by Dudley Pope
‘Yes, there’s usually at least one man in a crowd – rabble-rouser, union shop steward, Bolshie, sea lawyer, Trotskyite, radical person, call him what you will – that starts making trouble. Argues about the water ration, length of the spells at the oars, any wretched thing he can turn into a grievance. Jump on him quick – not too quick though, because sometimes the other men shut him up, and save you the trouble.’
Ned thanked the Mate. There was good advice in what he had just said, information learned at first hand. Obviously just surviving in bad weather was a full-time occupation for survivors, he thought grimly, without the added task they had been given! And at least he did not think any of his picked men would turn out to be moaners.
Harding looked at his watch again, glanced round the horizon and walked to the forward side of the bridge, jabbing the heavy metal button that sounded action stations throughout the ship, shrill bells which, Ned knew only too well, scared the wits out of you even before the enemy put in an appearance.
Dash-dash-dot: the Morse letter ‘G’, indicating that what followed was routine, not emergency. Action stations, and the bells sounded through the ship, fast and urgent. Almost at once doors slammed, the switches automatically shutting off the lights before they swung open, and he could imagine cursing men pulling on duffel coats and grabbing lifejackets and steel helmets before running to their action stations.
Several were coming up the ladder to the bridge, dodging round Painter and Harding to get to the square box at the end of the bridge, overhanging the sea and containing the two Hotchkiss machine guns. With an ease obviously coming from long practice, they unlaced the canvas cover and pulled it off the guns. While one folded it and put it in a corner out of the way, another man pulled a heavy leather belt round himself, grasped the pistol grips of the two machine guns, and leaned back against the belt. At the same time the first man checked the belts of ammunition.
Both said something to the third man: Yorke guessed it meant that they were ready.
Hotchkiss…there must have been a great store of them somewhere, relics of the First World War, because most British merchant ships seemed to be armed with them. They were reliable guns and, like most (except the ubiquitous Lewis, which was without peer), worked well apart from one nasty trick. The Hotchkiss’ trick was that the lever putting the action on Safe or Repeat (when the gun fired a single shot each time the trigger was squeezed), or Automatic, was at the end of the breech. The sequence was anticlockwise as you faced it, Safe, Automatic and then Repeat, which meant that in a rush, or in the dark, it was easy when slapping the lever across from Safe to Automatic to go one click too far so it stopped at Repeat. This meant in turn that as the gunner (nestling against the leather belt, a hand on each of the butts, an index finger round each trigger and tracking the target) squeezed the triggers, instead of a stream of fire, each gun fired one round; a defiant ‘bang-bang’ of Repeat instead of the tearing calico, racing belts and metallic clicking of ejected cartridges of the guns firing on Automatic. The gunner’s curse as he wrenched the two levers back to Automatic usually indicated that he could no longer track the target, which was most likely to be a diving bomber. Ned reflected that strangers listening to merchant ship gunners might well wonder why they had never previously heard of an arms manufacturer called ‘Soddinotchkiss’, the name by which the guns came to be called. This became almost as much part of the nautical vocabulary as ‘tramsmash’, the usual description of tomato ketchup when asking someone farther along the table to pass it, or ‘slide’, the more usual word for butter or margarine.
Ned looked round the horizon. Astern it was already nearly dark; ahead, to the westward, the sky was still light. He then looked at his watch, comparing the time with sunset.
Captain Painter seemed to read his thoughts. ‘We’re a touch late, eh, Commander?’
‘Ten or fifteen minutes later than we’re accustomed to do it in the RN,’ Ned said tactfully, ‘particularly since you haven’t zigzagged for twenty minutes or so.’
‘That’s a good point. Mr Harding, make a note that we go to action stations a quarter of an hour earlier, and are we following the zigzag diagram from the book?’
‘Yes, sir: number seven. It’s one with short legs to the south-west and longer legs to the north-west, so we increase our northing and westing.’
‘Ah yes, of course.’
‘But I agree with the Commander,’ Harding said. ‘I’m glad we’ll be going to action stations earlier: I’ve often felt we left it a bit late.’
‘But you didn’t mention it because you were too shy,’ Painter said sarcastically, although with no malice in his voice.
‘See a grey goose at a mile,’ Ned said suddenly, and was as startled as if someone else had spoken.
‘What’s that?’ Painter asked.
An embarrassed Ned searched his memory. ‘I read somewhere that in Nelson’s day – perhaps even earlier – the lookouts at dawn were sent aloft, and brought down on deck again at night, when they reckoned they could see a grey goose at a mile.’
‘Good enough yardstick,’ Harding commented.
‘Old naval family, yours?’ Painter enquired, obviously interested.
‘Seafaring, if not always Royal Navy.’
‘Some pirates back there hanging from the family tree, eh?’
Ned laughed at the allusion, which was almost correct. ‘A buccaneer or two in Jamaica before Henry Morgan’s day.’
‘Buccaneer, pirate – what’s the difference?’
‘Quite a lot, particularly if your eighth great-grandfather was a buccaneer,’ Ned said lightly. ‘I’d happily own up to a pirate, if we’d had one in the family, but the best we can do is a buccaneer – with the same name and nickname as myself.’
‘What’s that, then?’
‘He was Edward Yorke but, like me, usually known as “Ned”.’
‘Ned Yorke…Ned York…’ Painter repeated. ‘Wait a minute, I’ve read about him.’
Harding chuckled happily. ‘Raided Portobello, didn’t he? Captured so many Spanish pieces of eight that when he got back to Jamaica, they made them the official currency. And he’s an ancestor of yours, by gum!’
‘With respect, Commander,’ Painter said, ‘what’s the real difference – what was the real difference,’ he corrected himself, ‘between a buccaneer and a pirate?’
‘In spirit I doubt if there was much,’ Ned explained, ‘but legally a great deal. Think of the buccaneer of my eighth great-grandfather’s day as being the equivalent of the privateer of Nelson’s day.’
‘Oh, I get it: he had a sort of licence to capture enemy ships!’ Painter exclaimed.
‘Exactly. My forebear (and the rest of the buccaneers whom at one time he led) had a commission signed by the Governor of Jamaica allowing him to make war against the Spaniards, using his own ship.
‘If he lost or damaged his ship, that was his affair. But if he took prizes, whether sacks of gold from some town on the Spanish Main or Spanish ships, he had to bring it back to Jamaica and in effect declare it, paying the King and his brother (Charles II and James) their share.’
‘A private navy, in fact,’ Painter said. ‘I’m beginning to remember now. Weren’t those buccaneers given a special name?’
‘They called themselves “The Brethren of the Coast”.’
‘And their leader – he was called something special, too.’
‘Yes. My eighth great-grandfather was given the title of “Admiral of the Brethren”.’
‘Good for him,’ exclaimed Harding, obviously reaching back into boyhood memories of books he had read; florid Victorian histories condemning piracy competing with overblown Edwardian novels describing the buccaneers as heroes and the Spanish as villains. Few books that he had ever read gave any hint of the story told in ancestor Ned’s letters, written in the 1670's. Buc
caneers, pirates… Standing on the bridge of the City of Norwich as she zigzagged her way towards Halifax, Nova Scotia, a lone and almost insignificant protagonist in the Battle of the Atlantic, he found that the Ned Yorke of three centuries earlier had suddenly become closer.
The City of Norwich, a tiny moving island of steel carrying a few men who were caught up in a great war now affecting most of the world, thanks to the Japs bringing in the Americans and Hitler’s megalomania involving the Russians – yes, some of the phrases in the Restoration Ned’s letters took on, well, not a new meaning but somehow a real life: Ned seemed to be looking over his forebear’s shoulders as the quill pen scratched.
‘We are so few,’ he had written, ‘about a thousand undisciplined men hailing from half a dozen countries, to dispute the might of Spain. We have the tiny island of Jamaica while Spain holds the Main, thousands of miles of coast from Trinidad in the east round to the Strait of Florida, and the great islands of Cuba and Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Yet even as a tiny horse-fly can make a great plough horse bolt with pain, so can we sally out from Jamaica in our little ships (as sorry a collection as you could assemble for a debtor’s sale at the Nore on a windy day in midwinter, vessels on which no mortgagor would bother to foreclose nor any insurer write cover: a score of men to each and perhaps a couple of small guns) and keep the Spaniards away. If only the King would send up a ship or two: we are defending his possessions with our own ships, lives and pennies, and yet he does not abate by one penny his and his brother’s share in the prize money.
‘Picture us, if you will.’ (This phrase was always very clear in Ned’s memory: a quiet voice echoing through centuries like a whisper in a cathedral.) ‘Jamaica is situated about like Guernsey, in the Channel Islands, and all the land around (be it France or Britain, Spain to the south or the Netherlands and Denmark and Sweden to the north) belongs to Spain, who is determined to possess this tiny speck in the ocean.
‘Yet we who defend this speck are given no assistance from England. We have had to capture our cannon and our ships, our powder and our shot, and more recently the very gold coins we now use as currency with which to trade, to buy food and clothing, the very necessities of life. Yet we are called pirates by some, even though we do possess the only thing the King grants us for our defence – our commissions. With these flimsy parchments (for which we have to pay, of course) we defend his island and capture prizes which yield a goodly share for the King’s purse.
‘Yet all the time we wonder if the King has a secret agreement with Spain to hand back the island after a decent interval as his reward to the King of Spain for allowing him to live there in exile while Cromwell ruled Britain.’
Well, little has changed in three centuries, Ned thought: Britain had been completely unprepared for Hitler’s attack, and judging from the dockers’ recent strike and the Civil Service union’s attitude over Wrens, the unions had taken over the role held in Restoration days by absentee landlords enjoying themselves at Court while others kept the country secure. What would the dockers have thought as they stopped unloading the merchant ships, which had reached British ports only because the convoys had been fought across the western ocean, if the anti-aircraft gunners defending the ports in which their homes were situated had gone on strike for more sugar in their tea, and the German bombers had flown in unopposed?
‘Hope you still have some of the old boy’s money left,’ Painter said enviously. ‘Should keep you in the best Havana cigars!’
‘Very little. Gets a bit watered down in seven or eight generations, you know, and my direct line lost a fair sum of money as shipowners.’
‘Yes, I can see that, and I suppose it needs only one eldest son to blow his inheritance at the backgammon table!’
‘Yes, but luckily most of it was – and still is – heavily entailed: old Ned (then a young lad of course) saw the family lose everything to the Roundheads, although they got some of it back at the Restoration, and made sure his buccaneering and later landowning wealth was well tied up.’
‘Inherited wealth,’ Painter said vaguely, ‘I’ve often wondered about it.’
‘Have you any children?’ Ned asked casually.
‘Son and daughter, both at school.’
‘Do you believe in saving money?’
‘Of course! Don’t want to leave my wife without a penny when I go, and I want the boy to have a decent education, with something left over to set him up in a little business when this bloody war is over.’
‘That’s inherited wealth,’ Yorke said gently. ‘What’s the difference between your son inheriting it from you, and me inheriting it from my father? Who do most men struggle and save if not to give their children a better chance than they had themselves? That my eighth great-grandfather took enormous risks which let him provide for his descendants is really the same as you commanding this ship and dodging U-boats while your pay accumulates in your bank for the benefit of your family.’
‘So, I’m a buccaneer, eh?’ Painter asked humorously.
‘No different from the Commander’s ancestor,’ Harding said unexpectedly, ‘except you’re paid regularly in English quids and he got his irregularly in pieces of eight!’
Painter looked round the horizon: night had fallen except for a lighter patch ahead, to the west.
‘Different scale, surely, Commander?’
‘Yes, up to now. I shan’t have much to leave any children I might have (I’m a bachelor at the moment), but say you leave £5,000 to your son, who becomes a clever businessman and dies of old age leaving £500,000 to his son, who is a clever financier and leaves a couple of million…’
‘Some hopes, with taxation the way it is!’ Painter said.
‘My buccaneer forebear complained bitterly that the King took ten per cent and the Lord High Admiral, the King’s brother, fifteen of the gross, not net. So buccaneers were paying twenty-five per cent income tax in the 1660's, and no doubt they took the same view as you!’
Painter laughed heartily. ‘Yes, I see what you mean. “Inherited wealth” is someone else doing it, but when you do it yourself it’s looking after the wife and kids!’
Ned held up his hand. ‘I didn’t bring my glove, and this is beginning to feel a little frail.’
Painter shivered. ‘That’s a polite way of saying it’s bloody cold! Very well, Mr Harding, stand ’em down.’
Chapter Nine
The depression was small and quickly slid up to the north-east to bring more gloom on Iceland, thickening the snowfalls and sending bitterly cold winds scouring the bare and striated hills forming anchorages like Seidisfjord, where merchant ships and escorts were assembling.
The convoys to Murmansk were sailing again now that the nights were long, with fourteen hours and more of darkness, increasing through the winter until at the latitude of northern Norway half an hour’s twilight was the day’s ration.
The City of Norwich steamed westwards – seemingly in increments, Ned thought, when she turned a couple of points to port as the buzzer attached to the special clock in the wheelhouse signalled the next leg of this particular zigzag. The wind waves superimposed on the broad swell gave the ship an awkward roll, and glancing astern at the wake he saw that the quartermaster was still settling down to the different conditions as he tried to keep the ship on the new course.
How the City of Norwich’s quartermaster must hate that zigzag clock and buzzer! It was usually the second officer’s job, as the man responsible for navigation, to set the clock, which was like an ordinary ship’s clock but had a rim round the outside of the face along which small sliding metal contacts could be adjusted. Using details for a particular zigzag diagram listed in the manual, the contacts were set at various times, so that a buzzer sounded when the minute hand touched them. At each buzz the ship zigged or zagged on to a new course, the theory being that a lurking U-boat sighting the ship would be man
oeuvring into a firing position just as the ship turned away on the next leg of its zigzag, steaming out of range. Ned, like a number of naval officers, had grave doubts about zigzagging. By all means change course every few hours – especially at dawn and dusk – so that a U-boat sighting a ship could not make an accurate estimate of her future position and alert other U-boats farther ahead – but these shorter zigzags were just as likely to bring a ship into range of a U-boat as avoid it. With the U-boat able to move underwater only at nine knots, a 16-knot merchant ship steering a straight course was likely to pass out of range of a random U-boat faster than another which was zigzagging. Perhaps the mathematics showed zigzagging gave a slight advantage, but Ned reckoned the longer distance steamed over the zigzag course gave the ship many more chances of getting within the range of torpedoes than a straight course. Jemmy, with all the experience of having very successfully commanded a submarine, could not make up his mind for sure but tended to agree with Ned. He reckoned he had lost many chances of sinking enemy ships because they were passing too far off, and he had also sunk ships that started off too far away and then zigzagged into range. But he had also had a promising target zigzag out of range minutes before he was going to fire.
‘Our torpedoes are too slow,’ Jemmy had said. ‘The dam’ things go only a knot or two faster than a Tribal class destroyer with the wick turned up… Let’s fit destroyers with explosive bowsprits and go back to battering rams!’
Both Jemmy and the Croupier were sitting back in their bunks, legs hanging over the bunkboard, as they reported the day’s activities. Yon, the engineer, sat along the settee from Ned, working on a drawing and occasionally getting up to sharpen some crayons into the wastepaper basket.
‘The men,’ the Croupier reported, ‘are living like fighting cocks. Enormous breakfasts, steak for lunch and steak for dinner: seems the doctor once advised in preparing a Welsh boxer for a title fight. Two hours’ PT in the morning, and two hours’ scrambling round the ship, up and down vertical ladders. And the cricket balls are a success.’