The King's Privateer

by Dewey Lambdin

  They were lucky to make it, for the small crew that had stayed aboard Telesto were chopping and sawing at the grapnel ropes even before everyone could reach the rails to prepare themselves for the leap.

  It was a panic. Sepoys crowded the rails, their eyes rolling in fear, ready to abandon their weapons in their haste to flee. Chiswick was raving back and forth, shouting at them in Hindee and pushing muskets back into their hands, arranging a party of some of his largest men to literally throw some of the others across to Telesto’s bulwarks, to be caught by seamen.

  La Malouine was keening as the flames began to roar in earnest, the sound a soaked river rock makes when placed in a camp-fire. Men wounded and unable to move were screaming and gibbering in terror.

  “Damnit!” Alan sighed, sheathing his sword. He picked among the bodies, searching for his own. The dead he could do nothing for, but there were surely some English wounded that simply could not be left behind to suffer.

  “Oh, God, sir!” Archibald, the condom-maker, keened shrill as a frightened child as he lay on the gangway with blood soaking his leg. “Help meeeee!!!”

  “I’m here, Archibald, Let’s go!”

  He got him to his feet, an arm around him, and half-dragged him to the rail, yelling for help. Hodge, the topman, came swarming over to them with a free line, and quickly whipped a loop in it. They got Archibald seated in it and let it swing. Even if he bashed his head in on their ship’s hull, he was away. Cony returned with it as they began to search.

  “Telestos!” Lewrie called, almost choking on the stink of burning cargo below decks. Singed tea leaves swirled around him like a plague of locusts. “Hoy, Telestos! Sing out and we’ll save you!”

  A gut-shot French seaman raised an imploring hand from the deck, terror in his eyes. They passed him by. He was not one of theirs. Hodge drew a heavy belaying pin from the railing and did the man the favor of knocking him senseless so he’d know less about his immolation.

  “Don’t think they’s any more of our’n, Mister Lewrie!” Cony said, tugging at his sleeve.

  “Lewrie, leave it!” Ayscough called from their ship. “Leave it or die over there! I can’t keep station on her any longer!”

  Flames were shooting up the main-mast now, furled sails bursting alight, standing and running rigging covered with tiny shoots of fire like some expensive holiday illumination.

  “Good enough for me,” Lewrie responded, climbing over the rails.

  They threw them lines, and they swung across, suspended from gant-line blocks and yard-tackles. Lewrie thrust out his legs to take the shock of impact, but it knocked the wind out of him anyway. He dangled for a moment against the hull by the gunports until someone reached over and grabbed him by the collar to haul him up.

  He landed in a heap on the larboard gangway, almost getting trampled by sail-trimmers as they heaved on the yard braces to get the ship underway. He could barely hear the shouted commands over the roar of the fire aboard La Malouine.

  “Ya awright, sir?” Cony asked, helping him to his feet, and disentangling him from the gant-line block and three-part loops of line. “Christ, wot a mess!”

  When he had a chance to look back at their foe, once Telesto was far enough to leeward that she wouldn’t catch fire herself, he could see that the French ship was alight from taffrail to the tip of her bow-sprit. Her upper yards were raining down in chunks like dripping embers. No matter that they were heavy, they were almost floating against the fierce, roaring updraft of the fires. Now and again, there was a bright, bluewhite flash and dull thud as a powder cartridge burst, or a loaded gun took light. Sparks would fly against a yellow-white cloud of powder, making La Malouine look even more like carnival fireworks.

  Men dribbled from her, too. Men whose clothing, whose very flesh had caught fire, and swarmed staggering and blind in unspeakable agony, swathed from head to toe in greedy, gnawing flames like animated torches. They keened and howled, reeled and dropped out of sight. Or tumbled over the bulwarks of their ship to raise great splashes in the water alongside, where only a greasy smoke and a circle of foam marked their passing.

  They dropped into the water beside others who floundered and thrashed in the glowing amber water, thrashing clumsily for any bit of flotsam to support them before they drowned. Pleas for help went unnoticed, cries to God went unheard, amidst all the screaming and wailing, amidst the crackle and roar of the flames.

  La Malouine had had four ship’s boats, all nestled on the tiers that spanned the waist between the gangways over the upper deck, and three of them now roasted like unattended steaks on a grill. The fourth was in the water, one side charred black and half sunk, reeking with smoke. Half a dozen men clung to her, and two sat on her after-most thwart, fighting the others to prevent them climbing in and swamping her. There was one large, grid-worked hatch cover in the water, and more men clung to the sides, while others who could swim splashed in its direction. Out of La Malouine’s crew of roughly one-hundred-fifty men, not thirty could be discovered alive now.

  “Oh, Christ, sir, look!” Cony shuddered.

  Dark, triangular fins cut the glassy, illuminated red-and-amber waters. Sharks! Lewrie winced with a sudden cold chill as a fin went underwater just behind a struggling man. That man suddenly shot out of the ocean as if he’d been tossed by a bull, screaming louder than he could have thought possible from anyone’s throat, setting off more panic among the survivors. Pale white fish bellies rolled with him as they seized upon his flesh, bit and shook like bulldogs to tear off huge chunks of living meat! More fins darted in from nowhere, summoned God knew how from the depths. More men thrashed and wailed as they were taken. The survivors who had been clustered around the half-sunk boat swarmed up on it in a wave, climbing over each other in their haste, as the boat rolled on its beam ends and capsized.

  There was no time to put boats down. Telesto’s crew lifted up their own curved, grid-work hatch-covers and tossed them in as Ayscough had her steered through the thickest pack of Frenchmen. The tail-ends of halyards, lifts and braces were slung over so that those that could might reach them and climb to safety, and life.

  But it was futile. Three French sailors who could swim climbed aboard, shaking in terror. Perhaps three more made it to the floats. By the time Telesto had sailed on past, wore ship and came back into the area, there was no sign of living men around the overturned boat, and not seven altogether on all the floating hatch-covers, girded round entirely by circling fins and face-down bodies that one by one were taken under. There had to be a thousand sharks by then around La Malouine, striking at anything whether it moved or not—paddles, broken oars, charred flotsam or discarded clothing—it made no difference to them.

  La Malouine burned for two hours before she went under, still a spark on the horizon by the time Telesto found her cutter and took her back aboard. She finally winked out around two in the morning, about the time Mr. Twigg finished interrogating the shattered remnants of her people.

  Chapter 3

  “I should think we’ve done rather well so far,” Mr. Twigg said somewhat smugly as they held durbar, or conference, ashore at Bencoolen on Sumatra. They’d run into port before a punishing South China Sea taifun that had loomed up above the Johore Straits, and Telesto had been lucky to make a safe harbor before the full fury had broken upon them. The storm had passed, ravaging the settlement, but sparing the well-anchored ships. In its aftermath, a crushing humidity had settled in, along with steady rain and choking heat, and not a breath of breeze. If Bencoolen had been the arse-hole of the world before, the taifun had done nothing by way of improvement.

  “And what is to be done with our French prisoners, sir?” Captain Ayscough inquired as he poured himself another healthful mug of lemon-water and brandy. “The men don’t much care for having them around, you know, pitiable as they are.”

  “Perhaps it’d be a kindness to leave them here at Bencoolen,” Twigg said with an idle wave of his hand. “A passing French ship may take them eventuall
y. Them that survived, that is.”

  They’d picked up ten terrified Frenchmen. Some had been bitten by sharks, and their wounds turned septic immediately, and the gangrene killed them. Not five lived now, and two of those were in precarious health. Lewrie suspected Twigg’s penchant for cruel interrogation may have hastened the departure of some of those from life.

  “Leaving them here in Bencoolen is no kindness, sir,” Lt. Col. Sir Hugo Willoughby grunted. Alan’s father had grown even older since he’d last laid eyes on him: his hair thinner and greyer, his face more care-lined and leathery. “Hasn’t been much of a kindness for my battalion, either, let me assure you.”

  “You agreed it would place your troops closer to the action, I might remind you, Sir Hugo,” Twigg said, frowning. The vilely hot weather had not improved anyone’s tempers, but it was almost too hot and humid to argue. “As for the Frogs, I care less if all the buggers succumb. No real loss, is it, though I would wish for one or two to survive to bear the tale back to Paris. The effect would have been welcome.”

  “And do you feel that same impartiality to my men, sir?” Sir Hugo snapped.

  “Sir Hugo,” Twigg drawled. “Colonel Willoughby. Unlike my utter lack of sympathy for piratical Frenchmen, I feel most strongly and deeply for the plight of the men of the 19th Native Infantry. And I assure you, I shall be most happy to extricate them from this hellish stew at the earliest opportunity. That moment has almost arrived, sir, but you must bear the deplorable conditions here for only a few more months. Soon, I promise you.”

  “It had best be soon, sir,” Sir Hugo replied evenly, controlling his own temper with remarkable restraint, as Lewrie could attest. “We arrived in mid-February with a grenadier company, eight line companies, one and a half light companies, and the full artillery detachment. And now, with Captain Chiswick and his half-company returned to me, I may only field eight. Eight, sir! Allow me to protest most vigorously that if this battalion is not removed to a more healthful climate, I won’t have a platoon of men available to you by autumn! I demand of you, if you have any estimate of when we may depart this reeking cesspit, pray inform us of it.”

  “I quite understand, Sir Hugo,” Twigg replied, on the edge of an explosion of his own temper, no matter how much the weather might dampen his fuses. “Two months. Three months at the most, weather permitting, and you shall be out of here, at sea and in action.”

  That created a stir of interest among the army officers seated behind Sir Hugo, and among the naval officers as well.

  “You see, sirs,” Twigg continued calmly, getting a smug look on his face. “I know where this fellow Guillaume Choundas is. And where he shall be in a few months’ time.” Twigg looked about the damp and gloomy room, a wood and thatch imposture of a proper building, letting the stirring and chattering of their excitement swell and recede like a breaking wave of adulation before continuing.

  “Shaken as the French survivors were, it was fairly simple to play upon their fears, catch them out when they were at their weakest,” Twigg explained. “Have we a good chart of the South China Seas, Captain Ayscough? Could it be hung where all could see it? Good.”

  “Here, gentlemen. In the Spratly Islands.” Twigg chuckled.

  “Pretty far lost and gone from anywhere,” Ayscough commented.

  “But located so nicely for piracy, sirs,” Twigg informed them. “Flat, tiny, and worth nothing to anyone. As our sailing master may attest?”

  Brainard stood to address the assembly, flushing a bit at being before so many people. “There’s water enough, wild goats and pigs to eat. Sea-birds and their eggs. Nobody lives there, though, not permanent. Too small to farm. Too low to make ’em safe durin’ taifun season, ’cept for the highest hills inland. Good anchorage, I’ll admit. Chinese pirates sometimes shelter there, same for other pirate bands like the Sea Dyaks. Have to bring in salt-meats and such if you plan on stayin’ there a long time.”

  Brainard shrugged and reddened, trying to think of what else he might impart, but Twigg waved him off, which Brainard accepted with a whoosh of relieved breath.

  “The Spratlys are two-hundred-fifty miles southeast of the Annamese shores, three hundred miles northwest of Borneo, right in the middle of the mouth of the South China Sea,” Twigg related. “A ship, or ships, working out of here could control the shipping trade in time of war, especially if one were to be allied with native pirates who could patrol in their praos for likely pickings. Too far west for the Spanish in the Philippines to worry about. Too far north and west for the Dutch or Portuguese to deal with. Too far north and east of even this poor trading settlement of Bencoolen for England to look in on. I’m told a man named Francis Light may develop trading stations on the Malay peninsula soon, so that situation may change, but properly fortified and garrisoned, this little group of islands would be a hard nut to crack, even in time of war when a fleet might be available. This is where Choundas shall be. This is where he is based during the summer months. Where the pirates meet him. Where captured ships are looted, and their crews taken.”

  “And did we discover with whom Choundas and Sicard were in league, Mister Twigg?” Lieutenant Choate asked. “Would some of our prisoners be there still that we might rescue?”

  “As to the last part of your question, I’m afraid the answer is no, Mister Choate,” Twigg replied, frowning while rubbing the bridge of his nose as though in pain. “There is little chance that any Englishmen survived capture for very long. Especially if it was the native pirates who did it. Should they have, they’d have been taken east to Sulu Island and sold in the great slave markets there. And it would take a fleet to sail in there and free those unfortunates. As to the first part, we now know that the French are allied with the blood-thirstiest of the lot. The Lanun Rovers, from the Illana Lagoon on Mindanao.”

  “Oh, stap me!” Brainard hissed with alarm. “More likely, our people are skulls adorning their bloody praos by now!”

  “Goddamn French!” Ayscough spat. “Trust them to take hands with those devils. Not just as allies, but friends!”

  “Well, not for very much longer, sir,” Twigg said, chuckling dryly. “I propose we strike the Spratlys sometime after mid-June. When Choundas and his piratical crew will be there. When the Lanun Rovers will spend the summer with him. We may catch them all in one fell swoop!”

  “And just where is your pirate now, sir?” Sir Hugo asked.

  “He left Canton in late November, Sir Hugo. As I told you, I suspect he waited downriver at Macao for at least a week or so, to see if we would pursue him. When we didn’t, he most likely stopped in at the Spratlys, then sailed for the French possessions in the Indian Ocean. We have information that his first stop would be Ile de France, to have a refit in the yards there. Those same yards service the Royal French Navy, I might remind you. His usual course of action, his modus operandi, if you will allow me”—Twigg sniffed loftily, but gave them all a brief smile to remind them that he was human, after all—“would be to sail on for Pondichery, where he would load a cargo of Indian goods destined for Canton in the fall. A cargo that he would land at the Spratlys, since the goods would prove a liability to a privateering cruise. He does not load opium, only run-of-the-mill wares that will not spoil during storage ashore. The opium comes from our ships.”

  “And he didn’t sell any out of Macao, as I recall, sir,” Captain Ayscough stuck in.

  “Indeed not, sir,” Twigg agreed. “Part of his innocent pose is to deplore the opium trade. And a man so high-minded as to forgo the profits of opium could never, ever be suspected of anything so vile as piracy, now could he, hmm?” Which set them all into ironic laughter. “Then, he and Captain Sicard of La Malouine would meet in Pondichery.”

  “To put the bulk of their combined crews into Poisson D’Or, so he’d be as well-manned as any royal frigate, sir?” Percival asked with a hopeful expression.

  “Exactly so, Mister Percival.” Twigg beamed at him like a fond daddy. “Exactly as you surmised. Right, t
hen! Here’s Choundas, waiting in Pondichery for Sicard and La Malouine to arrive by at least the first of April, but she won’t this year, nor next year, either, ha ha! By mid-April, he’ll have smelled a rat. What’s worse for him, Sicard was to bring the profits from both ships to him. He lost no money by having his cargo confiscated by the Viceroy in Canton. Their arrangement with that particularly corrupt mandarin made sure he’d get full value from it, and give him freedom of action to boot. But suddenly, he’s starved of operating funds. There’s nothing to purchase a cargo with in Pondichery. No money to buy arms and powder for his piratical allies. And, more importantly, no ship such as Sicard’s to serve as his cartel for all the loot he expects to take this year of our Lord 1785. We’ve limited his options to an early raiding summer. Here!”

  “It strikes me, though, Mister Twigg,” Lewrie spoke up, “that even the most valuable goods such as silver and opium take up a fair amount of cargo space. Surely, La Malouine could not carry all of it. If only a quarter of the booty ends up in Canton, there must be some other ship, or ships, involved with Choundas yet. If he has, as you say, a full, believable cargo stashed in the Spratlys for his appearance in Canton in the fall, where does the rest of it go?”

  “A great deal of it would end up in the market at Sulu, sir,” Twigg countered. “Brasswares, copper, Indian cotton goods, all of it would be just as valuable among the pirate bands as it would in Canton. No, it’ll be Choundas on his own this year, I’ll wager. Driven by desperation to take more risks than before.”

  “If he’s any brains at all, he’ll know the game’s over, sir,” Lieutenant Choate insisted. “Time to lay low for a season. Or sail home for France and let someone else take over for him for a while.”

  “Ah, but he can’t do that, Mister Choate,” Twigg insisted. “If he leaves the Indian Ocean, he loses everything he’s built up out here. No rendezvous with the pirates in the Spratlys, say. Then what pirate would ever trust another Frenchman to keep his word? He’d not only be discarding his present alliances, he’d be ruining a chance for anyone who follows. The French Ministry of Marine who dreamed up his dirty business would never stand for that, oh no! Why, they’d break Choundas to common seaman if he simply sailed away. And, I don’t think our lad is the sort to cave in so quickly. He’s an ambitious little Breton peasant, a jumped-up fishermen who has no desire to end his days netting sardines in a filthy little smack. Pride goeth before a fall, and our boy has an ocean of pride. No, he might be late for the rendezvous. He may come empty-handed, but he’ll be in the Spratlys by June.”