Chapter 40 – December 15, 1755
I stretched in the weak December sunshine and filled my lungs with cold salt air, as if I could somehow scrub the stench of the hold from inside my chest.
The previous night had been a nightmare.
A violent Atlantic storm had tossed the Pembroke about like a toy in an icy bath. Men, women, and children had been thrown from one side of the hold to the other as the ship pitched and rolled in the darkness. Mothers clutched screaming children. Old men and women prayed aloud, their voices competing with the groan of the hull. More than a few of us had become quite certain we would die in that black, foul, smelling pit before we ever saw the Carolinas.
By morning, the storm had spent itself entirely. The sky above was a brilliant blue, scrubbed clean as though the gale had washed every cloud from the heavens. The sea still rolled beneath us, long heavy swells carrying the memory of the night’s violence, but the wind had gentled, and the air was cold, crisp, and so clean that every breath seemed to clear a man’s head. It stung the lungs as it went in, yet somehow left them grateful all the same.
I gripped the gunwale and looked out across the horizon and what I saw took me by surprise.
Nothing. No transports. No escort. No Baltimore sitting on the water like a patient threat. Just the Pembroke and the Atlantic, rising and falling together in the long grey swells, alone in every direction as far as I could see.
The convoy was gone.
Since we had sailed from Annapolis Royal on December 8th I had made a habit of counting ships whenever I was allowed on deck. Seven transports and the warship Baltimore, which had remained within sight throughout the voyage, a constant, unhurried reminder that the English held the muskets while we held little more than our prayers.
The story of the Baltimore kept coming back to me each morning when I saw her standing watch over the flotilla of boats carrying us away from home. I thought of the Irish convicts who had once seized her from the English and then abandoned her, leaving her adrift.
Looking for her now, I found myself wishing for a few Irish convicts of our own. Perhaps they might have been of some use to us in our time of need.
I watched for her, or for any of the other boats in our flotilla.
This morning, there was nothing.
The storm had scattered us, and we had been separated from the others. The Baltimore was nowhere in sight, nor were any of the boats that had accompanied us through that journey through hell.
I did not let my face show what I had seen. I leaned against the rail and kept the expression of a man simply grateful for cold air after a long night below, and while I stood there I began, quietly and carefully, to count.
The crew had made a mistake.
Whether it was the exhaustion left by the storm, frayed nerves, or simple carelessness hardly mattered. For the first time since we had been taken aboard, they had forgotten their own routine.
Normally, one group of prisoners was sent below before another was brought on deck for air and exercise. It kept us separated and easier to control.
This morning they had failed.
The first group still stood on deck when the hatch opened and the second group was marched up into the daylight. Suddenly nearly twenty Acadian aboard the transport were together, milling about beneath the watch of only a handful of weary sailors.
None of the English seemed to notice.
Joseph Guilbeau stood nearby, looking as uninterested as I was trying to look. He was the son of my old friend Alexandre, who had watched Beaubassin burn and written me the letter that still lived in the chest at home. Or what had been home. He had said nothing about his father since we came aboard. I had not asked. I caught the slight tightening along his jaw and knew he had seen what I had seen.
Eight crewmen.
That was all that stood between two hundred and thirty-two Acadians and the open deck of an unescorted ship.
In the first days of the voyage the crew had been careful, hands never far from pistols and cutlasses, eyes tracking every movement we made. But a week of docile obedience had softened them. I could almost hear the thought passing between them. The Acadians are sheep. They do what they are told.
The English had been underestimating Acadians for so long it had become a habit none of them thought to question.
I had no reason to believe today would be any different.
I was still working through the numbers in my mind, turning the problem over the way you turn a piece of timber before you decide where to make the first cut, when I heard it. Not a scream, not quite, but the sharp involuntary sound a person makes when they are suddenly frightened.
I turned.
One of the sailors had cornered my daughter Isidore against the rail.
He was young and broad, shouldered, with a red wind, burned face and the easy confidence of a man who had never once been stopped from taking what he wanted. One fist bunched her skirts while his other hand reached for her. She twisted against the rail, trying to pull away, and he grinned at her resistance the way some men do.
I did not think.
There was no time for thought, and I would not have used it differently if there had been.
Looking back now, I cannot honestly claim courage or heroism in what happened next. Any father reading these words will already know exactly what occurred the moment I saw his hands on my daughter. A man can endure almost anything done to himself. The beatings, the humiliations, the long days in a dark hold being carried away from everything he has ever built or loved. He can survive these things and go on surviving them, because there is always the possibility, however distant, that the situation will change.
What he cannot endure, what no father has ever endured, in any age or country or language, is watching it done to his child.
The sailor had forgotten that.
It was the last mistake he ever made.
Isidore pressed herself against the mast, pale and trembling, her eyes fixed on me as though she had never seen me before.
Perhaps she hadn’t. I had not seen that man myself in many years.
My hand found a belaying pin on the pinrail, a length of solid oak meant for securing lines and halyards. In the right hands, it was as deadly as any club.
I swung without hesitation.
The blow landed square across his back, driving the breath from him. He spun toward me, surprise still written across his face, but I was already swinging again.
The oak cracked against the side of his head.
He staggered.
I dropped the belaying pin, seized him by the collar, and drove forward with everything I had. I was no longer a young man, but fear, rage, and desperation lend a man strength he never knew he possessed.
I slammed him into the rail.
Once.
Twice.
Then I heaved with every ounce of my weight.
He toppled backward over the bulwark, arms flailing for something to grasp, but there was nothing. A heartbeat later he disappeared into the churning sea below.
The whole struggle had lasted only seconds.
Guilbeau saw what had happened and understood immediately that the moment we had been waiting for had arrived.
He did not hesitate.
The first mate, a thin, miserable-looking man with rotten teeth and a temper that seemed to match his foul mouth, turned toward the commotion. His eyes widened as he realized something was wrong, and he opened his mouth to raise the alarm.
He never had the chance.
Guilbeau already had a belaying pin in his hand. He swung with both anger and desperation behind it, the heavy oak pin cutting through the air before connecting with the man’s jaw.
The sound was sickening.
The first mate dropped instantly, as though someone had simply cut the ropes holding him upright.
What I remember most clearly was not the man falling, but the absurdity of what followed. Several of his blackened teeth broke loose and scattered across the wet deck boards. For a moment they bounced and rolled among the puddles before vanishing through the scuppers and into the sea.
Even in that moment of terror, I mused at the absurdity of his teeth rolling into the ocean.
Guilbeau stood over him breathing hard, the pin still in his fist. His eyes found mine. I looked back. Nothing needed to be said.
Around us the other Acadians stood frozen for a moment, struggling to comprehend what had just happened. Then, one by one, understanding arrived. For a week we had been prisoners. For the first time since leaving Annapolis Royal, we were not.
The Pembroke rose and fell beneath us on the Atlantic swells. Above, the mast drew steadily in the morning wind.
My mast. The mast I had shaped with my own hands along the banks of the Annapolis River, had watched it stepped into place, had run my palm along the finished spar the way you touch something you’ve made and know is good. Now here it was, carrying us into exile. The English were sailing us away from Acadia aboard a ship that still held pieces of it.
The irony was not lost on me. But there was no time to dwell on it.
Five crewmen remained free. More than two hundred Acadians waited below.
I dropped the belaying pin and rolled my shoulders and began walking toward the helm.
I caught movement at the edge of my vision, a sailor near the bow, finally understanding the danger he was in, his hand fumbling at his belt for a flintlock pistol. I saw him raise it. I saw where it was pointed.
Before I could react, young Denis Petitot was already across the deck.
He came at the sailor from behind with all the strength of a young man who had something precious to protect. The impact drove them both forward, and they crashed hard onto the wet planking.
The sailor’s pistol slipped from his hand and skittered across the deck, disappearing beneath the boots and chaos around them.
Denis landed on top of him.
What followed was not a fight. A fight implies two men still have a chance to win.
This was something else.
It was a young man releasing years of fear, anger, and helplessness onto the person standing between him and his freedom.
One blow.
Then another.
Then another.
Only when his father stepped forward and placed a hand on his shoulder did the blows cease.
“Enough,” Denis the elder said quietly.
Young Denis looked up, chest heaving, knuckles dark with blood. Beneath him the sailor was no longer anyone’s concern.
Denis the elder stooped without hurry, picked up the pistol, checked the priming pan with the ease of a man who had handled firearms all his life, and rose. Then he slowly swept the barrel across the remaining crewmen.
Nobody moved.
The Acadians surged forward. Men who had spent days with their heads bowed now moved with the particular purpose of people who have abruptly remembered what they are capable of. Crewmen were tackled, weapons seized, arms pinned. There was shouting near the bow and the brief sound of a struggle and then silence. Within minutes the entire crew sat bound on the deck.
I remember thinking how quickly power changes hands. One moment a man holds a pistol to your head the next moment you hold his life in your hands.
The door to the master’s cabin opened, and the captain stepped into the daylight, blinking against the sudden brightness.
It was the same officer who had refused to pay me for my work on the mast, the man who had stood on the wharf with that same calm certainty, as though my labor and my word meant nothing.
He emerged now with the same unhurried confidence, unaware that the world around him had changed.
To him, I was still just a craftsman beneath his notice.
A man who could be ordered about.
A man who could be cheated and forgotten.
But he was no longer standing on a quiet wharf surrounded by English authority.
He was standing on a deck where his authority had just disappeared.
That confidence lasted about three steps onto the deck. Then he saw me and recognized who I was.
“So,” he said, “the man with the axe. What is this all about?”
His crew sat trussed. Acadians stood everywhere. Several of them now held English weapons. And Denis Petitot’s pistol was pointed at the captain’s chest.
He took it all in with one long look. His eyes widened slightly, and that was the full extent of his visible alarm. Whatever else he was, he was not a coward.
I walked toward him, my pulse finally beginning to slow, though the anger beneath it had not moved at all.
“Isidore,” I said, without taking my eyes off him. “Bind his hands.”
My daughter stepped forward. Her face was composed, the same composure her mother had carried when frightened, that particular quality of going still and harder rather than breaking. The ships master watched her approach, glanced at the pistol, took in the men standing around him, and wisely extended his wrists.
She bound them quickly and tightly, with the practiced skill of someone who had spent a lifetime around boats and knew how to make a knot hold when it mattered. Her fingers moved without hesitation, choosing the kind of knots sailors trusted in rough weather and desperate moments alike.
“What is the meaning of this?” he demanded, his voice steady enough, though the color had gone from his face. “You will hang for this. Every one of you.”
“Hanging,” I replied, “may be preferable to another week in your hold.”
“I am warning you,”
I slapped him.
Not a punch. A slap, the kind of blow given not to injure a man but to remind him where he stands. His head snapped sideways. A hush fell across the deck. Even the wind seemed to go quiet for a moment.
“You are warning me of nothing,” I said. I was surprised by how steady my own voice was. Perhaps anger, when it runs deep enough, carries a man past the need to shout.
“You are standing on a ship full of people you have treated like livestock. Your hands are tied. Your crew is tied. I suggest you reconsider your position before you say anything else.”
At the helm, Guilbeau had taken the wheel and was making small, practiced adjustments as the ship moved beneath him. I watched him for a moment. Good. Very good. We were going to need capable sailors before this was over.
Guilbeau had been a fishing boat captain all his life and he was at ease behind the wheel of this vessel, he may have even looked happy for one moment.
I turned back to the master of the ship.
“Your name.”
He stared at me. Cold. Defiant. Silent.
“Your name,” I said again.
Still nothing. I stepped closer, close enough that he could see I was no longer a young man but also close enough that he could see this had not made me harmless.
“Allow me to explain your situation clearly,” I said. “There are two hundred and thirty, two Acadians aboard this vessel and seven of your crew. We are somewhere in the Atlantic with no convoy, no warship, and no witnesses.” I glanced toward the bound sailors, then back to him. “You possess exactly one thing of value to me.”
He said nothing.
“You know where we are. And you know how to get us somewhere that is not North Carolina.”
The wind moved through his coat. He held my gaze without flinching, and I found I could respect that even now.
“The moment you stop being useful to me, sir,” I said, “you become excess cargo.”
Something shifted behind his eyes then. Not fear, but calculation. The look of a man who has grasped that the world has changed around him and is deciding whether to be sensible about it.
His jaw tightened once.
“Nichols.”
I waited.
“Captain Robert Nichols.”
“Good,” I said. I let the silence sit for a moment, then turned and looked out across the empty Atlantic, grey and endless and indifferent to all of us. When I turned back to him my mind was already moving forward, past the deck, past the horizon, toward whatever came next.
“Now then, Captain Nichols.” I nodded toward the open water ahead of us. “You are going to take us home.”