Bernard Cornwell’s The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War is not strictly speaking nautical fiction but does focus on an ill-fated expedition that ended as the worst American naval defeat prior to Pear Harbor.

At first glance, The Fort has all the elements of good historical fiction. The American revolutionary war remains a popular topic. The historical events in the book are not well known. The novel shows a well known historical figure, in this case, Paul Revere, in a wholly new light. Perhaps most importantly, the tale is told by a skilled writer. USA Today described Cornwell as the “reigning king of historical fiction” and I would be loathe to disagree. Nevertheless, The Fort is somewhat disappointing.

After being driven from Boston in 1776, the British had no permanent base between Rhode Island and Halifax, Nova Scotia. In March of 1779, a British force of about seven hundred landed on a peninsula that was then called Majabigwaduce (now Castine) in what is now Maine, and set about building the fort from which Cornwell’s novel takes its name. The Americans quickly dispatched an armada of over forty ships under the command of Dudley Stallston and roughly one thousand militia and marines commanded by militia General Solomon Lovell.   Instead of sweeping the British from the still uncompleted fort, the American commanders dithered and fought amongst themselves.  The Americans delayed long enough to allow a squadron of Royal Navy ships to trap them in Penobscot Bay. The American fleet was driven up the Penobscot River where the ships were burned or captured. The militia and the ship’s crews were forced to flee into the wildernesses with little food or supplies.

What should have been an easy victory became a rout. The largest naval expedition of the revolutionary war became the greatest naval defeat of that conflict and every of other war up until World War II.  Nevertheless, the outcome of the battle had no effect whatsoever on the outcome of the revolutionary war.

One problem with the novel is that there are no real villains or heroes. Lovell is an amiable incompetent while Salston is arrogant and more prudent, or timid, depending on one’s perspective, than a naval commander should be. The closest thing to villainy to be found is that of Paul Revere, who comes across as lazy, inept and a bit cowardly. The “heroes” are more “nice guys” or well meaning professionals, who, no doubt, would be capable of heroics if the situation called upon it, which in this case it doesn’t.  A young British lieutenant in the novel, John Moore, would later go on to fame and glory, dying as a general in the Battle of Corunna in 1809.   Coincidentally,  Moore was memorialized in a famous poem by Charles Wolfe,  just as Paul Revere was made famous in  poem by Longfellow.

In some respects, Cornwell is as trapped as the American fleet in Penobscot Bay. The history of the American revolution is part of the creation myth of this country and cannot be easily tampered with by a historical novelist to increase the dramatic arc of a book. In any case, Cornwell generally sticks very closely to the history in his novels. Cornwell can not make the antagonists or the sequence of events anything but what history records them to be. The Americans forces were poorly led. The British were not. The battle was a waste of blood and treasure and yet was of no real consequence, except to those who died or suffered losses their purses or to their reputations.

As a dramatization of an historical event, The Fort works well. The problem is simply that not all history, even the dramatic history described in The Fort makes for good historical fiction. Cornwell is true to the history. The problem is that the novel, like history itself unfolds like a slow motion train wreck.  The outcome is clear but it takes a while for the disaster to unfold.