The Crossing Read Online Free PDF

no one who served under him who did not attest to his fine command of language. They were to take the boats. Oh, they could give paper for them, receipts, or kill anyone who tried to stop them or do whatever they damn well had to do, but they were to go with mounted men, and in three days he wanted those boats at McKonkey’s Ferry landing on the Jersey shore of the Delaware River.
    In three days? Didn’t he understand that it was impossible in three days or six or ten?
    He understood nothing of the kind; and furthermore, he told them, they were to destroy every other boat on the river, up the river thirty miles, down the river thirty miles—every boat on the Jersey shore was to be smashed to smithereens, beyond repair. Burn them, warm yourselves on the damn boats. Washington wanted only the Durham boats on the river.
    Suppose the people were to take their boats over to Pennsylvania?
    If they could trust them.
    So something had happened to the man who led them, and he was different.
    He told them to take a hundred men on horseback.
    Do, we have a hundred horses?
    They would damn well find a hundred mounted men, or he’d know the reason why. They were to take the men on horses and keep on moving, and the commander in chief could not care less whether they slept and whether they ate, but they were to keep on moving and get the boats. That was all he cared about at this moment—the Durham boats.
    Without the Durham boats it was all over.

[11]
    MEN WHO PERFORM SMALL MIRACLES are frequently too occupied to note the circumstances properly. Hampton and Maxwell got the Durham boats, at least twenty of them and possibly as many as thirty; we are not sure of the precise number. They didn’t do it in three days, but by the fifth of December, the first boats were steered into the ferry landing, where Colonel Glover and his men were putting together a crude embarkation dock. An hour after daylight on the seventh of December, the vanguard ranks of the beaten, shivering Continental army came into sight, and they were hustled into the big Durham boats by the New England fisherman. Whatever John Glover put his hand to, he did well, and this crossing was no exception.
    The first boat pushed off, thirty men as passengers and a dozen fishermen at the poles and sweeps; and the next boat began to load. It was Saturday, but Reverend McWhorter, a Presbyterian minister from Newark who had attached himself to the army as a sort of general chaplain, hastened the Sabbath and put up his folding lectern and prepared for services. The rain had stopped, and it was a sunny, glorious winter morning. Since there was nothing much else to do while waiting for their turn to cross over, the Reverend found himself with the largest congregation of his career and with the satisfaction of knowing that a considerable number of Methodists and Baptists were included in his audience, as well as a sprinkling of Papists, Jews, Quakers and Free-thinkers. He preached the sins of the British, and if there was a good deal of talking and hooting in his congregation, there was also considerable amazement. It was said afterward that this was the first time on the American continent that a Presbyterian minister preached without noting sinfulness in his own congregation—although in the back rows, there were over two hundred bedraggled women, camp followers most of them, who had stuck with the army through better and worse, mostly worse.
    By late afternoon of the following day, the army was across the river and safe—at least for the moment—in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The New England fishermen and their leader, John Glover, had taken them across in the huge Durham boats as nicely—as one of them put it—as any load of codfish. It is said that even as the last boat was pushing off, the skirling of Lord Cornwallis’s pipers was heard in the distance, those whom the Reverend McWhorter called “Papist Highland barbarians,”