Flashman and the Emperor

by Robert Brightwell

  He shrugged. “You can try to persuade some to stay and drown if you want, but you will only get a knife in the ribs for your trouble.”

  It was a persuasive argument and I could see that we were beyond that now. There was a rumbling noise as another water cask was rolled across the deck towards the boat. They would hear that in the saloon. It would only be a matter of time before the captain tore himself from his fruit to investigate.

  “Is the compass on board?” I asked.

  “Yes, it is in the longboat. Have you got the chart and sextant?” I confirmed that I did and then I scrambled down the side and took a place in the stern of the longboat. I settled myself on the thwart and felt a sense of relief. Whatever happened now, this boat was not leaving without me. There were around twenty men aboard by then and there did not seem that much spare space. A sudden commotion came from the ship and I could hear the captain shouting and banging against something. I guessed that someone had put a bar through the handles to the hatch.

  “Come on,” I heard the carpenter call from the deck above. “Let’s go.” There was a flurry of men down the side then. In a matter of moments, the longboat was full, but still men were scrambling down.

  “Cast off,” I called. “We are full.” I pointed at the boat behind. “Go in the cutter,” I shouted, although already that seemed just as full as the longboat. The man beside me unhooked our boat from the side and pushed us away. But in that moment two more managed to jump aboard, while another fell into the sea and grabbed the gunwale of the boat. His mates hauled him aboard as two more men splashed down into the water nearby.

  “That’s enough,” I shouted. “We are all going to die if we take too many.” I pointed again at the cutter. “Go to that one,” I urged the men in the water. I turned to my new crew. “Get the oars out,” I commanded. “We need to get away from the side.”

  The good thing about running out on people is that it is strangely addictive – and I should know. Once you have broken that bond of trust once, it is easy to abandon a few more, especially if your own life hangs in the balance. The crewmen in the longboat could see for themselves that the boat was full and my orders only eased their conscience. A few seconds later the wooden blades were pushing us further from the side and dipping hesitantly in the water.

  They had only taken a couple of pulls on the oars, when the carpenter appeared at the rail of the ship. An expression of fury crossed his face as he saw us rowing away from him. “Come back, you treacherous worm,” he roared at me. “I’ll kill the next one of you to pull a stroke,” he raged as he dived in. I tried to urge the men on, but it was pointless. They were more afraid of the carpenter than they were of me. It was for good reason too, for as several of them leant over to pull him aboard he looked to be in a murderous temper.

  “I thought you were in the cutter,” I tried to explain, but he was having none of it.

  “You lying dog,” he snarled. “If we did not need you, I would feed you to the sharks right now.”

  “Well, I could not let everyone in or we would all drown,” I protested. As I stared past him, I could see another half dozen men who had followed the carpenter being helped aboard. Before I could say any more there was a new commotion on the deck of the ship. The captain must have smashed his way through the hatch, for now a familiar figure stood at the rail, gazing at the moonlit scene before him. For a few seconds he just gaped at us, as several men in the nearer cutter laughed up at him and yelled obscenities.

  “Good luck bailing that colander, you fat fucker,” one of them shouted to the guffaws of his mates.

  “What have you done to my ship?” the captain demanded, still unaware that it had been fatally damaged for days. “Come back, you fools, you will all drown,” he implored.

  “You will be the ones drowning,” called someone else in front of me. Several others started to hurled insults too, but the carpenter shouted them down.

  “Quiet,” he yelled. “Let’s get the masts and sails up and pass back that lantern so that the cutter can follow us.” The men fell to following his orders. The longboat carried two short masts that each held a mizzen-rigged sail. I glanced back at the cutter, which was raising its own single mast. Looking over the side I could see that both boats were perilously low in the water. In addition to the men, we had two large water casks, several sacks of what I hoped was food and bundles of things that men had brought with them. More passengers were standing on the deck of the Dona Estela now, some shouting at us, others just appearing bemused at what was happening. Despite her various leaks, the ship still towered over us. As a wave splashed water over our gunwale, I wondered, not for the first time, if I had just jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

  Chapter 37

  It took twenty minutes and much swearing to get the mast and sails up. The seamen were skilled enough, but half a dozen of them had to move to get the simplest task done. With all the supplies aboard, we only had room for twenty to be comfortable, but there were double that number crowded on and between the thwarts of the boat. The carpenter insisted I show him where we were on the chart; two men had to crouch to allow me the room to unfold it. I showed him the captain’s last marked position and the Cape Verde islands.

  “We cannot sail directly east-north-east,” I told him, “for the wind is coming from that direction. But if we go north for a day and then head due east, we should reach them. Three days of sailing in reasonable winds.” I tried to sound confident, like the capable navigator that I was pretending to be, but inwardly I was a knot of anxiety. It sounded simple but finding some islands in a small boat, was harder than finding a fat man in the poorhouse. With no high mast to search from, down among the tossing waves, we could only see a few miles either side of us.

  The carpenter, though, seemed to have no such qualms. “Three days, lads, that is all we have to put up with this for and then there will be land.” There was a cheer at that and the news was shouted back to the cutter, which was following in our wake. It seemed that I was the only one with any doubts in my navigation ability, for the rest set to celebrating with enthusiasm. Some sailors started a song as we ploughed our way through the dark waves under a steady breeze. It was soon apparent that I was not the only one to have brought drink aboard. There was a strong smell of rum from forward, as several men seemed intent on passing the first part of the journey in a drunken oblivion. I confess I took a pull on my bottle myself, not that it made me feel much better.

  We lost our first man that night. The drunken fool jumped over the side, calling out that he was joining his mate in the cutter. We called out to the boat behind, but they never saw him.

  “We’re not stopping for every jackanape that falls over the side,” declared the carpenter. “There is no room to man the oars, as it is.” That might have sobered a few up, but others would have shifted on the thwarts, grateful for the extra room.

  Dawn found us in a sea empty but for the cutter. We were all quiet then, for there is a great feeling of vulnerability being in a small boat in a vast, empty ocean. Sight of the other overcrowded craft, sailing low in the water through relatively benign waves, only served to show how precarious our position was. I suspect that we were all thinking about the vessel we had left behind and whether it could have made Cape Verde.

  “She will have sunk by now,” declared the carpenter, confirming my thoughts. He was staring astern with the glass, but we were so low in the water I doubt he could have seen her if she was still afloat. I tried to stand to straighten limbs that had been wedged on a foot-wide plank seat for the last six hours. “How far do you think we have come?” the carpenter asked.

  “I have not the first idea,” I replied without thinking.

  “But you will know at noon,” he prompted more sharply. “When you shoot the sun with your sextant?”

  “Of course,” I agreed, staring down at the wooden box at my feet. “I will know then, all right.” Christ, what a mess I had got myself in. Seventy half-drunk and desperate
men all relying on my non-existent navigational skills for our very survival. The odds of us coming across a few pinpricks of land shown on the map in this huge expanse of sea, seemed longer than those of a hackneyed mule winning the Derby.

  Things got even worse later that morning when the wind died away completely leaving both boats in a flat calm. At least pissing over the side was a less precarious business, but that was all that could be said for it. The cutter managed to make room for a pair of oars and slowly they edged over to us, while a couple of the men in our boat tried fishing, but without success. One of the old salts announced that we were in the dog latitudes, whatever they were. He said that calms and intense storms were common in these areas, which was just the cheery news we needed. By noon I was very conscious of seventy pairs of eyes watching me closely as the time approached for me to ‘shoot the sun’ with my sextant and announce our position.

  With due ceremony, I opened the mahogany box and stared at the brass instrument inside. I wracked my brains and tried to remember what Cochrane had taught me when he had shown me how to use it, but that was near twenty years ago. Still, I had seen Crosbie use one nearly every day for weeks now and so I at least had a rough idea of how to hold the damn thing and where to point it. I hoisted the thing out of its box and twiddled with an air of confidence at one of the settings. Gazing up, I saw with horror that every single man on both boats was now staring at me with rapt intent. But then, with an empty sea all around, there were not a lot of other distractions. I put the viewing lens to my eye and directed it to the horizon underneath the sun. I knew that there was something else to move to measure the angle to the sun and so I pushed on a bar until it came fleetingly into view. I gave a grunt of satisfaction as though I knew what I was doing and called for the map.

  “Don’t you have the book of tables that the captain uses to make his calculations?” asked the carpenter suspiciously.

  “What? Ah, no, I don’t.” I remembered now the dog-eared book that had been on the captain’s desk. It had been full of pages of numbers that meant nothing to me and so I had left it behind, but I appreciated now that this had been a mistake.

  “In the navy,” I declared with a lot more confidence than I felt, “you are trained to do the calculations in your head. Those tables are normally only used by beginners.” I studied the dial on the sextant and continued. “There now, seven and three eighths.” I shut my eyes and adopted an expression normally associated with extreme constipation as I pretended to formulate our position. “Multiply by the tangent of the horizon,” I muttered to myself, “carry the one and square with the hypotenuse ... yes, that is it.” I opened my eyes triumphantly and called again for the map. I measured lines from side markings and then made a small cross just north-east of the last one left by the captain. “We are here,” I announced to the carpenter. “We have not made as much progress as I thought, but then this calm will have slowed us down.”

  There were murmurings of appreciation at my mental dexterity from some of the men sitting nearby. They had clearly been impressed by my performance, but the carpenter had not. His eyes were narrowed in suspicion. “Are you sure?” he demanded and I realised then that he had probably seen a sextant competently employed more times than I had enjoyed a hot dinner.

  “Yes, I am certain,” I assured him while feeling a prickle of alarm run down my spine. I had the strong impression that the carpenter was not at all convinced, but he looked at the map where I had made my mark. While I was sure that he now suspected I was a fraud, the small pencilled cross was where he expected us to be and so he could not be sure. Eventually, he gave a slow nod and I unobtrusively breathed a sigh of relief.

  The wind came back that afternoon with a vengeance. At first it was a strong breeze and our sails filled and we fair flew along. But then it got stronger and our bows bit into the waves, sending sheets of cold spray over the boat. Soon we only had one sail rigged to keep us before the tempest, while the rest of us were bailing with anything we could lay our hands on. As the eye of the storm moved past us, the wind veered round from a northerly to blow from the west. It was at least pushing us in the direction we wanted to travel, but whether any of us would survive long enough to see land seemed increasingly in doubt. As night fell, the waves seemed to grow even bigger and less predictable in direction. The darkness was perhaps a mercy as we could not see the huge mountains of water that pitched around us. There was no going below to ride out the storm this time; we were tossed about like a cork in the surf, only just managing to keep the boat from broaching in the waves. Once when I looked up, I saw one of the crew shrieking as he was swept overboard by the sea. How he had fallen in I had no idea, but I took off my belt and fixed it around the seat thwart and my thigh to ensure that I stayed inboard.

  That night was one of the worst of my life. I spent nearly all of it bailing with a large felt hat. It was desperate work; the more the water sloshed in, the lower we got and yet more waves splashed over the gunwale. My hands were soon frozen in their grip over the cloth but none of us could afford to rest for a moment. The water swilling ankle deep around us was a constant reminder of the perilous position we were in. I swear I fell asleep still bailing that night. Barely conscious, my limbs continued to scoop out water, while my mind and body were numb with cold and fatigue. Just before dawn the waves began to abate and we could rest. We were still running before the wind. I noticed that by now this was pushing us south-east, but I was too tired to remember how long we had been running a southerly course. I just sat there, wet and shivering, leaning against the man beside me for warmth, waiting for the sunrise.

  The morning light brought new surprises, for our boat was roomier than before. Six men had disappeared during the night. Whether some had jumped, been washed overboard or had just fallen out from exhaustion, it was hard to say. Sadly, the carpenter was not among them. He was still trying to work out who was missing, when someone called out that the cutter was no longer behind us either. Only the heavens know what happened to it, but the overcrowded little boat had made us feel less isolated in the vast ocean. Now we were cold, hungry, thirsty and as I alone knew, completely lost with no proper means of navigation. Everyone was given two biscuits that morning and a cup of water. There was to have been a rum ration too, but it was discovered that several men had drunk the rum in the night and there was none left. We turned to an easterly course and as the sun climbed higher in the sky I knew that it presaged another of my performances with the sextant.

  Once again my enactment with the brass instrument seemed to be the focal point for the day, with every man staring aft to see what progress I would declare. I had no bloody idea where we were and could only go by the variations in our heading I had seen on the compass. But how far wind and tide had taken us was anyone’s guess. Still, after my mathematical incantations, I called for the chart and had to make my mark. I used the pencil to show a point slightly to the east of the one before, claiming that the storm had pushed us part way around a circle. “It will probably be a couple of days before we reach the islands,” I cautioned, “unless we have favourable winds all the way.”

  “Well it is strong and steady from the west now,” insisted the carpenter. “If this wind keeps up we might spot the Cape Verde islands tomorrow.” At this pronouncement, there was a desultory cheer from the men as they were given a shred of hope to hang on to.

  The wind that day was as near perfect as it could be, pushing us on strongly in the right direction. It continued during the night and the mood in the boat lifted as the men talked about the things they would eat, drink and do in Cape Verde the next day. Even I prayed that night for the Almighty to intervene and guide us to land. But lifelong experience has taught me that God rarely listens to the requests of an inveterate sinner and so I also made more earthly arrangements. After a furtive pull on my brandy bottle when no one else was watching, I pulled out my Collier. The mood the next day was likely to get ugly and the pistol was my only defence. I slowly withdrew t
he charges as I expected the powder was damp. I retrieved some dry powder from a flask in my sack of possessions and tore up a sheet of Cochrane’s justification document for cartridge paper. Soon the gun was reloaded with fresh dry charges and primed. I put it back in my pocket feeling only slightly more secure than I had before.

  The dawn was greeted with shouts of “Land!” For a moment my hopes soared that a true miracle had occurred. But within an hour the sense of optimism had turned to disillusion, as the sighting revealed itself to be a cloud instead. We were still travelling strongly east; the men knew we were making good distances and that if I was right, land should appear soon. As noon came they crowded around the chart expectantly and I had little choice but to mark us just short of the Cape Verde archipelago. That seemed to make it certain that land would be spotted in the afternoon. So once more they eagerly scanned the horizon.

  The muttering and dark glances at me sitting in the stern with the helmsman began around four in the afternoon, according to my watch. The carpenter was with around a dozen in the bows and I watched as they slowly got more agitated. There was heated whispering among them and twice I saw men point in my direction. Finally, after a last look around the empty horizon, the carpenter began to make his way aft.

  “So where are these bloody islands?” he demanded as he stood in the centre of the boat, holding on to one of the masts. There was a murmur of agreement from the men around him. “You haven’t got a damn clue where we are, have you?” There was another rumble of discontent from the crowd as the mood turned uglier. “You don’t hold that sextant right and you haven’t got the captain’s book of tables. You don’t know how to use it at all.”

  “That is not true,” I interrupted. “I have been basing my calculations on the captain’s last position. Perhaps he got that wrong.”

  The carpenter gave a cry of triumph. “That thing,” he pointed at the wooden box at my feet, “tells you where you are. It does not matter what the captain wrote.” He jabbed his finger at me. “You are a double-crossing snake, who tricked his way onto this boat with lies and then tried to leave half of us behind.”