Except for Sundays. Then Blanding would order all ships into two short columns abreast and send his Chaplain to each ship in turn for Divine Services. Chaplain Brundish was a much younger fellow than Lewrie had expected, almost as stout as his patron, but agile and energetic. He was well read and a charming, erudite supper-table guest, as full of bonhomie as Blanding and, like many gentlemanly members of the Church of England, spoke glowingly of steeplechasing and the fox hunt, of how he missed his hounds and his favourite hunters. He had a wealth of decent amusing tales and japes, played the flute, recorder, and the violin, and was possessed of a loud, deep baritone voice. His homilies were marvels, too. Oh, he’d rail against the common sailors’ sins of giving in to boredom and ennui, of petty theft and drunk on duty, nodding off on watch, but they were mostly short, pithy, and very nautical, full of animus against their foes, “mateyness” between their own, of upholding God, King, and Country as a moral, religious calling, as a Good Work that would lead them all to Salvation and the Eternal Glory . . . all of it bracketed by well-known, beloved hymns of the up-lifting, muscular sort that left even the leery men with grins on their faces, and humming the tunes as Chaplain Brundish departed in Captain Blanding’s cutter to minister to the next ship and crew.
He, surprisingly for a man of the cloth, knew his way with the cutlass and small-sword, and had a keen eye with a musket.
After the third Sunday at sea, though, Modeste put up a signal for Reliant to come close alongside. With both ships loafing along under reduced sail, both rolling, heaving, and snuffling foam, about fifty yards apart, Blanding took up a speaking-trumpet and bellowed, “This is looking to be a rum go, Lewrie! The only Frogs we’ve seen are prizes took by other people!”
Wars could be declared, but merchantmen on-passage had no way of learning of it; warships returning from overseas or cruising on an innocent patrol beyond the reach of coastal semaphore towers could not be informed either, and the first they would know of it would be the pugnacious approach of an enemy warship or privateer with gun-ports open and artillery run out. Such surprises would happen to ships of both sides. Frustratingly, whilst their squadron had scouted round the approaches to the English Channel, other, luckier, British warships had sailed past them with French prizes in tow, or the odd enemy merchantman sent in under a prize-crew, with the Union Flag flying above the French Tricolour to mark the new possessor.
At several of their suppers aboard Modeste, Blanding had wrung his hands, or gnawed his napkins to nubbins, to be bound by specific orders which denied them the chance to hare off in search of prizes, too, and was forced to watch other captains send in fresh fortunes to be made in the Admiralty Prize-Courts.
“If they didn’t sail before the war was declared, they may not have come out at all, sir!” Lewrie had shouted back to him. “This could be a wild goose chase!”
“And, did they put to sea a day or two before, then they are weeks ahead of us by now!” Blanding had roared back, despair in his voice. “It just ain’t on, dash my eyes! We will go the West Indies and the mouth of the Mississippi, Lewrie! Our orders demand we do no less . . . whether they are really there or not! ‘Bring to battle, or pursue,’ we’re ordered. Then pursuit it will be! Order of sailing . . . Pylades, your Reliant, then me, with Cockerel the hind-most! Two miles’ separation ’tween ships, and shape course West-Sou’west, half West, cross the Bay of Biscay!”
“Aye aye, sir!” Lewrie had bawled back, wondering if his whisky, mustard, and store of jerked meat and sausages for the cats would last that long. More disturbingly, would he have to sift, rinse, and dry their litter for re-use, should the level of sand in the barrel run low?
“The Indies, sir?” Lt. Westcott asked after coming up to the windward side of the quarterdeck, with a brief tap of two fingers upon the brim of his hat for a salute.
“It appears so, Mister Westcott,” Lewrie said with a sigh. “The hands . . . damned few of ’em have had a chance to go there. Damned few have ever been exposed to Yellow Jack and the other fevers, ’cept for some of our older hands, our Blacks, and such. We’ll be arriving right at the height of summer, when it’s the sickliest. If we don’t have to spend too much time close to shore, we might escape the worst of it, but . . . perhaps our Surgeon, Mister Mainwaring, has some fresh insights about Yellow Jack and malaria?”
“A long passage to get there, sir,” Westcott said, shrugging in a fatalistic way. “Do we not run across any foes on the way, at least we will have Captain Blanding’s hoped-for skills imparted to them . . . before we start to lose some of them.”
That made Lewrie cock a brow and peer closely. “Rather, let us hope, must we lose some of our people, it comes in battle, and not the fevers first, Mister Westcott,” he told him.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
They went roughly Sou’west cross the Bay of Biscay, hundreds of miles out into the mid-Atlantic and off shore from France and the newly established British blockading squadrons, “reaching” most days on the prevailing Westerlies with the winds abeam and sails set “all to the royals” when the weather allowed, making haste. Captain Blanding let them be to bowl along like a Cambridge coach and work on their sail-tending and gunnery practice, his desire to press on over-riding his penchant for squadron manoeuvres, and unwilling to lose a single mile, a single hour, of his pursuit—whether they were chasing a Will-o’-the-Wisp or not.
They encountered only one other ship, off Cape Ferrol, the very northern-most tip of Spain, and that was another British frigate, headed home from the Far East and unaware that the war had resumed until they informed her. Then they plunged on further South, with the winds shifting ’til the latitude of Cape St. Vincent, where the first of the Nor’east Trade Winds began, and they could alter course West and ride them cross the Atlantic to the West Indies, running down a line of latitude for the most part.
It was only then that the four Ship’s Surgeons held a meeting aboard Modeste to discuss preventatives against the Yellow Jack and malaria. It was not productive.
“They’re certain that we should avoid all shore miasmas, sir,” Mr. Mainwaring told Lewrie in his cabins after returning back aboard. Mainwaring was a stout fellow in his mid-thirties, so grizzled, though, that he put Lewrie in mind of a professional boxer, with massive hands and thick fingers. “The jungle, forest, marsh, and swamp night mists. We should avoid any anchorage that does not have a sea breeze to keep land winds, and the noisome mists, at bay. And, there is the chichona bark powder, which is efficacious at combatting either of the fevers,” he explained, shifting in the collapsing chair and making it creak in an alarming way as he sipped a welcome glass of Lewrie’s Rhenish.
“Once they’re caught,” Lewrie grumbled, “not before.”
“The medical records show no usefulness in administering chichona bark tea to prevent outbreaks, sir . . . sorry.”
“And the citronella I wrote them about, sir?” Lewrie asked. “My former Surgeon, Mister Durant in Proteus, used it in lanthorn oil and in candles, and we suffered very few cases of Yellow Jack after our initial plague. The Spanish and Portuguese colonies burn citronella candles by the ton in Fever Season, and they don’t die by battalions.”
“Ehm . . . the uses your former Surgeon cited, Captain sir, were accompanied by keeping their houses, their windows, shut at night, to keep out the miasmas,” Mr. Mainwaring hesitantly related, with a faint scowl on his rugged face. “Secondly, the others reckoned that the Dons and the Portuguese have, after a couple of centuries, developed a toleration, and their only mortalities are some of the newborn and those just arrived in their colonies. And, thirdly, sir . . . it’s the cost of it. The others are loath to purchase large quantities of what may be a folk nostrum of no use. Like all their other medicaments, it comes out of their own pockets. Out of mine, sir,” he pointedly added.
“Humour me, Mister Mainwaring,” Lewrie stubbornly told him. “Do we put in somewhere that citronella candles and oils are available, I will buy it . . . and we will empl
oy it, even if the other ships do not. I’ve seen it work . . . God knows why, but it seems to. If anthing else, it seems to keep the hordes of mosquitoes at bay. We’ll place tubs of candles round the hatchways at anchor, burn candles belowdecks instead of the issue glims after dark, do we cruise close ashore or in a lee of an island. And, for good measure, I’m certain you’ll wish to get more chichona bark powders, do our people come down with Yellow Jack.”
“Of course, sir,” Mainwaring replied, though it was uncertain whether he was agreeing about the chichona bark powders or submitting to a captain’s odd caprice; in his experience as a Ship’s Surgeon, and in discussions with his fellows, Mainwaring had come to learn that Navy captains could be an eccentric lot.
Weeks later, in late June, the squadron was alee of Martinique and looking into the major naval port of Fort-de-France. Surprisingly, the windward approaches from the Atlantic, and the harbour itself, were already being watched by a slim squadron of three frigates or sloops of war, who reported that no fresh French squadron had been seen there, and what few enemy warships were present were effectively bottled up.
“Hear about Commodore Hood, sir?” the senior captain had called over to them with a speaking-trumpet. “He’s already taken their island of Saint Lucia, and the port of Castries, and is now off to do the same to Tobago! Capital, what?”
Further North at Guadeloupe, and it was much the same story off the fortified lee-side harbour of Basse-Terre. Rear-Admiral Sir John Thomas Duckworth, commanding the Jamaica Station, must have had early premonitions or secret despatches alerting him to the fresh outbreak of war, for he had sent his few warships of a peace-time squadron out to sea, just like Commodore Sir Samuel Hood of the Leewards Islands Station. They were informed that some French privateers had gotten out to prey on British merchant shipping, but there were hardly any warships in Basse-Terre, and they showed no signs of sallying.
The ships watching Guadeloupe had not seen Blanding’s mythical French squadron, either, and suggested that they might try further to the North, at St. Barthélemy or St. Martin . . . St. Domingue? “And the very best of luck to you at . . . whatever it is you’re doing!”
“Were I a cursing man, a blasphemer, gentlemen, I’d be in full cry by now! Dash it! Dash it, I say!” Captain Blanding fumed as he stomped round his great-cabins, his face going plummy whilst holding yet another officers’ conference aboard Modeste. “And why can I not engage in some raw Billingsgate, Brundish?” he demanded of his Chaplain, “when it would feel so bloody good about now?”
“Stoic acceptance of frustration and misfortune are the mark of the Christian, English gentleman, I fear, sir,” Brundish calmly replied over a glass of claret. “ ‘Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,’ all that? Spurs the mind to finding solutions, I vow.”
Blanding let out a clenched-teeth growl of displeasure.
“Best bet’s Saint Domingue, sir,” Lewrie pointed out, enjoying a glass himself. “Don’t know much about Jacmel, on the South coast. Toussaint L’Ouverture took it and eliminated his rivals long ago, so I doubt the French ever got it back. But there’s Port-au-Prince, if the Frogs got that far South, but it’d take a proper fleet and a big army t’go in there, if that’s where they shelter. After that, there’s Mole Saint Nicolas, up on the Western coast, then Cape François, the main port on the North. I’m fairly sure the French still hold those.”
“By the skin of their teeth, I’ve heard, sir,” Captain Stroud stuck in. “The fellow who took over from L’Ouverture when the French caught him and shipped him off to France, General Dessalines, has run the Frogs from the interior. Do they land troops, I’d think they’d be more than welcome at one of those two ports Captain Lewrie cites.”
“Mouth of the Mississippi?” Captain Parham spoke up. “That, or French Guyana? We took it in Ninety-Eight or Ninety-Nine, I forget which, but—”
“In South-rotting-America, sir?” Captain Blanding squealed—or gave a fair approximation of a squeal. He rushed to pour himself more claret, not waiting for a cabin-servant.
“Failing Saint Dominguan harbours, sir, we might have to look into Spanish ports on the Gulf of Mexico, as well,” Lewrie said with gruff despondency, despite how amusing Capt. Blanding’s outbursts were. “Havana, on Cuba? Pensacola, Mobile in Spanish Elorida? Then there’s Tampa Bay, and there’s a quite good deep-water harbour just above the East end of the Florida Keys . . . Tamiami, or something like that. No proper town, garrison, or fortification like Saint Augustine on their Eastern coast, but it’d suit.” Lewrie turned to poll his fellow captains. “Anyone know if Spanish Florida is part of the territory to be traded to the French . . . and sold to the Americans, along with Louisiana?”
“God rot the . . . !” Blanding snapped, even further exasperated. “Next you know, we’ll be poking our noses into the Arctic! Prowling the coasts of bloody Greenland! By all that’s holy, I—” He shut up quickly, admonished by a stern finger wagged by Chaplain Brundish. Captain Blanding sat himself down, heavily, into a stout chair.
Damme, but he’s fun t’watch when he’s explodin’, Lewrie thought.
“There’s ocean’s of prize-money being reaped,” Blanding mused aloud, absently patting his curly blond locks and gazing upwards at the overhead. “As we’ve heard on our way up the Leewards, sirs, there is fame and glory being won, and more to come when all the rest of the French West Indies islands are seized, yet we . . . we swan about like a pack of imbeciles let loose from Bedlam, hunting for ghosts. Ghosts, I say, who might never have sailed! Why, by the time we’ve looked into all the ports we’ve suggested, lurked off the mouth of the Mississippi, and found nothing, ah . . . ! We’ll be forced to turn ourselves over to Duckworth or Hood, for general duties. Now all know the war’s on . . . ,” Blanding trailed off, and stuck his nose into his wine glass.
It was not exactly the Proper Thing for a senior officer to express himself so freely, to doubt aloud. Well, Lewrie might’ve, but only in his early days, and he’d learned better since.
Lose his broad-pendant, for starters, Lewrie thought, busying himself with his own wine as the others shuffled their feet and got very silent and depressed-looking; Admiralty picked him for this hunt special, and what’ll a failure do to his career . . . even if the French squadron never existed, and he’ll have to report that? Not his fault, really, but . . . hmmm. When did Duckworth and Hood learn of the declaration of war? When did the Frogs?
“Look here, sir,” Lewrie said. “Assume the French sailed before us, by a fortnight or less. Letters of Marque were issued in mid-May, and the official declaration of war came on the eighteenth. Now, did they get down-Channel before that—by a fortnight or less!—they would’ve sailed in a fog, whilst we—”
“What’s the dashing weather to do with it, sir?” Capt. Blanding quickly sneered back.
“Metaphorical, sir . . . a lack-of-information sort of fog. They couldn’t know of the state of war when they left Holland,” Lewrie continued, warming to his topic. “No one could catch them up t’tell them once they were out to sea. And when they got to the West Indies, no one here knew of it, either. They arrived ahead of the news! No idea they had to get a way on, no need for haste, d’ye see, sir.”
“Hmm, go on,” Blanding urged, perking up considerably.
Aye, grasp any straw when drownin’ . . . even mine! Lewrie told himself with secret glee; Poor bastard!
“If they were as raw as the typical French sailors, who learn their trade on-passage like they usually get sent out,” Lewrie further said, “their crossing would’ve been slower than ours, sir. If they’d sailed a line of latitude t’pick up Dominica to fix their position—spot the mountains sixty miles out at sea, on a clear day!—let us say, did they carry at least a demi-brigade to Mole Saint Nicolas or Cape François—‘Le Cap,’ the Frogs call it—they’d have to take on water, firewood, and fresh victuals after landin’ the bulk of the soldiers, and perhaps even give their sailors shore liberty, wastin’ even more time
before they went on to New Orleans for the hand-over!
“Even were they five weeks ahead of us before we left European waters, sir,” Lewrie quickly speculated, “we might’ve made up a week on ’em with our fast passage, and made up another week sailin’ a line of latitude above Dominica, and perhaps two more whilst they anchored at Cape François or Mole Saint Nicolas and . . . frittered. Then, if they finally heard of the declaration of war, they might dither a bit longer before heading for New Orleans, sir. After all, their senior officer’s got strict orders t’be in New Orleans for the ceremonies . . . the same sort of firm orders as us, really, sir,” Lewrie concluded, a sly-boots smile on his face. “A failure’d not do his career any good.”
“By . . . Jove!” Blanding said at last, after munching that over in his head, his jaws actually working as if chewing the concept. “By Jove and by Jingo, Lewrie, of course he has strict orders! He’ll not waste time on the smaller isles in the Leewards, he’ll have put into Saint Domingue first, then . . .”
Blanding shot to his feet, beaming for a rare once since they’d departed their patrol of the Channel entrances. “That’s where he’d be hiding! That’s where he wishes to run from, soonest!”
“Sir?” Lewrie asked, puzzled. He’d thought to goad the fellow into a better mood, spur him into action and out of the slough of despond, but . . . where was his head going now?
“He fulfills his orders to go up the Mississippi to New Orleans, he’ll find shelter from our ships!” Blanding explained . . . sort of, kind of. “He can’t be blamed if he can’t get out after the exchange of ownership there. And if he’s less than a week ahead of us . . . I say! Top-ups, and I will have a glass with you all. We will crack on at once for the Anegada Passage ’twixt Anguilla and the Virgins, and then it’s ‘all to the royals,’ stuns’ls, too, for the Old Bahama Channel and the Florida Straits. Does he flee Saint Domingue, he’ll not wish to take a course south of Cuba . . . too close to Jamaica and our squadron there. Duckworth’ll not have them . . . we will!”
King, Ship, and Sword Page 34