The Midshipman Prince (29 page)

      
“Yes.” Susan said it in a flat unemotional voice—a simple statement of fact.

      
“I guess it started about the time my mother died. Cholera took her and it was... well, it was bad.

      
“Anyway, my middle brother and I started to sneak drinks from my dad’s supply. At first, it was just a couple of kids trying to act like adults; but, for some reason, the alcohol seemed to affect me a lot more than my brother. My brother just got sick and stopped doing it. Oh, I got sick too, but not before experiencing... I don’t know, I’ll call it a feeling of peace—however brief—that I hadn’t known since before ma died.

      
“So, the drinking continued on into my teens and became a growing problem; not that I recognized it as such, you understand. To me everything was normal. But now it was taking a lot more alcohol to get me drunk than before, and some of my friends started getting on me about it. So, I changed friends. I turned in the old set for a new group that was just as drunk as I was most of the time. Big improvement, huh?”

      
“But you graduated from college. You can’t graduate from college and be a drunk at the same time.”

      
“Yes, you can.” Walker replied. “Oh, yes you can.

      
“What I found out is that, if you are bright enough, you can do next to nothing and scrape by; and I was bright enough. I doubt if I actually went to a third of the classes I was supposed to attend.

      
“So I graduated and got a job teaching at Harvard College. Actually, things were going fairly well until one evening at a formal dinner I got into my cups and somehow decided that the dean’s young wife had a bosom that absolutely cried out for exploration, right then and there, at the dinner table.

      
“A month or so later I got my next job over at the College of New Jersey. The drinking had gotten worse. After all, a recently unemployed gentleman had a right to get drunk, didn’t he? I lasted about a month before it was pointed out to me that to teach you actually had to show-up in a classroom now and then.

      
“My last stop was Mrs. Harrison’s Academy for Discriminating Young Ladies. This was a ‘finishing school’ for young women where they primarily learned how to catch a husband—preferably at some point before their eggs dry up. The less said about that institution the better.”

      
Walker stopped talking, seemingly lost in thought.

      
“And then?” Susan prodded.

      
Walker awoke. “Then I got mad.”

      
“At who? It was your own fault.”

      
“I know. And that’s who I got mad at.

      
“I took a room at a run down inn and plunked a healthy purse in front of the innkeeper. He was to place two meals a day before my door and a pitcher of lemon juice three times during the day and once in the evening. Under no circumstances was he to open the door or to react to anything he heard going on behind it. He looked more than a bit dubious, but the purse was a hefty one so he agreed.”

      
“Why lemon juice?”

      
“I thought maybe I could get rid of the alcoholism simply by flooding my blood stream with lemon juice. Besides, I like lemon juice.”

      
“So what happened?”

      
“Oh, it was bad, Susan.
Really
bad. There was nothing easy about it. At first, I got the shakes, then hot and cold flashes, vomiting, nightmares, hallucinations, and the cycle would start all over again. I thought it would never end, that I was simply going to die. In fact, I wanted nothing more in this world than
to
die. It went on for five days and then it started to taper off. Not go away, mind you, but taper off. After about eight days I was able to hold down both meals, and on the tenth day I ordered the innkeeper to make up a bath for me.”

      
“And that ended it.”

      
“No, it did not. To this day... if I could take a drink right now, I would, but I can’t. Upon my life, I can’t and I won’t. I will drink water, and I will drink my lemon juice; but that’s it. I will
never
go through that again.”

      
“And now?”

      
“And now, I have no idea. I am stuck on these ships, a half-baked, self-taught, surgeon. If I ever get off... I don’t know. I hear there are a lot of colleges being built in the south and maybe they’ll be far enough away from the dean’s wife so even I can get a job at one.”

      
“I am so sorry, Lucas,” she said as she took his arm. She wasn’t sure she completely understood everything he said, but he had taken her into his confidence, and she was moved.

* * *

      
“If I wasn’t a gunner I wouldn’t be here. Number two gun, FIRE!

      
“Away from my home and my family so dear. Number three gun, FIRE!

      
“If I wasn’t a gunner I wouldn’t be here. Number four gun, FIRE!”

      
The
Tisiphone
had rounded the point leading into English Harbor and was firing its salute to the governor. It was an old tradition, designed originally to show that an incoming vessel’s guns were now unloaded and it meant no harm, but later used simply as a sign of respect. To reduce the waste of gunpowder the admiralty limited the maximum salute to 21 guns—and that only for royalty. Because the Governor of Antigua was the equivalent of a senior Rear Admiral, the
Tisiphone
was firing 13 guns at five-second intervals. To achieve that exact interval the gunner’s mate was using the time-honored chant: “If I wasn’t a gunner I wouldn’t be here.” Fort Berkeley, which they were now passing on their larboard side, replied with seven-guns. Technically Saumarez, as a mere captain, didn’t rate a salute at all, but seven was given as a courtesy.

      
In 1782, the Caribbean was still being carved up by the major powers. Spain had taken control of the four major islands Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, and disdained the lesser islands. France and England, however, knew that these “lesser” islands controlled the southern and eastern sea routes to the Caribbean and a mad scramble was on for what was called the Lesser Antilles.

      
The Lesser Antilles runs in a long crescent from the Virgin Islands, off the coast of Puerto Rico in the north, to Trinidad and Tobago off the coast of South America. It consists of over 25 significant islands and no one knew how many smaller ones. The French started things off by conning the indigenous people, called Caribs, out of Martinique and Guadeloupe, the largest islands in the chain. The British then simply took Barbados, St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua and Montserrat.

      
The French quickly established their main base of operations in Martinique and built a very large facility at Port Royal. The British, however, were less lucky. Originally, they wanted Barbados to be their Caribbean base but there was no bay suitable for their large ships of the line; so, their second choice was Antigua.

      
Geographically Antigua was further north and further leeward than they wanted but it had the advantage of English Harbor, a lovely natural bay. It was here that in 1725 the British built the English Bay Dockyard. A deep drafted ship could easily come in, be careened (laid on it’s side) and worked on. Smaller ships could be repaired either there or in Frigate Bay on St. Kitts.

      
The main thing was that all these islands, French and British alike, were windward of the Spanish possessions. The Antilles is subject to a ferocious continual wind from the east, the kind of thing that causes trees to grow bent over to leeward. It was said that the downwind trip from Antigua to Jamaica would take seven days; and the upwind trip back could easily take three weeks or more. Any Spanish ship coming out of the Caribbean had to tack against those winds; the British and French ships did not. They would have the wind at their backs.

      
The
Tisiphone
sailed past Fort Berkeley and dropped anchor across from the dockyard where the harbormaster came out to greet them. The Governor, Sir Thomas Shirley, was across the bay supervising the building of additional fortifications for the harbor and they would have to trek up a small mountain to meet with him. Captain Saumarez took Smith and Walker with him in case the governor had any questions concerning the presence of the prince.
 

      
“Have either of you ever met Governor Shirley?” Saumarez asked when they were almost there. Both replied in the negative.

      
“Then you’re in for a real experience,” Saumarez said cryptically.

      
“Ah, my good friend Captain Saumarez!”

      
They found the governor sitting underneath a canopy wiping his brow with a cold cloth and sipping some kind of fruit beverage. He was a thin, nervous man, the kind who always seemed to be in a hurry while, at the same time, not actually doing much of anything.

      
“I saw the
Tisiphone
come in and remembered you from your last visit. Please, sit down, all of you. Sit down.” He waved with irritation at a black steward who immediately produced three more chairs.

      
“Thank you, sir. I’d like to introduce Lieutenant…”

      
“So, have you been assigned to us,” Shirley inquired?

      
“Well, no sir, you see…”

      
“Quite. Quite. But we could certainly use a good man such as you. I tell you; these are dangerous times, Saumarez. Dangerous times. As soon as I heard of our defeat at Yorktown, I started work on this fort up here. Oh, Fort Berkeley is all right; but we need more than that. More, Saumarez! What with America lost, the damn frogs are going to go into a feeding frenzy down here. De Grasse already is around here somewhere loaded to the gunnels with troops and supplies to take Jamaica, I’ll wager. I am thinking of calling it Fort Shirley, Saumarez. What do you think? Has a nice ring, what?”

      
“Yes sir, it certainly seems to…”

      
“And what do you think they give me to stop them? I have five officers and 300 slaves. Five officers! Can you imagine? And look at those blacks out there, each one works slower than the one next to him.”

      
Smith looked around as Governor Shirley had suggested. They were on the heights overlooking English Harbor and the view was breathtaking. The lush green vegetation of the hilly island ran down to the sparkling blue of the ocean. Below, he could see the
Tisiphone
at anchor and not far away a hillside that had been blasted away to create the careening area, with warehouses and storage areas behind and to the right.

      
Smith looked to his left and could see a small army of black figures toiling away, cutting and placing the rocks that would eventually make up the fort’s walls. To his right and behind him, however, was the real reason for the importance of this and every other island in the chain. There were sugar cane fields as far as he could see. White gold.

      
Antigua’s development was typical of that of the other islands in the Lesser Antilles. It was founded in 1632 by a group of English colonists from St. Kitts. Their intention was to start some plantations to grow tobacco, ginger, indigo, and sugar; but, of these crops, only sugar did well.

      
The problem was that sugar was a very labor-intensive crop. At first, they used native Indians and even whites as slaves, but the Indians tended to succumb to disease too easily and the whites could not take either the diseases or the climate. That left African blacks as their only source of cheap labor. Both the blacks and the sugar cane seemed to thrive.

      
Smith refocused his attention when he heard Saumarez speaking again.

      
“Yes, sir. That is a most difficult situation. But my main reason for being here is that I am looking for Admiral Hood.”

      
“Hood? Hood, you say? Hood is a great sailor, no doubt; but he can’t do it alone. He was in here a few days ago. You just missed him. His ships are a mess, I tell you. He took on water and victuals, but we didn’t have much in the way of bread to give him so we had to give him breadfruit and yams.