Wilder Perkins: Hoare and the Portsmouth Atrocities

Portland stone, and lumber scattered throughout its narrow streets. The King's unheralded decision several years before to make Weymouth his preferred watering place may have thrown the townspeople into confusion but, determined to make the most of it, they had begun a frenzy of speculative building. But His Majesty had apparently dropped Weymouth from his increasingly confused mind, and much of the promising civic beautification had stopped in midproject.

An addicted snoop, Hoare wondered about Mrs. Graves's victim. It was a curious chance, he thought, that the dead man should have been the leader of the two. And who had known this to be the case? He could not remember.

He stopped, turned in his tracks, and climbed up the town hall steps. Common sense told him the town lockup would be in the hall's cellars; that would be the proper location for a dungeon, be it real or fictional. He found it there, guarded by a whiskery turnkey who was sleepily closing a barred door behind him.

"I'm a friend of Mrs. Graves," Hoare told him. "I want to see the man who died attacking her."

"Ye needn't whisper, sir," the guard said, pointing over his shoulder. "Dead as King Charles, 'e be. 'E be right in there, layin' quiet as can be."

Hoare pushed open the door. Below the rough, bloodstained bandage around its head, the face of the corpse was an ashen blue. No one had closed its staring eyes. There were traces of blood around its nostrils and a crust of dried foam around its lips.

Hoare had seen enough men dead of enough causes to know this man had not been killed by the blow of Mrs. Graves's slung stone. He had been smothered.

Thoughtfully, Hoare left the morgue.

"Where is the man we captured with him?" he asked.

The turnkey shrugged. "Dunno, sir. Some men of the town watch took un off just a few minutes past."

Leaving the town hall, Hoare retraced his steps. He arrived at Inconceivable, shoved her off, set sail, and set course for Portsmouth. The wind had backed into the east, and once again he could progress only with tack upon tack. He enlivened the trip by selecting a new name for his vessel from among the inventory in her bilges; she had left Portsmouth as Inconceivable but would return as Insupportable.

It was then he discovered Inconceivable had been searched from stem to gudgeon. Hoare had installed a small armory in her forepeak. It included a one-pounder swivel or jingal, mountable into either of two sockets, one of which was set into her bows and the other dead aft; a Kentucky rifle; four pistols; a cavalry saber; a rapier; five grenades; several mantraps; a crossbow with twenty quarrels of various types; and powder and shot for the firearms. At considerable expense, Hoare had equipped the latter with the novel percussion caps.

And now his deadly Kentucky gun was gone.

Bartholomew Hoare's father, Joel Hoare, was of Viking stock. Joel brought that good name of his with him when he came south from the Orkneys as an orphan boy, and he had defended it successfully throughout his rise from ship's boy and through the hawsehole to master's mate, thence to post captain.

Both Hoare sons had defended that good name with fists and feet again and again while still in their nonage. Bartholomew's elder brother, John, had been badly injured in such an affray and still limped about the family property in Shropshire, debarred forever from the sea.

Even before Captain Hoare had negotiated his younger son a post as midshipman in Centurion, 60, Bartholomew had run a jeering schoolmate through the thigh with a carving knife. Now, more than thirty years later, it was a foolhardy man who mocked that good name of Bartholomew Hoare's; though thus far he had avoided killing a single opponent, he wounded at will with pistol, epee, or saber.

As befitted the descendant of Vikings, Bartholomew was not only a warrior but also a masterly seaman. While still a midshipman, he had been the sole deck officer in the brig Beetle to survive the great tempest of September '81, when a rogue sea swept her quarterdeck clean. That night he led her surviving crew in club-hauling the brig off the roaring rocks of the Isles of Shoals.

Not only that; as young Hoare was working Beetle to Halifax under jury rig he had taken a small Yankee privateer by a ruse-her master had drained her crew into his English prizes-and he brought her into Halifax in modest triumph. The privateer had carried specie from one of her captures. Moreover, the navy had bought her up, bringing Hoare the entire quarterdeck's eighth of the proceeds, plus the one-thirty-second share due him as a midshipman-one of the four surviving warrant officers.

Thus, even before being commissioned lieutenant in 1783, Hoare had gained a solid reputation for competence both in the field of honor and at sea. He had also gained what, for a mere midshipman at the bottom of the navy's ladder of success, was a sizable fortune. That amount, TБ6,127/5/8, paid him by the Halifax prize master, was such a shock to young Hoare that, running counter to the behavior of the typical mid, he invested the entire sum in the Funds and left it at Barclays Bank to accrue in industrious idleness as its owner worked his way up the tedious ladder of promotion.

But the spent musket ball fired from Eole on the first of June '94 had put paid to his career at sea. Since any deck officer must be able to hail the main masthead in a full gale, Staghound's captain had regretfully put his first lieutenant ashore, silenced for life, with a letter of high commendation, endorsed by Lord Howe himself. Never since that black day had Bartholomew Hoare gone to sea in anyone's vessel but his own, unless as a silent, frustrated passenger.

By good fortune, Hoare also had influence among the mighty. Captain Joel Hoare, of course, as a member of Parliament, still carried weight with Their Lordships of the Admiralty, and his Uncle Claudius, brother of Bartholomew's late mother, had married Lady Jessica, eldest daughter of Geoffrey, third Baron Wheatley. It had needed both these connections and Lord Howe's precious letter to find the beached, despairing Hoare a place on the permanent staff of the Port Admiral at Portsmouth.

"And what the hell do Their Lordships expect me to do with a lieutenant who cannot talk?" that officer had asked Hoare as he paced back and forth in front of the stricken lieutenant.

"Can ye speak French?"

"Yes, sir."

"Read books of accounts?"

"Yes, sir."

"Hand, reef, and steer?"

"Yes, sir."

"Hail the fore topgallant?"

"No, sir."

So the Admiral had gone on, firing a question like a broadside every time he passed athwart Hoare's hawse, until Hoare sweated where he stood.

He had evidently passed muster, for the Admiral had him assigned as a general dogsbody, trotting about at the command of either the Commissioner (who commanded the Portsmouth shipyards) or the Admiral himself, as Port Admiral in command of the Navy vessels at the Yard and at Spithead just outside the harbor's mouth. In practice, Hoare spent most of his time slaving for the port's regulating captain-master of the press-and the local masters of the Navy Board, Ordnance Board, Victualling Board, and Transport Board. He ran errands and took on any project that a voiceless officer could reasonably accept. The life kept him out of the countryside where the Hoare family remained; he had found the stink of bilges and the scurry of rats preferable to the stink of cow shit and the scurry of chickens.

As well as becoming intimately familiar from below with the bizarre, cobwebbed workings of the so-called Silent Service, he must have been found useful. For, even though Sir Percy soon hoisted his flag in Agamemnon-at sea again at last, leaving the forlorn Hoare behind him on the beach- succeeding Port Admirals had kept him in place, to roll about wherever ordered, aging but gathering little moss. By now, he was forty-three.