CHAPTER ONE

 

Boston Harbor, November 15, 1775

 

Hours after the military curfew, sixteen-year-old Benjamin Cross darted from the safety of Gray’s shipyard. He’d been crouched among the bundles of flax, barley, rye, and cotton. Seeing his own shadow, thanks to a nearby torchlight, he momentarily wondered if he had any chance at all of escaping the city under British control.

British torches had been planted at intervals all along the dark wharf, and soldiers in gleaming red uniforms, routinely sought out anyone who dared being caught outside past curfew. Two guards marched toward his hiding place, and he must squelch his shadow, so he ducked deeper into the bails and bundles here on the wharf. He felt a sheer terror that his enemy would hear his heartbeat and his gasping breath.

Boston’s Long Wharf had been his home for as long as Ben could remember, but like everyone in the captured city, he was now trapped.  Trapped between two armies since April 19^th when British infantry troops clashed with armed Americans at Lexington and Concord. The settlements lay only a few miles from Boston, and as a result of the clashes there and at Bunker Hill, the city remained paralyzed. The population lived under the pale of the months’ long siege. The Battle of Bunker Hill had been the last clash, and it had left the two armies in a stalemate for now.

Both armies had suffered heavy casualties, yet no one knew which side had won the battle for Bunker Hill, except to say that the British maintained control of both the city and Boston Harbor, which also meant the shipping lanes. Now with the fighting at a standstill, the Boston Siege as it was being called, had settled into a game of waiting, while most citizens like Ben, who’d been caught up in the war were starving.

The British troops held Boston’s citizens hostage to the men they called Rebels, but Ben had heard through the grapevine that the so-called Rebels had formed a proper army, calling it the Continental Army. It seemed more than a rumor or a pretense to Ben, but even so, many Bostonians had long since sided with the British, calling themselves Loyalists…loyal to the King of England and his crown, which had always been the rule in the British colonies here. Regardless, whether a Boston man called himself a Loyalist or not, everyone in captivity here was made to swear the King’s Oath of Loyalty; it’d been a decree and carried out in every square and common, but those who’d steadfastly refused to give their oath to the King were hauled off and jailed. Ben and his friend Wilbur Gifford had grudgingly taken the oath, but had done so with fingers crossed behind their backs to offset the lie. Now after nights of preparation and planning, the two young friends had taken steps to end their nightmare and to escape Boston.

Ben Cross scurried on hands and knees through the flickering firelight of the wharf torches, chancing a look over his shoulder for Wilbur, who’d stopped short, frozen with fear, Ben imagined. His own heart was beating like the thumping of a well-shoed horse over cobblestones. Ben’s annoyance showed in his handsome face, as he did not want to take a single step backwards in his and Wilbur’s movement toward the boats. Still, he must weigh it up.

 If Wilbur should be discovered, his own chances of escape plummeted, as they were bound up in this plan as true friends, but Ben knew it was his plan and not Wilbur’s, and this was true from the beginning.

His second glance back into the inky night and darkness of the deep shadows cast by the bails, barrels, boxes, and steamer trunks scattered about the wharf sent back no reward. Surely, Wilbur sat frozen in the darkness and was unable to take another step. Ben entertained the thought of going ahead without his best friend, who had been by his side throughout his childhood in Boston.

He ducked low as two armed British soldiers, sharing a single blanket over their shoulders, half-walked, half-trundled on four legs in crablike fashion toward the only heat being given off this cold, damp November night. The twosome looked now like one huge monster, a bearlike creature where they huddled over a fire burning in a barrel. At the same time, the sentries, having set aside their muskets, relaxed, talked, smoked, and flapped their arms for warmth.

Watching the pair as closely as he did, Ben next saw the enemy slapping their arms about themselves to encourage warmth and circulation. As a result, Ben began for the first time to feel the cold that had settled into his bones and flesh. He could hardly make his icy fingers button up the now stiff blue coat he wore. The distance he and Wilbur had come to-and-through Gray’s Shipyard had already cost him two blistered knees, and now a sliver in his right palm, and him with fingers too cold to pluck it out. Worse still, Wilbur was missing.

The foul odor of fish heads and guts ringed the wharf, mingling with the freshly harvested beaver pelts hung here to dry. The stench of it assaulted Ben’s nostrils. Imagining Wilbur caught and executed and hung out to dry, Ben gritted his teeth and began crawling back to where he had last seen his friend. The search did not take but a minute, for there was Wilbur crouched under the shaft of the largest and darkest shadow from a collection of bundled cotton bales.

Ben snatched at Wilbur, pulling at his arm, whispering, “Come on, now! We’ve a chance, but only now.”

Wilbur’s round face and wide eyes bespoke his fear. “If-If we’re caught, you know they’ll jail our parents alongside us.”

“But we’re not going to be caught. Now come on.”

The heftier boy seemed out of breath, afraid to so much as whisper a further reply. Instead, he waved Ben off with a shoo-fly gesture and a nod to indicate he was coming up the rear. A soft November rain had begun to drench the two. It could be a good omen, Ben thought. The rain, while chilling them, would further cover them from the sentries, whose concerns seemed far more for comfort than for duty or guarding this exit by sea from Boston Bay.

They scurried like squirrels past a bevy of emptied rum barrels, the sweet odor hitting them full force. Ben wondered how the wooden barrels had escaped the soldiers, ever in need of more firewood. The soldiers had torn down entire houses that’d belonged to men now enlisted in the Continental Army, using the boards for their cooking fires. Many another home had been invaded instead, taken over, the soldiers bivouacked inside all these months. “Spoils of war” was the term Ben had heard bandied about. The Redcoats had broken shop windows, taking whatever goods they wished, and they’d even scavenged from Mr. Gray’s ships, both those afloat and those only half finished ones still in the yard. Ships Ben and Wilbur had formerly been working on as laborers, leaning the craft of ship building.

All for their cursed fires and worse yet, they’d forced Ben, Wilbur, and other boys of their age to help them in their pillaging. After all, 13,000 soldiers needed fires and provisions. Meanwhile, poor old Mr. Gray had been arrested and was living badly, under suspicion of being a Rebel sympathizer on account of his harsh, angry words as he’d watched his shipyard being looted for wood and supplies. Confiscated is the word the ranking officer had shouted in Gray’s face—so loudly as to lift his beard.

Everyone in Boston was hungry and food was a matter of daily scrounging. The shipment of supplies for the occupying force was a month overdue from England; some feared it had been sunk by a storm, while others wildly accused Rebel forces of somehow placing an explosive on board the cargo ship before it had left Southampton. A story that Wilbur had applauded, but which Ben had derided as far less likely than an Atlantic storm this time of year.

Ben and Wilbur were now out on the long finger of the dock, where they knew a small skiff awaited at the end. They’d seen the small boat used repeatedly by off duty soldiers who had used it to do some fishing in the bay. As they made their way down the length of the dock, each step took them further from the British torches and eyesight. Still, they were hardly out of danger or range of a musket ball. They remained in a crouch, hands and knees still, when Wilbur shouted in pain, alerting the sentries.

Ben turned to see that Wilbur had a huge ugly fish bone sticking from his left hand, with blood gushing. Wilbur gestured for Ben to run for the end of T-Wharf. Ben hesitated only a moment, hearing the sentries crying out, “Stop! Who goes there!” and he heard their footsteps closing on them.

“Come on, Wilbur! We can both still make it!” Ben insisted.

But Wilbur shook his head and instead leapt into the bay shallows, the fish bone having been plucked out of his hand by now. In the water, he began splashing and making more noise than an angry sturgeon. Ben immediately realized that Wilbur was in the business now of sacrificing himself so that Ben might make free. So that this gesture would not fail and would have meaning, Ben ran for the open boat at the end of the wharf. As he did so, the two sentries already stood over Wilbur, their muskets cocked and aimed.

Wilbur kept up his noise, shouting, “I fell in!  I can’t swim! Don’t let me die! Please!”

One of the soldiers shouted down to Wilbur, “It’s only a few feet there! Just stand up, boy, and you won’t drown!”

The other sentry shouted, “Hands over your head! What’re you doing out here anyway?”

“Past curfew!” added the other.

While all this was going on, Ben was untying the sailor’s knot that held the small boat at the end of the dock. The boat shifted and padded the end of the dock with the movement of the waves lapping at it. Ben quietly slipped onto the boat and began working the oars as silently as possible, a smile creasing his face at the familiar sound of Wilbur’s voice as he continued to beg for help from the soldiers. He was now telling themselves that he’d come out here to kill himself so that his mother might have more food in the house for his little sister.

Ben guided the boat due south for the other side of the huge bay and Dorchester Heights, a place overlooking Boston Harbor and Town, and a place occupied by that ‘rabble, ragtag rebel army’ as the opposition was called by the British officers, who shouted such insults at every drill formation. That was his intention all along, to get to the Continental Army, tell their leaders what he knew of the occupation forces, join up, enlist in the great cause of Freedom for America and American colonists everywhere.

Ben had read all the pamphlets written by the outlaw gang of men who’d started the revolution, and he’d dreamed of a day when all of America would indeed be free of King George’s Rule. He knew it was a mad dream, but others his own age had taken up arms to fight for that dream. Now he must do what he could, but the sea had its own ideas as to where it might deposit him, and the harder he rowed for the other side of the bay, the more he realized he was in some sort of powerful swell that wanted its way with the boat, oars or no oars. It soon became apparent that he was rowing in place like a man who’d forgotten to untie the line at the dock, but he was no longer in sight of the dock.

“So where am I?” he asked the empty darkness all around him.

The answer came only when he gave into the sea, upping the oars and planting them perpendicular to the keel. The ocean swells had simply taken on a new life, and they took him in hand, sending the boat to the terrible Back Bay region, a swamp.

Looking back in the distance, seeing that the first grey light of dawn painted the warehouses on Long Wharf and India Wharf beyond, Ben judged the distance from where he had escaped. He hadn’t got far, and in fact, he trembled to be so close to where he had boarded the boat to begin with. Beyond the docks, he made out the massive outlines of General Howe’s war ships. Angry at his failure to have not gotten any further than he had, Ben pounded a fist into the oar at his left hand when simultaneously a musket ball struck the paddle portion of the oar near his toes now. The ball splintered a hole in the oar. A second shot rang out, putting a hole in the boat’s stern.

Ben realized that British soldiers had fanned out along the bay, and that one stood at the end of T-Wharf, having discovered the missing skiff. Not only were the Redcoats onto his escape, they meant to enforce their orders: shoot to kill.

They could not beat the swamp, however. Not any more than Ben could combat it. Still, Ben knew the area better than they did, and he was determined to escape and to live. More shots pinged off the boat, even as Ben slipped over the side, shielding himself. He felt the sea taking him directly into the swamp, as the lightness of morning had begun to seriously cause him problem. Then came the sound of another kind of weapon firing at Ben and he saw the last remnants of fire dancing along the breech of this long rifle. This was followed by a spray of pellets hitting the water and the back of the boat, some zipping past Ben’s face. Ben leapt over the side and into the water to the shouts and hurrahs back at the wharf, a few words wafting out to Ben’s ears: “I got him! I got the traitor!”

Ben let go of the boat and swam below the water. His body had quickly acclimated to the cold. He swam, holding his breath for as long as he could. He heard more musket fire as he did so, and he wondered if it was real or imagined at this point. He could not fool himself as to the level of his fear, for another imagining came to mind—his body like flotsam washing ashore amid the seaweed and driftwood. It was then that he heard the bell tolling a general alarm back at the wharf. This made him smile wide.

He took a little pride in himself at the same time as imagining his death since simultaneously he imagined how his little adventure had emptied the Custom’s House of Redcoats. It was where so many of the soldiers had been garrisoned. He was a wanted man, wanted dead or alive, he assumed. In his and Wilbur’s small way, they had dealt a blow, however slight, to the King’s Royal Army.

 

The marsh was not a safe place to be in at the best of times, and it was far too close to Boston and the Red Coats, who were this minute scouring the area for the escapee. If the soldiers formed a proper search party, he could easily be cut off and captured. He realized that he must keep moving in a southwesterly direction, ever toward the American camp, and even if he could out maneuver the British soldiers, Ben knew there were other dangers lurking in the marshes. Dangers other than the human kind.

His eyes had adjusted to the mammoth field of bulrushes and reeds all around him where he clung to his rock; he knew the big stone was for him an island in a sea of soft, oozy mud and bogs, all just waiting to trap him. Even sure-footed deer were known to get stuck in the quicksand-like bogs here, left to die a slow death. Hunting in the Back Bay area by day was tricky, and men had been known to disappear and never return to their hearth and family, swallowed up by this place. Trying to cross this swamp by night was sheer and utter madness.

“Nothing I can do about it now,” he muttered to the night. An owl, safely perched in the trees on dry land, where he’d like to be, replied with its haunting who-who-who, which only sent a new shard of fear through to Ben’s core.

He wanted to await daylight, but he could hear the Red Coats beating about the shore, and he knew that once they spotted him stuck here, he was a goner. He wanted to race for solid ground, but he feared doing that as well. I’m literally between a rock and a hard place, he thought, and in his ear, the question of the owl kept sounding—who-who-who. But it changed somehow to here-here-here, so Ben formulated a plan to take the shortest route from his not so safe perch to the solid ground he sought by making a beeline to the sound of the owl, as that old hoot-owl sure seemed to be telling him to come straight to it and the tree it sat in.

It seemed to be as good a plan as he might devise. He could still see the harbor lights he’d escaped from, and thinking of Wilbur, he feared the terrible punishment poor Wilbur was undergoing at this moment. Then again, perhaps Wilbur was better off than he was. At least Wilbur’s fate was decided.

“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked the marsh and the owl now.

Thoughts crowded in on him alongside his gnawing hunger. He’d had to take to begging in Boston for crumbs of bread. He’d been abused and disgraced by some soldiers the day before—as had Wilbur and Mr. Gray. Boston had become a bad place, a different and difficult place; not at all home anymore. He missed Wilbur already, and he felt completely alone and on his own, left to his own devices for survival.

In a moment, Ben’s resolve to escape went out like the lapping waves around him. Then his resolve returned with the return of the sea striking his little island here. The sea was like a creature with its own heart and pulse, speaking to him, advising him to not give up, not now. He dropped down off the boulder and his feet sank into the sandy bottom beneath the water. He was waist deep in it, and shore now looked like a hundred miles away. Still, he took tentative steps, feeling for solidity below his shoes, a pair of old cobbled castaways with holes in them. The water and sand filled them and tickled his toes with each step toward the sound of the owl.

The oozy floor beneath him threatened to cover his feet and suck the near useless shoes from his feet. Each step felt more threatening than the previous one. It felt as if he might be walking into deeper and deeper ooze of the sort that could take him down. He must swim as far as he could toward shore; he must get his weight off the quicksand below.

Ben tried to swim in as straight a line as possible, keeping his objective in sight, using the coastline as a southerly heading, attempting to let nature help out, allowing the current to take him, hopefully, in a skirting move south of the marshland and bogs. Somewhere behind him now, the owl had gone silent, but ahead, he could hear a definite shoreline as the water lapped against it. Perhaps now the soft, imprisoning muck he’d encountered was behind him.

Then he saw it, an overhanging tree reaching out to him from shore like the hand of a friend. He grabbed onto the branch, its solid bark tearing at him but inviting at the same time. Ben pulled himself the rest of the way to shore going hand over hand, and thanks to the overhanging branch, he found himself on his back, exhausted, looking up at the night sky, panting for breath. The current had taken him several miles below Boston Harbor, and he felt safe for the first time tonight. He closed his eyes, meaning to rest for a short spell when he fell asleep.