CHAPTER 3
1794: JOSIAH IN TIMES OF PEACE
Josiah Markham’s visage was fierce and worn, all softness and compromise carved away, a forecast of what his son’s face would become after time and grief and the eternal coursing runnels of salt spray furrowed his young, yielding face. From Josiah’s temples the white strands reached out to encroach upon the domain of youthful brown; the white hairs were caught up into his sailor’s queue behind, and the tail of hair hanging outside his shabby coat was streaked with patriarchal white— white, not gray, for Josiah’s hair disdained the compromise, intermediate color, and turned straight into white. Josiah made his crew drill twice each week with Revolutionary pikes, spearing imaginary Englishmen off the bulwarks and tossing them back into their spectral boats. The hands laughed uneasily and privately wondered if the unbent man in the battered clothes was not a little mad. For it was 1794, and America was at peace with the world.
Gideon, aged fifteen and already a topman, knew this; but he performed his drill with the rest of the crew, unquestioning in public, enjoying the change from the eternal manufacture of rope-yarn or the tarring of the rigging, which he, an agile youngster, was forever asked to perform. Gideon handled the pike expertly; it balanced well in his two hands. The grain of the wooden stock was worn smooth from years of handling; the wicked steel point, newly brightened by the ship’s grindstone, gleamed in the tropical sun. Stamped into the steel point was the “broad arrow” that marked it as royal property— the pike, like so many other Markham possessions, was taken in battle from the British.
Gideon’s heart swelled as his father, the captain, complimented his dexterity with the weapon, but he wondered if the drill was not a little absurd.
The war had ended a little too soon for Josiah; it left him with scores yet to settle. Those years of war that had established the American republic had been victorious years for Josiah: he had never lost a ship nor failed to bring home a prize. But he had seen too much and lost too much to ever forget what he had seen and lost, and what nation was responsible.
The Revolutionary cannon had been taken out of the ship years before and replaced with cargo. Josiah made the men drill with their pikes, excluding no one; the entire crew, twenty-two seamen, a cook, a steward, five boys, and the mate, each was required to know the drill.
Josiah knew how effective those pikes could be, those seven-foot spears, superannuated on land. The middle finger of Josiah’s left hand was severed just above the knuckle, leaving behind an inch-long scarred stub. The rest was torn off when an English privateer’s canister swept his schooner’s decks in 1781. Josiah bound the bleeding stump in a handkerchief, ran his bowsprit into the enemy’s mizzen shrouds, and called for boarders. With pikes the British had been driven from their decks, driven or left behind in the scuppers cut open like fish, their lives bleeding over the sides and into the waiting sea. Josiah knew that his life might depend on those pikes and on whether his crew knew enough to use them. Josiah had no illusions that he lived in a peaceful world . . .
After drill Gideon returned the pike to the rack circling the mainmast and reported to his father. Josiah and his son descended to the captain’s cabin, and there they spent an hour in meditation, prayer, and reading Scripture. Afterward Gideon was sent forward to have supper with the rest of the foremast hands. Gideon was a common seaman, assigned to the larboard watch and to the maintop, treated no differently from any other hand so assigned except for that one hour each day. At supper Gideon squatted with the others, opened his jackknife, and ate his beef from the common pot. The gravy stained the keen blade, and Gideon licked it clean, feeling the sharp edge against his tongue.
The ex-privateer ship Cossack, its crew drilled in handling the ship and in the use of antique pikes, entered the port of Jeremie, in Haiti, past an anchored British sixty-four. The ship of the line sat squat and powerful, its ports opened to the cooling breeze—“ although England and France were at war, the ship had been invited to the port by the local planters, hoping to cow the island’s slaves away from their muskets and machettes, away from their red massacres and the leadership of their black prophets, and back to the sugar harvest and the life of happy toil that had made the planters rich. The British, whose local economy was likewise based on slave labor, were happy to oblige.
There was yellow fever aboard the man-of-war; British tars were dying at the rate of a dozen each day. Cossack’s crew could see the bodies committed to the deep, sliding each morning over the standing part of the foresheet, each wrapped in canvas with an iron- shot to anchor it to the sea’s bottom. The slaves saw the deaths as well; they watched the planters’ imported strength declining and counted the days until the English would be no more. Their machettes were hidden away but kept sharp, sharp as Cossack’s pikes, as Josiah’s eagle eyes. Josiah paced the quarterdeck, grim-faced, watching the man-of-war, his eyes straying anxiously to his son, unloading cargo, and to the gleaming edges of the old pikes standing ready in the racks.
He saw men with cutlasses filling one of the two-decker’s launches. Accompanying them was a man with a cocked hat. Josiah snatched a glass from the rack and trained it on the boat. And when he saw the launch heading for the ex-privateer, he knew that his war with the British was not over...
The pikes were taken from the racks. The crew— twenty-two seamen, a cook, a steward, five boys, and the mate— crouched hidden below Cossack’s bulwarks. Gideon, the haft of the pike cool and familiar in his practiced hands, remembered that Cossack was his uncle Malachi’s first ship, that some of the planks still bore the marks of British grapeshot, and that behind the sheltering bulwarks where he now crouched the twelve-pound cannon once roared brimstone and iron.
The man next to Gideon was chattering with fear, his lance-tip trembling. Gideon was surprised to find himself cool, strangely analytical: he charted the rise in his own heartbeat and, to comfort the man beside him, put out a hand and clasped his shoulder.
The British officer affected an offhand drawl, as if there were a hot potato in his mouth. He introduced himself, standing in his boat, as Lieutenant Lord Rowland, and asked that the ship’s company be paraded so that he might search for deserters. Gideon knew that there were three such men aboard Cossack.
Only a fool would not have been terrified of Josiah’s scowl. “By what authority do ye summon my ship’s company?” the old privateer demanded. To Lieutenant Lord Rowland, that splendidly casual young man, Josiah must have looked like a witless bumpkin, standing alone and ramrod-straight in the entry port, dressed in shabby, much mended clothes, his broken straw hat flapping, his hand on his old Revolutionary sword.
“By the authority of His Britannic Majesty,” Rowland drawled, condescending to banter with the old Yankee gentleman, conscious, perhaps, of what an amusing story this could make in the wardroom.
“The authority of His Britannic Majesty ends where that flag flies!” Josiah roared, his outthrust arm pointing at the Stars and Stripes. “Clear off! You have no authority on my deck, mister!”
Lord Rowland shrugged offhandedly, suddenly tired of the Yankee scarecrow, of waiting for Josiah to give him the opportunity for a telling witticism. Perhaps he was also conscious of the fact that he was the agent of a cynical, ancient, Old World tyranny, that banter was pointless in the face of his orders, which were to take off ten men whether they were British deserters or not, that he and his ship were in harbor to support the vicious economic system represented by the decaying Haitian planters and, incidentally, to keep the Yankees and their preposterous republic from gaining trade and enrichment from the rebellion of slaves. In the face of those imposing facts, what need was there for dialogue?
“Look here, my good man, His Britannic Majesty’s authority goes wherever his navy takes it, and today it’s being taken aboard your ship,” he drawled at last.
“Step aside before you hurt yourself, old man,” said Lieutenant Lord Rowland.
From where Gideon crouched by the bulwarks he could see Josiah’s profile cutting the sky like a knife. Gideon watched in amazement—“ couldn’t the Englishman see the magnificence of that uncompromised, triumphant scowl, that desperate anger, the readiness of that fierce pride? To cross Josiah would bring lightnings down, would char Lord Rowland’s body to ashes and shrivel his wailing soul.
But Lieutenant Lord Rowland could only see a ragged old Yankee whose refusal to acknowledge the inevitable was becoming tedious.
“Confound you, Brother Jonathan!” Rowland said as Josiah refused to make way. Rowland nodded to his bosun’s mate, and the British seamen began to climb Cossack’s oaken walls.
“Boarders!” Josiah bellowed, clearing his sword from its scabbard. “Boaaarders!”
The pikemen rose from hiding. There was a swift, vicious melee; four heartbeats and it was over. Gideon’s first well-practiced lunge, coming up from the deck as he rose, directed without conscious thought toward the center of the nearest striped jersey, threw the bosun’s mate back into the boat. The air resounded with a bone-concussing, squelching thud, and Gideon found the man next to him reeling back, his brains open by a cutlass. The cutlass came up for another blow, but in that instant Gideon shortened his pike and brought it up under the British seaman’s right arm. The well-honed edge pierced the man as if he were a bag of suet, but the lunge brought Gideon in under the cutlass and he knew that he could be killed unless he got out of the way. He was already moving forward; rather than throw himself backward he continued his forward movement, diving inside the arc of the cutlass, grappling his dying victim. Gideon hugged the British tar until the man’s lungs filled with arterial blood, until the muscles slackened and the eyes rolled up. It was not until the sailor had turned from person to thing that Gideon finally heard the cutlass ring on the deck. Surprised by his own coolness, Gideon cleared his pike from the corpse as he’d been taught and awaited the next enemy— but the fight was over.
Lieutenant Lord Rowland, his left eye dangling on his cheek by a bloody thread, was thrown whimpering from Cossack’s deck and into his boat; and the press gang, counting its dead, backed water and made its escape, too breathless to curse their luck. Josiah picked up Rowland’s unbloodied sword from where it lay on the deck, his craggy face beaming fiery joy; he added it to the rack of captured weapons above his mantel in Portsmouth.
Gideon was sent aloft to unfurl the main topsail. A bower anchor and thirty yards of cable were left behind on the harbor bottom. Josiah, wiping Lord Rowland’s blood from his coat with a handkerchief, defiantly steered Cossack within fifty yards of the sixty-four-gun ship, within easy shot of those gaping ports and their practiced guns. But the man-of-war had not yet learned that it had lost five men killed and eight wounded, pierced with privateer pikes; they saw Rowland’s boat bobbing in the Yankee ship’s wake and wondered what interesting story Rowland would tell when he returned. The British officers watched Josiah without interest and did not see the sprinkles of red on Cossack’s proud planks.
Later Gideon cleaned his pike before returning it to the rack. The lungs’ rich blood running down the shining edge reminded him of the way gravy ran down his jackknife at supper, and he tasted keen metal in his mouth. For the first time he felt sickened.
The next day the only American casualty, the man who had knelt next to Gideon and trembled with fear, died of brain fever. Josiah, following the immortal custom of the sea, auctioned off the dead man’s belongings. Gideon bought a spare shirt. The pike drills continued, twice each week, for all Josiah’s remaining voyages, until his hair went all white and he retired from the sea. For Josiah another score had been settled, another piece of his youth avenged, another arm of the octopus that was Britain had been severed.
For Josiah there would be no end: he was too old to forgive or forget and knew it. He prayed often for forgiveness for the fact that he could not bring himself to stop hating, and he prayed for his son Gideon, that the young man would not in his lifetime be compelled to hate so thoroughly, or to feel such triumph at the humiliation of an enemy.