And then it was 1774—a fateful year. There was broad unrest, and the laws were changing constantly due to the greed and perfidy of the British Crown. Hillsinger struggled; there were bad surprises. For one thing, local shipping costs in Maine turned out to be exorbitant—there were only a few shippers in Jennings, and they charged him tourist rates. Cutting the timber in Maine cost a fraction of what it did in Boston, but then the shipping costs were more than triple his highest estimates. To make matters worse, the Jennings boats were slow and overladen, which made them easy targets for the British Navy. Many were interdicted. Hillsinger’s diaries—quoted but not reproduced—expressed his outrage with the extortionate shipping companies of Jennings, alongside his firm belief in the basic model of logging raw timber in Maine and then transporting it to Newburyport to be finished.
He took on an extraordinary amount of bank debt using Shipley’s timber grants as collateral, and found a partner with the maritime experience he lacked. The partner’s name was Matthew Quick, a first mate for a transatlantic shipping concern out of New Bedford. Hillsinger asked him what ships he would build if he were building a fleet from scratch, to be based in Jennings, which was on a river, and with the specific object, too, of evading or outrunning the British Navy. Quick’s short answer was compelling: smaller and faster than traditional ocean-going ships, with an unconventionally shallow draft. Hillsinger liked what he heard, and under Quick’s guidance, they built an initial fleet of three ships that were materially faster than other cargo ships of the time, but with much smaller payloads and a draft so shallow that navigation proved difficult for those seamen trained on the larger vessels. These new ships were much harder to control in windy conditions, which were common, so they had to find and train highly skilled pilots rather than the local drunks employed by the Jennings cartel. Luckily for Hillsinger and Quick, the Jennings locals thought their strategy so comically wrongheaded that they did not see the threat until it was too late.
In 1775, the war with England finally came, and it made Hillsinger and Quick fantastically rich. The family annalists went suspiciously dark during the war, a void that Wilkie found telling. No one hides the glory of his ancestors, he thought, and most invent it. One author leapt abruptly to the end of the war in 1783, when the firm’s timber operation had without further comment been transformed into a hugely going concern (the word “firm” appears for the first time) called Hillsinger & Quick, Ltd, which suddenly boasted a fleet of fifty ships ranging from “light and fast timber haulers to decommissioned naval warships.” This last point made the true nature of their business obvious—they were privateers. Elijah Hillsinger and Matthew Quick hunted British merchant ships, commandeered the cargo, and sold off the proceeds. It was the best real-world explanation for the conjunction of war, fast ships, outrageous success, and official gratitude, the last of which led to the grant of Seven Island.
For Wilkie, the unanswered question was why, of all things, they had asked for this particular archipelago when the American government decided to reward them. Less than three weeks after the ratification of the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War, the firm—not Elijah Hillsinger and Matthew Quick as individuals, but the incorporated firm of Hillsinger & Quick—had received, as a grant from the embryonic United States of America, not only Seven Island but also “any island dependency thereto that may be reached with a dry shirt at low tide.”
If, Wilkie thought, the firm was so prompt to acquire this particular wilderness above all else, then there must have been a business problem that Seven alone uniquely solved. It was impossible that in acquiring Seven the two men were projecting their family’s leisure needs forward one or two hundred years at a time when so many rational people, including George Washington himself, thought it was possible and even likely that the new republic would fail.
Wilkie imagined the partners expecting, or at least concerned about, a second war with an outraged and reloaded England, perhaps in league with an opportunistic naval power like the Spanish. The more Wilkie read, the more he believed that the Seven archipelago was, in effect, a palisade made out of tides. Cyrus had confirmed to Wilkie that, like the Jennings River, huge tides and unpredictable shallow points made the Seven thoroughfares especially dangerous for all but the smallest boats steered with the most complete local knowledge. Their fleet of unusual ships was designed to hide forever in the coves and rocks and murderous fog at the northeastern corner of the Seven archipelago, at the meeting point of North and Pulpit and Sisters and Baffin islands, until the redcoats went away or were stupid enough to come in after them. Gaining official title to these islands, then, was a way to guarantee their business—and to some extent their lives—against the future atavism of the British Empire. If the archipelago threw off some timber or grazing, or if the children enjoyed the odd picnic there, then so much the better; but, Wilkie concluded, the logic of Hillsinger and Quick’s vision had been wholly apocalyptic. Seven Island was a fortress built on auguries of eternal war.
11
Cyrus woke to see Sheila’s face six inches away from his.
“There were three,” Sheila said.
Martha was asleep next to him, so he pointed outside, and Sheila crept out of the room. The math was grim. If the ewe had produced multiple births, that would be a surprise and also a problem, since that particular ewe had two teats that were defective, out of four. At least one of the lambs must be dead, and given Sheila’s inexperience, it was entirely possible that all three were gone.
“How many did we lose?” he said.
“None.”
“Come again?”
“It’s just that there were three.”
“She’s only got the two good teats.”
“The third lamb is with Betsy.”
Cyrus stopped outside the Staff House, which lay halfway between the small Manager’s house and the barn.
“Betsy is a dog.”
“She’s nursing her own litter, so I just put the last one on her.”