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The Rappahannock, Twenty-six
Bliven's eyes snapped open at the first rap on his cabin door, the first of three-always three-and he knew it was his steward. "Enter!" His voice was hoarse, and he coughed out a small clot of phlegm into the handkerchief that stayed by his pillow. He had slept soundly, the sea swell directly astern of them, powerful, gentle, rhythmic, and as he had fallen asleep it seemed to propel him forward into his dreams.
"Good morning, Captain."
"Good morning, Mr. Ross." His steward was a short man, of gracile build, with very wavy ash-blond hair, slightly dish-faced but not unpleasantly so, and with hazel eyes beneath woolly brows so heavy that they seemed always knit in worry. He bore a wooden tray with water, coffee, and a covered plate.
Bliven rubbed his eyes, rose stiffly from his berth, and entered his sea cabin. "I am eating alone this morning?"
"Sir"-Ross scooted aside a chart of the southern coast of Cuba that lay on the great mahogany table and set the wooden tray in its place-"the lookout sighted a sail just a moment ago. The officers are already on deck."
"Where away?"
"They make her three miles, sir, northwest."
Bliven paused to enjoy the morning sun streaming in the stern windows. "Toward the reef."
"It would seem so, sir."
"M-hm." If it was a pirate or a slaver, he was doing just what he needed to: trying to draw them into shallow water. Well, as dearly as Bliven would have loved to take a slaver out of the trade, he would not be drawn in. Even after more than a decade it made his gorge rise to think of how Bainbridge lost the gallant Philadelphia at Tripoli, racing into shoal waters where he had no business going.
Ross set his breakfast down next to the still-open logbook in which Bliven had been writing the night before. Even before his first sip of coffee he took up the pen, flipped open the inkwell, and dipped the nib. He paused to wake up a bit more, for if there was one thing that had come to irritate him, it was an inconsistent hand in the captain's record of the ship's operation.
October 20, 1817. At dawn, sail sighted three miles northwest, toward the reef. Suspicion of illicit activity, will give chase and investigate, but not enter Spanish territorial waters.
Bliven cleared the pen with a tidy rubric and set it in its stand. "How is the wind?"
"Easterly, sir. We have our will of him."
"Maybe." Yes, they held the weather gage, if they chose to use it. Bliven rose and walked stiffly across his great cabin and closed himself into the privy. In the old design of ships he would have had to exit onto a narrow quarter gallery to access it, and as in the old design the close stool itself emptied over the open water, but for this new generation of ships the architects had reworked the whole design of a captain's accommodation. Now it was divided by partitions into a six-compartment suite, with separate areas for working, sleeping, hosting guests, all surrounding the great sea cabin with its fine mahogany furniture-heavy, polished, elegant, but no longer fashionable and no doubt appropriated from some earlier vessel now stricken from the list-for dining and entertaining. Along the after bulkhead of his study, which lay to starboard and was matched by a guest berth to port, reposed the ten-foot assemblies of twenty-four-pounders on their carriages, their gunports closed against the weather. They served as reminders that in a battle even the captain's suite fought, and one feature of the new architecture was that its partitions were collapsible. In beating to quarters, the partitions were lowered and the captain's furnishings were stowed below in the wardroom, shared by the other officers at the stern of the berth deck. Thus the working frenzy of the gun deck in battle extended the whole length of the ship, from stern windows forward to the sick bay in the bow. Then, after the fight, even if the ship was ravaged by raking fire through the large, sunny windows, the partitions could be raised again and the furniture brought back up, and the captain and his guests could still dine in elegance and privacy.
In the privy, on a shelf bolted to the bulkhead, Bliven saw a new stack of small cut squares of lamb's wool, and wondered when Ross could have replenished them, for he did not remember them from the night before. He crossed again to his berth, where hot water steamed in its basin next to his razor and towel, and Ross had laid out his uniform, complete except for the body within it, then regarded again the breakfast laid out on the vast slab of a mahogany table with its silver accouterments. For a Connecticut farmer raised to do for himself, Bliven decided that the perquisites of command were not to be disdained.
He did not sit again but ate-eggs, a fresh pork chop, and toasted bread with jam-as he dressed. Their stores were fresh and plenty, for they had made a port call at Santiago de Cuba to spend money and try to assure them of America's friendship in the face of General Jackson's incursions into Spanish Florida chasing Seminole Indians, and their unending boundary disputes. That required diplomacy: Spain's crumbling empire could no longer afford to contest for Florida, which the United States wanted, but it was also desirable to preserve Spanish pride and good relations. Bliven had always been curious to see Santiago's looming Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca, to see for himself what kind of harbor fortification could take more than sixty years to build, and he got an eyeful, for they had anchored in its very shadow. The oldest parts dated back two centuries, separated from the mainland by a yawning moat, and supplied by sea, its storehouse cut into the living rock of the cliffs. The fortress's rising, receding terraces were lined with batteries of heavy guns, not unlike the decks of a ship of the line. Bliven had saluted the fort as he came gliding in under topgallants; the answering guns shook the Rappahannock's timbers, and he realized there was a reason that Spain, whatever her fallen state now, once ruled the western hemisphere.
After Santiago they rounded Cabo Cruz, on the lookout partly for slave runners-a task to which they were bound, since the African slave trade was outlawed in 1808-but still more alert for pirates, who now infested the Caribbean in more, and more devious, ways than in years past. The ongoing liberation of South America from Spain created new nations, who needed some semblance of navies and who even, as the United States had once done, turned to the contracting of privateers to establish a presence at sea. Many of those privateers, they now knew, were merely former pirates plying their old trade under the protection of new national flags. Since the close of the Second Barbary War, more than a thousand merchantmen had disappeared in the Caribbean, and, while maintaining some presence in the Mediterranean, much of the U.S. naval strength was now turned to the Caribbean to pacify that historically lawless sea. The very capable Hazard Perry had been dispatched to newly independent Venezuela-again, officially to demonstrate American friendship, but when out of sight of land to put pirates out of commission when they could not prove their bona fides. Bliven's task, in the northern Caribbean, was to intercept buccaneers whom Perry flushed from the coast of South America.
It was impossible not to think of President Washington's often-published farewell warning, that the United States should avoid entangling herself in foreign alliances, and smile. In the mere three years-three years just past the day-since the British had burned Washington in the attempt to reestablish her North American empire, the United States had become irretrievably enmeshed in world affairs. And this was no bad thing, from the standpoint of trade, by which America was profiting most handsome, nor from the standpoint of those many who viewed their homespun democracy as a light to the world, who believed in it so ardently as to see it as the desired hope of mankind. There was even the latest talk in the Navy of showing the Stars and Stripes again in the Pacific, that giant quadrant of the globe with exotic and potentially vast trade in which the United States had only dabbled in the most exploratory way.
To all this was required a Navy commensurate with the responsibility, and it was a thrill, a daily thrill every morning when Ross rapped on his cabin door, to be a part of. Ross was pouring coffee, elevating the silver pot as he did so as to aerate the brew as it swirled into the cup. "Sugar yet, Captain?" He grinned with a faint slyness.
"Thank you, no, Mr. Ross, I have not acquired a taste for sweet coffee in the past twelve hours." He knew Ross was joking, a venturesome familiarity for a steward with his captain, but Bliven had never attained the full stiffness of his rank, and he allowed something like friendship between himself and those whose duties touched him most closely. At Santiago de Cuba they had bought thirty barrels of sugar to leave some silver in their wake, with little use for it but to serve the crew the sweetest plum duff in the history of the Navy.
After Santiago they had put in at Cienfuegos, four hundred miles by sail west of there, a settlement less than a year old, to check on how their Louisiana colonists were faring. Here, too, there was a double purpose to the call, most assuredly to show their home country's amicable interest in developing this fertile and potentially rich portion of the island, but also to satisfy themselves that, being Louisianans about to engage in large-scale agriculture, they were not crossing that filmy boundary between utilizing slaves on their plantations and profiting from any transshipment of slaves to the U.S. mainland.
Bliven sawed easily through the tender chop of pork, to which he added a yellow fluff of egg, and slurped a sip of the hot brew. Every time he drank coffee he thought of Sam Bandy, who still made the Putnam family a present every Christmas of a sack of the finest Martinique beans. And they reciprocated with a jug of the first and finest draw of maple syrup, and always a barrel of their Putnam Farm cider. He and Sam did not correspond as frequently as they had during Sam's recuperation after the War of 1812. And directly after hard service in that conflict Bliven had been sent under Decatur on the Guerriere back to the Mediterranean for the Second Barbary War. That was a cruise he actually enjoyed, for he had come to like Decatur, and he especially took pleasure in reducing and capturing the cursed Meshuda, which had slipped from their grasp in the first Mediterranean conflict. That was more bracing duty than trying to explain to people since then that this Guerriere was a new American frigate, not a resurrection of the British ship destroyed by the Constitution in 1812. The U.S. Navy had, on occasion, adopted the English penchant for naming new ships after defeated enemy vessels. The custom tasted of British arrogance and, he believed, had no place in the fleet of a democracy, but his consultation was not sought in the matter.
Home again, he'd barely had time to turn around before being sent to the Caribbean to help quell piracy and the slave trade. Clarity and his parents had all let Bliven know their despair at losing him back to sea so soon after coming safe home, to the point that they could barely share in his triumph at being once more elevated to his own command, and in the rank of captain, at last.
"Shoes, sir," said Ross as he plopped them onto the Brussels rug that Bliven had spread in his compartment. Bliven stared at them with disgust and then slipped them on. Boots were harder to get on and off, and were lost if one were wounded and they had to be cut away, but that was a small price to pay to avoid fighting a battle feeling like one was kitted out for a dancing lesson. Ross helped him into his blue cutaway coat, and pulled lightly at the gold lace around the cuffs and collar. "Three-eighths of an inch, Captain, not a tittle less."
"Oh, for heaven's sake." The Navy had found the most astonishing regulations to insist upon other than defense. Ross handed him his sword, which he buckled on, and bicorne. With the hat tucked in the crook of his arm, he regarded himself in the full standing mirror, satisfied. He took several more rapid bites of breakfast, drained the coffee, and said mostly to himself, "All right."
He started to leave but heard Ross's voice behind him, "Your glass, Captain." He turned and Ross had it almost into his hand.
"Oh, yes, thank you." Outside his cabin he strode quickly forward down the gun deck, surveying its double file of twenty-fours and finding all in order as he reached the ladder. Below on the berth deck he could hear the crewmen greedily downing their breakfast as he ascended the ladder to the weather deck.
His new sloop of war, Rappahannock, twenty-six, fresh from the yard, represented something of a change in policy for the government. With the end of every conflict, after the Navy had more than proved its worth, the Congress would pare it down to save money, lay up ships in ordinary, and furlough officers to half pay. The country would retreat into its shell like a hermit crab, hoping the world that it refused to see by covering its eyes would therefore not exist. Bliven admitted the expense of maintaining ships at sea, but the United States would never assume a place of respect in the family of nations until they deployed the means to defend that vast merchant fleet on which the American economy depended more than ever.
The end of the Second Barbary War, however, presented such a new set of circumstances that for once the nation took a different tack. James Monroe, secretary of state under Madison in the last war, was now president. He was a diplomat, he had been abroad, he understood the still-colonial attitude of the Old World toward the New, and he wanted to make it clear that this was no longer acceptable. On land the War of 1812-the Second War for Independence-had gained them no new territory. As Bliven's father had foreseen, the invasions of the Canadas had been a collective disaster, but conquest had never been the primary goal. At sea American victories, and America's willingness to pay the price for those victories as with the loss of the President and the Chesapeake, won America freedom from impressment, which indeed had been their primary reason for going to war.
