Sails on the Horizon: A Novel of the Napoleonic Wars

by Jay Worrall

  As the stores were delivered they had to be inspected, counted and weighed, signed for and entered into innumerable ledger books before being stowed away. Each warrant officer had his own responsibility: the purser for the food, water, spirits, tobacco, and the like; the gunner for shot, powder, cartridges, and the equipment needed to work the cannon; the bosun for spare spars and canvas, paint, cordage, and cables. It all had to be stored with care in the hold, since the distribution of its weight would be of considerable importance to the handling of the ship at sea.

  Late on a Saturday afternoon Mr. Cleaves, one of the master’s mates, approached Charles on the quarterdeck and touched his hat. “There’s a visitor asking for you, sir. I haven’t allowed him on board—he’s a bit disreputable-looking.”

  Charles couldn’t think who it would be, then he remembered Poole. “Has he got one arm?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Show him to my cabin. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Charles found Poole standing nervously in the middle of the room when he arrived.

  “I got what ye wanted, sur,” the porter said without preamble. “It were scary difficult.”

  “What did you find?” Charles asked.

  “It’s all here,” Poole said, holding out a collection of papers. “The admiral had yer guns condemned and then had the navy buy ’em back again, good as new. Paid for twice, they were.”

  Charles took the papers and began to leaf through them—invoices, condemnation reports, more invoices. They were all signed by Grimsley. “Pocketing the difference?” he asked.

  “Big difference,” Poole said. “It’s all there.”

  Charles unlocked a drawer to his desk and took out an envelope he’d put there earlier—it contained forty one-pound notes—and handed it over. He put the papers Poole had brought in its place and relocked the drawer. “Why was it ‘scary difficult’?” he asked.

  “I think they’re on to me, sur,” Poole said. “I had to steal them papers. If they catch me, no tellin’ what they’ll do.”

  Charles thought about this for a moment. “Care to sign on?” he asked. “We’ll enter you under another name.”

  Poole’s face brightened. “I loved the navy, sur, but I only got one arm now.”

  “Pass the word for Mr. Bevan,” Charles shouted at the marine sentry outside his door, “and tell him to bring the ship’s roster.” To Poole he said, “Can you cook?”

  WITHIN A FURTHER week, already past the deadline set in his orders, Louisa was nearly ready for sea. Her yards were up and rigged, all her guns in place, and her stores as complete as they were going to get. He had long since received his orders, carried by packet from London. Louisa was to proceed to Lisbon with all dispatch, there to join the Mediterranean fleet. He was to report directly to Admiral Jervis for disposition at his lordship’s pleasure.

  Winchester’s recruiting efforts paid off better than Charles had any right to expect, netting sixteen experienced seamen, which had cost him dearly. That, together with the warrants, petty officers, and others that had shown up over the previous month, still left the ship forty-four hands short. Charles decided it was time to visit the dockyard admiral again. Actually, with the papers he’d acquired, he looked forward to it.

  The next morning he dressed carefully and allowed Attwater to fuss over him while he ate his breakfast. When he heard the ship’s bell ring twice, he called through the door to the marine sentry to have the ship’s gig readied. Then he went to his desk, removed an addressed envelope containing an unsigned cover letter and the papers Poole had given him, and slid it into his jacket pocket. As the gig’s crew pulled across the Hamoaze, he thought about Admiral Grimsley and what he might say to him.

  Charles was disappointed to find the admiral away, so he went across the hall to see Captain Cavendish. The older man looked at him warily but gave him a warm enough greeting.

  “Where’s Grimsley?” Charles asked.

  “At the Admiralty in London,” Cavendish said with a sigh. “In front of a board of inquiry. Just between you and me, I’m afraid they haven’t got enough on him. He expects to be back in a week or so.”

  “I’m sorry to have missed him,” Charles said, speaking truthfully. “But I’m here on business.”

  “What do you need?” Cavendish said, looking pained.

  “Forty-four experienced sailors—topmen, if you have them.”

  “I don’t,” Cavendish said, “God’s truth. I have six able seamen pressed off a merchantman yesterday and a motley collection of sheriff’s quotamen.”

  The sheriff’s men, Charles knew, were the rawest landsmen, recently culled from the region’s prisons and jails: poachers, vagrants, thieves, and other petty criminals. “I’ll take them,” he said without hesitation, “and be gone on the next tide.”

  Cavendish leaned back in his chair and smiled. “I envy you,” he said, “just starting out on your first command. I wish I had mine to do over again.”

  Charles felt the bulky envelope in his pocket. “May I speak to you in confidence?” he said.

  Cavendish nodded, looking at him curiously.

  “If I were you, I might think about distancing myself from Grimsley,” Charles said. “Things might become difficult soon.”

  “Your cannon?” Cavendish said.

  “Something like that,” Charles answered.

  On his way out of the building, he passed a box set there to collect navy mail and dropped his envelope into it.

  NINE

  “WEIGH ANCHOR, MR. BEVAN. AS SOON AS WE CLEAR THE sound you may set a course to weather the Eddystone light” were the first seagoing instructions Charles uttered as Louisa’s commander, and he said them with as much gravity as he could summon. The Louisa was already one week past the time laid down in his orders for leaving harbor. Charles watched with silent displeasure, tending to alarm, as the crew, the preponderance for whom the term “inexperienced lubbers” might seem a compliment, were sent into the yards or to the capstan or the starboard braces for the delicate maneuvers that would sail Louisa slowly over her own anchor so that it could be pulled directly upward out of the ooze of the harbor bottom. At Bevan’s shouts of “hands to the fore and mizzen topsails” and “man the larboard braces,” some of the crew ran to the left, others to the right. A few started up the shrouds of the wrong masts. In the confusion of swearing petty officers and bewildered landsmen, a furious Lieutenant Bevan bellowed, “Belay! Silence fore and aft!”

  The ship slowly fell silent and movement ceased except for those asking what “belay” and “fore and aft” meant. All eyes turned to the quarterdeck. Charles stood alone by the weather rail, trying to look unconcerned while Bevan fumed. He thought that the worst thing he could do would be to intervene. That would be taken as lack of faith in his officers, especially his first lieutenant. He also knew from experience that marshaling a new crew into a disciplined, efficient organization took time and patience, and neither he nor Bevan had ever seen a ship’s company with such a high proportion of utterly inexperienced hands before.

  “Petty officers, assemble your men by divisions on the deck,” Bevan ordered in a disgusted tone. When the crew had sorted itself, after some directing and shoving, into the appropriate groups on different parts of the maindeck, Bevan sent the topmen into the rigging, then the waisters (the mostly landsmen whose station was in the waist of the ship) to haul on the braces, and finally those who were to man the capstan to their places. Step by step he paced them through the process until the anchor was up and catted home and the ship under way. There was some further confusion as Louisa cautiously wore at Devil’s Point and tacked around Drake’s Island at the entrance to the sound, but apart from the ship’s almost coming ashore at the foot of Mount Batton, there were no major mishaps. They added sail at the approach to Penlee Point, and when the long rollers of the Atlantic came under Louisa’s hull Charles finally spoke. “Mr. Bevan, please call the hands aft. I wish to address them.”

  Char
les watched the men assemble in the waist of the ship, then stepped to the forward rail of the quarterdeck. All chatter and idle conversation on the maindeck below ceased. Some of the crew he knew well: his midshipmen, the various warrant officers, the masters and their mates, mostly. Two or three he recognized from the old Argonaut. He hardly knew any of the rest of their names. A half-dozen were lascars, and there were several blackamoors. The experienced sailors he could easily identify by their clothing and casual, expectant attitudes. He guessed they were mostly wondering what kind of captain he would be—harsh, lenient, capable, petty, stupid. The others, far too many others, were watching him anxiously. To them he would be one more new face in a confusion of new faces, tasks, living arrangements, food, and punishments. The first few months on board could be very hard for new hands, seemingly without reason or coherence, and all with the almost unlimited power of the captain and his officers hanging over them.

  Charles had already read to them the thirty-five Articles of War (which he was required to do by act of Parliament at least once a month) the previous Sunday. The articles laid out in explicit detail the activities prohibited on His Majesty’s ships and their attendant punishments, usually flogging or death. Now he wanted to explain why they were on board, what was expected of them, what rewards might come their way, and hint at what type of captain he would be.

  This would be the first time in his life Charles had addressed so many people, and he felt more nervous than he had expected to. “Our task is to defeat the French and her allies at sea wherever we meet them,” he began in a slightly faltering voice, which he covered with a cough. “I have noticed that we are not yet ready to do this.” A ripple of subdued laughter, mostly from the experienced seamen, spread across the deck as he had expected it would. Bevan moved to call for silence, but Charles stayed him. When the noise died away of its own accord, he continued. “I promise you that by the time we are called to action we will be ready to give England’s enemies more than they bargain for.” His apprehensions leaving him, he attempted a gesture, pointing at them. “If you follow orders and work hard I promise that Louisa will become among the best fighting frigates in His Majesty’s Navy—and, it is to be hoped, the richest in prize money.

  “Some of you have a lot to learn,” he went on, much more easily now, with a broad sweep of his arm. “This is all new to many of you. There’s no shame in that. Listen to your officers, follow their orders, and you will all become expert sailors and proud of your profession. It will be hard and you will make mistakes. All I ask is, don’t make the same mistake twice.”

  The faces continued to stare at him expectantly until it was clear that he was finished. Then someone yelled “Three cheers for the captain!” Charles had taken Jonathan Cleaves, one of the master’s mates, aside earlier and told him to yell that. Three indifferent “huzzas” followed from the waist of the ship. Charles waved his arms for silence. “Three cheers for the Louisa and her crew!” he shouted back, and the men broke into a series of uproarious shouts. With the noise still echoing across the deck, he turned to Bevan and said, “You may pipe the hands to dinner. Afterward we’ll exercise them aloft.”

  “I WOULD BE pleased if you and Lieutenant Winchester would dine in my cabin this evening,” Charles said to Bevan as they were standing on the quarterdeck, watching the topmen high in the topgallant yards practicing reefing the stiff new canvas. The more experienced were surefooted and confident even at those dizzying heights. The newer hands, at least those new to the tops, inched their way along the footropes, clasping the thick yard as if their lives depended on it, which of course they did.

  “I don’t know, I’m sure, sir,” Bevan answered, his eyes never leaving the men working above. “Such short notice. I’ll have to consult my social secretary.” Charles was about to respond when his lieutenant interjected, “There, that man there, third in on the starboard yard. He’s no business being in the tops. He’ll kill himself.”

  Charles saw the man Bevan pointed out frozen in place, clinging to the yard with his arms wrapped desperately around it. “Have someone bring him down,” he said quietly. “We’ll assign him somewhere else.” Finding good topmen could be a hit-or-miss proposition. Some were naturals, adapting quickly to working far, far above the decks on the wildly swaying spars, some came to it slowly, and some never adjusted at all. He listened as Bevan ordered a bosun’s mate into the shrouds to lead the man down—“and mind your bloody tongue, he’s scared enough already.”

  “As to dinner,” Charles said, bringing them back to the subject on his mind. “I will expect you both at the end of the second dogwatch.”

  “What’s the occasion?” Bevan asked, turning serious.

  “I’d like your impressions of the crew, what we have and how do we bring them along. I think that should do for starters.” That was part of the reason, Charles knew, to discuss the ship’s business in a more relaxed and convivial atmosphere. The other part was simply to have company. He was rapidly discovering that being a ship’s captain was an exceedingly insular business. He answered to no one on board and the temptation to stand in splendid isolation, issuing orders from on high, was strong. Captain Wood had done that. Charles couldn’t remember him inviting his lieutenants to dine more than once or twice on the Argonaut. But the more he had thought about it, the more he liked the idea of regular, possibly weekly meals with Bevan and Winchester. Not only would it help to keep him informed of the day-to-day goings-on aboard ship, but it would also keep boredom away. He might do something similar with the warrants—the master, purser, gunner, surgeon, bosun, and so on—though not weekly, perhaps monthly. It would help him to get to know them better, and they him. The same could be said of the midshipmen, although that was a less interesting prospect. Some of them were mere adolescents and they ate like wolves. Which reminded him that he had to assign someone to see to their education, the basics only: reading, writing, spherical geometry, and celestial navigation. The small Louisa had no schoolmaster. Maybe the sailing master would agree to take that on; Charles would have to ask him. And if he invited all of them to dine in his cabin, and on his stores, on a routine basis, they would be obliged to return the favor. It would be good to visit the wardroom again from time to time, he decided. He missed the arguments, humor, the pranks, and tall stories he had known there. Of course, it would all be somewhat subdued with the ship’s captain present.

  Dinner that evening, their first at sea in the Louisa, threatened to be a slow and awkward affair. It was as if neither Bevan nor Winchester knew how to relate to him as their captain when they were off the quarterdeck. Both lieutenants arrived wearing their best uniforms. Somewhat formal greetings were exchanged as Attwater took their hats and swords. “Wine before dinner?” Charles offered. “I have claret and port. I recommend the claret early in the voyage and that we don’t start on the port until that runs out.”

  “Claret would be fine, sir,” Bevan ventured.

  Charles nodded to Attwater. Bevan’s use of the term “sir,” which sounded more or less natural on deck, jarred him, but he let it go. “I have a toast,” he said as the wine was served. “To the Louisa, her officers and crew. May we all benefit from our experiences.”

  “Especially the crew,” Bevan rejoined with a grimace. “God bless their lubberly, gaol-house ways.”

  “And may God help their officers,” Winchester spoke. “We’ll need it.”

  “No doubt,” Charles said as he lifted his glass and then drank. “The question is, what do we do about it?”

  “What do you mean, sir?” Winchester asked.

  “He means, Stevie, my boy,” Bevan answered, “how do we go about making this ragtag collection of misfits and criminals into the best frigate crew in His Majesty’s Navy? Do we bring them along fast and spotty or slow and sure? Do we start with sail-handling or gunnery, or both at once? Am I right, Captain?”

  At that moment Attwater coughed discreetly to indicate that their dinner was about to be served. Charles ges
tured to the table laden with cooked freshly butchered pork and recently harvested vegetable dishes, purchased only hours before leaving port. As soon as they were seated, he said, “That’s exactly what I want to talk about. I have some ideas, but I’d like your thoughts.”

  The dinner went well, with a lively discussion about new crews and their training, mixing experienced seamen among the raw ones, even (something Winchester proposed) holding small “theoretical lectures” on the various aspects of ship management, sail handling, and gunnery, explaining why things were done the way they were. “Oh, posh,” Bevan said of the suggestion, but Charles thought it worth trying.

  “We’re agreed, then,” Charles said, consulting some notes he had scribbled as the after-dinner sherry was being poured out by a slightly tipsy Attwater. “We’ll concentrate on sail handling first, with explanations. Gunnery after they can get the canvas up and down properly. I suppose we must simply pray that we run into no enemy warships early on.”

  “Agreed,” Bevan answered, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his belly. “Now, if you’ve had enough of us telling you how to run your ship, I suggest Winchester toast the king. I have the middle watch.” The toast to the king, always offered by the junior officer present and always given seated in the navy in deference to low shipboard deck beams, was the traditional signal for the evening’s end.