by Seth Hunter
The only thing that cheered him was the weather. It had closed in almost as soon as they cleared the harbour, and instead of becoming lighter as the day went by, the sky appeared to be darkening by the minute. The rain had increased in density, and visibility was down to little more than a couple of hundred yards. Peering into the murk on his starboard quarter, Nathan could see nothing of either Algeciras or the Spanish coast, not even the light at the end of the mole. Although this was very much to his advant age so far as the gunboats were concerned, he would have liked some visual reference before he came round onto the opposite tack. If he turned too soon there was a danger of running onto the Point – an embarrassment which would have made him the laughing-stock of the Navy, if he was unfortunate enough to survive the encounter.
He left it as late as possible, in the hope of seeing the merest glimmer of light from the shore. He could feel the tension in the crew, for even the most lubberly among them knew they were heading straight for the Spanish coast, and when he finally gave the order – and it was executed rather better than he had expected – he gave an inward sigh of relief.
And at that precise moment, just as they were heeling to starboard, there was a startled cry from one of the lookouts and Nathan whipped his head round to see the beak of a massive ship of the line bearing down on them out of the rain, a great red cross emblazoned on her foresail like the curse of God.
For a moment he stood transfixed. The vast spread of canvas seemed to envelop him. He felt like a tiny rodent as some giant predator descends on him from the skies. She was so close he could see every detail of her figurehead: a saintly apparition with fanatical eyes that seemed to bore into his own, the specks of rain and spray on his black beard, the golden cross brand ished in both hands and a bishop’s mitre balanced ridiculously on his head.
Time stood still. The apparition did not.
‘Port your helm!’
Nathan could hear his voice shouting the command, even before his brain began to properly engage with the problem. It was a phrase that came instinctively to mind, as it did to all officers in the King’s Navy, though it had long been rendered invalid by the introduction of the wheel.
‘Port your helm’ meant putting the tiller to port – or larboard. Which would turn the ship in the opposite direction. But modern ships did not have a tiller. They had a wheel, which was connected to the rudder by a system of cables and pulleys so ingenious that if you turned the wheel to starboard, you also turned the ship to starboard. It was nothing short of miraculous, and the Admiralty, lacking an understanding of miracles, had issued no instructions on the subject. Every quartermaster in the Navy knew that ‘Port your helm!’ meant ‘Turn to starboard’. What was the point in changing it?
The trouble, in this instance, was that the quartermaster of the Swallow was a Portuguese called Apolinario, and though he was an able seaman and possessed many excellent qualities, including a reasonable knowledge of English, his knowledge of this subtlety was less than perfect.
Possibly he thought Nathan had made a mistake. Possibly the word ‘port’ evoked in his mind the image of the fortified wine for which his country was justifiably famous. Possibly he had been told the true meaning of the word by Tully but had forgotten. But for whatever reason, he did not respond to Nathan’s urgent command as rapidly as might have been desired. He stood staring from Nathan to the oncoming vessel in a kind of fascinated horror.
It was Tully who saved them. With an animal cry he leaped at the immobile helmsman, shouldered him from his station, and spun the wheel.
Slowly, painfully slowly, the bows came round. Far, far too late. Nathan watched helplessly as the gap between the two ships narrowed. Other details became apparent. The double row of gunports. The twin red stripes on the black hull, like the markings on some exotic insect. The men aloft and alow staring with the same horrified intensity as Nathan had seen on the face of the hapless Apolinario. The large red and yellow flag of Spain at her stern. The cluster of officers mouthing what might have been curses or prayers.
They missed her by a good few feet, though for a moment Nathan thought the bowsprit was going to pass straight through her stern lantern, and was almost disappointed when it did not. He heard himself utter a strange, barking laugh. Checked himself. And with clownish aplomb turned, bowed, and doffed his hat to the Spanish officers. That and the Stars and Stripes convinced them. He heard the word ‘Americano’, accompanied by several others he did not understand but which were almost certainly impolite. He saw the name of her fanatical saint emblazoned across her stern. San Leandro. Then she was gone into the mist and the rain.
Nathan stood gazing after her for some minutes, waiting to see if she would turn. But she did not. She must have been on her way into Algeciras, beating into the wind as the Swallow had on her route out of Gibraltar. He let out a sigh.
‘Well, that was a close one,’ said Imlay, coming up to him and peering into his face suspiciously and not a little anxious, as if to assure himself that Nathan was still awake and capable of making a rational decision.
Nathan gave a curt nod. He looked about him. Apolinario was back at the helm. Tully was reminding him, with emphatic gestures, of the meaning of certain key phrases in the King’s English, or at least its maritime equivalent.
Nathan caught the eye of the sailing master, who was looking at least as anxious as Imlay.
‘Very well, Mr Cribb,’ he told him, ‘you may set a course for Algiers.’
They appeared to have missed hitting Europa Point, and so far as he knew there were no other hazards to navigation between here and Africa – besides those they carried aboard.
Chapter Twelve
The Innkeeper of Algiers
‘No! I will have no more figs!’
Nathan glared down at the overloaded bumboat bobbing beneath his starboard quarter. It contained a very large Arab woman, a very small Arab boy, and a very great quantity of dried fruit. Or decaying vegetable matter; it was hard to tell.
He knew he was sounding like a petulant child, but an hour or so’s conversation with the itinerant traders of Algiers had done nothing to improve his temper. Above a score of bumboats pressed in on both sides of the Swallow, jostling against each other and subjecting the pristine paintwork of the ship’s hull to grievous insult as their occupants engaged in similar transactions with members of the crew – these being conducted in several different tongues at extreme volume and involving a consider able range of goods, mostly edible, though Nathan would have been extremely surprised if women did not figure in them somewhere. He had no doubt that the scene below decks resembled something from Dante’s vision of Upper Hell – or the average seaman’s vision of Lower Paradise – as it did whenever a ship-of-war moored off a sizeable port and declared itself open for trade.
‘Tell her I have enough figs to clear the bowels of Behemoth,’ Nathan instructed the dragoman who had been assigned to them by the American Consul in Algiers in the hope, as this gentleman unfortunately put it, that ‘it would ease their passage’.
The dragoman frowned over the exact translation of Nathan’s directive, but whatever he said it seemed to do the trick. After some muttering, the woman reached under her skirts and produced a live hen which she held up for their inspection.
‘Bit skinny,’ Nathan told the dragoman begrudgingly. ‘Ask her how much.’
They embarked upon another round of negotiations. Normally Nathan would not have jeopardised the dignity of his office in such a manner, but with the purser, the steward, and even the cook ashore with Imlay, he had no other option if he wished to purchase a private stock of supplies while he still had the chance. Since leaving Gibraltar he had been dependent upon Imlay’s hospitality, for it had been impossible to obtain anything from the Rock in its present state of siege, and he had a natural reluctance to partake of the supplies of salt beef, pork, pease and oatmeal that were issued to the hands. Imlay had characteristically laid in a sufficient stock of delicacies for himself whi
le at Lisbon, but Nathan was equally loath to rely upon his charity for the duration of the voyage. For the same reason he had declined to accept Imlay’s offer of remuneration at the inflated rate he was offering the rest of the crew, preferring to maintain his dignity as a frigate captain in the King’s Navy on a paltry 11 pounds and 4 shillings a month.
Fortunately, General O’Hara had very generously advanced him the back pay due to him while he was a guest in the Governor’s prison and he had departed Gibraltar with seventy-five golden sovereigns jingling in his purse and a pocketful of loose change. He could afford the odd chicken.
The dragoman was addressing him. ‘She say do the Effendi want it dead or alive?’
Nathan considered. A live chicken was preferable. Then he did not have to consume it in the next day or two, and while it remained alive it might even contrive to lay a few eggs. But there was no designated Jemmy Ducks aboard the Swallow who could be relied upon to look after any live animals that were aboard, and if the hen disappeared into the maws of the ship he would never see it again; he would have to keep it in his own quarters. His dignity had suffered a great many setbacks in the past few months, but he did not think he could tolerate a live hen running about the Captain’s cabin, and Imlay might have words to say on the subject, besides.
‘Dead,’ he said, with reluctance.
He watched as the woman wrung its neck and accepted the offering with distaste before summoning one of the more reliable of the ship’s boys to take it down to his quarters. The dragoman asked him if there was anything else he would like, accompanying this suggestion with a significant wink. In fact, there was a great deal that Nathan would have liked, all of it edible, but he was weary of the effort required to obtain it. With a little luck the purser would have purchased a sufficient number of sheep, goats and bullocks during his foray in Algiers for them all to dine off fresh meat for the next day or two. After that, it was figs with everything.
He looked out across the still waters towards the port, about the distance of a long cannon shot off the Swallow’s starboard bow. Behind the ramparts of its enclosing walls, the domes and minarets gleamed in the late-afternoon sun. Other details were lost in a shimmering haze of heat.
Algiers. For all his service in the Med, this was Nathan’s first visit to the port. But with Spain in the French camp and most of Italy lost, it had become an important source of supply for the British fleet, and all officers were under strict instructions not to give offence to the Pasha-Dey, Baba Hussein. And the Pasha-Dey had duly supplied them with most of what they required, at rates that made his former occupation of piracy redundant.
But Imlay seemed to have no shortage of funds, for once. He had promised to supply the ship not only with fresh meat but also with the additional crew members Nathan required. Quite how remained a mystery. Doubtless there was the usual quota of unemployed seamen in the port, but they would almost certainly be Arab by race and Moslem by religion. Nathan had nothing against either as seamen or as people, but he was not sure how his Genoese and Portuguese crew members would take to them, their countrymen having suffered rather more than most over the years from the raids of the Algerine Corsairs. Nor was he at all sure that he could count on their loyalty if they were required to fight their fellow Moslems in the service of Yusuf Karamanli.
Imlay had simply told him ‘not to worry’.
He had been ashore for most of the day now, visiting the American Consul Mr Barlow – an acquaintance of his days in Paris. Barlow had helped to arrange the peace treaty between Algeria and the United States in ‘95. As a result of which, for a payment of about half a million dollars a year, American shipping was preserved from the raids of the Algerine corsairs, and the Swallow could, with impunity, sail into Algerine waters. Imlay had been characteristically cagey about Barlow’s role in the present dispute with the Pasha of Tripoli, but it seemed reasonable to suppose he was advising Imlay how to make a similar arrangement.
The only thing that Nathan was sure of was that there would be something in it for Imlay at the end of the day.
He took off his hat and wiped a handkerchief over his sweating brow. As this was a private command, he had dispensed with the King’s uniform for the duration of the voyage, but even in a cotton shirt and ducks he was still sweltering in the heat and there was not the slightest of breezes to alleviate his discomfort. If it was this warm in late April, he could only hope that he was not forced to linger off the Barbary Coast through the height of the summer. Though the heat, he anticipated, would be the least of his worries.
He gazed with displeasure along the crowded upper deck of the Swallow. Not only was it littered with baskets and bundles of produce – the result of the seamen’s negotiations – but diverse articles of apparel hung from washing lines erected between the mainmast and the foremast. The seamen them selves, or at least those who were not having a better time below decks, also hung about, in various stages of undress, taking the sun or otherwise amusing themselves. It would likely have been much the same aboard a King’s ship in similar circumstances, but Nathan felt strangely discomforted. There was something different about it from the usual disorder of a washday aboard the Unicorn, say, or any other ship-of-war in the King’s Navy. Perhaps because there were so few blue jackets and, more to the point, no red ones. No comforting Marine sentry at the con, turning the glass, or at the belfry ringing the bell, or guarding the entrance to his cabin with a loaded musket. And no master-at-arms keeping a wary eye on the sly peccadilloes of the crew. Nathan had been in the Navy since he was thirteen years old, and that sense of discipline, that sense of order, had insinuated itself into his mind to such an extent that when it was not there he felt a distinct sense of unease, almost of offence. Before his present assignment he would have said that he had a natural inclination to unorthodoxy. Now he was not so sure. He felt like a pirate captain – or Captain Bligh in the South Seas tending the simmering crucible of mutiny until it boiled over – and he did not like it.
A cry from the maintop, where Tully had set a watch, alerted him to the approach of another flotilla of small boats from the shore. He thought at first that they were more bum boats and was bracing himself for the invasion when he saw they were led by the ship’s launch, which had set off that morning with Imlay and his following. Hopefully, this was bringing them back, for Nathan was anxious for news. He recovered his Dolland glass from where he had hid it in the binnacle, safe from thieving hands, and focused it on the approaching vessel.
Sure enough, there was Imlay, and seated with him in the stern were two gentlemen Nathan had not seen before. One of them wore Arab dress, of no mean substance, from what Nathan could see at this distance, and nor was the man who wore it. He was not quite of Belli’s girth but not far short of it. The other man wore a tricorne hat and a blue uniform coat with a smattering of gold lace, so was either a naval officer or a consular official. He was not Joel Barlow, though, whom Nathan had met briefly when he himself was in Paris.
Nathan looked beyond them to the other boats in the flotilla and saw with some anticipation, but also a degree of foreboding, that two of them contained a number of live animals. There were at least half a dozen bullocks and a considerable flock of sheep – or goats, it was hard to tell at this distance – which would have to be accommodated on the Swallow’s crowded decks. The other boats seemed to be full of men.
He saw Tully already heading towards him, his face creased with concern.
‘Yes, Martin, see if you can clear the decks, will you,’ Nathan instructed him, suppressing a twinge of conscience, for this would be no mean feat with the men at Tully’s disposal, ‘and get rid of this lot.’ He waved a dismissive hand at the fleet of bumboats. ‘And we had better rig a tackle from the yards to haul the cattle aboard – and a pen to keep them in, until they are slaughtered.’
The next few hours were likely to be fraught, if his previous experience of loading live bullocks was anything to go by, but at least they would have a decent steak
to look forward to when they sat down to dinner instead of salt beef and pork.
‘Captain Turner, may I present to you His Royal Highness Prince Ahmed of Tripoli. Prince Ahmed, this is my very good friend, Captain Nathaniel Turner.’
Nathan removed his hat and executed a polite bow whilst striving to conceal his bewilderment. The Prince inclined his head graciously. He was a small, plump gentleman of between thirty and forty with a surprisingly pale complexion, a wisp of blond beard – and sad, rather protuberant blue eyes.
‘Brother of Yusuf Pasha,’ hissed Imlay in his ear as the dragoman translated his introduction for the benefit of their distinguished visitor. But before Nathan could begin to assimilate this intelligence or its portent, the next man had stepped up to the mark.
‘And this is Mr James Cathcart, formerly of the USS Confederacy and more latterly adviser to the Dey of Algiers.’
‘The USS Confederacy?’ Nathan repeated, permitting a little of his bemusement to show, though in fact the name vaguely rang a bell.
‘Thirty-six-gun frigate,’ replied Cathcart genially. ‘Late of the Continental Navy. Forced to strike to the Roebuck and the Orpheus off Cape François. I was one of her officers, sir – a midshipman, to be precise – and found myself obliged to spend the next three years on a British prison hulk in the Medway. And I don’t mind telling you, sir, all things considered, I had rather be a slave to the Mohammetans.’
Certainly they seemed to have fed him better, Nathan reflected, for he was run considerably to fat. Nathan wondered if he had been castrated, for he had something of the look of a eunuch, though his voice did not seem overly affected by the trauma.
‘Ah, yes. Very good,’ Nathan murmured blandly. Despite the broad smile on Cathcart’s face, he detected a degree of antipathy in his eyes. Clearly, he still harboured some resent ment at his treatment by the British authorities, and though Nathan had no personal experience of a prison hulk he had heard enough of conditions aboard them to understand why. He had a distant recollection of the action off Cape François – either he had read about it in his youth or his father had spoken of it. The frigate had been taken into the British Navy and renamed the Confederate.