In Distant Waters

by Richard Woodman

  To the British deserters he promised, with complicit winks and other indications of racial superiority, that if they played along, he would accomplish their rescue. There were prolonged parleys, exchanges of some form of gifts or money and then they were led off on the promise of good behaviour, by the mountain-man whom they knew by the obvious alias of ‘Captain Mack’. Since the alternative was inevitable death at the hands of either Indians, half-caste Spanish or the tender ministrations of what they thought was the Inquisition, they shambled off in the wake of their rescuer.

  After a march of three days, Captain Mack led them down to the sea, on the shores of Bodega Bay where, to their astonishment, they found soldiers who spoke a language they could not understand, but was clearly not Spanish. It did not take them long to find out that they had unwittingly become the serfs of the Russian-American Company, and that they were to be shipped in one of the filthy brigs that lay in the bay, to the Company’s more secure post on the Columbia River. Captain Mack had gone with them to strike his bargain with the commandant there, and had been waiting to return to the mountain forests of California when Drinkwater had arrived in the schooner. As for the men, they were to be employed refitting or serving in Russian ships in the Pacific.

  ‘The hands are mustered, Captain.’

  Drinkwater came out of his reverie to find Derrick confronting him. ‘Eh? Oh, thank you, Derrick. I shall be up directly.’

  There was something piratical about the assembly amidships. Whether it was the lean, dishevelled and indisciplined appearance of the men, or whether the character of the schooner under its false colours, or simply the crawling uncertainty that nagged at Drinkwater that contributed to this impression, he was not sure as they stared back at him. Despite his titular right to lead them, his tenure of command had never rested on such insubstantial foundations. Among the men confronting him were almost certainly those who had attempted to sabotage the Patrician.

  ‘Very well,’ he began, silencing them and studying their faces for traces of guilt, defiance, insolence or contrition. ‘Fate has literally cast us in the same boat . . .’ he slapped the rail beside him, ‘and I intend to discover the whereabouts of the Patrician and free our shipmates from the kind of bestial treatment some of you have just subjected yourselves to. Make no mistake about it, there are worse forms of existence than service in the King’s Navy.’ He paused, to let the point sink in.

  ‘I can offer you little beyond hardship and the possibility of retaking our ship from the Russians, clearing our name as a company and destroying our enemies.’

  He paused again, clambering up on the carriage of a 6-pounder. ‘Well, what d’you say? Are you for or against? Do we keep that rag aloft,’ he pointed up at the red and gold ensign of Spain still at the main peak, ‘or are we going to take this little hooker into Plymouth to be condemned as a prize to Patrician?’

  There was a second’s hesitation and then they were yelling stupidly and throwing their arms in the air in acclamation. Drinkwater got down from the gun carriage.

  ‘Very well, Mr Q. Lay me a course of nor’-nor’-west. Happily their experiences as subjects of the Tsar have taught them that there are degrees even of injustice.’

  CHAPTER 19

  July–August 1808

  The Trojan Horse

  Drinkwater tapped the dividers on the chart and looked up, gauging his prisoner.

  Vasili Zhdanov, one of the three men captured with the Russian brig, spoke English of a kind, having been in attendance upon his one-time master when that worthy had served as an officer with the Anglophile Seniavin. However, Zhdanov had been caught stealing and after a sound whipping had been sold to the Russian-American Company, so that he had found a kind of life as seaman in one of the company’s trading brigs. Now the reek of him, and particularly of his Makhorka tobacco, filled the cabin.

  ‘How do you know that the British ship Patrician is here?’ Drinkwater pointed to the bay which lay far to the northward, on the south coast of distant Alaska. There were a thousand anchorages amid the archipelagoes of islands that extended northwards from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, not least that of Nootka Sound, but this remote spot . . .

  ‘I see . . . she come . . . Suvorov come . . .’ replied Zhdanov, haltingly.

  ‘Who is captain of Suvorov?’

  ‘Barin Vladimir Rakitin . . .’

  ‘How many guns?’

  Zhdanov shrugged; he was clearly not numerate. ‘Do you wish to serve King George of Great Britain?’

  ‘I fight with Royal Navy,’ Zhdanov said with some dignity, but whether he referred to Drinkwater’s proposed change of allegiance or to his own past history he was unable to make clear. Drinkwater looked up at Quilhampton.

  ‘Split the three of them up, try and make them understand they can join us and swear ’em in. If they protest, you’ll have to put ’em back in the bilboes . . .’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ Quilhampton led the Russian out. Drinkwater opened a stern window to clear the air. The man reminded him of a strange cross between a feral animal like a bear, and a child. Yet there was something impressive about him, reminding Drinkwater of those vast numbers of such men he had seen encamped about the Lithuanian town of Tilsit a year earlier. Like patient beasts they had awaited their fates with an equanimity that struck him as stoic. Zhdanov had responded to his own autocratic proposal with the simple obedience that made the Tsar’s armies almost invincible.

  He looked again at the chart. There was logic in secreting a ship in such a place. It was well-surveyed, compared with the adjacent coast, a strange opening into the surrounding mountains, like a fiord except that its entrance, instead of being open, was almost closed off by rocky promontories. Between them, Drinkwater guessed, the tide would rip with considerable ferocity.

  Inside, the fiord was deep, a single steep islet rising in its middle, beyond which there was a sudden, abrupt bifurcation, the bay’s arms swinging north and south and terminating in glaciers. If Vasili Zhdanov was right, somewhere within those enclosing pincers of promontories, lay Patrician.

  Drinkwater opened the dividers and stepped off the distance, laying the steel points of the instrument against the latitude scale; more than a thousand miles lay between their present position and the lone bay which nestled under the massive shoulder of Mount Elias and the great Alaskan Range. He stared unseeing from the stern windows. So much depended upon their success. Where were Fraser, and Frey, the punctilious Mount or Midshipman Wickham? Were they prisoners aboard their own ship, or had they been held at San Francisco?

  If providence granted success to this venture, he would return thither and force those corrupt time-servers, the Arguello brothers, to release his men. And force some measure of expiation out of that dishonourable dog, Rubalcava!

  He felt his pulse beat with the mere thought of revenge and a wave of anger swept over him as he recalled the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of Prince Vladimir Rakitin.

  If, if only providence had turned her face upon him again, he might yet do something to retrieve the ragged flag of honour.

  No matter how assiduously one studied a chart, the reality never quite conformed to the imagination. Assessment of the present landscape had not been helped by the unfamiliar topographical terms Zaliv, Mys or Bukhta rendered incomprehensible by the Cyrillic script. Neither was Drinkwater’s familiarity with French sufficiently proficient to determine whether it was La Perouse or the Russian Kruzenstern who had named the places on the chart. What impressed him was the quality of the thing, manufactured as it had been, half a world away in the Russan hydrographic office in St Petersburg.

  He raised the glass again and raked the shore, seeking the narrow, half-hidden entrance and avoiding the scenic seductions of the mountain range that seemed to beetle down upon the littoral. It was stunningly magnificent, this chain of mighty peaks, shining with the sunlit glitter of permanent ice, like the nunataks of Greenland. And then he saw her, the black tracery sharp in the crisp, cool air whic
h sharpened every image with more intensity than the most cunningly wrought lens. He knew instantly that the ship anchored beyond the low headland was indeed Patrician.

  He shut his glass with a snap. ‘Hoist Spanish colours, if you please, and call all hands to their stations.’

  He had assumed the worst and formed his ruse accordingly. Patrician, he theorised, would be well manned by the enemy, despite his inclination to believe the contrary due to her remote location. Her own people would have been removed in San Francisco, so there would be no spontaneous rising to assist; art and cunning must, therefore, be his chief weapons. He sent below for the Spanish uniforms and saw to his side-arms long before the approach to the entrance. When he was ready he turned the Virgen de la Bonanza to the north-east and, ascending to the foretop, spied out the narrow strait between the guardian headlands. From that elevation he saw at once why the entrance was so difficult to locate from the deck. The island which he knew lay within the bay, lay directly upon the line of sight when peering through the gap, so appearing to form one continuous coastline. Turning, he called down to Quilhampton by the helm, the course was altered and the bowsprit below him swung towards the narrows.

  The schooner heeled, turning to larboard and bringing the wind fine on that bow and Drinkwater, surveying the entrance from his perch, felt the fine thrum of wind through the stays and the halliards that ran past him. The water ran suspiciously smooth in the gut, with darker corrugations rippling out from either side, corrugations which tore off into whorls and rips of gyrating turbulence, where unseen rocks or sudden treacherous shifts of current, manipulated the violent motion of an ebbing tide.

  ‘Deck there!’

  ‘Sir?’ Quilhampton looked aloft.

  ‘I want a steady hand on the helm . . . there’s a deal of broken water ahead . . .’

  ‘Aye, aye, zur.’

  Drinkwater smiled as Tregembo took the helm and then turned his attention to the narrows again. Their progress was becoming slower, as they felt the increasing opposition of the tide. The schooner crabbed sideways under its influence, unable to point closer to the wind. Drinkwater bestowed a quick glance at the anchored ship.

  She was alone, alone beneath those great slabs of mountains which lifted into the heavens behind her, their snow caps sliding into scree and talus, tussocked grass and low, stunted trees which, on the lower ground that fringed the fiord, changed to a dark, impenetrable mantle of firs. And she was most certainly the Patrician.

  ‘Steady there . . .’

  He felt the schooner lurch and looked below to see Tregembo anticipate the tide-rip’s attempt to throw the vessel’s head into the wind. The sea was slick with the speed of the tide, almost uninfluenced by the effect of the breeze as it rushed out into the ocean beyond the confines of the bay. Those dark corrugations resolved themselves into standing waves, foaming with energy as the mass of water forced itself out of the bay so that the schooner slowed, stood still and began to slip astern.

  The heads of curious seals, impervious to the viciously running ebb, popped out of the grey water to stare like curious, ear-less dogs, their pinched nostrils flaring and closing in exaggerated expressions of outrage at the intrusion.

  For an hour they hung, suspended in this fashion until almost suddenly, the tide slacked, relented and the power of the wind in their sails drove them forwards again. The low roar of the rush of water eased, the corrugations, the rips and eddies diminished and slowly disappeared. For a while the strait was one continuous glossy surface of still water, and then they were through, brought by this curious diminishing climax into sudden proximity with their quarry.

  ‘And now,’ said Drinkwater regaining the deck, ‘we must play at a Trojan Horse.’

  ‘After Scylla and Charybdis ’twill be little enough, sir,’ remarked Quilhampton with unbecoming cheerfulness.

  ‘Belay the classical allusions, Mr Q,’ snapped Drinkwater, suddenly irritated, ‘belay the loud-mouthed English and lower the boat, then you may carry out your instructions and fire that salute . . .’

  The bunting of the Spanish ensign tickled Drinkwater’s ear as he was rowed across the dark waters of the inlet towards the Patrician. The schooner’s boat, hoisted normally under her stern, was smaller than the cutter they had lost in the Columbia River. But he hoped his approach was impressive enough and he was aware, from a flash of reflected light, that he was being scrutinised through a glass by one of the half-dozen men he could see on his own quarterdeck.

  Behind him came the dull thud of the 6-pounder, echoing back after a delay to mix its repetition with the sound of the next signal-gun so that the air seemed to reverberate with the concussion of hundreds of guns as the echoes chased one another into the distance in prolonged diminuendo.

  No answering salute came from the fo’c’s’le of the Patrician, no answering dip of her diagonally crossed ensign. He stood up, showing off the Spanish uniform with its plethora of lace, and holding out the bundle of papers that purported to be despatches.

  He noted a flurry of activity at the entry with a sigh of mixed relief and satisfaction.

  ‘How far is the schooner, Potter?’ he asked the man pulling stroke-oar.

  ‘She’s just tacked, sir,’ replied Potter, staring astern past Drinkwater, ‘an’ coming up nicely . . . they’re tricing up the foot of the fores’l now, sir and the outer jib’s just a-shivering . . . ’bout long pistol shot an’ closing, sir.’

  ‘Very well.’ Drinkwater could smell the rum on the man’s breath as he made his oar bite the water. Off to starboard an unconcerned tern hovered briefly, then plunged into the water and emerged a second later with a glistening fish in its dagger-like beak.

  ‘We’re closing fast, lads, be ready . . .’ He paused, judged his moment and, in a low voice, ordered the oars tossed and stowed. Beside him Tregembo put the tiller over. Amid a clatter of oars coming inboard the bowman stood up and hooked onto Patrician’s chains.

  Drinkwater looked up. A face stared down at him and then he began to climb, not daring to look around and ascertain the whereabouts of Quilhampton and the schooner. At the last moment he remembered to speak bastard-French, considering that it was not unreasonable for a Spanish officer to use that language when addressing a French-speaking ally. The fact that he spoke it barbarously was some comfort.

  Stepping onto the deck he swept off his hat and bowed.

  ‘Bonjour, Señores,’ he managed, looking up with relief into the face of an officer he had never seen before, ‘ou est votre capitaine, s’il vous plait?’

  ‘Tiens! C’est le capitaine anglais!’

  Drinkwater jerked round. To his left stood one of the midshipmen he had last seen in Don José’s Residence at San Francisco. Hands flew to swords and he knew that his ruse had failed utterly. He flung the paper bundle at the young man’s face and drew the cavalry sabre before either of the Russian officers had reacted fully. Letting out a bull-roar of alarm he swiped the heavy, curved blade upwards in a vicious cut that sent the senior officer, a lieutenant by his epaulettes, reeling backwards, his hands to his face, his dropped sword clattering on the deck.

  ‘Come on you bastards!’ Drinkwater bellowed into the split second’s hiatus his quick reaction had brought him. ‘Board!’

  Would they come, those disloyal quondam deserters, or would they leave him to die like a dog, hacked down by the ring of steel that was forming about him? What would Quilhampton do? Carry out the plan of getting foul of the Patrician’s stern in a histrionic display of incompetence which was to have cut Drinkwater’s inept French explanation and turned it into a farce of invective levelled by him at Quilhampton under whose cover the Virgen de la Bonanza was to have been run alongside the frigate. During this ludicrous performance his men were supposed to have come aboard . . .

  Armed seamen with pikes from the arms’ racks around the masts and marines with bayonets, men with spikes and rammers and gun-worms were closing, keeping their distance until they might all rush in and kill him.<
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  ‘Board, you bastards!’ he shouted again, his voice cracking with tension, his eyes moving from one to another of his enemies, seeking which was the natural leader, whose muscles would first tense for the kill and bring down Nemesis upon his reckless head . . .

  It seemed he waited an age and then a shuffling of the midshipman’s feet told him what he wanted to know. He thrust left, pronating his wrist and driving his arm forward so that the mangled muscles cracked with the speed of his lunge. The pointe of his sabre struck the young man on the breast-bone, cracked it and sent him backwards, gasping for breath in an agony of surprise. As he half-turned he sensed reaction to his right, a movement forward to threaten his unprotected back. He cut savagely, reversing the swing of his body, the heavy weapon singing through the air and cutting with a sickening crunch into the upper arm of a bold seaman whose cannon-worm dropped from nerveless hands and who let out a howl of pain and surprise. And then he lost the initiative and was fighting a dozen assailants for his very life.

  ‘Frey, I think you are an infatuated fool. That must be the twentieth portrait of La Belladonna you have done,’ quipped Wickham, looking down at the watercolour, ‘and they do not improve. Besides they are a waste of the dip . . .’ he reached out with dampened fingers to pinch out the miserable flame that lit the thick air of the cold gunroom and received a sharp tap on the knuckles from Frey’s brush.