The Power and the Glory (10 page)

The Frenchman narrowed his eyes. The ruddy color on his face darkened and his upper lip curled, exposing yellow teeth. Suddenly his right fist lashed out, catching Richard square on the jaw. “
Cochon insolent!”
he sneered. “
Je suggère que vous apprenez quelques manières, monsieur!”

The blow sent Richard reeling backward. He grabbed hold of the mast, steadied himself, then felt with his index finger the cut on his lower lip. Blood trickled down his chin.

Wadsworth advanced two steps. Several of the crew followed him.

“As you were, Wadsworth!” Richard shouted.

“We can take them, Captain,” Wadsworth snarled. His hands were balled into fists and his eyes were glued on a youthful privateer brandishing a musket at waist level, its aim wavering now in the face of the challenge. “We outnumber the bastards.”

“That's sheer folly, Jake. They'll kill you certain. Even if we did manage to overcome them, that brig over there would blow us out of the water. Stand down, all of you.
Stand down! Now! By my order!”

Wadsworth muttered something incomprehensible. Nonetheless, he motioned to the crew to back off. Richard faced the privateer captain.

“Monsieur,” he said in French with as much deference as he could muster, “what you are doing makes no sense for either of us. Take what stores you require and leave us. A bad storm is coming. You can see that. You can also see that you are putting your brig in grave danger by staying so close to land. You need sea-room, and plenty of it.”

He spoke not as an enemy to an enemy, nor as a victim to his tormentor, but rather as one sea captain to another. As the privateers finished offloading barrels of provisions into the launch, their captain considered his choices.

“
Très bien
,” he said, his mind made up. “
Vous avez raison, monsieur
.
Merci pour votre provisions
.” With that, he strode to the entry port and ordered his men back into the launch. As he turned around to descend the short ladder, Richard noticed his right hand gripping a pistol by the barrel. He was about to shout out a warning, but the Frenchman was too quick. Whipping out his arm, he slammed the butt of the pistol hard against Wadsworth's face. Wadsworth's knees buckled and
he collapsed on the deck, blood pulsing from an ugly wound between his nose and upper lip. Cursing, he sat up and spat out fragments of a front tooth.

“Son of a
bitch
!” Richard seethed in angst and anger and an appalling sense of helplessness. “Back off!” he managed to shout to his crew.

“
Quelque chose pour se souvenir
,” the French captain jeered. “
Au revoir, mes amis.”
He stepped down into the launch.

As the oarsmen struggled against cresting waves to get back to their brig, Richard focused a glass on the ship's stern where the name
Le Léopard
was displayed in bold gilt lettering. Fitting, he thought, for a ship like that to bear such a name. He vowed never to forget this ship, or this captain. Someday, somehow, he would again cross tacks with this particular leopard, under far different circumstances.

 

RICHARD'S WARNING about the storm proved all too accurate. Within an hour after parting ways with the French brig he was forced to reduce canvas to a small triangular storm jib and a double-reefed mainsail. Two hours later,
Elizabeth
battled her way northward past the islands of Muskeget and Tuckernut, barely visible to starboard in the gathering mist and uniform gloom. The hum of the wind in the rigging had intensified from a low, sinister moan to a wild, agonized shriek. Gray seas whipped with foam crashed against her hull, battering her timbers, washing her weather deck with icy seawater, and sending shudders of agony through the fabric of the sloop.

Immediately on shortening sail, Richard had ordered six of his crew below and the hatch cover battened down tight with tarpaulins. He and Wadsworth remained at the helm, his mate having convinced Richard that his nose was not broken. The bleeding had stopped, and it would take a damned sight more than a tooth knocked out by a turd-sucking, frog-faced Frenchman to keep him from his duty. Collins was posted at the bow as lookout, and able seaman George Avery stood by the mainsail sheets. All four men were tethered to a rope linked to a jack-line running amidships from stem to stern, the loop at the bowline knot attached to the jack-line, allowing them free movement about the deck. No one could see much. Freezing rain had yielded to sleet and then to swirling snow, and the darkening cloud cover had now combined forces with fog so thick that sea could no longer be distinguished from sky.

When Richard judged that
Elizabeth
had fought her way sufficiently northward, and that her furled sails were in peril of being ripped from their gaskets by the sheer weight of the wind, he cupped his hands
directly over Wadsworth's ear. “Bring her about, Jake,” he shouted. “And brace yourself. This won't be easy.”

Wadsworth nodded in reply. He waited for the right moment and then, with Richard's help, pushed the tiller hard to larboard, forcing the sloop's bow to starboard. Richard signaled Avery to release the mainsheet. As her bow tore through the wind,
Elizabeth
took the full brunt of the near-hurricane-force winds on her larboard side. She yawed sharply over to starboard, close to her beam ends. Avery slipped and fell onto his back and slid helter-skelter across the deck until the rope securing him to the jack-line jerked him to a halt just shy of the bulwarks. He struggled to his feet, groping wildly for the flailing mainsheet. He managed to seize hold of it, wrestling it as though a bucking stallion were at its other end. As
Elizabeth
slowly came to rights, Richard eased her bow back to eastward, forcing the wind from the mainsail, which thundered in protest. Wadsworth, again judging the moment right, surrendered the tiller to Richard and stumbled forward to where Avery was battling the mainsheet. Together they hauled in the unruly beast and secured it to a belaying pin. At the tiller, Richard eased
Elizabeth
off the wind until her double-reefed mainsail came taut, her rudder found traction, and she plunged ahead into the frothing, mounting swells.

Wadsworth fought his way back to the helm, and Richard yielded the tiller. The oilskins both men wore to protect them from the storm were weighted with snow and ice. “Steer by the binnacle, Jake,” he shouted in encouragement. “Keep her as steady as you can on a course south by east.”

“South by east, aye, Captain,” Wadsworth shouted back into the screaming wind.

That course, Richard calculated, would take them inside the great sandy wings of Nantucket Island, a landfall that he pictured as a gargantuan manta ray swimming upon the ocean's surface in a southeasterly direction. Her outer shores might feel the shock and surge of the stormy Atlantic, but once inside those protective wings, the eastern one capped by a towering wooden lighthouse on Sandy Point, a vessel found safety as long as the wind did not rage from due north, which it rarely did. The harbor of Nantucket Town was
Elizabeth
's destination, and they would get there none too soon, unless one of the two hundred whaling ships that called Nantucket home suddenly appeared before them in the murk. A collision would likely mean the swift end of everyone on board the sloop. At this time of year, the life expectancy of a man immersed in these waters could be measured in minutes.

Gradually the seas subsided, although a stark wilderness of wind and snow continued to engulf them. Forward, Joel Collins grabbed hold of the jack-line and trudged aft, hand over hand, toward the helm.

“The fog lifted long enough for me to catch the shore, Captain,” he shouted when he reached the binnacle. He pointed in the general direction. “Brant Point lies two points to larboard. Land's coming up fast, sir,” he warned.

“Understood, Joel,” Richard yelled back. “Alert the men. We'll need their help. It may be safer now on deck, but I want everyone on deck tied on until we've passed the point.”

Their ordeal wasn't over yet. Land was closing too rapidly to steer into the northeaster on a close haul to the harbor entrance. They had to swing
Elizabeth
around to northward, back into the fierce onslaught of wind and waves, to the outer reaches of the protective wings, before she could make one last final lunge to safety on a broad reach.

In due course
Elizabeth
glided past Brant Point and into the harbor's sheltered waters. One final swerve to the northeast and her crew dropped anchor and doused her small strips of sail. Around them, vessels of various sizes and descriptions bobbed at anchor, their top-hampers white with snow and ice, an armada of ghost ships facing into the wind.

Richard ordered everyone below and the hatchway secured. In his cabin he peeled off his oilskins and seaboots and leaned against a bulkhead, closing his eyes as he uttered a short, silent prayer of thanksgiving. Wearily, his energy spent, he went to his sea chest and pulled out a thick woolen sweater, adding it to the two layers he already wore. Gathering up the remainder of his dry clothing, he carried it forward to where his crew had slumped down onto the damp deck. Most had their heads down with their arms dangling across their knees.

Richard tossed his spare clothing onto the deck. “For anyone who needs these,” he said. He looked around at his spent crew. “Let's see where we are, lads. For starters, has anyone taken inventory of our stores?”

“I have, Captain,” replied Timothy Cates, a young topman who did double duty as ship's cook. “They didn't leave much. We have a few biscuits and some bits of meat. That's about it. We do have wood for the stove. And,” a grin lit his face, “they didn't take the rum, sir. I reckon they didn't find it, stored up forward. We have all four casks.”

“Well, at least there's that,” Richard acknowledged, adding, in a more hopeful tone: “All right, lads, here's the drill. We'll get the galley stove going and we'll keep it going. Everyone sleeps here tonight, by the
stove. We'll maintain five watches of two hours each, two men each. Collins and I will take the first watch. Each watch has two responsibilities: to make certain the fire doesn't go out and to go up there,” indicating the hatchway ladder, “every hour to clear away the snow and ice from the hatch cover. Unless, of course, you enjoy it down here so much you'd prefer to stay the winter.” He attempted a smile. No one seemed able to summon much of a reaction. The eyes fixed upon him were those of the half-dead.

“Right. I suggest we indulge ourselves with a tot of rum and what biscuit we can spare. Mind you, no one gets drunk tonight. We must keep our wits about us. We won't feast, but we won't starve either. Tomorrow, when this storm blows over, we'll find provisions ashore to see us home.”

Two days passed before
Elizabeth'
s crew was able to climb up on deck and begin the arduous task of dumping snow overboard and chipping away at the inch-thick ice on the standing rigging. The morning was brilliant and bitterly cold, with a cloudless sky and a moderate northwesterly breeze. Snow, perhaps two feet of it, with drifts considerably higher, cast an almost blinding white pallor over Nantucket Village, a cluster of shops and homes nestled close together by the harbor's edge. Wisps of smoke curled up from many of those homes, some of them, those belonging to whaling captains and ship owners rising up in the background, as elegant in federalist design and red brick construction as anything Richard had seen in Louisburg Square in Boston.

His first order of business: find food for his crew. The meager rations they had managed to unearth had run out the previous afternoon. Seeing no activity ashore, Richard scanned the decks of vessels anchored nearby, most of them whalers of one design or another. He saw no activity there, either, except on board one ship-rigged vessel anchored not far away. On her deck, men were chipping away at ice-coated rigging with iron mallets, just as his own crew was doing.

“Call out the gig,” he ordered. “Cates, go below and bring up a cask. Put it in the bow of the gig.”

“A cask, sir?” Cates questioned.

“Yes, Cates, you heard me. A cask. A
full
cask.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Swinging out the boat was a relatively easy task, secured as it was to the weather deck bottom-up. The men had just to flip it over, loosen the binds holding the oars, insert tholepins into the gunwale on both sides, and hoist it out and down with tackle rigged on stays and the yardarm
with a midshipman's hitch. Richard was soon on board, seated on the center thwart and rowing toward the whaler.

“Ahoy!” he cried up to a deckhand breaking ice on lower shrouds at the fore chain-wale. The man was so heavily clothed that Richard could distinguish nothing about him except that his beard was long, curly, and coal black. “Is your master aboard?”

“No,” the man yelled down. “He be ashore.”

“Are his mates aboard?”

“One is. What can I do fer ye?”

Richard shipped an oar and brought his free hand to his mouth.

“I am the master of the sloop you see over there. We were caught in the storm on our way home to Boston. I need provisions for my crew.”

“Sorry,” the mate declared unsympathetically. “We've no provisions to spare. Try ashore in town.”

“I cannot,” Richard persisted. “You can see for yourself that everything is closed up tight and will be for some time. Please, sir, my men are hungry. They have not eaten since yesterday. There are ten of us, and we need only a two-day supply.”

“Sorry, mate,” the man shouted again, irritation entering his voice. “I can't help you.” He went back to chipping at the ice-laden shrouds.

“I am prepared to pay!” Richard shouted up at him.