"Boys, now we decide whether we live or die."
The voice was resolved, low, nearly inaudible in its competition with the creaking of the boat and the waves slapping against it. Alfred F. Jones looked at the speaker, eyes wide and communicating a scared confusion. In his head, he thought indignantly that surely a young sailor on a merchant ship wouldn't come in contact with death so soon. His only purpose was fulfilling his dream of seeing beautiful foreign ports and cities. Why would he have the option of dying? He saw the ship coming, of course he did, but what would an English warship want with their small sloop?
"Why?" he managed to ask to the small crowd gathered on the upper decks. He was closest to the edge, watching the vessel approach them. Some of the people closing in around him were murmuring about jumping over and saving themselves from a worse fate. Alfred knew there were sharks down there - when one of the black servants got sick and died, he was thrown over. The beasts of the ocean were on that corpse in moments. "Why are you jumping? That's dangerous. It's just a passing ship, that's all."
"R'you daft, boy? Don't 'ya know 'bout the impressment?" a man intoned, scowling. His teeth were blackened and missing; Alfred guessed he'd been treated with mercury in the fever outbreak a few years back. The blonde sailor stared blankly. He had never been good in schooling and wasn't learned like his brother, but still, he should know the current events and politics of his world.
"Impressment?" he echoed, mouth hanging open. His voice was beginning to grow lost in the other ones, and he couldn't coax his throat to sound more intimidating or loud.
"Right... The impressment. Yer mad if you don't 'spect that. We're flying the stars n' stripes." the man with his thick accent pointed up toward where their American flag whipped fitfully in the wind. Al had often watched the fifteen stars on it blend with the night sky as he slept up here, so beautiful and satisfied. Now, its fierce waving looked to be something of fear, quivering.
"We're just a merchant ship. A tiny little merchant ship with indigo and fabric. What could they want us for?" he retorted, cringing when a sad and cynical laugh came as his response.
"They want all the men they can have, regardless." the captain interrupted, walking up behind the crewmen. Several turned around to nod to him in respect. The lot of the men fell silent.
"Will we be fighting, Captain? Should we go prepare the cannons?"
"Fighting?" he echoed the question, making the simple word sound completely absurd and bringing a blush to the asker's cheeks. "It's no use. Take a look. From here you can see, they have a hundred cannons, minimum. We have two and they're rusty from misuse. We don't stand a chance."
"You're going to let them capture us, then?" a man asked angrily. He carried the accent of an Englishman but spewed more patriot talk than was imaginable - especially when he drank. He would talk endlessly about his brother who died in the Revolution at the end of a British bayonet, how he had earned a scar in the Boston Massacre even though he was only a small child of eight years at that time.
"There's no other option." the captain insisted.
Sailors were always thought to be salty drinkers, the ones who would touch a married woman's bosom if she passed on the street, who would slur out drinking songs with missing teeth and rumpled hair. Alfred thought the Captain quite a gentleman, but the opinion wasn't shared by all, he noticed.
"You just want to keep your goddamn ship! You don't care about us!" the man accused, stepping forward with his fists clenched. Someone held him back and more people locked onto his arms. He spat swears at the captain. The only thing cooling his temper priorly was the threat of being flogged, but he knew with his English accent he'd not be here much longer and could not receive that punishment from the man he cursed at now.
The captain turned away. His bootsteps sounded across the wooden planks of the deck. Alfred watched him, nausea rising, as he walked off. "Are we really going to die?" he asked, on the brink of tears.
"For some of us, it's one way or another. Now at British gunpoint or later in their Navy." the rare woman aboard told him, nervously wringing her bonnet in hand. She was the niece of the merchant who owned the vessel, and right pretty. A British man would probably take a liking to her and force her aboard, have her be their servant and bed her at the first opportunity. Alfred saw that fear in her eyes. He began to respond, his mouth opening to object to her anxiety, but it snapped shut. They were too far away from the coast for her uncle to help her, too far away for the comfort and loyalty of their sweet America. Trapped, among ocean spray and frothing waves. He turned away.
The ship was closer.
If he was to be honest, the ship was a spectacle; three gun decks peaked at the bow into a couchant. He could not see yet what the couchant was and wished to not be close enough to. The vessel was elaborately painted, coppered, and far more fantastical than the boat he'd called home for a month now ongoing. If the American squinted, he could just see the outline of some of the foreign sailors. He'd heard rumor back home that their ships were horrible; although their Navy was strong, the ships that it owned were dirty and crowded. He could not believe it from his faraway view, but the rough appearance of the men onboard made him reconsider. A few guffawed with delight. Alfred thought he hadn't heard such a terrible laugh from even the most awful of criminals.
"Surrender!" one jeered loudly. Alfred swallowed hard, feeling he'd retch if he dared look up and think of his possible fate. Thoughts of his mother and brother behind, waiting at port every season for him… the same for the familiar people milling around him… He nearly got sick, clutching the side of the boat for leverage. The seas' tossing never seemed so severe.
"Al, you look like you're going to cast." Matthias, one of Alfred's best friends on this voyage, said from behind him.
"I am." he replied, trying to copy the other's habit of smiling his problems away. The expression soon dropped: he could hear the other ship creaking, sails snapping in the wind.
"Come on, it'll be alright." Matthias leaned against the railing. He was Danish; his accented voice might be his escape route from the Hell that was approaching them. "You're as American as they come. There's no way they can justify taking you away as a deserter from their navy."
"But they have." Alfred felt near to tears. He shook his head hard, skin paling to a sick, pasty green. "With others. You heard him, either we surrender and fight for them or we die. It's not just me."
"The Capt' likes to scare us so we do what he wants." Matthias responded easily. His blond hair was thrown up by the salty winds, appearing to virtually defy the way locks fell. His face was beginning the transition into adulthood from late teen years, and just squaring his jaw, though his eyes were innocently blue and Alfred could be calmed with that. "People are remarkable. Give them something to hope for and they can do anything. Kill it, they'll give up," Matthias had grown wiser in the weeks since they left port. "and the people who give up are more easy to control."
"But..." Alfred began stupidly, locking his gaze on the shining glare of the enemy cannons. They seemed to stare back at him as the sailors did; they took every thought from his admittedly dense mind. He only nodded meekly, swallowing bile that threatened in his throat.
"I'm going to go talk to the Captain." Matthias explained as he started away, a crooked grin gracing his face. "At least get him to talk to the other one. Maybe they can work something out." the taller of the two shrugged, waving Alfred off. Quite honestly, the collective attitude was disgusting to Alfred. There was crisis. He wasn't only worried for himself, but everyone else aboard who had a family and life to go back to after the crashing of the waves ceased into the hum of their home city.
There was a shrill scream and a splash. Alfred bent over the railing of the ship once more and shrieked, "Man overboard!" he ran in a tight circle like a dazed chicken, repeating the phrase to anyone who happened to be passing, pointing at the side from which the rope boy had gone.
"Let 'im go, aye?" one of the men mused back as people rushed for life preservers. "He gone by 'is own accord. Ain't no one who can pull 'im out now."
"We have to save him!" Alfred returned. The scraggly crowd of people that had gathered to watch him drown slowly disbanded with hopelessness. They'd given their last effort. "We have to... save..." he breathed.
"Daft boy." someone huffed as they passed Alfred. His bottom lip twitched into a pout.
"I ain't daft." he whispered. He glanced up at the ship that was now preparing to throw lines on theirs, draw them in and take them away. He stood up, a flash of remembrance turning his eyebrows up. He had brought his citizenship certificates. He raced belowdeck, where it appeared he wasn't the only one to have this thought. Others were rummaging for their certificates, including Matthias.
"Capt' says there's nothing he can do." he explained to another man, sighing. Alfred ignored the bad news for his own sake, pretending that he couldn't hear the thick Danish accent over the sound of waves and cargo sliding against other cargo. He clutched at his satchel, pulling from the worn pocket a document that read Protection Certificate of a Seaman of the United States of America in prominent ink letters. He remembered with a flash of bitterness his excitement over it, Mama's insistence that he carry it always. He found a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth; fond memories indeed. "Al, you're wasting your time."
Alfred jumped at Matthias' sudden closeness. "No, I'm not. If I have this... If I have this they'll know I'm American."
"Say you forged it." Matthias shook his head slightly. Alfred gave him a puzzled look, and he continued theatrically. "Say you paid a man to print one for you, while you spent your first week in America after jumping ship and leaving the Brits. Say your name isn't really Alfred Jones and you stole it off another man, a dead one perhaps. Say -"
"Understood... but I've got to hope that maybe they'll be reasonable." Alfred nodded to himself, running his thumb over the paper's worn edge.
"They're not reasonable. They're English." the Dane said that as if it explained every fault the British had, with his own wry smile that suggested something deeper than what Alfred could understand. He was gone before Alfred could think of a response, moving out of the dark space under the deck. He was pushed aside at the last moment and nearly tumbled back down; a sailor who appeared to be high in rank scolded him briefly for not moving in the first place.
Everything fell silent. Once Alfred had heard a story of the war, an old veteran soldier telling him that the world seems to turn to molasses in the minute before something terrible happens. He hadn't believed it, but as everything slowed and fell into a silent drag of sounds and words, he found a small voice in the back of his mind pondering over whether he would be able to tell his own story in a few years, an old veteran himself.
"Everyone," the British Naval officer began, looking impressively regal as he broke the stillness in the room. Even standing in a stature shorter than Alfred's own, among the boxes of cargo and sleeping cots, he was intimidating. "You're required to stand above-deck. We suspect that this vessel is hosting traitors to His Majesty's Navy."
There was another lag until a few protests rose from the crowded cabin and one voice rang up above the others: "We're American!"
In response, there was a small moment of metal clinks and a strange sound like a laugh from the officer. Seeming to appear from thin air was a Sea Service Musket, blackened at the barrel, held in one of the officer's gloved hands.
"This vessel is hosting traitors to His Majesty's Navy." he repeated, holding the weapon out toward the sailors. Some uttered gasps and moved to protect themselves behind others in a show of cowardice. As far as the officer and his comrades were concerned, these movements were admittances of guilt. On some silent cue between them, the cabin flooded with black and white flashes of uniform as sailors were grabbed and hauled up the ladder to the main deck. The British officers were hellbent on the orders they'd received from their captain.
Alfred had stood dumbly in the same spot as the commotion went on, a word never passing his parted lips, hand still clutching his citizenship papers. Perhaps, he thought slowly, he was daft; he was grabbed by the arm and pushed toward the steps and only obediently went up into the sunlight. Stupid. He stood in line next to another American sailor. Idiotic. He looked up into a new officer's face and could not spit out the words to defend himself. Ignoramus. His hand thrust the papers into the brass-decorated chest in front of him and attempted to gesture out some sort of indication that he did not belong here. The papers only crumpled and fell to the deck, and he heard with a crashing sense of his own fate that the officer thought he recognized Alfred. Daft.
Once again, with numb following, Alfred was led to the other ship across a makeshift bridge between them. He heard Matthias yelling protests in Danish behind him and the sound of the merchant's niece weeping, the screams of the Patriot man who had lost a brother to the British. He heard boots on worn wooden planks and the captain pleading with an officer. He could not lose these men, he said.
All around him was chaos, but with finality and hopelessness that had finally ebbed into his own body, Alfred ducked his head down and quietly made the walk from American port to British starboard.