Into Uncharted Seas

by E. C. Williams

  He took another long look through his telescope, and was forced, to his surprise, to the conclusion that the dhow carried not bronze guns, but steel ones; the greenish hue of weathered bronze had been replaced by the dull gray of painted steel. And come to think of it, the dhow's rate of fire seemed high, as compared to previous engagements. Sam wondered, with a sinking heart, if the pirates were now not only casting steel guns, but breech-loaders.

  He watched carefully as the dhow's bow gun fired a round, then another, without pulling it back to access the muzzle: it was, in fact, a breech loader, God damn en stoot dit na die hel! The pirates might be religious fanatics, but they were also clever and inventive, damn them; they had begun the war well behind the Kerguelenians technologically, but were catching up fast. And this was yet more evidence that the Caliphate was a wealthy and sophisticated civilization.

  Sam supposed that they were only using one gun as a bow chaser because moving the other one forward, to the lee bow, would have involved tricing up the foot of the foresail, thus affecting the dhow's sailing abilities. Also, the weight of both guns in the bows, almost certainly weighing a ton or so apiece, would have brought the vessel down by the bow, affecting both her steering and sailing.

  Sam had time, too, to reflect on the design of the pirates' no-doubt-ingenious mobile mounts, which allowed them to quickly reposition their guns – weapons that must be quite heavy and cumbersome -- to any point round their vessels' sides. The Kergs had never gotten a close look at one.

  During the previous age of sail and muzzle-loading guns, in ancient times, a gun large enough to have any great range and power was necessarily almost immobile. Warships thus had to be big enough to have their sides lined with multiple guns. Small vessels necessarily had small guns. The pirates' mobile mount meant that a relatively small vessel could carry one or two heavy guns and train them quickly along any threat axis, giving them almost the flexibility of the powered warships of a later period, which were equipped with rotating turret gun mounts.

  The chase went silently on for long periods, interrupted by furious eruptions of fire when the Albatros was briefly in range of the leading dhow. The second dhow raced along a few miles astern. Since she was no faster than her sister, she had no hope of catching up unless and until Albatros was slowed or disabled by a lucky long shot; then she could come up and add her own firepower.

  Sam checked the compass, then stepped into the chartroom for a moment, where he quickly noted that their present course would take them into Reunion waters. He decided that he should send an updated warning to local shipping of the imminent presence of the pirates. He quickly drafted a brief message to that effect and ordered it transmitted en clair.

  An hour later Sam was pacing the quarterdeck anxiously, gazing at the leading dhow every few moments through his telescope. All three vessels were now sailing as fast as they could, continuously making minute adjustments to sheets and course. With the help of the drifter and the thrice-blessed motor sloop, the Albatros was just maintaining her lead on the pirate dhows. But any accident, any check, and they would be upon her.

  He had time to reflect bitterly on the lesson in humility he was being taught. His officers – yes, even his medical officer – had been right in decrying the recklessness of his decision to split his force, and he had been wrong. In justice to them, he would eventually have to acknowledge his error. If they survived that long.

  Robert, the Comms Officer, appeared on deck with his clipboard and handed it to Sam, saying with a significant look, “I thought you should see this right away, sir. It was in the Navy code – just broke it.” The fact that Robert brought the message personally always meant that he thought a message had immediate operational implications.

  And so it did. It originated from Radio Reunion, apparently in response to his recent warning. Terse and to the point, it said, “RESPECTFULLY SUGGEST YOU LURE OR DRIVE ENEMY TOWARD LE PORT WITHIN RANGE OF OUR SHORE BATTERIES SIGNED CHASSEUR GENL COMMANDING REUNION DEFENSE FORCE MESSAGE ENDS.”

  Sam did a double-take that would have been comic under other circumstances. Shore batteries? Reunion now had shore batteries?

  Sam knew that, since their last call at the island, the Reunionnais had completed the restoration of, and re-opened to trade, a marine terminal called simply Le Port, near Saint-Denis, returning it to its ancient role as Reunion's principal seaport. This had been a lengthy and arduous task involving clearing away the rubble of the ancient port, building new godowns, removing wrecks from the berths and basins, and tedious agitation dredging of the silted-up entrance channel. The Reunionnais had thought this worth the trouble since it gave them a sheltered harbor with multiple berths, superior to the port of St. Pierre and greatly facilitating their maritime trade. But Sam had not known about the shore batteries there, a piece of news that filled him with joy.

  He was afire with curiosity about these batteries, and longed to query Chasseur by return message on the number and caliber of the guns, and how they were sited. But he knew that the general would be reluctant to broadcast such sensitive information, even encoded, and it wasn't data Sam necessarily needed to know right now.

  Of one thing he could be almost certain – the Reunnionais guns were bigger than his 37 mm rifle. For fixed defensive positions, it would just make sense to go with the biggest, most powerful weapons one was capable of casting and boring.

  Sam stepped into the chartroom again, and laid off their present course; it was just south of the course directly to the entrance of Le Port. The Albatros would have to edge up to windward to make the entrance, but not yet: even a small deviation from their present course would allow the dhows to begin to gain on him. No, he would wait until Reunion was in sight before he altered course toward the entrance to the channel. If all went well, the pirates, within range at that point and convinced they were on the verge of sinking or capturing the Albatros,would chase him right into range of the Reunion batteries.

  If all went well. A mistake in timing – even a small one – could allow the pirates to sink or board the Albatros before she was within the protective arc of Le Port's guns.

  And if the pirates were as ignorant of the existence of the batteries as Sam had been until moments ago. This was something of which he could by no means be certain. There was ample reason to believe that the Caliphate had agents among the Kerguelenians, who provided them with valuable intelligence. Whether these spies were secret converts to the pirate cult, or mere paid mercenaries, was not known, nor was there any clue as to how they communicated with their handlers. But the circumstantial evidence for their existence was overwhelming.

  Nevertheless, whether or not the pirates knew of the batteries, they could still be the salvation of the Albatros, if he could only make it within the range of their guns.

  He was reassured to note, by double-checking his speed calculations, that Albatros would indeed raise the coast of Reunion in daylight – by dawn the next day, in fact. The moon was new, which would have made an approach in darkness challenging.

  Sam returned to his pacing, and spared a thought for his crew. They would have to stay at battle stations all through the night, which would leave them exhausted by morning, when there would almost certainly be a battle. He considered this for a moment, then said to the watch officer, “Mister Mooney, set Condition Alfa.” Then he turned to his phone talker and said, “Pass the word for the XO.” The phone talker intoned into his microphone, “Commander Kendall, your presence is requested on the quarterdeck.”

  The pipe for Condition Alfa was being made just as Al Kendall stepped on to the quarterdeck.

  “You saw the message, Al?”

  “Yes sir. Shore batteries! Those Reunionnais, eh?” the XO replied with a grin.

  “Pas de la merde! Yes. I'm going to try and follow General Chasseur's advice. But the crew needs a break now if we're to stay at battle stations all night – which we'll have to do, of course. Have half of them at a time take, say, three bells for a bite and a
nap. We'll pipe “battle stations” again at sunset.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “And pass the word to the galley to have coffee and soup available all night, to be served to the hands at battle stations as needed.”

  “Will do, Skipper.”

  At that point, Sam saw Ritchie, his steward, walking aft, temporarily stood down from his battle station in sick bay, as a stretcher bearer.

  “Ritchie, we'll be up all night, so make a big pot of coffee and some food I can eat cold out of my hand – rice balls or whatever. Then take a nap. When battle stations is piped again, you stay aft with me. I'll square it with the MO.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Ritchie replied with a pleased look; he did not find sick bay a tolerable battle station, nor the SBAs congenial company. He was happiest doing what he did best: cooking and serving, for the Commodore, the best food and drink he could manage with the materials at hand.

  Sam next passed the word for the Gunner. Mr. Du Lesseps soon appeared, still limping from an old wound and now bandaged from new, thankfully minor, wounds sustained in the tragic accident with the number two fused round.

  “Guns, we have to do something about those number two frag rounds.”

  “Yes, sir. I've got a couple of my mates below now, removing the fuses from the rounds we've made up and replacing them with number ones.”

  “That's well, Mister D – that's just what I was going to suggest. But how can we replace them – how can we achieve the same effect with a round safer to handle?”

  “Well, Commodore, HE frag works, but only if it hits something that'll activate the fuse, like a mast or spar. Canister has the same effect on sails and rigging, but it's shorter range.”

  Canister rounds were cylindrical, thin-walled steel cans containing a mixture of shot and jagged pieces of metal. Designed so that the can came apart from the force of the propellant, it gave the 37 mm gun the effect of a very large shotgun. The problem with canister, however, was that the cloud of fragments it produced quickly lost velocity and force as compared with single projectiles. It was intended as a short-range anti-personnel round; its maximum effective range was well within that of the pirates' three-inch bronze smooth-bores – the guns they used to have.

  “What if you kept the number two fuses separate from the rounds, and only assembled them at the gun, just before loading?”

  “That'd be safer, o'course, sir, but it'd be almighty slow – the rate of fire would go down a lot.”

  “You could keep other projectile types in the ready box, and keep up a steady fire of two or three HE or solid rounds for every number two fused frag round, couldn't you?”

  “Well, yessir, we could do that, I guess.”

  “Then that'll have to do until we can think of a better solution, Guns. I don't want to lose another fine lad like Tsang” – the young volunteer seaman from Reunion who had dropped the round and gave his life trying to catch it. “The pirates kill far too many of us – let's not be killin' ourselves.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Sam next passed the word for the Medical Officer, “...but stress that she should come only when she feels her patients can spare her, Ebert,” he added to his phone talker.

  Dr. Girard appeared quickly. Either her patients could indeed spare her, or she had interpreted Sam's summons the way officers generally comprehended a request to appear before the Commodore “at their convenience”, translating that into “on the double!”

  “Doctor, I do hope you aren't here at the expense of a patient. What I have to talk to you about can wait.”

  “No problem, Commodore. My one critical patient is stable now, having come through emergency surgery quite well. It looks as if he'll survive.”

  “Well, thank God for that. What about the other wounded?”

  “All minor injuries, except for the surgical patient just mentioned, and of course poor Tsang.”

  They moved over to the windward rail, where they could be less easily overheard by the navigational watch.

  In a lower tone, Sam said, “Marie, in all justice I have to confess that you were right. I'll have to eat some crow in front of Kendall and Murphy, too, who made more or less the same points you did, but you get to serve the first helping: I was reckless in risking the Albatros by dividing my force just to have a shot at a pirate. I could have lost her, and I still may. There. You may say 'I told you so'.”

  Girard looked at him in astonishment. “Sam, dear, you don't have to justify your decisions to me. And you shouldn't. If someone else was your MO – someone with whom you didn't have our … our personal history, would you be saying this? Of course not! And I advise you to say nothing to Commander Kendall or Captain Murphy – it can do no good, and may weaken their confidence in you.”

  Sam looked at her in surprise. “You may be right, Marie.”

  “Of course I'm right!” She paused and looked around to see any of the quarterdeck denizens were watching them, then put her hand lightly on his arm. “Sam, you are always free to share your doubts and fears with me, and I'll keep them to myself. But you must always … always … rely on the rightness of your decisions, and never show doubt before anyone else, because all of us must have confidence in you, if we are to do our duty without hesitation.

  Sam stared out to sea, and thought about this for a long moment. Then he said slowly, “Yes, I see that, now, Marie. Thank you.”

  “No need for thanks, Sam.” They stared out to sea in silence for a few minutes. Then, in a louder, more formal tone, she said, “Now, Commodore, if you don't mind, I'll go check on my surgical patient.”

  “Of course, Doctor. Carry on.”

  The rest of the afternoon slipped by, the dhows straining to catch up, the Albatros desperately making all the speed she could. Precisely as the sun's upper limb slipped below the western horizon, “battle stations” was piped, and the watch below turned out of their hammocks and rushed up on deck, rubbing the sleep from their eyes.

  In spite of the tension of the chase, Sam, Mooney, and the midshipmen still shot and worked out evening star sights, comparing the positions each arrived at. It was critical that the Albatros make first landfall at Reunion very near the entrance to Le Port. And to accomplish that without large course changes, which would give the pirate dhows opportunities to catch up, she had to know her position as precisely as possible now.

  When darkness was complete, with only the stars and a tiny sliver of moon for illumination, Sam took the risk of bringing the motor sloop alongside for refueling, relieving her crew, and re-stocking her with food and water, including five-liter metal canisters of soup and hot coffee.

  The risk was great, because with the slackening of the Albatros's speed, the lead dhow would be sure to gain on them. But the motor sloop's crew had spent all day in a tossing open boat, under a tropic sun and continually soaked in spray while striving to coax the utmost out of her little Stirling engine, at the same time tensely alert to semaphored changes in course from the Albatros. Sam knew they had to be near the end of their endurance.

  While forward, a gang of seamen worked frantically to complete this task as quickly as possible, Sam and two hands especially picked for the keenness of their night vision stood at the stern rail, staring in the direction of the lead dhow. In the darkness, they could sense her rather than see her, as an occasional darker blob on the horizon, blotting out the lower stars.

  The 37 mil gun crew stood by tensely, gun run out on the port balcony and trained aft. The Gunner had strict orders from Sam not to fire without orders. In darkness, the gun shot out a visible dart of bright flame longer than her barrel, disclosing the Albatros's exact location as precisely as if she were lighting off pyrotechnics.

  Finally, after what seemed like hours but was in reality only minutes, the evolution was complete and the motor sloop had again taken up the strain on the towline. Mr. Mooney was adjusting the sail trim to take into account the slight shift forward of the relative wind, and Sam took a deep breath for what
felt like the first time since the sloop came alongside.

  Sam now left the quarterdeck and made a tour of the schooner, speaking a few words to seamen and officers as he passed. He couldn't really see faces in the darkness, but he heard the fatigue in their voices as they replied. He was also heartened to hear cheerfulness and determination as well as weariness. But he could tell that the long hours of tension were taking their toll.

  When he reached the XO's battle station forward, he paused to talk with Kendall for a few minutes. A galley hand came by just then with a can of coffee, strong, black, and sweetened with cane sugar, and a fistful of tin mugs, his fingers through their handles, in his other hand. Sam and Al both took a mug, Sam more to be companionable than because he wanted yet another cup of coffee. And anyway he preferred Ritchie's fragrant brew to the syrupy-sweet, over-strong concoction favored by the crew.

  “Is the galley keeping the hands refreshed, Al?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. Cookie's been a rock – she hasn't taken a break since we went into action.” The Albatros's cook was one of only five women among the crew, the others being Dr. Girard, her two interns, and a purser's mate.

  Sam considered the fatigue of his crew. And they would have hours more of tension before dawn, at which time the schooner would almost certainly go into action.

  “I think we can safely allow half the crew at a time to take a nap – lying down on the deck, at their stations,” he said to Kendall. “But be sure each station has at least one man awake and alert.”