by David McDine
Dover sole followed, fried in butter and perked up with juice from lemons brought on board by Captain Merton.
Next came freshly-slaughtered beef and fresh vegetables — a rare treat for men accustomed to lengthy periods at sea, far from cabbage, sprout or carrot.
Undoubtedly smuggled wine, readily available in a fishing/smuggling town like Deal, flowed freely throughout the meal and conversation grew louder and less and less inhibited as consumption mounted.
Having downed a splendid suet and fig pudding known in the service as figgy duff — but to most as ‘drowned babies’ because of their puffy, glistening new-born appearance — the diners downed the dregs of their wine and ship’s decanters of port and Madeira began their larboard voyages.
Both fortified wines that were now fortifying the company came, again, from their guest, Captain Mordecai Merton, whose Indiaman had recently touched at Funchal and Porto on her way home from the Far East.
The final flourish from the cooks came in the form of bowls of freshly-picked cherries purchased from a bumboat, carried in with some style and set between the diners.
Howard tapped his glass. ‘Gentlemen, the King!’
All responded: ‘The King.’
The loyal toast duly drunk, seated as was the custom in the service owing to the very real danger of crashing already fuddled heads on low bulkheads, the decanters continued to circle the table and the captain tapped his glass again.
‘A further toast, gentlemen. It is my pleasure to welcome on board our current next-door neighbour Captain Merton of the good ship Delivery — a fine representative, if I may say so, of our nation’s mercantile fleets, and we thank him for the excellent port and Madeira that is even now warming the cockles of our hearts.’
‘Hear, hear!’
‘Kindly raise your glasses.’
Merton beamed, rose unsteadily to his feet, and nodded to the captain and each of his fellow diners in turn. ‘Think nothing of it, dear sir, gentlemen. You have done me great honour by inviting me. We merchant fellows are mere tradesmen, pedlars of the seven seas, and we bow, as ever, to the nation’s real heroes — of the Royal Navy!’
The ship lurched at anchor and he staggered but managed to keep his feet by grabbing the table, provoking mirth by admitting that ‘Robust beverages, port and Madeira, gentlemen, are as you can see, extremely quick-acting on middle-aged fellows like me!’
Captain Phillips, his cheeks shining from the effects of the food and wine, caught Anson’s eye and clicked his fingers. ‘Damn me, I clean forgot! It being a Sunday, I’d meant to propose a toast to absent friends and those at sea, but I’m reminded that one of our friends is no longer absent! So we’ll couple it with our former shipmate Oliver Anson, returned from the dead!’
All eyes turned to Anson and glasses were emptied in salute to him.
Phillips put down his glass, wiped his hand across his mouth and announced: ‘Now, gentlemen, I call upon our former shipmate to explain in detail why it has taken him so long to return on board after his run ashore at St-Valery-en-Caux.’
Anson sighed and spread his hands. ‘Must I, sir?’
‘Certainly! The last I saw of you, my boy, was when you climbed into one of the boats off the Normandy coast, although of course Howard and McKenzie reported back what had happened on the mole.’
Nodding, Anson recalled the high hopes they had of cutting out a troublesome privateer — hopes that were dashed when they found the French had been alerted.
He offered: ‘The raid could well have succeeded, sir, but as I subsequently learned ashore, quite by chance a battalion of French infantry had arrived in the area and bivouacked nearby. We weren’t to know that and without them the mole would likely have been at best lightly defended and penetrating the inner harbour and cutting out the privateer would have been relatively straightforward.’
Relieved, Phillips ventured: ‘So it’s your opinion that Admiral Leng’s plan was realistic?’ In posing the question the captain, whether by accident or design, was making sure his officers understood that no blame for the failure of the raid could be attributed to him personally.
It was the admiral commanding the blockade who had ordered Phryne to undertake the mission after receiving intelligence from a French royalist sympathiser that the privateer pestering merchantmen off England’s south coast was lurking at St Valery.
‘Absolutely, sir. I have no doubt that we would have succeeded with minimum casualties. As it was—’
Howard interrupted: ‘We lost five men killed, several wounded in the boats, and you and two others wounded on the mole and captured.’
‘That’s about the size of it. Our lads did all they could, but the odds were overwhelming.’
‘But fortunately you were able to escape.’
‘Once we had recovered somewhat from our wounds. It was relatively easy to get away before we arrived at a prison camp, but I doubt I’d have managed to get to the coast and make it back across the Cannel without the support of Hoover and Fagg.’
McKenzie asked: ‘My Corporal Hoover, the American?’
‘One and the same, although he’s a sergeant now — master at arms of my Sea Fencible detachment. As reliable and resourceful fellow as you’ll ever find.’
The Scot nodded enthusiastically. ‘That’s good to hear. We train ’em well in the marines, you know!’
‘Hoover is an exceptional man. But for the fact that his father was killed fighting the rebels in America, he could well have had an easier start in life and become an officer. Still could and should in my opinion.’
McKenzie looked doubtful. It was not just the fact that Hoover was an American by birth. Commissions from the ranks were rare, even in the marines, and almost unheard of in the army where the system was bedevilled by the purchase system. It was well known that anyone short of a congenital idiot could buy his way in and up the rank ladder.
Phillips enquired: ‘The other man, Fagg, wasn’t it? I remember him as an excellent foretop-man, albeit a mite too cheeky for his own good, but then he was from Chatham.’
‘Indeed, sir,’ Howard observed. ‘He was one of those artful devils you suspected of all sorts of mischief but were never actually able to catch at anything,’
Anson grinned his now lop-sided grin. ‘Quite so, but he also proved to be just the sort of man to have with me when attempting to escape from France — annoyingly cheerful, quick-witted, and able to scrounge from the French without having a word of the language, well, no words they would have understood! He’s now my detachment bosun.’
Phillips laughed. ‘So you’ve got ’em both promoted! Well, a spot of nepotism never did the navy any harm!’
Anson raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘Guilty as charged, sir. But when taking command of a bunch of Sea Fencibles who’d been badly led, I was advised to have about me one or two men I could trust — and Hoover and Fagg had proved to me beyond doubt during our escape from France that they were such men.’
‘Now tell us about this stone frigate of yours and these strange Sea Fencible creatures you command.’
‘Well, basically they’re a bunch of harbour rats, mainly men who earn their living by the sea and rather than serving afloat they volunteer for the fencibles. No doubt the main attraction is that they are given a protection against being pressed, so there’s no shortage of recruits.’
‘Presumably they’re paid, too?’
‘Yes, a shilling a day for training with the great guns — we have our own shore battery, y’know — and with musket, half pike and cutlass. And we have two newish gunboats armed with carronades.’
‘And the role is mainly to prevent French landings?’
‘It is. If the French were to evade our ships and invade, our role is to frustrate any attempts to land — and of course to protect the coast from enemy privateers. Some call the fencibles man-of-war dodgers, but without them the Normandy privateer would not have been taken. What’s more, every man jack of my detachment volunteered fo
r the Boulogne raid — and paid in blood when it all went wrong.’
*
The decanters continued to circle and Anson was persuaded to recount the circumstances of the capture of the privateer, which he did with some reluctance, playing down the heroics.
Nevertheless, Howard and McKenzie, who had both been in the thick of the unsuccessful and costly St Valery raid, were not to be fooled.
The marine declared: ‘Damned brave, boarding and taking a well-armed and well-manned brig like that!’
Howard concurred: ‘And with a bunch of harbour rats!’
‘Yes,’ the captain agreed, ‘but British harbour rats!’
More drink flowed and Anson escaped further swinging of the lamp about his exploits since leaving the frigate by recounting the story of the stuffed birds he had sent his particular friend, the naturalist and antiquarian Josiah Parkin, from Gibraltar.
To the huge amusement of all, he explained that all that could be found of the stuffed hoopoe, blue-cheeked bee-eater and greater short-toed lark when Parkin opened the box back in England were a few feathers, bones and glass eyes — the work of Rattus rattus, alias the black or ship rat.
The by now well-oiled diners subsided into helpless mirth, and first Allfree, then others, followed up with tall stories of exploding rats that had been at a ship’s powder store, midshipmen’s ratting expeditions — and moved on to tales of weevils and other creatures that inhabited their nautical world.
Captain Merton was prevailed upon to recall exotic dishes served up by his cooks and his mention of Clive of India reputedly calling the pungent lizardfish ‘Bombay duck’ sparked the first lieutenant to counter with ‘Spithead pheasants’:
‘The navy’s nickname for kippers,’ he explained to the puzzled merchant captain. ‘We made good use of ’em when I was a middie in the old Unforgiveable. The first lieutenant was a real tartar, hated by the gunroom. He’d masthead or cane us for the slightest thing. But we got our own back.’
‘How did you do that?’
‘One of the other mids overheard the captain agreeing that the swine could go ashore to meet some lady friend when we reached Devonport. So a few days before he went, we purloined his best coat, unpicked the lining, put half a kipper in each of his coat tails and sewed them up again.’
‘Good grief!’ Anson exclaimed. ‘Didn’t he notice?’
‘Not ’til the kipper started rotting, but by then he was ashore no doubt being followed about by an extremely nasty smell emanating from his nether regions. I imagine it had an adverse effect on his love life. Coitus interruptus, you might say.’
Anson winced. The last time he had heard that expression, it had been blurted out by the dreaded Charlotte when they were caught by surprise dallying on the terrace during the Brax Hall ball. It was not something of which he wished to be reminded.
He swept the image from his mind. ‘Surely your first lieutenant must have found out what was causing the evil smell, put two and two together and taken his revenge?’
‘That’s the strange part. We’re sure he did eventually track the smell down and got rid of the kipper, because when he came back on board his jacket had clearly been freshly laundered and he reeked of ear de Cologne.’
‘But didn’t he punish those responsible?’
‘He must have had his suspicions, of course, but he never did discover who’d done it and if he’d punished the entire gunroom the captain would have wanted to know the reason why. The whole story would have come out and made him a laughing stock. In any event, we reckoned he’d learned his lesson and realised that if he cracked down on us youngsters too hard, we had ways of getting back at him.’
Captain Merton chuckled. ‘I have to say, gentlemen, that discipline in the merchant service is an altogether different animal, but then we rarely have to lock horns with an enemy. We carry sufficient by way of guns to deter would-be plunderers, but fortunately we have the legs on most men-of-war and privateers and at the first sight of a strange sail we cut and run.’
Phillips offered: ‘With a valuable cargo to protect, that’s the sensible thing to do.’
‘Thank you, sir, kind of you to say so. Some might accuse us of being lily-livered, but the owners require us to forego heroics and bring their ships home intact.’
Mordecai Merton took another swig of his drink and enquired: ‘Having heard of Mister Howard’s kipper exploits as a midshipman and observed the relaxed atmosphere on board Phryne, I take it this is a happy ship by comparison?’
Phillips waved his hand dismissively. ‘Not for me to say, sir, but we are fully manned and many of the ship’s company have been with me for a good while. I venture to suggest that the same would not be true in an unhappy ship.’
‘Very true, captain — and I am much relieved to hear that you are not in want of hands.’
‘Relieved?’
‘Indeed. I have a confession to make. As soon as we hove to in the Downs, I sent my best hands ashore in a Deal bumboat to avoid the press. It’s well known that short-handed warships using this anchorage send boats to filch men from merchantmen sheltering here.’
Knowing looks were exchanged by his hosts, most of whom had been involved in doing just that at some time or another when short-handed.
‘Yes, gentlemen,’ Merton continued, ‘the shipping companies have had it decreed that the navy must not press masters, mates, boatswains and carpenters of vessels of fifty tons or more, but even they can be taken if they set foot ashore unless on company business. Hence sending ’em off with packages addressed to the company.’
‘Wise of you, sir, very wise. If I didn’t have a full complement, I wouldn’t be averse to winkling a few out myself.’
‘It’s an occupational hazard for us merchant types, especially when returning from a deep-sea voyage. I’ve known merchant ships with specially constructed hiding places where hands can lurk if navy boats come near.’
‘But you prefer to send ’em ashore?’
‘I do, giving them the wherewithal to enjoy a spot of leave while my purser holds on to most of the pay they’re due to make sure they return once we’re safely alongside in the London docks.’
Howard asked: ‘Have you had any scares yourself?’
‘Last voyage we were scarcely into the chops of the Channel when a British man-of-war ordered me to “Heave-to in the King’s name” and sent a lieutenant and a tough-looking boat’s crew to board me looking for men to press.’
‘And you lost some men?’
‘Only a few bad hats: drunken, truculent fellows who’d given me nothing but trouble from the moment we sailed. I entertained the lieutenant liberally in my cabin and told my first mate to make sure all the boat party had a few wets. They left as happy as sand-boys carrying with them the men I would cheerfully have thrown overboard myself if such things were permitted!’
‘Good for you, sir. I’ve no doubt both sides came out of it well. You got rid of your trouble-makers and the navy got some hard bargains who could no doubt be licked into shape and prove to be useful in a scrap!’
Midshipman Foxe produced his fiddle and the company continued well into the night with songs of the sea and recitations by several of the officers.
The decanters continued their voyages round the table, and it was not until the early hours that Captain Phillips dozed off in his chair, sliding slowly down until he was in imminent danger of slipping below the table.
The merchant skipper had already left saying he needed to relieve himself and instead wisely crept away to his waiting boat to return to his ship. He was due to sail for London in the morning, the south westerly being in his favour.
The first lieutenant signed to the rest that it was time to depart and led them unsteadily out of the great cabin, shushing any who made a noise — not that anything could be heard above their leader’s loud snores.
11
The Morning After
Next morning the officers of His Majesty’s frigate Phryne were not so merry.
The captain himself, when he eventually appeared on deck, confided in his first lieutenant. ‘I must admit I don’t feel too clever this morning, Howard.’
Tongue in cheek, Howard observed: ‘The wine went down well enough, so it must have been something you ate, sir, the oysters perhaps?’
Phillips growled. ‘The truth is, I’m getting a bit past staying up all hours knocking it back with you youngsters. You’ll find the time comes when it begins to catch up on you.’
The first lieutenant smiled wanly. He was but a few years younger than his captain and didn’t feel too clever himself after the night’s carousing.
‘The pusser has procured some excellent coffee from one of the merchantmen. May I suggest you repair to your cabin and instruct your steward to make you a strong brew of it? I’d not refuse a mug of it myself. There’s precious little for any of us to do until this wretched wind changes direction.’
‘You’re right, as ever, my dear boy. I’ll heed your advice, but pray do not hesitate to call me on deck should anything untoward occur.’
‘Untoward? Here at anchor, sir?’
‘Yes indeed. A plague of locusts, the sudden appearance of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, some stray admiral poking his nose into our affairs, a favourable breeze — that sort of thing.’
Howard smiled affectionately. He and his captain had covered many a league together and each understood the other as well as, if not better, than a married couple. And unlike most of those joined in holy matrimony, they seldom became irritated with one another.
‘Rest assured, sir. I have the weight.’
*
With no duties to perform and nothing much else to do, Anson spent a good deal of time at Josiah Tutt’s side, quizzing him about his vast knowledge of the Channel and its foibles. Truth be told, the vagaries of wind and tide, indeed the whole business of navigation had never been Anson’s strongest subject and he used the opportunity to educate himself a little better, courtesy of the master.
Tutt was one of a special breed. They were charged not only with navigation but all the complexities of stowage, rigging and trim — and were expected to provide their own navigational charts, books and instruments, including a sextant, dividers and parallel rules.