IN LIFE AT SEA CURRAN HAD NEVER HAD A CABIN OF HIS OWN, AND THE SHEER vastness of his new stateroom, all of seventy-two square feet, made him feel every bit an oceangoing raja. His cabin had a standing bedsit supported by stanchions fore and aft. Though he would have preferred a hanging cot, the cabin was an auxiliary surgical space for Doctor Darby, which explained the princely length of the mattress and also why the berth was fixed to the deck. There were two gimbaled whale oil lanterns, as Wainwright had promised, a luxury that gave more than enough light to read and write—again, a coincidence and benefit of the cabin serving in battle as a dressing station.
A hanging brass stove was suspended on a chain from the overhead. In colder climes it would be filled with coal, another luxury for a ship whose home port of Boston could lash her sons with a bitter winter. Behind the hanging stove, an eight-inch scuttle passed through the hull—which in this part of the ship was a gratifying slab of oak all of three feet thick. The scuttle could be closed with an iron baffle so the through-hull could be shipped tight in a running sea. This bit of craftsmanship allowed a generous amount of ventilation without making the cabin parky or wet. Despite the opulence, that night Curran slept fitfully, not yet accustomed to the sounds of his new ship.
Dawn was still an hour away when Curran went on deck to meet Kerr coming off the middle watch. They retired into the master’s cabin, and Curran formally relieved Mister Kerr as navigator. Kerr was as happy as any young man released from a great responsibility and good-naturedly countersigned the papers accounting for the ship’s several chronometers, sextants, hundreds of charts, and six fat leather-bound copies of the requisite tables. On Enterprise, the navigator was accountable for the lead-covered signal books as well as the ship’s codes and ciphers, and Curran signed the paperwork acknowledging all sorts of brutal, peremptory, and shameful punishments should he permit, cause, or allow the ship’s signals, codes, or papers to fall into the hands of an enemy, hostile power, or foreign prince.
Kerr made introductions to Mister Pybus, the sailing master, and Mister Midshipman Fancher, master’s mate. They seemed almost like father and son, both dark-haired and muscular with piercing eyes and the same ready crooked smile. The master had come up through the hawse pipe, serving first before the mast as a seaman ordinary, captain of the maintop, master’s mate, then the very man himself. Mister Pybus had more time at sea than Curran had on earth, and was not the sort of old salt that was much bothered by young officers.
Fancher was the most senior of the midshipmen on board, just twenty, and would sit his examination for lieutenant in the spring. Kerr had told Curran privately that Fancher was a fine hand with the charts and tables, serious, dependable, and certain to be given his step, which was more than could be said for the other midshipmen—Hall, Nordhoff, and Wainwright—who were not only slovenly and lazy but also of no use in naval matters: incorrigible rascals and superfluous chow burners. Curran listened as Kerr disclaimed them, together and individually, as embarrassments to the service and a blight on the nation from which they sprang. Curran agreed to keep a close eye on them but did not forget that three days ago, he too had been a midshipman.
During the pleasant, windy morning Enterprise made the rest of her water and provisions were put aboard: great wheels of cheese, hams, casks of wine and beer, two or three lowing cattle, half a dozen piglets, a harem of hens for Chanticleer the rooster, two goats, and a pair of suspicious and troubled-looking sheep. There were also liberty parties passing back and forth, and though some of the men might return to their duties slightly impaired by a night ashore, all hands turned to with efficient goodwill. Erskine was everywhere, above and below, seeing to the shifting of ballast, scribbling with the purser, and even rejecting some of the more decrepit stores himself, making sure the carpenter, sailmaker, and bo’sun received honest value for the items they paid for.
During the second watch Curran met each of the quartermasters, generally a sober set of men; among them was the captain’s coxswain, Guild. Also presenting themselves were Kanoa, Finch, and the other senior petty officer, Padeen Hoyle; all were right seamen. Together, out of 400 sailors on Enterprise, there were almost 70 Britons, 35 Irishmen, 15 Africans, 10 Scots, 9 Norwegians, a Swede, a Finn, a French-speaking Dutchman, 2 Bugis, an Algerian Jew, and 10 of a boat crew all brought up in the Sandwich Islands, tattooed and proud, one of them a former Nantucket harpooner and blood prince of the island of Moloka‘i. Also aboard was a white-faced, black-eared terrier bitch named Beazee. The scarcity of rats aboard Enterprise was due to her zeal and industry (she’d been rated an honorary fore-castleman), and “Queen Bee” had the run of even the sacred quarterdeck. It was known she had no love for the ship’s cats and had driven each of them on occasion scratching up halyards, sheets, and even bare masts in mortal fear of their nine lives. Beazee was much caressed and was said to like nothing better than rattling a Norway rat, slurping a quart of beer, and being turned loose on the deck of an enemy ship.
The tramontana expired in puffs and gusts, and as the morning spread on, the harbor became still and flat. During the day, Nolan was occasionally seen on deck, always followed by a Marine. The men set to details and working parties generally ignored him, and he had enough sense of ship’s business to usually keep out of their way. A few of the older hands who had seen Nolan in other commissions might simply nod hello, but as far as Curran could tell not one sailor or officer spoke to him all day.
At the end of the forenoon watch Curran joined several of the officers and Mister Erskine on the quarterdeck for the noon observation. Like druids worshiping the sun, half a dozen officers faced out over the larboard quarter, peering through smoked glass lenses, waiting for the precise moment of zenith. At sea, the noon sight was one of the crucial observations for establishing the ship’s position. In port it was mostly a ceremonial occasion, and though attended by more formality than necessity, the ritual was an immovable part of the ship’s routine. The officers all held their sextants fixing the disk, and when it was as high as it would get in the sky, Curran in his capacity as navigator pronounced, “Mark.” Mister Pybus and Mister Fancher concurred, and Midshipman Nordhoff stared at his instrument with an expression of bafflement and heartbreak.
Curran said to Mister Erskine, “It is noon, sir.” Erskine walked two steps to the binnacle and said to the Marine and the bo’sun of the watch, “Pipe the hands to dinner.”
The glass was turned, eight bells ended the forenoon watch, and as the last of the bell strokes throbbed away, the pipes screamed first “all hands” and then “pipe to dinner.” As the notes trilled out, there was a general movement to the hatches and then a sustained sort of crashing belowdecks, shouting, and the banging of pots and tankards.
In the harbor, the men of the returning liberty boat were seen to stretch out at their oars, rowing like heroes so not to miss the meal—or the ration that was just now serving out of the tub forward of the mainmast, a concoction mixed with exacting measure by the bo’sun and the officer of the deck. The spirituous ration aboard Enterprise was whiskey cut twice with water and, when stores were aboard, sometimes sweetened with citrus and sugar, as it was today. Rum was used when it could be had in the Caribbean, preferably taken from British merchantmen. American sailors had taken to calling their liquor “Bob Smith” after President Jefferson’s Secretary of the Navy, the Honorable Robert Smith, who had decided that monongahela—that is, American-made whiskey—was a salubrious and republican beverage more befitting the character and fighting humors of the United States Navy than the Royal Navy’s grog, a potion invented by a slab-sided, mincing king-worshiper of a British lord and occasional admiral.
Erskine looked up at the bows, his hands on the quarterdeck railing. Nolan had pressed himself against a gun carriage, making himself as thin as possible so sailors could stream into the hatchways to the mess decks below.
“It isn’t noon everywhere,” Erskine said.
“I would have hanged them both,” sniffed Lieutenant Varney. The Marine’s somewhat lurid complexion contrasted awkwardly with the green of his jacket. Varney cleared his throat. “Burr and this cully as well.”
Curran watched as Nolan walked to the bow and sat on the larboard cathead looking out to sea. “I have heard the men call him Plain Buttons, Mister Erskine,” Curran said. “What does that mean?”
Padeen Hoyle, just presented on watch, put himself forward as an expert. “Beggin’ your pardon, sir. It’s that coat he wears. It is the uniform jacket of an Army officer. Only he ain’t allowed to wear the Army buttons nor epaulets as they bear the emblem of our country.”
“His coat has gotten a little thinner over the years,” said Erskine.
“Do you know him, sir?” asked Curran.
“No one does, well. Though when I was a mid he was held aboard Constitution.”
“I know this,” Varney said. “He is a bastard, as well as a traitor. He was born in Rhode Island during the occupation, the natural son of Sir Henry Clinton, the British general commanding in New England. His mother was a whore.”
Captain Pelles’ voice came from the ladder way: “Do you know that as a fact, Lieutenant Varney?” The officers touched their hats as Pelles came onto the quarterdeck. The captain glanced at the log board and then his eyes fell on the Marine.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Varney muttered. “Only I have heard it said around the fleet.”
Curran moved to larboard as the captain looked down onto the main deck.
“Perhaps you have also heard that Mister Nolan fought a duel before his court-martial. He shot and killed a pompous militia colonel with a flapping jaw.”
“I believe what I heard to be the truth, sir,” Varney grunted. “About his mother, that is.”
Pelles’ expression was glacial. “Then I gather not many have said it to Nolan’s face. I do not condone gossip, Mister Varney. I find it a bit feline for a gentleman—and it should be rather beneath an officer.”
Varney folded his hands behind his back; he dared say nothing else. Pelles’ reputation as a duelist and fighting captain was such that he no longer feared disagreement, much less affront. In a democracy, no mayor or governor or even president wielded so complete authority as the captain of a warship. And no magistrate in any court wielded so complete and arbitrary justice over his subjects. Aboard Enterprise, Pelles was judge and jury. His word was absolute, and with the authority of his command came the ability to brook no disagreement.
Pelles looked down onto the spar deck at Nolan. It now fell to him and to the ship’s company to administer Nolan’s sentence, and Pelles knew that his own conduct, measured in the smallest gestures of courtesy or derision, would shape the behavior of his officers and men. Pelles thought his check of Varney was sufficient; he would not tolerate chatter about the prisoner, not in his presence and definitely not on the quarterdeck. Pelles knew as well as anyone aboard how a crew could create a scapegoat. He would not tolerate cruelty.
The captain looked into the rigging and then at the clouds hanging above. Nothing moved; there was not a breath of wind. “Mister Erskine, the ship will remain one more night in Cádiz and depart with the first ebb. The glass is falling, and we may soon have a Levanter.”
“I have noticed that, sir.”
“All hands who have completed their duty will be permitted a run ashore, the starboard watch to return to the ship not later than three bells in the first watch, and the larbolines given Cinderella’s liberty.”
“Very good sir.”
Pelles looked out into the harbor. The calm had induced a boatload of whores out into the roadstead. Though they did not approach Enterprise closely they did wave and flaunt their handkerchiefs. Pelles looked beyond the bawdy boat and toward the town. An open carriage was passing down the cornice, and it was not hard to imagine a beautiful Spanish doña borne by it.
“Have you any additional business in Cádiz, Mister Curran? Should you like an evening on shore?”
“I had a three-day run, sir, after Epevier sailed. I have seen all of Cádiz.”
All the officers knew, and Curran could now only suspect, that Captain Pelles was quite fond of evenings ashore, particularly evenings at the theatre.
“Mister Erskine, who is the midshipman of the watch?”
“Nordhoff, sir. The youngster.”
Pelles seemed to suppress a smile. “Please have him put on a presentable uniform and bring his journals and the noon figurings. He will join me directly in my cabin for dinner.” Pelles started for the ladder and said over his shoulder, “Mister Curran, have you checked the noon reckonings of the young gentlemen?”
Curran tried to remember if that had been mentioned as part of his new duties. “No, sir,” he said, expecting squalls, “I have not.”
Pelles answered, “When we are back at sea, you may wish to have the duty midshipman assist you and Mister Fancher with the noon sights. Before you came aboard, on Wednesday last, Mister Wainwright handed me a reckoning that placed us in a sea of lava very near the center of the Earth. I weep for my country when I think of that young man navigating a warship.”
“I will attend to it, sir.”
Below, the word was being passed for Mister Nordhoff, who had been found near the after hatchway. His terrified voice peeped up. “Me? Dinner with the captain? Oh Jesus, what did I do?”
Pelles pretended not to hear, and the terrified mid continued squawking, calling for someone to help brush his coat and begging Wainwright to let him just glance at his reckonings. The captain went below, the officers dispersed, and Erskine suppressed a yawn.
“Mister Hall,” Erskine asked. “What is playing at the opera house?”
Curran watched as the midshipman removed a folded newspaper from the pocket of his coat. Apparently knowledge of the theater’s schedule was a collateral duty. Hall squinted at the paper. “It’s Mozart, sir.”
“Mozart is dead, Mister Hall; we have been through this before. What is playing at the opera house?”
Confounded, Hall narrowed his eyes at the paper.
“The Magic Flute?” Erskine asked.
Hall’s lips twitched.
“Die Zauberflöte?” Curran suggested.
“It’s all foreign, sir,” Hall mumbled. “Don geo-something?”
“Avast heaving, Mister Hall,” Erskine smiled. “I believe the captain will want his gig alongside in an hour. You can arrange that, I am sure.”
“Yes, sir,” Hall answered. “Right away.” Hall stuffed the paper back into his jacket and skipped down the quarterdeck ladder.
“The captain enjoys opera?” Curran asked.
“He is an aficionado,” Erskine smiled. “Mister Curran, it might do for you to plot courses from the roadstead tonight, one for an offing and one through the Gut and into the Med. It is our captain’s habit to conceal his intentions until after we have raised the hook.”
“I will, sir.”
Captain Pelles had indeed decided to spend the night ashore, and after the ceremony of his departure Mister Midshipman Nordhoff was sent into the mizzen crosstrees. Though not quite as implausible as the reckonings of his messmate Wainwright, Nordhoff’s scribbled calculations had placed Enterprise somewhere north of Bay St. Louis, in the Mississippi Territory, hard aground in a pine forest. Curran saw that Nordhoff took a book up with him and permitted him to smuggle a sandwich under his jacket. A few minutes after three bells, Curran followed Kerr and Pybus into the wardroom.
Even a happy ship exhales when the captain is not aboard (“Jehovah is no longer among us”), and in the half hour before dinner the wardroom of Enterprise filled with her officers, a content and conversational set of men, all anticipating supper.
It was the first time Curran had seen together all of his mess mates, a dozen of them, plus the two Marine officers, Captain MacQuarrie and Lieutenant Varney. The doors to the cabins adjoining opened and closed as officers shifted out of their working clothes into more presentable dress. The space was generous, especially compared with the cramped gunroom on Epevier. Fore and aft ran an oak table ten feet long and all of six inches thick. Punctuating the officers’ cabins on either side were two of the long 24s. The wardroom’s four guns, collectively called “the Apostles,” were bowsed neatly and kept shining with the cook’s own plush. All was lit by the beautiful expanse of the stern gallery, the glass polished to perfect transparency, and a padded locker ran the breadth of it, strewn with blue-covered cushions.
The table was set with linen and china, and as this was an in-port rather than an at-sea meal, there were bread barges set in place, with soft tommy fresh from the oven and two rounded ladle scoops of butter on saucers fore and aft. Mister Erskine stood at his place by the head of the table, welcoming everyone by name, and his good humor was on fine display. Most of the officers had blown their gaffs the night before; anyway, Cádiz was not the liberty port of the world, and they were most of them happy now to sip beer and half-water Bob as they smelled dinner preparing in the pantry just forward.
Lieutenant Ward scraped at a fiddle (he was the sort of officer who had curtains in his berth), but he played a creditable version of the Virginia Reel as conversations gathered. Curran took a can of beer from Mister Leslie, wishing him health, and as talk continued, the officers drifted toward their set places at table. To Erskine’s right was the Marine captain, MacQuarrie, a thin, boyish man, nevertheless famed as a fighter, and just the person to lead a boarding party or to smash up a battery ashore. There was Piggen, the purser, and MacQuarrie’s assistant, Lieutenant Varney, still looking somehow put out, but attending to Ward’s music with some satisfaction. Curran listened more than he spoke, trying to make out currents and cross currents of conversations, and he guessed correctly that Varney’s hauteur could become tedious on a long commission.
There was the master, the redoubtable Mister Pybus, and the third lieutenant, Mister Fentress. Mister Leslie, the fourth, was a tall, gimlet-eyed Virginian, a native of the Tidewater, who managed to combine courtly manners with a wry sense of humor. All seemed fine people, with Fentress maybe a bit unpolished, and definitely a man who said exactly what he thought. The surgeon, Doctor Darby, was in his black coat, a bald man without even eyebrows, and it gave his face a constant expression of either wonder or delight. Doctor Darby was highly regarded by the crew, though he made them filter every drop of fresh water brought aboard through sand, charcoal, and wood ashes. Darby had also persuaded Captain Pelles to line the number two water tank with beech wood and store in it three hundred gallons of lager, which the doctor swore was the finest antiscorbutic known to man.
Last to join the mess was the second lieutenant, Kerr, who had just signed ship’s articles for a dozen British seamen who had swum away from HMS Melampus at Gibraltar and come overland to Cádiz hoping to find an American ship. He was still smiling when he came into the wardroom, slapped Erskine on the back, and said facetiously, “God bless King George. Bless him! Two of them were rated gunner’s mates, and one a quartermaster. And not one word of foreign do they speak. I shall now replace that damned rascal Sulesi, Solangrutan, whatever his name is, that damned pirate Boogie man as loader of number seven.”
Kerr filled a glass and Erskine stood behind his chair at the head of the table. “Gentlemen,” he said, “most of you know we’ve been joined by Mister Curran, who is come over from Epevier. He has relieved Mister Kerr as navigator—”
“And I am glad of it,” said Kerr.
“And we are safer for it,” said Leslie taking up a tankard.
“I hope you will make Mister Curran feel to home.”
Nods and bows. The three officers he had not yet met came across and shook his hand saying welcome, and the purser and Captain MacQuarrie made very civil bows across the table. “Your servant, sir,” said the purser, but Curran judged him to be like the rest of his profession—calculating and close-fisted.
Curran was asked a few questions about Epevier. She was French built, of course, captured by the British off Ushant carrying dispatches from Napoleon himself. Taken into the Royal Navy at once, she sailed for half a dozen years as HMS Epevier. MacQuarrie surprised Curran by saying that he had been a lieutenant of Marines aboard USS Peacock when HMS Epevier was captured off Cape Canaveral, between the Bahamas and Spanish Florida, during the War of 1812.
“I heard it was quite a fight,” Curran said. “When I was first aboard there was still a plug in the hull, square in my cabin.”
MacQuarrie smiled, for although it had been a desperate fight, things had come out well. “Epevier was pretty badly shot up,” MacQuarrie said. “The prize crew had the devil’s own time getting her back under the St. Mary’s battery in Georgia.” MacQuarrie did not mention it, but it was his own fine seamanship conning the sloop back to port that had won him promotion. The prize money wasn’t bad either. Although Peacock had left HMS Epevier a battered hulk, Georgia shipwrights had put USS Epevier to service as a weatherly and well-found vessel. Kerr and Ward had both seen her in the Atlantic and said pleasant things to Curran about his former ship.
“She is a right basher,” Curran said, “and maybe even a bit over armed. Captain Gormly dearly loved to hear things go boom, and we carried sixteen 32-pounders.”
“Sure, that’s a lot of guns,” said Erskine, “for a sloop-of-war.”
“It was, sir,” said Curran. “But in the Atlantic station we found our enemies pretty well spaced, not many pirates or slavers in the northern station, but our captain did have us shoot targets constantly, and once or twice even at icebergs.”
Overhead, the quartermaster began to toll out six bells. By the second stroke, Ward had put the fiddle away. Erskine sat and passed the bread: the meal began. The stewards brought in tureens of turtle soup, and the more sharp set of the officers put their spoons to use. At the exact instant the last bell clanged, there was a rap on the wardroom door. A Marine sentry opened it and revealed Philip Nolan in his best coat and slightly yellow linen.
The appearance of the prisoner immediately brought conversation to a halt. Curran stood and Erskine turned in his chair. In the enthusiastic conversation before dinner, Curran had almost forgotten that Nolan was invited. Erskine had been told (he was, after all, president of the mess), but it had also slipped his mind. Spoons were poised in midair, and faces wore empty looks triangulated somewhere between contempt, indifference, and confusion.
“Forgive me, gentlemen, if I am late,” Nolan said. He was in fact, exactly on time, to the stroke of the bell.
Curran said to the table, “Mister Nolan will join us for supper, gentlemen. He will do so every Monday during our cruise.”
There was silence, and just as Pelles knew, Erskine realized that the wardroom officers would take their cue from their seniors. He said, “Welcome, Mister Nolan. You will please join us.”
Nolan stepped into the room, presuming to look directly at no one in particular, and found the empty seat across from Curran. The steward brought him a bowl of soup, and to Nolan’s immediate left Lieutenant Varney stood. With excruciating dignity the Marine said to Erskine, “Sir, may I have permission to leave the mess?”
MacQuarrie looked at his subordinate but did not countermand him.
Erskine said, “If you wish, Lieutenant Varney.”
The officer went out, and there was only the sound of spoons against china. Finally Erskine took up the cause. “So, Ward, what tune was that you were playing?”
No one dared say “Old Virginia,” and Erskine realized almost at once that he had blundered into shoal waters.
“The name escapes me now, sir. It was just a reel I picked up somewhere.”
“It was played very well,” said Curran, who knew the name of the tune as well as anyone at the table.
“Ward has much time to practice,” said Kerr. “I would too, if I was not so attached to earning my keep or learning my trade.”
There were a few snickers. Fentress, who was not the keenest of Enterprise’s wags, said, “I have heard it played before. When I was in Cumberland we called the tune ‘Sweaty Betty.’ ”
“Perhaps there are different lyrics for different occasions, Mister Fentress?” said Erskine, hoping that Fentress would not sing them a few lurid verses.
“They were quite descriptive, sir.” Fentress smirked. “Very informative—”
Erskine gave him a look, and Doctor Darby shook his head. There was silence again for a little while, and one by one empty soup bowls were taken up.
“Mister Nolan,” Curran said, “I could not help but notice that in your cabin you have a copy of Epictetus.”
“I do, sir.”
“If it is in Latin, you need have no fear of me borrowing it,” Darby smiled. “I have enough with my medical texts, and have come automatically to associate Latin with all that man must suffer.”
“Very true,” added MacQuarrie. “Latin and I parted lifelong enemies.” He signaled for the steward to take his bowl, asked for the bread barge. “Epictetus. I seem to recall that name, though I don’t remember him to be an emperor. I take it the book is in some manner a classic?”
Leslie said, “MacQuarrie, they are all classics. Every bleeding one. I have the switch marks to show for my trouble.”
“But I have read a bit,” Darby said. “Is he not a Stoic philosopher? Of the second century, I think. Some find him greater than Seneca.”
“Seneca?! Not those damned cannibal Iroquois?” asked Fentress.
Curran put in kindly, “Lucius Annaeus Seneca: Seneca the Younger. A Roman philosopher, sir. I believe that the Indian tribes share the name only by coincidence. Though the Indians are most warlike and grim, Seneca himself was a bit of an opulent cove, for a Stoic.”
“Have you read Epictetus, Mister Curran?” asked Nolan.
“I have read the Enchiridion and his other fragments. My father swore by him. So much so that he taught us grammar from the book itself. Mister Leslie and I probably share the same stripes.”
Leslie raised his tankard. “I hear you, Mister Curran. A nasty business that language is.”
At this moment the stewards brought out two steaming platters of langoustines, several gallon-sized kegs of porter, and a tray of finely chopped salmagundi. The beer was poured, though Mister Kerr abstained and the purser poured himself a dusty bottle of blackstrap. There was a general crunching as tails were twisted off and shells cracked open. Doctor Darby launched into a story about the relative intelligence of lobsters, as opposed to crabs, which said more about the doctor than any crustacean.
There came soon after a fine paella filled with finger-sized prawns, mussels, chorizo, and five pounds of saffron-colored rice. A curried relish appeared in small ceramic dishes, and Curran was told this was Old Chick’s specialty ketchup. Nearly everyone poured the Vesuvian mixture over everything they were served, but Darby stayed away from it, and warned Curran that it was so spicy he wondered how even a hyena could survive swallowing it.
Mister Leslie slathered a dollop over his paella and said, “It only burns twice!”
Doctor Darby was by now in a well-lubricated state and said, “Then, Mister Leslie, it will serve you as a sturdy, perhaps even heroic anthelmic.”
“De gustibus non est disputandum,” Nolan quipped, and Doctor Darby beamed. “Capital sir! Most capital! A glass of beer with you, sir!”
The far end of the table laughed again after MacQuarrie mistranslated Nolan, rumbling out, “You are what you eat,” and Erskine raised his glass.
“Where did you come by such prodigious Latin, sir?”
“At Magdalen College. In Oxford.”
“England, sir?” sputtered Fentress.
“In 1794. Between the wars,” Nolan said. “I first went up as a servitor, a sort of student and knight of the washtub.”
“An academic midshipman?” asked Curran.
“If you will, sir,” Nolan bowed. “The comparison is apt.”
“What did you study, Mister Nolan?”
“Languages, of course, and a certain measure of the classics cannot be evaded. I read history and mathematics.”
“I did not know that there were so many—” Curran was plainly stumbling over the word “Americans,” but Nolan rescued him.
“There were five of us, sir, six when I started, and almost two dozens of Canadians among the other colleges, particularly at Pembroke.”
Fentress blinked. “You found no hostility there, because you was—”
“None, sir. Well, very little. It was, as I said, between the wars.”
This was coming dangerously close to talk of country, or at least of nationality, and Curran put his hand on the rudder of the conversation. “I would guess you found the course of study challenging?”
“The winters were more challenging, and the food,” Nolan said. “The English boil things that have no business being put into a pot.”
“Hear him!” said Kerr. “They are the very Huns! Savages, sir, with the vile things they eat. Soused pig’s face. Trotters fresh from the sty’s bilges! The most unwholesome offal and fish that even the French would not feed to prisoners.”
“They have as a people a vile compunction to eat haslets on purpose,” said Doctor Darby. “I believe it is what compels them to extreme bellicosity and dyspepsia.”
“And, I would add, a certain want of romantic vigor,” Nolan said. The table rang with laughter. Nolan had come quite close to proving himself agreeable company.
Fentress poured some beer. “Now, I know a man who went to Oxford, like you, between the wars. I’d always heard that he was one of them gentleman commoners, like you said. His family, they was plantation owners, and had some sort of timber operation in . . . well, it was west of . . . anyway, they grew trees, as I said, and tobacco and corn of which they made whiskey. What you would call a very tidy operation. This man, his name was Fitzgerald, though was not one of those insolvent, slovenly bog-trotter Micks, no not, by no long shot. A gentleman and an attorney. He was an artillery officer too. Big as a barn.”
Nolan’s face had brightened as Fentress spoke. “Fitzgerald! Do you mean Wendell Fitzgerald, sir?”
“Why, yes. As I said, I knew him in . . . well, I did not say that. But I knew him well enough. And his wife was the most beautiful thing ever.”
“Was Fitzgerald a friend of yours, Mister Nolan?” asked Curran.
“A particular one, sir. I would not have survived Oxford without his help.” Most of the gentlemen at the table had been educated at sea, and with the possible exception of Doctor Darby, there were very few of them who would have survived there at all.
Nolan said, “When I first went up to Oxford, I was assigned to wait on Lord Melville’s son. A quite ill-mannered drunk, and though he was a friend of my guardian, I found the situation very unpleasant. I was treated little better than a footman. Wendell was a year ahead of me, and he lived in great style. Made no bows to lords or the swell mob.”
Leslie, who was a staunch republican, said, “Right he should.”
“Just so.” Nolan nodded. “I was hungry, and he fed me—a fire in his rooms every night. He was very generous. And big as a cart horse. He actually called out Melville’s son—sabers it was, not pistols. Fitzgerald disarmed the scrub in the first pass and then beat him with the flat of his sword—right on the field. He settled the young lord’s hash, as we used to say. I had no trouble after that.” Nolan turned smiling to Fentress. “It has been years since I have seen him. I hope you last saw him well?”
Fentress shoveled more rice into his moving jaw and spoke with his mouth full. “Don’t take offense because you ain’t heard from him.”
There was a small space of time when the only sound was Fentress chewing.
Nolan finally asked, “Why is that?”
“He was killed at Fort McHenry in 1812.”
Curran froze at the mention of the battle, and Erskine glowered at Fentress. Oblivious to them both, he continued bitterly: “I served in the naval batteries there. One of them British Congreve rockets arced in all the way from the harbor. Fitzgerald and an entire gun crew was swept right off the parapet and blowed up. I saw it myself.”
Fentress fixed Nolan with a particularly icy expression. “Right after your goddamn schoolmates burned Washington City.”
THE DECK WAS STILL. THERE WAS A FAINT LIGHT IN THE SKY, AND THE HARBOR seemed to glow, indigo and aqua, smooth all the way to the town and the battery. The air was much colder, and the lights coming up on the cornice showed plainly—candlelight in windows, lanterns in doorways and on carriages, and a lumenaria in progress around the theater. Nolan stood by the mainchains, hands behind his back, looking out across the anchorage.
The sentry was nearby, half a dozen steps away, and with him sat the ship’s terrier, scratching herself absently. Standing perfectly still, Nolan’s mind played through the course of the conversation, working backward from the words that had stunned and cut him. What had made him so misjudge the men in the wardroom? Why had he thought that this ship might be different from all the others that had carried him? Had the small courtesy of a livable cabin led him to hope?
Overhead, the rigging creaked and the masts swayed against the gathering dark. It would be better, Nolan thought, if they were all like the Marine lieutenant—abrupt and open in their dislike. He could now remember little of the meal except the look on Fentress’ face—cold, calculating, intending hurt. Nolan became aware of the sentry moving away from him, the Marine coming to something more like the position of attention. Curran descended the quarterdeck ladder and came slowly across the spar deck.
“Good evening, sir,” Nolan said.
“It looks to be,” Curran answered. It was nearly dark, and Nolan would soon have to quit the deck. Behind Curran the sentry held back, cradling his musket with his arms crossed.
After a pause Curran said, “That was a hard way to learn about your friend.”
Nolan took a breath and put his hands on the bulwark. He said quietly, “It seems amazing to me that he is really gone.”
A party of topmen went by carrying lanterns; in their passing light Nolan’s face was ghostly.
“How many ships have carried you, Mister Nolan?”
“I couldn’t say. Some never even opened the envelope that held my papers. It is more than a dozen commissioned vessels, not counting gunboats and packets. I believe I have been in every ocean of the world save the Antarctic sea. I have seen as much of the planet as any man—just not as much of the earth.”
Curran watched as Nolan studied the glittering strand; the lights of people’s homes were as far away from him as the stars. After Nolan had left the wardroom, Erskine had coldly dressed down Fentress, letting him know in no uncertain terms that if he ever again violated the conditions of Nolan’s sentence, he would have him flogged. Few aboard had ever seen the exec so thoroughly enraged. An evening that had begun with so much promise had ended in acrimony and recrimination.
“I know this evening was difficult for you,” Curran said. “I will not require you to attend any other mess nights.”
“No, sir. I did not find it unduly trying.”
Curran was touched by Nolan’s calm and determined smile.
“I would like very much to dine with the officers—that is, if they will have me. I find challenging company better than none.”
“Then we will have you, sir.”
Nolan made a short bow, a courtly gesture from another era. It was hard not to feel sympathy for this man whose life and manners were trapped in amber.
“If you will excuse me, Mister Curran, I think I will return to my cabin,” Nolan said. “Good evening, sir.”
“Good evening, Mister Nolan.”
The terrier stayed and stretched out her limbs, but the sentry glided below, as close to Nolan as a shadow.
Curran walked aft to the quarterdeck. There was not a breath of wind and the scattered clouds were silver around the moon. In the east, the Pleiades were fully risen; Atlas and Pleione, dim in the left-hand sky, Alcyone, and the rest of the Seven Sisters, clustered together exactly as Tennyson described them—fireflies tangled in a silver thread.
Curran hoped there would be wind tomorrow, wind to get under way, for the lights on the shore seemed now a provocation to him, and he knew that to see them must be worse, much worse for Nolan.
CAPTAIN PELLES CAME ON BOARD AT FIRST LIGHT, OR RATHER SPRANG ABOARD very much like a tiger. He went up the side quickly, his body turned slightly sideways on the ladder, sliding his one hand deftly up the forward manrope. He arrived on deck and saluted the colors, then the officers; the Marines presented arms with a shout and crash.
It occurred to Curran that Captain Pelles looked a dozen years younger than the man who’d gone ashore the previous evening. An earnest if somewhat rustic production of Don Giovanni had been a pleasant distraction. But if Pelles seemed like a tiger, it was one that had just been fed, for the part of Elvira had been played by an enchanting soprano. Her perfume might still be detected on the captain’s best uniform had any of the officers ventured close. It was a smell so delicate that it could never have been discovered through the fug of the waking ship and the pleasant smells of coffee, bacon, and just baked bread.
Pelles looked up at the dogvane above the mizzen. “Mister Erskine, when we have weighed, we shall make all plain sail. This land breeze should help us make good an offing.”
Erskine answered, “Very good, sir,” quite as though the order had not been anticipated.
Enterprise was already at single anchor, and the capstan bars were shipped. The gig was quickly brought aboard, and the waisters were added to the mass of men standing by on the forecastle.
The pipe trilled “all hands up to anchor,” and the fiddler played “The Old Thirteen.” A voice called from the forecastle, “Short stay.”
Captain Pelles said in a conversational voice, “Heave round, stamp and go.” The bo’sun repeated this in a booming shout, and through the hatchway the fiddle could be heard squeaking rapidly. Pelles stood on the starboard side of the quarterdeck; Curran, Erskine, and the other officers to larboard, just aft of the wheel. Padeen the quartermaster and Lachat the sergeant of Marines stood behind the wheel and binnacle, two of the most experienced and surest men of the ship. The music came piping up from below, faster and faster, and as Enterprise made good her hawse, the ship was drawn toward the eye of the wind. Pelles looked up at the vane and then back across the harbor as a cat’s paw of wind went away past the battery. Enterprise yawed slightly as the anchor was broken out from the sandy bottom.
From the forecastle again a deep voice: “Up and down, sir.” Then, “Anchor’s aweigh.”
Pelles watched the work on the forecastle closely, and as the bo’sun thundered “Catted, sir,” the captain cupped his hand around his mouth and shouted, “Up the jib and loose topsails.” That eponymous sail ran quickly up the forestay. As the jib filled, the bow started to fall off and the ship slowly turned away from the land. The topmen took to the shrouds, quickly scooted out across the stirrups and out onto the yards. Curran watched as the men aloft laid out, and let fall in a body. The topsails fell together, dropping like curtains at the end of a play, and were briskly sheeted home. Enterprise gathered way, and there was a rush of water along her sides.
As the ship made the various evolutions of getting under way, Nolan observed from the spar deck. He was not lubberly enough to obstruct either the men heaving or those going aloft, and by the time the swabs and holystones came out at the bow he had moved aft to the mainchains.
Pelles turned his eyes on Curran. “Since you have set an open course, Mister Curran, I gather you have some curiosity as to where we are bound?”
“I do, sir.”
“We’re down for the Barbary Coast of Africa, gentlemen. The Algerines are used to us in the Mediterranean. I mean to surprise them off the African shore. After we put Madeira behind us we will sail southwest. When the moon is new we will make a coastwise approach. Perhaps we will surprise a few of the villains before the whole continent knows what we are about.”
“Very good, sir. I’ll see that the course is laid.”
Erskine gave Curran an almost imperceptible nod. That a course would be laid for Madeira and then the African coast was soon communicated about the ship, and as Enterprise continued to gather way, the singing of the water down her sides was answered by a growing enthusiasm among her crew. Pelles was himself glad to shake the dust from his feet, for though he had spent a charming evening ashore, one that was, in fact, very agreeable, the ocean was his element and he was glad to be back in it. To Curran, Pelles looked completely unlike the silent, brooding man who had read his orders in the great cabin.
The topgallants bloomed, and Enterprise was soon making four knots and then six. As all captains are, Pelles was merged with his ship. He knew both her fine points and when she would gripe. He knew the ship’s course and her point of sail by discerning a vibration, something very like a musical tone. With the same calculus that he knew the vessel, Pelles also knew his men. Since Nolan had come on board there was added to the composition both a deeper note and a measure of silence. And silence in a crew is something all captains are alert to.
Below the quarterdeck break, Nolan was sitting on a starboard carronade trying to coax Beazee closer with a piece of biscuit, but she was soon away, snapping at one of the insolent tomcats who leaped up onto the fife rail with bristled tail. Pelles stood at the rail, looking on with an expression that was difficult to translate.
The captain drew a breath—for a moment it seemed to Curran as though Pelles was about to give an order, but the expression on his face changed and he said quietly, “Carry on, gentlemen. I shall be in my cabin.”
THE WORK OF A SHIP AT SEA COMMENCED. EACH MORNING WAS BRIGHTER AND warmer than the last, and soon Enterprise took a fine bone in her teeth, logging 130 or even 150 nautical miles each day under no great press of sail. When they were a few days out of Cádiz the second Sunday came, and Nolan was escorted by a pair of Marines to the captain’s cabin at precisely eight bells in the afternoon watch.
Nolan disappeared into the coach and remained during the captain’s Sunday supper and for two hours after. The quartermasters later said that they heard laughter through the skylights, but the captain’s steward, Grimble, would report only that they ate a pair of fowls in oyster sauce, fried potatoes, and chess pie, and drank two bottles of Latour.
What was to be made of this the lower decks didn’t know, but two of the ship’s old hands set a parcel of first voyagers straight that night when the smoking lamp was lit. Though he was most of a seaman, Billy Vanhall had harangued a few of the gullible with tales that Nolan had been sent by Burr to assassinate President Jefferson. Sitting next to Old Chick, Padeen Hoyle puffed his pipe and grunted that Vanhall’s story was all bull and a crock.
“Plain Buttons and the Old Mogul was shipmates in the Pacific. Would our skipper ship with what you would call a known assassinator? Not by a long chalk.”
“Thas’ right,” drawled Old Chick. “And wasn’t Mister Nolan with Porter when he sailed to Tie-heety? Now, would someone like that get to make a cruise to Nuku Hiva, what is a sailor’s paradise, mate, and also take eleven rich British whale ships as prizes? Not hardly if he was as guilty as you says, Billy Vanhall. Not hardly.”
“Well, he’s convicted, was all I was saying,” huffed Vanhall. “And I heard him called a jinx, too.”
“Like you ain’t, neither,” said Padeen, narrowing his eyes.
Vanhall stood and hitched his trousers. “Say what you like,” grumbled the little man, “but there’s a Marine stands sentry at his cabin every night. Why? So’s he don’t kill us all in our sleep. So there.” At this, Vanhall walked aft, smugly put his hands into his pockets, and tripped over a bucket.
For several pleasant days the brisk Levanter drove them west. It was a fine topsail breeze, two points on the frigate’s quarter, one of her favorite points of sail. When the wind backed round to the north, Curran laid a downwind leg for Madeira. Enterprise set her watches and kept lookouts, but she was making a passage, not yet cruising, and there was an easygoing complacency about the ship. Watch after watch glided by; the log was heaved and her course made good.
Six days out they met a New Bedford whaler, Libertas, homebound but ordered to Lisbon to meet one of her owners. When the whalerman backed her topsails and lowered boats, Curran walked forward. Nolan was sitting on the combing of the middle hatch examining a dozen small shrimp he had caught in a cast net. Next to him was a pad weighted down with a piece of bar shot. On it, Nolan had begun a very careful sketch of the creature with colored bits of chalk.
“Good morning, Mister Nolan,” Curran said. “I am afraid I must interrupt your drawing.”
Nolan looked up from his work—he had been using a magnifying glass, and it took him a second to refocus his eyes. From the quarterdeck he heard the officer of the deck bark through his speaking trumpet, “Larboard manropes!”
Nolan began to gather his pencils. “I gather we have been hailed?”
“We have, sir,” Curran said politely. “I must ask you to go below.”
When he stood, Nolan could just see over the hammock nettings. The whaler was two or three hundred yards downwind, hove to under the frigate’s lee. The bo’sun and his mates converged forward of the mainmast and opened the entry port.
“Forgive me for troubling you, Mister Curran,” Nolan said. “I didn’t realize she was so close aboard.” Nolan gathered up his things as quickly and quietly as possible. He did not want to give the impression of taking liberties, not early in a commission, and not to an officer who had been kind to him. He wrapped up the shrimp in a bit of cloth and put them into a basket.
“I don’t think you will be inconvenienced long,” Curran said.
The whaleboat was pulling across, and already a few of the men had formed a sort of cordon to screen Nolan from the larboard gangway. As Nolan picked up his papers, an awkward gust came across the forecastle, scattering a few of his drawings. Curran could see the very real stamp of embarrassment under Nolan’s tanned brow.
“Allow me, sir,” said Mister Wainwright, slouching down to take up a few of the wayward papers. “This way. If you please, sir.”
The midshipman crossed the deck in a few youthful bounds, and Nolan was guided after him. As they disappeared into the companionway, Curran took up a sheet of paper Nolan had left under the bar shot. The drawing was of an arc-shaped creature, something between a crab and a shrimp. Under the half-completed drawing Nolan had written: “A nondescript Amphipoda of the class Malacostraca.” Red and yellow lines rendered it exactly, depicting its various parts and capturing its translucence perfectly.
Curran heard the bo’sun’s pipe and turned. The whaler’s captain came up the side, beaming “How do ye” and slapping backs. He was a large, sun-browned man in a faded black coat. He said he was “dee-lighted” to see Enterprise, knew her right away, and was damned happy to see the Stars and Stripes.
Pelles emerged on deck and was introduced. The whaler captain seemed inclined to gam, and Pelles asked him into the cabin. The whaleboat was veered astern and a man in a tall black hat and red waistcoat came aboard: Mister Conway, sailing master of Libertas. Nordhoff and Hall met him at the ladder, and Mister Kerr had a smile wider than usual as Curran climbed up to the quarterdeck to meet their visitor.
“You’re the navigator, sure?” said Mister Conway, holding out his hand.
“Curran, sir,” he answered, tucking Nolan’s drawing into his coat.
“Thankee, yes, yes, and I wonder, Lieutenant, if you might have a moment at leisure?”
Curran nodded.
“As I explained to your midshipmen, I believe I have a problem with my instrument,” Conway said, somewhat in an undertone.
“Which I told him we have a physician aboard,” said Nordhoff flatly. Beside him, Hall strangled a guffaw. Curran narrowed his eyes at the boys as Conway doffed his hat, reached into it, and removed small wooden box, the sort that held timepieces.
“You see, sir, it’s a sidereal matter.”
“In that case, I might be of service,” Curran said. “This way, sir.” As Curran showed Mister Conway to the master’s cabin, he said over his shoulder, “Mister Nordhoff, you will take this drawing back to Mister Nolan in his cabin and then join Mister Hall in the mizzen top.”
The sidereal problem was not hard to grasp but was impossible to solve. In Mister Pybus’ cabin, the whaler opened the box and revealed an Arnold chronometer smashed completely into a handful of silver, gold, and crystal fragments.
“Off the chart table and across the cabin,” Conway said. “A wildcat of a night, gentlemen, in fifty-three degrees south. Rolling it was, thirty footers, and then we took one out of nowhere. Big like kingdom come, stole upon us like a thief. We were in five-hundred-fathom water, but it reared up and broke like a comber. I saw it, pitched out with a black shadow in front of it—we was pooped and neared like to founder. The brass repeater in the captain’s cabin swept clean overboard when the deadlights bashed in.” Mister Conway stirred the wreckage with the tip of his finger. “Lost our best sextant too, smashed t’other, and lost a dozen men when a boat was swept off the davits.”
Curran and Pybus were astonished to learn that Libertas had made good a course from the Carroll Grounds, nearly five thousand miles, solely on dead reckoning and a sextant with a broken mirror. Pybus and Conway at once set about establishing latitude (which Mister Conway had computed accurately) and, more important, longitude, for without a working timepiece Libertas might have made only a very, very rough speculation.
Enterprise had two fine stellar reductions and a lunar from last night, as well as a fresh plot, and the gift of degrees, minutes, and seconds was very gratifying to a mariner with a smashed chronometer.
Mister Conway clucked that it wasn’t more than 173 miles out from where he’d guessed. Libertas had piled on sail for the last six weeks and had put the heels to a dozen other whalers, mostly Americans, but also one Liverpool ship and a Dane, who were all still lasking up the African coast, a sorry set of buggers.
Libertas was a fast ship, Mystic built, and had carried tea before she was taken into the fishery. Her sailing master seemed as proud of her as he was of his navigation. He might have a right to his opinion, now that they were out of the Bight of Benin, filled to the gunwales with oil and their backsides covered by nothing less than a United States frigate. A side trip to Lisbon didn’t signify—not for a ship that was a hundred miles closer to port than she had reckoned, and not for a crew that had been three years from home.
The sun had become enormous as it touched the horizon. The visitors shook hands all around, then dropped back into their boat. Standing on bowed legs, the whaler’s captain steered back to his ship, clamping the stern oar under his arm and turning about to wish a prosperous voyage.
As Enterprise made sail, Libertas wore ship and yawed north, showing an ornate and gilded stern. In place of an ensign staff the whale ship had a bronze torch held by a carved gilt arm—the hand of the liberty goddess herself.
Curran watched as Mister Conway’s top hat darted here and there aboard Libertas as her crew shipped an elaborate flambeau atop the torch—a hundred minute panels of leaded glass fashioned into the shape of a flame. A whale oil lantern was hurried to life and put inside the glass, filling it with a pure, gold light.
All of Enterprise stared. “It is very grandiose for a stern light,” Doctor Darby sniffed.
“I have never seen its like,” Curran answered. He wondered how so elaborate a chandelier could have survived a storm that smashed both of the whaler’s clocks, battered in her deadlights, and swept a dozen souls to eternity.
Forward, by the bow chasers, Padeen nodded to one of the Bannon brothers. “It would be the two of ’youse that I would make shine that thing.”
“How them codfish put on airs,” Christopher Bannon said.
His brother Stephen did not take his eyes off the light but was jealously calculating the value of a fiftieth of a single share of a fully loaded whale ship. Disgusted, he muttered, “It’s all well to show away and top the nob while it’s us that plays the watchdog.”
Their observations were cut short by eight strokes of the bell and a long warble of the bo’sun’s pipe. Libertas and her crystal torch were a fascinating sight but could not compete with the smells from Enterprise’s own mess decks: a hundred pounds of fresh-caught tunny, fried in filets, a hogshead of rice from Murcia, and buttered okra only two weeks old. As the whaler steered north, Enterprise’s hands rumbled below to mess between the guns. The tide of men settled down to supper, and Nolan was allowed out of his cabin in the orlop.
He passed unseen up the ladders from the hold, through the berth and gun decks, and by the time he emerged on the spar deck there were only the watch and the lookouts above. The warmth had gone out of the breeze and darkness was quickly lowering. As Nolan’s eyes adjusted to the dusk, he saw a bright light moving away to the northwest. Where he thought to see the whale ship’s stern, a yellow light came down on a gilded arm holding aloft a bronzed and laurel-wrapped torch. Rising on the swell, the whaler’s transom shimmered, and letters of gold presented themselves: LIBERTAS, and below, the ship’s home port, MYSTIC. Rippling from the mizzen were the broad Stars and Stripes of an old-fashioned ensign. The glow of the stern light made the flag luminous, iridescent as a piece of sunset. The sight astounded him, and for a few seconds Nolan succeeded in dismissing it as some trick of light—an illusion conjured of memory. Nolan did his best not to feel a pang, but the power of his will was not complete. He found he could not turn away from the light. Nor could he escape the ache in his heart.
The first, bravest stars pricked themselves out against the sky, and Nolan watched until the whaler’s sails took on the color of night. The sea between the ships seemed blacker than he had ever seen, and the slender glow that spilled between grew thinner, thinner, and parted at last.