The Fort

‘I suppose not,’ McLean said, though he suspected a disloyal pilot could well serve his rebellious cause by guiding HMS Blonde onto a rock. There were plenty of those breaking the bay’s surface. On one, not fifty paces from the frigate’s port gunwales, a cormorant spread its dark wings to dry.

They waited. The gun had been fired, the customary signal requesting a pilot, but the smoke prevented anyone aboard from seeing whether the settlement of Majabigwaduce would respond. The five transport ships, four sloops and frigate drifted upriver on the tide. The loudest noise was the groan, wheeze and splashing from the pump aboard one of the sloops, HMS North. The water spurted and gushed rhythmically from an elm spigot set into her hull as sailors pumped her bilge. ‘She should have been broken up for firewood,’ Captain Barkley said sourly.

‘There’s no patching her?’ McLean asked.

‘Her timbers are rotten. She’s a sieve,’ Barkley said dismissively. Small waves slapped the Blonde’s hull, and the blue ensign at her stern stirred slow in the fitful wind. Still no boat appeared and so Barkley ordered the signal gun fired a second time. The sound echoed and faded again and, just when Barkley was considering taking the flotilla into the harbour without the benefit of a pilot, a seaman hailed from the foremast top. ‘Boat coming, sir!’

When the powder smoke cleared, the men on Blonde saw a small open boat was indeed tacking out from the harbour. The south-west breeze was so light that the tan-coloured sails hardly gave the boat any headway against the tide, and so a young man was pulling on two long oars. Once in the wide bay he shipped the oars and sheeted his sails hard so that the small boat beat slowly up to the flotilla. A girl sat at the tiller and she steered the little craft against the Blonde’s starboard flank where the young man leaped nimbly onto the boarding steps that climbed the tumblehome. He was tall, fair-haired, with hands calloused and blackened from handling tarred rigging and fishing nets. He wore homespun breeches and a canvas jacket, had clumsy boots and a knitted hat. He climbed to the deck, then called down to the girl. ‘You take good care of her, Beth!’

‘Stop gawping, you puddin’-headed bastards!’ the bosun roared at the seamen staring at the fair-haired girl who was using an oar to push her small craft away from the frigate’s hull. ‘You’re the pilot?’ the bosun asked the young man.

‘James Fletcher,’ the young man said, ‘and I guess I am, but you don’t need no pilot anyways.’ He grinned as he walked towards the officers at the Blonde’s stern. ‘Any of you gentlemen have tobacco?’ he asked as he climbed the companionway to the poop deck. He was rewarded with silence until General McLean reached into a pocket and extracted a short clay pipe, its bowl already stuffed with tobacco.

‘Will that do?’ the general asked.

‘That’ll do just perfect,’ Fletcher said appreciatively, then prised the plug from the bowl and crammed it into his mouth. He handed the empty pipe back to the general. ‘Haven’t had tobacco in two months,’ he said in explanation, then nodded familiarly to Barkley. ‘Ain’t no real dangers in Bagaduce, Captain, just so long as you stand off Dyce’s Head, see?’ He pointed to the tree-crowned bluff on the northern side of the harbour entrance. ‘Rocks there. And more rocks off Cross Island on the other side. Hold her in the channel’s centre and you’ll be safe as safe.’

‘Bagaduce?’ General McLean asked.

‘That’s what we call it, your honour. Bagaduce. Easier on the tongue than Majabigwaduce.’ The pilot grinned, then spat tobacco juice that splattered across the Blonde’s holy-stoned planking. There was silence on the quarterdeck as the officers regarded the dark stain.

‘Majabigwaduce,’ McLean broke the silence, ‘does it mean anything?’

‘Big bay with big tides,’ Fletcher said, ‘or so my father always said. ’Course it’s an Indian name so it could mean anything.’ The young man looked around the frigate’s deck with an evident appreciation. ‘Day of excitement, this,’ he remarked genially.

‘Excitement?’ General McLean asked.

‘Phoebe Perkins is expecting. We all thought the baby would have dropped from her by now, but it ain’t. And it’ll be a girl!’

‘You know that?’ General McLean asked, amused.

‘Phoebe’s had six babes already and every last one of them a girl. You should fire another gun, Captain, startle this new one out of her!’

‘Mister Fennel!’ Captain Barkley called through a speaking trumpet, ‘sheet in, if you please.’

The Blonde gathered way. ‘Take her in,’ Barkley told the helmsman, and so the Blonde, the North, the Albany, the Nautilus, the Hope, and the five transports they escorted came to Majabigwaduce. They arrived safe in the harbour and anchored there. It was June 17th, 1779 and, for the first time since they had been driven from Boston in March, 1776, the British were back in Massachusetts.

Some two hundred miles west and a little south of where the devils arrived, Brigadier-General Peleg Wadsworth paraded his battalion on the town common. Only seventeen were present, not one of whom could be described as correct. The youngest, Alexander, was five, while the oldest were the twelve-year-old Fowler twins, Rebecca and Dorcas, and they all gazed earnestly at the brigadier, who was thirty-one. ‘What I want you to do,’ the general said, ‘is march forward in single file. On the word of command you stop. What is the word of command, Jared?’

Jared, who was nine, thought for a second. ‘Halt?’

‘Very good, Jared. The next command after that will be “prepare to form line”, and you will do nothing!’ The brigadier peered sternly at his diminutive troops who were in a column of march facing northwards. ‘Understand? You do nothing! Then I’m going to shout that companies one, two, three and four will face left. Those companies,’ and here the general walked down the line indicating which children comprised the leading four companies, ‘are the left wing. What are you, Jared?’

‘The left wing,’ Jared said, flapping his arms.

‘Excellent! And you,’ the general paced on down the rest of the line, ‘are companies five, six, seven and eight, the right wing, and you will face right. I shall then give the order to face front and you turn. Then we counter-wheel. Alexander? You’re the colour party so you don’t move.’

‘I want to kill a redcoat, Daddy,’ Alexander pleaded.

‘You don’t move, Alexander,’ the colour party’s father insisted, then repeated all he had said. Alexander was holding a long stick that, in the circumstances, substituted for the American flag. He now aimed this at the church and pretended to shoot redcoats and so had to be chivvied back into the column that singly and generally agreed that they understood what their erstwhile schoolmaster wanted them to do. ‘Now remember,’ Peleg Wadsworth encouraged them, ‘that when I order counter-wheel you march in the direction you’re facing, but you swing around like the arm of a clock! I want to see you turn smoothly. Are we all ready?’

A small crowd had gathered to watch and advise. One man, a visiting minister, had been appalled to see children so young being taught the rudiments of soldiery and had chided General Wadsworth on the matter, but the brigadier had assured the man of God that it was not the children who were being trained, but himself. He wished to understand precisely how a column of companies deployed into a regimental line that could blast an enemy with musket fire. It was hard to advance troops in line because a long row of men inevitably straggled and lost its cohesion, to avoid which men must advance in companies, one behind the other, but such a column was fatally vulnerable to cannon-fire and quite unable to use most of its muskets, and so the art of the manoeuvre was to advance in column and then deploy swiftly into line. Wadsworth wanted to master the drill, but because he was a general of the Massachusetts Militia, and because the militia were mostly on their farms or in their workshops, Wadsworth was using children. The leading company, which would normally hold three ranks of thirty or more men each, was today comprised of Rebecca Fowler, aged twelve, and her nine-year-old cousin, Jared, both of whom were bright children and, Wadsworth hoped, capable of setting an example that the remaining children would copy. The manoeuvre he was attempting was difficult. The battalion would march in column towards the enemy and then halt. The leading companies would turn to face one way, the rearward companies turn to face the opposite direction and then the whole line would counter-wheel about the colours in a smooth pivot until commanded to halt. That would leave the first four companies facing away from the enemy and Wadsworth would need to order those eight children to about turn, at which point the whole formidable battalion would be ready to open fire against the enemy. Wadsworth had watched British regiments perform a similar manoeuvre on Long Island and he had reluctantly admired their precision and seen for himself the swiftness with which they had been transformed from a column into a long line that had unleashed a torrent of musketry on the American forces.

‘Are we ready?’ Wadsworth asked again. If he could explain the system to children, he had decided, then teaching the state militia should be easy enough. ‘Forward march!’

The children marched creditably well, though Alexander kept skipping to try and match steps with his companions. ‘Battalion!’ Wadsworth called, ‘Halt!’

They halted. So far so good. ‘Battalion! Prepare to form line! Don’t move yet!’ He paused a moment. ‘The left wing will face left! The right wing will face right, on my word of command. Battalion! Face front!’

Rebecca turned right instead of left and the battalion milled about in a moment of confusion before someone’s hair was pulled and Alexander began shouting bang as he shot imaginary redcoats coming from the Common Burying Ground. ‘Counter-wheel, march!’ Wadsworth shouted, and the children swivelled in different directions and by now, the general thought despairingly, the British troops would have hammered two slaughterous volleys into his regiment. Perhaps, Wadsworth thought, using the children from the school where he had taught before becoming a soldier was not the best way to develop his mastery of infantry tactics. ‘Form line,’ he shouted.

‘The way to do it,’ a man on crutches offered from the crowd, ‘is company by company. It’s slower, General, but slow and steady wins the day.’

‘No, no, no!’ someone else chimed in. ‘First company front right marker to step one pace left and one pace forward, and he becomes left marker, raises his hand, and the rest fall in on him. Or her, in your regiment, General.’

‘Better company by company,’ the crippled man insisted, ‘that’s how we did it at Germantown.’

‘But you lost at Germantown,’ the second man pointed out.

Johnny Fiske pretended to be shot, staggered dramatically and fell down, and Peleg Wadsworth, he found it hard to think of himself as a general, decided he had failed to explain the manoeuvre properly. He wondered whether he would ever need to master the intricacies of infantry drill. The French had joined America’s struggle for freedom and had sent an army across the Atlantic and the war was now being fought in the southern states very far from Massachusetts.

‘Is the war won?’ a voice interrupted his thoughts and he turned to see his wife, Elizabeth, carrying their one-year-old daughter, Zilpha, in her arms.

‘I do believe,’ Peleg Wadsworth said, ‘that the children have killed every last redcoat in America.’

‘God be praised for that,’ Elizabeth said lightly. She was twenty-six, five years younger than her husband, and pregnant again. Alexander was her oldest, then came three-year-old Charles and the infant Zilpha, who stared wide-eyed and solemn at her father. Elizabeth was almost as tall as her husband who was putting notebook and pencil back into a uniform pocket. He looked good in uniform, she thought, though the white-faced blue coat with its elegant buttoned tail was in desperate need of patching, but there was no blue cloth available, not even in Boston, at least not at a price that Peleg and Elizabeth Wadsworth could afford. Elizabeth was secretly amused by her husband’s intense, worried expression. He was a good man, she thought fondly, as honest as the day was long and trusted by all his neighbours. He needed a haircut, though the slightly ragged dark locks gave his lean face an attractively rakish look. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt the war,’ Elizabeth said, ‘but you have a visitor.’ She nodded back towards their house where a man in uniform was tethering his horse to the hitching post.

The visitor was thin with a round, bespectacled face that was familiar to Wadsworth, but he could not place the man who, his horse safely tied, took a paper from his tail-coat pocket and strolled across the sunlit common. His uniform was pale brown with white facings. A sabre hung by leather straps from his sword belt. ‘General Wadsworth,’ he said as he came close, ‘it is good to see you in health, sir,’ he added, and for a second Wadsworth flailed desperately as he tried to match a name to the face, then, blessedly, the name came.

‘Captain Todd,’ he said, hiding his relief.

‘Major Todd now, sir.’

‘I congratulate you, Major.’

‘I’m appointed an aide to General Ward,’ Todd said, ‘who sends you this.’ He handed the paper to Wadsworth. It was a single sheet, folded and sealed, with General Artemas Ward’s name inscribed in spidery writing beneath the seal.

Major Todd looked sternly at the children. Still in a ragged line, they stared back at him, intrigued by the curved blade at his waist. ‘Stand at ease,’ Todd ordered them, then smiled at Wadsworth. ‘You recruit them young, General?’

Wadsworth, somewhat embarrassed to have been discovered drilling children, did not answer. He had unsealed the paper and now read the brief message. General Artemas Ward presented his compliments to Brigadier-General Wadsworth and regretted to inform him that a charge had been laid against Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Revere, commanding officer of the Massachusetts’ Artillery Regiment, specifically that he had been drawing rations and pay for thirty non-existent men, and General Ward now required Wadsworth to make enquiries into the substance of the allegation.

Wadsworth read the message a second time, then dismissed the children and beckoned Todd to walk with him towards the Burying Ground. ‘General Ward is well?’ he asked politely. Artemas Ward commanded the Massachusetts Militia.

‘He’s well enough,’ Todd answered, ‘other than some pains in the legs.’

‘He grows old,’ Wadsworth said, and for a dutiful moment the two men exchanged news of births, marriages, illnesses and deaths, the small change of a community. They had paused in the shade of an elm and after a while Wadsworth gestured with the letter. ‘It seems strange to me,’ he said carefully, ‘that a major should bring such a trivial message.’

‘Trivial?’ Todd asked sternly, ‘we are talking of peculation, General.’