They proceed back down the Ferry Branch as they came, along the farther shore from McHenry, whose gunners now lose them in the darkness and cease their fire. It looks as though Captain Napier, against all probability, will complete his assignment without casualties. Andrew tests the water with his hand: very warm in the cool night air. “We must signal the fleet we’re coming,” he whispers to the lieutenant, “or they’ll take us for Yankees,” and without asking permission he snatches up the launcher and fires a rocket to the Surprize. As he intends, it is seen at once by the Fort McHenry gunners as well as by the fleet. The lieutenant wrestles him down; the world explodes; the boat beside them goes up in shouts and splinters. All the batteries of Fort McHenry let loose, and flights of British rockets and bombshells respond. Andrew gets to his knees in the bilges among the straining, swearing oarsmen. His last sights are of the lieutenant scrambling for a pistol to shoot him with; of Major Armistead’s cannon-riddled storm flag — sodden and limp, but lit by the shellbursts over the McHenry ramparts — and of a misaimed Congreve whizzing their way, some piece of which (or of oar, or of gunwale) strikes him smartly abaft the right temple, just over the ear, as he dives into the bath-warm river.
He will wake half tranced some days or hours later, knowing neither where he is nor how he came there (Marvelous to relate, by a series of bonnes chances he is in the house of none other than the merchant William Patterson. Betsy’s elsewhere, avoiding Baltimore and making ready to return with nine-year-old Jérôme Junior to Europe, now that war’s done. Her father, after making a tour of his beloved city on the morning of the 15th, has volunteered his house to shelter the wounded defenders, for one of whom, by reason of his civilian clothes, Andrew was mistaken by the Fort McHenry garrison when they found him on the shore that same dull dawn). As he can neither say nor see now what he will piece together in the days to come, you sing it, Muse, if you can reach that high: how F. S. Key, that leaden A.M., has glassed Mary Pickersgill’s 17-by-25-foot $168.54 auxiliary stars and bars, standing out now in a rising easterly, and has shared the good news with his companions. How their joy increases through the morning at the retirement of the bomb ships and frigates downriver to the main anchorage, and at the obvious preparations on North Point for the army’s return. How in his elevation Key hums the English drinking tune he’d used for his ode to the Tripoli chaps, and searches vainly for something stirring to rhyme with stripes—or for that matter with flag, McHenry, Armistead, or Sam Smith. Not Cook’s graven/raven, certainly: he will entertain that word no more. He slaps about his person for paper to make a list on, and fishes forth the turncoat’s letter; is at first repelled by the notion of employing such compromised foolscap to so patriotic a purpose, stars wars bars, fight night sight, but comes soon to savor the paradox, Baltimore evermore nevermore? Dum dee dum dum dum dum: anapestic tetrameters actually, one quatrain and a pair of couplets, abab cc dd, feminine endings on the b lines, plus an internal rhyme to perk up the fifth line, he unfolds the sheet to see what the rascal wrote after all and reads
O Francis Scott Key,
Turn the bolt on our plight! Open wide Music’s door; see her treasure there gleaming! Golden notes bar on bar — which some more gifted wight than Yours Truly must coin into national meaning. For the United States of America’s fate hitherto’s to have been, in the arts, 2nd-rate. We’ve an army & a navy; we’re a country (right or wrong): but we’ve yet to find our voice in some national song!
ABC
Surprised to find it an apparently earnest, unironic exhortation (he has thought only to write some local sort of ode, for the Baltimore press perhaps), Key rereads the letter, Anacreon dum-dee-dumming in his head—et voilà. By the time Andrew is enough himself to leave Baltimore, the lyrics of Defense of Fort M’Henry have been run off in handbill form, rerun by the Baltimore Patriot & Evening Advertiser, re-rerun by presses in other towns, taken up by the tavern crowd; by the time he reaches New Orleans, Americans from Castine (Maine) to Barataria are straining their high registers for the rockets’ red glare and the la-and of the free, and have given Key’s anthem a different title.
