A matter of honor, p.4
A Matter of Honor, page 4
Richard was not inclined to forget either rule as he stepped out for the first time from the larboard chain-wale onto the tar-encrusted standing rigging. He had been aloft before, to the semicircular platform at the maintop, and farther up still to the crosstrees at the juncture of the topmast and top-gallant mast. Those times, the vessel he was aboard had been lying at anchor or secured at dockside. Here, with a ship heeling to larboard and pitching and rolling in great ocean swells, the task seemed a great deal more formidable. Halfway up from the deck to the foretop he froze.
“Don’t look down, Richard,” said Tom Pickett, an experienced seaman climbing alongside. “That’s right. Always look up to where you’re going, not down to where you’ve been. And keep your hands on the shrouds. Ratlines are for your feet.”
Richard flushed. He knew these things. The cook in the galley knew these things. Furious with himself, he heaved himself to the next ratline. Glancing straight up at the foretop, he saw Will already at the futtock shrouds.
“Hey, Richard! Watch this!”
Richard ignored his own fears as he watched, with mounting anxiety, Will climbing out like a spider onto the rope mesh leading from the foreshrouds in ever steeper angles up and around the sturdy oaken platform that defined the foretop. Able seamen of every nation used this route to the top, viewing with contempt the alternative route, a lubber’s hole cut through the base of the platform directly above the final length of shrouds. When Will reached the area where the angle was most acute, he hooked his legs in and around the crisscrossed hemp strands. Locking himself firmly into place, he let go his upper body. With his torso swinging upside down, he began bellowing gleefully and pounding his chest with both fists.
“Will! For Chrissake!” Richard cried up to him.
Tom Pickett shook his head in disbelief. “The captain’ll be wanting a word with him,” he chuckled.
Captain Winthrop did want a word, and as a result, Will was confined to the deck and the stricter scrutiny of his tutor. True to his word, Thomas Cutler had retained the services of a scholar to tutor his sons aboard his ship in return for free passage to England, to visit family there. He was Harvard-educated and took delight in the rigors of academe, a perspective shared by neither Will nor Richard. Conjugating Latin verbs in the pluperfect tense was not what they had envisioned when they had first swaggered aboard Eagle to sign their names in the muster book.
There was other learning more to their liking. Eagle was, at her core, a wooden structure propelled along the ocean by two pyramids of canvas. Each section of each pyramid was supported by a carefully balanced framework of masts and yards, and each section was controlled by a complex web of standing rigging that sustained the masts and running rigging that worked the sails.
“When we reach Portsmouth,” Captain Winthrop had told them in Hingham, “you’ll have grasped the essentials of what it takes to sail a square-rigger. Learning the rest of what’s involved will take you a lifetime.”
By the time Eagle had reached midocean, Richard and Will were testing each other with growing confidence on which sheet belonged to which clew, which brace was attached to which yardarm, what brail gathered in which sail, and what tackle each was rove through to be sent below and coiled around which belaying pin on which pin rail by the bulwarks or fiferail by the masts.
“Well done, lads,” first mate Ezrah Harley declared one day after the boys had demonstrated to him what they had learned. When he added, with conviction, “Well done indeed,” Richard had never experienced such pride.
To Captain Winthrop, Richard had a natural gift for working the quadrant, a triangular-shaped instrument used to measure the height and angle of heavenly objects. Whether sighting the sun at noon or the Polar Star at night, he quickly grasped the technique of bringing the celestial body down to the horizon, then consulting a list of numbers in published tables to convert the measured angle to an exact line of latitude. Calculating sights into fixes came less easily to Will. He could determine his degree of latitude at night if northern skies were clear and moon glow revealed the horizon, since latitude in the Northern Hemisphere equaled the height of the Pole Star above the horizon. During the day it was more challenging. On one occasion, Richard found Will slumped against the mainmast, cursing his inability to comprehend the mathematical relationship of secants and cosines to a global position. Richard squatted down beside him and put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t fret, mate,” he said. “Africa’s a big continent. You’ll find it.”
Will laughed at that, and as always, when Richard succeeded in pulling his brother up from the depths, he felt he had returned a favor.
With Ushant and the western approaches to the Channel two days away by dead reckoning, the weather turned foul. A gentle wind had backed suddenly, and the second mate reported to Captain Winthrop in his cabin that thickening clouds were gathering ominously ahead. Eagle was sailing on a close-haul with her yards braced up; cold spray splattered over her foredeck as her bows cut into pewter gray seas becoming roiled by a strengthening wind. Ahead and to the north, white cumulus clouds had deteriorated into menacing billows of charcoal black, an omen to all hands that the worst lay ahead.
Hurrying on deck, Captain Winthrop took the speaking trumpet from its becket. “Stations to shorten sail, Mr. Harley!” he shouted to his first mate, standing in dripping oilskins amidships. “Hands by the t’gallant halyards! Up fore course; in spanker and topgallants! Goose-wing the main course! Set the storm jib! Ease off lee topgallant and topsail sheets!” Lowering the trumpet, he ordered the helmsman to luff her up a half point. As Eagle’s bow edged into the stiffening breeze, her sails shivered at the leeches, then banged and thundered in protest as the sharp heel came off her.
Eagle’s crew leaped to their stations. Waisters on deck grappled with sheets, halyards, lifts, and braces, while topmen scrambled aloft—Richard and Will among them. By now Richard was familiar, if not yet entirely comfortable, with the toil and grit demanded on each yard of each sail, in particular the top-gallant to which he had been assigned. Climbing with resolve, he heaved himself up to the crosstrees, looking down only when he felt firmly wedged into position by supporting ropes. Directly below, laid out on both sides of the topmast yard, he could see other topmen with both arms over the yardarm, struggling to attach the second reef points of the topsail to their yard. Below them, bent over the longest yard like twelve yellow half-opened jackknives, the strongest and most experienced of Eagle’s crew waged war with the fore course. With legs splayed out precariously on quivering footropes, they battled fistful after fistful of flailing canvas up to the yard with the help of buntlines, leech lines, clew garnets, and the sheer force of human will.
Despite its daunting height above deck and the harsh rolling motion at that height in choppy seas, the topgallant was the easiest sail to furl. Its yard was shorter and narrower than the others, and because the sail was intended for use in lighter winds, its flaxen material was more manageable than the heavier canvas on the topsails or courses. Moments before an onslaught of thick, merciless rain began pelting Eagle, the topgallant yard was settled on its cap, and the six-man crew had the sail secured with gaskets. What only minutes before had been a gentle, relaxing breeze was now a stiff wind moaning in mournful wails of warning through the rigging.
“Lay in and down!” cried a mate positioned at the topsail bunt. “Everyone on deck!”
No one required extra prompting. With her plain sails furled, or reefed, and the calming effect of the lower staysails taking hold, Eagle steadied herself, yielding to the forces of nature. But she pitched and heaved as she rode up each wave and plunged into the depth below, her reefed topsails barely high enough in the trough to catch the wind and maintain her present course.
One by one the topgallant crew lowered themselves from the yard onto the windward shrouds, exploiting the heel of the ship to facilitate the climb down. When it came Richard’s turn, a rogue wave threw Eagle to leeward, causing the mast to lurch sharply and Richard’s foot to slip off a ratline. He grabbed for the mast but was unable to hold onto the slick pine. He grasped at the yard and furled sail just as Eagle yawed on a severe downroll, forcing her beam ends over and his hands to lose their grip. With a desperate lunge, he seized hold of the Flemish horse at the yard’s extremity For several terrifying moments, teetering with one arm through the rope stirrup, he glanced down at the wind-whipped churning water rapidly drawing away from him as Eagle fought to right herself. Closing his eyes to the horror, he swooned toward the inevitable fall just as someone’s arm came under his armpit and around his chest.
“Hang on, Dubber,” Will shouted over the shriek of wind. “I’ve got you.”
He was leaning out from the yard, one arm around Richard, the other around the single-rope topgallant mast shroud leading to the truck. With a mighty heave, he tried to haul Richard upward. With his strength failing him, he tried, unsuccessfully, to lug him sideways toward the mast. Straining under the effort, he cried out for help.
“Behind you, Will!” he heard Tom Pickett call out.
Tom had worked his way along the yard and was reaching down to grab Richard under his other armpit. With their combined muscle, he and Will managed to drag Richard back to the relative safety of the mast and shrouds. Richard clung to those shrouds, as if to life itself, while Will kept his arm tight around his brother’s waist. At length, both the wind and Richard’s hard trembling eased.
“All right?”
Richard nodded, exhaling, unable to speak. With panic ebbing slowly from its high-water mark, he stared blankly at Tom Pickett, then at his brother. Will grinned back at him.
“Fun, ain’t it?”
As Captain Winthrop had predicted, the squall quickly blew itself out. Thirty minutes after arriving back on deck, the crew was back at it, setting a full press of canvas that propelled Eagle forward, eventually into the English Channel along the south coast of Cornwall. When St. Catherine’s Point on the southern tip of the Isle of Wight was slightly abaft her beam, she turned north direct for Southampton Water and the Solent, an arm of the sea that together with Portsmouth harbor and the adjacent coves and inlets formed the littoral heart of England.
His watch off duty, Richard walked forward to the larboard foremast shrouds to survey the scenery ashore. Will joined him, as did most of the ship’s crew. It was the first land they had seen in nearly four weeks, and for the older sailors aboard, it was homeland.
“Look, Will,” said Richard, pointing abeam. “Those ruins over there on that cliff. Ancient fortresses, I suspect. Wasn’t it the Tudor kings, the Henrys, who ordered them built to protect the naval base here?”
Will did not respond. Richard continued to watch with fascination as history passed by him on either side of the brig. “There’s another one, Will, to starboard. Take a look,” he implored. Again Will did not respond. Richard turned to look at him; when he saw Will staring transfixed ahead, he looked forward to see what his brother had found so engrossing. Confused by what he saw, he decided to go to the prow for a better view. To his surprise he realized there was no room to move forward. What seemed the entire ship’s company was standing on or near the forecastle in silent contemplation of what Eagle was approaching. Thoroughly bewildered, Richard grasped a backstay and stepped out onto a larboard chain-wale. Leaning out, he searched ahead to where the Solent met Southampton Water between Portsmouth harbor and the Isle of Wight. There, stretched before him as far and wide as sight would permit, was a display of naval power beyond imagining, each ship looming ever more imperiously into view as Eagle glided serenely through the protected water.
“Spithead,” remarked a seaman, as if explanation at this point was necessary.
It was a virtual forest of masts and spars, a basin covering a vast area filled with ships of every description and size, some bigger than Richard had ever envisioned. Bustling about among these leviathans was subservient water traffic: longboats and bumboats and lighters powered by sail or oars shuttling back and forth between the great ships and Portsmouth Town, bearing the officers, crew, cargo, provisions, water barrels, ordnance, and dispatches to sustain an empire. Up until now, Richard had considered a brig such as Eagle a large vessel. He had seen larger ones of course. A Royal Navy frigate had once sailed into Hingham Bay, and a year ago in Boston his father had pointed out three ships of the line anchored in the harbor. But those vessels he had viewed from a distance, and from that distance they appeared more like the toy models he and Will used to build as children. Certainly they had seemed far less formidable than the ship they were now closing on, so close that Eagle seemed in comparison a mere water bug cruising by. Ezrah Harley identified her as the flagship of a vice admiral of the Blue, pointing up at the long blue pennant fluttering self-importantly from the foremast truck. Three tiers of gun ports were closed shut on her starboard side, and a Jacob’s ladder hanging down from the waist to the waterline seemed to lead up to the Almighty himself, in command on the quarterdeck.
“How many warships do you think, Will?”
“I dunno. A hundred, maybe?”
“More than that, mate,” a seaman corrected him. “And them’s just the ones happen t’ be in port. The Royal Navy’s been called the wooden wall of England. Now ye knows why.”
It was with a keen sense of humility that Eagle’s crew took her on a final tack through the narrow and crooked entrance of Portsmouth harbor and dropped anchor near the commercial wharves at Gosport, at the opposite end of the harbor from the Round Tower and the long stone buildings of Portsmouth Dockyard, a Royal Navy facility that by 1774 had become the largest industrial enterprise the world had ever known.
☆ ☆ ☆
THE HOME of William Cutler was in an inland town called Fareham, about an hour’s ride north. Although close to Portsmouth, it was a world apart from the noise, stench, and confusion of that old walled city. Here, amid the rolling fields and forest glens of Hampshire, was a land ruled by serenity and gentility. The estates they passed were all worthy of note, the least imposing among them, to Richard’s mind, a considerable step up from the mansion John Hancock had recently built on Beacon Hill, trumpeted as perhaps the finest in Boston. Manors here were constructed mostly in Georgian style: red brick with white colonnades in front, whiter trim around the windows, and statues of Greek or Roman origin placed strategically for the best view from within the house and for those passing by on the road. Each estate bespoke wealth—whether inherited or earned wealth a subject of endless speculation over pots of tea and decanters of sherry—but wealth nonetheless.
“Look, Will and Richard, see that house? My best friend Katherine lives there. She’s coming for supper tomorrow with her family. You’ll enjoy them ever so.”
Richard smiled at Elizabeth Cutler. He had met her for the first time earlier in the day when she had accompanied her father to his shipping office to welcome her cousins to England. Richard was immediately drawn to her. She was about his age and looked a lot like him: not as tall, but the same Saxon hair and blue eyes, the same strong cleft chin and thin nose. Her unaffected enthusiasm was infectious; whenever she laughed, which was often, her carefully coifed blond curls jiggled around her head.
“I shall look forward to that, Lizzy,” Richard replied affectionately.
“The Hardcastles are Royal Navy,” William Cutler remarked. He was sitting straight up on the cushioned bench inside the post chaise, his arms crossed and his right leg stretched out to brace himself against a sudden jolt from the deeply rutted road. “Katherine’s father is a post captain, retired. He has three sons in the service. Jeremy is based in Gibraltar, Hugh in the Indies. James will be shipping out later this summer or fall. You’ll meet him tomorrow He’s a year younger than you, Richard, a midshipman at the age of thirteen. Capital young fellow”
Another half mile and the carriage veered down a long pebbled drive with a view of a pond to the left and, to the right, a dazzle of flowers and hedgerows of shrubs lining the entire length of road. Beyond lay a perfectly manicured lawn, a swash of emerald green extending from the hedgerows to a sharp demarcation of forest a cable length in the distance. Turning in a wide arc, the carriage shivered to a halt in front of a six-columned portico at the entryway to the Georgian manor. A footman appeared beside the door of the carriage. He opened it and placed a footstool beneath the three-rung debarkation ladder. As he was sitting closest to the door, Richard stepped out first and stretched his legs, feeling in them the motion of the sea.
“Well, what do you think?” Lizzy asked her cousins, moments later when they were standing on the portico. They could hear shouts from inside the house. Other family members were coming out to greet them.
Richard did not know what to think, but it took Will a mere glance or two around to make up his mind. “We’re getting into the sugar business, Richard,” he said with such conviction he made Lizzy giggle.
Their first day ashore was consumed with family matters. William Cutler had not seen his brother Thomas in five years. Until this day he had never met any of his children. There was a lot of ground to cover: so persistently did he press for information that for much of the day it took considerable effort for his wife, Emma, or son Robin to get a word in edgewise. Robin too was keen to learn about his cousins and life in America. Emma absorbed what she could while directing staff hither and yon to provide for her nephews’ comforts and ravenous appetites. The cascade of questions and answers, opinions and comments, continued well into the summer night, until the glow of family communion was inevitably dimmed by fatigue. With a final round of hugs from Aunt Emma and Lizzy—a firm handshake from their Uncle William and Robin—Will and Richard trudged up the grand stairway to their room on the second floor, where they collapsed into the bliss of goose-down bedding. Tonight, there would be no hammocks swaying in the forecastle, no mate to rouse them out for the graveyard watch.
