The local boat-wrights initially assured us that they could fix it with a patch and we wouldn’t be delayed more than a few hours. So John and I stood on the quay amongst the crowd of well-wishers and lamenting women and watched as our galleys and transports cast off with bleating sheep and complaining chickens on their decks to begin to make their way down the Thames on the first leg of the long voyages each of them was about to undertake.
And they were indeed going on long voyages—my brother Thomas and my son George were sailing in Harold’s galley to visit the Pope in Rome and deliver this year’s prayer coins and the King’s secret parchment. They would continue on to Rome after stopping for a few days in Lisbon and Ibiza to try to sell some of our prizes and set up trading posts in both of those important ports. We had considered Palma instead of Ibiza but my bad experience there had soured me on the place. I still limp when the weather’s bad from the sword that stuck me.
Yoram and Harold and most of our galleys and almost all the transport prizes we decided to keep would call in at Ibiza for supplies and then sail all the way to our major post on Cyprus via Malta and Crete. From there, they would go on to ports along the coast of the Holy Land and Constantinople and put into our regular service of carrying cargos and passengers between ports and taking Moorish prizes.
No raids on Moorish ports were to be undertaken along the way by any of our galleys. I had made that clear to everyone early on and repeated it just before they sailed. Nothing of that sort was to occur until I came out to Cyprus in the autumn and could plan the raids on the Moorish ports and lead them myself. On the other hand, it was always acceptable and greatly encouraged for our galleys and pirate-taking cogs to go after individual pirate galleys and Moorish transports. Taking prizes was, as you might imagine, constantly on everyone’s mind because of the potential prize money. Raids on major Moorish ports, however, had to be carefully planned and executed.
Harold and Yoram and almost all the rest of our galleys and unsold prizes sailed for Cyprus at the same time as George and Thomas sailed for Rome. The first stop for all of them, as usual, would be Lisbon.
When they get there, Yoram and Thomas will tarry for a while and try to sell some of our prizes. They will also attempt to establish a permanent post as we’ve been meaning to do for the past several years. Then Thomas and George will sail on to Rome via Malta, and Yoram and most of our galleys and transports will head to Malta and on to Cyprus and then the Holy Land ports.
John Heath, Robert’s brother, had been given another stripe and was travelling with Thomas and George to become our four-stripe post sergeant in charge of our new Lisbon station. George’s friend and fellow student, William the Ryder, was to be John’s three-stripe apprentice sergeant and scribe.
Poor William Ryder; he had picked up the nickname of “the Ryder” because he kept falling off his horse when he was assigned to serve with Raymond and the Horse Archers as Raymond’s apprentice and scribe.
******
Three days later, the repairs were finally completed and I sailed for Cornwall with one of Thomas’s students, young John Farmer, as my apprentice and scribe. The quay was mostly empty when we left and many of the berths along it were empty. The distraught women and curious onlookers were long gone as the rowing drum started its beat and we began to move down the Thames. Only Robert Heath and David Levi and his sons were there to wave as our lines were cast off and the rowing drum began its monotonous beat.
Chapter Five
William is storm-wrecked near Hastings.
My voyage to Cornwall was a star-crossed voyage from the beginning. It had taken three days to repair the damage to the hull of Jeffrey’s galley. We left on the tide as soon as the boat wrights pronounced it ready to sail. The sun was shining and the wind favourable when we finally cast off and got underway for Cornwall about an hour after sunrise. It stayed that way all day as we made our way down the Thames and for a few hours after we turned to run down the channel to Cornwall.
Late in the afternoon as the sun was almost finished passing overhead, the wind and weather suddenly began to rapidly worsen when we were off Dover. The wind changed direction and increased. And then it changed again and increased even more. It started blowing us towards shore and the seas got rougher and rougher amidst a driving rain. The sail was quickly lowered and everyone was sent to the oars including me. We lost sight of land, and the weather continued to worsen about the time our pilot and the sailors amongst us reckoned we were abeam of Folkston. That’s when the repairs began to give way and we began taking on water far faster than we could possibly bail it out.
One minute, we were sailing with the sail up and the winds favourable; the next, the sky was black, the water dangerously rough, and the wind roaring. Then the patch gave way and we began to take on water and sink. It was as bad a storm as I’d ever experienced and I was greatly weakened by being seasick. John was terrified and so were I and all the men seated on the rowing benches around us.
Jeffrey was the galley’s sergeant captain and he had no choice when the patch gave way; he ran his galley aground and destroyed her on a rocky beach near Hastings. The wind was howling as a wave carried us up on the beach and I could feel the crunch through my sandals and knew instinctively that the hull was ruined beyond repair. Within an instant the galley started to slide back off the beach into the channel as the wave receded. That’s when an even bigger wave pushed us further up on to the beach and slewed us sideways.
“Come on,” I shouted as I grabbed John by his tunic and pulled him after me. All around us desperate and screaming men were leaving their rowing benches and running for the galley’s railing to try to jump down on to the beach in a frenzied effort to escape. I jumped with them and so, I think, did John.
I landed with a splash in water well above my knees and stumbled forward just as another huge wave came in and moved the galley even closer to the beach and pushed me forward with it. Several men were crushed as the hull of the galley went over them and then we were all pulled back deeper into the water as the wave receded. More and more screaming and yelling men poured over the deck railing and jumped into the water all around me. I stumbled forward and desperately tried to run against the pull of the receding water to escape the next wave.
******
We pulled ourselves ashore with some of the stronger men helping those who were too exhausted or injured. A few minutes later, darkness closed in on thirty-seven wet and shivering men of a crew that had once numbered more than one hundred and fifty. John and Jeffrey weren’t among them.
It was the most terrible night of my entire life. It may have been summer but it didn’t feel like summer. It was dark and cold and windy with a driving rain that continued for hours. We had no shelter and nothing with which to start a fire, not that we could have lit one in the rain even if we’d had the means.
“Sergeants, bring your men here to the captain; sergeants, rally here.” I shouted in an effort to get some degree of control over our sad situation. Then I called out again in the pitch black dark and rain. “Everyone rally here for orders.”
I sensed men moving towards me from their cries and the various noises I heard as they tried to move over the rocky beach.
“We’ve made it to safety, lads.” I shouted into the rainy dark in an effort to encourage them. “We’ll have to buck up until dawn comes and we can walk to Hastings. It’s close nearby even though we can’t see it for the dark. So it’s jumping jacks for every man and run in place to stay warm; don’t give up now. We’re safe. It’ll be warm and we’ll be rescued in the morning.”
All we could do all night in the darkness was stay awake, constantly jump up and down and run in place to keep our blood from thickening, and shiver and wait for the sun to finish circling the other side of the earth and bring dawn to us.
Dawn’s early light finally came and found the thirty-seven of us still alive and shivering uncontrollably. Several of the men had lost their tunics and many had lost one or bot
h of their sandals; I had lost the sandal on my right foot and one of my wrist knives. At first, my right foot hurt from wading ashore on the rocky beach and moving around to stay warm. Then it got so numb I was afraid that if I fell down I wouldn’t be able to get back up.
As soon as it was light enough in the morning to see we began wading into the cold surf to pull bodies ashore on to the fog-shrouded beach. What was left of the galley was grounded on its side just off the strand in water too deep to reach by wading. Clearly it was wrecked beyond repair and would never sail again.
Suddenly, there was a hail from what was left of the wreckage. Two men were alive. They had stayed aboard and somehow ridden out the storm.
“Don’t try the water, Charlie. We’ll get help,” someone shouted from the beach to a mate whose voice he recognised. “Don’t give up.” I was busy taking a sandal off of one of the bodies and didn’t see who gave the order.
In the distance, as the light of dawn came up, we could see a castle on a hill overlooking the channel and rooftops below it. It had to be Hastings Castle and its village. Everyone instinctively began moving towards the shelter it promised without a word being spoken. Several of the men began to run. The rest of us walked as fast as we could.
Within seconds, the strand in front of the wreck was empty except for the dozen or so bodies at the edge of the water and a couple of men who were in very bad shape and couldn’t move. One of them was moaning and holding his obviously broken leg; the other was sitting with his back against a large stone shaking his head.
“We’ll send someone back for you,” I told them before I hurried off with the others. Reassuring them was all I could do; hope was all I had to offer.
The rain had stopped, but everyone was shivering uncontrollably in our wet clothes and the early morning chill as we walked as fast as possible across the rocky strand towards the village and rescue. Several of the running men were far ahead of us as we picked our way across the strand. It was summer in England but you wouldn’t know it on the beach near Hastings.
Then it dawned on me—thanks to God, the storm didn’t hit three days earlier and destroy our entire armada.
******
As we walked towards safety, we began to meet people coming the other way. First one man, and then another, and then a hurrying column of ragged men and women passed us going in other direction. None of them stopped to help us and most of them didn’t even slow down except to ask what our galley had been carrying. They spoke the strange dialect of East Sussex, and we could barely understand their shouted questions as they went past us. The handful who paused to question us seemed disheartened when they heard it was a galley that had been stranded instead of a transport full of cargo.
The intentions of those who came past us to salvage the wreck were immediately clear to everyone; they were there for salvage, not for a rescue. There was nothing we could do but continue on to the hovels we could see ahead of us. I constantly shouted at the people streaming past us that I would pay twenty silver coins for each of our injured men on the beach and on the hull they brought in alive—and that I knew there were at least four of them.
******
Smoke was drifting up through the thatched roofs of several of the first group of daub and wattle hovels we reached. Our men had already broken into one of them by the time I got there. It was already full of shivering archers and sailors when I ducked my head and entered through its narrow door.
A young woman nursing a baby was the only other person in the bare room. She was crouching in a corner, and clearly overwhelmed and sobbing. So, for that matter, were several of the men. The men’s emotion was different—one of relief and deliverance even though every one of us was wet and cold and still shivering, but at least we were out of the wind and the light rain that continued to fall.
I do believe that initially all thirty-seven of us squeezed into that little one-room daub and wattle hovel with its cooking fire smouldering on stones in one corner of the room. Even as wet as we were, our body heat seemed to warm the room even more as we crowded in. Within a few minutes some of the men had recovered and were leaving to break into the nearby hovels in search of food and dry clothing or bedding in which to wrap themselves.
We quickly understood that we had broken into the four or five hovels of a small fishing village on the outskirts of Hastings, people who were themselves always desperately poor and hungry. The village was virtually empty as all but one old man who was watching over some children and the young nursing mother were either away fishing or gone to salvage the wreck.
According to the old man, there was no sense going to the castle—it was no longer inhabited. It had been destroyed last month on King John’s orders for fear of it being taken by the French. I was surprised and asked why.
The explanation I got from the nursing mother and then from the old man, to the extent I could understand their dialect, was that Hastings Castle belonged to one of the great French lords who was not at all loyal to England or King John. John had ordered it destroyed because he was afraid the lord’s retainers would welcome the French when their invasion armada arrived. The castle’s castellan and its soldiers had commandeered fishing boats and fled to France leaving their English servants behind to starve and the fishermen with no one to buy their catch.
******
Within the hour, the villagers who had rushed past us to get to the wreck began trickling back empty-handed to find their hovels occupied by our survivors. The tables had been turned; whilst they were gone, we had broken into their homes and looted them of food and bedding to wrap around ourselves in an effort to get warm.
Almost all of the would-be salvagers returned as soon as they saw the barren beach and the wreck aground in water too deep to reach by wading. Some ran back to launch their fishing boats as soon as they saw that the hull of the wreck was somewhat intact and could be reached by boat. They were unhappy seeing us in the hovels we had taken over as they returned to pick up their oars so they could row their fishing boats to the wreck.
I told the infuriated greybeard who stormed into the hovel where some of my men and I were huddled around the fire we’d gotten going that I would pay twenty silver coins for each of our men he brought back alive and three silver coins for every ship’s sword, pike, and longbow he and the other fishermen could salvage. I promised a copper penny for every five arrows. His anger at finding strangers in his hovel turned to calculation, and he rushed off with a nod of his head.
It turned out to be an important offer because my suggesting that we had money saved our lives.
******
The rain had finally stopped and most of the villagers had returned from the wreck to find their homes occupied. The first returnees did not bring in any of our survivors, so I sent a party of four volunteers off to the site of the wreck to retrieve our two injured men and see if the two men clinging to the wreck still needed to be rescued.
A few minutes after they left, a large party of armed men arrived on foot from the nearby town of Hastings. They weren’t poor fishermen; they were ship owners and sailors armed with swords and clubs. Worse, as it turned out, they knew who we were and they weren’t friendly.
It seems that one of the fishing boats that had reached the wreck, the first one on the scene, had rescued the two survivors on our galley and picked up a number of the galley’s swords, longbows, and other weapons as salvage. They took our two men and their salvage to the Hastings city quay. Our rescued men had understandably identified themselves and told everyone who we were and what had happened. This caused us a great misfortune—not because we were wrecked on the strand and the people of Hastings were disappointed in the salvage, but because we were archers and sailors from a galley based in Cornwall.
Chapter Six
George and the troubles in Lisbon
On our third day out of London, a great storm blew us to the north and scattered our armada. We ran on and on before the wind in high seas. Not a one of our galleys or tr
ansports or anyone else’s was in sight when the weather finally cleared. And when it did, Harold and our pilot had not the slightest idea as to where we might be located. There was only a great, empty, grey ocean stretching out to the horizon in every direction.
We fixed our position the best we could using the rising and setting sun and then sailed south and easterly knowing that sooner or later we’d hit land. Two days later, there was a hail from the mast and in about an hour we could see the low, grey outline of a land mass to the south.
As we approached the unknown land, Harold’s pilot, an old greybeard from London whose name was Samuel, said he thought it was almost certainly the southern tip of Ireland. He said he recognised an inlet where he’d taken on water when sailing between Dublin and Galway. I listened and learnt as Thomas and Harold consulted with Samuel and they talked at length about what to do and why to do it. Should we head south for Cornwall to replenish our supplies or sail east to Lisbon? That was the question. In the end the winds made the decision for us—they were favourable for Lisbon.
******
We raised the galley’s sail and rowed to keep the men busy and headed east. Six days later we raised the coast of Spain. Then we turned to our right and rowed along the Spanish coast until we reached Lisbon three days after that. It was a hot, summer day with hardly a cloud in the sky when we arrived.
Almost half of our galleys and French prizes were already in Lisbon’s great harbour as we rowed through the harbour entrance. Several of them must have been quite battered in the storm because we could see repairs underway as we rowed past them. One of our galleys seemed to have been hit particularly hard by the storm; it was lashed to the quay and a crowd of men were on its deck trying to install a new mast.
Others of our galleys and cogs were moored to the quay taking on water and supplies. The place was bustling with stevedores and merchants despite the hot sun beating down. Many of the men were wearing little straw hats with wide brims to cool their hair.
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