The Cruise of the Albatros

by E. C. Williams

  The Cruise of the Albatros

  Book Two of the Westerly Gales Saga

  By

  E. C. Williams

  Dedication:

  To the memory of

  Harry Jon Price

  Captain, United States Navy (Retired)

  1943 – 2011

  who gave his life for his country

  Copyright 2011; All rights reserved

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the late Captain Harry Price, USN (Retired), whose help with naval gunnery and tactics was invaluable, and to whose memory this book is gratefully dedicated. My former colleague and shipmate, Captain David Mackey, Professor of Marine Transportation at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, very kindly advised me on towing and related issues of seamanship. Finally, my wife, Sue, made her usual essential contribution in the form of tireless and meticulous editing and constructive criticism. Any errors and flaws are of course the responsibility of the author alone.

  CHAPTER 1

  It would take the RKS Albatros, the first and (so far) only warship of the infant Republic of Kerguelen Navy, just over four days to sail the 800 sea-miles from Hell-ville on the island of Nosy Be to Port Louis, Mauritius, at an average speed of about seven knots.

  Her captain, Sam Bowditch, was enjoying every mile of it – the southeast trades blew steadily, the weather remained fair, and the three-masted schooner, on a broad reach, her best point of sailing, was a delight to handle, showing that she, like Sam, had recovered from her wounds. The extensive battle damage she had received from the pirates, and repaired during her too-lengthy stay in Hell-ville, had obviously not impaired her sailing qualities.

  Sam enjoyed the fair weather and good sailing in spite of the lingering headaches he still suffered from the injury he had received in the schooner's recent battle with two pirate dhows. The schooner's mizzen topmast had been shot away, and a section of it had come down squarely onto Sam's head, causing him a severe concussion, and making the Albatros's medical officer, Dr. Marie Girard, worry that he had a skull fracture and possible brain damage. However, these fears proved groundless, and he was recovering well from the concussion – aside from one setback caused by Sam's stubborn insistence on returning to duty too soon.

  Sam's wound, and consequent absence from the deck during most of the battle, had confirmed for him the wisdom of his selection of Bill Ennis, one-time merchant master and Kerguelen Bureau of Shipping marine surveyor, now Commander RKN, to be Executive Officer of the Albatros. Bill had handled the schooner superbly, and after a lengthy moonlight battle and stern chase sank one pirate vessel, and saw the other, in desperation, blow herself up in a futile attempt to take Albatros with her,. In doing so, he probably saved the Nosy Be coastal settlement of Andilana from being sacked by the pirates, the men slaughtered and the women and children taken away as captives – the fate suffered months earlier by the Kerguelenian settlement on Mauritius.

  The Mauritius raid had been the most horrific of a series of pirate attacks, all previously mounted against lone Kerguelenian merchant vessels at sea, and had prompted the arming of the three-masted cargo schooner Come, Angel Band and her rechristening as Albatros, followed by her commissioning into the new navy. The Albatros had since fought two battles with the pirates, in both against two-to-one odds and in both victorious. Although, to Sam's mind, they still knew far too little about their enemy, the capture of a few prisoners had revealed that the pirates apparently originated somewhere in the Persian Gulf or Red sea, in the half of the world above the equator that was largely a mystery to the Kerguelenians.

  Midshipman Dallas, a young man whose talent for languages exceeded his potential as a line officer, was assigned to intelligence duties and left behind with the prisoners on Nosy Be to continue their interrogation. The only additional bit of information he had managed to glean before the Albatros departed Hell-ville was the pirates' motivation: they were fanatical adherents of a variant of an ancient religion called “Islam”, and their attacks were impelled by ideology, not greed.

  Until it became clear that a string of unaccountable merchant ship disappearances were the result of attacks at sea, the Kerguelenians had assumed that they were the only people in the world with the ability to build ocean-going ships. This assumption led naturally from another – that the inhabitants of the rocky, barren sub-Antarctic island, descendents of refugees from the Troubles of centuries before, were the only people who had maintained a semblance of a technological civilization. This conclusion was a natural one, drawn as it was from the Kergs' extensive voyaging throughout the southern hemisphere, where they had encountered only small bands of hunter-gatherers, regressed to the Paleolithic in technology.

  The period generally referred to as “the Troubles” was a generation-long series of disasters, man-made and natural: economic, nuclear, and biological world war coinciding catastrophically and synergistically with desertification due to climate change, crop blights, and a renewed volcanism of a violence not experienced in human history. Devastating plagues, both man-made and natural, exacerbated by malnutrition and the collapse of all sanitary and public health services, killed millions. One or two of these disasters could have been survived; the combined effects of all of them resulted in a massive population crash unequaled in the known history of homo sapiens sapiens, and the destruction of civilization world-wide.

  Except in the Kerguelen Islands. A small population of scientists, studying the flora, fauna, and geography of the sub-Antarctic, were stranded there, joined by an equal number of seafaring refugees – commercial fishermen, the crews of two cargo vessels, and families fleeing the Troubles on sailing yachts from America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. This small population, protected from the plagues and other disasters ravaging the rest of the world by its very remoteness in the far Southern Ocean, and fortunately exempted from the resurgence of volcanism, managed not only to survive but to maintain some of the attributes of civilization – literacy, democratic government, and a level of technology just sufficient to allow them to scrape a living from their rocky soil and the surrounding waters. The Kergs became a seafaring culture out of sheer necessity: their islands lacked nearly every resource, and scavenging expeditions to the ruins of cities around the northern edges of the Southern Ocean were essential to their survival. As the population gradually increased, the islanders established small colonies around the world, first in the forties south latitude, at places like Tasmania and the Falklands, and later northward into the tropical Indian Ocean. But always on islands – mainlands remained associated, in the collective psyche of the Kerguelenians, with chaos and death.

  Captain Bowditch, who was, as usual when he was on deck, pacing back and forth along the windward rail on the quarterdeck, had his enjoyment of the day interrupted by the sight of the slim and graceful form of Doctor Marie Girard, the Albatros’s medical officer, walking aft. She was probably coming to see him – she rarely left sick bay unless on an errand too important to entrust to one of her mates or an SBA – and that produced mixed feelings in him. He was as appreciative as any man aboard of her striking good looks, and he noted how, as always, she attracted covert looks of admiration from the hands she passed on deck. He was grateful, as well, for her medical competence. She had saved the life of many a sailor so badly wounded that another doctor would have given up. She had also, arguably, in her treatment of his recent wound, saved Sam from permanent disability.

  But she rarely failed to irritate Sam in the course of their official interactions, and it was obvious that she found him equally exasperating. Part of it, for Sam, was the way she remained so defiantly unsailorly after her months on board the Albatros. Her p
ersistent use of lubberly terms like “downstairs”, “floor” and “wall”, instead of the more seaman-like below, deck,and bulkhead had not lost its ability to grate on Sam. It was a never-ending source of wonder to him that someone born and reared on an island where no one lived farther than a short walk from the sea could be so ignorant of it.

  At least, he couldn't fault her behavior toward the men on board. Although not the only woman in the crew – two of her three mates (whom she referred to as 'interns') were female, as were the schooner's cook and the Purser's clerk – she was by far the most attractive, and Sam had feared sexual tension, male competition for her smiles, disruptive jealousy fatal to morale. And indeed if she had been the least bit coquin, had shown the slightest display of preference for the company of one of her brother officers, she could have caused an unpleasant situation. But she had behaved with perfect professionalism, civil but correct with everyone.

  Sam had to admit, too, that the Navy was lucky to have her. Something of a medical child prodigy, she had raced through the usually long and arduous process of becoming a physician, and had established a lucrative practice in French Port, back on Kerguelen, with a round dozen interns – and had, according to reports, turned away dozens more who wanted to study under her – all by the time she was in her late twenties or early thirties.

  “Good morning, Captain,” she said as she walked up to Sam on the quarterdeck. An established custom was that the Captain, when on the quarterdeck, was to be approached only after asking permission through the officer of the watch. Sam was resigned to the fact that the doctor was oblivious to such nuances in the evolving culture of the Navy.

  “Morning, Doctor. All's well in sick bay, I hope.” Sam had feared, when he saw her coming, that she was about to report a death among her patients – even though those most seriously wounded in the recent battle had been transferred to the charge of the Hell-ville hospital before sailing.

  “Yes, Captain. All my patients downstairs are coming along nicely. I just came to check on my highest-ranking patient. How are you feeling? Are the headaches any better?”

  “Yes, ma'am, thanks. I still wake up with a slight headache, but fresh air usually does away with it.”

  “How are you sleeping?”

  “Fine – as well as ever.”

  There was a pause as they both gazed out to sea for a moment.

  “Sorry – I should have said 'below', not 'downstairs' just now. I realize that seafaring, like medicine, has its own terminology, but often I cannot recall the right word just when I need it.”

  Sam gazed at her with new respect. This was the first time, to his knowledge, that Girard had ever expressed any willingness to conform to seaman-like ways of speaking.

  The two stood in silence for a few moments, looking at the sea and the sky. Then Doctor Girard said, “Please let me know if your headaches worsen, Captain, or if there's any change in your sleep patterns. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'll return to my other patients.”

  Sam watched the medical officer walk forward with some bemusement. He wasn't admiring her graceful walk, as pleasant a sight as it was; he was trying to remember if they had ever before had an exchange of more than a few words that had not ended at least in irritation, at worst an angry outburst, for one or both of them.

  These thoughts were interrupted by the rattle of small-arms fire. A small group of seamen were firing the new 6.35 mm rifles the Albatros had acquired on Nosy Be. The rifles were a local product, being fabricated to arm the Nosy Be militia, and in return for lending the Albatros’s gunner's mates for assistance in their manufacture, plus a dozen ordinary seamen for the unskilled labor involved, Sam had received thirty of the weapons. Although somewhat inferior in range and accuracy to the schooner's half-dozen seal rifles, and of a different caliber, they would be very useful for arming a landing party – a force for which Sam already had a specific mission in mind.

  The Gunnery Officer, Mr. Du Plessis, had consulted the crew marksmanship records he had compiled back in Morbihan Bay, during a marksmanship contest to identify those among the crew with the greatest potential to become sharpshooters, and selected the next best thirty scores after those of the already-designated marksmen, those armed with the 7.62 mm seal rifles procured as part of the Albatros's initial armament. Sam and Bill then went over the list with the Gunner, and, deciding that youth and physical fitness equaled marksmanship as selection criteria for this duty, made some changes.

  The thirty resulting candidates had been mustered, and given some practice with the 6.35 mm rifles at targets thrown over the side. This exercise served to eliminate some robust young seamen who were magnificent physical specimens but nevertheless lousy shots, and a final selection was made.

  These sailors, now officially dubbed the “landing force”, were presently doing some more firing at floating targets. This practice soon ended, and Mr. Du Plessis was seen consulting with the XO. Both now came aft and reported to Sam that they had concluded that any further return to this training was outweighed by the expenditure of ammunition, and decided to substitute loading-and-dry-firing drills with empty cartridge cases, to accelerate their rate of fire.

  “That's well, XO, Guns. Whatever you think best,” Sam replied, and this exercise commenced. The seamen of the landing party soon all approached or exceeded ten rounds a minute, at least in this simulation, and both the XO and the Gunner were satisfied that they would give a good account of themselves in any action with the enemy – they had already all proved their courage and coolness in the battle of Pirate Creek. But the Gunner resolved to sharpen their marksmanship at the militia rifle range on Nosy Be at the first opportunity.

  “Your Marines are shaping up nicely, Mister Du Plessis,” Sam remarked.

  “’Marines’, sir?” The term was obviously unfamiliar to the Gunner.

  “The landing force – it’s an ancient term for sea-soldiers.”

  Mr. Du Plessis snorted involuntarily at this – his notion of ‘soldiers’ was formed by his experience of the militiamen on Nosy Be, gaudily uniformed but hopelessly unseamanlike.

  “With respect, sir, I don’t think the lads would take kindly to being called ‘soldiers’. They’re proud of being gunner’s mates and seamen.”

  “Okay, Guns. Just a thought. No more mention of ‘Marines’.”

  Mr. Du Plessis, mollified, continued. “Actually, they’re not yet officially rated as gunner’s mates, but I’d like to suggest that we do so for the Landing Force, just as we did for the marksmen – the men armed with the 7.62 mm seal rifles. They can still serve as seamen when we’re not in action, but we’ve created a new technical subspecialty that ought to be recognized.”

  “Very well, Mister D. – make it so. See Commander Ennis so he can order the necessary changes on the ship’s books. But it has to be a lateral transfer – no promotions, no raises in pay. Ordinaries, ABs, Leading Hands, and POs to be rated the equivalent in gunner’s crew.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  This conversation brought to mind a quirk of Kerg usage that never failed to amuse Sam: for no reason anyone could remember, the Kerguelenians used the metric system on land, but switched to the older English system at sea. Thus, their motor sloop measured ten meters in length while on the builder's ways, but became a thirty-three footer once launched. And the schooner's main battery, two long 25 mm rifles, crew-served and rail-mounted, were the “one-inchers” to the crew, to the continued irritation of the gunner officer, Mr. Du Plessis, who had been a master gunsmith, not a seaman, before joining the Navy.

  But, to confuse matters further for the lompkinders – an Afrikaans word that originally meant something like “clumsy children”, and had become a synonym for “landlubbers” – this rule was not followed consistently: the 7.62 mm seal rifles with which the half-dozen marksmen were armed remained 7.62 mm, not .30 caliber. Similarly, the 6.35 mm rifles they acquired on Nosy Be did not become .25 caliber when at sea.

  The next day, as they neared
Mauritius, Sam consulted Mr. Mooney about navigational hazards. With no pilot, he was leery of taking Albatros into Port Louis harbor in the absence of local knowledge – he had never called at the port.

  “I’ve called there many times, Captain, but always with a pilot,” Mooney said. “The channel is deep enough, but if you stray out of it you’re quickly in shoal water. The channel was buoyed the last time I was there, but, without maintenance, who knows if the buoys are still in position?”

  “Guess we’d better stand off, then, and send in the motor sloop instead.”

  “That would be my recommendation, Captain.”

  Sam watched the motor sloop being manned and launched, packed, as a precaution, with the armed Landing Force – their first mission as such. Launching the sloop was an evolution that, with much practice, had become smooth and apparently effortless, a dramatic contrast to the frantic confusion that had accompanied their first attempts, back in Morbihan Bay. As he watched, he considered what he knew of Mauritius, and the history of Kerguelenian settlement there.

  The direction from which the first Kerg mariners in these waters had approached dictated that the coast of Madagascar was explored first – the southern tip of Madagascar was actually the nearest land (other than small sub-Antarctic islands, and Antarctica itself) to Kerguelen, so the ruins of its southernmost towns and cities were early exploited for salvage.

  The Kerguelenians had first ventured into the Indian Ocean only after the round-the-world expeditions had become routine. Although Tasmania, New Zealand, the Falklands, and South Georgia, the sites of early Kerg colonies, were a much greater distance from Kerguelen, the fact that these destinations were all down-wind from the Rock made them easier for the Kerguelenians to reach on their first long-range sailing vessels. These were catamarans improvised from two hulls joined together – originally fishing trawlers or large sailing yachts of close similarity in dimensions —and fitted with the traditional Chinese junk rig, with two or more masts on each hull. This odd-looking arrangement proved to be handy and fast downwind and on a broad reach, and had the added advantage that, if broken apart by violent weather, each hull was independently stable and rigged.