN 978-1-61251-466-6 (epub)1. United States. Navy—History—19th century—Fiction. 2. United States—History, Naval—To 1900—Fiction. 3. United States—History—1801–1809—Fiction. 4. New England—Commerce—History—19th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.A69586

  813'.6—dc23

  2014003066

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  222120191817 161514987654321

  First printing

  In loving memory of my uncle

  LANSING V. HAMMOND

  Lance always encouraged me to write.

  Death be not proud, though some have called thee

  Mighty and dreadful, thou art not so . . .

  One short sleepe, we wake eternally,

  And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

  THOMAS DONNE

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Prologue

  SOON AFTER the turn of the nineteenth century, as the opening salvoes in the war against Tripoli thundered along the Barbary Coast, the United States became increasingly embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars, an epic struggle for national survival fought between Great Britain and its ancient enemy, France. By 1805 the conflict had become a world war, having slogged its way across the globe since its French Revolution genesis in 1793—with only a brief fourteen-month interval of peace provided by the Treaty of Amiens in 1802. Napoléon Bonaparte’s ego and determination were every bit as strong and unrelenting as his armies; all that stood between him and his dream of global domination was the sea power of the Royal Navy, the much-heralded “wooden wall of England.” By the summer of 1805 the war had consumed nearly every corner and byway of Europe, and its funeral pyres blazed as far away as the West Indies, Latin America, South Africa, and the Orient. And now Napoléon was threatening to up the ante by dispatching his Armée de l’Angleterre to northern France in preparation for invading Great Britain.

  In this conflict the United States remained neutral. In truth, it had no choice: it had no viable army, and its fledgling navy was otherwise engaged in the Mediterranean. Further, the young republic had no vested interest in the war’s outcome; it did not take sides, at least in theory. Because the nation supported the principle of free trade, one customer was just as desirable as another, regardless of what language that customer spoke or what political theory he espoused. But to the two great leviathans slugging it out in Europe, the upstart Americans posed a serious threat. Yankee sea captains were out to turn a profit at every opportunity, and the scourge of war in Europe provided a potential windfall for American ship owners and their crews.

  In lockstep with high potential rewards, of course, come high potential risks. Peril lurked on every horizon and in every port of call. France might rule the Continent, but the Royal Navy ruled the world’s sea-lanes. And because America’s merchant fleet was the world’s largest neutral carrier of food and supplies, the British Admiralty had stated publicly and repeatedly that it would do whatever was necessary to keep those ships and their cargoes out of enemy hands.

  While the entrepreneurial Federalists in the northeastern states wrestled with such transnational issues, the Republicans, most of whom lived in the southern and western states, looked inside their own country for their rewards. In 1803, with the purchase of the enormous Louisiana Territory, the United States had doubled in size. In that same year the state of Ohio had been admitted to the Union and the Indiana Territory organized. In 1804 President Jefferson had given his blessing to the expedition proposed by two Virginians of his acquaintance: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Newspapers carried electrifying reports and detailed maps of their exploration route, which wound northwestward across the hills and hollows of the Louisiana Purchase before snaking westward through the high mountains on a course between British possessions to the north and Spanish possessions to the south and west of Great Salt Lake. Their ultimate destination was the Oregon Territory, which belonged formally to no nation but was richly coveted by all: Great Britain, Spain, and the United States—and Russia, whose traders and pioneers had migrated southward from their base in Alaska to the mouth of the Columbia River.

  It was not exports or new overseas markets that the Republicans craved; it was raw land that they could purchase for pennies and then earn dollars by farming the land and selling its produce. Native Indians posed a constant threat along the frontier, and British agents in the Northwest Territories and agents of Spain working the border between Spanish-held Florida and Georgia were doing their best to stir up trouble.

  Thomas Jefferson, recently reelected to a second term in office, was again caught in a geopolitical bind. Republican to his core—for Americans of every political and social stripe he embodied the Republican ideals of states’ rights, agrarianism, and limited government spending, especially on the military—Jefferson’s back-and-forth positions on issues of national defense and national honor had often left both politicians and citizens scratching their heads in bewildered confusion. He professed to oppose a strong navy and preferred the construction of gunboats to frigates; yet during the war against Tripoli he had, without hesitation and without consulting Congress, dispatched four naval squadrons across the Atlantic and had stayed the course until the United States had secured what to his mind was an honorable peace. Even now, USS Constitution, arguably the most powerful frigate ever to sail the seas, remained on station in the Mediterranean to safeguard America’s interests there. Further, whereas President Jefferson advocated the virtues of the yeoman farmer over those of merchants, bankers, and investors, he also espoused the principle that free ships made free goods. The primary beneficiaries of that policy were the wealthy New England shipping families—who had voted against him in the last two presidential elections.

  Napoléon, it was reported, guffawed when
informed of Jefferson’s stance. The British were less amused. In an attempt to prevent America from capitalizing on Europe’s depleted merchant fleets by shipping directly from French, Spanish, and Dutch colonies in the West Indies to their mother countries, Britain imposed the “Rule of 1756.” Under that rule, trade that had been closed in time of peace could not be opened in time of war; certainly Holland, for example, had never allowed direct shipments of goods from Saint Eustatius to Rotterdam (or vice versa) in American merchant vessels. Undaunted, American shippers responded with the principle of the “broken voyage,” a tactic that brought produce bound for Europe from the West Indies to an American port where it was offloaded and then reloaded for re-export to Europe. Perhaps as a result of the rapprochement that had existed between Great Britain and the United States since the signing of John Jay’s treaty in 1795, the British Admiralty Court at first upheld the legitimacy of the broken voyage. In the Polly case, it ruled that produce imported to an America port ipso facto became the property of the carrier, and the carrier could do with it whatever the carrier wished.

  Great Britain was not, however, entirely amenable to American interests. With the lapse of the Jay Treaty in 1803, Great Britain applied with a vengeance its long-held right to board American vessels to capture Royal Navy seamen suspected of jumping ship and signing on with an American merchant vessel or man-of-war. Any British citizen, in fact, could be forced into service. Although maritime Americans viewed impressment as nothing less than kidnapping on the high seas, it was not an issue subject to adjudication in British courts, as was, for example, the disposition of American merchant vessels and cargoes seized by the British. The right of impressment was considered a prerogative of the Crown. The Royal Navy desperately needed sailors to man its thousand-plus warships and was determined to take them wherever it could find them, regardless of such diplomatic niceties as naturalization papers, which could easily be, and often were, forged. If in the process of exercising the king’s prerogative American citizens were impressed into the Royal Navy either by mistake or on purpose, no one in Great Britain was inclined to give it much thought.

  These events and outcomes abroad were vastly unsettling to New England shipping families such as the Crowninshields and Endicotts. The golden goose that was their carrying trade depended on good relations with the former mother country. Britain was America’s chief trading partner, accounting for nearly 80 percent of all imports into the United States and a healthy percentage of its exports. What would become of this country, they asked, if the artery conveying its lifeblood was blocked or severed? More important to many of them was the question of what would become of the families. In the fall of 1805, no merchant or trader or politician had a ready answer.

  As ominous as the dark clouds beginning to gather over the eastern horizon might be, one New England shipping family—the Cutlers of Hingham, Massachusetts—had a more immediate and pressing concern to address, one that was at once both life-defining and life-threatening.

  One

  Hingham, Massachusetts

  September–October 1805

  “RICHARD? I’M SORRY to wake you, but it’s almost nine o’clock.” The voice seemed to come from a faraway place, a different dimension, yet it was a sound familiar since his earliest childhood. His eyelids fluttered open, then his gaze shot to his wife lying on the bed next to the wingback chair that for the last three days and nights had been his watch post. To his relief he found her peacefully asleep, her chest rising and falling steadily, the shipshape bedsheet and blanket across her chest attesting to serene dreams. He had seen the same sight throughout the night, at least until the wee hours when exhaustion had finally claimed him.

  He glanced up at his sister. “Nine o’clock you say, Anne?”

  “Yes. Dr. Prescott just arrived. The family is gathering in the parlor.”

  “Right. Give me a minute. I want to tidy up a bit and stoke up the fire.”

  “Take whatever time you need,” Anne Cutler Seymour said. She squeezed her brother’s shoulder before walking quietly out of the room.

  Richard leaned forward in his chair and stared intently at his wife. He longed to touch her, to take her hand or caress her bare lower arm, but he did not want to wake her. As if reading his thoughts, she stirred slightly and turned her face toward him. But still she slept.

  He rose and stretched out the soreness in his legs and back and neck. He realized that such would not have been necessary had he followed the advice of his siblings and children and gone upstairs to sleep in one of the spare bedrooms, perhaps the one he and his brother Will had shared as boys. But Richard would not, could not, leave his wife’s bedside. The downstairs study, which had once been the purview of his father and was now that of his brother Caleb, was hardly large enough to accommodate the bed and other extra furniture it held. But it was on the first floor, in the quietest part of the house; and it was off the kitchen, where boiling water was quickly available to sterilize sheets and bandages and surgical instruments. Caleb had insisted that for the procedure Katherine be brought here to the family seat on Main Street where he and his wife, Joan, and their infant son, Thomas, resided. Richard had not argued. This house was considerably larger than Richard and Katherine’s home on South Street, and it contained more amenities.

  He tucked in his shirt, buttoned his brown cotton waistcoat, and rolled up his sleeves. From a pitcher set on a table before a mirror he poured water into a porcelain basin. After splashing some onto his face, he smoothed back strands of near-shoulder-length blond hair that retained a youthful thickness and luster belying his forty-five years. Late last evening he had shaved with soap and razor in anticipation of this morning’s gathering. As he ran his fingers back and forth across his chin he felt no residual stubble, although he did note, more with passing interest than concern, the bloodshot eyes looking back at him in the mirror and the puffy gray skin around them. He dried his face with a towel and, turning around, found to his surprise and delight that his wife was watching him.

  “Well, good morning, my lady,” he said cheerfully as he walked over to her. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took her left hand in both of his. “Sleeping in a little, are we?”

  A faint smile graced her chapped lips.

  His tone turned serious. “How do you feel, Katherine? Is there anything I can get for you? Water? Soup?”

  She shook her head and glanced down at her chest, which was covered by layers of bandages, a sheet, and a blanket. She lifted her gaze slowly back to his. “It’s over, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It’s been over for nearly a day. You’ve been drifting in and out of consciousness, so I doubt you remember much. Dr. Prescott has been in to see you and gave you a dose of laudanum for the pain. He’s here right now, in fact, in the parlor. He wants to meet with the family to explain things. After that, he’ll be in to check on you.”

  “Then you must be going,” she rasped. “You must not keep the good doctor waiting.”

  “I won’t. But I won’t be gone long. Rest now. We need to get your strength back, and I must tell the family the good news that you are awake.” He raised her hand to his lips. As he kissed the warm, silken flesh, emotion whirled within him. “In fact,” he added with a broad grin, “it seems I must tell the entire town, for most of Hingham has been keeping vigil outside along Main Street for the last two days. Some people stood in the street all night holding candles. Many of them are still out there.”

  “Dear God,” she murmured. “How very, very kind.”

  “They love you, Katherine. You have touched many lives during our twenty-three years in Hingham.” He forced himself to stop there, although there was more, much more, that he ached to say to her. But he dared not continue lest his emotions overcome him. He had resolved to remain upbeat in her presence during the early days following the procedure. They both knew that her reluctance to admit to her condition and seek treatment had made matters worse than they might have been, but he was determined not to me
ntion that. And there was, after all, no reason not to be upbeat. What he had been told privately by Dr. Prescott—and what he would no doubt hear repeated in a few minutes—was that there was every reason to be hopeful. Holding that blessed thought in mind, he placed his hand on her forehead and looked deep into her hazel eyes, “I love you,” he said softly and leaned down to kiss her lips.

  She lifted her hand to touch the side of his face and mouthed the same words back at him. Then the opiate took hold again and she drifted back to sleep.

  Richard stood, walked over to the hearth, and placed thin sticks of white birch on the hot embers. When the flames blazed up, he added a slab of heavy oak to keep the fire going. Then he slipped away through the kitchen and down the front hallway to the parlor near the entrance of the house.

  Most of his family was waiting, seated on sofas and chairs. His younger son, James, was not present—he remained on station off the Barbary Coast in Constitution—and Agreen Crabtree, Richard’s closest friend and his first officer in Portsmouth, was still at the naval base in Hampton Roads, Virginia, attending to the peacetime disposition of the 36-gun frigate that had been their command during the war against Tripoli.

  The subdued conversation ceased abruptly as Richard entered the room. All eyes followed him as he walked over to where Dr. Prescott stood in the middle of the gathering—dressed entirely in black save for the silver buckles on his shoes and the blood-red buttons of his waistcoat.

  “She is resting peacefully,” Richard said to the doctor in a voice loud enough for all to hear. “She awoke for a few minutes and spoke. She says she is comfortable and in no pain.”

  “That is most encouraging, Richard,” Prescott said. “We can all take comfort in that news.” He motioned Richard to a seat on a sofa next to his younger sister, Lavinia, and her husband, Stephen Starbuck, up from Duxbury. Lavinia took Richard’s hand and gave it a brief squeeze of sympathy.