A stiff wind was blowing from the south-west, and the North West Company schooner Marie-Anne lurched through the grey rollers east of Long Point. Every so often she buried her nose in a wave larger than the others, and white sheets of Lake Erie water flew across her decks. Her crew seemed not to mind this at all, but her passengers were a different matter. Several of the volunteer militiamen under MacLea’s command had already been sick over the side of the ship, and the Mohawk warriors who had accompanied Norton, sitting huddled on the wet deck around the foremast, were looking distinctly uncomfortable too.
John MacLea stood at the stern, holding onto the railing as a harder gust of wind struck and the schooner heeled over. He did not mind the motion, or the weather; in fact, he barely noticed them. He was daydreaming about women; or specifically, a woman, the one he had met in the street in Niagara. She had puzzled him then, and somewhat to his annoyance, she was continuing to puzzle him now. Something about her bothered him. She was exotic, undoubtedly. Good-looking… well, he supposed she was. Enigmatic, most definitely.
But enigmas annoyed John MacLea. He did not like problems he could not solve. Who was she? he kept asking himself. What on earth was she doing in Niagara? Why had she given him that long, lingering stare? There had been something almost challenging about her gaze, as if she was questioning his right to be there. I do not find our present circumstances particularly unhappy. What was that supposed to mean?
The schooner banged into another large wave and MacLea lurched sideways, gripping the rail tightly. As a single man and a man of property in Stormont County, he had several times been the subject of campaigns by women determined to marry their daughters to him, and twice by widows who had wanted to marry him themselves. Frontier society made women tough and direct; none of the ladies in question had exactly been milksops. But equally, none had studied him like a natural scientist discovering a new species of insect. Yet it was not this that bothered him. If he was honest with himself, he had not really minded her inspection of him. No; there was a mystery about her, he was absolutely certain of this. And when – or if – he returned to Niagara, he was going to find out what that mystery was.
Another wave slapped inboard, showering him with spray and shaking him out of his reverie. The ship had been running north-west, tacking against the contrary wind, but now she was preparing to go about onto a southerly tack, one that should carry them past the end of Long Point and out into the open lake. MacLea could see the point quite clearly, a long, low spit of land running twenty-five miles out into Lake Erie from its northern shore, plumed with white as waves rolled up onto its beaches.
He watched the helmsman spin the wheel as the ship began to change course, the crew running to haul the sails around. Larose, the schooner’s captain, stood on the deck bellowing obscure nautical terms in a thick French-Canadian accent. The crew seemed to understand him clearly, though to MacLea’s ear he might as well have been speaking Greek. But he had to admire how smoothly the ship came around, running back across the waves a little east of south so as to clear Long Point by a safe distance. The lake around the point was full of sandbars, Captain Larose had cheerfully told them earlier, and notorious for shipwrecks.
Marie-Anne lurched again and another militiaman staggered to his feet and leant over the lee rail to spew. This time one of the Mohawks joined him. Brothers in misfortune, thought MacLea drily. On the whole, though, his militiamen were holding up well. When he had first laid eyes on them at Fort George, after Captain Boydell had trawled around the York and Lincoln flank companies looking for volunteers, his heart had sunk. Most of the twenty volunteers who had come forward were ill-dressed, and none was kitted out for field service. One was barefoot. Another had a musket with no ramrod. When Sergeant Murray had asked him how he loaded his weapon, the man, whose name was Hill, demonstrated by pouring the charge of powder into the barrel, banging the butt of the musket on the ground to tamp the powder and simply pushing the ball a few inches down with the stem of his pipe.
‘Does that actually work?’ the astounded sergeant had demanded.
‘’S’worked so far,’ Hill replied, grinning. ‘Reckon it’ll keep on working. Leastways, till I get kilt.’
James Boydell, all obliging affability, had helped MacLea procure kit and find boots for the barefoot man and a ramrod for Hill. There had been three days’ delay at Fort Erie while they awaited the return of the Marie-Anne from Amherstburg, which had given MacLea and Murray time to put the men through their paces. Apart from a couple of backwoodsmen from York County who were used to shooting for the pot and were fine marksmen, the rest were woeful shots. Even with ramrods, it took them as long as two minutes to load and fire a musket. Drumming it into their heads that their lives might depend on being able to shoot fast, MacLea and Murray had drilled them for hours. They had made some improvement, and if there was another delay at Amherstburg, there might be time for more.
MacLea looked around for Norton and saw him further forward, a slender figure looking out over the lake. As he made his way cautiously forward along the slippery slanting deck, he passed his own men, including Murray, who looked up and grinned at him. ‘Everything all right?’ asked the captain.
‘Fine. As you can see, we are all enjoying ourselves immensely.’
Like MacLea, Murray had a strong stomach. He grinned again. The young black man Moses Crabbe managed a grin too, though a rather wan one. Two surprising volunteers had sought MacLea out on the eve of departure from Fort George. One was Crabbe, whom he had detailed to look after the wounded American lieutenant by the river bank; the other, even more surprising, was a hard-faced man with the scarred back of a runaway slave. His name was Abel Thomas, and he was one of the men who had been trying to kick the American to death before MacLea intervened.
‘We want to see some fighting, sir,’ he said when asked rather sharply why he was volunteering, ‘and we reckon you’re the man who can help us find it.’ Crabbe had bobbed his head in agreement. ‘We’re not deserters, sir,’ Thomas had added. ‘We have Captain Gerrard’s permission.’
He had handed over a letter, written in a spidery hand, and the faint smell of rum had drifted to MacLea’s nostrils as he read.
Thomas and Crabbe want to volunteer to serve with you. If you have a place for them, I recommend you take them. They’re good lads, the best of lads, and they’ll serve you most faithfully; my honour on it.
Yr very obedient servant,
Aloysius Gerrard (captain, Upper Canada militia)
MacLea had taken them. According to regulations black men were not supposed to serve in the same units alongside white soldiers, but during his own service MacLea had seen plenty of black sailors fighting for the Royal Navy, and he regarded this particular regulation as nonsense. With this pair, the two York backwoodsmen and Murray, he had at least the nucleus of a unit capable of fighting its way out of trouble. Even so, he had been reluctant at first about Thomas, whom he thought to be a loose cannon whose blind hatred of Americans could well land them all in trouble. One evening in Fort Erie, on the way back to their billets, Thomas had described to his comrades in venomous terms how he wanted to see, above all other Americans, his own father at the end of the barrel of his musket, and the delight he would take in pulling the trigger.
‘Good God, man!’ Sergeant Murray had said. ‘What have you got against your father?’
‘He owned my mother,’ came the reply.
Not even the normally loquacious Murray had an answer for this, but thereafter MacLea felt he understood Abel Thomas a little better. That did not mean he trusted him any more, especially not where wounded American officers were concerned.
MacLea passed black-bearded Captain Larose, who offered him a rough salute. One of the other surprises had been to find, when Marie-Anne arrived at Fort Erie, that her captain had been told to put himself and his ship under MacLea’s orders. MacLea had made it clear that his only orders were to get himself and his party to Amherstburg with all speed, and the two of them had got along well.
Norton was in the bow, standing just behind the four-pounder cannon that was the schooner’s only armament and holding onto a rope for support. He turned his head as MacLea came up alongside him. ‘It’s rather wet,’ he said. ‘Here, hang onto this.’
He made room so both men could cling to the rope, bracing themselves against the roll of the ship. Norton continued to scan the grey lake, whitecaps rolling far out beyond the white feathers of spray on Long Point. MacLea recalled briefly what John Macdonell had said about the chief when the two men met privately for a few minutes just before the colonel accompanied Brock back to York.
‘His heart is in the right place,’ Macdonell had said, ‘even if one is never entirely sure about his head. He’s a whole mass of contradictions, I fear. His father was a Cherokee boy, captured by American settlers. He finally ended up in Scotland, and married there. Norton himself spent time in the British Army; we rather think he is a deserter, but so long as he remains useful to us we’re not going to pursue the matter. He decided to go back to his father’s people, or at least the nearest he could get, and settled with the Mohawks about twenty years ago, working with our Indian Department as a translator. He has translated the Gospel of St John into Iroquois, believe it or not.’
MacLea had raised his eyebrows at this. There might be more to John Norton than met the eye. ‘He was a protégé of Joseph Brant, the Mohawk chief,’ Macdonell continued. ‘Brant appointed him a war chief a few years ago. His influence has declined since the old man died, though. He also gets under the skin of some of our Indian Department officers, especially Colonel Elliott at Amherstburg, so try to keep them apart. He likes you, though,’ Macdonell had added. ‘Handle him right and he will give you no trouble.’
MacLea had doubted both of these statements, largely because he had not laid eyes on Norton for several days after that meeting in Niagara. Then, on the eve of their departure from Fort Erie, the chief had appeared suddenly with a dozen Mohawk warriors at his back, all armed to the teeth with muskets, hatchets and knives. They looked quite capable of escorting themselves, which rather begged the question as to what MacLea and his men were meant to do.
Now, bracing himself as the schooner turned once more onto a north-westerly tack, this time on a course to round Long Point and run up the western side of the sand spit, he looked at the other man and said, ‘Why am I here?’
‘Do you mean that in the metaphysical sense, Captain? Or do you seek to understand why you personally are here on this ship, with me?’ Norton chuckled. ‘The former I cannot help you with, but the latter is easy. You are here to watch me.’
MacLea waited. ‘Brock does not trust me,’ continued Norton. ‘I do not take it personally, for he does not trust anyone. He is surrounded by enemies, within and without. The army, the legislature, his own staff: there are traitors everywhere. He cannot see them, but he knows they are there.’
‘And you can see them?’ asked MacLea.
Norton shifted a little and turned to look into the captain’s face. His dark eyes were deep and penetrating. MacLea met his gaze steadily for about a minute, and then Norton smiled.
‘You have nothing to hide,’ he said. ‘Brock must have sensed that about you. His instincts are good. But he does not have the sight.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You are a Scotsman, Captain. Have you not heard of the sight? My mother’s family, or so it is rumoured, came from a long line of witches. My father’s family were what the English crudely call “medicine men”. Thanks to inheritance from one or both, I can see a little of what passes in men’s hearts. I understand how people think, and why.’
MacLea could not quite keep the scepticism out of his voice. ‘And yet it has not helped you persuade your own people to fight for us.’
Norton smiled again. ‘A prophet is without honour in his own country,’ he said softly. ‘I understand how people think, but I have no power over what they think. The Iroquois of the Six Nations fled to Canada because they preferred the rule of King George to the rule of Congress. They believe that if they take up arms now and the British then decide to surrender Upper Canada, the Americans will take revenge on them. Already they are fearful of the consequences of the events of last year.’
‘What happened last year?’
‘The Iroquois people, my own Mohawks included, sent warriors to fight alongside Tecumseh. They fought the Americans on the Tippecanoe River, and lost. The Iroquois fear that if the Americans come, they will be punished for this; and taking up arms again might compound the punishment. Now, their hearts tell them to fight, but their heads tell them there might be wisdom in neutrality.’
‘They are wrong,’ said MacLea.
‘I know,’ said Norton gazing out over the windswept waters. ‘But I lack the eloquence to make them see. Of all the warriors of the Grand River Iroquois, not more than forty or fifty are willing to fight now. And Tecumseh faces the same problem. The Americans have offered peace with the Shawnee and all the other western tribes. After the bloodletting at Tippecanoe, the tribes are reluctant to challenge them again. Not even all of the Shawnee are willing to fight. Tecumseh’s own clan, the Kispoko, will follow him to the end, but the others – who knows?’
‘Can Tecumseh sway them? Brock seems to think he can.’
‘If any man can, it is Tecumseh, but I do not think it is certain. Tecumseh and his brother have a dream. They want to create a united nation of Indian peoples, and they preach that all the Indian tribes are brothers who share the soil. But the Indians themselves do not see it that way. Their loyalty is to clan and family, not to nation.’
‘Rather like Scotland,’ said MacLea.
Norton smiled. ‘You understand,’ he said. ‘The tribes will not, cannot, fight until they know the British are behind them. And with some reason, they do not trust the British. The Indian Department offers them fair words, but will it send weapons, gold, men to support them? If it does not, then the tribes will remain neutral, even though in their hearts they want to fight.’
‘But all your interests must surely lie in a British victory,’ said MacLea. There were Mohawks living in Stormont County too, settlements of farmers and hunters here and there; both he and Murray had traded with them often, and liked them. But he had never really followed the politics of the Indian peoples of the west, and he was struggling to do so now. ‘General Brock believes that if you join forces with us, the British have a chance of victory. And if the British are victorious, will not your position be much stronger?’
‘No,’ said Norton, his voice barely audible over the wind. ‘No, my friend, we will not be stronger. One thing is certain. The Americans will probably win this war. The British might win, given a miracle. But the one certainty is that the Indians will lose. No matter which side is victorious, our time is over. I know it; Thayendanegea – Joseph Brant, my uncle – knew it. Tecumseh knows it. We are the last generation of Indians to live as free men.’
‘But surely if the British win, they will be generous to their allies.’
Norton said nothing, and MacLea listened to the sentence in his own head and thought: he does not believe it, and neither do I. He opened his mouth to speak again, but Norton was paying him no heed. The chief had raised one arm and was pointing into the mist to the south-west, staring hard, unspeaking, every fibre of his being concentrated on something unseen.
Then came the cry from the lookout, perched above the main yardarm high overhead. ‘Sail ho!’
Norton was already scrambling back along the deck. MacLea followed him, curious but not yet alarmed. Captain Larose, black beard dripping with spray, stood at the foot of the mainmast, balancing himself against the sway of the ship without apparent effort. ‘What vessel is she?’ he called up to the lookout.
‘Dunno, sir! She’s a brig, that’s for certain.’
‘Aye, there she is!’ said one of the hands on deck.
The mist had parted a little and they could all see her now, dimly through the flying spray; a two-masted square-rigged ship coming steadily downwind towards them. She was about two miles away. Captain Larose pulled out his telescope and stared at the oncoming vessel, then tugged at his beard and muttered to himself.
‘I do not know what ship she is,’ he said to the deck in general. ‘She is not the Queen Charlotte. She is not the General Hunter. Both these I know.’
To MacLea, every ship looked more or less like every other. But the other seamen were staring too, some through spyglasses of their own, and MacLea could sense their unease. ‘Must be the Lady Prevost,’ said one man. ‘You know, that new brig the guv’mint built at Amherstburg.’
‘No,’ said another positively. ‘I’ve seen the Lady Prevost and that ain’t her. I’m certain sure.’
‘Well, them’s the only British ships on the lake,’ exploded the first man. ‘If she ain’t the Lady Prevost, then who in thunder is she?’
‘Captain!’ said the lookout overhead, sharp and urgent. ‘I can see her colours, sir. She’s flying the Stars and Stripes!’
There was a moment of stunned silence. Then a hubbub broke out, the captain, the mate, the helmsman and several of the sailors all talking at once. Murray rose to his feet and crossed the deck to join MacLea. The latter heard again in his mind Brock’s parting words in Niagara. *You should have an easy passage to Amherstburg. Our spies tell us that there are no American warships on Lake Erie. *
Well, General, he thought, you might want to have a long, hard talk with your spies.
He turned to Captain Larose. The explosion of nautical jargon had died down, and the captain looked at Norton and the two soldiers almost apologetically. ‘Messieurs, I am afraid we are in what the British call a spot of bother. That is an American brig of war. She will mount a dozen guns, perhaps more. We have one gun only.’
‘Can we run?’ asked Murray.
‘We can try, but if we go about and try to run back past Long Point, she will cut us off with the greatest of ease. And at the moment, on our present course she is overhauling us by about two knots. Marie-Anne was built for carrying furs, not for speed. We can increase speed a little by altering course directly to the north, but…’ He pointed to where the coast of Long Point ran down from the north-west in a long line of boiling white breakers. Any ship entering those waves would run aground and be smashed to pieces. ‘That awaits us,’ Larose said, wiping the water from his face. ‘I fear there is only one choice, messieurs. Shall I give the order to strike our colours?’
Norton was silent. MacLea looked at the men on deck. All of them were staring back at him: the sailors, the Mohawks, his own men. He looked at Thomas and Crabbe, and thought about the fate that awaited runaway slaves captured by the Americans. He looked at Norton’s Mohawks too; it was unlikely that the Americans would bother taking them prisoner. He was responsible for these men, and the thought of surrendering to save his own skin while condemning them to death turned his stomach.
I have already lost one command, he thought, anger suddenly building up inside him. I’m damned if I’m going to lose another.
He looked at Murray. Their eyes met. ‘What do you think?’ MacLea asked.
‘It’s better than the alternative,’ said Murray.
‘Yes.’
MacLea turned back to Captain Larose. ‘How many men do you think might be aboard?’ he asked, gesturing to the oncoming brig.
‘Tabernacle!’ swore the captain, staring at him. ‘A hundred easily, perhaps a hundred and twenty if she carries marines. My crew are eighteen.’
‘And with my men and Mr Norton’s, we have about fifty,’ said MacLea. ‘The odds are not so bad, are they? Captain Larose, I am disinclined to surrender, not now when the war is just starting to grow interesting. Bring the ship about, if that is the correct expression, clap on every sail you can and run straight at the Yankee, then come alongside and we’ll board her.’
The crew stared at him as if he was mad. He stared back, and so he missed the slow smile spreading over John Norton’s face. The Mohawks had understood all right, and were on their feet, looking hopeful. Murray turned to the volunteers and yelled at them to load their muskets.
‘Morte-dieu!’ said the captain. ‘It is insane.’ Then he began to grin, and suddenly let out a high-pitched whoop of delight. ‘Monsieur Macrory!’ he shouted to the mate. ‘We will wear ship! Helmsman, steer a course straight for that Yankee salaud! Marcouf, Barlow, break out the small arms! Gun’s crew, to your stations!’
More orders followed in a stream, and MacLea and Murray braced themselves as the schooner came about, lurching in the waves, and then began to tear back along her previous course, heeling over alarmingly as the wind filled her sails. Men were coming up from below decks with a variety of weapons: muskets, carbines, a couple of fowling pieces, cutlasses, boarding pikes and axes. Norton was with his Mohawks, talking to them urgently in their own tongue, and MacLea and Murray slithered along the deck to join the other volunteers.
‘As soon as we are alongside her, get aboard any way you can,’ the captain said. ‘After that, you know what to do.’ He saw Abel Thomas’s face glittering with excitement.
‘We are closing fast,’ said Larose. ‘Make ready, gentlemen.’
The two ships raced towards each other on converging courses. The brig was suddenly much closer now; God, very close! Smoke blossomed from its bow, blown away at once on the wind. A white fountain leapt from a wave crest just to the Marie-Anne’s right – not right, MacLea thought, starboard; must remember to call it that – and their own gun’s captain, not bothering to wait for orders, pulled the lanyard. The four-pounder boomed and jerked back on its carriage. Her crew leapt to the little cannon, swabbing out and ramming down a fresh charge of powder, wadding and shot. The American ship fired again, and this time the shot drilled a neat hole through one of the Marie-Anne’s topsails.
‘Clumsy bastards,’ said Macrory, the mate, in disgust. ‘They don’t even know enough to fire on the downward roll.’ Moments later, Marie-Anne’s bow pitched up on a wave just as the gun fired, the shot hurtling skyward; swearing horribly, the mate went running forward to take over the gun. The two ships were only about half a mile apart now, rushing straight towards each other, and the distance between them was closing very fast.
The American’s bow chaser fired again, wildly. ‘I reckon we’ve puzzled them,’ said Murray. ‘We were supposed to surrender or run away.’
‘I know,’ said MacLea. ‘We’re not playing by the rules… What are they doing now?’
The American brig had been sailing straight towards them, but now she was turning, the shape of her hull growing longer as she came around quickly before the wind. Suddenly they could see the full power of her artillery: six open gun ports and the black muzzles of guns run out. ‘Twenty-four-pounder carronades,’ said Larose, looking through his glass. ‘They’ll load them with canister, hold fire until we come up on her, and then rake our decks from end to end. Like as not, we’ll be killed. But I think you are right, mon ami. It is better than surrendering.’
MacLea watched, his chest taut; he had not foreseen this. Not my kind of war, he thought. The broadside of the American ship blossomed with flame and smoke, and he flinched; there was a whir of projectiles in the air and a few more, smaller holes appeared in the sails. The lake ahead of them was churned into a white storm of spray and foam as the canister, scores of musket balls discharged from each cannon, tore harmlessly into the water. There were whoops of derision from the crew, and Larose bellowed over the racket of the four-pounder going off again, ‘She has fired too soon, before we are in range! Now she will not be able to reload in time before we are alongside her! We may live after all, messieurs!’
Privately MacLea thought their chances were still small. Their own gun crew were capering like demented men, for they had scored a hit on the American brig with their last shot, and Macrory was roaring at them to calm down and grab hold of weapons. Two seamen produced grappling hooks, barbed four-pronged iron hooks on lines of rope. MacLea looked up to see men with muskets lining the rail of the American ship. ‘Get down!’ he shouted to his men.
They dived onto the deck, the Mohawks crouching too; MacLea himself took cover behind the foremast, hearing the thump of a musket ball burying itself in the wood above his head. The brig was right in front of them now, seemingly almost close enough to touch. Larose was screaming orders. A seaman ran past MacLea and then fell dead with blood running from his face. More men were running to the halyards, heedless of the enemy’s musketry, most of which seemed to be going high; to MacLea’s mind, it seemed that the Americans were again firing wildly, almost panicky. His own men were shooting back, and he saw a ramrod, left carelessly in the muzzle, arc through the air like an arrow. He turned his head to see who had fired; Hill, of course.
And then, just when it seemed that they must ram the enemy head on, the Marie-Anne came about onto a parallel course and seemed to slide sideways through the water towards the other ship. With a crash of rending timber she struck the American vessel, measuring her entire starboard length against the brig’s hull. Men leant over the rail of the brig, several feet higher than the deck of the schooner, and shot at them. MacLea sighted on one of the Americans and pulled the trigger of his musket, and the man staggered and fell back out of sight. The grappling hooks were thrown and took hold, binding the two ships together; he saw an American hacking at the rope of one hook and then screaming and jerking back as Croghan, one of the York backwoodsmen, shot him through the shoulder.
MacLea dropped his empty musket. There was a cutlass lying on the deck; he seized this, and then jumped to grab hold of the rail of the enemy ship. Somehow he managed to haul himself one-handed up over the rail, and then flop rather awkwardly onto his back on the wooden deck.
An American sailor in sodden blue jersey and trousers stood over him, raising a boarding pike in both hands to impale him where he lay. MacLea hacked at his ankle with the cutlass, feeling the blade bite through skin and into bone, and rolled over as the pike stabbed into the deck where he had been lying. He scrambled up to see two more men rushing at him, but then Norton’s Mohawks came over the rail screaming like fiends, hurling themselves on the nearest American sailors and marines and driving them back. Some of the Americans fell over themselves in their haste to get away from the slashing axes and knives.
Behind the Mohawks came Murray and the militiamen, and Larose and his sailors, hauling themselves over the rail and rushing forward with cutlass and pike and clubbed musket. Some of the Americans were making a stand: the crews of two carronades were laying about them with cutlasses, one man using a wooden rammer like a quarterstaff. Half a dozen blue-coated American marines knelt in a line by the foremast and fired a crashing volley that sent men sprawling on the deck, but Murray and Croghan charged through the smoke, followed by the Mohawks, and the marines were overwhelmed.
MacLea did not see how that fight ended; he had troubles of his own. A sudden wave of blue-coated men with cutlasses came running from aft, urged on by a bare-headed young officer with gold epaulettes. MacLea fell back quickly. Abel Thomas was at his side, and Macrory too, the first mate raising an aged blunderbuss and squeezing the trigger. There was a deafening crash and a gust of smoke, and the Americans fell back, several of them howling in pain as buckshot sprayed through their ranks. Shouting at them to hold, the young officer raised a pistol and aimed it at Macrory, pulling the trigger. The weapon misfired. Abel Thomas flung himself on the officer bare-handed, lifting him off his feet and then hurling him down hard onto the deck.
MacLea ran past him and carried on towards the quarterdeck, ducking as two more pistols were fired at him. Another officer with gold epaulettes stood beside the helm, holding a smoking pistol. He drew sword as MacLea ran towards him, extending his weapon en garde and lunging at the Canadian. MacLea dodged; the officer slashed at him again, and then reeled and fell back, dropping his sword. A heavy wooden belaying pin, thrown with great accuracy by Macrory, had struck him on the head. Stunned and bleeding, he dropped to his knees and MacLea stood over him with cutlass raised.
‘Strike your colours, sir.’
The officer nodded dumbly. MacLea turned to Macrory, but the mate was already moving to the flag halyard, slashing it through with his sheath knife. The Stars and Stripes fell in a sodden heap to the deck. There was a roar from further forward, where men were still struggling with each other, but now the Americans were falling back, sullenly throwing down their weapons. Some looked fearfully at the Mohawks, edging away from them. The latter stood and jeered in their own language, mocking the defeated men. It was the Indians, MacLea knew, who had made the difference. The American sailors had been terrified of them, and few had been prepared to stand up to them.
Captain Larose was alongside him, black beard split into an enormous grin despite blood dripping from a cut to his forehead. ‘Incroyable! We have won the day. It is the spirit of Nelson, I think. Toujours l’audace!’
‘I believe that is Napoleon, not Nelson,’ said MacLea. He looked around a little wildly, trying to think what to do next. Until now, he had been unable to concentrate on anything except surviving long enough to get aboard the ship. ‘Make certain the prisoners are disarmed and take them below. Lock them up in the… the hold, or some such.’ He turned to the dazed man kneeling at his feet. ‘What is this ship, sir?’
‘United States Ship President Madison, sir, out of Presque Isle. I am James Wyndham, first lieutenant. You have this ship, sir, but for the love of God, don’t let those savages loose on our men.’
‘Your men will be safe. Where is your captain?’
‘Below in his cabin.’ The lieutenant looked up, blood running from his own head and his face a mask of pain, but there was no disguising the contempt in his voice. ‘He is seasick,’ he said.
Order began to emerge on deck. The prisoners were being herded below. MacLea watched as Abel Thomas hauled his own prisoner to his feet. He was swearing viciously at the American, but the officer appeared to have no more than a few bruises. ‘Well done,’ said MacLea.
‘I’m learning manners, sir,’ said Thomas. ‘Go on,’ he added, giving the young officer a shove between the shoulder blades, ‘get below with the rest of the trash, damn you.’
A few yards away, a discarded American musket lay on the deck; MacLea pulled out its ramrod and threw it to Hill. The latter bobbed his head and grinned his thanks. ‘Do it again,’ said MacLea, ‘and I will save the Americans the trouble of shooting you. Captain Larose? I am going to the captain’s cabin.’
‘Do not be long,’ said Larose urgently. ‘Remember, Capitaine, this wind is pushing us straight towards Long Point.’
MacLea nodded and went below. The captain’s cabin was at the stern of the ship. Waves leapt up and lashed at the leaded glass windows running along the stern gallery. The windows leaked badly, and there were pools of water on the deck below them. The cabin itself stank of vomit and rum. The captain’s remedy for seasickness, apparently, was alcohol; an empty bottle rolled back and forth on the deck beside the cot where the man himself lay senseless. MacLea judged that he would be unconscious for hours.
He searched the cabin quickly. The ship appeared to be very new, her planks in places still rough from the saw. He found a wardrobe full of uniforms and a sea chest containing personal effects, but nothing of interest. He turned to the pinewood writing desk. Its drawers were locked, but a few blows with the hilt of his cutlass smashed in the flimsy wood panels.
In the third drawer, he found what he was looking for: an oilcloth packet inscribed on the outside, To the captain of USS President Madison, to be opened after leaving port. He sat down at the desk listening to the wind and the waves and the captain’s snores, and began to read.
The orders were brief. President Madison was directed to make all possible speed to the area of Long Point, where she was to wait and intercept the Canadian schooner Marie-Anne. The latter was to be taken if at all possible, and sunk if not. All prisoners and dispatches should be brought back directly to Presque Isle, the report concluded coldly, all save for any Indians found aboard, who should be destroyed immediately.
It took a few moments for MacLea to take it in. They knew we were coming, he thought. We did not know of this ship’s existence, but they knew exactly where and when to find us. Who told them? He rose to his feet, tucking the dispatch into his coat and going back up on deck, where Larose was shouting orders at his sailors and getting the President Madison under way. Murray was there too, gathering the company.
‘What are our losses?’ asked MacLea.
‘Watson and Carriere both dead. Three wounded, one seriously. Three of the Mohawks are hurt, two badly. Two of Larose’s sailors are dead and two more hurt. The Americans lost eight killed and about a dozen wounded, and we’ve a hundred prisoners below decks.’ Murray chuckled. ‘No one will believe this, you know.’
‘No,’ said MacLea slowly. ‘I am not entirely certain I believe it myself.’