to the neck. They had brought Macintosh back and he had been sentenced to two hundred lashes, the severest punishment McLean had ever ordered, but he had few enough men as it was and he needed to deter others from desertion.
Desertion was a problem. Most men were content enough, but there were always a few who saw the promise of a better existence in the vastness of North America. Life here was a great deal easier than in the Highlands of Scotland, and Macintosh had made his run and now he would be punished.
‘One!’ the sergeant called.
‘Lay it on hard,’ McLean told the two drummer boys, ‘you’re not here to tickle him.’
‘Two!’
McLean let his mind wander as the leather whips criss-crossed the man’s back. He had seen many floggings in his years of service, and had ordered executions too, because floggings and executions were the enforcers of duty. He saw many of the soldiers staring aghast at the sight, so the punishment was probably working. McLean did not enjoy punishment parades, no one in his right mind would, but they were unavoidable and, with luck, Macintosh would reform into a decent soldier.
And what Leviathan, McLean wondered, would Macintosh have to fight? A schooner captained by a loyalist had put into Majabigwaduce a week before with a report that the rebels in Boston were assembling a fleet and an army. ‘We were told there were forty or more ships coming your way, sir,’ the schooner’s captain had told him, ‘and they’re gathering upwards of three thousand men.’
Maybe that was true and maybe not. The schooner’s captain had not visited Boston, just heard a rumour in Nantucket, and rumour, McLean knew, could inflate a company into a battalion and a battalion into an army. Nevertheless he had taken the information seriously enough to send the schooner back southwards with a despatch to Sir Henry Clinton in New York. The despatch merely said that McLean expected to be attacked soon and could not hold out without reinforcements. Why, he wondered, had he been given so few men and ships? If the crown wanted this piece of country, then why not send an adequate force? ‘Thirty-eight!’ the sergeant shouted. There was blood on Macintosh’s back now, blood diluted by rain, but still enough blood to trickle down and darken the waistband of his kilt. ‘Thirty-nine,’ the sergeant bellowed, ‘and lay it on hard!’
McLean resented the time this punishment parade stole from his preparations. He knew time was short and the fort was nowhere near completed. The trench about the four walls was scarcely two feet deep, the ramparts themselves not much higher. It was an excuse for a fort, a pathetic little earthwork, and he needed both men and time. He had offered wages to any civilian who was willing to work and, when insufficient men came forward, he sent patrols to impress labour.
‘Sixty-one!’ the sergeant shouted. Macintosh was whimpering now, the sound stifled by the leather gag. He shifted his weight and blood squelched in one shoe, then spilt over the shoe’s edge.
‘He’ll not take much more,’ Calef growled. Calef was replacing the battalion surgeon who was sick with a fever.
‘Keep going!’ McLean said.
‘You want to kill him?’
‘I want the battalion,’ McLean said, ‘to be more frightened of the lash than of the enemy.’
‘Sixty-two!’ the sergeant shouted.
‘Tell me,’ McLean suddenly turned on the doctor, ‘why is the rumour being spread that I plan to hang any civilian who supports the rebellion?’
Calef looked uncomfortable. He flinched as the whipped man whimpered again, then looked defiantly at the general. ‘To persuade such disaffected people to leave the region, of course. You don’t want rebels lurking in the woods hereabouts.’
‘Nor do I want a reputation as a hangman! We did not come here to persecute folk, but to persuade them to return to their proper allegiance. I would be grateful, Doctor, if a counter-rumour was propagated. That I have no intentions of hanging any man, rebel or not.’
‘God’s blood, man, I can see bone!’ the doctor protested, ignoring McLean’s strictures. The whimpers had become moans. McLean saw that the drummer boys were using less strength now, not because their arms were weakening, but out of pity, and neither he nor the sergeant corrected them.
McLean stopped the punishment at a hundred lashes. ‘Cut him down, Sergeant,’ he ordered, ‘and carry him to the doctor’s house.’ He turned away from the bloody mess on the cross. ‘Any of you who follow Macintosh’s example will follow him here! Now dismiss the men to their duties.’
The civilians who had volunteered or been conscripted for labour trudged up the hill. One man, tall and gaunt, with wild dark hair and angry eyes pushed his way past McLean’s aides to confront the general. ‘You will be punished for this!’ the man snarled.
‘For what?’ McLean enquired.
‘For working on the Sabbath!’ the man said. He towered over McLean. ‘In all my days I have never worked on the Sabbath, never! You make me a sinner!’
McLean held his temper. A dozen or so other men had paused and were watching the gaunt man, and McLean suspected they would join the protest and refuse to desecrate a Sunday by working if he yielded. ‘So why will you not work on a Sunday, sir?’ McLean asked.
‘It is the Lord’s day, and we are commanded to keep it holy.’ The man jabbed a finger at the brigadier, stopping just short of striking McLean’s chest. ‘It is God’s commandment!’
‘And Christ commanded that you render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,’ McLean retorted, ‘and today Caesar demands you make a rampart. But I will accommodate you, sir, I will accommodate you by not paying you. Work is paid labour, but today you will freely offer me your assistance which, sir, is a Christian act.’
‘I will not …’ the man began.
‘Lieutenant Moore!’ McLean raised his blackthorn stick to summon the lieutenant, though the gesture looked threatening and the gaunt man took a backwards step. ‘Call back the drummer boys!’ McLean called, ‘I need another man whipped!’ He turned his gaze back to the man. ‘You either assist me, sir,’ he said quietly, ‘or I shall scourge you.’
The tall man glanced at the empty Saint Andrew’s cross. ‘I shall pray for your destruction,’ he promised, but the fire had gone from his voice. He gave McLean a last defiant look, then turned away.
The civilians worked. They raised the wall of the fort another foot by laying logs along the low earthen berm. Some men cut down more trees, opening fields of fire for the fort, while others used picks and shovels to sink a well in the fort’s north-eastern bastion. McLean ordered one long spruce trunk to be trimmed and stripped of its bark, then a sailor from the Albany attached a small pulley to the narrow end of the trunk and a long line was rove through the pulley’s block. A deep hole was hacked in the south-western bastion and the spruce trunk was raised as a flagpole. Soldiers packed the hole with stones and, when the pole was reckoned to be stable, McLean ordered the union flag to be hauled into the damp sky. ‘We shall call this place …’ he paused as the wind caught the flag and stretched it into the cloud-shrouded daylight. ‘Fort George,’ McLean said tentatively, as if testing the name. He liked it. ‘Fort George,’ he announced firmly and took off his hat. ‘God save the King!’
Highlanders of the 74th started on a smaller earthwork, a gun emplacement, which they made close to the shore and facing the harbour mouth. The soil
