“What we do,” Wadsworth spoke to himself as much as to the men in his boat, “is discover a place we can defend.” He had been told the river twisted and in his mind’s eye was a sharp turn where he could land guns on the upstream bank. He would begin with one of Revere’s cannon, because once that was emplaced it would mark the new rebel position and as the ships passed upstream they could donate cannons, crewmen, and ammunition so that, by morning, Wadsworth would command a formidable battery of artillery that pointed directly downstream. The approaching British would be forced to sail straight at those guns. The river was far too narrow to allow them to turn and use their broadsides, so instead they must either sail into the furious bombardment or, much more likely, anchor and so refuse the offered fight. The rebel fleet could shelter behind the new fortress while the army could camp ashore and recover its discipline. A road could be hacked westwards through the woods so that new men, new ammunition, and new guns could be brought to renew the assault on Majabigwaduce. As a child Wadsworth had loved the story of Robert the Bruce, the great Scottish hero who had been defeated by his English enemies and who had fled to a cave where he watched a spider try to make a web. The spider failed repeatedly, but repeatedly tried again until at last it was successful, and that spider’s persistence had inspired the Bruce to try again and so achieve his great victory. So now the rebels must play the spider, and try again, and keep trying until at last the British were gone from Massachusetts.
But as the crew rowed him steadily upstream, it seemed to Wadsworth that the river hardly twisted at all. An island, Orphan Island, divided the river into two channels and Odom’s Ledge was in the navigable western branch. Once past Orphan Island the river’s bends seemed gentle. The flooding tide helped the oarsmen. They were now far ahead of the ships, traveling in a summer’s gentle evening up a swirling, silent river edged by tall, dark trees. “Where are these sharp bends?” Wadsworth asked James Fletcher nervously.
“Up ahead,” James Fletcher said. The oar blades dipped, pulled, and dripped, and then, suddenly, there was the perfect place. Ahead of Wadsworth the river twisted abruptly to the east, making almost a right-angled bend, and the slope above the bend was steep enough to deter any attack, but not so steep that guns could not be placed there.
“What’s this place called?” Wadsworth asked.
Fletcher shrugged. “The river bend?”
“It will have a name,” Wadsworth said vehemently, “a name for the history books. Spider Bend.”
“Spider?”
“It’s an old story,” Wadsworth said, but he did not elaborate. He had found the place to make his stand, and now he must gather troops, guns, and resolve. “Back down the river,” he told the crew.
Because Peleg Wadsworth would fight back.
The rebel warships were faster than the transports and they gradually overhauled the slower vessels and passed Odom’s Ledge into the river narrows. All the warships and almost half of the transports passed that bottleneck, but a dozen slower boats were still stranded in the bay, where the tide was slackening, the wind dying, and the enemy approaching. Every sailor knew that there was more wind at the top of a mast than at the bottom, and the masts of the British ships were taller than the transports’ masts, and the frigates were flying all their topgallant sails and so had the benefit of what small breeze remained in the limpid evening. The sun was low now so that the frigates’ hulls were in shadow, but their high sails reflected the bright sun. They crept northwards, ever closer to the transports crammed with men, guns, and supplies, and looming behind them, queen of the river, was the towering Raisonable with her massive cannon.
Just short of Odom’s Ledge, on the western bank, was a cove. It was called Mill Cove because a sawmill had been built where a stream emptied into the cove, though the mill was long gone now, leaving just a skeleton of rafters and a stone chimney overgrown with creepers. The dozen transports, almost becalmed and increasingly threatened by the frigates, turned towards the cove. They were being towed, but the river’s current had now overpowered the last of the flood tide and they could not force their way through the narrow channels either side of the ledge and so they hauled themselves across the current to the shallow waters of Mill Cove and used the last of the wind to drive their bows ashore. Men dropped over the gunwales. They carried their muskets and haversacks, they waded ashore, they gathered disconsolate beside the mill’s ruins and they watched their ships burn.
One by one the transports burst into flames. Each and every ship was valuable. The boat-builders of Massachusetts were famous for their skills and it was said that a ship built in New England could outsail any vessel from the old world, and the British would love to capture these ships. They would be taken to Canada, or perhaps back to Britain, and the ships would be sold at auction and the prize money distributed among the sailors of the ships that had captured them. The warships might be purchased by the Admiralty, as the captured frigate Hancock had been bought, so the Hampden would end its days as the HMS Hampden and HMS Hunter would be using her New England–given speed and her New England– cast guns to chase smugglers in the English channel.
But now the American transport skippers would deny their enemies a similar victory. They would not yield their ships to a British prize court. Instead they burned the transports and the banks of Mill Cove flickered with the light of the flames. Two of the burning hulls drifted towards the river’s center. Their sails and rigging and masts were alight. When a mainmast fell it was a curving collapse of bright fire, sparks exploding into the evening as the lines and yards and spars cascaded into the river.
And the fire did what the Warren and the other warships had failed to do. It stopped the British. No captain would take his ship near a burning hull. Sails, tarred rigging, and wooden hulls were dangerously flammable and a wind-driven spark could turn one of His Majesty’s proud ships into a charred wreck, and so the British fleet dropped anchor as the last of the evening wind died.
Upstream, beyond Odom’s Ledge, the rest of the rebel fleet struggled northwards until the current and the dying light forced them to anchor. At Mill Cove hundreds of men, with no orders and no officers confident of what should be done, started walking westwards. They headed across a wilderness towards their distant homes.
While in Fort George Brigadier-General Francis McLean raised a glass and smiled at the guests who had gathered about his table. “I give you the Royal Navy, gentlemen,” he said, and his officers stood, lifted their glasses of wine and echoed the brigadier’s toast. “The Royal Navy!”
From a letter by General Artemas Ward, commander of the Massachusetts Militia, to Colonel Joseph Ward, September 8th, 1779:
The commander of the fleet is cursed, bell, book, and candle. . . . Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Revere is now under an arrest for disobedience of orders, and unsoldierlike behaviour tending to cowardice.
From Brigadier-General Solomon Lovell’s journal, August 14th, 1779:
The British Ships coming up the Soldiers were obliged to take to the Shore, and set fire to their Vessels, to attempt to give a description of this terrible Day is out of my Power it would be a fit Subject for some masterly hand to describe it in its true colors, to see four Ships pursuing seventeen Sail of Armed Vessells nine of which were stout Ships, Transports on fire, Men of War blowing up, Provision of all kinds, and every kind of Stores on Shore (at least in small Quantities) throwing about, and as much confusion as can possibly be conceived.
Excerpt from Brigadier-General Francis McLean’s letter to Lord George Germaine, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the American Colonies, August 1779:
It only remains for me to endeavor to do justice to the cheerfulness and spirit with which all ranks of our little garrison underwent the excessive fatigue required to render our post tenable. The work was carried on under the enemy’s fire with a spirit that would have done credit to the oldest soldiers; from the time the enemy opened their trenches, the men’s spirits increased daily, so that our las
t chief difficulty was in restraining them.
Chapter Fourteen
Peleg Wadsworth slept ashore, or rather he lay awake on the river’s bank and must have dozed, because he twice awoke with a start from vivid dreams. In one he was cornered by the Minotaur, which appeared with Solomon Lovell’s head crowned with a pair of blood-dripping horns out of a nightmare. He finally sat with his back against a tree and a blanket about his shoulders, and watched the dark river swirl slow and silent towards the sea. To his left, to seaward, there was a glow in the sky and he knew that red light was cast by the ships still burning in Mill Cove. It looked like an angry dawn, and it filled him with an immense lassitude, so he closed his eyes and prayed to God that he was given the strength to do what was needed. There was still a fleet and an army to rescue, and an enemy yet to be defied, and long before first light he roused James Fletcher and his other companions. Those companions were now Johnny Feathers and seven of his Indians who possessed two birch-bark canoes. The canoes slipped through the water with much greater ease than the heavy longboats and the Indian had happily agreed to let Wadsworth use the canoes in his attempt to organize a defense. “We must go downriver,” he told Feathers.
The tide was flooding again and the ships were using that tide to escape upriver. Their topsails were set, though no wind powered the vessels, which either floated upstream on the tide or were being towed by longboats. The canoes passed six vessels and Wadsworth shouted to each crew that they should take their ship past the place where the river turned sharply eastwards and then anchor. “We can defend the river there,” he called, and sometimes a captain responded cheerfully, but mostly the sullen crews received his orders in silence.
Wadsworth found the Warren aground where the river widened briefly to resemble a lake. Three other warships were anchored nearby. The frigate was evidently waiting for the tide to float her free of a mud bank.
“You want to go on board?” Johnny Feathers asked.
“No.”
Wadsworth had no stomach for a confrontation with Commodore Saltonstall, which, he suspected, would be fruitless. Saltonstall already knew what his duty was, but Wadsworth reckoned pointing out that duty would merely provoke a sneer and obfuscation. If the fleet and army were to be saved it would be by other men, and Wadsworth was looking for the means of that salvation.
He found it a quarter mile downstream of the Warren where the Samuel, the brig which carried the expedition’s artillery, was being pulled northwards by two longboats. Wadsworth’s canoe went alongside the brig and he scrambled up and across the Samuel’s gunwale. “Is Colonel Revere here?”
“He went away in his barge, sir,” a seaman answered.
“I hope that’s good news,” Wadsworth said, and walked aft to where Captain James Brown stood by his wheel. “Did Colonel Revere ship a cannon onto the lighter?” he asked Brown.
“No,” Brown answered curtly, nodding to the ship’s waist where the cannons were now parked wheel to wheel.
“So where is he?”
“Damned if I know. He took his baggage and left.”
“He took his baggage?” Wadsworth asked.
“Every last box and bundle.”
“And his men?”
“Some are here, some went with him.”
“Oh dear God,” Wadsworth said. He stood irresolute for a moment. The Samuel was inching upstream. The river was so narrow here that branches of trees sometimes brushed against the brig’s lower yards. Wadsworth had hoped that Revere’s one cannon, placed at Spider Bend, would be a marker for the rest of the fleet and the first of many cannon that could hold the British pursuers at bay. “You’ll keep going upstream?” he suggested to Brown.
The Samuel’s captain gave a mirthless bark of laughter. “What else do you suggest I do, General?”
“Ten miles upstream,” Wadsworth said, “the river turns sharply to the right. I need the guns there.”
“We’ll be lucky too make two miles before the tide turns,” Brown said, “or before the damned English catch us up.”
“So where is Colonel Revere?” Wadsworth demanded and received a shrug in answer. He had not passed Revere’s white-painted barge as he descended the river, which meant the colonel and his artillerymen must be further downriver, and that gave Wadsworth a glimmer of hope. Had Revere decided to fortify a place on the Penobscot’s bank? Was he even now finding a place where a battery could hammer the British ships? “Did he give you instructions for the cannon?” Wadsworth asked.
“He asked for his breakfast.”
“The cannon, man! What does he want done with the cannon?”
Brown turned his head slowly, spat a stream of tobacco juice onto the portside scupper, then looked back to Wadsworth. “He didn’t say,” Brown said.
Wadsworth went back to the canoe. He needed Revere! He needed artillery. He wanted a battery of eighteen-pounder cannon, the largest in the rebel army, and he wanted ammunition from the Warren, then he wanted to see the round shot crunching into the bows of the British frigates. He thought briefly of returning to the Warren, which also had the big guns he needed, but first, he decided, he would discover what Colonel Revere planned. “That way, please,” he told Feathers, pointing downstream. He would go to the Warren afterwards and demand that Saltonstall give the artillery all the eighteen-pounder shot they needed.
The sun was up now, the light clear and crisp, the river sparkling, and the sky spoiled only by the smear of smoke from the ships still burning south of Odom’s Ledge. A quarter mile beyond the Samuel there was a whole group of anchored ships, both transports and warships, all chaotically clustered where the river divided around the northern tip of Orphan Island. On the eastern bank, just upstream of the island, was a small settlement about half the size of Majabigwaduce. “What’s that place?” Wadsworth called to James Fletcher who was in the second canoe.
“Buck’s plantation,” James called back.
Wadsworth gestured that the Indians should stop paddling. The river bent here, and Wadsworth wondered why he had not chosen this as a place to defend. True, the curve was not so pronounced as the sharp turn higher up the river, but in the early-morning light the river’s twist looked sharp enough and on the western bank, opposite Buck’s plantation, was a high bluff about which the Penobscot curled. He needed a place on the western bank so that supplies could come from Boston without being ferried across the river, and the bluff looked a likely enough spot. There were already men ashore at the bluff’s foot, and there were plenty of guns aboard the nearby ships. Everything Wadsworth needed was here, and he pointed to the narrow beach at the base of the bluff. “Put me ashore there, please,” he said, then called across to James Fletcher again. “You’re to go back upstream and find the Samuel,” he shouted. “Ask Captain Brown to bring her back downriver. Tell him I need the cannons here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And after that go to the Warren. Tell the commodore I’m making a battery here,” he pointed at the western bluff, “and say I’m expecting his ship to join us. Tell him we need his eighteen-pounder ammunition!”
“He won’t like me saying that.”
“Tell him anyway!” Wadsworth called. The canoe scraped onto the beach and Wadsworth jumped ashore. “Wait for me, please,” he asked the Indians, then strode down the beach towards the men who sat disconsolate at the high-tide line. “Officers!” he shouted. “Sergeants! To me! Officers! Sergeants! To me!”
Peleg Wadsworth would pluck order from chaos. He was still fighting.
Lieutenant Fenwick was obeying Commodore Saltonstall’s orders, though with a heavy heart. The Warren’s main magazine had been half-emptied, and the powder charges were being carried down to the bilge and up to the maindeck. There was a growing pile of powder bags on the ballast stones at the foot of the main mast in the bilge’s darkness, another under the forecastle and a third beneath Saltonstall’s cabin. On deck there were heaps of bags around each mast. White trails of slow-match were laid from each pile, th
e snaking canvas ropes meeting in a tangle on the foredeck. “What we cannot do,” Saltonstall told Fenwick, “is allow the enemy to capture the ship.”
“Of course not, sir.”
“I will not allow British colors to fly from my ship.”
“Of course not, sir,” Fenwick said again, “but we could go upriver, sir?” he added nervously.
“We are aground,” Saltonstall said sarcastically.
“The tide is flooding, sir,” Fenwick said. He waited, but Saltonstall made no comment. “And there are French ships, sir.”
“There are French ships, Lieutenant?” Saltonstall asked caustically.
“A French flotilla might arrive, sir.”
“You are privy to the French fleet’s movements, Lieutenant?”
“No, sir,” Fenwick said miserably.
“Then kindly obey my orders and prepare the ship for burning.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Saltonstall walked to the taffrail. The early light was pellucid and the air still. The slow tide gurgled at the Warren’s waterline. He was gazing downstream to where a gaggle of ships was clustered by a bluff. Two sloops were using the tide to come upriver, but it seemed most of the ships had decided to stay by the bluff where longboats and lighters were carrying supplies to the western bank. The British ships were out of sight, presumably still below Odom’s Ledge where the smoke rose to tarnish the sky. The smoke rose vertically, but Saltonstall knew that as soon as that pillar of smoke was ruffled by the wind the enemy sloops and frigates would start upstream.