by Chris Durbin
‘Then why the devil are you here, and not half-way to Harwich?’ exclaimed Sir Richard, cutting across the younger man’s explanation. ‘That’s clearly a contraband cargo for the French army.’
‘Unfortunately, sir, her bill of lading shows her cargo consigned to a Colonel Reutter in the Austrian army at Emden and the master is insistent that it’s therefore not contraband. I thought it best to consult you, sir. I have the bill here.’ Jensen was between the devil and the deep blue sea. He knew that his captain was anxious to take a prize and impatient to be away from the coast before dark, but this talk of Austria had unsettled him. The Austrian Empire was far away and had no navy; Jensen – no student of current affairs – didn’t even know whether they were friends or enemies.
Sir Richard studied the bill of lading in the diffused light from the setting sun that seeped through the stern windows. It looked authentic. Naturally, it was in Dutch, but he knew enough of the language to get its meaning, and it did appear that the entire cargo was destined for a detachment of the Austrian army at Emden. He knew that Britain and Austria weren’t formally at war. They’d chosen opposite sides in this conflict, but Britain was conducting the war against France at sea and in its colonies, while Austria was almost exclusively engaged in the east against Prussia. There was no good reason for the forces of the two empires to meet, and they had no quarrel with each other; they had therefore taken the rational decision to refrain from a declaration of war. Presumably this detachment – if the bill of lading was true – must have come from the Austrian Netherlands, that odd buffer state between France and the Dutch Netherlands. The Austrian garrison must be of significant size – a battalion or more – to require the whole cargo of this substantial vessel.
Now here was a pretty conundrum. If this was merely a ruse and there was no Austrian battalion at Emden, then he’d look foolish and would undoubtedly have to answer to their Lordships for letting this cargo slip between his fingers to sustain the French army through the winter. On the other hand, if he sent the bilander into Harwich for a prize court to determine its fate, and if they decided to send it on its way, then he could be personally liable at law for the loss of earnings that the vessel incurred. There had already been several disputes over the application of the Rule of 1756, which in its current interpretation allowed captains to take as prizes any neutral vessels carrying cargoes for the King’s enemies. He turned and gazed out of the stern windows at the Dutchman, lying easily under backed topsail just a cable to leeward. There was need for haste because the wind was veering into the west as the master foretold and with a flooding tide it would be difficult to claw off the coast.
‘Very well, Mister Jensen,’ he said with as much stoicism as he could muster. ‘Return to the bilander, retrieve the prize crew and wish the master a safe voyage with my compliments. I’ll keep the bill of lading, it may interest their Lordships. If the master asks for its return, pretend you don’t understand; he may damn well whistle for it.’
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1: Chance Encounter
Wednesday, Fourteenth of December 1757.
Kestrel, at Sea. Scillies East-Northeast 150 leagues.
George Holbrooke stared into the blackness to leeward. Somewhere out there, he was sure, the vast French convoy would be running before this westerly gale, as they had been when he’d glimpsed them just before the light faded on the previous evening. It was still an hour before sunrise, and the low cloud had killed any chance of a pre-dawn glow to illuminate the enemy. They could be much closer than he’d calculated; they could be just a couple of miles away, to be revealed with the dawn, too close for comfort. He had no ambitions to interfere with the convoy, it was too large and too well-protected, and in any case, he was carrying dispatches from Port Royal to the Admiralty in London and therefore charged with making the fastest passage possible. Holbrooke knew that the rule wasn’t absolute; for instance, if he’d met a lone French merchantman, he’d be forgiven – praised even – for taking a prize, so long as the delay was merely a matter of a few hours. No, the lookouts were straining to see the French convoy so that Kestrel could avoid it. With any luck, it would be to the south of the sloop’s planned track, and he wouldn’t have to change course.
Holbrooke knew this convoy well. He’d watched it leave Cape François on Saint Domingue’s northeast coast a month ago while in temporary command of the frigate Medina. He’d followed the French into the chokepoint of the Caicos Passage and distracted the escorts at the rear while two British privateers had taken handsome prizes. As a finale, he’d destroyed the French forty-four-gun L’Outarde on the reefs of Great Inagua Island. Since then he’d returned to Port Royal in Medina and in a whirlwind four days had been commissioned into Kestrel as her master and commander and sent home to England bearing news of the previous month’s victory at Cape François and the convoy’s departure. When he’d last seen the whole convoy in the Caicos Passage, the escorting ships-of-the-line had been stationed in the van, leaving the frigates to look after the rear. It was a wise deployment of the French commander’s forces, keeping his main strength concentrated to respond to a determined attack. However, it did leave the rear exposed and with such a large convoy – forty-one merchantmen, four ships-of-the-line and two frigates when Holbrooke had last seen them – communication between the van and the rear was necessarily difficult.
Holbrooke, therefore, hadn’t been looking for the convoy. Quite the opposite in fact; but there was an inevitability about their meeting. The winds and currents of the sea determined the routes across the vast oceans and the courses from the Caicos Passage for the English Channel and for Brest were almost identical. Moreover, the convoy could only proceed at the pace of the slowest merchantman, and even with its ten-day head start, the French West Indiamen were so slow that Kestrel could easily have overhauled them.
The French commander de Kersaint knew only too well and from bitter experience that any stragglers would soon be snapped up by a British cruiser or privateer. The French economy badly needed the injection of hard cash that would come from this rich cargo, and every ship-load would count. He had no choice but to make this painfully slow progress across the Atlantic.
Holbrooke’s problem was to avoid getting entangled with the convoy’s escorts while making the fastest passage possible to Portsmouth. But for now, he didn’t know exactly where they were in relation to Kestrel, and that information was critical in determining the course he should steer.
‘Masthead!’ shouted the first lieutenant, tilting his head to the complexity of wooden spars, sails and rigging that stretched away into the upper darkness. ‘What do you see?’
‘Nothing sir,’ came the disembodied reply. ‘It’s pitch-black to leeward still.’
Holbrooke looked on with approval. Charles Lynton knew that it was good policy to occasionally remind the lookouts of their duty, particularly when they were invisible from the quarterdeck. He also knew that it was best to save the captain from the need to intervene so that his weight of authority was reserved for when it was really needed.
It was a sparsely-manned quarterdeck, even for a sloop. Admiral Cotes at Port Royal had given Charles Lynton an acting commission and appointed him first lieutenant of Kestrel, and he’d moved a reasonably-experienced master’s mate into the sloop. However, there was no unemployed warranted sailing master available in all the Jamaica station, so the responsibility for navigation rested on Holbrooke’s shoulders. It made the unabridged, archaic wording on his letter of appointment a fact: Master and Commander. Holbrooke didn’t really mind as he felt quite confident in fixing the ship’s position in the emptiness of the North Atlantic, and he knew the southwestern approaches to the channel well enough. He could even take Kestrel to anchor at Spithead in safety, although he’d prefer to embark a pilot if he had to sail right into the harbour. The lack of a specialist navigator could be tolerated, but it left him short-handed in experienced officers-of-the-watch, and it was hard on Charles Lynton who had to keep a
watch as well as manage the ship.
In consequence, the few officers who populated the quarterdeck were dog-tired. Lynton had been on deck since midnight with only two hours of sleep before coming on watch, and the master’s mate was hardly in a better state. Holbrooke hadn’t left the deck all night; not with this skeleton team and so close to an overwhelming enemy force. Perhaps that’s why he’d been lured into so badly underestimating his enemy, or maybe it was the string of successes that he’d experienced against the French navy in his previous two frigates. Whatever the reason, when the urgent hail came from the masthead, it smashed through his complacency like a jet of icy water.
‘Sail! Sail on the larboard quarter!’
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Even before he turned, Holbrooke knew what he’d see. Hubris leads to Nemesis, his previous captain was fond of saying, and that was precisely the situation. It took only a quick glance. He didn’t need the telescope to confirm his worst fear: he’d been outwitted. Kestrel must have been seen last evening by one of the French frigates as she was silhouetted against the setting sun. That frigate – either Sauvage or Licorne, they were almost twins – had reported to the escort commander and had been ordered to set a trap. Or perhaps her captain had taken it upon his own initiative. Either way, the frigate must have stretched away to the north and spent the night under bare poles waiting for Kestrel to pass her. So here they were, trapped between the convoy and a fast French frigate. Kestrel’s sixteen six-pounders against her opponent’s thirty-two eight-pounders. They were hopelessly outmatched.
‘Helm up, Quartermaster,’ snapped Holbrooke. ‘Put the wind on your starboard beam.’
There was only one way out of this, and that was to reach to the south as fast as they could. The Frenchman was almost certainly the speedier ship, particularly in this gale, but at least Kestrel could have the wind on her beam. In this sea, the larger ship would have a decided advantage if the wind was on her bow, while by reaching they’d be more nearly equal. Southward it must be, but that would place the French frigate and the convoy between the sloop and her destination. Kestrel would have to work around to the west and then turn east when the danger had passed, but meanwhile, with a week to go to the solstice, they had only eight hours of daylight to survive, and until Holbrooke had a better plan, south was undoubtedly the right course.
The two steersmen leaned back on the tiller, their feet gripping the battens that had been fastened to the deck for just this purpose, and Kestrel came swiftly to starboard. With the hollow sea at the tail-end of this winter gale, and with the wind squarely on her beam, the sloop pitched and rolled alarmingly. Holbrooke and Lynton exchanged glances. The same waves were hitting both the frigate and the sloop – the Frenchman had turned south in pursuit of Kestrel – but the much larger frigate was sailing quite comfortably while Kestrel was labouring badly and the strain on her weather shrouds was intense. It only took a few minutes to confirm that they were being overtaken by their faster pursuer.
‘This won’t do Mister Lynton,’ said Holbrooke. He was furious with himself for allowing the French captain to out-think him. He knew that he should have guessed that he’d been seen and with such a strong escort de Kersaint could afford to detach one of his frigates to set a trap. Now he had some hard decisions to make. In the eight hours of light that was left to the Frenchman, Kestrel had to keep out of range of her eight-pound guns. The best way to achieve that was to put the wind on the sloop’s quarter where the frigate’s speed advantage would be minimised; that would require a course of south-east or thereabouts. However, there were two disadvantages with that heading: first, it was the wrong direction for the Channel and would add at least a day to their passage, possibly more if the wind veered after the gale had blown out, which was quite likely, and secondly, it would take Kestrel dangerously close to the French convoy which would surely be in sight soon. The French frigate was blocking any escape to the north and west.
‘Deck ho!’ shouted the masthead lookout, as though he’d read Holbrooke’s thoughts. ‘Sails two points for’rard of the larboard beam, lots of ‘em. It looks like the convoy, sir.’
‘Very well,’ answered Holbrooke, his voice cracking as he projected his reply up to the masthead in the teeth of the gale. ‘Let me know when you identify the men-of-war.’
Sighting the convoy changed nothing, it just confirmed what he already guessed. The French ships were a little further north than he’d expected, but that merely tightened the noose on Kestrel. It made the sloop’s present heading even more certainly correct, in the circumstances. If they could only stay ahead of the Frenchman until dark, he could escape into the sanctuary of the night. Holbrooke could see that it was possible; they were being overtaken, but only slowly. When the light faded at the end of this day they could be fighting for their lives, or equally they could be sailing away into the friendly southern darkness.
‘Deck Ho! I can see another frigate to larboard, sir. She’s to the south of the merchantmen. I can’t see the ships-of-the-line yet.’
‘Who’s the lookout Mister Lynton? I don’t recognise the voice.’
‘It’s Shepherd, sir, if you please,’ replied the first lieutenant.
That was useful to know. Shepherd was an old Medina. He’d seen this convoy and escort as it left Cape François heading for the Caicos Passage. He could be trusted to recognise the second frigate, the twin, very nearly, of the one that was pursuing them.
‘Captain sir,’ shouted Shepherd again. ‘Can I come down to report?’
Holbrooke wondered what on earth the lookout could have to say that he couldn’t shout from the masthead. It wasn’t like Shepherd to shirk his duty, so it must be something important.
‘Send up a relief Mister Lynton.’
Shepherd slid down the backstay and arrived on the quarterdeck looking as though he’d just stepped from a fixed staircase; he was hardly out of breath. Holbrooke was confident aloft, but he knew that he could never achieve the sangfroid of these experienced topmen. Shepherd was a self-assured man of about twenty, and he wasn’t overawed by the gentry of the quarterdeck. In Medina, he’d been thought to be close to crossing the invisible border into insubordination, but a sloop was a very different matter to a frigate and discipline was necessarily less strict.
‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ said the topman, knuckling his forehead as he swayed easily to the motion of the ship. ‘I’m almost certain that the frigate to windward is the same one that was guarding the tail of the convoy back in the Windies. I can just see her white stripe above the gunports.’
Holbrooke considered the sailor carefully. They were about the same age and as boys wouldn’t have been so far apart in social class. It was the commander’s good fortune that his father had obtained him a place in the naval academy at the same time as Shepherd was volunteering as a landsman in the fourth-rate Canterbury. Otherwise, their positions could easily have been exchanged; Holbrooke had no illusions about superior intelligence or any other supposed virtue that separated them. It was just the chance of birth.
‘You’ve good eyesight then Shepherd?’
‘Aye, sir. The best in the ship I reckon.’
‘Thank you,’ said Holbrooke. ‘If your eyesight is so good then I need you back at the masthead.’
‘Aye-aye sir,’ replied the able seaman with a grin as he turned and ran forward to ascend the starboard shrouds.
‘If that’s Sauvage, then we know she’s game, Mister Lynton. It took a signal from the flag to recall her to her duty the last time she chased us. Of course, her captain doesn’t know he’s up against you and I again, and perhaps we can use that to our advantage.’
‘Aye, sir,’ replied the first lieutenant. ‘It’s unlikely that he’ll ever have seen this sloop before, either as Torenvalk or Kestrel.’
‘The second frigate will be Licorne,’ Holbrooke added. ‘Her captain was much less enterprising when we last met.’
Holbrooke stood right aft against the taffrail holding the b
ackstay against the wild lurching as the sloop ran across the sea. It was none of his business to engage a thirty-two-gun frigate, and nobody would think the worse of him for declining to fight. He had a fair chance of keeping his distance from Sauvage until nightfall, and in this weather, with a convoy to protect, the frigate would surely haul off and rejoin the escort. But Holbrooke was also very much aware that he was being pushed to the south when his fastest heading for the Channel and Portsmouth was somewhat to the north of east. If he let the frigate chase him for the next eight hours, he could be a whole day late – or more – in delivering his dispatches.
There was another factor, one that he couldn’t even share with his first lieutenant, although Lynton must be able to guess his line of thinking. Holbrooke was an acting commander; he’d been promoted by the commander-in-chief of the Jamaica Squadron, but his commission was subject to confirmation by their Lordships. It was the talk of Port Royal at the time because Holbrooke had only been a lieutenant for less than eighteen months and there was a strong suspicion that he’d been commissioned below the minimum age. There were far more senior men waiting for this opportunity. He was proud of his rapid advancement, but it did leave his promotion vulnerable to being rescinded. If he were deemed to have failed in his first mission – to deliver the dispatches in a timely manner – then that would be all the excuse that their Lordships needed. The most cursory examination of Kestrel’s logbook would reveal the truth about this unfortunate delay.
There must be a host of senior lieutenants – many with political or family connections – who were ready for the step up to the command of a sloop and the rank of commander that went with it. If he failed today – if he was pushed far to the south and consequently delivered his dispatches later than he should – then it would take a miracle for his promotion to be confirmed. He’d be back as a very junior lieutenant, posted as fourth or fifth of a ship-of-the-line and waiting his turn for another chance to prove himself fit for command. This war wouldn’t last forever, and it was an even chance that he’d still be a lieutenant when it ended. That was a very unappealing future.