Reefs and Shoals

by Dewey Lambdin

  “From Firefly, as ordered!” her lone Midshipman shouted back.

  Faulkes came on deck at that moment with his freshly penned notes and Lewrie handed Bracegirdle one. “More scribblin’, Mister Faulkes. Sorry,” he said to his clerk. “Something I just learned. Oh, Hell, it is faster t’just tell it to the other ships’ Mids. Never mind.”

  I’m babblin’, Lewrie chid himself; Stop that!

  As each sloop’s boat came alongside, Lewrie handed over their packets of mail and newspapers, and had a word with the Midshipmen from Firefly and Lizard, stressing that there might be upwards of ten or more French ships far down in the Windwards, but that Nelson would be chasing after them with a powerful fleet of his own, and that for the moment, the squadron would continue its patrolling off Spanish Florida.

  Once that was done, and the boat from Thorn had arrived and departed with her lost seamen, he turned to look seaward, and there little Squirrel still was, loafing along one hundred yards off his frigate’s starboard beam.

  S’pose I should invite him aboard for a drink, at the least, Lewrie thought; I might even dine him in.

  He went to the binnacle cabinet, took up a speaking-trumpet, and went to the rails to shout an invitation over. Lt. Richmond was happy to accept a supper.

  “We will be standing out to deeper waters at the start of the First Dog, Richmond!” Lewrie called over. “If you will take station astern of me, that will save you a long row in the dark!”

  “Most welcome, Captain Lewrie!” Richmond replied. “At any rate, I hoped to remain in company ’til dawn before returning to Nassau. We are being plagued by reports of a French privateer in our waters, and I do not relish making my little ship an appetiser!”

  “A French privateer?” Lewrie bellowed back, “Have any ships been lost?”

  “No way to know, sir!” Richmond responded. “Settlers on Grand Bahama and the Abacos have sent word to Nassau that they saw her, and one of our local merchantmen came in and said that she’d been pursued, and only made her escape by reaching shoal waters!”

  Richmond was right; there was no way to know if any ships had been taken. Once a merchant ship dropped below the horizon from New Providence, out-bound, it was just assumed that she would complete her voyage. If a merchantman left England, Boston, or Charleston for the Bahamas, no one there could know she was coming, or when she was expected to make port … or if she had ever existed! It would only be the owners and investors, the “ship’s husbands”, who would mourn her inexplicable loss, months or years later.

  Lewrie suggested that Richmond come aboard at the beginning of the Second Dog, at 6 P.M., gave him a cheery wave, then returned to the binnacle cabinet to stow the speaking-trumpet, then peer into the compass bowl, up at the commissioning pendant and the sails to judge the strength and direction of the wind, and ponder.

  Forrester had word that a privateer or two might be loose in his “patch”, but he sailed off, anyway? Lewrie thought with admitted wry amusement over the failings of a long-ago, none-too-loved shipmate; He always was a damned fool! With Mersey and the brig-sloops gone with him, there’s nothing of worth left t’guard Nassau and adjacent waters. He’s off for glory, his name in the newspapers, and a pat on the back from Admiralty for his boldness.

  Lewrie reached into a side pocket of his uniform coat to draw out Forrester’s note to re-read it. Once he’d done so, he began to grin in delight, seeing the possibilities. Forrester had snidely asked him to take his place while he was gone, a request that Lewrie was sure was already a complaint in Forrester’s report to London that would be a black mark against him. But two could play that game, Lewrie thought with a rising excitement.

  There was a French privateer prowling the Bahamas. Could it be Mollien and his Otarie? Catching him would be sweet! From Charleston, where he had first seen that schooner, to the Bahamas was close to the suspected aid and comfort of the lower Georgia coast.

  Lewrie looked cross the quarterdeck to the shore. The coast of Spanish Florida was a thin green streak, and of late, not a very productive one. He contemplated leaving Bury in Lizard, and Lovett in Firefly, to continue the patrolling and partial blockading of St. Augustine, but … if he did run across a privateer in Bahamian waters, he would need them and their shoal draughts to chase the foe where his frigate could not dare go. Besides, if he did manage to find a real enemy, it would be unfair to deprive them of the excitement!

  Long ago, he in Alacrity and his old friend Benjamin Rodgers in Sloop of War Whippet had raided on Walker’s Cay to suppress piracy, and it was Alacrity that had to strike from the West at dawn. “Lewrie, I dasn’t risk the Banks,” Rodgers had said of the treacherously shoal Bahama Banks. There was shelter for a privateer up yonder, and only a sloop of shoal draught, and the new gunboats, would be able to get at it.

  Might he leave HMS Thorn? No, he rejected that, too, for there might be need of her heavier firepower closer to the shoals that ever Reliant could get. Hang it, I’ll take ’em all! Lewrie thought.

  “Mister Warburton,” Lewrie said of a sudden, “pass word for my cook, Yeoviil, and hoist a signal to all ships. ‘Captains To Supper,’ at the start of the Second Dog Watch. Then, ‘Alter Course’ to Seaward.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  This was the sort of thing that he would have to impart to all of them, face-to-face, this change of their area of operations, and a new mission.

  Now in much surer takings, Lewrie began to pace from the head of the starboard gangway to the taffrails and back again, working up his appetite for supper, and pondering just what he should serve, and what Yeoviil could come up with on short notice.

  “Look at that!” Midshipman Warburton whispered to Midshipman Munsell, who shared the watch with him. Both slyly grinned, and then caught Lt. Merriman’s attention, jerking their heads in Lewrie’s direction, bringing a grin to Merriman’s face, too. “I wager he doesn’t even notice!”

  The ship’s dog, Bisquit, had slunk up the ladderway to the quarterdeck, that tempting forbidden territory, had hidden by the binnacle cabinet ’til Lewrie’s back was turned, and had then begun to pace along a few steps behind Lewrie’s shins, mouth wide open in what could be construed as a grin as he looked up with his ears perked, and darting ahead of him whenever Lewrie turned about to continue his slow pacing, then “take station” off his quarter once more, and with Lewrie so lost in his thoughts that he was all un-knowing.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Reliant’s little squadron, augmented for a while by Lt. Richmond and Squirrel, quartered the seas as they beat their way Eastwards into the Northwest Providence Channel, with the smaller ships ranging back and forth to peek in at Bimini and the Isaacs, into Cross Bay on Grand Bahama and the hurricane hole that Lewrie had used ’tween the wars, as if the frigate was the Master of The Hunt and the sloops were the fox hounds. They stopped and inspected a few schooners and small brigs in case they were French or Spanish privateers flying false colours, and “spoke” to many local fishing boats which might have seen any sign of an aggressive strange sail, or seen any British vessel being pursued by one. They poked into the Berry Islands, then dropped Squirrel off to make her way to Nassau with Lewrie’s latest reports and replies to the newly received mail, and steered for the Northeast Providence Channel and the Abacos.

  The mail, well! After sorting through and filing the important letters, and sending the least important to the quarter gallery for use as toilet paper, Lewrie had had time to savour personal news from home before his captains had come aboard for supper.

  There were several from Lydia, all warmly fond, chatty, and informative. Beyond all sense, her brother Percy was going to wed this mid-Summer, though people in Society thought him daft for taking a circus rider like Eudoxia Durschenko for wife! Eudoxia’s evil-looking father, Arslan Artimovich, was already looking yearningly at their vast stables of saddle horses and the racing thoroughbred, and was then at their principal estate, installing himself as Master of Horse!

 
There were letters from Sir Malcolm Shockley, an old ally in Parliament; his father, Sir Hugo; brother-in-law Burgess Chiswick; and reports from dour Governour Chiswick and his wife Millicent on his daughter, Charlotte’s, progess.

  And, one from his youngest son, Hugh, now a Midshipman aboard HMS Aeneas under another old friend, Captain Thomas Charlton. That one was most informative, and news that Lewrie could pass along to all of his captains over that supper. Aeneas was in the Mediterranean, and a part of Admiral Lord Nelson’s fleet!

  That French Admiral Villeneuve had slipped out of Toulon early in the year in a storm, whilst Nelson’s fleet had been loading supplies at Maddalena Bay on Sardinia. They had sailed as far East as Alexandria in Egypt in search of Villeneuve, fearing a second attempt at building a French empire in the Middle East and the Holy Lands, but Villeneuve had slipped back into Toulon. By mid-March, they had learned that the French had sailed again, and they had gone as far as Sicily in search of them before hearing that the French had slipped past Gibraltar and were bound for the West Indies.

  … fears that Villeneuve’s ultimate Ambition is the Conquest of Jamaica, so we are off, all of us, in hot, pursuit, and Huzzah! I know not if Sewallis in Pegasus is still on the Brest Blockade, but if so, will he feel Envious! We pray earnestly that we catch up the foe and bring him to action!

  “One can only hope that Captain Forrester and his brig-sloops do not cross hawses with this Villeneuve on his own, sir,” Richmond had said at supper.

  “If he and the first French squadron unite, who knows how many ships of the line that will be,” Lt. Westcott had commented, looking a tad grimmer than was his usual wont.

  “The entire French Toulon fleet? What’d that be, I wonder?” Lt. Darling had speculated. “And did he pick up any Spanish ships of the line with him? Twenty, twenty-five sail of the line, and at least half a dozen frigates?”

  “If Jamaica’s their intent, the Bahamas will be safe,” Lewrie had told them. “And when Nelson lays into them, so will the rest of the West Indies, perhaps the Med, too, once the French have nothing left.”

  “Hear hear!” Lt. Lovett had exclaimed, raising his wine glass on high. “Gentlemen, allow me to give you Nelson, and a bloody battle!”

  “Nelson, and victory!” Lt. Bury had soberly amended.

  All in all, it had been a cheering supper, but for the dessert, for neither Yeovill nor Cooke had been able to master the receipt for pecan pie, despite their experimentations.

  * * *

  Once Squirrel had departed them, the squadron had sailed on out the Northeast Providence Channel, past the lower-most tip of Great Abaco, the Hole-in-the-Wall, then up the Eastern coast past Cherokee Sound, Little Harbour, Hope Town, and Marsh Harbour, the main settlement, and seaward of the chain of cays; Man O’ War, Great Guana, Green Turtle, and Powell Cay, bound for the Northern-most end of the Bahamas where the Little Bahama Bank continued beyond Little Abaco and Fox Town and Walker’s Cay, where lay the East entrance to the inner Bank, Walker’s Cay Channel.

  This should be good lurkin’ grounds, Lewrie told himself as the seventh day of their search went on with nothing to show for it.

  Ships bound in or out of Nassau had to use either of the Providence Channels, and if one did not have enough ships to watch each of the channels simultaneously, the best bet would be to cruise north of the Little Bahama Bank, making long transits to the East-Sou’east to watch one channel, and to the West-Sou’west to watch the other, with a “hidey-hole” round Walker’s Cay should a warship turn up. It was the very place Lewrie would have chosen, had he been a privateer in search of prey, but … perhaps the French didn’t think like him, he was beginning to doubt.

  They had seen several American ships bound for New Providence, or returning to home ports from the island, and had stopped and taken a look at them to ask if they had seen any privateers. Despite his cautions to treat the Yankee Doodles and “Brother Johnathans” with respect, and to eschew the urge to check the bona fides of their crewmen to determine if any of them were British, none of them had departed from those encounters happily, even if none of their sailors had been press-ganged. Stopping them for what seemed no cause was irritating enough! Some of the boarding parties reported that they had been accosted with shouts for “Free Trade, and Seamen’s Rights!” no matter how politely they had been handled.

  Should he give up this search and head South? he speculated. The pickings for a privateer further down the island chain would be leaner, the prizes almost too small to be worth the effort, if the Prize Courts which served the enemy were as parsimonious as the ones he’d dealt with. Or, by late afternoon, they might put about and go Nor’east round the top of the Little Bahama Bank to do it all over again.

  Reliant was at the North end of a line-abreast patrol line with only four or five miles between ships, with little Firefly the closest to the pale green waters of the Bank. The weather was clear and the winds a touch lively, strong enough to mellow the heat. The seas were sparkling, glittering in medium-length waves not over three or four feet in height. All in all, it was a pretty morning, but it didn’t appear as if it would be an eventful one. Lewrie was just about to decide to send down for his deck chair when a lookout shouted down to the deck.

  “Signal from Thorn, sir!” Midshipman Grainger added from his perch halfway up the larboard shrouds of the main mast.

  Lewrie fetched his telescope and peered outward, trying to read it for himself. There was Thorn four miles off the larboard beam with a hint of Lizard four miles further off, almost hull-down and perched off Thorn’s stern, almost masked. She, too, flew the same signal. The Firefly was only a tops’l over the horizon, completely masked by HMS Thorn, the originator of the alert relayed up the patrol line.

  “The hoist is ‘Enemy In Sight’, sir!” Grainger shouted.

  Lieutenant Lovett was not the skittish sort; if he said that he could see an enemy ship, then an enemy there was in the offing.

  “Mister Spendlove,” Lewrie ordered the officer of the watch, “Beat to Quarters”

  “Another signal, sir!” Grainger shouted once more. “Enemy Is A Brig’, and ‘Enemy Is Flying … South’!”

  “Mister Eldridge?” Lewrie said, turning to the older Midshipman aft by the taffrail signal-flag lockers. “You’re fluent and fast by now, I trust?”

  “I will try, sir,” Eldridge replied.

  “This is going t’be complicated,” Lewrie told him, taking one quick look at the chart on the traverse board. “First, a hoist for Firefly and Lizard, their numbers, for ‘General Chase’, adding ‘Inshore’.” He wished his smaller ships to pursue, slanting toward the Little Bahama Bank to deny that brig a chance to get into shoal water. He hoped that “Inshore”, would convey that desire, and had to trust to Lovett and Bury to want to cut her off.

  “Second hoist will be to Thorn,” Lewrie explained, waiting impatiently as Eldridge scribbled it down on a scrap of paper. “Her number, and ‘General Chase’, adding ‘Seaward’.”

  “I relieve you, sir,” Lt. Westcott told Lt. Spendlove as he gained the quarterdeck in a rush, still fumbling with his coat, sword belt, and hat. He knuckled the brim of his hat in salute, Spendlove replying as casually, before dashing to the waist where the gunners were assembling by their pieces. “We’ve found something, sir?”

  “It appears we have, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie told him. “Do you wait ’til the hoists are completed, then shape course Due South to pursue. The Chase is a brig that Lovett deems a foe.”

  Lewrie looked aft as the signal halliard blocks squealed. The first signal was soaring aloft to be two-blocked. While Lewrie was waiting for it to be repeated, Pettus came up with the keys to the arms lockers, which Lewrie passed on to Lt. Merriman, and his sword belt, and his pair of double-barreled Manton pistols.

  “I’ll see your cats to the orlop, sir,” Pettus promised.

  “Have Jessop see to the damned dog, too,” Lewrie ordered.

  Thorn hoisted a repeat of the first
signal, and then there was a long wait ’til the mast-head lookouts could report that Lizard had made the hoist to Firefly, and an even longer wait ’til Lizard made a single-flag hoist for “Affirmative” back to Thorn and then to the frigate.

  This is one hellish-poor way t’speak with each other, Lewrie thought, regretting that he had spaced his patrol line so far apart; This command of a squadron, and sendin’ orders and hopin’ for the best, is enough t’tear my hair out! But, if Firefly hadn’t been down South so far, we might’ve missed the Chase altogether.

  The blocks were squealing again as the first signal was lowered and the second was hurriedly bent on to the halliards. With commendable despatch, Eldridge got the second one to Thorn two-blocked not a minute later. With only four miles between them, Lt. Darling’s ship was quicker to respond with the “Repeat,” and no “Query” or “Submit” to delay the process.

  “Strike it, Mister Eldridge,” Lewrie ordered, which was the order for Thorn to execute. As soon as Thorn whisked her Repeat down, her helm was put over and she wheeled Sutherly, hardening up her gaff sails and bracing round her tops’l and wee royal for drive.

  “Alter course, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie snapped.

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  Reliant spread more sail aloft, too, braced her square sails and yards for more speed, and hoisted the outer flying jib and both the fore and main topmast stays’ls. She leaned her starboard shoulder to the sea and began to lope South, her forefoot smashing and parting the sea, her hull and masts humming and trembling in haste.

  “We might be up level with Thorn in an hour,” Lt. Westcott speculated aloud, “though I doubt either of us will be of much help to Lovett and Bury’.”

  “The important thing is for us to be seen, West of the Banks, so the Chase can’t hope to hare off that way,” Lewrie said, feeling a need to cross his fingers; what he hoped to occur could still turn to shambles. “The wee sloops can deny the Chase an escape into the Banks, and Thorn can loom up in a stern-chase. So long as she’s a brig of average size, Lizard and Firefly, can catch her up and take her. We’ll be ‘In Sight’ of her taking. Think there’s a penny or two per hand in that, Mister Westcott?” he said with a grin.