As my “Evens” mates and I were hurrying in one direction towards the harbour, archers who were “Odds” were also double-timing the other way, coming towards us. We were passing in the rain because our captains were moving their men from where there were no functioning bridges and fighting to where the Greeks had gotten ladders across the moat and were trying to climb them, at least that was what they told us as we went past them. Sometimes the men coming from where there had been no fighting still had dry strings under their caps and in their pouches.
By the time we reached the place where the wall turned and began to run along close to the shoreline of the sea, the rain was really pouring down hard. All my mates and I knew for sure at that point was that none of the Greeks had reached the top of the wall along the parts we had just run past on our way to our galleys. Not yet, at least.
Chapter Thirty-five
The Venetians are coming.
“Hoy the deck. Captain Spencer, there be a shite pot full of Venetian galleys in the strait and they be coming fast.”
I immediately gave the order “Cast off and get underway” in response to the lookout’s warning report of the on-coming Venetian fleet. It turned my coin-collecting galley into an absolute frenzy of activity.
The men of my crew were mostly sailors and volunteers from the city since all of our archers were on the wall. But they understood what was at stake—their lives and freedom if the Venetians caught us and the lives and freedom of their mates at the Company’s harbour if we did not get the word to them in time for them to get ready to fight.
Our alert horn blower immediately began tooting and everyone in the crew rushed to their assigned places—the rowers to their seats on the rowing decks and the sailors to raise the sails. The rowing drum began a beat that got faster and faster as we picked up speed, and my sailors began raising every sail they could crowd on to both our galley’s main mast and its smaller forward mast.
We pushed off from the transport whose tolls we had been collecting and were underway and picking up speed in less than a minute. I had rushed up the mast to see the Venetians for myself, shouting orders to get underway as I did, and was back at my place on the roof of the stern castle a few moments later as our oars began to bite into the water and we surged forward. A few minutes later I moved forward to the roof of the forward deck castle. I did so as soon as I was sure there was no immediate threat coming up behind us.
It was literally a matter of life and death that we got underway quickly as soon as possible after the alarm was raised. Our mates at the galley harbour would need time to get ready to fight off the Venetians—and we wanted them to be ready because we would be going ashore and joining them in the Company’s battle ranks as soon as we arrived.
My rowers pulled with a will. Many of them were sailors who had made their marks on the Company’s roll. They understood why we had to reach our under-crewed galleys to sound the alarm before the Venetians reached the harbour where the Company’s galleys were anchored and pulled ashore. They also understood that we had to get there enough ahead of the Venetians so that our mates back at the harbour would have enough time to get to their weapons and be ready to fight to save them.
My crew had no slackers even though my lieutenant and I were the only archers on board now that every archer in our regular crew was serving on the walls. Every man was an experienced rower, and every man was pulling with a will as we surged away from the Moorish transport that had stopped to pay its tolls. I called for a runner to bring me my bow just in case. One never knew when an opportunity might come along.
Commander Lewes had warned us about the possibility of a Venetian sally coming through the Dardanelles, and we had deliberately been given a substantial number of extra rowers so we could get to the city before the Venetians did and sound the alarm. As a result, every oar on my galley had two men pulling it and there were more men squatting in the aisle between the benches ready to take their place when they needed to go for a drink of water or take a brief rest.
We quickly left the slave-rowed Venetians so far behind that they could not be seen without climbing to the top of our main mast.
Only one thing was certain so far as I was concerned—there was no way the slave-rowed Venetians could catch us once we were underway and ahead of them. What was uncertain was whether we would get to Constantinople in time for our mates to get themselves properly ready to fight to save the Company’s galleys.
******
I did not know how far the Venetians were behind us as we rowed for Constantinople. All I knew for sure after the first few hours was that they were no longer in sight. There was little wonder in that—despite the heat, and then the rain storm which we entered, we had pulled hard all the way and made very good time.
The crews of the other sails we passed, both coming and going, rushed to their decks and gaped as we went flying past them. Some of them waved and tried to hail us. They probably never had seen a galley moving so fast in these waters. The more experienced of them probably knew something was up.
Indeed, our need for speed was so great that both Lieutenant Williams and I, and the sailing sergeant too, took a turn at the oars. We rowed so the men would understand the importance of getting to the harbour as soon as possible to sound the alarm. My painful blisters were a small price to pay for encouraging the men to keep putting everything they had into their rowing.
It was pouring rain and the one lookout we had aloft was waving the “enemy in sight” flag even though we could not actually see them. We were still rowing hard when we entered the little harbour in front of the city wall. It was the harbour where some of our galleys were beached and the rest were anchored with only minimal crews on board.
I was standing on the roof of the forward castle shouting the rudder instructions to the rudder men on the steering oar as we entered the harbour. Bill Meadows, my sailing sergeant, who normally would have giving the rudder orders, was in the bow nervously sergeanting the three strong-armed sailors who had been assigned to throw the tow lines ashore.
Normally we would have thrown just one line ashore. Not today. We needed to get all the way ashore and fast. Hopefully there would be men on the shore waiting to place rollers under our bow and help pull us out of the water. That, at least, was the plan.
As soon as the tow lines were thrown, Sailing Sergeant Meadows and some of his men would jump into the surf and begin pulling on the lines to keep the galley’s bow pointed towards where we want it to go when it slid up on to the strand. Others of them would run for the rounded rollers waiting nearby and begin placing them under the hull so the galley could roll over them and be quickly pulled all the way out of the water.
Hopefully some of the men on shore would join in to help pull us up on to the strand alongside galleys that were already there. That was the plan, but we could not count on them.
Everything was as ready as it could be for our galley to come up on to the strand and keep on going on the rollers until it was all the way out of the water. The rowers, once their oars were no longer in the water would first run to the stern to weigh it down and, in so doing, lift the bow up so we could get further ashore before we touched.
Once the galley touched the strand and stopped moving forward, the entire crew, including me, would run forward and jump into the surf and onto the strand to lighten the galley and help pull it further forward until it was all the way out of the water.
In all my years with the Company it was the fastest I had ever been moving when my galley entered a harbour. As a result, Sergeant Matthews was nervous and we were moving much too fast as we approached the place on the strand where we were supposed to pull our galley out of the water.
Men who were already on the strand had stopped doing what they were doing to watch. We could see by their tunics that they were mostly Company sailors. Someone must have said something for a moment later they all began running towards us to help pull us ashore.
A second or so later I gave the
orders to change our speed.
“ROWERS STAND BY TO BACK OARS” … “BACK OARS.” … “PULL” … “PULL.” …
There was a great scraping noise and much shouting from my crew as the bow of our galley reached the strand and began sliding up on to it. The sudden slowing as the galleys hull first touched bottom almost threw me off my feet.
A few moments later more than a hundred shouting men, including me and all the sailors and rowers, even the rudder men, made a mad dash for the stern bow, and stayed there until the galley stopped moving forward. Then, with much shouting we all ran to the bow jumped down into the surf and on to the strand and began pulling on the lines that had been cast ashore as soon as the galley stopped moving forward. Men on the strand were already picking up and pulling on the thrown tow lines to help pull us further ashore.
I had been satisfied with myself and breathed a great sigh of relief as I jumped down on to the strand, and twisted my ankle as I did. My galley had sounded the alarm and come ashore acceptably close to our assigned position. We might lose the coming battle with the Venetians, but as I grabbed the tow line to help pull I felt as though I had done all I could to prevent the loss.
Captain Spencer was wrong about having done all he could to prevent a Venetian victory. But no one knew it at the time.
****** Lieutenant Commander Harold Lewes.
The Venetians must have scheduled their sea attack on our idled galleys to occur on the same day as the Orthodox army assaulted the outer wall and the city rose. They were all almost certainly planned to occur at the same time because it meant the archers of the galleys who were manning the walls would be pinned down and unable to come to their galleys’ rescue. What neither they nor we had anticipated was that it might rain on that day.
It was about then that we began to understand the reason the Greeks had placed their bridges in the night, and then delayed their attacks—they knew the Venetian galleys would need many hours of daylight to get clear of the Dardanelles strait and row all the way to Constantinople. It was the benefits the Greeks and Venetians hoped to gain from attacking at the same time, not the rain, that explained why the Greek army had waited until early in the afternoon to launch its attack against the wall.
Richard Ryder was with me at the harbour. He was in command of the sailor men who would fight on land if the Venetians tried to attack the galleys we had pulled ashore. He had been training them to do so every day for more than three weeks, ever since every available archer was summoned to man the walls.
It was Richard’s idea to pull all of our floating galleys ashore at the last moment so they would be easier to defend against an attack by sea—and a damn fine idea it was.
Our toll-collecting captains and their crews had been on high alert at the entrance to the Dardanelles strait for several weeks, ever since word had been received that the Orthodox Army was on the move. Their galleys had been from amongst our fastest and they had also been sent out with extra rowers so there would be at least two rowers available to pull on every oar with a good number of spare rowers as well.
We first knew the Venetians were actually coming when one of the lookouts on the mast of Galley 43, our toll-collecting galley at the mouth of the Dardanelles, sighted them coming through the narrow strait alerted his captain. The captain of the galley, one of our fastest, a good man by the name of Mark Spencer, had quickly gotten his galley under way and rowed hard in order to bring us a timely warning.
Captain Spencer had not stopped to count the Venetians sails coming through the Dardanelles, and rightly so, but he thought there were at least twenty of them. He had a head start and his crew rowed hard. They were able to give us a good twenty minutes of advance warning before the first of the Venetians reached us. That was almost enough time for us to finish putting into effect our plan to fight the Venetians on land, instead of at sea, if and when their fleet of war galley attacked in force.
Our main problem, the reason we decided to pull all our galleys ashore, was that almost all of their archers were fighting on the walls; our main advantage was that a Venetian attack had been expected and we had had almost a month to make the various preparations needed to give them a very unfriendly welcome.
One of our early preparations was to pull some of our galleys, those with the deepest drafts, all the way up on to the strand so we could fight on land to keep them from being destroyed or taken as prizes. The galleys with the shallowest drafts, on the other hand, were emptied as much as possible and placed in a row across the harbour entrance so they would appear to be in a defensive line.
We anchored the shallow draft galleys in a row after we did everything possible to lighten them so they would be easier to pull out of the water. Then we attached long tow lines to their bows so their anchor lines could be chopped and they could be quickly pulled ashore without having to wait for rowers to go on board. We also had rollers, rounded logs with their bark stripped off by our sailors, ready to be placed under their hulls so the lightened galleys could be brought well up on to the strand.
Our hope was that the Venetians would get reports from their spies that there were a dozen Company galleys at anchor in a defensive line that closed off most of the mouth of the little harbour that had been assigned to us, and perhaps twice that many of our galleys pulled up on the strand with some of the Company’s poxed and wounded men on board for barbering, but without their crews.
In other words, what we hoped was that, if and when the Venetians came to join the battle for the city, they would arrive expecting to have to fight a sea battle with our galleys blocking the harbour entrance—and be surprised to find that they would have to fight on land if they wanted to take or destroy them whilst their crews were fighting on the city’s walls. What we also hoped was that deciding what to do next would delay the Venetians from coming ashore to attack us long enough for reinforcements to arrive from where the galleys’ archers were stationed along the wall.
Forcing the Venetians to come ashore to fight us was not the only thing we could think to do to get ready, but it was amongst the most important
****** Lieutenant Commander Harold Lewes
The very first thing I did upon seeing the high-speed approach of our toll-collecting galley waving its “enemy in sight” flag was order everyone to turn out to help pull ashore the galleys anchored in the harbour. I also send immediately sent a galloper with a warning message to Commander Courtenay on the wall.
And then, a few minutes later, as soon as Richard and I heard Captain Spencer’s breathless report and knew we were badly outnumbered and in for a real fight, we sent three messengers, one right after the other, two galloping and one running, to the Commander asking for all the help he could send to us from the archers fighting on the walls.
We sent three messengers, instead of the usual one and a backup, in order to emphasize the seriousness of the situation.
My sailors had all been trained to fight at sea using swords and shields. It was required of all our sailors. And Richard had spent the better part of the previous month putting even more learning on them about how to move about and fight on land with their mates by their sides.
Man for man, because they had been trained to fight alongside the archers, our sailors had always been better fighters than the Moorish pirates and, perhaps, as good or better the Venetian soldiers and sailors who manned their galleys and sometimes helped their slaves and convicts with the rowing.
Now, of course, the sailors at the harbour were even better fighters as a result of Richard’s efforts. But they were still not real fighting men and we were about to be badly outnumbered if the Venetians actually came ashore, which seemed likely.
The Venetians, on the other hand, would be fighting on land where they had absolutely no fighting experience or training. Even so, they were likely to outnumber us and might well overwhelm us by their sheer force of numbers and take or destroy our galleys. It was something we were determined to prevent.
There was also no q
uestion about our need for more men to help defend our galleys if Captain Spencer was right about the size of the Venetian fleet. Twenty galleys full of Venetians were just too many for our sailors to hold off without reinforcements.
We had to have them, the reinforcements that is, or we risked losing most of our galleys, and perhaps the entire Company. There was no doubt about it, we would be in deep shite if some or all of the archers who had been detached from their galleys to help defend the city were not quickly returned to us.
It took us more than twenty minutes to get ready for the Venetians despite all of our preparations and practices. As a result, the last two of the galleys that had been anchored across the front of the harbour were still being hurriedly pulled up on to the strand when the first Venetian galleys cautiously made their way through the harbour entrance. It was raining when they did.
The two Venetians came in a bit too cautiously, actually. That may or may not have been a good sign. It probably meant their captains were aware of fighting abilities of English archers as a result of the losses their fleet had taken lately. Their spies had almost certainly reported that their archers were helping guard the walls. But spies were often wrong and the Venetian captains were taking no chances.
If the Venetian captains had known for sure that we only had a single file of seven archer sergeants at the harbour helping to teach the sailors to fight on land, they probably would have behaved differently and come straight at us. Unfortunately, the fact that we were short of archers was something they would know soon enough if we did not get reinforcements before they attacked.
Indeed, had the Venetian thrusters dashed forward they might well have been able to take the last two or three of our galleys, those that were still being pulled up on to the strand. But they did not. They were flummoxed and overbalanced by not finding our galleys in the harbour where they had been told to expect them and fight them.
The Alchemist's Revenge Page 25