Honorable mention, p.12
Honorable Mention, page 12
“But Captain, your wife? Surely we can stay overnight?”
Wake shook his head. “Thank you for your concern, Mr. Rhodes, but you know we have to check on those ships at Tampa as soon as possible. I don’t want to leave, but we have to.”
Emerson added his observations of the pandemonium around them as islanders, mostly women, started to climb aboard from their boats. “I don’t know, Captain. I don’t really think they’ll let us go after only an hour or two. We may have to fight our way out of all this hospitality, and I fear the crew will be on the islanders’ side.”
Wake laughed, but knew Emerson was right that the crew would be upset at leaving such an obviously inviting place. It was time to remind everyone of duty. “Gentlemen, I understand your sense of appreciation for this reception. These islanders really do want us to stay, but we can’t. I have more reason than anyone aboard to stay, but even I can’t. I want all the officers and petty officers to explain that to their men immediately. This is not a liberty port. We have to get to Tampa to ascertain the well being of those ships as soon as possible. We leave when we are unloaded, understood?”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Seeing the smiling dual reply, Wake thought he’d better add another caveat. “And gentlemen, no slacking in the unloading. We unload, and we weigh anchor. We’ll return another day. Mr. Emerson, I’ll be lunching ashore with the island’s leaders and my wife.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Oh, and two more things. Mr. Emerson, keep a weather eye out for palm wine or rum being brought aboard from those boats. And mind the men that most of these women’s husbands are fighting in the Union militia regiment. I want no gross suggestive behavior toward them. They are enthusiastic to see us. Don’t let the men translate that into something else. Understood on those two subjects?”
Both officers acknowledged Wake and went to spread the unpopular word. Wake turned to Curtis, the watch bosun’s mate, and told him to call away the launch.
Rork watched his captain head ashore as the executive officer told the men to get away from the railing and gather around him. The word was short and strong. They would be there two hours. Only one boat crew would leave the ship. Nothing but food could be brought aboard, and none of the women in the boats were trollops—most had soldiers as husbands—so woe to anyone who treated them that way. Rork, not knowing the content of the ship’s orders in detail, was surprised at the brief stay, but surmised that there was something more pressing to make them leave so soon. It would have to be pressing indeed to make Captain Wake leave his pretty bride. Rork swung to with a will and boomed out his best deck voice to the gathered men, as Master Emerson walked forward to check on the working party there.
“All right lads. There’s a bit o’ a war on, an’ it seems we can’t have the garden party jus’ yet. So let’s do this and do it right smartly!”
Amid some low grumbling, the sailors sullenly turned to loading the boxes of supplies into a cargo net while Rork glanced again at the ship’s launch closing in to the dock that made its way out from the beach. Wake stood in the sternsheets, waving at Linda who was running down the hill. Little Rain was running too, followed by Sofira at a walk.
She melted his heart. She was so beautiful with her soft skin, her auburn hair done up, and those green eyes that captivated him. Memories of all the stolen encounters in Key West during their forbidden affair came to his mind as he waited while Lawson brought the launch alongside the dock. Linda was standing there, looking more lovely than he remembered. And the irony of it was that now that they were legitimately married, he could stay but an hour.
Surreptitiously, the boat crew was watching the exchange of looks between their captain and his wife. Consumed with empathy for their commander and his girl, the stroke oar failed to backwater in time, making the boat bump into the jetty, and incurring the subdued wrath of Coxswain Lawson, who was constrained from giving full vent to his comments by the proximity of the captain’s lady. But none of it mattered to Wake, who bounded up out of the boat and onto the dock in a leap. Then she was in his arms. She felt so small, but strong.
“Peter. I missed you so very much. I love you.”
“Linda. I love you too, darling.”
She leaned back and looked up at him, beaming with happiness.
“Everyone’s excited. They’re making a hog roast for your men. Oh, Peter, it’s been so long.”
He had to say it, had to break the magical spell. It almost broke his heart. “Linda, I only have an hour. We have to get under way as soon as the supplies are unloaded. We’re bound up the coast to help some other ships. I can’t stay, darling. I want to, but I can’t.”
She pulled him close again, burying her head into his shoulder, her voice trembling. “You have to stay. You’re here now. You have to stay. Just stay the night with me.”
She didn’t let go of him. The soft warmth of her body was melting his resolve. He was trying to control himself, afraid that if he gave in to his emotions tears would flow, and he would succumb to her pleadings. He managed only two words.
“I can’t.”
They stood there, neither releasing the embrace, not caring that dozens of people from the island and the vessels were watching their heartbreak. Her face tilted up, her lips finding his, and they held the kiss for a long time.
Linda broke away first. She wiped her face with the sleeve of her gingham dress, then straightened out the wrinkles and looked away to the top of the high hill, where thin smoke was still rising. Her voice seemed as far away as her gaze.
“I must tell the people here to stop their preparations. They’ve been working on them since we got word you were sighted at Boca Grande. It was going to be a grand evening, Peter. You were going to be the guest of honor.”
“I’m sorry, dear. You know that I am so sorry.”
“I know that. It’s just that my hopes were raised when I heard it was your ship, and I had visions of a wonderful evening—the wedding feast we never had in Key West.”
The mention of their wedding increased the pain. They were married in secret by a black Bahamian preacher at the African Cemetery on the south beach in Key West. The exchange of vows was followed by a brief gathering of a few friends around a fire on the beach. There was no formal wedding, no officially sanctioned demonstration of their love that most couples take for granted.
“Linda, I wish more than you know that it was different and I could stay.”
She nodded and walked over to Sofira standing on the sand, exchanging words and gestures. Linda returned to Wake and took his hand in hers.
“We’ll go to our home. I promise to have you back at the boat in one hour, Peter. But this hour is mine. I’ll share your time with no one.”
They walked hand in hand up the pathway from the beach as Sofira went among the other islanders to stop the celebration preparations. There would be no party on Useppa Island that evening. The war, which had dictated everything in their lives for the last three years, would not allow it.
***
One of the things Wake appreciated aboard a steamer was the powered capstan. As a schooner sailor, he had hauled anchor cables and chains many a time. It was back-breaking, time-consuming work. But today he wished the crew had to break the hook out of the mud the old-fashioned way. It would’ve taken twenty minutes. The steam engine did it in four.
He didn’t want to stand around a lot of people listening to banal chatter, so he went to the afterdeck, where three men were restowing some of the cargo on the deck. Emerson had the conn and Rork knew the channel. They could take Hunt out. Wake didn’t want to talk with anyone right at that moment lest his feelings show, so he ignored the men and stood by the massive towing sampson posts, watching Useppa Island recede in the pale afternoon light. Heartache and anger swirled inside him, making him want to cry and hit something at the same time—heartache at leaving Linda, and anger at the cruelties of war that make such departures so common. He was also more than just a little afraid at his almost succumbing to her pleas on the dock. That had almost happened in Key West, the day he took his first command, a year and a half ago. Linda had a power over him that he had never felt with any other woman. Thankfully, she had stopped her anguished requests at the dock for him to stay, for he wasn’t sure he could’ve denied her any further.
Once they arrived at the thatched hut, she begged him no more. They didn’t even speak of his leaving as they lay together in the crude bed. Instead, they talked of everything else in their lives. Linda was very busy on the island, and happy there. She had no desire to return to Key West. On the island she had found friends that understood tragedy, for each of them had a sad story. Sofira’s was the saddest, and had just gotten sadder.
Linda told him of Sergeant Thomaston’s death a month and a half earlier, killed in an ambush up the Caloosahatchee River where the Rebels had used a slave as bait to lure the Union soldiers. Thomaston and two other soldiers were killed while trying to rescue the black man. Sofira had taken the news stoically, resigned to trying to make a future life for her child alone in the white man’s world, since her own Seminole people, and the Thomaston family in upper Florida, equally distrusted her. The islanders had consoled her and offered to let her stay, but Sofira had decided to leave for some other place come the winter dry season. Linda was attempting to get her to stay too, but told Wake she thought it was hopeless and her friend would leave.
Wake told of what he knew about the happenings in Key West, and briefly of his experiences at sea in the last few months. But mainly he just listened to Linda. He loved her dry and gentle humor. He loved to hear the very sound of her voice, a southern accent with just a tinge of her Irish roots showing when she pronounced her “r.” It was a soft voice, so different from the loud and brash voices he was used to in his world of men.
In what seemed to be merely minutes, but was actually an hour, Sofira came up and knocked on the simple board door, then walked away. Five minutes later a grim-faced Wake was in Lawson’s boat, seated at the sternsheets and staring at his ship, heading away from the island and his love.
The island was now just a green tinge with a few brown smudges. The failing light of the November evening couldn’t illuminate the lush colors of the flowers Wake knew were growing all around the settlement. From this distance you couldn’t see the proud American flag undulating bright colors from the bamboo pole atop the high hill, you couldn’t even tell there was a settlement. There was no indication of the people, or their lives, or loves. It looked to be just another island among hundreds of others on the coast.
The ship’s steam engine droned its pounding beat as she rounded the shoals and turned westerly, heading for the Boca Grande Passage and the open sea. Wake moved over to the starboard rail amidships and gazed forward. He never tired of watching the sunsets in Florida. The falling sun was molten copper now, turning the sky into a giant concave prism. Shades of pink and gold and green were emerging from their pale blue background for a moment of luminescent brilliance, then fading back into a gray void. A few high clouds streaked the sky, holding the pastels a little longer, but then they too faded away as the stars came out one by one over the black eastern horizon.
Wake sighed and made his way forward to the wheelhouse. Rhodes had the watch. He watched the captain enter and struggled to find something to say.
“Evening, sir. We should be passing the Case in twenty minutes or so, Captain. We’ve got an ebb helping us.”
“Very good, Mr. Rhodes. You may carry on.”
Just then Curtis opened the door, not noticing Wake’s presence.
“They’re at that seashell caterwaulin’ again from the islands. Eerie, I tell ya. Damned eerie.” Curtis caught Rhodes’ sideways glance, suddenly saw his captain, and became quiet.
The sun was down in the sea now, for all the world appearing to be boiling the Gulf of Mexico. Wake stepped out the port side door and listened. He heard the two-toned, long-winded moans of the conch shells from Palmetto and Lacosta Islands and looked over at the bosun’s mate.
“They’re saying goodbye, Curtis. Goodbye to the sun, so it will feel needed and return tomorrow. They do it everyday. An old custom, from the original Indians they say.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Curtis.”
“Sir?”
“It’s never failed once in all those years . . .”
The next day they raised Egmont Key at the entrance to Tampa Bay, finding the steam gunboat Gates, Lieutenant Commander Williamson commanding, at anchor off the island. Her consorts, the armed schooners Joslin and Taber, were anchored close by. Wake could discern no damage as Hunt approached the anchorage until a half mile away. Then, through the glass, Wake could see the repair parties at work on the spars and rigging of each ship.
Swinging the scope left he saw that the island showed the effects of the storm even more than the ships. The few trees were down, and the scouring effects of a storm surge were apparent in many places. The depot built by the navy had not escaped either. The slat-sided storage buildings had no walls left, and the roofs of most of the four structures were either partly or completely gone. The hastily constructed temporary hospital, built to house the yellow fever patients of the last few months, was almost totally destroyed. The coal bunkers by the wharf were only partly filled, their contents spread out over the island and the bottom of the anchorage. And the wharf itself was a tangled mass of lumber jutting out at all angles. Wake noted that the lighthouse, rebuilt six years earlier to withstand any storm after the original structure had been severely damaged by a hurricane, was still standing tall over the island.
They found no emergency at Egmont Key. Two men ashore had been drowned and several injured, but fortunately most had emerged unscathed. Each ship had casualties, but miraculously no life-threatening wounds. The Gates did have two topmen with broken arms suffered from securing a gaff that had gone adrift in the high winds. Wake offered to take them to the hospital in Key West and was thanked. The damage was such that the vessels were well on their way to self-repaired service.
It was anti-climactic for Wake. Even the enemy was quiet. Other than the battery at Pinellas Point which occasionally threw a half-hearted round toward the ships, the Confederates ashore were too busy tending to their own damages from the storm to attack the naval contingent during its weakened period of refit. The provisions and supplies were very much welcomed, however, and two days were spent in transferring barrels and boxes and bags of cargo among the three floating recipients.
In the evenings the captains would visit each others’ ship for dinner, and Wake listened intently as they described riding out the storm, the two schooners at anchor off the Little Manatee River, and the Gates having gone to sea. Wake found their experiences similar to his, except for the salient point that they had a shore to leeward, a frightening prospect for any captain in a storm. He also realized that they experienced higher winds for a longer period, and that the center of the storm must have gone ashore somewhere to the north of the bay, since the winds never were easterly for very long. The common agreement was that the ships at Bayport and Cedar Keys may have had a more difficult time, being closer to the eye of the storm. Wake was not to go north of Tampa Bay, however, for according to his orders the Tahoma was heading there to check on those ships.
The morning of the third day at Egmont Key they weighed anchor and steamed west around Anna Maria Island. Moving down the coast they felt the wind go to the northeast, dry and cool for the first time since the previous spring. It was a clear day, and mile after mile of wide white sand beach stretched out alongside of them as they chugged south, rolling slightly in the low northerly swells. There was a subtle change in the air aboard the steamer. They were finally heading for Key West. The men were sure that they would have liberty this time and spent their day making plans on how to spend it.
The following morning the sun rose over Sanibel Island, five miles to the east of them. Wake looked to the northeast toward Boca Grande, but saw nothing, and was about to leave the wheelhouse when he heard the lookout call down from his perch aloft.
“Deck there! Sail, hull down, three points off the starboard bow on the horizon. Looks to be a schooner. Not cut like one of ours. Headin’ south with all sail spread out.”
Wake thought about that. The only authorized schooners on this coast were the three navy and one army, and he had just rendezvoused with the navy’s schooners, so that one out in front of them most likely was a runner.
“Deck there! She’s wearing ship and comin’ round to port, headin’ easterly now. She’s full an’ by now an’ movin’ fast towards the islands.”
Emerson had come into the wheelhouse upon hearing the call. He looked at the chart. Wake didn’t need to examine the chart, he’d patrolled this area extensively the year before. They were heading east, and that meant only one destination.
“Set your course for the sou’east, Mr. Emerson. We’ll get her off Point Ybel before she goes into San Carlos Bay. Tell Ginaldi I want steam for nine knots.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” replied Emerson as he gave the orders to Rhodes. Then he went off to find the engineer. Rhodes went to the chart and studied it.
“Are you sure, sir?”
“That’s where they run to. They’re hoping to get close to shore near Punta Rassa or Estero Island and run her aground, get away from her and find some Rebels that will help them. They don’t want to end up in Portsmouth Prison.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wake went outside to watch the other ship. He could see her now from the deck with a ’scope, and what he saw told him some interesting things. She was around seventy feet and had sails that were faded and splotched with patches, so she was a veteran. She was carrying all plain sail and a big fisherman staysail, heeling over and moving fast. No small crew could set or handle that much canvas, so she had a number of men aboard. She was relatively low in the water and stiff, so she was probably loaded down with cargo of some sort. And, as the lookout had said, she was moving fast. Her bottom was clean and her captain was a good seaman. This would be interesting.
