from the British side vowing that when the war was over he would leave behind everything bad in his life in Southwark and swallow the anchor somewhere among the eelgrass and cattails of the Choptank River. Sadly, it was not to be. Early on during the battle with HMS Serapis in the North Sea, Henry Sawyerâs dream of living out his days as a Marylander died the instant an 18-pounder on the lower deck misfired and exploded into shards of scalding iron.
Richard glanced down at the chart cradled in his lap. âGive it another half-cable, Mr. Wadsworth,â he called back from the mainmast chains. âThe water is deep close in, eight fathoms at a minimum.â
âAnother half-cable, aye, Captain.â
Richard rose and walked slowly forward past duck-trousered sailors making ready to ease off the jib sheets and lay the sloop on a northwesterly course toward the old colonial capital of Annapolis, a town made rich by the slave trade.
It was a bracing November day. A brisk northwesterly breeze persisted, but it carried little of the blustery cold it had when Richard had departed Hingham in the single-masted topsail sloop a few days earlier. Elizabeth was one of the smaller vessels in the Cutler merchant fleet, yet built seaworthy enough to withstand foul weather. He gripped the forestay and gazed out upon the thick woodland splendor of Tilghman Island and beyond, across the wide mouth of the Choptank River past Cook Point. He had been in the Chesapeake Bay before, back in â81 during the siege of Yorktown, but the demands of war had kept him along its southern perimeter from Cape Charles to the Potomac. Never had he ventured this far north, and what he had seen thus far confirmed the lore of a place that bordered on legend for both mariners and lubbers: a coastline laced with peninsulas, coves, and inlets where fresh and salt water converged to provide excellent anchorage and hauls of bounty for the fleets of oystermen, crabbers, and other watermen who worked these tidal estuaries. Geese, gulls, ducks, osprey, and terns abounded, swooping low over the water or soaring high above in flawless V formations, their calls at once piercing and pleasing to the ear.
âAll hands, ready about! Stations for stays!â Wadsworth shouted the orders to eight crewmen on deck who were standing by to tack. High above, on footropes beneath the single yardarm, four other sailors had clawed in the topsail and lashed it to its spar.
âReady! . . . Ready! . . . Helmâs a-lee!â Wadsworth shouted the signal to let fly the head sheets. Smoothly, deliberately, Elizabethâ s bow swung into the wind.
âHaul taut! Mind the boom!â
With the sloop momentarily in stays, and with her three foresails and mainsail jouncing about in the lighter breeze close to a lee shore, sailors in the bow secured the foresail sheets to larboard as others amidships heaved on the mainsheets and boom to force the gaff-topsail up into the wind, using that wide spread of canvas like a giant weathervane to help coax the sloopâs bow off the wind to leeward. In an admirable span of time Elizabeth lay on a comfortable starboard tack, her stout cutwater knifing through the bayâs light chop.
âIâm going below, Mr. Wadsworth,â Richard said to his mate. âPlease inform me when you have Baltimore in sight.â
âAye, Captain,â Wadsworth replied. âIt wonât be long now.â
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FROM A DISTANCE Baltimore appeared not unlike Boston, although its population of 20,000 was smaller. Structures of various sizesâmade
mostly of wood with deeply canted, shingled rooftops, but a few, those of the wealthy, of imported red brickâheld sway along a complex of narrow, intersecting cobblestone streets rising up from the waterfront atop small hills under the dominion of a much larger hill to the south. As in Boston, water dominated the visual senses of those arriving by boat: the sparkling blue
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