“Es un hereje para ser quemar?” someone said from a balcony.
“Él no es solo un asesino, él es un perro protestante,” opinioned a woman pushing a cart of sardines.
Curran answered in Castilian that there would be no burning at the stake, and that both of them would soon be taken aboard the warship in the bay. Curran noticed as he was speaking that the prisoner smiled at the crowd—his Spanish was as good as Curran’s own. The townsfolk moved away, and Curran looked into the offing where Enterprise was just now rounding the battery at San Sebastián.
Constellation hoisted the private signal and made her number. Enterprise had answered, but neither ship seemed much interested in the other. Curran watched as Constellation’s cutter was taken in tow and the frigate let fall her mains and courses. Towing her boat, Constellation sailed west into the mouth of the bay.
“If I may ask,” the prisoner said pleasantly, “would that ship be Enterprise?”
Curran did not answer. In the roads, the ships passed without a cheer or even a hailing from deck to deck, quite as if they were ignoring one another. As Constellation groped out of the roads, Enterprise hauled down the private signal but left her own number flying proudly.
“A two-decker I believe,” said the prisoner. “A fine-looking ship. Very much like Congress, I am sure. Perhaps they were built at the same yard.”
Curran looked at him with an expression of cold bafflement. The business of a prisoner in a threadbare Army uniform was unusual, and the conduct of the ships was equally puzzling.
The man seemed suddenly to remember his place and said quietly, “You’ll forgive me, sir. It has been a while since I have had company.”
Enterprise headed up, and as soon as way came off her the frigate’s best bower splashed into the harbor; when her yards were squared and the sails had been made fast in perfect neatness, she put a boat over the side.
“Prisoner, can you swim?” Curran asked.
“I suppose I can. It’s been a long time since I tried.”
Curran tossed him the keys. “You will remove your shackles. Should our boat upset crossing the reef, I’d not want to watch you drown.”
Curran looked on as the boy and his uncle took down his chest and seabags from the oxcart. The prisoner knelt and prized open the irons on his legs, and then the manacles from his wrists. With a practiced hand he looped the chains around the top of his sailcloth sack and secured them with a loop and cinch. The prisoner stretched out his limbs. “This is kind of you.”
Curran opened his cruise box and shifted into his number one uniform coat. “Do not mistake my manners, sir,” Curran answered. “If you try to run, I will shoot you.”
ENTERPRISE’S BLUE CUTTER WAS COXED BY A PETTY OFFICER, A BLUFF SAILOR with red muttonchop whiskers. Curran could hear the coxswain and stroke oar joking together as the boat approached. They were dressed in their best shore-going rigs: blue jackets, duck trousers, kerchiefs, and tarpaulin emboldened with the words “United States Frigate Enterprise.” All were happy, obviously expecting liberty.
“Coxswain, we are for Enterprise,” said Curran as bow oar heaved a line to the pier.
The sailor at the tiller, Finch, looked at Curran and then at the prisoner and was made instantly solemn. In the cutter the smiles were gone and a dozen oarsmen sat with their heads locked, looking neither right nor left, but exactly at nothing, eyes in the boat. For a few seconds no one spoke or moved a muscle.
“You, sir, in the boat. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” Finch said. “We’re here to get you.”
Curran’s things were quickly put aboard. The coxswain narrowed his eyes at the man in the blue coat, troubled by the chains and shackles draping from his hands. “Sir, would you like me to send out for them leathernecks? We got nothing for arms aboard except a pair of cutlass.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Curran said as he dropped into the cutter’s stern. “Directly to the ship, please.” Curran sat on his sea chest next to the coxswain, and the prisoner was put forward in the bows.
“The ship it is, sir.”
The cutter backed water, came smartly about, larboard holding and starboard pulling, and the men stretched out for the ship. There was only the sound of the trucks in the oarlocks and the smooth pull of water under the sweeps. Curran noticed that the oarsmen on either side of the prisoner took pains to lean away from him as they plied their oars.
In the boat, the man in the blue coat did his best to become invisible. The prisoner had such a talent for silence and self-effacement that Curran soon forgot he was there. For the ninth time in twenty minutes Curran made sure that his papers and orders were in their silk and sailcloth folder, checked again that his number one scraper was firmly lodged on his head, and flicked away a bit of lint from the shoulder of his best dress blue jacket.
Ahead of him, still most of a mile off, Curran could see Enterprise riding easily. She had shifted colors and now wore the jack at her bow and the national ensign astern. Curran had so concentrated on the American ships he’d almost failed to notice that the harbor was full of vessels, merchants all of them: Swedes and Danes, Finns and Dutchmen, and lateen rigs of the Med, all in various states of cleanliness and repair. Small boats plied between them and ranged up and down the harbor. There were even a few stranger craft—herring busses, xebecs, and a dismasted hulk being used as a receiving ship. Most shocking of all, a hermaphrodite-rigged poleacre, painted red, black, and white with a lateen sail rigged as a mizzen, a contraption so heterogeneous that it could only have been sailed by men without a notion of shame: Ragusians or perhaps Greek spongers.
As the cutter came into the anchorage, Curran could see that Enterprise was busy. Constellation had come and gone in silence, but from Enterprise came the screech of a bo’sun’s pipe and orders shouted from deck to maintop. Enterprise was putting over her long boat and both gig and cutters, liberty men in some, working and watering parties in others. Bumboats from the town were already about, offering every temptation of the port, jabbering in the pidgin of half a dozen languages, and deals were being struck for many things more potent and desirable than bottles of blackstrap and mitad y mitad.
Close up, Curran had seen Enterprise only in the yards at Boston. The ship had seemed impressive then, but from the stern sheets of a 30-foot cutter the frigate seemed so massive and rooted in the water that it did not float so much as jut up from the sea like a cliff. As the cutter pitched in the chop, the tall black sides of the frigate did not move, but conducted the swell down the waterline, showing a band of white and copper as the waves passed. Enterprise was renowned, as was her sister Constitution, for stiffness in a seaway. She was nearly 210 feet from beakhead to taffrail, 2,200 tons burthen, and of course ship-rigged. Enterprise was what the British had come to call a “pocket ship of the line,” for they learned that Enterprise and her sisters outgunned and outsailed most of what His Majesty’s navy called frigates.
This Enterprise was the fourth United States warship to bear the name. Laid down at the Boston Navy Yard in 1811, “Easy E” had an enviable reputation as a comfortable ship and was as fast as any man o’war that ever swam. Built from a Humphrey draft, Enterprise differed from Constitution in that she had a taller rig, an enclosed spar deck (and therefore an elevated poop), and a pair of stern galleries instead of only one. Her masts were raked aggressively, and her bristling rows of gun ports and Nelson chequer gave her a menacing, even predatory appearance. All of this imparted on Curran