(cont'd from page: Volume 1)

Geoffrey Frost balanced his telescope on an anxious Ming Tsun’s shoulder, and in its erratic ellipse studied the activity at Fort William and Mary, the largest of the Piscataqua’s three forts. "The fort intends to salute us, Slocum," Frost announced to his bosun standing two paces behind him.

"Then happily we’ll take her salute, Captain, though we don’t have nothin’ to answer her with, save perhaps a pop or two from a musket," replied the normally taciturn Slocum Plaisted in what was, for him, a lengthy speech. Frost reckoned that the blow to Plaisted’s skull, which had been thick enough to turn the edge of a cutlass that had taken off only the better part of his right ear, occasioned his bosun’s loquaciousness. Yet Plaisted was unique among bosuns, being widely read at a time when few bosuns were able to write, much less read. He particularly delighted in reading Shakespeare to the men in the fo’c’sle during long passages. Plaisted’s head was swathed in a bloody bandage torn from Frost’s last clean shirt. Except for Ming Tsun, Hannibal Bowditch (if you did not count that small but painful splinter scratch on his forehead) and Struan Ferguson, not one of Salmon’s crew had escaped some injury– or death, though the seriously wounded had already died, while those with light wounds such as Plaisted bore would live.

Frost spared a quick glance at the carnage on his deck, the great gaps blown in Salmon’s bulwarks, gouts and great swatches of dried blood amidst the fallen tackle and splintered spars, and the sad tumult of still, canvas-shrouded forms arrayed along both sides of Salmon’s waist. Above the carnage rang the monotonous, lugubrious clanking of the pumps, which, judging by the increased sluggishness with which she responded to her helm, were not keeping pace with the water in her bowels despite the sailcloth fothered over the most obvious shot holes and seams hammered open by the shock of collision.

"I believe we shan’t fall overly much behind the water if we pause the men at the pumps for a cheer." Frost traversed the telescope further inland and found the other flagpole rising from Bosun’s Hill, the highest point on the New Castle bluff. Nothing was visible from its peak, and the chill breeze of this mid-April day of 1776 would have made a streamer of his house flag. Frost snapped the glass closed, pressing the objective lens against his body to offer the necessary resistance, then slid the glass into the long pocket of his faded and frayed tai-pan’s coat, the snuff-colored one with the poorly mended rip in the sleeve.

The rip had been made by the blade of a drunken major of the British 49th Regiment of Foot, who had called him out in Macao for some obscure reason Frost had long forgotten. Frost disliked the coat, though a trader’s frugality caused him to keep it, and it was the only coat Ming Tsun had been able to find in the bloody, water-soaked chaos of his cabin.

The doubts renewed their assault on Frost. Was he doing the right thing, running the Piscataqua with a sail plan suitable for the tributaries feeding into the Great Bay, but not for the fast currents of this treacherous river, in a vessel heavily down at the stem and balking at answering what relieving tackle steering he had been able to jury-rig?

The headache that had bedeviled him for thirty-six hours now pounded like a drum inside his skull, his teeth ached, and the acrid sulfur taste of gunpowder wadded at the back of his throat, defying all efforts to hawk it out. His ears still chirped like crickets from the concussions of the cannons. Frost wanted to be anywhere but here on the quarterdeck of his stricken vessel. Instead, he smiled at Slocum Plaisted. "That rag twisted around your noggin gives you a proper piratical look, Mister Bosun."

Salmon was reaching for the channel lying east of Great Island and Fort William and Mary; she had yet to round Fort Point and its grand light-tower, the one ordered built by John Wentworth, last royal governor of the British colony of New Hampshire, now ignominiously fled. Frost was immensely cheered that the log boom obstructing the channel at the narrows against a British warship’s attempt to run the river had been temporarily shunted aside. There was still time to snub Salmon on a short cable, easy holding ground for an anchor in the ledges he knew were five fathoms under the keel, and wait for slack tide and a tow. Frost had no leadsman, not that he needed one, so well did he know the Piscataqua, but the spring flood tide was running near five knots . . .

"Prepare to haul round and hold her fair for midstream once we breast Fort Point, Mister Plaisted." This more formally: "Stand to your station. I’ll handle the signal." Should he forgo the more dangerous branch of the Piscataqua around Pull-and-be- Damned Point and take the more sedate back channel of Crooked Lane behind Jenkins Island that the gundalow shipping generally used on the slack tide? Frost painfully hauled the telescope from his coat pocket, extended it, and swept Crooked Lane. He was startled to see the masts and spars of a vessel jutting above the channel just over Clark’s Island, though he could spy no hull.

"Damme," Frost thought, instantly regretting the mild oath, "the New Hampshire Committee of Safety had the forethought to scuttle a vessel in the back channel." Salmon had Fort William and Mary behind and had taken a westerly heading as she raced toward the narrow gut of Pull-and-be-Damned Point, neatly splitting the two hundred yards of water between Seavey’s Island, coming up sharp to starboard, and Pierce’s Island, with the pitiful battery of Titus Salter’s cannons poking out from the ramparts of the hastily thrown up Fort Washington to larboard, and Pull-and-be-Damned Point looming up. Was it possible Frost’s vessel was nearly abreast the entrance to the Pool between Goat Island and the westernmost point of Great Island? Truly; Frost could see the masts of half a dozen vessels anchored in the Pool, including the two-hundred-ton brig Prince George taken the October before when the brig’s captain had unluckily blundered into Portsmouth Harbor.

No! The Prince George was not in the Pool! Those were her masts and spars in the back channel, meaning that her hulk now effectively blocked Crooked Lane. The inflowing tide had been making for almost an hour, and would last another two. The greatest tidal influence would be around Pull-and-be-Damned Point, time enough to convey Salmon all the way to the Frost Trading Company’s wharf without having to touch the pathetic scrap of sail–if the Great Buddha smiled and the Great God turned not away His head. Inshallah. Joss. Fate. Luck.

"Aye, Captain." In truth, Bosun Plaisted was busy enough. Salmon’s wheel had been shot away, and Plaisted was conning her by quietly giving orders to two teams of three more or less able-bodied seamen hunched in the wreck of Frost’s cabin below, straining to keep a firm nip on the auxiliary steering cables –relieving tackle–leading around blocks to the rudder. A hole had been crudely mortised into the deck with axe, adze and saw, cutting out the small sky light, so that Plaisted could judge when to order more tension, first on the starboard, then the larboard cable.

Frost pocketed his telescope again, shook the flag Hopkins had given him at New Providence from its bag, and made his way, Ming Tsun following, to the short halyard at the stump of foremast from which fluttered the house flag of the Frost Trading Company, a black F in ornate French script inside a wreath of olive branches on a field of white, with the house motto, Nil Desperandum, surmounting the wreath. Frost reeved down his house flag using his left arm only, grunting against the pain the exertion caused. His right arm was bound tightly against his body; Ming Tsun had done that after applying a poultice and bandage to the deep wound in his right shoulder, and the other, lesser cutlass thrust and scrape to his ribs. Ming Tsun watched him now, fairly hissing like a goose tending an unruly gosling, and Frost studiously avoided his gaze.

With Ming Tsun’s help Frost unbent his house flag, then bent on the dull yellow flag embroidered with the coiled rattlesnake and its legend "Don’t Tread on Me," followed by the Royal Navy red ensign, its union flag in the upper staff quadrant, much soiled and stained by powder burns and smoke. In four quick pulls, using left hand to pull and teeth to hold the slack, Frost raised the flags the short distance to the stump’s top. The mast was so short that the hem of the ensign would have touched the deck had not the breeze blown it into the belly of the lateen sail.

A cannon from Fort William and Mary coughed a deep, hollow boom, echoed almost immediately by another, and yet a third. "Damn fools," Frost muttered to himself, "don’t they know powder’s too dear to be shooting it off for display? With powder money being reckoned at two pence each registered ton of burthen, damned if I’ll pay a penny or a pence more for the forts." With a guilty start Frost realized he had used an oath–again, even if no one had overheard.

The men on Salmon’s decks who could stand pulled off their caps and at Frost’s order dutifully uttered hoarse, weak cheers. From astern came the answering roar of a cannon, and another, then a third. With unseemly haste Frost ran back to his quarterdeck. The Royal Navy’s late ship-rigged sloop-o-war, HM Jaguar–its gilded figurehead of a panther, lithe yet muscular, cunningly recumbent beneath the bowsprit and glinting dully in the wan April sun–was following obediently two hundred yards aft of Salmon and gathering in her unneeded top sails, keeping jibs and driver only as she, like Salmon in front of her, surrendered to the full tug of the inflowing tide.

Salmon had the light-tower at Fort Point abaft her larboard rail now as the rattlesnake flag, followed by the Frost house flag, and that atop a British Union Jack–that curious amalgam of England’s red cross of Saint George superimposed on Scotland’s white cross of Saint Andrew, devised by the Scottish James Six when he became king of England in 1603–soared to the peak of Fort William and Mary’s flagstaff. Salmon’s men cheered again, though not so strongly that they could be heard over the cheering from the warship behind.

"You have done a fine thing," Ming Tsun signed quickly with his hands, trying to read his fate in Frost’s eyes. Frost responded with a quick nod. Fortunately, he was left-handed and had taken the unexpected wound just below his right shoulder blade. Great Buddha, but the matrosses at Fort Washington were also essaying a ragged, hesitant salute! Even with cannon charged with shot, Titus’ matrosses could not harm a flounder. Had he but known the poor quality of their gunnery, the Prince George’s captain easily could have evaded the capture of his vessel laden with flour originally destined for Gage’s troops occupying Boston. And then two of the four cannons on Seavey Island’s Fort Sullivan spat out a welcoming salute.

The wharves of the town were lined with people, and on the shores as well, on both the New Hampshire and the Maine side of the Ports of Piscataqua, and they were cheering, and cheering. A number of boats were putting out from shore as Salmon rounded Pull-and-be-Damned Point, and they too were filled with cheering Piscataqua men.

Rindge’s Wharf was still the better part of a mile upriver, though Frost could see the already planked hull of the Raleigh on the building ways. When the Salmon had cruised from Portsmouth barely six weeks before, the Raleigh’s keel had just been laid. "Cousin John is the Congress’s agent, and he’s a most impatient man when it comes to shipbuilding," Frost thought, marveling at the rapid progress of the work. "And Tommy Thompson, who wants command of her, is supervising her construction." Frost knew that command could be his, were he to accept the commission that John Langdon had strongly hinted would be in the offing should his cruise to New Providence be successful.

The blandishments of a commission in the Continental Navy were hardly tempting, for Geoffrey Frost was, first and foremost, a trader, and he fancied traders did not make particularly good naval officers. Frost spared not a moment’s thought for the boats approaching from shore; he seized a hatchet in his left hand and stood ready to hack through the spring holding the best bower anchor in its trip should Salmon lose steering and threaten to run aground.

The fastest skiff hooked onto Salmon’s larboard foremast chains, paid off until the skiff was even with the great gashes in Salmon’s larboard waist, and one of the Piscataqua pilots, Reedy Stalker–universally known, and generally despised, on the river as "the stoat"–heaved himself aboard. He saluted Frost theatrically, grinning just long enough to show his rotted and mercury-blackened stumps of teeth–failed treatment for venereal disease–the grin quickly gone as Stalker wiped his ferret-like nose on a coat sleeve heavily slimed with mucus. "The morning’s blessing to ye, Captain Frost, and not every morning it be that a Portsmouth merchantman fishes in a British man-o-war."

Frost almost gagged at the foulness of the man’s breath. Stalker’s clothes reeked of the punch house. "Thank you, Mister Pilot, though as you ken I know the Piscataway well enough your pilotage is not required."

"God’s witness, sir, I grant readily that ye know the river better than I, though ye’d allow it’d be five pound well spent, tide runnin’ at such a moll and all. I was merely anxious to be first aboard to see if ye required assistance, and as ye know, there’s always in-clearances which has to be writ."

Frost, despite knowing how dearly the stoat’s help would come, almost accepted, for his men at the pumps could barely stand. But none of his crew would have wanted the stoat’s assistance. "These are Portsmouth men, Eliot and Berwick men, Dover and Durham and Exeter men, Mister Pilot. They’ve just bested a British warship with five times our weight of guns, and almost thrice our number. They’ll see the Salmon safely to her berth at my company wharf."

"Aye, but it seems this victory of yers came at some cost, eh?" The pilot glanced meaningfully at the still shapes beneath the sailcloth. "And a shameful waste of new sailcloth, yer cousin’s Raleigh needin’ it and all, when ye could have dropped them overboard wrapped in rumbowline with a few words from the Book, and naught to speak a’gin it. But ’spect ye be right a-bringin’ ’em back, these boys died for a glorious cause."

Frost glared at the pilot, but Stalker affected not to see the contempt in Frost’s eyes. "These men did not die for any glorious cause–they died for the Salmon and for me. Good day to you, Mister Pilot. I must be about preparing my ship for its berthing." Frost handed the hatchet to Ming Tsun and nodded stiffly. Reedy Stalker did likewise. Frost walked wearily back to his quarterdeck. Salmon had already drawn abreast of the town proper. He heard Slocum Plaisted give the helm commands that would keep Salmon in midstream to wear Noble’s Island. The Pulpit was already in view, and just before the riverbank’s curve toward the Pulpit, on Christian Shore, Frost could clearly see the warehouses and long wharf of the Frost Trading Company.

It was commonly accepted among New England sailors that their compatriots who died at sea would be buried at sea. Truly, no one in Portsmouth, nor any sailor’s family, would have voiced complaint had Frost committed his dead to the sea off the Isles of Shoals, but Frost placed great value on those who had walked through the wall between life and death for him. Salmon was returning to Portsmouth with every crewman signed aboard for the cruise, the sick and lame he had taken aboard at New Providence because Hopkins’ squadron did not want them, and as nearly as he could judge, all the British dead as well.

Frost awkwardly pulled the Bréquet watch with the delicate silver trellis of scrolled foliage on its silver case from his waistcoat pocket, the watch that their mother had given Jonathan to commemorate Jonathan’s first voyage to China with Frost. Great Buddha, an hour had passed since Salmon had entered the Piscataqua channel: the tide was running slightly more than five knots! Almost to his warehouse and wharf, surely he could rest now, give the task over to Plaisted. Nobody could fault him . . . Frost snapped the cover of Jonathan’s watch closed and pulled himself up to stand next to Slocum Plaisted.

Frost was beginning to recognize individuals on the shore now, and with his heavy stubble of beard, still tinged with a residue of burned powder and that had not seen a razor for well over a week, he wished that Ming Tsun could have shaved him. There had been time only to splash water on his face, club his hair and don his faded and frayed tai-pan’s coat. A small hiss, a warning fromMingTsun, brought Frost around: Reedy Stalker, thinking no one alert enough to pay him mind, was stealthily rifling the pockets of one of the corpses. In five rapid steps Frost laid the stoat by the collar and jerked Stalker upright.

"I’ve a mind you would filch the pennies from your own dear mother’s eyes at her wake, Mister Pilot," Frost growled as he twisted the stoat to his feet.

"Naw, Captain, ye know these poor boys would naught object to their poor effects helpin’ the poor still livin’ . . ."

Frost hurled Stalker halfway across the main deck. "Ming Tsun, fetch the pilot’s barge, if you please." Ming Tsun used the halberd he had recently wielded with such deadly ferocity, two feet of steel growing tonguelike from the mouth of a brass dragon that formed the tangs attaching the blade to its five-foot-long shaft, to hook the skiff’s painter and draw it to the splintered waist. Frost tumbled Stalker into the barge, noting with approval that Ming Tsun had flicked the oars out of their locks with his halberd before parting the painter with a quick chop.

"Ye canna treat me this wise, no matter who ye be, Captain Frost," Stalker shouted, breaking off to lunge ineffectually for an oar floating just outside his reach. Stalker knelt in his skiff and shook his fist at Frost. "I’ll see ye again, Captain Frost, when ye’ll owe me far more than five pound for my pilotage fee, when ye wasn’t be havin’ yer heathern Chinee with ye!"

Frost thought no more about the Piscataqua pilot; from the sharp, stomach-churning agony in his right shoulder and Ming Tsun’s sharp intake of breath, he knew that his exertions had opened the deeper wound. Damn that lieutenant who had pierced him unexpectedly from the rear after Jaguar’s dying captain had surrendered his sword and his ship.

Struan Ferguson, Salmon’s first mate, had wanted to kill the lieutenant there on the quarterdeck of the vanquished British warship, but Frost had forbade it. "That would be murder, Mister Ferguson. He must not have realized, in the excitements of the moment, that his ship had struck."

"He knew it well enough," Ferguson had retorted, shaking his head at Frost’s obstinacy but knowing full well how obdurate his captain could be, "and he intended murder right enough. He’ll do for ye again should he live."

Frost dismissed everything from his mind except the task of bringing Salmon to her final berth. Bosun Plaisted and the men laboring with the steering cables had long been spent past endurance, yet they kept to their tasks. Frost ascended from the waist to the quarterdeck to stand beside his bosun. "Well done, Mister Plaisted," he said, seeing the bustle of workers at the Frost warehouse, most of them, and a horde of town’s people, gathering at the end of the long wharf jutting into the Piscataqua from Christian Shore. Frost was about to give up the vessel in which he made three round-trip voyages to China and which has been his home for ten years.

How old was the Salmon? Frost did the calculations, his mind slow and fogged from fatigue and sleeplessness. Half his age, so Salmon had been thirteen years off the stocks. "Signal Mister Ferguson that the British ship shall berth against the wharf. Let the good old Salmon take the beach. We have little cargo to shift, and she deserves her ease."

Plaisted gave orders through the mortise in the quarterdeck, and Frost turned away from the brief sight through the mortise of the shambles of his cabin, though the blood of poor Roger Green, mercifully, was hardly visible. "We can spare the men from the pumps now to take a line ashore over the larboard bow, then pass another through my cabin’s larboard quarter badge. Bring cables aboard and hove the old Salmon down properly. Then dismiss the men. Men ashore who had the unutterable luxury of lying asleep whilst we fought for our lives can unlade us."

Salmon thrust her bows into the muddy beach with an audible sigh. It was mean high tide, and Salmon would never stir from the Christian Shore again, at least not as a ship. Weary men, released from the pumps, their torn and bleeding hands still curled in the shape of the handles, clambered ashore with lines that were bent to heavier cables sent over to bowse the vessel. Silas Rutherford, Frost’s warehouse superintendent, had somehow gotten aboard and was knuckling his forehead as he approached. "Good morrow to you, Captain Frost, I expect you’ll be needing some yard workers."

"Truly, Silas, but first to remove our dead, then the dead aboard our captive." It was too difficult to think of the Jaguar as anything other than his captive; he hardly knew the vessel’s name, much less the name of her late commander. "Every man is to have a coffin, made from our best lumber; the British dead without exception. Families may claim their dead once they are encoffined; those unclaimed because their families are too far away shall be buried in Portsmouth as soon as I have consulted a parson."

Rutherford nodded soberly. "A coffin for every man, of our finest wood, built before we shift Salmon’s cargo. And was your cruize to New Providence as successful, Captain Frost, as was your encounter with this British off the Isles of Shoals?"

Frost braced himself against the quarterdeck’s fife rail to stave off the vertigo that suddenly seized him. A crow swooped low over the Salmon, gained altitude with a few wing beats, uttered several mocking, despairing croaks, and flew into the tall wineglass-shaped elm just beginning to leaf at the corner of the warehouse, joining the murder of crows that had solemnly and silently observed Salmon’s arrival. "We fetched away what Colonel Langdon commissioned Salmon to ship, the cannons Commodore Hopkins allowed, and some shot, and all of the powder. Not much powder, not upward of twenty barrels." Frost was too tired to tell Rutherford the fate of the cannons he had shipped, or of his planned use of the twenty barrels of gunpowder blocked in Salmon’s hold.

Salmon groaned slightly and listed imperceptibly to starboard. The tide had run past its peak, was already reversing, and Frost was more tired than he could ever remember in his life. But there was so much work to be done! Miraculously, Ming Tsun was at his side with a bowl of hot noodles. Where had Ming Tsun found the fire, much less the time, to cook? And wonder of wonders! Ming Tsun also held out half a lime! Frost took the bowl and lime eagerly, squeezing the lime juice onto the noodles as a condiment, then rubbing the pulp onto his forehead, a sovereign remedy for the headache that had plagued him since the desperate battle off the Isles of Shoals. Completely disregarding all his table manners, Frost tipped the contents into his mouth. When had he last eaten? The broth was thick with bits of chicken.

"Silas," Frost called to his warehouse superintendent, his voice a croak hardly different from that of the crow in the elm tree, "order food sent from the Widow Crockett’s tavern, all she has, hot or cold, fetch it quickly, and bring out a hogshead of that sweet verdelho wine from the Western Isles. Our men to be fed first, then the British prisoners. Immediately Salmon be unladed, I wish all of the powder aboard the British sloop be shifted into the company’s stone magazine–the powder aboard Salmon to be housed there as well, though both stores to be clearly marked as to their origins–and a guard set."

Frost eagerly drained the bowl of noodles, holding the hot bowl awkwardly with his left hand, and thought, guiltily and too late, to offer a portion to Ming Tsun. Frost glanced hastily around for his best friend in the world, but Ming Tsun had disappeared. As had Frost’s headache. Frost, the now cooled bowl forgotten in his hand, turned to his bosun to give the next in a long series of orders that would unlade the mortally stricken vessel that had been his only home for the past ten years of his life.

(c) 2002 by J. E. Fender