At the Edge of Honor (The Honor Series) Read online

  Table of Contents

  At the Edge of Honor

  The Honor Series

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Map 1

  Map 2

  Bound for the War

  A Question of Identity

  Renegades and Scoundrels

  Yellow Jack

  The River of Peace

  The Island of Refuge

  Revenge from Useppa

  The Shoals of Havana

  Ghosts of the Martyrs

  Her Majesty’s Wishes

  Course Made Good

  About the Author

  Robert N. Macomber’s Honor Series:

  At the Edge of Honor

  Robert N. Macomber

  Pineapple Press, Inc.

  Sarasota, Florida

  The Honor Series

  By Robert N. Macomber

  At the Edge of Honor

  Point of Honor

  Honorable Mention

  A Dishonorable Few

  An Affair of Honor

  A Different Kind of Honor

  The Honored Dead

  The Darkest Shade of Honor

  Honor Bound

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2002 by Robert N. Macomber

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

  Inquiries should be addressed to:

  Pineapple Press, Inc.

  P.O. Box 3889

  Sarasota, Florida 34230

  www.pineapplepress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available upon request

  E-ISBN 978-1-56164-520-6

  Print and ebook design by Shé Hicks

  Dedication

  Respectfully dedicated to James Hervey Macomber, Naval Surgeon, U.S.S. Honeysuckle, 1864, East Gulf Blockading Squadron of the United States Navy, who died in the service of his country and was the inspiration for this novel

  Acknowledgments

  This book is the product of years of work and there are many to thank. First, my gratitude goes to Dena Sue Macomber, my wife and co-adventurer of twenty-one years, a true believer from the start, enduring and encouraging when times got tough. My thanks also to Randy Wayne White, famous Florida author, fellow Islander, and seaman, a gifted teacher who enlightened me in the ways of storytelling, and the one who introduced me to the two most important writers it has been my privilege to know—Dian Wehrle and Roothee Gabay. These two Parrot Hillians were aboard for the entire voyage, sharing all the frustrations and exhaustions of this adventure. They gave far more than they got from this old sailor, became my good friends and have my great appreciation. I must also thank that other Island legend, Sheba, the Wonder Dog, my writing companion and morale officer, who made me laugh when I needed it most. And finally, thanks also to June Cussen, my editor at Pineapple Press. About a hundred times I’ve thanked the Lord for giving me a writer’s editor. Peter Wake would be honored to have them all in his crew.

  —Bob Macomber

  Off the coast of Florida

  31 August 2001

  Preface

  This book is a novel about a real squadron of men in the United States Navy who fought in the American Civil War. Their war was unlike that on the Mississippi River or the Carolina coast. No glory could be attained where these men fought. No entourage of correspondents were with them to disseminate and immortalize their deeds. Only a dirty, personal, and frustrating ordeal awaited the officers and sailors who were ordered to the East Gulf Blockading Squadron on the tropical coasts, islands, and rivers of Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas.

  Like their descendants one hundred years later on the coasts of Southeast Asia, they fought a war without lines, enemy uniforms, or clear rules and goals. It was a war in which the person in the gun sight could be an enemy, a refugee fleeing from the enemy, or one of their own irregular troops. In fact, the enemy spoke their language, worshipped their God, appreciated their songs and humor, and shared many of their political views. Many of the new enemy had been their comrades in arms just three years before during the Third Seminole War in southwestern Florida.

  The naval Civil War in Florida was a war in which the geography, flora, and fauna were against them also. Jungle insects, various types of carnivores, and poisonous plants and snakes were every bit as deadly as enemy bullets. Mind-numbing heat and humidity competed with unseen diseases, like malaria and yellow fever, to terrorize even the strongest men. The badly charted coast of Florida was a maze of islands and rivers that led into a forbidding interior. Shallow waters and tropical storms and a landmarkless coast added to their troubles and strains.

  On top of these problems, the British and Spanish had territory only a few days’ sail away. Many of the vessels on the southwestern Florida coast were foreign, which brought international law and serious repercussions into every encounter with them. Patrolling the coasts and islands of Cuba and the Bahamas increased the tension and the potential for unwanted conflict with the imperial might of Spain and Britain. Communication with the squadron commander at Key West was very difficult at the best of times, and the ships’ commanding officers were frequently left to their own devices and judgment.

  And yet, in spite of all of these handicaps and obstacles, they did it. They maintained the blockade, porous at first, but increasing in its strength so that by 1863 they could go on the offensive and bring Union control to the coast. These men, who fought against so much in addition to the enemy, closed down the Confederate coastal supply routes. They then assisted the army in disrupting the interior supply lines, which had been giving the main Confederate armies further north the beef and foodstuffs to prolong their operations and thus the conflict. The Anaconda Plan, devised in 1861 and the primary mission of the U.S. Navy in the Civil War, had finally extended its mortal squeeze even to the jungle coasts of Florida.

  The main character of this book, Peter Wake, commands an armed sloop named the Rosalie on those coasts. Already an experienced merchant marine officer, he now goes through the tough process of becoming a naval officer and combat commander. Wake and the other characters in the book are constructions of my own. Many ships mentioned in the book actually were with the East Gulf Blockading Squadron. Several of the events are based loosely on real incidents documented from the Official Naval Records.

  Your most humble servant,

  Robert N. Macomber

  Map 1

  Map 2

  1

  Bound for the War

  Peter Wake stood near the gumbo limbo tree at the back gate of a modest house on Whitehead Street, vaguely aware that the town of Key West was starting to come to life around him, his attention focused on an upstairs windowpane as it turned pink with the coming sunrise. He felt the winds shift around to the east even before the moving air brought him the smooth feminine scent of jasmine, the scent he would now forever associate with Linda, who watched him from the window.

  He had managed to tell her, this green-eyed girl with whom he had fallen hopelessly, and foolishly, in love during the weeks he had been in Key West, that he could not say when he would see her again as he had been assigned a ship and would be sailing soon. He’d told her of his feelings and she’d professed her own, and they now kne
w their lives would be intertwined, whatever that might mean in this time of war. His gaze did not leave hers until the wind rose further with sound and movement in the swaying limbs of the gumbo limbo.

  His mind then shifted to that other female that had arrived in his life, the Rosalie, the sloop he would command starting today. She’d be hove short and needing to catch the ebb. He began to think of the many things he was responsible for accomplishing in the next few hours.

  Linda blew him a kiss, and he had another brief moment of deciding to abandon his duty and go back to her. But then, in the way of a sailor, he turned and left her. He did not look back at her in the window of her father’s house on the shaded street, on the gentle side of town.

  Moments later, as the young naval officer walked toward the harbor, home of the East Gulf Blockading Squadron, he thought of his situation and winced. He was more than just a little concerned at how close he had come to not leaving her world. It would have been very dangerous to stay here in Key West and be around Linda Donahue. His decisions had not been very logical lately. As he turned onto Duval Street he started to return to his usual demeanor, carefully observing the sky for signs of what could be expected, watching the streets of the port as they began to convey various types of early morning persons on their errands. He was confident of his experience on the sea, but he knew little of the business of war and had plunged into his temporary staff duties with a will to learn. He found that being a United States naval officer carried with it expected duties and attitudes he had not known during his years as a schooner’s mate along the New England coast. Used to the small shipping firm owned by his family, he was astounded at the bureaucratic chaos of the nationwide naval organization that had sprung up over the last few years. But then he had finally received his orders. Not only was he going to sea, but because of his experience he was commanding a small armed sloop that had been brought into the navy just a few weeks earlier. It was more than he had dared hope for. The excitement of anticipation became stronger with each step away from Linda—not that his love was diminishing with distance, just that the overwhelming stimulation of a new command filled him with a positive energy that fairly propelled him along the street.

  When he made the officers’ landing at the seawall, the sun was just starting to emerge from the horizon. In the clearing light, Wake confirmed what he had felt earlier as he left Linda. The wind was a steady trade breeze out of the rising sun, with not a cloud in sight. Another beautiful May day, in this, the third year of a very ugly war. A broad reach to the north, he thought as he looked out over the congested anchorage that contained a diverse selection of vessels. Every type of warship, except for those new-fangled monitors he had seen when passing through the Charleston squadron, competed with merchant and local fishing vessels for space to swing on their hooks. The tide was starting to ebb now. Time was not to be wasted on pipe dreams of lives that were not to be. It was time to be the naval officer that he had become, and to go meet the Rosalie. She would be his world now. His life, and the lives of other men, would depend on her.

  The young seaman in the dinghy at the landing had been trying to get his attention for some time now, Wake suddenly realized.

  “Pardon me, sir, but is ya Master Wake, the new cap’nin of the Rosey, sir? I’m meanin’ the Rosalie, pardon, sir.”

  The boy was obviously attempting to be extremely polite while daring to question a dreaded officer, hoping not incur the wrath of someone who could have him disciplined without recourse.

  “Yes, I am, boy. Are you from her?”

  “That I am, sir. The bosun sent me for ya, sir. Said that Master Wake would be here, sir. She’s a fair pull out yonder, sir,” the boy said, without adding that it would be he who would be doing the pulling and he wanted to shove off and use the tide to assist him rather than fight it.

  The boy was trying so hard to look competent that Wake almost started to laugh at the sight, but he pulled himself together and assumed the look of command that captains have worn since men first went to sea.

  “Very well, boy. Bear a hand with my bags and gear, and shove off for her.”

  Well, he thought, a proper ship would have a whole boat’s crew of four or five men, in a real ship’s boat and not a dinghy, to bring me to my first naval command. But then, this was pretty much in keeping with how things had gone for the last several months.

  As the boy struggled to row the cramped dinghy away from the landing and through the anchorage, Wake thought about his life before the navy. A life on the sea, to be sure, but with the comparative freedom of a mate in the merchant service. Born and raised into a family of seafaring men and strong-willed women, Peter Wake had been at sea since the age of ten. His brothers, James, Luke, and John, had all gone on to command schooners. But his father had other plans for Peter, whom he recognized as having a different constitution from his other sons, with some aptitude for the intellectual side of carrying trade on the sea. He had sent his youngest son ashore at age thirteen to receive the necessary education to someday run the offices of the family business.

  At the hands of the dull-demeanored instructors at the Teignmouth Classical School, Peter had excelled in the musty world of the great thinkers of history, science, and mathematics, but he spent every spare moment available to him at the docks of the small coastal village three miles from the institution. Talking with the fishermen, watching the small craft sail into and out of the port, and many times just sitting on the cliffs staring out to sea, Peter dreamed of life at sea. Three years dragged by.

  A week after his sixteenth birthday, he summoned the courage to speak to his father and tell him of his desire to return to the freedom of the sea. To his surprise, his father had nodded and said that he, more than many, certainly understood his son’s feelings. Two days later he was a seaman in a schooner bound for Maine and a cargo of spar lumber. Wake had not been ashore for more than two months since that voyage, sailing as a seaman, next a bosun, and finally the mate on the biggest of the family’s six schooners. He was looking forward to his own command when one of the older captains would retire ashore and a position would be available. Wake’s life was moving along the predictable course of a fifth-generation New England sea captain when events far to the south finally made themselves felt even in the cold reaches of the coast of Massachusetts.

  War had come to the United States. States were squaring off against each other like school boys whose taunts had finally gotten to the point of fisticuffs. The South’s threats of the previous fifteen years were no longer dismissed by New Englanders as a problem far away.

  Thousands of young men flocked to the regimental recruiters, but the commerce of the coast continued as before and the Wake family schooners still sailed their routes. By early 1863, even this facet of normality changed though, as Confederate ocean raiders’ successes struck fear into the American merchant marine and intimidated many of the insurers of ships and cargoes. Even the coastal trade suffered. No insurance meant no cargo, and therefore no ships, so hundreds of sailors were thrown onto the beach. Many owners sold ships to the rapidly expanding navy or to the army as transports, but the senior Captain Wake refused to sell even when the price was better than average. For generations the family had been building up their fleet, with a ship only leaving the company when she was old and worn out, and always replaced by a newer vessel.

  But finally old Captain Wake had no choice but to make the tough decision that would send his youngest son to war. The family laid up three of their schooners, with the senior siblings commanding the three remaining. Peter was without a job and knew he would soon have to decide, not if, but how, he would become involved in the war that was engulfing every part of his world. To stay connected with something he understood, he chose the sea and volunteered for the navy.

  “If you’ve got to die, then die clean, son,” his father had told h
im. “Soldiers always live and die in the mud.” The year before, 1862, had provided the nation with enough examples of soldiers dying in the mud. Fewer and fewer maintained the illusion that this would be a short war.

  So he had taken his father’s advice and ended up here, in a nearly-awash dinghy, rowed by a terrified boy through the crowded harbor at Key West—leaving the woman of his dreams and going to war.

  The boy was heaving hard now, glancing over his shoulder at the Magnolia, a five-gun sidewheel steamer captured from the Rebels off New Orleans the year before and soon to be the flagship of the East Gulf Blockading Squadron, which was based at this harbor. The boy swung the dinghy away from the stern of the steamer and passed along her starboard side. Wake could see the officers lounging on the afterdeck and watching him. He thought he could see the smirks on their faces as he tried to look dignified while the boy struggled onward around the tough-looking steamer.

  Next ahead was the Dale, the squadron’s aging ordnance ship. The boy swung wide around her as well, reflecting the sailor’s age-old fear of ordnance ships. Thank God I’m not on her, thought Wake as he inspected her weather decks. She was a bit slack in the rigging, the officer of the deck apparently not paying attention to his duties. Better the lowly Rosalie than that vessel of slow death by boredom or much quicker death by mishandling the powder and ammunition aboard.

  And then he saw her. Anchored out beyond the ordnance ship, the Rosalie was not imposing or beautiful. Just another small vessel attached to the squadron for inshore patrol, she lay in the shallower water by the Frankfort Bank close to the schooner Ariel. He could see some activity on Rosalie now. Several figures were looking his way. The boy was still heaving away at the oars with a steadily increasing stroke. He now had to impress the men of the crew as well as his new captain. Wake stared ahead and let the lad do his job, for he could remember times like this in his own youth.