The French Admiral (56 page)

“Recognition signal, sir!” he screamed down minutes later. “This month's! 'Tis
Roebuck,
sir, her private number!”

“Hands been fed, Mister Railsford?” Treghues asked.

“Aye, sir.”

“Douse the galley fires and clear for action, just in case.”

“Aye, sir.”

But the stranger was indeed
Roebuck,
one of the ship-rigged sloops of war that had accompanied them on their raid on the Danish Virgins back in the late summer of 1781. She surged up close and her captain took up a brass speaking trumpet to speak to
Desperate.

“What lit a fire under you, Captain?” Treghues shouted, with his leather lungs and cupped hands around his mouth in lieu of a trumpet.

“The French, Captain Treghues!” the other retorted. “Thirty sail of the line and a transport fleet have fallen on St. Kitts!”

“Jesus!” Alan muttered. St. Kitts was part of a pair of islands, Nevis and St. Kitts, that were not a day's sail from Antigua, and Antigua was the main base of the Leeward Islands. Admiral de Grasse was wasting no time in making use of his splendid fleet after returning to the Indies from the Chesapeake and Yorktown. Lewrie frowned in depression as he thought of his last few months; a failed opportunity at the Chesapeake battle, the loss of England's last field army at Yorktown, the evacuation of Wilmington, and the rumors of a revitalized Rebel army under General Greene closing in on Charleston; now this disaster. If the French took St. Kitts, Nevis was barely five miles across a safe channel. Then what came next, English Harbor? They had already retaken St. Eustatius, Admiral Rodney's treasure trove. If Antigua went, there went the Indies.

“They struck two days ago, on the eleventh,”
Roebuck
's captain was continuing to shout. “Anchored off Basse Terre and marched on Brimstone Hill. They're holding out so far. I am to carry word to Hood off Barbados.”

“God speed you, then!” Treghues called back. “We shall follow as best we are able!”

He turned back to them with a hard expression on his face. “Well, gentlemen, we have been here before, have we not? It seems we must deal with this devil de Grasse one more time to rescue a British army as we attempted in the Chesapeake. This time they may have bitten off more than they can chew. Brimstone Hill is on a high cliff ten miles march from Basse Terre Roads, and the island is not big enough to support a large land force by foraging as the Virginias supported Rochambeau and Washington. Brimstone Hill is a proper stone fortress, well stocked with artillery and powder. Their fleet must wait for results ashore, and when Admiral Hood lights into them this time, there will be no timidity such as we saw from Admiral Graves. We shall see something wonderful then, and we'll square this Frog's yards for him for good and all this time! Questions?”

“May I get off here, sir?” Alan quipped, only half kidding, though everyone treated his comment as a jest only, laughing heartily and calling him the very devil of a merry wag and other such complimentary comments.

“To your stations. Stand the hands down from quarters, Mister Railsford, and send them aloft to make sail, all the sail
Desperate
'll fly. Should
Roebuck
fall across the hawse of a French ship or fail in her mission, then we may also carry word to Admiral Hood.”

Good Christ Almighty, Alan thought sadly. It's not as if I haven't done enough already, is it? There's only so many times I can put myself in the line of fire before I get knackered, and if it's only going to be half as bad as that muddle up in Virginia, then I'm a dead man this time. A very wealthy dead man, at that. Just when things were turning sweet for once. Just when I thought life was giving me a fair hand at last!

Realizing there was nothing for it but to go game, he went forward to Mister Monk's side by the wheel. At least, he could appear enthusiastic.

AFTERWORD

T
he
incident concerning the gruesome fate of the infant and mother really did happen during the Virginia campaign, though not at that time and place; Washington and Rochambeau's troops discovered the scene on their march down from Head Of Elk, Maryland. I ran across it in Barbara Tuchman's book,
The First Salute,
which provided me with much pertinent information about Yorktown.

The Revolution was not the clean, glorious endeavor so familiar from history books and post-office murals; it was a bloody civil war, as bitter as any armed conflict between neighbors, though never approaching the cruelties of the French Revolution.

David Fanning, “Bloody Bill” Cunningham, and the local commander of Wilmington's garrison, Major Craig, were real people on the Loyalist side during the Revolution, and their memories are still hateful for their depredations as irregular partisans and oppressive occupiers, held in as much contempt as Quantrill's raiders or the James boys during the Civil War.

While the sentiments of the time forbade harm to be inflicted by direct action upon non-combatants, harm was inflicted to civilians nonetheless on both sides, first by the less-disciplined irregular militias and partisan rangers, then later by regular troops. And the fate of the Loyalists and their property after our Rebels had won is still a subject as closed as the fate of the Creek and Cherokee in the American version of history. I do not wish to give the impression, since my events happened in the South, that this was solely a problem limited to the Carolinas; Northern Rebels and Loyalists suffered just as much.

The British did indeed muddle their way to defeat time after time, and one begins to wonder if they ever had mixed feelings about fighting their blood-cousins in the first place. There were few examples of military genius on either side until the impartial French arrived.

The actions of Graves and Hood at the Battle of the Chesapeake and Graves' failure to relieve Cornwallis's army were the final nails in the coffin for British hopes of victory. As one historian wrote, Graves didn't really lose a single ship in the battle (although HM
Terrible
had to be sunk later); he didn't lose the battle, so much as called it a draw and broke it off; what he lost was America. Hood went on to great success against de Grasse, and with Adm. Sir George Bridges Rodney, won undying fame at the Saintes a year later. His hanging back at the Chesapeake has never been satisfactorily explained.

The contributions of Adm. Paul Comte de Grasse, the unseen eminence in this novel, Gen. Rochambeau, Adm. de Barras (dilatory as he was up in Newport), Gen. St. Simon and his superb artillery trains, and the regiments Touraine, Gatenois, Saintonge, Royal Deux-Ponts, and Soissons are also glossed over, and only Lafayette is given the honor due them all. But, had it not been for direct French intervention in 1781 and material and monetary support in 1778, we would still be subjects of Great Britain.

Unlike the history taught about the Revolution, mostly written by north-east educated historians, the war did not revolve around New York and the upper colonies; most of it was fought in the South, and there are many patriots who should be famous, who did more to capture our freedom than Washington or his New York State generals.

I wish to apologize to those who thought the Pennsylvania (or Kentucky) rifle won the Revolution; opposed to common myth, the piece was a light hunting rifle, stripped down to the basics, slow to load and fire due to the rifling in the barrel, which made ramming home a grease-patched ball difficult. The militia and minutemen who faced up to British regulars did not lay them out in windrows, but usually got themselves tromped and skewered by more rapid smooth-bore musket fire and fixed bayonets, just as the Chiswick brothers described. The Continental Army and the various state militias became a force to be feared in the field, equipped with French muskets and bayonets, captured British arms, or those few American-built copies of European muskets. Much money was spent and little was received from contractors who promised the moon, much like military budgets today.

My apologies to anyone whose ancestors really lived on Jenkins Neck, which only appears as described geographically and in the map; the Hayley plantation never existed except in my imagination.

I'd like to acknowledge a debt to Mrs. Diane Cobb Cash-man and her lovely book,
Cape Fear Adventure, An Illustrated History of Wilmington,
about my favorite seaport town which figured in
The French Admiral.
Lastly, thanks to Jimmy Buffett for just about everything he ever wrote or recorded, which figured prominently in late-night sessions.

D
EWEY
L
AMBDIN
S
EPTEMBER
12, 1989
P
ERCY
P
RIEST
L
AKE
N
ASHVILLE
, T
ENNESSEE