The Kingdom on the Waves Page 31
[A memorandum to Captain Mackay]
June 30
The Crepuscule, off Gwynn’s Island
Captain Bryant of the Crepuscule sloop-of-war presents his Compliments to Capt. Mackay and wishes to make known he shall appear presently to inform the Captain of the Loss of 7 Privates & one Officer in their late Raids upon the Rappahannock.
On the 29th in the Evening, about 6 PM, we anchor’d near Fairweather Creek on the Advice of Lt. Bryson & sent a Party of 21 Privates & their Serjeant ashore. There, the Enemy engagd with the Party & in the Affray were captured or slain 7 Privates & Sjt. Clippinger. A full List is appended to this Memorandum.
Following this Skirmish, the remaining 14 Pvts. were brought aboard. We sent warning Shots to annoy the Rebels, but received no Reply. One Half Hour later we sent a Flag of Truce ashore to demand Return of any Taken & any Dead. The Rebels wd not treat with us; they had abandond their Post of Ambush & could not be Found.
We waited until 10 PM (some 4 Hours) but Sjt. Clippinger not returning, we weighd & set sail.
We fell down the River toward the Bay.
We may supply more Details as necessary. This Memorandum to notify you of the Circumstance.
Capt. Bryant of the Crepuscule
[From Dr. John Trefusis to Lord Dunmore]
Gwynn’s Island
June 30th, 1776
To His Lordship the Earl of Dunmore:
YOUR LORDSHIP shall forgive his correspondent for troubling him, but I am in a most anxious taking and I do exist in hope that Your Lordship might in some wise ameliorate my concerns. It is a vexing matter of some note that when the foraging party aboard the Crepuscule sloop-of-war returned this morning, they reported they had lost several of their number in an engagement upon the Rappahannock. There were two Privates of especial interest to me assigned to this detachment who were not among those who returned. I wish to hear with all celerity of their location and the manner in which Your Lordship proposes to assure their safety. Such word shall do much to soothe the troubled mind of
thy most humble & obedient servant,
Dr. J. Trefusis
[From Captain Mackay’s orderly book, July 1st, 1776]
Lost, presumed dead or captured in Saturday’s action upon the Rappahannock:
Serjeant Tho. Clippinger
Pvt. Wm. Harrison
Pvt. Pompey Lewis
Pvt. Wm. Williams
Pvt. Jemmy Baron
Pvt. Octavian Nothing
Pvt. Cæsar Ackerman
Drummer Jack White, called Ollickundy
The following Promotions are made by His Lordship until His Majesty’s Pleasure is known: Corporal Wm. Craigie is to be Serjeant vice Tho. Clippinger, lost. Private Jacob Tye is to be Corporal vice Wm. Craigie, preferred. Private Quash Miller is to be Drummer vice Jack White in the Regimental Musick.
GOD SAVE THE KING.
[From Dr. John Trefusis to Lord Dunmore]
Gwynn’s Island
July 1, 1776
To His Lordship the Earl of Dunmore:
Having received no answer from Your Lordship to my letter of the 30th ult. I write again as I am in the utmost distresses.
I demand to know what measures you propose, sir, to recover those taken prisoner last week. I demand to know your intentions regarding this unspeakable affront to the dignity of His Majesty’s troops. An army sits idle here. Perhaps Your Caledonian Excellency might put them to use. That is, I am to understand, what actual men of honor do with armies.
But perhaps fondly mistaken is
thy servant,
Dr. John Trefusis
[A letter from Lord Dunmore to Dr. John Trefusis]
Aboard the Dunmore
July 2nd, 1776
Sir You are a doctor and I wonder at what school you learnt impudence. I am not accustomed to receiving scoldings from men the most debased, liars & degenerate rogues. We shall in no wise exercise ourselves for the loss of a few Negroes, which action would be on all heads impracticable & fruitless. They are most likely now sold again or executed and an expedition would be the height of absurdness.
I regret that you lost your especial Negroes. If you would wish to purchase more, Mrs. Daunting aboard the Pleasure schooner wishes to sell five.
If however Dr. Trefusis wishes a topman’s view of the surrounding country to espy his dear black friends, I shall happily suspend him from the yardarm by his neck if he send another missive like his last to
Your Royal Governor,
John, Earl of Dunmore, Baron Murray of Blair,
&c., &c.
[A letter from Dr. John Trefusis to Dr. Matthias Fruhling of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was discovered in Virginia. It seems likely it never was sent.]
Gwynn’s Island, Virginia Colony
July 2nd, 1776
My dear Fruhling —
My news is the most dire. I cannot express the like. I know not how I shall deliver this billet to you. Though coasters depart from our camp here daily, they do so with an eye not to stretching north, but for brigandage about the Bay; and in any event, did they arrive at some northern port, no letter they deposited should be received by you, ensconced as you are in the heart of lawless usurpation and rebellion. However, in times of tumult, oft expression supersedes — by God — no matter —
They are gone, Fruhling — my boys, they are gone.
Octavian, of whom I have written, and William Williams, another servant of the College of Lucidity in the days of our ascendancy, set forth seven days ago with a foraging detail navigating the Rappahannock River. The next day, the sloop-of-war upon which they sailed returned, and reported the melancholy news that they had met with resistance at a rebel farm, and that eight men were lost. Among the number who could not be accounted for were both Williams and Octavian.
’Twas said that at the farm, the rebels lay an ambush and divided the landing party; and having so done, fell upon the smaller of the parties, killing some and taking others captive. Did they survive, a fellow soldier explained to me without remorse, they shall by now certainly be hanged or brutally used in some other manner. I have gone to each officer of that Regiment demanding that they send a retributive expedition, but none evinces the slightest interest in the undertaking. Lord Dunmore himself will not admit me for an audience.
Here, all is in chaos: The Governor of Maryland is fled Annapolis, brought by the Fowey man-of-war to our camp. He hath been ousted from his seat. He joins Lord Dunmore here. All royal authority seems to have ceased on the land, and the governors preside only over their floating town and this sickly island. The rebels crowd so thick over the shore that they resemble the locust.
Shortly before he set forth on this final voyage, Octavian, my dear Octavian, spake to me of writing a treatise upon government. I inquired of him what should be its salient points, and he replied: “It is a fact easily discernible that governments are instituted to commit the crimes that their citizens require for gain, but cannot countenance committing privately.”
I intervened in this piece of charming youthful désespoir, countering that some philosophers say governments were instituted to protect the natural rights of the citizen; to which Octavian said that nature recognizes no rights. “Our rights are unnatural, or we should need no government to defend them.” I protested; he insisted. “Look abroad in the fields,” he said. “What may kill, kills; what may eat, eats. All things are born unequal, and there is no law but that inequality.”
I did not disagree, but I was uneasy at the savagery in his address. “You would say yourself,” I reminded him, “‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’”
“And you would say yourself,” he replied, “‘The world is the house of the strong.’” Thus ended our protreptic discourse.
And yet, the same day, as we fetched water, Octavian observed a small child of two or three summers, the child of one of our soldiers, wash her father’s face imperfectly and laugh; and as Octavian observed this fumbled cl
eansing and the father’s smile, I saw that he wept for the sweetness of it. This is the boy I know — soft-hearted and solemn — not he who speaks of natural rights being nonsense; not he who declaims there is no law but power and profit; not he who declares the inheritance of the meek to be void and entangled in probate.
What soured thee, my child? This I know — for I did.
Thou speakest like me.
The world is indeed the house of the strong; and we are indeed a terrible animal. We are granted gifts of intellect almost god-like, to raise ourselves out of the burrow and ditch; and yet cannot enjoy these excellences, for no sooner does one establish the work of his hands and plow the field, than some other, deranged with greed, sweeps in to plunder or to expand their own holdings through act of law or canny dealing.
Speak not to me comfortable words.
We are a foul animal poisoned in all its springs and motivations, a beast of snarling ferity that parades itself in silks and calleth itself an angel, while gnawing upon cattle, seizing upon fowls, ransacking the earth and the seas, clawing our neighbor to provide for ourselves small trinkets to lay in our nests where we curl in bloated slumber.
Do I possess hope for the future? I may reply, I do have hope, in that I do not believe our race shall perish. We shall, in two hundred years, in two thousand, yet be flourishing, the strong oppressing the weak, telling tales of why they must; we shall yet be starving each other, maiming, whipping, killing, raping, sacking, burning, scorning, despoiling, savaging, and congratulating ourselves on our superior nature.
Do not speak glibly of virtue. Nothing shall change — nothing — so long as each individual awaits preferment rather than embodying beneficence in himself; so long as we wait upon the edicts of a government ruled by invested and interested men looking to their private purses; so long as we idle in expectation that all shall be healed, and that we shall somehow be stopped in our career of plunder by an eighteen-hundred-year-old mummy, scarred with the wounds of torture, falling out of the sky or stumbling out of the desert, eyes filled with the tears that we should weep ourselves.
Send me my boys back. Send them back to me, safe and sound, and I shall grant anything. Do not permit me to wither and die alone. I ask only this one thing.
So do I await news of them. I sleep not in the night. In the day, I minister to the dying in the quarantine camp, which hath a sweet miasma so foul it can scarce be borne. Hundreds die now.
In my other hours, I have taken up again the pen of the naturalist; it being my purpose to supply an entry lacking in the System of the great Linnæus. It hath always struck me oddly, that the man categorized all of the animals and birds upon the globe, and yet provided no entry upon the creature which produced this plenitude; for which reason, it hath been my steady purpose in these last days to write an addendum to Dr. Linnæus’s monumental work, upon that first Mover and Progenitor of all the rest, which species I have given the Latin name Deus omnipotens. I have scoured the Testaments Old and New to determine its behaviors and diet; such scraps as I have gleaned according well with what we read described by the Hindoos and the authors of pagan antiquity.
The form (limbs, markings, fur) of Deus omnipotens is as yet unclear to me. Aristotle maintaineth that God hath no shape, being but the limit of heaven; Epicurus claimeth that it appeareth to be a man in shape, though one of such great blessedness and incorruption that it is uncomprehending and indifferent to the plight of mortals. Pythagoras taught that God is a number; Xenophanes that it is a sphere, passionless and consubstantial with all things; Parmenides that it is but the confluence of earth and fire.
In its habits: It appeareth that Deus omnipotens reproduceth not with a female of its own species, but by engendering young upon a female Homo sapiens of a tender age, viz. Europa, Leda, Semele, Alcmene, and the Nazarene girl, much as the cowbird, first in deception and violence, doth force the female of other species to hatch its young. The offspring thus produced from the conjunction of deity and damsel hath a nature intermixed, the two species commingled, and perhaps, like the mule, is incapable itself of generation.
Some several points remain to be determined: as to where the creature maketh its burrow; how many specimens yet subsist; whether it did, when numerous, hunt in packs; whether it is territorial, jealously favoring the desert wastes and snarling at any that approach, or keeping to the forests of the New World, the denizens of which now claim it as their own; whether it molt; whether it excrete; and most, of great consequence, whether, as some authors claim, it adoreth its children and guard them zealously; or whether, like the scorpion (Scorpiones Buthidæ), it awaits their fall, and then devoureth them.
Your humble & affectionate servant,
Dr. John Trefusis
[From the Itinerarium of Octavian Nothing]
’Twas but a few hours after I had written my brief entry upon our first raid that we anchored by a bend in the river and were again sent ashore, that numbers and arms might impress with force.
The day was an excessive warm one; the dirt itself smelled of heat when we landed; and, as if distempered, the skies began a sickly-warm drizzle as we formed upon the dock.
We marched up athwart a hillock toward the house, Olakunde beating our step to better impress upon the inhabitants our seriousness of purpose. This drumming could not outstrip that of the heavens, which opened up upon us with tattoo of rain so furious that it seemed to bring on night.
Serjeant Clippinger called a halt before the house, and, standing beside Olakunde, had begun to entreat the inhabitants to show themselves, that we might deal with them fairly, according to the King’s intention, when detonations flared in all the upper windows and we found ourselves in the midst of a very fierce fire indeed.
There was no need to call retreat — for at the intensity of that first volley, we had stumbled backward — and now we found ourselves split into two parties. One ran; one held.
Clippinger ordered us to stand and fire — which we attempted — but our powder was so wet that a full two-thirds of the muskets — mine among them — produced nothing but a hollow click — and still the rebel shots blasted out through the windows.
It was at this moment that three more rebel muskets discovered themselves in the dark of the barn, and fired at our flank — causing great confusion, though I believe none was struck. Our other party, fleeing, made an uneven retreat down toward the launch — Clippinger, still by our side, calling across the lawn to them to stand — stand and fire, cowards — but nothing could induce them.
Our small party remained — Bono saying, “We perhaps flee, sir?”— and Clippinger swearing and looking in a panic. He assented to flight, and we turned and fled in a disorderly rout.
Now came, however, the boys out of the barn, and they descended upon us with sickle, froe, and scythe. We running, Clippinger ordered still that we affix our bayonets, which I did with trouble, the metal slick with rain, my fingers skirret-stiff with fear — and we found our van overtaken by the brutes. We turned to fight, thinking ourselves rather fine with bayonets — and this did indeed at first startle our pursuers —
We stood our ground now and with great shouts and menace, advanced upon the enemy, who were engaged in full combat with the last three or four of our number. Clippinger stood by and shouted I know not what through the devilish drench and I saw then that the rest of the detachment had still not halted, but had continued their flight down to the shore, and so we were alone, the few of us.
No sooner had this I seen — and queried to myself as to whether a whipping for insubordination attendant on flight was preferable to engaging in the chaotic affray before me — me standing at some fifteen foot distance from the combat — no sooner —
Olakunde ran past me — and Clippinger cried, “Flee!”— and two more soldiers hurtled by me — and then we were all fled, and coursing down through the fields and shrubs. I followed Bono closely and reasoned that soon should I be once again in the Crepuscule’s berth, reclined in that smoky, st
ale, yet familiar atmosphere, drying, able to sleep, the guns of the ship ringed and crowning us like laurels.
I looked back to gauge the progress of our pursuers, and whether they followed — and ’twas then I saw that Pomp had fallen behind the rest of us, cut off.