Flashman and the Seawolf

by Robert Brightwell

  “You are indeed a diplomat Ambassador Flashman. I will consider your proposal. And now your mission is complete I suggest that you return to your ship and take your leave.”

  We salaamed our way out of the room and gave our thanks to Cathcart who was staying in the palace to conduct other business. As we had left the court on friendly terms the guards with their huge axes and swords walked respectfully behind us rather than around us as before. A fat gaudily dressed court chamberlain led the way and with him in front and the palace guards bringing up the rear, the crowds kept well back when we emerged onto the streets. We returned the way we had come and as we approached the hospital I looked up at the window but the woman was not to be seen. But rounding the corner we found Pierre Auclair lying curled up in the dust, whimpering in agony as two of the guards who had punished him sat nearby in the shade.

  Cochrane and I had not spoken since we had left the palace. We were both boiling in anger but did not want to talk in front of the Chamberlain who may have been able to speak English and report back to his masters. I don’t know about Cochrane but I had felt defeated and betrayed during the encounter with the Prime Minister and now my temper was up and I was looking for a target. Before I knew what I was doing I snarled at the guards in the shade “pick him up and bring him with us.” The guards seeing the palace chamberlain and the palace guards standing behind us assumed we had the authority of the court and moved to obey, one of them swinging Auclair up over his shoulder.

  The fat Chamberlain’s hands fluttered in front of him “you no permit for this” he shrilled.

  Cochrane reached down and started to draw his sword a few inches “Yew’ll do exactly as he says or I will chop off your balls if ye still have them” he spoke quietly but with unmistakable aggression.

  One of the palace guards sensing trouble even though he spoke no English now stepped forward moving his huge executioner’s sword down from his shoulder and standing between Cochrane and the Chamberlain. It was a standoff and everyone looked at the Chamberlain to make the next move. Only now was my brain catching up with my anger as I realised what I had started and what the risks were in this town where European life was held so cheap.

  The Chamberlain glanced from the broken prisoner to the foreign ‘ambassador’ and naval captain and then to the guard, now glowering over us with his rock steady sword. Finally the Chamberlain made up his mind and muttering something to the guard with Auclair over his shoulder, he turned and continued down the street. We hesitated and the guard with Auclair moved to follow him. Our sword wielding guard stepped back and our slightly elongated procession now proceeded down to the docks.

  “Flashman” muttered Cochrane, “the next time you feel like picking up some waif, try to do it when some big hairy bastard with a huge bloody sword is not standing behind me. He grinned at me and continued “still it is good to get something out of this trip, even if it is a moth eaten frog.”

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  Chapter 16

  Our boat crew were resting at their oars in the anchorage, just out of range of any stones thrown by the mob on the harbour front. This crowd dispersed when we appeared with our palace guards and the boat rowed quickly back to the steps to collect us. Auclair was laid in the bottom of the boat and as he realised that he was leaving with us he started sobbing in relief. As soon as we were back on the Speedy we weighed anchor and caught the end of the ebbing tide to get out of the bay. We wanted to be away and out of range of the harbour guns before news of our extra passenger reached the Palace. The fortresses stayed silent as we slipped away and we all felt a surge of relief as we got out into the open sea. None more so than Auclair who had been left behind when the rest of the French legation was freed earlier in the year. Guthrie tied some boards around his feet to act as splints and bandaged them carefully so that they would heal straight and undamaged.

  That evening as the sun set in the west a sail appeared on the horizon to the south, it looked like the Algerians had sent a ship after us. But it was only a small vessel that was no threat and so we shortened sail to allow it to catch up. The next morning the wind slowly lightened until we seemed to be moving no faster than a slug on sand. The Algerian had come to a halt too half a mile away and had lowered a boat to reach us. With nothing else to do, we lowered a boat and met them half way. Their message was from the Prime Minister who wrote to say that he would send a message to Admiral Keith along the lines we proposed. He suggested that it might be best if we took our time to get back to Port Mahon to allow events to take their course.

  This suited us, we were in not hurry to get back either. In fact over dinner that night Cochrane revealed that he was planning to leave the Navy entirely. “What is the point of staying in” he exclaimed. “I could capture an admiral’s flagship in a laundry woman’s bumboat and they still would not give me any recognition. Aye they would probably try to get me killed that much harder. There is talk of peace coming and as soon as it is signed I am giving up the Navy. I have a mind to go into the House of Commons and root out this corruption at its heart.”

  “Are you sure you have the temperament to be a politician?” asked Archie tactfully with a grin tempting the corners of his mouth.

  “Ye mean am I windsucking fatwit that spends his time seeking enrichment at the expense of the public purse, of course not. I am going to stand as a radical and pledge to remove all vice from government and the Navy and dockyards in particular.”

  “But you will never get elected”, I said. “You need the patronage of someone who owns a seat or a lot of money to buy one of the rotten boroughs. No one in power will help you get a seat as they all have an interest in maintaining the status quo.”

  “Stop your worry I have a plan.” Cochrane grinned “so my disadvantage is that I have no money and the voters in the rotten boroughs are corrupt and greedy and will vote for whoever pays them the most is that correct?”

  “Yes” we chorused wondering how he would turn this into an advantage.

  “Well I am going to stand in a rotten borough on an anti corruption platform and offer voters nothing at all.”

  “Then you will get barely any votes at all” I said puzzled as to why he thought this would work.

  “Ah but after the election I will go round the few voters that did vote for me and give them double what they would have got voting for the winner. Then I will sit back and wait for the next election.”

  “Sorry I still don’t get it” said Archie.

  “At the next election the voters will remember that I paid double to my voters. They will need to weigh up the certainty of an amount from those offering cash to the potential of double from me. As they are greedy I reckon I will get enough votes to be elected.”

  Well I doubted it at the time but that is exactly what he did a few years later. He turned the voters of Honiton, one of the most notorious rotten boroughs, into a laughing stock when they voted him in on the second election. Of course his political career was a disaster as he made enemies faster than a clean dog gathers fleas and he ended up being framed for a stock market fraud and disgraced but that is for another time.

  I will spare you the detail of that cruise as it followed the same pattern of many of the earlier ones. We intercepted a British ship headed for Port Mahon and sent via that vessel a very brief report on our mission to Algiers, not mentioning the letter going to the Admiral. We then sailed along the Spanish coast getting close inshore at night and trying to cut out prizes in the dawn. We fell in with another naval brig, The Kangaroo, under a Captain called Pulling who seemed a decent sort and soon between us we had a fair armada of prizes. We had no wish to have men guarding prisoners and so captured crews were allowed to row for shore in the boats and in one of these boats we put in Auclair who continued to profess gratitude for his rescue. Eventually, running low on ammunition and supplies and with our crew spread thinly over the various prizes we could delay no longer and turned back to Port Mahon.

  There were a number of naval sh
ips in the harbour but no sign of the Admiral’s flagship. The Speedy, Kangaroo and their flotilla of prizes anchored in the roads. As the anchors splashed into the water, boats were launched from the vessels to take crew members ashore. Cochrane and I were among the first to land and walked the short distance to the naval headquarters. We strode into Mansfield’s office, deliberately not knocking first, to find he was not there. Instead there was a timid looking man who looked nervously at us from behind the desk.

  “Who are you?” asked Cochrane brusquely

  “If it please your lordship,” the man tugged nervously at his forelock “I am Benton the new Admiral’s clerk.”

  “What happened to Mansfield?” I asked hoping he had not escaped his just desserts.

  “The Admiral had a letter sir, from some foreign gentleman sir. ‘E was mighty upset about it sir and ‘e sent me aboard a Frigate here sir. The frigate was ordered to take Mr Mansfield and bring him to the Admiral sir. The man paused and then whispered in a scandalised tone “they was to bring him in irons sir.”

  “Excellent” I said happily.

  Cochrane asked sternly “I trust you have orders to sell any more prizes we bring in at the proper price rather than give them away to foreign potentates?”

  “Oh aye sir, the Admiral was most insistent that he wants all decisions re the sale of prizes referred to him. He’s written to Captain Manley Dixon the same sir.”

  We picked up our mail and went away well pleased. For all the church’s talk of piety and turning the other cheek, there are few things more satisfying than seeing someone who has crossed you, getting paid back in full. Especially when it is some jumped up little clerk that has done his best to get you beheaded or thrown in some stinking foreign jail. I only had one letter and recognised the hand as my father’s so put it in my pocket to read for later as I saw that Cochrane had a more impressive letter with the Admiralty in London’s seal on it. I will save you the stream of profanities that erupted from my friend as he read it.

  “I am being turned down for promotion after I captured the Gamo, can you guess why Flashman?”

  “Did you pass the port the wrong way at the celebration dinner afterwards or serve the wrong cheese?” I was resigned to any madness from the Navy now, but the real reason was still a surprise.

  “No I have been turned down as the number of my own men killed in the action was insufficient to support the application. Lord St Vincent has turned down Parker for promotion too. This from a man that earned his earldom in an action where Nelson took all the risk and casualties and only one man was killed on Vincent’s flagship during the battle. Dammit I am going to write back and remind him of that fact and assure him that I will do better killing my own men next time.”

  “You can’t do that, you will never get any favour from him again.”

  “Pah what is the difference from now when they try to kill me. Perhaps I will give the miserable old bastard apoplexy and he will die and be replaced by someone with more sense.”

  The irony was that both St Vincent and Cochrane were similar characters. They were both proper seaman, both wanted to fight corruption in the Navy and both were as stubborn as a menopausal mule. Thus having got off on the wrong foot they could never recognise any credit in the other. St Vincent had joined the Navy at fifteen as an able seaman, although the family had money to help him in his early career and he finished as Admiral of the Fleet. He was a harsh disciplinarian but he did implement some reforms before he was brought down by the same people with vested interests in corruption that would later end Cochrane’s political career in disgrace.

  We consoled ourselves with wine that night and had a splendid dinner with Archie and Guthrie, during which I told them that I had decided to return home on the next mail boat. This time no one tried to talk me into staying in the Navy. There was a sense among us all that the happy days of cruising and effortless prize taking were coming to an end. I thought back, I had been with the Speedy for over six months but I felt I had truly grown in that time. Cochrane’s extraordinary confidence in his own abilities enabled him to have great confidence in those around him and we all strived unconsciously not to let him down. That I think was his secret, he brought out the best in those around him. I had changed greatly from the nervous young man that had joined his ship. We had escaped from two powerful frigates and captured a third. I had helped capture around twenty different prizes over that time, I had shot a spy, been captured in espionage, then rescued, withstood threats of torture and a siege and faced up to a foreign pirate king. The man that somehow found the courage to climb on the Gamo and haul down its colour or bluff guards into handing over a wounded prisoner was very different to the boy who had been frightened in Vauxhall Gardens.

  This is not to say that I had been transformed to Flashman the Brave, most of those acts had also involved preserving my own precious skin. They were also largely against the Spanish who were the least effective enemy I have ever known, and I have known a few. Fighting is hard work and Spanish men are the laziest I have encountered. They can get fired up into a passion but invariably they will take a nap before doing anything about it and then put off any action until the next day. I have stood with Wellington and a whole British army in the Peninsular waiting for the Spanish to get out of bed and join an attack that was supposed to have happened at dawn. They arrived at noon, long after the French had made their escape.

  To be fair, the Spanish women were different. When I served with the army in Spain later in my career, only six wives per company were allowed to accompany the troops from England and be officially on the strength. The rest were left at home with no means of support and so lotteries were held to decide who could come. A full strength company was around eighty men and so many soldiers found Spanish women during the years they served on the Peninsular. These Spanish wives were tough, often living with the army out in the open. They had to submit to army discipline and perform washing, cooking and other duties while many gave birth and raised children as they followed their men around the country. I remember one tight spot when we were defending a village against an attack from French dragoons, the women with us were busy reloading muskets from the dead and passing them up to the survivors on the ramparts. Some young girl who had found herself a widow just hours before was loading for me in the room below and passing the weapons up to where I lay on the roof. Part way through the action I heard a scream and looked down to see the green jacketed body of a dragoon impaled on the bayonet of a musket she was holding. One of the most shameful things I saw was when the British army disembarked from Bordeaux at the end of the Peninsular campaign. They only took six wives per company back to England, leaving all the others with their children on the dockside, again with no means of support. Provosts drove weeping men onto the ships and weeping women and children off the docks. Some men had already risked hanging by deserting to be with their Spanish wives and some found the money to come back to them. But others, such as those with wives in England, never saw these families again.

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  Chapter 17

  If I thought that my decision to leave the Speedy would result in a safer life then I was wrong, fate showed that it had more tricks in store. Bizarrely the first of these related to a house move by Cochrane’s immediate commander, the dour and resentful Captain Manley Dixon. He had been given a reprimand by Keith for the Algiers affair and had no love for us. He had recently been offered the use of a large villa on the island by a merchant who had also acquired the lucrative rights to run the mail packet ship to Gibraltar. The only slight drawback for this merchant was that he did not own a ship. To maximise his profits he hired the cheapest boat he could find, one that had been condemned by its previous owner. I discovered this when I stepped aboard it some days later to start my journey home. It is true that rats do leave a sinking ship. I saw several swimming in the water as I went aboard and I would not criticise their judgement. Part of the handrail came off when I hauled myself onto the deck. There
was a strong smell of rot and decay about the ship, which had a marked list to starboard. Four seamen seemed to be continually working the pumps and the jet of water going overboard showed no sign of diminishing. This was all while it was in a calm and protected bay, what it would be like in a rough sea did not bear thinking about.

  The thought of sailing to Gibraltar in this old bucket did not fill me with joy and I was just contemplating seeing if Cochrane would be able to get me to Gibraltar instead when I saw him being rowed to the mail boat. The Speedy had just been relegated to mail boat escort ship by Manley Dixon, doubtless in return for a discount in his rent. Cochrane was ordered to take the mail from the mail boat in case it sank on the journey and return it just outside Gibraltar so that the merchant could claim the generous payment for the mail concession. Cochrane was of course livid at this further insult, but I struggled to share his rage as I hurriedly grabbed my things and returned to the seaworthy Speedy.

  Weighing anchor we set sail to travel down the Spanish coast to reach Gibraltar. It was a longer route but it gave more chance of further prizes. Cochrane admitted that he hoped the longer voyage would give the mail boat more time to sink, depriving the merchant of his fee, but it doggedly wallowed in our wake. Early one evening, just past Alicante we spotted a small fleet of merchant ships anchored in a bay and turned towards them. As soon as they saw the predatory Speedy heading in their direction the crews ran their vessels ashore on the sand to avoid capture.

  We were under orders to escort the mail without delay and had already stretched them with the longer route; although we could argue that keeping close to the coast was a precaution to help the mail boat should she start to founder. But with the ships beached we would have to wait hours for the tide to turn to float them off and then send a landing party onto a hostile coast at night to carry them away. It would be a clear breach of our orders but Cochrane could not leave the enemy targets untouched. Leaving the mail boat waiting nervously offshore we sailed into the bay and anchored opposite the beached ships so that we could bring our guns to bear. It was now close to dusk with the sun setting on the hills behind the ships and we could see lanterns as the crew hurriedly removed possessions from the little ships and then ran up the dunes for shelter.