CHAPTER 5
An Invitation
By the mark thirteen!'
Drinkwater looked at the American chart. 'Very well, Mr Wyatt, you may anchor the ship.'
'Aye, aye, sir.' Wyatt raised his speaking trumpet. 'Main braces there, haul all aback!'
The knot of officers on the quarterdeck stared upwards as the main topsail and main topgallant came aback and flattened against the mast and the maintop.
'By the deep twelve!' the leadsman's chant continued. 'A quarter less twelve!'
Patrician lost what way she had been carrying in the fickle breeze blowing off the green river-banks and bringing with it the nostalgic land scents of grass and trees. The hands hauled the fore and mizen yards aback and the frigate glided to a stop, submitting to the rearward thrust of her backed sails and the current of the river. Wyatt and Drinkwater each selected a transit ashore, Drinkwater a lone tree which drifted into line with the corner of a white Palladian mansion standing majestically amid a broad and luscious swathe of grass. The two objects remained in line for a moment and then began to reverse the direction in which they had closed: their drawing apart signified that the frigate was moving astern over the ground. Wyatt caught his eye and he nodded.
'Let go the cat stopper!' Wyatt called and there was a thrumming as the short rope ran out, followed by a splash and then the vibrating rumble as the cable ran out through the hawse-holes.
The ship would take some time to bring up to her cable and Drinkwater pulled his Dollond glass from his tail pocket, levelling it momentarily at the noble house and its beautiful sweep of parkland. It made a mockery of his scrubby Suffolk acres and the homely architecture of Gantley Hall. He watched as a groom, a tall negro, brought a chestnut horse round the corner of the house from what he assumed was a stable block.
'Castle Point, Captain.'
Drinkwater was not certain whether Vansittart, resplendent in plum-coloured velvet, meant this as a statement of fact, or a query as to whether or not they had reached their destination. He swung his glass to the ship ghosting up two cables' lengths distant from them. She too followed the same procedure, backing her sails and letting go her anchor.
'Aloft and stow!'
'Aloft and stow!'
The orders were piped and called simultaneously from each ship and it was clear a race was to be made of it. The topmen leapt into the rigging, setting the shrouds a-trembling in their haste to be aloft, urged on by Metcalfe's usual loud, unnecessary exhortations and the active chivvying of the bosun's mates.
Drinkwater watched the other vessel. She was no more than a sloop, a twenty-gun ship, but at her peak, lifting languidly in the light breeze, flew the stars and stripes of the United States of America. She had laid-to athwart their hawse off the Virginia capes, her guns run out, and had sent a lieutenant across by boat demanding to know the reason for their presence in American waters. By his bluster the officer had clearly been expecting a show of arrogant truculence on the part of the British commander. It transpired that within the previous two months a pair of British frigates had been cruising off the capes, stopping and searching American merchantmen for both contraband cargoes bound for Napoleonic Europe and British deserters. Hard-pressed for men, they had inevitably poached a handful of seamen which had infuriated
Yankee opinion, disturbed the peaceful prosecution of trade and insulted the sovereignty of the United States. The Patrician, it seemed, appeared as another such unwelcome visitor, and this time Mr Madison's administration had seen fit to have a guardship off the capes to ward off such an impertinence, if not to challenge openly any such mooted interference with American affairs upon her own doorstep.
Much of the American officer's bluster was understandable. After the unfortunate incident between the Chesapeake and the Leopard, the British government had not reacted when the USS President fired into the much smaller British sloop, the Little Belt. The British press, however, had made much of the incident, screeching for revenge, and the Ministry's restraint must have seemed to the Americans uncharacteristic, wanting only an opportunity to reverse the odds and hammer the upstart navy of the young republic. The materialization of the Patrician, clearly a frigate of the heaviest class possessed by the British navy, could therefore have but one interpretation to the commander of the patrolling sloop. He had sent his first lieutenant to find out.
Drinkwater received the young man with considerable courtesy, invited him below and introduced him to Mr Vansittart, whom he had ensconced in his own cabin. There was, Drinkwater observed, a regrettable air of condescension about Mr Vansittart, trifling enough in itself, but obvious enough to provoke a reaction from the American lieutenant, whose corn-pone homeliness was laid on a little for Vansittart's benefit.
Nevertheless, Lieutenant Jonas Tucker went back to his ship with a request for Vansittart's passport to be honoured. The two ships lay-to together for half an hour within sight of Cape Charles and Cape Henry awaiting the American commander's sanction before Lieutenant Tucker returned with his senior officer's compliments. Drinkwater refused his offer of pilotage as being not consonant with the dignity of the British flag, but diplomatically accepted an escort into Chesapeake Bay.
'If you will follow our motions, sir,' Tucker had drawled, addressing Drinkwater and ignoring Vansittart, who had accompanied him on to the quarterdeck, 'and bring to your anchor here.' He unrolled a chart and Drinkwater bent to study it.
'Off Castle Point?' Drinkwater had asked.
'Just so, sir.'
Drinkwater had looked up, 'Mr Wyatt, do we have Castle Point on our chart?'
'You may have the loan of this one, sir,' said Tucker.
'Thank you.' Drinkwater had accepted the American's offer. 'We will salute the American flag, Lieutenant, immediately upon anchoring, if you will reciprocate.'
'I guess that will be an honour, sir,' Tucker had replied with insincere formality, and had taken his departure.
They had doubled Cape Charles, standing south towards Cape Henry to avoid the Middle Ground before hauling the yards and swinging north-west into the bay. Ahead the American sloop led them in. They cleared the Horse Shoe shoal and The Spit, between which the York river debouched into the bay and where thirty years earlier Cornwallis had surrendered to Washington and Rochambeau, effectively ending the American War and ensuring independence from Great Britain. They steadied on a northward course, forming in line ahead, finally entering the mouth of the Potomac and anchoring two miles below Falmouth township, off Castle Point.
The rumble of the veering cable ceased with the application of the compressor bars. Patrician brought up to her anchor and immediately from her forecastle the first boom of the salute reverberated around the anchorage. Clouds of pigeons rose in a clattering of wings from the adjacent woods and a flock of quacking duck and wildfowl flew up from the reedbeds fringing the river. The concussion of the gunfire echoed back and forth, returned by the classical façade of the mansion. The exact, five-second intervals between each explosion were timed by Mr Gordon, so that the twenty-one discharges sounded like a cannonade, only to be repeated and amplified by the gunners of the Yankee sloop they now knew to be the USS Stingray.
As the last echoes faded away, Drinkwater turned to Vansittart.