The French Prize (21 page)

The trouble had started at Jack's birth, or before that, possibly.

Whatever it was that made Isaac Biddlecomb the man he was, the hard and the soft of him, strength and weakness, brilliance and folly, that was the stuff of which his son Jack was made as well. The fact that they had been born into different worlds did not change that truth. Isaac, born to a former soldier turned farmer of a small part of Rhode Island's sandy soil, was orphaned at the age of twelve. His mother died in childbirth. His father, wrecked by grief, rejoined his regiment and took a French bullet at Quebec. Isaac was then taken under the wing of William Stanton, but Stanton did no more than give him work in the man's world of the forecastle until Isaac's native genius for driving ships and men had revealed itself, and he took his first steps onto the quarterdeck.

Isaac Biddlecomb was born in the British colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Jack was born in the state of Rhode Island in the United States of America, in the middle of a war to determine if those united states would remain a sovereign nation or return to their former status as colonies of England. Jack's mother, Virginia Biddlecomb n
é
e Stanton, William's daughter, was heir to a great fortune that the war did not diminish. Indeed, through the quasi-patriotic and thoroughly profitable enterprise of privateering, Jack's grandfather actually managed to increase his wealth during eight years of conflict.

By the time Jack was old enough to have some understanding of the wider world the war was over, his father was lauded as a great hero of that war, and his mother had somehow produced a baby sister. Jack would not come to appreciate until many years later just how comfortable their situation was, particularly in light of the great fiscal devastation visited on so many others by the War for Independency.

In his ignorance he enjoyed a childhood free from want. During much of his younger days his father was gone, off to sea, but when Jack was eight Isaac came ashore permanently to be with his family and oversee the growth of Stanton and Biddlecomb, Merchants.

Isaac, naturally, wanted everything for Jack that he himself had not enjoyed: a family home, education, social standing, and the graces expected of one who occupied that station. Jack, naturally, wanted none of it. Like his father, he longed for the sea. A series of tutors managed to plant the seeds of Latin, sprout translations of Caesar, the words of Shakespeare, husband the young shoots of an appreciation for music, but they found the soil rocky and inhospitable.

Mathematics alone took some hold, not out of any academic interest but because Jack understood that mathematics was central to navigation, and navigation was one of those things that separated the men who spent their lives heaving on capstan bars and hauling on braces from those who gave the orders to do so, and Jack knew enough to know he wished to be the latter.

And so, at the age of eleven, with his father despairing of his ever pursuing a more gentlemanly life, Jack was apprenticed to a ship's captain, a trusted friend of Isaac Biddlecomb. Virginia, despite being the daughter and wife of sea captains, or perhaps because of this, objected to the arrangement. Her objections manifested in her shrieking at her husband and hurling various
objets d'art
at him, weeping, and directing the same barrage at her father, who sided with Isaac on this issue. It was the only time before or since that Jack had seen such behavior from his mother, the only time he had ever seen her lose that composure and air of cold command that he would later come to admire in the better ship's masters under whom he served.

Eventually Virginia was convinced by Isaac and by William Stanton that Jack was of such a temperament that if he was not sent to sea with someone they could trust he would run away to sea and find himself in a situation far worse. This was true; Jack was already making alternate plans if his father should fail to win the day; and when Virginia saw the truth of it she relented.

As his peers among the sons of the Rhode Island gentry were stuck with their
amo, amas, amat
, Jack and his three trunks of gear, his notebooks, sextant, portable writing desk, ditty bag, oilskins, envelopes, sealing wax, all the things that a mother deemed her young apprentice to the sea might need, were delivered up to the 354-ton merchant vessel
City of Newport
, tied to a wharf in her namesake town.

The master of the vessel was a venerable man named Amos Waverly, whom Isaac had known for many years, they both being members of that exclusive fraternity of respected Rhode Island seafarers. Waverly stood on his quarterdeck as they approached, tall and rail thin, white hair like a dandelion in seed under a tall hat. His hands were clasped behind his back, his face was locked in an expression of serious intent. He looked more like the ship's figurehead than its master. They went aboard, Isaac and Jack, at Waverly's invitation, down the ladder to the great cabin, where a somewhat cowering young steward served the men wine and Jack a cider royal.

The three of them, Isaac, Jack, and Captain Waverly, discussed the coming apprenticeship, the places to which they would voyage, the things that would be expected of Jack, the things he would learn. “We'll see young Master Biddlecomb brought up to the sea as a gentleman should be,” Waverly assured Isaac, and both Biddlecombs knew that whatever their particular wishes might be, such an approach was very much what Virginia Biddlecomb wanted, and so there they were.

The ship was Jack's classroom, from the keelson to the truck of the mainmast, and there he would learn all the sailors' arts. He would be taught to hand, reef, and steer, to long splice and short splice, to draw and knot yarns, make spun yarn, foxes, and sennit, to box the compass, to set, trim, and take in sail, to navigate with deduced reckoning and lead line and sextant. He would learn bills of lading and keeping a log and the fine art of negotiating for a cargo in a foreign port. His penmanship and table manners and clothing would be attended to as well. In short, all the things that would make him a competent mariner and a gentleman would be passed on in the time-honored tradition of master and apprentice.

And Jack was a willing student. For all his bold talk he was as frightened as any eleven-year-old boy would be to leave everything he had known and sally forth into the world of men, ships, and the sea. Waverly made him less frightened. The idea of not being thrust into that world so much as ushered in by the likes of such a man as Waverly made the entire thing less terrifying.

Being a ship's master, Waverly lived a life removed, both physically and spiritually, from the men under his command. A captain sensitive to the moods of the men, the atmosphere of the ship, can know a great deal about how things are acting, even when no one will tell him what specifically is taking place, which is nearly always the case.

But Amos, Jack would discover, was not a sensitive man. His only concern was that the ship's work be done, done right, and done quick. He was exacting and he was a driver and he had shipped a mate who saw those wishes carried out, who made manifest Waverly's philosophy that the men before the mast were not to be coddled in any way. Waverly had little sense for the attitude in the forecastle and cared even less. This much Jack would discover, months later, and to his profound regret.

 

15

The education of Jack Biddlecomb, ship's boy, green hand, apprentice, began immediately, before the
City of Newport
even was under way, bound for Lisbon with salt cod, rum, ginger, and general merchandise. With a few words of encouragement and a manly handshake his father left him in the care of Captain Amos Waverly, who was still below. Isaac took his leave to return to the family home in Bristol, where Virginia remained, having made her tearful, thoroughly dramatic good-byes there, thus sparing her son the humiliation of doing so dockside.

Jack was left alone on the quarterdeck, and he remained there, unsure of what to do, for a full twelve minutes before he decided a climb to the main topgallant would be in order.

For all his lowly status as boy, his rating of apprentice, Jack was no stranger to ships. Indeed, he knew quite a bit for a boy of eleven, having made several short coasting voyages with his father and Uncle Ezra, both of whom had been eager teachers, and having sailed boats in Narragansett Bay and read whatever he could lay hands on, including Mountaine's
The Seaman's Vade-Mecum
and Falconer's
Universal Dictionary of the Marine
. He had been aloft more times than he could ever count, but his familiarity with a ship's rig had not been so obvious to the mate who ordered him down in a volume and tone of voice that made his displeasure clear. Waverly used the same tone, though quieter and thus more intimidating, when Jack reported to supper a few hours later in torn stockings and tar-stained clothes.

“Master Biddlecomb,” Waverly said, his words were like those of a strict schoolmaster, not the kindly sort, “you have no business climbing aloft unless you are ordered aloft, and when you are quite ready you will be ordered aloft for work, not for skylarking. You are a gentleman and your place is aft and I'll thank you to not forget that.”

“Yes, sir,” Jack said, sensible enough to say no more.

They were under way with the next tide, and with the boat away passing the warps to the warping posts, Jack was eager to lend a hand at the windlass, but Waverly restrained him. “You stay on the quarterdeck,” he ordered, “and see how this is done. Heaving on a handspike is not a gentleman's work.”

And so Jack remained on the quarterdeck and watched an evolution with which he was already quite familiar, and danced from one foot to another in his eagerness to jump in and lend a hand. But even when the order was given to loosen sail Jack was not allowed to the topgallants, which were boys' work, but had to remain aft while the single boy in the forecastle, a biggish fellow a few years Jack's senior named Jonah Bolingbroke, and another rated boy though he would certainly never see twenty again, made the long climb up to the light yards.

As the
City of Newport
plowed her way east and south, so Jack's education was also full under way, with Waverly driving that as hard as ever he drove his ship. As much as Jack would have wanted that education to include the most tarry, marlinspike aspects of seamanship, Waverly's philosophy ran more toward navigation, mathematics, and even, to Jack's chagrin, a smattering of Latin translation and literature.

The days passed, and then the weeks, and the crew settled into their watches, and bit by bit Jack was able to find release from his books in the great cabin and engage in those lessons in which he had real interest. For this Waverly put him under the care of the boatswain, a Boston man named Henry Hacking who was everything Jack thought a boatswain should be; old for a seaman, gruff, generally unpleasant, thoroughly competent with anything that fell under his purview; willing to teach if he did not have to even pretend to be kindly while doing so.

Jack soaked it up with the enthusiasm of his youth. He had come aboard thinking he knew quite a bit. He soon learned that he knew practically nothing, but he worked hard to change that. Three weeks into the voyage he turned twelve, but he did not mention it to anyone because one of the things he had learned was that no one would much care.

But for all the progress Jack was making in his seagoing education, he was still just a boy, one who had grown up in privilege, well sheltered from the worst that the world had to offer. He had no sense for how the company of the
City of Newport
felt about him. Since he generally liked everyone, he assumed everyone generally liked him, and it did not occur to him that he was looked on as the spoiled, pampered son of a great war hero and wealthy merchant, a silk-stocking little puke who spent most of his time on the quarterdeck or in the great cabin and played at being a sailor-man while they were worked near to death by Waverly, the hard driver, and the mate who enforced Waverly's will.

Indeed, Jack would have been shocked to know they felt that way, since he himself hated standing aloof on the quarterdeck or poring over Latin texts or trigonometry in the great cabin. The times he was most happy were those times he was doing the meanest or most dangerous tasks, side by side with the men.

They were still a couple of hundred leagues shy of Lisbon when Jack came to understand the reality of his place aboard the ship. He had spent the morning with pages of Cicero and it was a great relief to take his ditty bag up into the foretop to replace ratlines that had become dangerously worn. There he found Bolingbroke, already at work.

For some time now Jack had the idea that he should speak to Bolingbroke, seeing as they were near in age and were the only boys aboard, save for the one older green hand rated boy. They had had few interactions, because Bolingbroke was generally off doing some lowly job and Jack, by Waverly's orders, was not allowed into the forecastle. Bolingbroke seemed to be shunned by the men forward—Jack had seen him cuffed and kicked on more than one occasion—and Bolingbroke never seemed as if he would welcome any sort of contact.

Jack pulled himself into the foretop, hung his ditty bag from the stretcher, cut the seizing of the old ratline away, and worked the clove hitches loose with his marlinspike. “Are you from Rhode Island?” he asked Bolingbroke, by way of conversation.

“No,” Bolingbroke said, and he said no more.

Jack was seizing the new ratline on and trying to come up with some other approach when Bolingbroke spoke at last. “You are, ain't you? From Rhode Island?”

“Yes. Bristol.”

“Of course,” Bolingbroke said, with a sneer in his voice that took Jack by surprise. “Son of the great Captain Biddlecomb, of the War for Independency.”

Jack felt himself flush. “Yes. That's right,” he said at last. He was not sure why he should be embarrassed by that, but he was.