The Lively Lady

by Kenneth Lewis Roberts

  “A pleasant trip, indeed,” I said. “You make it often?”

  “No, we’ve worked hard for a number of years, and now we feel it’s time we enjoyed ourselves.”

  “Of course,” I said. “And what may your business have been?”

  The squatty red-faced man, I could see, had grown tense once more.

  “Really,” said his buck-toothed friend, thoroughly English in his manner but smiling sweetly none the less, “such interest in our affairs is complimentary, I assure you.”

  “A natural interest,” I told him, “for I recently spent some little time among English people and became almost excited about them. Now for a few more questions—after I learn your business?”

  “Land,” said the buck-toothed man sourly. “We dealt in land.”

  “Where?”

  “London, of course. Land and houses.”

  “Your families didn’t accompany you?”

  “No; my wife is dead—ah—my children are too young to travel.”

  “So you left them with relatives?”

  “Here!” he protested, “you’ve no right to ask these things!” His lips were tight across his teeth; but when I looked at him without speaking and Jeddy laughed under his breath, he smiled again, albeit a trifle weakly.

  “Of course,” he said, “I left them with my sister: two sweet little girls and a little boy.”

  “And you learned to speak Spanish while selling land in London?”

  “Why, yes; that is, no. I don’t speak Spanish.”

  “Probably you were talking to the captain in Russian when we came up, then, or was it Malay?”

  He glowered at me, and Jeddy laughed again.

  “Oh, well,” I said, “that doesn’t matter. Suppose you show me the trinkets you picked up in China and Ceylon and Madagascar for your two sweet little girls. And for the little boy. And for the kind sister who has been caring for this lonely little family.”

  Both Englishmen stared at me.

  “Well,” I said at length, “I’m waiting. Let me see some of the things you bought somewhere except India.”

  “This is a damned outrage,” the red-faced man said huskily.

  “No doubt,” I returned, “but if we start exchanging outrages, we’ll be here all night, and we must be on our way. This is an English brig carrying English goods to an English port, and it’s as plain as the nose on my face that the captain’s no captain at all, but a cat’s-paw put aboard for you to hide behind. Get your dunnage together. We’ll shift you to the sloop.”

  “I protest,” said the man with the buck-teeth, though it was plain he knew he was caught. “What’s to become of the brig?”

  “Well, it’s a shame to harm this fine new English vessel, even though she does masquerade under the Spanish flag; but I’m going to shift her cargo to the sloop and bum her.” With that I told him to tell the Spanish captain that if all of them would help shift cargo, we would put them aboard a smaller prize some day, so they could sell it and have the money: otherwise they would be ordinary prisoners of war with the chance of being carried to America.

  We laid the sloop alongside and worked at shifting cargo all that afternoon and through the hot, calm night. An hour after sunup the next day we had what Cephas Cluff and Jeddy and I figured was close to eighty thousand dollars’ worth of the best India goods under hatches, to say nothing of a lot of new spars and sails, kegs of Spanish wine, and barrels of powder to replace that shot away in practice; and the crew were sluicing themselves with buckets of clear cool water from the blue Gulf Stream.

  At eight o’clock we hoisted her sails, lashed her helm, and set her afire. Ten minutes later we ran up to windward and used her as a target. There was an oval keg of Spanish wine at the foot of the musket rack by the main hatch; and when the crew had given her a few rounds out of long guns double shotted with grape and ball, there were so many white splinters showing around her bends and bulwarks, and so much gear at loose ends, that Jeddy went down and told the crews to have a small tot all around. With that we wore ship under her stem and let her have both long guns through the cabin windows. The grape and solid shot went in with a crash that could be heard above the roar of the guns—such a crash as might be made by a horse falling through a roof. Her mainmast was cut four feet above the deck and her foremast halfway up; so that in less than five minutes she had become a tom and shattered hulk, belching a column of smoke amidships, and trailing masts, sails and shrouds over her sides.

  ’Lisha Lord turned from this sad wreck to shake his fist threateningly at the crews. “By Ory!” he shouted, “I told you to keep that fire low, and here you’ve gone halfway up the foremast with your shot! What the hell you think you’re shooting at? Angels?”

  XII

  WE HAD worked well down toward the trade route when Pomp, seated at the masthead like a black cloud, shiny and happy from the heat of the noonday sun, caught the flash of a distant sail on our starboard quarter. We put about, and when we drew up on it in the late afternoon, we made her out to be a ship: a good one; partly laden so that she rode high out of water, and pierced for twelve guns, five on a side and two in the stem. We stared hard at her, but could find no trace of a long gun.

  “I tell you,” ’Lisha said, “she carries carronades and nothing else, like most running vessels.”

  The men in the waist of the ship were shouting “Take her! Take her!” so we piped to quarters and loaded and double-shotted the long guns. Tommy Bickford brought me the double-barreled fowling piece my mother had traded out of Sir Arthur Ransome, placing it on the deck where it would be handy; and my little dog Pinky came and lay beside it, helpful and obliging, his whiskers resting on its stock.

  We ran up the British flag and bore off to windward of her. Her ports were open, and we could see men at the guns, but not many, and I was sure there would not be enough of a crew to damage us with musketry fire when we closed with her.

  She hoisted no answering flag, so we hauled down the British flag, ran up the American flag, and fired a gun. She ran on as silently as before, a beautiful, high-sided ship, her mass of sails ruddy in the late afternoon sun. A cloud of pink smoke puffed from her stem; and a spout of water shot into the air two hundred yards ahead of us well off line.

  “Hell,” ’Lisha told me, “that’s a twenty-four pound carronade! We can outrange her and take her from here.”

  “Go ahead,” I said, having determined long ago never to risk losing a man if I could avoid it.

  ’Lisha sighted his long eighteen. The deck jerked; the gun roared; the white smoke came down around us. There was a distant crackle, like a dog crunching a stick between his jaws. The boat at the after davits seemed to fall apart reluctantly.

  ’Lisha cursed bitterly while the gun crew sponged and rammed, moving with seeming laziness, as they had been taught, but having the gun ready almost before the smoke from Pendleton Quint’s gun had blown into our throats.

  “There, by gravy!” said ’Lisha, squinting after Pendleton’s shot. “Caught her that time!” A star-shaped patch of white splinters appeared at the stranger’s water line.

  ’Lisha pulled his lanyard, and the ship’s mizzenmast swayed drunkenly, just as she tinned slowly into the wind. She ran up the British flag, only to haul it down instantly.

  She was the ship Auchterlonie, Gilbert Lubbock, master, from St. Thomas for Bermuda, 518 tons and twenty-four men, armed with two twenty-four pound carronades and ten nine-pound carronades, and half laden with sugar and rum. I went aboard with Jeddy and found Lubbock feeling unhappy, as well he might.

  “Here,” I told him, “it’s not your fault. If I didn’t take you, somebody else would.”

  “Aye,” he said, gazing bitterly at the Lively Lady, which seemed too small and battered, lying off to windward, to be anything but a tender for his splendid vessel, “but I could have stayed with the convoy another day or so.”

  Here was news indeed—news that might, if our luck held, result happily for us and sadl
y for the British. “That’s true,” I said, hoping to lead him into giving me further information, “but doubtless we’d have caught you in the end; for it’s probably a small convoy, and weakly guarded, like most we find in these waters.”

  Lubbock nodded angrily. “Weakly!” he growled. “The word’s as weak as the guard! If the Governors of the Bank of England followed the methods of the fools in the Admiralty, they’d toss their money in the street and set a sleepy midget to guard it! Thirty-two sail there were in our convoy when I hauled away, and no protection save the Turnstone sloop-of-war.”

  Delighted at what he told me, I assured him we would do all we could for him.

  “Aye,” he groaned, “in America.”

  “No,” I said, “we’ll try to get you another vessel somewhere. Anyway, America isn’t so bad. All our prisoners are paroled.”

  “I dinna like the place,” he growled. “It’s either too hot or too cold, always, and not too bonnie, neither.” As an afterthought he added, “But bonnier than the stone box the British have for prisoners. They’ll give ye no parole!”

  “I know,” I said hastily, having heard enough of Dartmoor. “Where’s your specie, Captain?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and pressed his lips together stubbornly; then, evidently figuring on making the best of a bad bargain, he showed me the panel behind which he kept his specie kegs, they being made and marked to look like nail kegs. We rolled out twelve, containing thirty-five hundred English pounds, or in the neighborhood of eighteen thousand dollars. We took out some rum and small articles from the Auchterlonie, and bales of pink flamingo skins— birds that must look like patches of Maine sunsets, so beautifully rosy are their feathers. Then, though I disliked the thought of so many prisoners, we sent the captain and the crew to the Lively Lady, wheeled a carronade to the Auchterlonie’s main hatch, and blew a hole in her bottom—though I couldn’t help but hear the men growling while they did it.

  We had brought Rowlandson Drown with us, in anticipation of needing a carpenter’s help in scuttling her; and I think his grumbling was loudest. “We’d get forty thousand dollars for this ship if she was manned out for home,” he told Seth Tarbox, his face dark with sourness; and unfortunately he was right.

  * * *

  It was dark when we set her afire and tumbled into our boat; and we wasted no time on rum or Spanish wine, for every last one of us panted to see the convoy of which Lubbock had spoken.

  We paroled Captain Lubbock, the two Englishmen from the Dos Hermanos, the Spanish captain and McAndrew from Eh Bagley’s brig; but we had to be watchful of the seamen lest they rise against us and seize the Lively Lady for themselves, which was why I disliked taking prisoners if I could avoid it; yet I couldn’t turn them loose in a good ship when it was my purpose to distress the enemy in the greatest possible degree.

  We bore off to the eastward, hunting for the convoy, and cruised for three days, with the weather what it so often is in those parts— bright blue overhead, fleecy beds of cloud near the horizon, and occasionally a sharp squall banging past with a thunderstorm in its arms. Toward mid-afternoon on the third day there was a bellowing of “Sail ho!” from the bow and the masthead at the same time, a distant squall having uncovered a white speck like the tip of a hen feather.

  Hoping we had found the convoy, we held on our course, and soon discovered the stranger had hauled her wind and was bearing straight for us. Since there was no other sail in sight, we concluded she was in chase of us. We ran off on the other tack, figuring on getting to windward of her, whereupon she went off on the other tack herself, and we saw she was a schooner with a raking stem and bow and almost no freeboard, so that she seemed plastered to the water. She had tremendously tall raking masts and next to no top-hamper, there being only two shrouds to the foremast and one to the mainmast; and the masts, bending like fishing rods, seemed to spring the schooner ahead as though she were alive and being whipped along. She had a beautiful clean run, and she slipped over the waves, rather than through them, seeming to have no keel at all to hold her back.

  “Well,” I said, “there’s only one place where they build schooners like that, and that’s Baltimore.” The others agreed, but we manned the long guns for the sake of safety and watched her whisk through the water. We saw she could weather us with no difficulty. Indeed, she was the fastest schooner I had ever seen. If we were logging twelve knots, which I think we were, she must have been logging thirteen and a half. I even think she was doing a knot or so better than that, but I am reluctant to say it for fear there will be folk to snort and declare no craft afloat can travel with such speed. I knew no Britisher could have overhauled her in a chase, so it seemed to me that she must be an American privateer. If I had not felt sure, I would have run from her long before; and I think I could have kept ahead of her until dark and then given her the slip.

  We ran up the American flag, and I maneuvered to get under her lee; but a hen might as well have maneuvered to get under the lee of a kingfisher.

  She came about and ran down on us. We could see she carried fourteen guns—two of them long guns—and had a sizable crew on deck. She hoisted the American flag and slipped alongside, not a half pistol shot away; and since there were no muskets leveled at us we knew her captain was certain of our nationality. None the less, her gun crews were at their stations, and a dark, slender man with a small black mustache, flashing white teeth, and elegant-seeming clothes clung to the ratlines, one hand on his hip, and shouted down wind, “What sloop is that?”

  I rapped Pinky on the snout to stop his barking, he being beside me with his forepaws on the rail, considerably affronted by this stranger’s question. “Private armed sloop Lively Lady, Nason, out of Arundel,” I called back.

  The dark man took off his gray beaver hat and made me a polite bow. “Schooner Comet” he shouted, “out of Baltimore; Boyle commanding. Would you do me the honor?”

  We hove to, and I was rowed over to the Comet, where Boyle met me, hat in hand, as mannerly as though Commodore Truxton himself were coming over the side.

  This Captain Thomas Boyle of Baltimore was the most affable man I have ever known, and the gentlest-seeming. Indeed, if I had not seen more of him at a later date, I might have thought his deference assumed; for it seemed to me, at times, that no man could be as gracious as he and still be serious about it. Yet he was always courteous, even to his men and prisoners; though there are captains of a score of British war craft and masters of almost a thousand British merchantmen who have declared he was the most tantalizing and troublesome man that ever lived.

  He was, as I have said, gentle—so gentle, almost, as to seem harmless—and appreciative of things said by others. I noticed early in our acquaintance that if I was speaking with him and he was forced, for some reason, to interrupt the conversation, he would apologize profoundly at the earliest opportunity and ask me to be kind enough to proceed from the point where he had, as he put it, so rudely broken in on me.

  He was quiet, too: the most deceptive man, it seems to me, that ever lived. His seamanship was a thing for seamen to marvel at, and I have never seen his equal for boldness. It was this boldness that so addled and fuddled the British; and it was common talk in French ports at one time that the captain of a British frigate had been so infuriated at Captain Boyle’s behavior in the Channel that he had wept openly on his own quarter-deck from rage.

  He took me below to a neat small cabin as pleasant to look at as his beautifully fitting broadcloth coat and pale-colored trousers buckled under his boots, and had out a mahogany chest inlaid with a satinwood lion and unicorn.

  “I do hope you’ll like this, Captain,” he said, drawing out a fivesided bottle made from purple glass—the prettiest bottle I had ever seen. “It seems to me not half bad. I took it from a ship with a delightful captain: thirteen pipes of old Madeira wine, he had. This is from the oldest, and I find it passable, but I’m eager to have your opinion.”

  He took a goblet from the slots in the cov
er—a purple goblet, like the bottle—filled it for me, and watched me anxiously while I sipped. If the wine had been sea water and sour milk I would have praised it, because of his eager hospitality, but it seemed to be a blend of delicious fruits and faint perfumes and the essences of tropical nuts.

  “Well,” he said, when I spoke enthusiastically of it, “that is very kind of you. Very kind. Let us have another glass. Then you must tell me about your cruise. I hope and trust, Captain, that your cruise has been successful. Your idea of a small boat is excellent—excellent! Next year you may find a larger craft advisable; but what we need now is speed. I think you’re exactly right.”

  “She’s a tub beside yours,” I said.

  “No, your sloop is very fast, Captain Nason. You’re too modest by far. You could have lost me in the dark if you’d tried.”

  “Yes, and if I’d tried, I might have been raked with a long twenty-four around midnight.”

  Captain Boyle laughed, a musical Southern laugh, quite in keeping with his voice, which, being soft and flat, was easy on the ear. “No, sir; I always talk things over with an enemy before I shoot, if it’s possible.”

  “Well,” I said, “I saw she was a Baltimore schooner, so I suspicioned you were American, but I never saw a Baltimore schooner behave like this. Sometimes she gets right up out of the water and flies.”

  “It’s a pleasure to hear such appreciation from a seaman like yourself, Captain Nason,” Captain Boyle assured me. He held up his purple goblet and stared through it at the scuttle overhead. “Now that you mention it, I feel free to tell you that so far as I know the Comet is the fastest Baltimore clipper ever built. She’s faster than the little Baltimore-built government sloop Enterprise. Doubtless you remember her, Captain Nason. Before the navy cut down her masts and made her into an unbreakable brig she was said to be the fastest craft afloat. I’m very averse to saying it, sir; for I might be misunderstood; but you’ve seen the Comet, sir, from the deck of a fast sloop; so I’ll tell you she’s logged over fifteen knots.”