The King's Privateer

by Dewey Lambdin

  They warped Telesto away from the stone docks on 4 February, sent the temporary “wives” ashore the next day and put the crew back into discipline. Alan got to go ashore just the once, to pick up his last personal stores and purchases to complete his kit, and almost drowned in the rough harbor waters out and back in a ship’s boat under lug-sail that tried its best to capsize or pitch him out.

  On the dawn of 7 February, the winds came fair, and the weather moderated. Telesto sailed.

  “Anchor’s in sight!” Alan bawled to the officers aft from his place on the forecastle.

  “Heave and in sight!” Choate urged his crew on as they tramped in a circle round the massive capstan on the lower gun deck.

  “Bosun, hands aloft there! Lay out and make sail!” Ayscough bellowed loud as a steer. “Mister Lewrie, hoist away jibs forrud!”

  “Murray, hoist away, flying outer jib and fore topmast stays’l! Chearly, lads!” Alan ordered. “Anchor’s awash! Ready with the cat to seize her up, there, larboard men.”

  Telesto paid off from her head-to-weather anchorage, free of the last link with the land. They backed her jibs to force her bows around to face the harbor entrance as the large spanker aft on the mizzen filled with air and made the noise of a gunshot. Canvas boomed and drummed and rustled in the middling winds. Standing rigging that held the masts erect and properly tensioned creaked and groaned as a load came on them. Blocks squealed and sang as hands on the gangways and upper decks hauled away on lifts, halyards and jeers to raise her massive yards up from their resting positions. Drummers drummed on snares and bass, fiddlers and fifers gave the tune and the pace and the hands chantied.

  “We’ll rant and we’ll roll

  like true British sailors,

  we’ll rant and we’ll roll all across

  the salt seas,

  Until we strike soundings

  In the Channel of Old England

  from Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues!

  “Braces, there! Brace her in!” Ayscough almost howled.

  “Ease your jib sheets,” Alan ordered. “Walk ’em to the larboard side, Murray. Trim for starboard tack.”

  “Aye, sir! Walk away wi’ the larboard sheet!”

  “So let ev’ry man raise up his full bumper,

  let every man drink up his full glass.

  For we’ll laugh and be jolly,

  and chase melancholy,

  with a well-given toast to each true-hearted lass!”

  “Anchor’s catted, sir,” one of the hands told him.

  “Well, the cat. Ring up the fish,” Alan said, leaning over to see how the hands over the side on the rails were doing after being dangled to seize the hook in the ring of the anchor to cat it. If nothing worse than a good soaking had occurred, it was a good day—handled badly, anchors could kill those poor men. Very few sailors of any navy knew how to swim, Alan Lewrie least of all, and going over the side for any task was enough to shrivel any seaman’s scrotum. Those men came scrambling back up to the deck, up the heavy chain wale and beakhead rails almost on the waterline, soaked to the skin and turning blue from the frosty air and waters. One had to stay, hung in canvas hawse-breeches, to hook the fish onto an anchor fluke to swing it up parallel with the bulwarks. His bare legs trailed in the ship’s now-apparent wake, and he shrieked as the icy waters surged as high as his waist.

  “Oh, be a man, Spears!” Murray the fo’c’sle captain told him.

  “’Nother dunkin’ lahk ’at an’ me man’ood’ll be froze off!” the man shouted back. “Got it!”

  “Haul away on the fish-davit! Ring her up!”

  “Let fall courses! Starboard division, hands to the braces!” they ordered from back aft.

  There was enough labor for a warship’s crew of 650 men usually allotted to such a vessel. With the lower deck artillery mostly gone, Telesto had more a frigate’s complement of 250, and everyone had to bear a hand to see her safely out of harbor. Had she truly been a civilian ship, she would not have carried 100 all told, and some of her men would already have been ruptured.

  So it was half an hour before they had her put into proper order, with one reef in the courses on the lowest yards, one reef in the topsails, the royals raised at two reefs on the fore and main-mast, and the spritsail under the jib boom and bowsprit set to take advantage of the northerly wind. Gradually, the confusion shook down to a pull at this, a tug on that, and the rat’s nest of heavy running rigging was coiled up, flaked down, hung on rails in giant bights and out of the way. Already the galley funnel was smoking as the first meal at sea was being boiled in the steep-tubs.

  “Starboard has the watch. Dismiss the larboard watch below!”

  Alan gave everything a last once-over and went aft along the starboard gangway to the quarterdeck.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, gentlemen, please!” he shouted to the passengers and landsmen of the crew, who were experiencing their first bout of seasickness as the ship began to feel the Channel motion. “If you have to spew, do it to larboard, over there. Downwind so it won’t blow back on you, hey? Downwind so I won’t have to send you over the side to scrub off your breakfasts. Oh, not on the deck, you oaf! Sorry, Burgess. Didn’t recognize you with your face that particular shade of green.”

  “Oh, God, I’m so ill I think I could die,” Burgess wailed in his misery as Alan tried to help him to his feet.

  “You won’t die of it,” Alan offered. “You only wish you could.”

  “You heartless bloo … bloo … burgck!” Chiswick retched, and cast up more of his accounts on the starboard bulwarks.

  “Were you ill when you sailed back from New York to Charleston? From Charleston to England?” Alan inquired.

  “N … no,” Burgess sighed as Alan led him to the larboard side of the ship, across the quarterdeck to the lee rail.

  “Well, you’re going like the town drains now, I must say,” Alan said cheerfully. “Tell you what. Send down to the passengers’ mess. Get a brimming bumper of hot rum. Stay up here on deck. The cold air will brace you right up. For God’s sake, don’t watch the ocean close-aboard! Stare out at the horizon. Think pleasant thoughts,” he added in closing, unable to help himself and trying hard not to grin.

  “Bastard!” Burgess hissed.

  “I’m on watch, so I’ll leave you to it for now,” Alan sighed. “Steward?”

  He went aft to stand by the sheltered double wheel, where four quartermasters threw their weight on the helm as Telesto butted her way through the off-shore Channel chop. There was now and then some hint of the Atlantic to come, a long roller cross-set to the chop. The wind, once out of shelter of the coast, was a live thing that tried to throw the ship’s head down southerly for the coast of France, requiring those four men’s strength to hold her course. Captain Ayscough took a last look around, nodded to the second officer, Mr. Percival, and took himself aft under the poop into the passageway to his great cabins right in the stern. Percival strolled up the canted deck from amidships to the windward rail, taking a look at the compass card and grunting his satisfaction in passing.

  Alan didn’t think he was going to like Percival. The man was one of those massive beasts, all chest and arms, with a neck like a breeding bull, and a heavy jaw. Percival had the brow ridge of a mountain gorilla, and looked to be the sort who could break oak beams with his bare hands.

  He was certainly the sort of fellow who had grown up being the biggest and toughest of his playmates, the one who enjoyed being the top-dog in the pack, and would fight anyone to keep his status. In the last week, they had sparred, verbally so far. Even asking for the jam pot was a challenge to Percival’s dominance.

  “All prick and no personality,” Alan muttered to himself, and one of the quartermasters grinned at the comment as he shifted a quid of tobacco from one cheek to the other. “West sou’west, half west, as she goes.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Other than Percival, the wardroom was a fairly decent gathering. There was Choate, bluff and s
teady, glad to have active employment now the war was over. He had a wife and family in Harwich, and was more in need of full pay than most. The third officer, Colin McTaggart, was one of Ayscough’s protégés, a slim and wiry young fellow of twenty-five or so. He had black hair as curly as a goat, dark eyes and a pug nose. Being a Scot, he was better educated than most young men who joined the Navy, and was enjoyable to converse with. So far.

  To make room for their super-cargo (Twigg and his mostly unseen partner Tom Wythy) the sailing master, one Mr. Brainard, had been shifted below a deck to the officers’ wardroom. He was another of those mysteries, like Ajit Roy—brought in on account of his familiarity with Asian waters. He was also, like Twigg and Wythy, civilian in origin, never having served in the Royal Navy. Brainard had a civilian’s usual disdain for the Navy and its way of doing things. A sneer here, a lifted eyebrow there and a heavy sigh or two of exasperation met any evolution that differed from merchantman practice.

  Brainard was as roly-poly as a Toby jug, but held no cheer, and sheltered his past, and any conversation, behind an aloof air of duty. He was as weathered and dried as a piece of hawse-buckler leather, baked to a permanent brick color. So far, he had not been seen to imbibe anything but water or small beer, or crack the slightest smile in the mess. Indeed, it would have been hard to determine if he had any facial expressions at all, since he swathed himself in the heaviest grogram watchcoat even below decks where a small coal-fired stove attempted to warm the wardroom. It seemed a chore to remove his mittens so he could partake of his meals. And the one time Alan had peeked through the opened door of his cabin as one of the ship’s boys cleaned it, the bunk had been mounded with no less than four blankets.

  One thing Alan had learned in his Naval service, though, was that even the worst messmates could be abided. He hadn’t expected the voyage would be all “claret and cruising.” People gave others personal space, as much as was able, and ignored the worst offenders, limiting their exchanges to professional work.

  Far enough off the coast now that England was an indistinct smear of headlands almost lost in low scudding clouds, the ship was going like a hobbyhorse in a playroom. Alan clung to the weather shrouds on the starboard side of the wide deck and began to wonder why he had thought Telesto a big ship. The open Atlantic rolled and heaved up in dully glittering hills before them, shrinking the massive ship to a toy that groaned and creaked as she rolled and pitched with a slow, ponderous gait. Soaring up as the scend of the sea deigned to raise her, cocking downward as the waves receded behind her. One moment Telesto was elevated high enough to expose miles and miles of ocean to Alan’s view, the next sunk down into a trough, sliding forward as though she would butt into the next wave and shatter, but always riding up and away from danger. And at those times, he could see no farther than the creaming tops of the wave-crests that hillocked like frothy ink on either beam as high as the weather deck.

  “Going like a race horse,” he muttered aloud, feeling Telesto as she trembled up from keel to oaken decks below his shoes. She was, indeed, riding the sea and careering forward at a wonderfully prodigious pace.

  “Mister Hogue?” he called for one of the master’s mates in his watch who was secretly a senior midshipman enlisted in their adventure.

  “Aye, sir?”

  “Cast of the log, if you please. I doubt very much if we’ll get a decent sight for our position today. And I’d not like to set her on Ushant before the voyage is even begun.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Hogue came back several minutes later, his watchcoat and hat speckled with drops of seawater, and his mittens soaked. “Nine and a quarter knots, sir,” Hogue said proudly. “She’s a fast ’un, no mistake about her, sir.”

  “Indeed she is,” Alan said, grinning. He climbed up onto the mizzen shrouds for a better view with his telescope. “I make that to be the high point just west of Looe, just aft of abeam now. Where would that put us, were you navigating, Mister Hogue?”

  “Allow me to fetch my sextant, sir.”

  Every time the ship rose up on a surging billow of ocean, they took a land sight, comparing compass bearings, trying to compute on a slate how far offshore they were, if the high ground west of Looe was known to be 387 feet high, and only subtended a degree or so above the indistinct horizon.

  “Then on this course, allowing for Telesto making a certain amount of leeway to the suther’d, we’ll fetch Lizard Point with at least ten miles of sea-room,” Alan stated finally.

  “If the wind stays fair, sir,” Hogue commented, more sage than his scant eighteen years might allow. “Bound to come more westerly as we leave the Channel.”

  “A hard beat, then, but with the tidal flow, not against it, until at least midnight.”

  “Else we’ll have to tack and fight the tides, losing everything we’ve gained, sir,” Hogue warned. “Inshore in the dark.”

  “Thankee, Mister Hogue,” Alan said, rolling up the chart Mr. Brainard had left on the binnacle table.

  And if that happens, Alan thought lazily, it’ll not happen on my watch, thank the good Lord. He strolled back up to the windward side and took out his pocket watch to take a peek at the time. Three hours to go until his watch would be dismissed below.

  He threaded an arm through the shrouds once again and shivered in his thick clothing. The wind was wet and a little raw, a live thing out at sea, a continual noise that a landsman would never notice above the murmurs of the ship.

  If the winds did come more westerly, they could harden up to close-hauled and beat within six points of its origin, he decided: just enough to keep Telesto in mid-Channel, well clear of the Lizard, and a safe twenty leagues or so from the rocky coast of France. He debated with himself if it would be worth it to tack north’rd if it really came foul—embay themselves south of Falmouth, then tack once more due south to clear the Lizard?

  He turned his face to the raw wind and felt its strength on either cheek, sniffing for the source of all that awesome power that moved their ship. Still well north of west, and not so strong they’d have to take another reef aloft just yet.

  A gaggle of passengers came boiling up from below, reeling in another bout of illness, and Alan smiled as they staggered down to the leeward side to spew. So far, his own stomach was showing its cast-iron consistency. And, he realized with a start, his sea legs were returning, those sea legs that in the beginning he had never even had the slightest desire to achieve. “Not so bad once you’re in,” he mused aloud. “Like Young Jack told his first whore.”

  Depriving and dull a voyage might be, but it was something he had become somewhat good at. His ability to shrug off the natural reaction to the ship’s motion and spew his guts out, or reel like a sot as she pitched and rolled beneath him, was pleasing to his pride. As was his ability to decypher their rough position with the briefest of clues from the coast. And didn’t Telesto ride well, he thought. She was a true thoroughbred, properly laden and ballasted, with as much canvas aloft as she could bear for the moment—slicing through those hummocking seas with a sure-footed neatness of motion that gave him a thrill of … dare he call it pleasure … with every swoop and rise?

  “Damme, this feels good!” he declared to the winds and seas.

  His first watch ended at four in the afternoon, and he headed below, face and hands raw with the wind and chill, eager for warmth, for a seat near the glowing stove and a glass of something cheerful. But he was delayed from those simple pleasures by the sight of Tom Wythy, their other “owner.”

  “A word with ye, Mister Lewrie?” the man beckoned. Since Wythy had been pretty much an unseen presence so far, it was more curiosity that led Alan aft to the doorway to the passage that led under the poop to the super-cargo cabins.

  “Aye, sir?” Alan replied, and followed the rotund man into his cabin across the passageway from Twigg’s. He hoped he’d get some liquid refreshment, at the least.

  “Tot o’ rum?” Wythy offered once the door was shut. Wythy took up most of t
he cabin—he was rounder and heavier than even Mr. Brainard the sailing master, his face hidden behind a thick greying beard, and that in an age when most fashionable men shaved closely. There was a red-veined doorknob of a nose, ruddy cheeks round as spring apples and bright, glittering eyes lost in the pudding face the beard most likely concealed.

  “I’ve made some inquiries about yer little excitement,” Wythy told him, rubbing the side of that bulbous proboscis with the side of a thumb as thick as a belaying pin. “Took this long t’ get even a fast rider t’ London an’ back. An’ I asked about ashore. That’s what’s kept me busy an’ out o’ sight so far, so this is our first opportunity to make our acquaintances. Hope ye’ll forgive me that.”

  “Of course, sir,” Alan told him. “And what have you found?”

  “Oh, we’ve stirred up an ant-hill, no error.” Wythy grinned, baring a rather sparse, but strong set of teeth—those remaining in his head, at least. “Even caught us a French spy or two.”

  “So it was the French, sir.” Alan enthused at the proof of a devilish conspiracy, the rum racing in his veins and warming his chill belly.

  “Nothin’ t’ do with ye, sir,” Wythy informed him, turning the broad smile off. “We winkled a brace o’ informers out o’ the woodpile, but that was more serendipity. Ye’ve been a bad boy, Mister Lewrie, ’deed ye have. A very bad boy.”

  “Was it anyone I told, sir?” Alan cringed, waiting for the thunderstorm of rage he imagined would follow.

  “I was thinkin’ more o’ yer taste for married flesh, Mister Lewrie, not yer indiscretion,” Wythy said, glaring at him. “Imagine it for a moment. Us expectin’ the worst. Word o’ our venture leakin’ to our foes ’cross the Channel. No end o’ shite-storm as our people trace back every man in the know, ye included, t’ see if someone’s blabbed in his cups’r whispered in the wrong wench’s ear.”