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  “The sailing passages bring forth the power and agility of the Baltimore privateers and the bold confidence of their handlers. Captain Tom Boyle had to be a master of sailing to elude the Royal Navy, so effective at privateering that England put a price on his head. Banners is a vividly imagined exploration of early American nationhood.”

  Captain Jan C. Miles

  Master, the Pride of Baltimore II

  VIRGINIA BEACH

  CAPE CHARLES

  Banners

  by Diane Carey

  © Copyright 2014 Diane Carey

  ISBN 978-1-938467-95-0

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other – except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters are both actual and fictitious. With the exception of verified historical events and persons, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Published by

  210 60th Street

  Virginia Beach, VA 23451

  212-574-7939

  www.koehlerbooks.com

  Revere not this bit of cloth, but revere its message.

  Protect not its fibers, but its foresight.

  Live not in its shadow, but in its gleam.

  Table of Contents

  1811

  The West Indies

  The Americans

  The Road

  Sailors and Spies

  The Flag Lady

  Free Trade and Sailor’s Rights

  The Great Heart

  1812

  Tug of War

  Upper Marlboro

  The Royal Navy Blockade

  Trim to Fighting Sail

  Eminence Grise

  1813

  The International Highway

  The Home of Francis and Mary Key

  Wool

  National Ensign

  Red-Blooded Legend

  Fortifications

  Into the Fray

  1814

  A New Ship

  A Year on Guard

  A Coastal War

  Respect

  Attack!

  Surrounded

  Red Heaven

  Aroma of Destruction

  Rivers of Soap and Whiskers

  The Royal Exchange

  Infested

  Stragglers

  The Negotiator

  Prisoners

  The Biggest Gamble

  Earthworks

  Bombardment Fleet

  The Red Glare

  Fort McHenry

  Mary’s Banner

  Scribbles

  The Return of Pride

  SPECIAL THANKS FROM THE AUTHOR

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  1811

  EMISSARY OF PRINCES IMMEMORIAL

  The West Indies

  “SIR, CAN YOU SEE?”

  The sky had died. Caped in fog, the Brig Helen scratched through paraffin seas. Not a wave cut across her bow. The water was glass. The world colorless.

  A young commander trembled inside his Royal Navy jacket as if he were wearing a ghost’s coat. He yearned to brush the wrinkles from his woolen sleeves, but such a gesture would communicate his doubts to the crew. They were watching him. These were baneful days.

  “Can you see?” his first mate called.

  The young commander had no answer, and could not see.

  The fog had the character of metal shavings, gray, coarse and moving, twisting like an animal, and high, perhaps three hundred feet high, unnavigable except by instinct and a few tricks of the trade. All hands were to quarters, and the larboard rail was lined with men, crouching, hunched, squinting into the fog, listening, yet there was no human sound. There was only the soft flap of the English Royal Standard high overhead, starved for breeze, and the moan of leather fittings where the yards met the masts. The order of the hour was silence, the silence of a prowling hunter. James E. Gordon of His Majesty’s Royal Navy blinked up at the standard, high on the main t’gallant masthead, displaying the distinguished lineage of this ship, but he could not divine more than a soggy streak of red, white, and blue, as if the great flag had been reduced to a hem. All that the flag declared was lost to the flat air and fog.

  Pressing both hands to the moist wood of the larboard rail, he leaned out over the water. He squinted at an imaginary horizon and canted his head. If he could not see, he would at least listen. He pressed his hollow belly against the rail and damned the fog. Let me see.

  As if he had not heard his first lieutenant’s question, he spoke to the waxy sea. “The lawless American. I smell his boiling blood.”

  A shipmaster of the Navy should be able to turn a back on his crew, but such luxury was not afforded Gordon. On the open ocean, each man’s life depended upon the next, and all knew it. Collusion offered no gain when the seas rolled and the spray bit. But this was not the open ocean. This was the West Indies, where island shores romanced conspiracy, where even Gordon’s salt-crusted first lieutenant became shifty and muttering.

  Creases bracketed young Gordon’s mouth, creases which had not been there when he first took the Helen’s deck four months ago. His thick Black Irish hair, his mother’s pride, had gone dull and gritty. Drawn back in a queue that fell stiff and filthy between his shoulder blades, it was bound by a red velvet ribbon she had given him when he attained his first command. Blessed be that she could not see him here. Lady Gordon would unsettle at her son’s condition. He thought of her, sitting in the family country house in Ireland, tutoring him and his brothers to keep the King’s English and avoid an Irish accent, the irony of which was lost on her young Jamie as he rode his pony across the jeweled hills, falling in love with the land and even some of the people.

  Damn the fog … I don’t like fog.

  Gordon squinted at the bowsprit and scouted the water. There was forward progress, but only the kind that comes from current and possibly a knot of wind or less. From here on the quarterdeck, aft of everything, the best way to sense faint movement was to project his gaze forward, all the way to the sprit, and beyond to the jib-boom spearing outward before the vessel like a giant insect’s feeler. The jib-boom carried the headsails well out over the water, a dynamic sight which today was veiled by mist. He shifted his eyes slightly to starboard of the foremast, let them fall out of focus, and waited to see whether the bowsprit would come to meet his line of sight, showing there was some movement.

  Befallen by a sudden foulness in the air, Gordon choked and brought a hand to his mouth. Speaking into his palm, he rasped, “Moycroft, please God that’s not our bilge …”

  First Officer Angus Moycroft’s cheeks puffed out as he stifled his own gagging. Up and down the larboard rail the crewmen balked and grimaced. To their credit, only a few small chokes caused any disruption to the order of silence. Moycroft somehow managed to lean closer to Gordon without coming too near. “Came when the breeze shifted, sir,” he whispered, gazing up at the weather gauge, which ruffled without enthusiasm on the mizzen topmast. “Southeast by east now.”

  Gordon’s stomach crumpled. “More like south by sick house.”

  “Might be a dead whale floating by, sir.”

  “I think he vomited before he died.” Nauseated, Gordon turned from the odor as if it wouldn’t follow him. As he turned, four men crowding the quarterdeck ladder abruptly ceased shifting about and stood perfectly still, staring up at him. Two jumps away.

  Breaking his own order, he sharply said, “Moycroft, what are those men doing abaft of the main? I have my pistol!”

&nbs
p; His voice cracked. They hadn’t possessed sufficient drinking water in a month. Even the green horror in the scuttlebutts had been niggardly rationed. The moment he gave that rationing order, he began seriously fearing for his life. Nine days now. Most of his crew believed Gordon lingered on the quarterdeck because of command devotion or superhuman will, but like clairvoyance he possessed neither. Exhaustion ruined the youth in his eyes. Distrust had soured his heart.

  Moycroft scowled and, uncharacteristically, did not respond. Was his annoyance for the hellish stink or for Gordon’s comment about the pistol? The archetypical first officer was devoid of personality and impervious to insult, concerned only with the ship, mindless of any human being on earth including himself, and utterly humorless. He could sleep in the fighting tops if he slept at all, had more oakum in his veins than blood, and his feet had spent more days with decks under them than solid ground. He had no finesse, no subtlety, was unburdened by devotion, and boggled by his young commander’s intuitions.

  “Forward of the main, you cockroaches, if you’ve no duty here.” Moycroft spoke quietly, but with a snap of his fingers. “Give the command some breathing room!”

  Moycroft’s tone pretended that Gordon had nothing to fear from him, which was not true. The stocky, muscular mate had been a professional boxer on Liverpool’s smarmy docks. Moycroft had no memory of mother’s knee, hearth, or home. It’s as if he were dropped at the age of four aboard a ship, with a bucket in his little puffy hands. To him, there was no earth, no street, home port, or bed. He had never slept upon a mattress. Only hammocks. He enjoyed more real power aboard than Gordon, who with his aristocratic past had no such leavening upon which to call. But for the loaded pistol stuck in his belt and the tattered gold braid upon his shoulder, he held little influence over this crew. They had their secret code of action—never let him go unobserved.

  Would the mood improve if he bribed them? Promised them shore leave on some fruitful island, in spite of the risk? A few days of relief—

  No. That was William Bligh’s mistake. The taste of forbidden fruit.

  The breeze was barely firm enough to push the brig forward, but she was indeed moving. Two knots, perhaps three with a good pinch of the wheel. Enough to maneuver, to hunt. The smallest two-master in the Royal Navy, the Helen was fit for these shallow Caribbean waters, with a draft at the sternpost of only six feet. She could skulk into narrow coves and scratch over the eternal sandbars, yet she could turn a fair broadside of six-pounder guns on pirates or blockade-runners. If she could find them.

  This single ship was the entire blockade in these waters, the lone presence of the English blockade, and Gordon was her brain. With her two good masts and her shallow draft, she was the guardian of the Indies. The deckhands were her arms and legs, the officers her pumping heart. Together they should be one body, but Gordon simply could not trust them. He had failed to divine whom among them he could depend upon, and thus ultimately he trusted none. Those islands beyond the cinder-gray fog, those tropical beaches bowered by fruit trees, those jungle ponds of fresh water beckoned too temptingly the scrawny, ill-fed, sick, and parched men aboard a British ship in these terrible times. He both feared and pitied them. They had little reason to care about their mission here. Even the willing ones were ill, sluggish at best. How many had cousins in the United States and saw no reason to wrangle with the outlaw nation? They could easily mutiny, become pirates or privateers, and cast their lot with the lawless for better food and higher pay. After the Bounty, all captains slept with one eye open. If Gordon and his fellow commanders did not hold the barrier high, history would record in its diary the year 1810 as the ruinous and unstopped Age of Napoleon.

  But those pages were not yet struck to paper. The hand of history was stayed, and waiting.

  A flicker in the fog jolted him. He blinked. Had he seen a brief brown slash with a wink of yellow?

  “I see it!” he rasped. “Starboard, Ramsay!”

  Three steps away on the raised quarterdeck, fifteen-year-old helmsman Isaac Ramsay flinched like a bird and cranked the stiff wheel over.

  “Repeat your order, Ramsay,” Moycroft said with irritation.

  “St-starboard, aye.” Ramsay put his foot on a pin to press the wheel over.

  Nothing happened. The wheel was over, but nothing changed. Gordon squinted forward again to see if there was movement.

  Aware of the deck beneath his feet, he felt no movement to the side … only a wobble of impending change. Too slow.

  “Chills the blood,” Moycroft commented. “The Yank’s handier in these daft airs.”

  Gordon bristled beneath his coat. The American ship was made of oak and fittings and line, same as any ship, but disappeared as if made of vapor. A wink, and fog again. He had heard of these birdlike Baltimore rigs, but he had never seen one.

  This had been going on for nine hours. With the American near enough to hear, to spit upon, he had not seen his enemy yet. They had spied bits of the American ship four times, but only in flashes—a wink of sail, a swinging gaff, a shrouded phantom, a murmur on the water. Only the configuration of the islands and sandbars had prevented the American from simply sliding away in her chosen direction, forcing the cat-and-mouse operation to maneuver through known and charted thoroughfares.

  But even that would end. The islands would give way to the open sea, and Americans’ favor would be lost.

  Gordon parted his lips to speak his thoughts, but drew back. Better not confide too much to too many, a difficult style for a young officer who had not long ago been a privileged but timid boy. Command had aged him, set him apart. Stress and starvation made his men unscrupulous. For weakness of the flesh, he could not blame them, but was not a man measured by more hallowed things?

  Holding his eyes out of focus made him dizzy. He grasped a deadeye for support. The heavily tarred shroud cables shot upward from his hand to support the main mast. In days gone by, those shrouds had been so numerous as to earn their name by blurring the view of a ship’s mast. Today they were stronger and fewer, but still carried their cryptic name. Gordon looked up at them as if beseeching their counsel, but the shrouds pierced the cottony fog and disappeared even before he could see the futtocks at the topmast fittings. Linked by the ratlines spaced just far enough above each other to allow a man to take a step up, the shrouds seemed like a ladder to the heavens beckoning Gordon to simply climb them out of all this.

  He squinted into the fog, forward, but could barely see the Helen’s bowsprit or her headsails, great fifty-foot sickles of canvas licking at meager airs. The sails were no more than ghosts.

  There was commotion at the lookout. The crew pushed off the larboard rail and pattered athwartships on their leathery feet to the starboard side, as if the deck had tipped and rolled them there like marbles.

  “What’s this?” Gordon demanded. No one responded. Only then did he realize his own order was keeping him ignorant. None dared answer him.

  Moycroft clambered down and plowed forward, elbowing through the filthy knot of men, met the lookout and engaged in a confusion of pointing and whispering. After a moment, he came scurrying back to Gordon. “Something afloat, sir, fine on the starboard bow. Coming right for us.”

  “Is it the dead whale?” Gordon leaned over the rail, almost unbalancing himself. Something in the water.

  He strained to make out a sodden shape moving slowly toward him, scratching along the ship’s planks. He heard the bump on the ship’s hull before he saw a mass come scratching along the tumblehome, a sodden bundle the color of wheat.

  Young Ramsay craned over the wheel spokes. “Maybe it’s a horse carcass! There’s the hoodoo in these waters! Maybe it won’t have a head!”

  Moycroft already had the boathook off-board, poking toward the mass.

  Gordon parted his dry lips. “Well?”

  “A bale of cotton, sir,” Moycroft struggled to remain quiet, and to keep from splashing or knocking the side of the ship with the boathook.

 
Slowly sinking, the mass dragged on the boathook so heavily that two other men came to help Moycroft hold it.

  “Cotton …” Gordon pondered. “How long would it take seawater to saturate a mass that size?”

  “No idea, sir.”

  “Have you no estimate, Moycroft?”

  “Eh … maybe a quarter-hour, sir?”

  The guess was not much help.

  “Seems he jettisoned his cargo,” Moycroft quickly added, covering the fact that he had provided a useless answer to an impossible question.

  Gordon fidgeted and scratched his sweaty cheek. “Why would he do that in a cloaking fog?”

  Again having no answer, this time Moycroft said nothing.

  Gordon turned to Ramsay. “What is the projected course back from that bale?”

  The helmsman blinked, confused, then said, “North by northeast, sir.”

  “Take that course.”

  The bowsprit dipped, very slightly. The deck went down, perhaps two inches under his left foot, rose under his right in a rocking motion. He flexed his knees and waited to feel another clue.

  A brief boomph erupted from somewhere in the fog—a sound recognized by every man aboard. Gordon flinched, waiting for the shock of a musket ball between his shoulder blades. He heard only a brief echo of the sound they’d just heard.

  “Firing on us!” Moycroft spat in the direction of the gunshot. “They’re due north!”

  Caught up in the action, Ramsay began to turn the wheel.

  Once Gordon realized that he had not yet been assassinated, he quickly said, “No, belay that!”

  “But that was a gunshot, sir!” Moycroft said. “We should adjust toward it!”

  “Didn’t you listen?”

  “But the direction …”

  Gordon held up a hand, feeling for a breeze. The direction. The direction—

  “Turn the ship,” he began, and paused to think. “Turn the ship … northeast.”

  “Sir? That shot—”

  “Do it or I’ll nail your toes to the garboard strake!”