The Tempest--Commander Putnam and Mr. Madison's War Read online

  ALSO BY JAMES L. HALEY

  THE BLIVEN PUTNAM NAVAL SERIES

  The Shores of Tripoli: Lieutenant Putnam and the Barbary Pirates

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  NONFICTION

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  Most Excellent Sir: Letters Received by Sam Houston, President of the Republic of Texas, at Columbia, 1836–1837

  Texas: An Album of History

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  The Buffalo War: The History of the Red River Indian Uprising of 1874

  JUVENILE

  Taming Texas: Texas Law and the Frontier

  Taming Texas: How Law and Order Came to the Lone Star State

  Stephen F. Austin and the Founding of Texas

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

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  Copyright © 2017 by James L. Haley

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Haley, James L., author.

  Title: A darker sea : Master Commandant Putnam and the War of 1812 / James L. Haley.

  Description: New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2017. | Series: Lieutenant Putnam and the Barbary Pirates ; 2 | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017028230| ISBN 9780399171116 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780698164079 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: United States—History, Naval—19th century—Fiction. | United States—History—War of 1812—Fiction. | United States. Navy—Officers—Fiction. | GSAFD: Adventure fiction. | Historical fiction. | War stories. | Sea stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A54638 D37 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028230

  p. cm.

  Map © 2017 by David Cain

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To the Millers, Mike and Corina, and Becky and Kat, with love

  To have shrunk, under such circumstances, from manly resistance, would have been a degradation blasting our best and proudest hopes; it would have struck us from the high ranks where the virtuous struggles of our fathers had placed us, and have betrayed the magnificent legacy which we hold in trust for future generations.

  —JAMES MADISON,

  PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY JAMES L. HALEY

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPILOGUE

  MAP

  PROLOGUE: The Hound in Blue

  1. Dangerous Trade

  2. Mr. President Madison

  3. To War, Slowly

  4. For the Commodore’s Eyes Only

  5. Chasing Men, Chasing Ships

  6. The Warrior

  7. The Shaded Bower

  8. Two Sailors, One Sea

  9. Obookiah

  10. New Year’s Broadsides

  11. Home

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FURTHER READING ON THE WAR OF 1812

  PROLOGUE

  The Hound in Blue

  In his cabin at the stern of the brig Althea, Sam Bandy dressed as he sipped the morning’s first cup of coffee, rich and full-bodied, from Martinique. Sped into Charleston on a fast French ship with a dry hold, it tasted of neither mold nor bilge water. He was lucky to have gotten it in, avoiding the picket of British cruisers who, in the never-ending mayhem of the Napoleonic wars, sought to sweep all French trade from the seas. It might well have ended in the private larder of an English frigate captain. Now he had brought a quarter-ton of it to Boston, tucked into his hold along with the cotton and rice that one expected to be exported from South Carolina.

  Yes, the life of a merchant mariner suited him, and it endlessly amused him. If one wanted a bottle of rum in Charleston, the cane was grown in the West Indies, where it was rendered into sugar and its essential byproduct, molasses. Thence they were taken by ship and, passing almost within sight of Charleston, delivered all the way to Boston, or Newport. There the scores of Yankee distilleries manufactured the rum, which then had to be loaded and taken back south to Charleston, which was halfway back to the Caribbean. And money was made at each exchange.

  Sam ascended the ladder topside, coffee in hand, snugging his hat upon his head—a blue felt Bremen flat cap that a German sailor had offered him in trade for his American Navy bicorne. Sam had surprised the German with how readily he accepted the exchange, for in truth he felt no sentimental attachment to it at all. There were several considerations that impelled him to separate from the Navy. The death of his father during the Barbary War and the disinterest of his brothers placed the responsibility for their Abbeville plantation on his shoulders. And the Navy’s penchant for furloughing junior officers for months at a time, and then recalling them without regard for the seasonal imperatives of planting or harvesting, he could not accommodate. Most important, on his voyage home from the Mediterranean on the Wasp, he had brought the daughter of the American former consul to Naples, and she had become his wife. Naturally he wished to provide her and their growing family the gracious life he had known, and shipping provided them a measure of comfort even beyond that of their neighbors.

  And this would be a profitable trip. Their South Carolina cotton for the Yankee mills had brought him eighteen cents per pound and paid for the trip, leaving the rice, some indigo, and the Martinique coffee as pure profit. Topside, he observed his first officer, Simon Simpson, directing stevedores down into his hold. Simpson was astonishingly tall and brawny, dishfaced, with wild black hair; he knew his trade but was not overly bright, but then, apart from captains, what men who became merchant sailors were?

  Their lack of schedule suited Sam; they had tied up halfway out the Long Wharf, selling until his hold was empty, and his taking on new cargo could not have passed more conveniently. As he reflected, Boston’s famous Paul Revere was in his mid-seventies, but still innovating, still trying his hand at new business. His late venture into foundry was a rousing success, and Simpson lined the bottom of Althea’s hold with cast-iron window weights, fireplace accoutrements—andirons, pokers—and stove backs. Nothing could have provided better ballast, and atop these he loaded barrels of salt fish, all securely tied down. This left room for fine desks and bookcases from the celebrated Mr. Gould. Upon Sam’s own speculation, apart from that of his co-owners of the ship, he vis
ited Mr. Fisk’s shop and bought a quantity of his delicate fancy card tables and side chairs, for which he expected the ladies of Charleston to profit him most handsome. Fisk’s lyre-backed chairs were in the style of Hepplewhite of London, and when Sam visited Fisk and Son to make the purchase, it caught his ear that more than one patron expressed his pleasure that Fisk’s fine workmanship had soured the market for Hepplewhite itself, so disgruntled had people become with the British interference with their trade.

  The Long Wharf, with its glimpse of Faneuil Hall at its head, the taverns he had frequented in their nights here, the dockside commotion, the frequent squeals of seagulls, the salt air beyond his West Indies coffee, all left him deeply happy, but he was ready to go home. “Mr. Simpson!” he called out.

  Simpson left his station at the hatch and joined him by the wheel. “Good morning, Captain.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Simpson. The tide begins to run in three hours. Can we be ready by then?”

  “No question of it, we are almost finished.”

  “Excellent. Now, if you please, divert two of those Fisk chairs to my cabin. There you will find on my desk a package, addressed to the Putnam family in Litchfield, Connecticut. Take it to the post office and dispatch it. The Port Authority is right close by there. Arrange a pilot for us, come back, check the stores, and prepare to get under way.”

  Ah, the Putnams. Sam did not miss the Navy, but he missed Bliven Putnam. Their midshipman’s schooling together on the Enterprise, their learning the handling of sabres together, their fighting Barbary corsairs together, even their fumbling attempts to bridge the cultural gap between Connecticut and South Carolina, and their punishment together at the masthead of the President mandated by Commodore James Barron for their having fought each other, all had bonded them in a way that would have been imperishable even had Barron not compelled them to swear their friendship to each other. Sam could not absent himself from the ship for a week, which would gain him only a day’s visit to Litchfield, but he could send Bliven a sack of this rich coffee.

  By ten Simpson had returned, and Sam hoisted the flags, signaling his imminent departure. With crew counted and hatch secured, Sam cast off, moving ever so slowly under a single jib and topsail into the harbor. The wind was from the northwest, which could not have served them better.

  At the end of the wharf the pilot boat appeared, a small, sleek, low-waisted schooner, which hoisted Althea’s name in signal flags. Sam answered and fell in behind her gratefully. In Boston’s shallow bay the tides ran swiftly; once, he visited the other side of the city when the tide fell just to see the sight of Back Bay emptying out as fast as a man could walk; such flats were no place to get trapped. But this pilot very clearly knew what he was doing; the schooner was under a full set, and Sam had to loose his courses to keep up. They passed through the channel between Long and Deer Islands, and could see Lovell Island off their starboard bow. At this point the pilot came about, wishing Althea fair sailing; Sam signaled his thanks and steered east-southeast for the northern curl of Cape Cod. If the wind held, they should round the cape and be halfway down that seemingly interminable spit of sand when dark fell. He would be safe on a southerly course and well clear of Nantucket by morning, when he could set a new course, if the wind permitted, west-southwest for Long Island.

  If it were not for the knowledge of going home, Sam would not relish the southward voyage. South by west was the most direct course to Cape Hatteras, but that would place him in the very teeth of the irresistible, opposing push of the Gulf Current. More distant in miles but infinitely faster it was to steer closer inshore along the mid-Atlantic and follow the eddying cold-water currents that would aid him.

  Their seventh day out, Sam awoke to the accustomed clatter of the cook setting the tray of his breakfast on his desk. He did not mind, for every morning it reminded him of the glorious luxury of not being in the Navy, that every morning there were eggs and bacon and toasted bread for breakfast. On this voyage he did rather feel obligated to share his Martinique coffee with the crew, but it was a small cost to see the men feeling favored, and thus working with a more congenial will.

  He dressed and glanced at a chart on the table, estimating in rough how far they must have come during the night. Topside at the wheel he saw his tall, wire-haired first mate, keeping a firm grip on the wheel in a stout wind from their starboard quarter. “Good morning, Mr. Simpson.”

  “Good morning, Captain.”

  Sam regarded the wind and the set of sails. “Steer east-sou’east until noon, then make due south.”

  “Very good, sir, east-sou’east she comes.” Simple Simpson eased the helm a few points to port.

  There was no need to explain why. Their southerly course had brought them almost to the outer banks of North Carolina. Now it was necessary to stand out far enough to avoid those coastal shoals whose locations changed with every storm, shallows that had brought numberless crews to grief, yet not stand so far out as to meet the strongest opposition of the Gulf Current, which here compressed as it rounded the Hatteras Cape and was here at its swiftest. If they made that mistake they could labor all day with their sails bellied full out and end the day not five miles farther on than when they started. It was a delicate calculation, but they would know if they went too far, for old sailors had many times told Sam, and he had himself once discovered the truth of it, that the inner edge of the warm Gulf Current was so sharp and sudden that in crossing it, water brought up from the bow and the stern might be twenty degrees different in temperature.

  At the same moment in the sea cabin of His Majesty’s sloop-of-war Hound, twenty-two guns, Captain Lord Arthur Kington in his dressing gown poured himself a glass of Madeira. Two weeks out of Halifax, bound for Bermuda, but empty-handed. They had not raised a single French sail to engage, nor even an American merchant to board and harvest some pressed men. For days now they had been plowing through the drifting mess of the Sargasso Sea, no doubt snagging strands of the olive-brown weeds that would hang on their barnacles and slow them down.

  How in bloody hell could he have fallen from command of a seventy-four- to a twenty-two-gun sloop? For six years he had sailed in purgatory like the Flying Dutchman, each morning asking and answering the same question of himself, unable to break the cycle of it. It was difficult to comprehend how that incident in Naples had precipitated such a consequence. In attempting the apprehension of a deserter from a dockside tavern he and everyone else knew he was carrying out Crown policy. His fault, apparently, lay in attending a diplomatic reception while his press gang was assaulted and bested by a clot of drunken American sailors. No captain of a seventy-four would be seen in the company of his press gang; the notion was absurd, and he the son of a duke. What did they expect of him? Apparently, that his press gang prey only upon victims foreign or domestic, beyond the protective circle of their shipmates. It was his lieutenant on the Hector who had acted imprudently, but in the long-established calculus of the Royal Navy, he as captain should have foreseen such a circumstance and ordered his lieutenant to greater caution. That junior officer had not suffered for the act, he had later been raised from the Hector’s third officer to second, but it was Kington himself who, in response to the diplomatic stink that the Americans had fomented, had to be punished. And yet he wondered if there were not more to it, whether some key bureaucrat in the Admiralty had simply conceived a dislike for him.

  At least the Admiralty had broken him in command only and not in rank, an admission that they needed his service as one who would willingly overhaul vessels on the high seas and take off what men were needed to crew His Majesty’s ships. The need was bottomless, for desertions were constant, and Napoleon simply would not be crushed. Kington’s conclusion was that his value to the Navy lay in impressing men in ways that could not be readily discovered, and in six years at this he had come to excel. The Navy needed him but would not acknowledge him; it was a circumstance that left him feeling il
l used. Yet, if he did but do his duty, without complaint, and without overmuch using family influence on the Admiralty, he would work his way back up to his former station. This was certain, for even now a new frigate was waiting for him in Bermuda to take command once he brought in the Hound with a merchant prize or two, and some well-broken American sailors.

  Thus he served, secure in the knowledge that the Royal Navy needed pressed men more than ever—and more particularly they needed him, for after that affair with the American frigate Chesapeake, their need for impressment was forced into still greater subterfuge. Infinitely more so than Naples, the Leopard–Chesapeake encounter had altered the dynamics of impressment. Doubtless, it had been less than prudent, or at least less than sporting, for Post Captain Humphreys of H.M.S. Leopard to pour broadsides into the unprepared American frigate in peacetime, but it was open and obvious that the Americans had been enlisting British deserters into their crews. The American captain, some fellow named Barron, had been court-martialed and suspended for not fighting his ship to the last, irrespective of the hopelessness of the contest.

  Kington screwed up his mouth into a smile. That said much for the American frame of mind, but not their practicality. Barron had had no chance. His guns were unloaded, rolled in, their tompions in place. His decks were piled with stores in preparation for a long cruise; when approached by the Leopard, Barron, knowing they were not at war with Britain, had not beat to quarters. Had he resisted, his crew would have been slaughtered as they limbered up the guns. As it was, the American was lucky to lose only four killed and eighteen, including Barron himself, wounded. Humphreys had seized four men from the Chesapeake, and then, the worst insult of all, refused Barron’s surrender—they were not at war, after all—and left him there on his floating wreck. God help them if they ever encountered Barron again; he would sell his life very dearly indeed.