A Call to Arms Page 7

  Before the newlyweds entered the coach, Richard took the bride aside for a warm embrace. “Welcome to our family, Adele. We are so very proud to officially call you our own.”

  Adele returned his embrace and added a buss on the cheek. “Thank you, Mr. Cutler,” she replied. “The pride is mine.”

  “Thank you for everything, Father,” Will said. “And you, Mother.” He embraced them both, Katherine holding on, for a precious moment, to a dear life. “I’ll check in at our office in Baltimore,” he promised as he assisted Adele aboard the carriage, referring to a small shipping office that Cutler & Sons maintained on Fleet Street in Baltimore to facilitate the shipment of sugar and molasses and other produce into the rapidly developing interior of the United States.

  “You will do no such thing, Will,” his mother-in-law admonished with mock gravity. “You’ve more important work to attend to.” Anne-Marie gave her daughter a final embrace. “Go with God, my dear, dear child,” she said softly, reverently. “Go with God and with my love, forever.”

  “Good-bye, everyone,” Will exulted. As the carriage lurched forward, he waved out the window. “It’s your turn next, Uncle!” was his parting cry.

  Caleb Cutler drew his flaxen-haired intended close to his side. “Indeed it is,” he whispered to her. “And I am counting the days.”

  The wedding party trickled back inside to the festivities and familiarity of neighbors and friends. Except for one, who politely dismissed those around her, including her husband. “It’s quite all right,” she assured them. “I just need a moment. Please.” That moment dragged into many minutes as Anne-Marie stood alone in the silence of her private thoughts, staring down Main Street. The newlyweds’ carriage had wheeled through the heart of the village, across South Street and North Street, and was visible on a road in the distance leading to Crow Point. She remained until long after the carriage had disappeared from her view and the dust in its wake had settled.

  WITH WILL GONE and Caleb’s upcoming wedding in the capable hands and financial resources of the Cabot family, Richard turned his attention to preparations for war. The week after Will and his bride sailed south for the Chesapeake, he and Agreen sailed north to the Portsmouth Navy Yard on Rising Castle Island.

  There, to their satisfaction, they found Portsmouth fully planked with New Hampshire white oak along her hull, her railing up, and her bowsprit and jib-boom firmly in place. She lay on a cradle, the fine sheer of her hull braced upright by stout beams that looked like giant oars sweeping out from her starboard and larboard sides. Tubs of tallow had been placed nearby. When the time came—and that time had to be soon, else the tubs would not be there—the tallow would grease the ways to ease her slide off the cradle into the deep river water.

  Once afloat, she would be brought alongside an old hulk equipped with a sturdy mast and sheer-legs, and the supporting tackle necessary to lift and lower the frigate’s three masts down three decks where they would be stepped into locked position on her keelson. Only then would begin the arduous and finely detailed tasks of getting a ship ready for sea, from sending up her upper masts and yards, to roving mile upon mile of running rigging, to installing her ship’s bell and brightwork and stove and wheel and binnacle, to furnishing the officers’ cabins, and finally, with some fanfare, to hauling aboard her twenty-four 12-pounder long guns, twelve on each side of the gun deck, and twelve 6-pounders on her weather deck, six to a side.

  “When do you expect to launch her?”

  Richard posed that question to the superintendent of the yard, who, judging by his white hair and beard, wrinkled flesh, and yellow teeth, might have observed the launch of Richard’s first ship, Ranger, from this very spot twenty-five years ago. The rasp of a two-man saw drew their attention to a large sawpit nearby, where they could see one man standing above a large, thick log; his partner was out of sight below in the pit as they fashioned strakes for the construction of yet another naval vessel. The air about them was rife with the pungent yet pleasing scent of freshly hewn wood.

  The superintendent cast an experienced eye on the frigate. “I’d give her a month yet, maybe two,” he replied. “We’ll need to paint her, and her masts could use a bit more seasoning.” He pointed, unnecessarily, to a circular pond in the distance where the resinous ship’s spars were seasoned underwater to keep them sound and resilient. “She should be ready for her shakedown cruise, oh, by the beginning of September.”

  “May my lieutenant and I go aboard?”

  The superintendent grinned. “She’s your ship, Captain.”

  “Right, then.” He turned to Agreen. “Shall we?”

  Richard led the way up a ladder on the frigate’s larboard side. When he reached what would soon define the ship’s entry port and swung his legs over the still unpolished and unpainted railing, he jumped down onto the weather deck between the slightly raised quarterdeck aft and the more pronounced rise of her forecastle forward. Agreen followed him.

  There wasn’t much for them to see as they gazed along her 140-foot length and 26-foot beam. Anyone else standing where they stood would see a wooden platform propped up on a cradle on land, the blue of sea visible only in the far distance down the fairway of the Piscataqua River, past the harbor town of Portsmouth on its south bank and the village of Kittery on its north bank. Richard, however, saw his first command as a captain in the United States Navy. This was his ship; try as he might, he could not quell the surge of elation cascading through him like a raging springtime river swollen with winter melt.

  Agreen watched him with a blend of amusement and understanding. “Are you plannin’ t’ just stand there and gawk all day?” he asked at length. “Or are we actually goin’ t’ get somethin’ done?”

  Richard grinned. “Right you are, Lieutenant. Where do you suggest we start?”

  “I suggest we take a gander belowdecks, then proceed aft and sit on the deck of your palatial cabin and figure out how in God’s name we’re goin’ t’ man and employ this ship. She requires three hundred officers and crew, and so far all we have are her two senior officers and the few sailors from Cutler & Sons.”

  “At least we have those. Caleb insists he can’t spare more than the twenty-five who have volunteered, and I have to agree with him. And remember, Cutler & Sons has pledged to make up the difference in pay for those volunteers. Gallatin’s policy of slashing sailors’ pay to ten dollars isn’t doing us any favors.” Richard had been outraged when the treasury secretary had recommended cutting the monthly pay of able-bodied seamen in the Navy from seventeen to ten dollars—a recommendation grudgingly accepted by President Jefferson and Navy Secretary Smith. “Most merchant companies today pay an ordinary seaman more than twice that amount. If you or I were in Gallatin’s position, I daresay we could find a better way to manage expenses than by taking it out of the hide of the common sailor. That’s just plain stupid. And it makes recruitment that much more difficult. All the Navy can offer is the possibility of prize money,” referring to the profits shared among a ship’s crew, prorated according to rank, realized from the sale of a captured enemy vessel.

  “Gallatin never has supported the Navy,” Agreen grumbled. “But at least we can make good use of those twenty-five men. They’ll make excellent petty officers and topmen.”

  “That they will. And George Lee will be our second, assuming his promotion goes through. He liked you and Will when you met in Batavia, and Preble has trained him well. We can use an officer of his quality who’s familiar with an Essex-class frigate.”

  “Aye,” Agreen agreed. “And he can help with recruitment. He’s known and respected in these parts.”

  “There you go, Lieutenant. You see? Everything is under control. You have nothing to fret about. I have every confidence you’ll get the job done with your usual flair for efficiency. Why else would I have requested you as my first officer?”

  “For my good looks?”

  Richard pretended to ponder that. “No. Lizzy’s more interested in that sort of
thing than I am.” He grinned. “I had other reasons, and I suggest we waste no further time putting those reasons into action.”

  SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, in Boston, Midn. James Cutler reported aboard Constitution. Trouble was, there was no one aboard to report to. The frigate’s only commissioned officer other than Captain Preble was 1st Lt. Charles Gordon, and he had come and gone—where and for how long, no one seemed to know. A ragtag band of eleven sailors clad in the castoffs from a slop chest lolled about the deck without much to do and without much enthusiasm for doing anything. Certainly they appeared unimpressed by what Jamie realized must have appeared to them as a young, full-of-himself snotty strutting about the weather deck in the relative resplendency of a midshipman’s undress uniform of buff trousers and a coat of indigo blue cloth with short lapels, six gold buttons, and a stand-up collar. ‘That one came in through the cabin window,’ he could almost hear these sailors whispering about him, ‘not through the hawser hole the way less fortunate officers do. They have to earn their rank.’

  Constitution, Jamie quickly discovered, was a shambles. Since returning to her home port following the conclusion of the war with France, she had been laid up along the banks of the Charles River without even a caretaker crew until the men he saw lazing about on the deck came aboard a couple of months ago—and they took care of her hardly at all. Debris littered her weather deck, and few lengths of running rigging were properly coiled to their belaying pins. Hardly anything Jamie observed met the minimal requirements of naval regulations or seamanship. As bad as it was topside, what he found belowdecks was worse. It was as though a herd of wild beasts had run amok, with no one bothering to pick up the mess they left behind. Only the guns on her gun deck were done up properly, bowsed tight against the starboard and larboard bulkheads. But every gun on that deck cried out for someone to scrape away splotches of orange rust and restore its black gleam.

  Following a brief inspection of the two middle decks—he did not bother going down to the orlop deck; the stench wafting up from there turned his stomach—Jamie returned to the gun deck. He folded his arms, leaned against the cascabel of a 24-pounder on the starboard side of the gun deck, and peered out its gun port at the Boston skyline visible across the river. Having no idea what to do next, he thought through what his father had taught him about command. Command. He snorted at the word. On his first day as midshipman in “the pride of New England,” he found himself, for the moment, the ship’s ranking officer. And his crew was clearly indisposed to take orders from an upstart eighteen-year-old boy whose every trait bespoke good breeding and privilege.

  After considerable thought, Jamie concluded that he had two choices. He could return topside and inform the men that he was going ashore to report to the superintendent of the Charlestown Navy Yard, the very man Captain Preble had warned him about and the officer who bore primary responsibility for the sorry state of affairs in Constitution. That option, to Jamie, seemed cowardly. Or he could do what his father had always encouraged him to do when faced with a tough situation: Trust your instincts and take action.

  His mind made up, Jamie clambered up the main hatchway ladder. The first sailor he spotted on deck was perhaps twice his age and was wearing a blue-and-white-striped jersey and wide-bottomed white trousers. His hair was bound in a loosely plaited queue, and gold shone from his left earlobe. He was lazily coiling a rope that Jamie suspected had been coiled a hundred times in the past week alone. The sailor hardly glanced up when Jamie emerged from belowdecks and approached him.

  “Your name, sailor?”

  The man gave him a suspicious look. “Simpson, Your Honor,” he mumbled. Jamie caught the sarcasm in his voice.

  “Come again? I didn’t hear you.”

  “Simpson,” the man repeated in a slightly louder voice. “Alan Simpson.”

  “Thank you. Your rating, Mr. Simpson?”

  A pause, then: “Able-bodied seaman.”

  “I see. Can you tell me, is there a petty officer aboard?”

  Another pause. “Aye, there is.” He went back to coiling the rope.

  “Would you be so kind as to point him out to me, Mr. Simpson?”

  Whether from an inbred reaction to an officer’s direct query or in appreciation of the midshipman’s unusually respectful tone—no officer had ever addressed him as “mister”—Simpson pointed at a stocky, muscular man with a short-trimmed black beard who was leaning against the mainmast whittling on a block of wood. “His name’s Baker. Boatswain’s mate.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Simpson.”

  As Jamie approached the petty officer, Baker stopped whittling, placed his work on a pinrail, and stood slightly slouched, as though signaling either boredom or resentment of this intrusion on his day. His insolence notwithstanding—or perhaps because of it—Jamie saw a man he would most definitely want on his side during a tavern brawl.

  “Are you Boatswain’s Mate Baker?” Jamie asked him.

  “I reckon I am,” the man replied, his southern heritage coming through in his accent.

  Jamie bristled at the unmilitary response. “My name is James Cutler,” he said. “I have a midshipman’s warrant, and I have been ordered by Captain Preble to report for duty at my earliest convenience, which is today. Please assemble the men, Mr. Baker.”

  Baker narrowed his eyes and advanced one step. “Assemble the men, you say?”

  Jamie held his ground. He could feel his heart pumping. He fought to keep his voice calm. “Yes, Mr. Baker. That is what I said. And I would very much appreciate you doing it now.” Feeling a ripple of fear, Jamie realized he was treading in perilous waters. The next few minutes could decide his future as a naval officer.

  Seconds ticked by as the two men—one seasoned by years at sea, the other as yet untested—stood face to face, neither budging. Sailors on the weather deck dropped what they were doing and came together by the mainmast, keen to observe more closely this unexpected and intriguing spectacle.

  Baker blinked first, although his tone was hardly conciliatory in defeat. “It seems, Mr. Midshipman Cutler,” he sneered, “that the men have already complied with your request.”

  “I can see that, Mr. Baker. And I appreciate your cooperation.” Jamie turned on his heel. In a loud voice he said, pointing to starboard, “Men, please gather over there. That’s right, over there by the mainmast chain-wale.”

  Whether driven by a sense of duty or simple curiosity, all eleven sailors, including Baker, obeyed. When they had formed a semicircle close by the broad, thick plank projecting horizontally from the ship’s side, Jamie grabbed hold of a shroud and climbed onto the railing.

  “Men,” he said in as clear and steady a voice as he could muster, “I am James Cutler. I have in my possession a midshipman’s warrant, signed by the secretary of the Navy, to serve aboard Constitution. That warrant makes us shipmates. During the next few days I shall come to know each of you and your name and your rating. I look forward to that.

  “We have serious work to do. Whatever has happened aboard this ship before today is of no concern to me. I care only about what happens from this day forward. Three months from now, Captain Edward Preble will take command of this vessel. We must have her in fighting shape before he does. You know our captain’s reputation. He will not tolerate insubordination or dereliction of duty from any member of his crew—including his officers. Make no mistake, lads, if we don’t have Constitution shipshape from stem to stern by the time Captain Preble steps aboard, you and I will pay the forfeit. You and I together. Lieutenant Gordon is out on a recruiting mission,” he added, not certain if that was the truth, “so help is on the way. But we cannot wait for help to arrive. We need to start our work today. We need to start right now.”

  With that, he jumped down onto the weather deck. After removing his coat and draping it over a belaying pin, he rolled up his sleeves and began gathering the debris that littered the area between the main and mizzen masts on the starboard side of the weather deck. Sailors made way for him
as he went about his task. One of them picked up a broom; another grabbed a large gunnysack into which he jammed the litter Jamie had piled up. Within the quarter-hour most of the sailors were pitching in. Within the half-hour every sailor was hard at it, including Boatswain’s Mate Baker and the seaman named Simpson.

  SUMMER AND EARLY AUTUMN plodded by in naval routine for those aboard Constitution and Portsmouth as both ships made ready for sea. Exactly when they would sail remained a matter of conjecture to the crews and to the national press.

  Captain Preble had suffered another medical setback. According to his doctor, Edward Miller, the setback was not serious and should not delay matters more than a few months, and those being the months of winter. To those serving in Constitution, that report presented a not-unwelcome reprieve. In mid-September, just a few weeks before Captain Preble was to take command, Lieutenant Gordon, in company with James Cutler and Ralph Izard, had descended to the depths of her hold beneath the orlop and had poked her bottom in numerous places with boathooks and rakes. What they pulled up, at nearly every poke, was a discouraging blend of sea grass and moss.

  “Her copper’s broken and full of holes,” the lanky, brown-haired lieutenant announced. He yanked a clump of green moss off his rake, examined it, and threw it back disgustedly into the watery hold.

  “Which means we’ll need to bream her and re-copper her,” Izard said confidently. Jamie had developed a great respect for the slim, sinewy midshipman from Charleston, South Carolina, in the weeks since he had stepped aboard and dropped his seabag onto the deck.

  “Quite right, Mr. Izard,” Gordon responded. “Another damned delay. But there’s nothing for it. We’ll have to ride out the winter and set her sea trials for early spring. Captain Preble should be in fine fettle by then, so nothing is really lost. For the moment, let’s get her moved to Union Wharf and set about careening her.” He added sotto voce, “At least at Union Wharf we will be outside Captain Nicholson’s jurisdiction. That should expedite things. Among other benefits,” he added disdainfully.