The French Prize by James L. Nelson Page A

enmity, by no means ended, was tabled until they reached Boston, their next port of call, and Bolingbroke was paid off and disappeared in the mysterious and debauched way of sailors ashore. And Jack went on hating him, despite the fact that everything that Jack Biddlecomb was, everything he had thus far accomplished, he owed to Jonah Bolingbroke.
    *   *   *
    With his move aft, Jack was no longer Harwood but rather Mr. Harwood, and once he had left the Hancock in Philadelphia and shipped aboard another as second he became Mr. Biddlecomb, which he remained until the blessed moment when he became Captain Biddlecomb. And, as Captain Biddlecomb, Jack spent much of his time below, laboring over bills of lading, and bills of health and general clearances and clearing manifests and invoices, lists of passengers, lists of crew, lists of sea stores. He discovered that the life of ease he had always imagined his former captain Mr. Asquith enjoyed was not so easy at all, that it was, in fact, more drudgery and paper than he had quite realized. That, despite the fact that Jack had always had a hand in keeping the ship’s books and accounts in order.
    His days were spent pen in hand, or arguing with chandlers and sailmakers and riggers and ship’s carpenters and, more obsequiously, with Robert Oxnard, as well as Oxnard’s agent, William Dailey. Dailey, in particular, seemed to have an endless assortment of papers for him to consider, and on the worst of their meetings Jack found himself signing forms for this or that without even understanding in any meaningful way what it was he was signing.
    In the evening, when the ship’s carpenters and the riggers and the longshoremen were done with their labors, and there was no one left aboard in need of supervision, Jack and Stiles and a gaggle of sundry young gentlemen took their pleasure in Philadelphia, the greatest city in the burgeoning United States of America. Like a pack of feral dogs they roamed the taverns, pursuing women and the endless amusements that only a thriving port city could offer.
    Philadelphia, capital of the United States, was no creaky, arthritic, staid farm community with its entrenched and homogeneous population, a churchgoing, disapproving community always keeping a weather eye out for impropriety, and quashing the first hint of it. This was a seaport, its lifeblood flowed from the Atlantic, up the Delaware Bay to the wharves and anchorages on the Delaware River, and when it was spent it flowed out again. And carried on that stream the goods and the people of the Atlantic world, sailors with no communal ties who sated long-pent desires, always with the knowledge that, no matter how debauched they became, no matter how quickly they ran through three, four, or six months’ wages, their hard-won abilities to hand, reef, and steer would provide for them both their passport and their breakfast.
    It was midmorning, a week and a half after his aborted duel with Bolingbroke, Jack having given up waiting for an invitation to continue the affair, that he returned after a particularly grueling and vexing time at Oxnard’s to the wharf where Abigail remained tied, fore and aft. Jack had managed to infuriate Oxnard by returning to the chandler an entire delivery of salt pork, ten barrels of it, meant to feed the Abigail ’s men. His reason for returning it, a reason by Oxnard’s lights entirely inadequate, had to do with its being rancid beyond what even a foremast hand could be expected to eat. Jack suspected that some teamster along the way had emptied out most of the brine to lighten the barrels and make them easier to transport.
    â€œNow see here, Jack, your foremast hand don’t need fancy cooking, none of your French cuisine with sauces and such. Just give them their salt pork and dried peas and a run ashore and they’re merry as grigs,” Oxnard had explained. But Jack had served his time in the forecastle, had eaten