How Dark the Night

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 2014 by William C. Hammond

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hammond, William C., 1947–

How dark the night : a novel / by William C. Hammond.

1 online resource.

Summary: “How Dark the Night continues the seafaring adventures of the Cutler family by picking up the action where the fourth volume, A Call to Arms, ends in 1805. The years leading up to the War of 1812 were devastating ones for the young republic. The life-and-death struggle between Great Britain and France caught the United States in a web of financial and political chaos as President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison labored to keep the unprepared United States out of the conflict without compromising the nation's honor. On the home front, Jefferson's embargo threatened the livelihood of the Cutlers and other New England shipping families as merchant ships rotted on their moorings and sailors sat on the beach, penniless”—Provided by publisher.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN 978-1-61251-466-6 (epub)
  
1. United States. Navy—History—19th century—Fiction. 2. United States—History, Naval—To 1900—Fiction. 3. United States—History—1801–1809—Fiction. 4. New England—Commerce—History—19th century—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3608.A69586

813'.6—dc23

2014003066

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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First printing

In loving memory of my uncle

L
ANSING
V. H
AMMOND

Lance always encouraged me to write
.

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, thou art not so . . .
One short sleepe, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die
.

T
HOMAS
D
ONNE

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Glossary

About the Author

Prologue

S
OON AFTER
the turn of the nineteenth century, as the opening salvoes in the war against Tripoli thundered along the Barbary Coast, the United States became increasingly embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars, an epic struggle for national survival fought between Great Britain and its ancient enemy, France. By 1805 the conflict had become a world war, having slogged its way across the globe since its French Revolution genesis in 1793—with only a brief fourteen-month interval of peace provided by the Treaty of Amiens in 1802. Napoléon Bonaparte's ego and determination were every bit as strong and unrelenting as his armies; all that stood between him and his dream of global domination was the sea power of the Royal Navy, the much-heralded “wooden wall of England.” By the summer of 1805 the war had consumed nearly every corner and byway of Europe, and its funeral pyres blazed as far away as the West Indies, Latin America, South Africa, and the Orient. And now Napoléon was threatening to up the ante by dispatching his Armée de l'Angleterre to northern France in preparation for invading Great Britain.

In this conflict the United States remained neutral. In truth, it had no choice: it had no viable army, and its fledgling navy was otherwise engaged in the Mediterranean. Further, the young republic had no vested interest in the war's outcome; it did not take sides, at least in theory. Because the nation supported the principle of free trade, one customer was just as desirable as another, regardless of what language that customer spoke or what political theory he espoused. But to the two great leviathans slugging it out in Europe, the upstart Americans posed a serious threat. Yankee sea captains were out to turn a profit at every opportunity, and the scourge of war in Europe provided a potential windfall for American ship owners and their crews.

In lockstep with high potential rewards, of course, come high potential risks. Peril lurked on every horizon and in every port of call. France might rule the Continent, but the Royal Navy ruled the world's sea-lanes. And because America's merchant fleet was the world's largest neutral carrier of food and supplies, the British Admiralty had stated publicly and repeatedly that it would do whatever was necessary to keep those ships and their cargoes out of enemy hands.

While the entrepreneurial Federalists in the northeastern states wrestled with such transnational issues, the Republicans, most of whom lived in the southern and western states, looked inside their own country for their rewards. In 1803, with the purchase of the enormous Louisiana Territory, the United States had doubled in size. In that same year the state of Ohio had been admitted to the Union and the Indiana Territory organized. In 1804 President Jefferson had given his blessing to the expedition proposed by two Virginians of his acquaintance: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Newspapers carried electrifying reports and detailed maps of their exploration route, which wound northwestward across the hills and hollows of the Louisiana Purchase before snaking westward through the high mountains on a course between British possessions to the north and Spanish possessions to the south and west of Great Salt Lake. Their ultimate destination was the Oregon Territory, which belonged formally to no nation but was richly coveted by all: Great Britain, Spain, and the United States—and Russia, whose traders and pioneers had migrated southward from their base in Alaska to the mouth of the Columbia River.

It was not exports or new overseas markets that the Republicans craved; it was raw land that they could purchase for pennies and then earn dollars by farming the land and selling its produce. Native Indians posed a constant threat along the frontier, and British agents in the Northwest Territories and agents of Spain working the border between Spanish-held Florida and Georgia were doing their best to stir up trouble.

Thomas Jefferson, recently reelected to a second term in office, was again caught in a geopolitical bind. Republican to his core—for Americans of every political and social stripe he embodied the Republican ideals of states' rights, agrarianism, and limited government spending, especially on the military—Jefferson's back-and-forth positions on issues of national defense and national honor had often left both politicians and citizens scratching their heads in bewildered confusion. He professed to oppose a strong navy and preferred the construction of gunboats to frigates; yet during the war against Tripoli he had, without hesitation and without consulting Congress, dispatched four naval squadrons across the
Atlantic and had stayed the course until the United States had secured what to his mind was an honorable peace. Even now, USS
Constitution
, arguably the most powerful frigate ever to sail the seas, remained on station in the Mediterranean to safeguard America's interests there. Further, whereas President Jefferson advocated the virtues of the yeoman farmer over those of merchants, bankers, and investors, he also espoused the principle that free ships made free goods. The primary beneficiaries of that policy were the wealthy New England shipping families—who had voted against him in the last two presidential elections.

Napoléon, it was reported, guffawed when informed of Jefferson's stance. The British were less amused. In an attempt to prevent America from capitalizing on Europe's depleted merchant fleets by shipping directly from French, Spanish, and Dutch colonies in the West Indies to their mother countries, Britain imposed the “Rule of 1756.” Under that rule, trade that had been closed in time of peace could not be opened in time of war; certainly Holland, for example, had never allowed direct shipments of goods from Saint Eustatius to Rotterdam (or vice versa) in American merchant vessels. Undaunted, American shippers responded with the principle of the “broken voyage,” a tactic that brought produce bound for Europe from the West Indies to an American port where it was offloaded and then reloaded for re-export to Europe. Perhaps as a result of the rapprochement that had existed between Great Britain and the United States since the signing of John Jay's treaty in 1795, the British Admiralty Court at first upheld the legitimacy of the broken voyage. In the
Polly
case, it ruled that produce imported to an America port ipso facto became the property of the carrier, and the carrier could do with it whatever the carrier wished.