Chapter One

January 30, 1863 

A lighthouse gleamed over the massive stone fort like a Cyclops peering out to sea. They’d seen its beam thirteen miles away when they were halfway between the Salt Cay Banks and Matanzas. The young man on the American merchant schooner Laura Ann was standing by the foremast, his hands resting on the ratlines. He rubbed his cheeks where a stubbly beard had started to grow in. He felt awkward and undeserving, calling himself captain. He had signed on as first mate in New York, and now, two weeks later, he was the ship’s captain. His change in status was not a promotion but a necessity, and it did not make him feel proud. Alone on deck, Everett Townsend was doing the first anchor watch. It must have been near midnight. He breathed in deeply, and then exhaled with a sigh as he turned toward Havana harbor which was a welcome sight after a damnable voyage.  Townsend cursed himself and ran his calloused hands through his dark curly hair. The howl of the wind, and the roar of the waves had been deafening on that stormy night a week ago. What could he have done? They were sailing down wind, wing and wing, riding gale-force winds directly into the Gulf Stream current. The huge boom of the schooner’s foresail had swung out of the darkness, smashing Captain Evans in the head and sweeping him overboard. They had turned back as quickly as they could. All night long he had called the captain’s name into the wind and the waves. They had waited until morning, but it was useless in the storm. The man was gone, swallowed by the night one hundred miles off the coast of North Carolina, a familiar graveyard for so many sailors. Townsend kept blaming himself. Maybe he was the ship’s Jonah? The old tars said it only took one bad sailor to curse a ship. A fish jumped, startling him from his memories. The beam from the lighthouse tower slithered over the glossy blackness of the water. Townsend looked up at the grim stone walls of El Morro Castle. He knew the Spanish word morro meant headland, and he’d read that this castle was partially hewn out of solid rock, and modeled after a Moorish castle in Lisbon. There was a mysterious darkness about it. He could see the outline of a sentinel next to the shape of a cannon on El Morro’s parapets. A fitting portrait, he thought to himself, of this Spanish colonial fortress city. He shifted his gaze to the naval gunboat disappearing into Havana harbor, its paddlewheels thumping and throbbing. The gunship with its deck guns fully manned had passed by earlier on night patrol, and its captain had told him he was too late to enter the harbor. Townsend understood Spanish, but he pretended he didn’t. The Spanish captain then picked up his sea trumpet and repeated his commands in English, making his meaning loud and clear.  He pointed to El Morro Castle. No boat was allowed to pass into Havana Bay after the signals had been dropped after sunset. The captain barked that he must head back seaward or wait at anchor outside the harbor until sunrise. Those were the orders of the Captain of the Port of Havana.   The strident tone of the man’s voice left a bitter taste in his mouth. Townsend had no love for authority. He’d almost started an argument, but then reconsidered. Going back to sea was not an option. The Confederate gunboat, the Florida was somewhere off the coast of Cuba on a rampage, burning American-flagged merchant ships. No, they would not be claimed as a Confederate prize, particularly as they were an unarmed vessel flying the Stars and Stripes. Townsend felt lucky to reach Havana without an encounter. He knew the crew was anxious to get ashore. Even after the accident, storms had stalked them most of the way from North Carolina down past Abaco Island and into the Bahama Bank. The voyage had left its mark on all of them.   Townsend had given an order to anchor the Laura Ann, a two-masted, double topsail schooner, just five hundred yards to the east of the fortress. He’d made soundings and they were in about eleven fathoms, some sixty-five feet of water. The ocean floor outside Havana harbor was known to have poor holding ground. He walked toward the bow where the riding light illuminated the thick anchor cable on the drum of the windlass. He pulled the hemp line, which was not only taut, but quivered with tension, much to his relief. The other anchor on the port side was ready to be dropped if they started to drift. He was taking no chances, not after what had happened on this voyage. Townsend scanned the worn, yellow pine decks of the ninety-three foot long schooner. They were covered with a cargo of Maine lumber. Somehow in all the stormy weather they hadn’t lost even one plank of wood. He could hear one of the men snoring inside the forward house, the beams creaking as another sailor moved restlessly about in his berth. Townsend looked down at his bare feet and imagined what he must have looked like to that prim Spanish naval officer. He was more like a fisherman than a ship captain. Not only was he barefoot, his dirty shirt was open at the chest. Tar-stained overalls hung low around his waist and were two inches too short. He had a Bowie knife in a leather sheath on his belt. No one would have taken him for the shipmaster. It wasn’t just his appearance, but his age. He was only nineteen years old.  Townsend clenched the staysail boom tightly as he thought of his many mistakes. Until a month ago, he thought he would be a Naval officer. His quick-flare temper had gotten him into trouble before. It wasn’t that he resented all authority. He just rejected it when he felt the person was in the wrong. He thought of his father back in Maryland at their home in Havre de Grace who by now had probably heard the sudden and unexpected news of his son’s dismissal from the Naval Academy. Maybe he’d received a copy of the same letter Townsend was given. “Midshipman Everett Townsend: General Conduct: Not good. Aptitude for Naval Service: Poor: Not recommended for continuance at the Academy.” The words stung. He imagined his father cursing his oldest son for bringing disgrace to the family.  His gloomy thoughts were interrupted by a figure with a floppy hat emerging from the forward cabin house. Clyde Hendricks carried a kerosene lamp in one hand and the coffee pot with two cups in the other. “Midnight now, Cap’n,” the cheery Bahamian sailor said in his lilting island accent, and handed him a cup. “How the ship anchor holdin’?”  “Like molasses on a jackasses’s tongue,” said Townsend with a smile.   “You bes’ get something more than molasses to plug up them Irish sailors’muzzles. They be honkin and braying like true jackasses, I tellin’ you.”  They both laughed. Hendricks bunked in the forward cabin house with four Irish sailors on lumpy mattresses filled with straw or what they called “donkeys’ breakfast”, and he was always grumbling about the snoring.  The two men sat at the stern of the boat on the raised “boot heel” quarterdeck, talking quietly as a silvery slice of the moon crept up in the sky. Hendricks reminded Everett of the Negro sailor who had taught him to work the foredeck on several of the Chesapeake Bay schooners owned by his father. Hendricks was a man of about forty, he guessed, but he looked younger, hardly a furrow in his sloped-back forehead. His wide set eyes were oddly mismatched. One hopeful and sparkling, the other, sad and distant. He was a skilled sailor with a quiet manner. After they lost the captain, the two of them had sailed the boat together through several days of heavy weather. The crew, most of whom were Irish immigrants trying to escape forced conscription into the Union army, had huddled below deck, fearful that the ship was cursed. But Hendricks hadn’t hesitated, tending halyards and jib sheets like a nimble acrobat. Once they reached the Bahamas, he had shown Townsend his shoal water skills by climbing up to the foremast head and helping him pilot the boat through the shallows with simple hand signals. Hendricks was a man Townsend thought he could grow to like, but he knew their paths would probably separate in Havana. The schooner was to be sold to the Havana merchant house receiving the cargo, and they would all soon be looking for another ship. The two men fell into silence and looked out at the dark silhouette of El Morro Castle and the clear, starry skies. Both were lost in their own thoughts. There was not a sound to be heard now except for the waves gently rolling ashore. A cool breeze brushed against Townsend’s face. He guessed it was below 65 degrees, cold for the tropics, but balmy compared to where they’d come from. Just thirteen days ago they’d left New York harbor, catching the last sight of Sandy Hook lighthouse and saying farewell to the leafless trees and snow-covered hills of New Jersey. With that fading landscape, he had lost contact with the news of the Rebellion, and he was eager to get to shore to hear what the latest developments were.  Just behind the fort, Townsend could make out hundreds, maybe thousands, of sparkling lights. There was Havana, the city of his imagination. Just the name made him think of gold-laden treasure ships, explorers and pirates from centuries past. He was suddenly excited, but then the reality of his situation came back to him. His mother was Cuban, born and raised on the island, but she had rarely spoken much about her past or her family. When she did say anything about Cuba it was always in whispers to his father as she choked back her sobs. Townsend knew his parents had met in Cuba, but not much more than that. She’d spoken in Spanish to him and his brother when they were little, but as they got older she mostly spoke in English. Now she was gone forever from his life.

Two months earlier she had died from pneumonia- leaving him to ponder why she had been so secretive- and why she had left Cuba, never to return. He sighed and looked upwards as he wondered for the hundredth time if he’d made the right choice to come here.  At the sight of three bright stars directly overhead, Townsend nudged Hendricks.  “Orion’s Belt?” he asked. From his studies at the Naval Academy, Townsend was pretty sure it was.  Hendricks looked up to the sky and nodded. “Yeh, mon, you right.” “What about the Southern Cross?” Townsend asked. “Can you see it from here?” Hendricks shook his head and gestured towards the harbor. “Bes’ way to find south at night is to sail for El Morro lighthouse. Once you see dem lights of Havana you know you can’t go no futher south. You mus’ sail east or west. Dis a big island, you know. More than seven hundred miles long.”    At that moment, Townsend heard splashing, something thrashing about in the sea.  “What in tarnation is that?” Townsend cried out.   Hendricks was silent, but went up to the bow to try to get closer.  Then they heard a muffled cry.    Townsend rushed over to the stern rail. The yawl boat had already been readied for use, and was now hanging outboard on the davits. He unfastened the block and tackle line from the cleat, dropping the small boat with its oars into the water. Hendricks threw a rope ladder over the bulwarks, and they both leaped in, rowing out away from the ship toward shore. Townsend felt for his knife in the sheath at his side. It was still dark but they were getting closer. Now they could hear a man shouting for help. Townsend caught a glimpse of a black shadow on the surface of the water, passing within an oars length of them.  “Did you see that, Hendricks! Some kind of fish.”  “Lawdy, da ain’ no fish. Das a shark,” Hendricks yelled out.  Townsend could now see a white blur swimming quickly toward him, a pale, silvery face of a man with an expression of terror. The black fin was already circling back. They pulled with greater strength toward the splashing. The man was punching the water like a madman. All around him were the silhouettes of a half dozen shark fins and an orgy of glimmering phosphorescent light. Townsend threw a line towards him and watched as the man reached for it, grabbing the rope with one hand even as he fended off a shark with the other. Townsend pulled him in, the man’s body twisting through the water like a twirling corkscrew.  Suddenly an ominous black dorsal fin passed within a yard of the boat’s stern. The fin came right for the man’s arms. Townsend reached for his knife, but Hendricks had already leaned over the gunwale and stabbed the back of the shark. The dorsal fin abruptly veered off in a swirl of phosphorescence, and the surface of the water erupted into an explosion of thrashing. The sharks were attacking one another. Hendricks stabbed and plunged his knife into the dark frenzy of twisting and tearing. Townsend reached out and grabbed the man’s flashing arms and hauled him aboard with a sudden jerk, falling backwards in the process.  Breathing heavily and shivering, the man looked at Townsend with bulging, fearstricken eyes, and then collapsed in the bottom of the boat, his body heaving and twitching. The revolving beam from the lighthouse streaked across his face. The man looked like an emaciated survivor of a shipwreck with unkempt curly hair, a scraggily beard, his clothes torn, revealing bruises and welts on his skin. “Bloody hell! Close… close call. Thank you,” he finally gasped. “Damn! I thought I was a dead man.” “You’re a lucky man, I will say that,” Townsend replied. “What in blazes were you doing out here at night?”  The man remained silent, still breathing heavily, shivering and shaking. It was as if he didn’t hear the question. Finally he looked up at Townsend. "Look here my man, I need your captain."  "Certainly,” Townsend replied, noting that this man they’d rescued had an English accent, and a refined one at that. He was no rough sailor from the East End of London. “Can you take me to him?” the man asked, a plea in his fearful eyes.  “You’re speaking to him."   The man looked at him first with astonishment, then relief.  “Please hide me,” the man asked, and suddenly collapsed. He was bleeding from a shark bite on his calf. They rowed back to the schooner and took him below into the captain’s cabin. The crew was still sleeping. Hendricks stitched up the wound on the man’s leg, painted it liberally with Lugol’s iodine solution from the ship’s medical kit, and bandaged it tightly. Townsend handed him some dry clothes to put on and a warm blanket. They gave the man a heavy dose of Dover’s Powders for the pain and told him to rest.  Hendricks pulled Townsend aside and whispered to him. “What you gon’ do with this man? He gon’ cause trouble. You know dat?” “But he needs help,” Townsend replied. Hendricks shook his head. “I tellin’ you he gon’ cause big trouble. We talkin’ about, Spanish Cuba. T’ain’ got no justice here, none a’ t’all.” But Townsend simply looked away.   An hour later, the same Spanish steam sidewheel patrol boat cruised by. Townsend got a closer look at it this time. It wasn’t much bigger than the Laura Ann.  Sharp bow, rounded stern with a large cabin house. Two light cannons in the bow and two in the stern. The Spanish flag flying from a stern pole. He could see the Spanish naval officer standing on top of the paddlewheel box searching the waters with his spyglass, a cloud of angry black smoke rising above him. He felt a sudden wave of doubt, bordering on panic, and it increased as the gunboat came closer. The thin-faced captain picked up the ship’s trumpet and asked in Spanish if they had seen anything unusual. He repeated the same question in English. The Spaniard was staring suspiciously at the yawl boat still in the water with the oars all askew, and the rope ladder dangling from the side of the schooner. Townsend’s head swam. He grabbed one of the stays with a tighter grip. For a brief moment, he thought about telling the Spaniard about the swimmer, but it was something about the captain’s unpleasant expression that made him shake his head. He put his hand on his knife as a way to bolster his confidence. “Only fish,” Townsend stammered, wondering if he would regret those words. “Nothing unusual.”  The Spanish captain hesitated. Even in the dim light, it was clear from his posture he didn’t believe or trust Townsend. The Spaniard loudly announced he would be boarding the schooner. Townsend pretended he couldn’t hear what the captain had said. He was glad the shadowy darkness cloaked his unease. The next thing he heard was a command in Spanish to drop the gunship’s launch boat into the water.  “Prepárense para bajar la lancha. Vamos a abordar la goleta.”  In a panic, Townsend shouted a reply in English.   “You are welcome aboard, Captain, but you should know we have a sick man aboard. Some kind of fever. We hope it’s not yellow fever.” Townsend was surprised at how easily the lie had flown out of his mouth. A weighty silence between the boats greeted that announcement. Finally the Spanish captain rescinded his order, and informed Townsend the search could wait until tomorrow morning when the young captain would need to present his ship’s papers to customs immediately upon entering the harbor at sunrise. It was then that Townsend understood that his unexpected guest might be a fugitive from Spanish authorities. He looked up with trepidation at the looming walls of El Morro, and then at the departing patrol boat, which had left behind a faint residue of sooty smoke clinging to the Laura Ann’s mastheads.