A Hard, Cruel Shore

by Dewey Lambdin

  This’ll take some careful doin’, he thought, steeling himself.

  If he was brutally honest about the severity of the damage to the mast, and the slim odds of there being a spare in the mast ponds to replace it, Admiralty might deem Sapphire redundant to the needs of the Royal Navy if she was forced to sit idle long enough for a new mast to be fashioned for her, and relegate her to an un-armed troop ship or harbour hulk, jerking his quarterdeck right out from under his feet, and casting him ashore on half-pay in the middle of an active commission!

  Can’t have that! Lewrie fretted to himself; She’s still a good fightin’ ship, we’ve proved that, over and over, and her crew’s been honed t’the peak of perfection, with the best gunners ever I did see!

  In point of fact, Lewrie had gotten her six months into her re-commissioning, when her former Captain and First Officer had shot each other in a duel—piss-poor shooting on their parts—and she was now about one year from the necessity of being de-commissioned and turned over to some dockyard graving dock for a complete rebuild before some other Captain got her, in one form or the other. Lewrie knew he only had a year of commanding her left before being forced to give her up, anyway, but he wanted that one last year, dearly!

  To The First Secretary of The Admiralty,

  The Honourable Mr. H. H. W. Pole,

  Sir, it is my Duty to Inform you and The Lords of Admiralty further anent the damage which my Ship suffered on passage from Corunna to Portsmouth. The lower mast, sadly, is so damaged that it must be drawn out and replaced. I am assured by the Surveyor of the Dockyard that it can, and shall be, speedily replaced and that HMS Sapphire can return to full Service as soon as that is done.

  Well, he sorta promised, didn’t he? Lewrie qualified, tongue firmly planted in one cheek; It ain’t an outright lie!

  He mulled over how much more he could add, but there was an interruption. His Marine sentry stamped boots, musket butt, and shouted “Cap’um’s Cook t’see th’ Cap’um, SAH!”

  “Enter,” Lewrie called back, and James Yeovill came into the great-cabins, shaking flakes of snow from his watchcoat and swiping a shapeless wool cap from his long and frizzy hair which was bound back with a hank of ribbon into what looked like a fox’s brush.

  “Thought you might not mind a cup of hot broth, sir,” Yeovill offered.

  “I would, indeed, Yeovill,” Lewrie perked up, for his mug of tea was empty, at last, and the cabins were still chilly. “Bring it on! What’s planned for supper?”

  “That would depend on whether you’re of a mind to dine some of your officers in, tonight, sir,” Yeovill said, coming to the desk with his offering.

  “No, just me and the beasts, tonight,” Lewrie told him.

  “Nothing in the way of a salad, sir, the last greens have gone over.” Yeovill ticked off on his fingers. “But I thought that a soup of salt beef could start it, then a quail or a rabbit, your choice, would go down well, and there are some decent potatoes left, along with garbanzos, that lot of Spanish chick peas we took aboard at Gibraltar are still in quantity and quality. There’s shore bread come aboard, and I can do a bread pudding with caramel sauce.”

  “Rabbit, if it’s a fat one,” Lewrie decided. Long ago he had been advised by a senior officer to stock his share of the manger with both rabbits and quail, for they bred and matured rapidly. “The cat, and Bisquit will find rabbit toothsome, too. Along with their sausages or jerky, o’ course. Sounds grand. I leave it to you to produce another of your miracles.”

  “Aye, sir,” Yeovill said, turning to go.

  “Has it started to snow, again?” Lewrie asked, taking note of the back and shoulders of Yeovill’s watchcoat.

  “Off and on, sir,” Yeovill said with a grin. “And thank God for a warm galley, even one with Mister Tanner in charge of it.”

  Bisquit whined and whuffled at Yeovill’s side before he left the cabins; he was smart enough to be friends with the source of all good treats, and all those delicious smells! Once he was gone, the dog padded round about a couple of times and settled down in front of Lewrie’s desk, on the deep and soft Turkey carpet.

  Lewrie read over what he’d written, wondering if there was anything more to add, wondering if going further would be “gilding the lily”, or sounding a tad too desperately smarmy to keep his ship.

  “Shore messenger t’see the Cap’um, SAH!” the Marine sentry bellowed, slamming boots and musket butt on the deck.

  “Christ, what now? Enter!” Lewrie shouted back.

  A shivering, teeth-chattering Midshipman came in, hat under his arm, and advanced to the desk as Lewrie rose to his feet.

  “A message from the flagship presently in port, sir,” the Mid told him as he handed over a wax-sealed letter. “There are at least twelve senior Post-Captains that have come in with the Admiral and his squadron, and in two days they will sit aboard the flag to hold examinations for all qualifying Midshipmen.”

  “In two days,” Lewrie queried, opening the sealed letter and discovering pretty-much what the Mid had just stated. “I’ve several who will eagerly attend, and thankee for bringing news of it, young sir. Mister…?”

  “Tominy, sir, George Tominy,” the Mid replied.

  “Thinkin’ of tryin’ your luck, yourself, are you, Mister Tominy?” Lewrie jested.

  “I lack a year on ship’s books before I could, sir,” Tominy said with a moue of disappointment, and a shrug.

  “Well, you’ll have your turn, in time,” Lewrie assured him. “Thanks again, Mister Tominy.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the Mid said, and headed for the door, and the foul weather. He was snow-flaked, too, Lewrie noted.

  A Midshipman’s Board, well well, Lewrie thought; And is there a chance that I can get rid of Midshipman Hillhouse, at long last? Oh, just please Jesus!

  It wasn’t that Hillhouse was not competent, no; he was one of the oldest and most experienced of Sapphire’s ten Mids, well into his mid-twenties. Hillhouse’s problem was that he seemed to have a bad case of the “sulks” over his few chances to shine and be mentioned in reports, to command a prize into harbour, be given grander duties.

  “Jessop?” Lewrie called out to his cabin servant. “I’d admire did ye run this letter down to the Mid’s cockpit, and inform them that if letters of recommendation are desired, they should let me know at once.”

  “Me, sir?” Jessop replied, sounding put-upon. “Oh, aye, sir.”

  He took the letter, found his wool watch coat for his brief exposure to the foul weather, and dashed away.

  Lewrie looked over his damage report to Admiralty some more, wondering if he could hint that his proficient, and well-drilled, crew and their impeccable gunnery skills would prove valuable, and deadly to the French, and should be kept together and gotten back to sea, instanter. Is that beggin’, or boastin’? Lewrie pondered.

  He dipped his precious steel-nibbed pen in the inkwell and began to add to his report, but Chalky got over his fear of the sleeping dog, left the comfort of the bed-cot, and leapt into Lewrie’s lap without even a warning mew or trill. Lewrie’s hand was jounced, and a large glop of ink spoiled the report.

  “Damme, but you’re a hazard,” Lewrie said with a weary sigh as he balled up that sheet of paper and tossed it aside. He gave Chalky some long strokes along his back and tickled his jowls and cheeks, anyway, getting him settled into a white-furred pot-roast atop the desk before pulling out a fresh sheet to begin again.

  The door opened, admitting an icy blast as Jessop returned, shaking snow from his coat like a dog shedding rain, and emitting an audible Brr!

  “They’s three wantin’ letters, sir,” he said, handing over the letter, with the aspirants’ names now pencilled in at the bottom.

  “Oh, good,” Lewrie said, groaning faintly. “More scribblin’ to do.”

  “Niver saw such a pig-sty me whole life, sir,” Jessop went on, sounding offended. “Ever’thing hangin’ on pegs’r spillin’ outa their sea chests, filth in ev’ry corner, an�
�� it stinks worse’n a corpse’s armpit. Don’t think they ever sponge off. You oughta do somethin’ about it, sir. Why, even the tablecloth ain’t white, anywhere you look, nothin’ but stains an’ spills, an’ their steward … he were cleanin’ the meat fork by stabbin’ it through the tablecloth t’get some crusty black stuff off’n it!”

  “Don’t be bothering the Captain with all that,” Pettus said, making a shushing motion over his mouth.

  “Mister Kibworth, sir,” the outraged Jessop went further, ignoring the warning, “he wuz drinkin’ cider outa a glass so filthy it’d gone brown, an’ when Mister Leverett wanted some, he had nought but an old shoe t’drink from, an’ they laughed an’ said they all used shoes when they got soup, ’coz Mister Kibworth had the only glass left!”

  “And someday, God willing, Jessop,” Lewrie told him with glee, and remembrance of his own Midshipman days, “they will all become exalted Post-Captains … if they don’t poison themselves, first. That is very much like what I saw back in my day. You’ve been spoiled.”

  “Spoiled, sir?” Jessop said, cocking his head to one side.

  “The way Pettus keeps these cabins, how neatly, and cleanly,” Lewrie told him, “My father’s country house, the way the Coneys keep the Old Ploughman back in Anglesgreen. You’re used to it, by now.”

  “Oh, Well, s’pose I am, then,” Jessop agreed after a long ponder. He had wandered into a “rondy”, a tavern hired out for recruiting volunteers, when Lewrie was fitting out his last frigate, HMS Reliant, in early 1803, before the Peace of Amiens was broken, and Britain went back to war with Napoleonic France. He’d been a street waif, living hand-to-mouth and sleeping rough wherever he could lay his head, nigh-illiterate, and completely alone in life, filthy in clothes and body, and lice-ridden. A thorough wash under a hose from the wash-deck pump had made him screech in horror after he had come aboard and had scrawled a shaky attempt at his name in the ship’s muster book.

  Now, though, Jessop was almost sleek with good living, and a guaranteed three meals a day, with meat four days a week, dressed in clean “pusser’s slops”, shod and stockinged, with a short blue coat with brass buttons, a flat, tarred hat on his head, and, as a ship’s servant, he had “all night in” to sleep soundly in a corner of the upper gun deck near the Marine complement.

  Jessop even had something to aspire to, learning his knots, learning to box the points of the compass, to hand and reef, if not yet steer, to go aloft as agile as a monkey, and serve as a member of one of the starboard carronades’ gun crew.

  He’d also learned to chew tobacco, drink to excess, curse as grandly as a Bosun’s Mate, and had gotten himself two very nautical tattoos, and on shore liberty at Gibraltar, had taken runs at the whores.

  “Lay the table, Jessop,” Pettus ordered, “and mind that the settings are clean.”

  Lewrie re-wrote his letter to the First Secretary, carefully fudging the wording on the second try, and signing his name and “the etcs” at the bottom, pleased with the result. He reached into a side drawer for sealing wax and a seal, weighing whether he would use the plain one with only his initials, or the one that bore his crest of knighthood.

  Knighthood, and a baronet to boot! Most gentlemen of his ilk would leap over the moon to hold such an honour, would fight and claw to attain such a gift from King George, but it had always left a bad taste in Lewrie’s mouth, suspecting the reason for his elevation to be a cynical, back-handed sop from the government. And, there was too much lost.

  He and Reliant had been part of a four-ship squadron ordered to seek and bring to battle a French squadron rumoured to be sailing for Spanish Louisiana to reclaim that vast territory, and the strategically sited city of New Orleans, in exchange for some duchy where a relative of Spanish King Carlos could hang his new crown. They’d found them after weeks of fruitless cruising, just off the Chandeleur Islands near the Eastern pass into the Mississippi River, and beaten them quite handily. Since it had been the first, and nigh the only, significant sea action that year, all the national papers were full of it for days, and the victors were lauded to the skies …

  Captain Blanding, their Commodore, had been certain to be knighted. Lewrie, though, even in command of the most powerful of the three frigates present, putative second-in-command, usually could not expect to be included, but, oddly, he was. He knew why.

  Lewrie and his wife, Caroline, had reconciled after years of bitter recriminations over his extra-marital dalliances, and had gone to Paris for a “honeymoon”. He still didn’t know quite what he had done to anger Napoleon Bonaparte when presented at the Tuileries Palace to exchange dead French officers’ swords for a hanger that Lewrie had had to surrender into Bonaparte’s hands at Toulon years before, but they’d been warned to flee at once, and with the aid of a fraudulent Sir Pulteney Plumb, who styled himself as “The Yellow Tansy”, and his wife they had made it to Calais in one disguise after another, and almost into a waiting rowboat, where the French caught up with them with orders to kill them, and Caroline had been shot in the back and died minutes later as the boat neared a waiting schooner.

  The papers had been full of that, too, for days; NAVAL HERO AND WIFE PURSUED UNDER DEATH SENTENCE, WIFE SLAIN BY PERFIDIOUS FRENCH ON ORDERS OF THE CORSICAN OGRE. And it went on being beaten like a drum as England had prepared to go back to war, on and on, mentioned in the same breath with which nation would keep Malta, demands for France to end their occupation of Switzerland, and an host of depredations and atrocities the French had been capable of.

  Much like Lewrie forever being a somewhat useful “gun dog” to the agents from the Foreign Office’s Secret Branch over the years, he had been useful to stir the nation’s patriotic fervour, and his wife’s death had been … productive! Even fortuitous!

  So, Lewrie had found himself a year later at Saint James’s Palace in un-accustomed silk finery, with an irritating powdered wig, kneeling before King George the Third and a bored Prince of Wales who had seemed more concerned with the dirt under his fingernails, and it had turned into a shambolic farce, for the King was having one of his bad days, and after dubbing several before Lewrie with baronies, knighthoods, and baronetcies, it must have stuck in his head, so when the dangerously swinging Sword of State had touched Lewrie’s shoulders (very near his ears!) out had come “Knight and Baronet”, which was repeated several times in search of the proper word to emphasize, then a question from his Sovereign as to why he was on his knees in front of him. He was told in an anteroom moments later that the Crown did not “err”, which had been pronounced much like “grr” and there it was, what what?

  Well, it cost me enough, Lewrie sadly thought as the stick of wax was melting over a candle; the fees for such honours at the College of Heralds for his crest, ring, and seal had been horrendously steep. He dripped a large blob of hot blue wax over the fold of the letter, then chose the crest seal to press into it. One down, three to go, he told himself with a sigh as he began to scribble praise for Midshipman Leverett.

  “More tea, sir?” Pettus asked in a soft voice, sidling up to the desk with the shiny pewter pot.

  “Aye, fill me back up,” Lewrie said with his head down over his writing, wondering just what he could say for Hillhouse that would improve his chances of promotion.

  CHAPTER THREE

  And, that’s why they pay me the glorious sum of ten shillin’s a day, Lewrie told himself over the next few days, as one problem after another cropped up.

  First came the men addled by the lightning strike. The Ship’s Surgeon, Mr. Snelling, a tall, and skeletally gaunt fellow, came to him with the bad news that it was not two hands affected, but five, all prime topmen.

  “They were so close to the strike, sir, that they came within a breath of perishing, themselves,” Snelling reported. “Since then, they have all lost their sense of balance, their co-ordination, their sight has been impaired, and they show difficulties with forming words and thoughts. In addition, they seem as if their strength has vanished. Las
situde, general weakness of their limbs…”

  “Ain’t playin’ a ‘fiddle’, are they? Shirkin’?” Lewrie had to ask.

  “No sir, it’s quite real, and most mystifying to me,” Snelling said with a shake of his head. “Do recall, sir, that we were both on the quarterdeck when the lightning struck, and we both felt a strong frisson of the electrical aura, as if the very atoms of our beings were being stirred, or somehow re-ordered. Who is to say what force it really was that re-ordered the wits, and the strength of those poor fellows. I fear they must be medically discharged, sir. Even light duties out at sea would be the death of them.”

  “Damme, Mister Snelling, that’s eight experienced topmen of the mainmast crew, and hellish-hard t’replace!” Lewrie barked with a wince. “Christ on a crutch, three dead and five sent ashore? Well, I s’pose there’s no helpin’ it. Send my clerk your findings and I’ll handle the discharge papers.”

  Next, it was the First Officer, with more bad news.

  “The lightning strike, sir,” Lt. Westcott said with a scowl on his face, “it transferred itself down the lower stays to the channels and dead-eye blocks, and the metal sheaves are damaged. And the iron bolts that tension the blocks beneath the channel platforms, well … they look to be partly melted, and may have to be replaced, as well.”

  “Mine arse on a band-box,” Lewrie growled. “I thought Mister Posey passed ’em.”

  “Best we send for him, again, sir, for a second look, before we step a new mast and re-rig the stays,” Westcott suggested.

  “Right, then, I’ll see to it,” Lewrie replied with a much put-upon sigh. “God, I wonder what it did to the bolts that hold the iron knees of the lower decks!”