“You’ve still agents in Paris?” Lewrie asked, stunned.
“One or two,” Mr. Peel confessed most slyly. “Once the war began last May, Bonaparte clapped a total embargo on correspondence going in or coming out of France… almost every book, newspaper, or letter’s read… but we’ve managed. We have our ways, after all. So far, we only have vague descriptions, no sketches, of this other type of craft, but everyone would dearly love to lay hands on one. You’ll be working along the French coast? Good. Do you ever come across what looks like a water-beetle with sails, you snap it right up.”
“A water-beetle,” Lewrie said with a dubious frown.
“There’s a M’sieur Forfait, been made inspector-general of the invasion fleet. One of Bonaparte’s pet mathematicians and scientists? Forfait earned his spurs designing and building shallow draught barges and such for use on the Seine. Some people in London think the entire idea’s as daft as bats, but… he is a skilled mathematician, so we can’t dismiss his work out-of-hand.”
Mister MacTavish is a skilled engineer, too, and look what he’s come up with! Lewrie sourly thought.
“There are two types described,” Peel went on, leaning closer. “One’s about thirty-six feet by fourteen or fifteen feet, and will only draw about three feet of water. The second’s about fourty-six feet in length and sixteen or eighteen feet in breadth. That one is said to draw a little less than four feet of water, when fully laden. Eighty or an hundred soldiers aboard… a twenty-four-pounder gun mounted in the bows, and, from the description may resemble two serving platters joined together, the top one inverted, and very flat-bottomed. There are slanted berths for the soldiers in the rims of the lower platter, and they’re supposed to be rigged like a Schweling fishing boat… whatever the Devil that’s supposed to look like. Any clue?”
“Never seen one in my life,” Lewrie told him with a shrug.
“Anyway, the most intriguing part of the written description is that there’s a long box atop the upper platter that runs the length of the boat, tall enough to allow the soldiers aboard to sit below it and be sheltered from fire,” Peel said, grimacing with mock dis-belief. “Four or five abreast, and twenty or so deep, so they can sit there in the same formations they’d form in the field… Napoleon Bonaparte is very fond of the column when attacking opposing lines. Not keen on it, myself, but it’s seemed to have served him well, so far. Now, what we are worried about is whether that protective box, and the wide slope of the upper hull from the waterline up, might be armoured somehow. If the French have re-enforced these boats, they might be the principal craft to drive themselves right onto the beaches, and be proof against shot from any of our field guns or horse artillery batteries. Our fellow in Paris describes the damned things as three-fifths of their length flat, with a rise of eight feet at the ends. They could come ashore like so many walruses!”
“Armoured? With iron plate, d’ye mean?” Lewrie gawped. “That’d make ’em top-heavy as Hell. Centre of gravity, metacentric height… all that?”
“You’ve been reading technical books?” Peel teased.
“Ye listen to others long enough, well…,” Lewrie shrugged off. “If they’re armoured, they’d be drawin’ a lot more water than three or four feet, Jemmy. I’ll allow that the breadth of their hulls’d buoy ’em up a good deal, but not that much. And if they’re that heavy, it would take a lot more sail area than a fishing boat’s t’drive ’em.”
“The report says that they only require a crew of five or six seamen,” Peel said, dredging half a roll through the juices and gravy on his plate for a last bite. “And some sort of paddle arrangement to propel them if the wind fails. What sort? The work done by soldiers? Really, Alan… if you see one, go after it, MacTavish’s experiments bedamned.”
“I’ll try and do my best.” Lewrie grinned back. “Anything else? Pick up the Golden Fleece? Slay Medusa while I’m at it?”
“What’s for dessert?” Peel asked, laughing heartily.
“I think my cook said there’s a bread pudding. Are we done on confidential topics, I’ll have my steward return,” Lewrie said, rising to go to the forward door to his cabins to speak with the Marine guard so he could pass word for Pettus and Jessop.
“Rather humble fare for a knight and baronet,” Peel mused once he’d returned to the dining-coach. Lewrie opened a covered dish.
“It comes with caramel sauce,” Lewrie said, after sticking one finger into the dish and licking it. “And don’t you start! It’s all a sham, anyway. Awarded for sympathy, not anything I did. The closest I ever got to something of note was years ago in the South Atlantic when we took the L’Uranie frigate. And the baronetcy… hmpf! King George was havin’ an off day, let’s leave it at that. Unless ye wish to hear the whole story.”
“Is it amusing?” Peel asked.
“Completely,” Lewrie assured him.
“Then do tell!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“It’s grand that Spain’s stayed out of the war, so far,” Peel said after supper. They had gone on deck to the taffrails of the quarterdeck so he could light up a slim cigaro and blow smoke rings at the night. “Do they decide to re-join the French against us, the price of tobacco will soar, and the quality will decrease. Say what you will of American tobacco, but I still think the best is from Spanish colonies.”
“Wouldn’t know much about that. Never developed the taste for it,” Lewrie said with a shrug, lounging most lubberly on the after-most bulwarks. He looked over to Fusee, about half a cable off to larboard. “They wouldn’t let you smoke over there, not with all the powder aboard her. We’re much more hospitable,” he added, grinning.
“Think those things will work?” Peel asked.
“No idea,” Lewrie replied. “I s’pose we’ll soon find out. The wind’s fair enough for us to set out tomorrow morning, and let us test the first batch. Though, after what we’ve learned of them the last few days, I think my chances’d be better were I a French matelot sittin’ on an anchored barge than bein’ in the launchin’ boat.”
“Well, if MacTavish’s don’t, there’s other designers’ ideas to try out,” Peel imparted with a knowing nod and wink. “There’s a fellow name of Robert Fulton… an American, who’s come up with a variation on the torpedo. Man’s just brimming with ideas. He claims he could build a ship driven by a steam engine. Dead-keen on steam engines, he is.”
“No thankee!” Lewrie scoffed, after a second of surprise. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t steam engines need big fires under the boilers? Fire, on a wooden ship? Brr!”
“Not only that, this Fulton fellow said he could also build a nautilus, a submersible boat that could sink down twenty or thirty feet and stay down for the better part of an hour,” Peel further told him. “A small crew, three or four, I forget which, paddle it forward in some way.”
“And do what with it?” Lewrie gawped, then shook his head. “The very word ‘sink’ makes my ‘nut-megs’ shrivel. Sounds suicidal, t’me.”
“That’s what Admiralty thought, too,” Peel said with a snicker. “He offered both, just after the war began again last May. I gather that Fulton couldn’t sell his ideas to his own navy, and couldn’t raise sufficient private funds in his own country, so he flogged his schemes on this side of the Atlantic. The last card up his sleeve was the idea of explosive torpedoes, though I believe that the submersible boat and the torpedoes would have worked together, the boat towing the torpedoes under an anchored ship, and the torpedo exploding when it came into contact, whilst the submersible paddles away on the other side.”
“Not with a timing mechanism?” Lewrie grimaced. “That would take some sort of hair-trigger pistol, and any hard knock’d set it off. You wish crew for that thing, best look in Bedlam!”
“Admiralty’s judgement, too,” Peel said, shrugging, pausing to take a deep puff on his cigaro and exhale a jet of smoke. “Mind, now. All these daft schemes are William Pitt’s doing. Soon as he got back into office as Prime M
inister, he pressed for offensive action, and not sit idle, waiting for the French to invade. Admiral the Earl Saint Vincent was against them, but who knows about Lord Melville. The damned things may turn up to be tested, do we give events long enough, or they grow dire enough.”
“Christ,” was Lewrie’s sober comment to that.
“Better us than the French, I suppose,” Peel said, laughing some more. “Before he came to London, Fulton tried to sell his schemes to Bonaparte. Went to Paris during the Peace of Amiens and got an audience with the ‘Ogre’ himself… and thank God ‘Boney’ thought Fulton’s ideas madder than a March Hare, too.”
Lewrie tried to picture what the French would have done with a submersible boat and a towed torpedo. Could people be found with more martial ardour than sense to crew the things in the first place? Then this anchorage at the Nore would lie open to a creeping, unseen danger. Portsmouth, Plymouth, Great Yarmouth, or Harwich… He had to shake his head to rid himself of the image of a peacefully anchored and sleeping warship suddenly smashed open by a titanic blast, then heeling over and sinking in minutes, aflame from bow to stern!
No thankee! At least a steam-driven ship’d give you a fightin’ chance, and stay atop the sea! Lewrie thought, wondering uneasily where all this inventiveness would lead. Warfare at least had a few gentlemanly rules-not that Lewrie had always paid heed to them when needs must-but, in the main both sides went into battle with assumptions that things would go honourably, fairly, and… sporting, like knights of old at a joust. If inventiveness mated with desperation, though…
No, with any luck, such things won’t work well enough to become normal, or acceptable, Lewrie told himself.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Peel prompted upon seeing how silent and pensive Lewrie had become.
“Wonderin’ what Fulton’s torpedoes are like, compared to ours,” Lewrie dissembled; it wouldn’t do to sound fretful, even with a friend. That would be “croaking,” and might give Peel the impression that he’d no faith in MacTavish’s torpedoes and would not do his utmost to test them fairly.
“Smaller, I gathered,” Peel told him, flicking an inch of ash over the stern. “Small enough to be rolled over the side of a boat… spherical, made of copper. I think they’re to be deployed in pairs, with a line buoyed with cork blocks like a fishing net, between them. Other than that, the clockwork timers and cocked pistols to set them off are similar to MacTavish’s. This very moment, there’s probably a captain like you charged with experimenting with Fulton’s version. A competition ’tween the two versions, if you will.
“And of course, old man,” Peel sarcastically added, assuming an Oxonian accent, “can’t let the old-school side down, you know! Better the winner is British, than a benighted ‘Brother Johnathon’ from New England, what?”
“Yoicks, tally-ho, and all that?” Lewrie smirked.
“Win for ‘The Roast Beef of Old England,’ ” Peel laughed back. “Unless the damned things turn out to be a pile of manure.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The first cask torpedo was tried out in English waters, just off Mersea Island and the mouth of the Blackwater river, where the North Sea tides ran particularly strong, and the ebbs left miles of exposed mud flats. Reliant stood guardian to the Fusee bomb as she worked her way within a mile of shore as the tide began to flood, and it was Lieutenant Johns and Mr. McCloud who saw to its priming, its lowering into the waters, and its towing behind one of their new thirty-two-foot barges.
Lewrie had himself rowed over to Fusee to watch, and stood with Mr. MacTavish whilst the evolution was carried out.
“They will be setting the timer… drawing the cocking line to the pistol… and letting it go!” MacTavish narrated, a telescope to his eye, like to jump out of his skin with excitement. “McCloud and I agreed to set the clockwork for half an hour. No specific target, just a trial of all the various elements, you see, sir.”
He’ll piss his breeches, does he have t’wait for half an hour, Lewrie cynically thought, a telescope to his own eye. The twelve-oar barge was wheeling about, fending off from the torpedo with a gaff and re-hoisting its lug-sails… in understandable haste, he also noted.
MacTavish, for all his seeming urbanity, did closely resemble a squirming, tail-wagging, circling puppy which would piddle in excitement. He collapsed the tubes of his glass and became rivetted to his pocket-watch, a fine one that had a second hand in addition to the usual minute and hour hands. The fellow paced, stewed, fretted, peered at his watch, and fussed with the set of his coat and waist-coat, his neck-stock, and (unconsciously) his crutch.
The barge returned, Lt. Johns and McCloud came upon deck, and the boat crew led her aft for towing. Long minutes passed. As a half-hour slowly ticked by, Lt. Johns and McCloud caught the fidgets, too, coughing and ahumming and now and then putting their heads together with MacTavish for urgent whispered conversations.
Lewrie looked at his own watch. If MacTavish was right, their torpedo would explode in five minutes. He lifted his telescope again, looking for the device, but could not find it any longer. That black-painted upper hemisphere hid it from sight most effectively, even with a slight chop and bright sunlight shining off the white-glittering wave tops; the damned thing should have had a ring of revealing foam around it. Unless it had sunk, of course, Lewrie thought.
“Ehm, sirs…,” Fusee’s Midshipman piped up, coughing into his fist for attention. “Sirs? Ahem? That trading brig coming out from the river. Should we warn her off, or something?”
Lewrie wasn’t the only one who raised a telescope, or scrambled for one. Sure enough, a small two-masted merchantman was rounding the point east of Bradwell Waterside and standing out to sea, sails trimmed to broad-reach the Nor’easterly breezes.
“Could she be anywhere near your torpedo, Mister MacTavish?” Lt. Johns fretted aloud.
“What was the rate of the tide, Mister McCloud?” Lewrie asked the artificer. “In half an hour, could it have…?”
“Nae muir than four or five knots, I judged eet, sae…,” McCloud tried to shrug off.
“Pencil and paper!” MacTavish cried.
“My slate, sir?” the Midshipman offered.
“Think we should warn her off?” Lewrie suggested.
“Warn her, aye, sir!” Lt. Johns hurriedly agreed.
“How?” Lewrie further asked. “You have signal rockets?”
“We could fire a gun!” Johns barked, turning to order his small crew to man one of Fusee’s puny 6-pounders.
“And what’ll they make o’ that?” Lewrie snapped.
“I… don’t know, sir!” Lt. Johns replied, stunned to inaction.
“Five knots’ drift for half an hour, that’s two knots’ progress… on a course roughly Northwest…,” MacTavish was mumbling half to himself, a stub of chalk squeaking loudly on the Midshipman’s borrowed slate. He paused to raise an arm to where he judged the torpedo first had been released, his other arm to mark a rough course of drift; then he fumbled to trade slate and chalk for his telescope once more. “Well, damme, I think… yes, it’ll be wide of the mark. Sure to be wide of the mark.”
Once clear of the shoals, the little merchant brig hardened up a point or two to the winds to sail on a beam reach, angling further out to sea, as if to pass well to windward of the anchored bomb and frigate, without a clue or a care in the world.
“Safe as sae meeny houses,” McCloud predicted, his thumbs stuck in the pockets of his waist-coat. “We’ll miss her by a mile or-”
BOOM!
A gigantic column of spray and foam liberally mixed with dark clouds of exploded gunpowder sprang up from the sea… tall enough to tower over the brig’s mast-head trucks, between her and the shore.
“Oh shit,” Lewrie breathed.
Hope her owner has insurance, he further thought.
“One half-hour to the minute, sirs,” the Midshipman meekly said.
“My God!” from MacTavish.
“Weel, hmm,” from McCloud.
A shiver in the sea from the explosion was transmitted to Fusee to rattle her blocks, up through her hull to the tiny quarterdeck, to make the oak planks shudder for a second or two.
“What have we done? Dear Lord, what have we done?” Mr. MacTavish was almost whimpering, about ready to tear his hair out by the roots.
“Weel, eet deed wirk, sir, sae…,” McCloud tried to comfort him.
Lewrie took another long look. The merchant brig had hardened up to a close-reach; it was the wind pressing her sails that made her heel over more steeply, not the blast of the torpedo. She sailed off to their right-hand side, revealing that titanic column of spray and foam that was collapsing upon itself like a failing geyser, at least a mile inshore of the brig, but closer to the mouth of the Colne river than the centre of Mersea Island, as MacTavish had planned.
“That’ll put the wind up him,” Lewrie commented sarcastically. “Perhaps the whole coast. Mister MacTavish, did you or Admiralty warn the locals of your trials?”
“Well, of course not, Captain Lewrie!” MacTavish snapped back. “They are to be secret!”
“Well, it don’t look too secret, now,” Lewrie told him with a wry grin as he lifted his telescope once more. What fishing smacks that had been out off the coast were haring shoreward. Signal rockets were soaring aloft from Clackton-on-Sea, and a semaphore tower’s arms were whirling madly, the large black balls at their ends passing on a message to somewhere most urgently.
They were a bit too far offshore to see or hear the alarm their torpedo’s explosion had caused, but Lewrie could only imagine they had stirred up a hornet’s nest; militia drums would be rattling, mustering bugles would be ta-rahing, and the womenfolk would be dashing about in a dither, sure that the mysterious blast had been a fiendish French device, sure sign of imminent invasion!
The Invasion Year l-17 Page 27