The Privateersman (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 1)

by Andrew Wareham

  “I volunteer, sir. Boarder, if you please.”

  “Captain Blaine knows the sea, Tom, he just had a bit of bad luck which turned him sour a bit,” Smith explained. “Beginning of the war, he was doing well, a young man, I don’t know how old exactly, say twenty-five or so, but he had his own frigate, Arrow, 28, nine-pounders, was cruising off Chesapeake Bay when the lookouts called a sail at dawn, making out to sea in the fogs you get there, couldn’t see hardly nothing. Captain closed her and then made the challenge at a cable, gave her a gun across the bows as a wake up. She made no reply and set her topsails and seemed to swing towards, so he gave her a full broadside and closed and boarded. Kestrel ship-sloop, had taken damage from a big blockade runner the previous day, lost her captain and first and the youngster left didn’t know what to do when he couldn’t hoist the lights for the reply, thought to come within hail. Anyhow, the broadside killed a dozen of her men, including a midshipman whose mother was a niece of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs! The court found for the captain, but he was beached and wasn’t never going to command a King’s Ship ever again. I was master’s mate on watch with him, stayed with him when he was offered a berth as master of a privateer. He made enough to buy Star in the first twelvemonth, but his luck’s been out since.”

  Smith was resigned, philosophical almost.

  “How long has he had Star, Mr Smith?”

  “Eight months; long enough to fit her out and take her on two empty cruises. Not so much as a sniff of a prize. Anything we chased ran up English colours!”

  Tom nodded; judging by the store-room he had seen this was not going to be a long cruise.

  “So where are we bound, Mr Smith?”

  “Bordeaux stream, then the Spanish coast if we have no luck. Rich waters, French West Indiamen as well as coastal traffic.”

  Tom nodded; he knew nothing of those waters, having previously crossed the Channel only to run directly to Normandy to pick up smuggler’s cargoes from the smallest fishing villages. He noticed that Smith was uncomfortable, had left something important unsaid. He waited, let the silence draw out, dad had always said that the silent man heard most.

  “Thing is, Tom, those are heavily patrolled waters, too. Both the French and the Spanish keep an eye open in that part of the Bay. You need to be wide awake in those waters.”

  Tom thought of the picture Blaine had presented – he could have described him in several different ways, but ‘wide awake’ was not a term that leapt to his mind.

  The Star was a strangely disorganised vessel – there were two watches, but no petty officers to run them, the men splitting the work between them as they fancied, the result being that the least popular jobs simply were not done and the decks grew dirtier on a daily basis while the heads were utterly appalling. Blaine and Smith were the sole officers – there had been two other boarding masters but they had refused to sail for a third cruise on the Star, preferring to earn a living wage instead. The cook had sailed again, and he boiled the ration beef daily and issued them with biscuit and cheese for breakfast and supper; for the rest, there were onions for those who wished to cut them up, and suet and flour and dried plums for anyone who wished to boil up a pudding. Small beer was issued by Smith, thrice daily, a quart pot per man at each issue as the water was somewhat dubious, safe only when well boiled because the barrels had not been scrubbed out before filling; there were no spirits outside of the captain’s cabin. Discipline was relaxed, to the point of being effectively non-existent – the men were almost all volunteers and they could see their own interest as being best served by good behaviour, while there was no such concept as ‘desertion’ as they were all free to resign at any time, in theory, though it might have been somewhat impractical to hand in their notice in the middle of the ocean. In any case, most of the men had a reason to be where they were, at sea and invisible, not on land in their home towns or villages, though, naturally, they tended to keep those reasons to themselves.

  Over four uneventful days Tom came to know the names of the men in his watch, the five other boarders particularly.

  George and Joby Coles were brothers, either side of twenty, although they did not know their ages for certain. They were Diddicoy, settled travellers who claimed their families to have been Romany, once upon a time. They were short, squat, sandy-haired and kept themselves to themselves; both carried knives where they could be seen.

  John Murray was an older man, nearly forty, toothless and balding, lean and slightly bent over; his back ached and he moaned that it was crippling him; he had a very short temper, it was said, with drink in him could explode in anger, blade or bottle in his fist, whatever was close to hand. He was thought to be a Scot who had come south years before; he had little of the accent of the far north, sounded to Tom very much the local man – perhaps he had been brought to England by his parents as a small child.

  Dick Smithers was a big, fair Dorset man, much like Tom in appearance and perhaps ten years older, and deeply, fundamentally stupid. He had been a farmhand for years, had had to leave his village near Blandford a few days previously; he had not chosen to say why.

  Luke Mundy was from Hampshire, a flash, good-looking young man, forever combing his jet-black hair, always clean-shaven and with a ready smile to show off his white teeth and sparkling blue eyes. He made no secret of the fact that he came from a little village near Southampton, Durley its name, and that he had had to run like hell for getting a leg over the squire’s daughter – very frequently, he claimed – and putting her in the family way; they would have called it rape, to save her name, and stretched his neck for his pains, he said, laughing mightily. He did not think he would go home again.

  “What about you, nipper? Where’s home for you, Tom?”

  “Towards Bridport, Luke. I don’t reckon I’ll be going home no more, neither. Mum’s dead these ten years and Excisemen put a pistol ball in Dad’s chest last week.”

  “I heard about that,” Smith interrupted. “There was a big fight when they jumped a set of smugglers, Excise and dragoons both. They said a man grabbed a sabre and laid about him, killed three of them with it, a really big bloke. Half a dozen of them got away but they chased down four who had taken pack-horses and tried to run on them. They didn’t catch the big bloke, though.”

  “So I heard,” Tom said.

  They had all noticed the fading bruises he carried, chose to say no more.

  They closed the French coast, somewhere off Brittany, Tom understood, although as he wasn’t entirely certain where Brittany was, this helped him very little. They worked their way south through empty waters, not so much as a fishing boat in sight. Smith decided, belatedly, that he should make sure his boarders knew what they were about – he was not used to taking command, still wanted an officer to give him the initial order.

  The Coles brothers had sailed with him twice before and sat back and watched the exercise. Neither Dick nor Luke had handled a pistol, but both knew how to load a scatter gun and quickly mastered the essentially similar smaller weapon; accuracy was of little concern, all they needed do was point and pull the trigger as they would never be more than the width of a deck from their target. Tom took his pistol, loaded quickly and expertly, hardly looking at what he was doing, and took a snap shot at a gull flying ten yards off their quarter, reducing it to a heap of bloody feathers on the waves.

  “Christ, nipper! Just ‘ow did you do that?”

  “Dunno, Luke. I could do that first time I ever picked one up. Dad had a pair on the boat, just in case of trouble, he always said – the Channel’s full of Frogs and you never know… So long as I can see it, I can hit it.”

  “What about with a musket, Tom?” Smith asked.

  “No good at all, sir,” Tom replied. “It’s all I can do to hit a barn door at twenty paces with a long gun.”

  They laughed and shook their heads, said they had all heard of stranger things, but not many.

  Smith ferreted about in their little armoury, came up
with a wide leather belt with a diagonal bandolier attached, passed it across to Tom with instructions to put it on, right shoulder to left hip. Half an hour’s fiddling fixed six holsters, one to each hip on the belt and four to the bandolier across his chest, one left and three to the right. Two more hours and between them they had selected the six best pistols and checked their springs and flints before handing them across to Tom.

  “Good thing you’re a big bloke, Tom,” Smith commented. “With a cutlass as well it will make a fair old load. By the way, have you ever handled a blade, Tom?”

  A furious outbreak of coughing from Luke led him to withdraw the question, very apologetically.

  Tom spent the rest of the day sat on the deck with rags and oil, painstakingly cleaning the heavy pistols and then rousting through the gunnery chest to find the tools to file down the sears and reset the triggers to a lighter pull. They were still clumsy brutes at the end of his labours, but he would trust them not to misfire and to put their ball more or less where he expected. He liked hand-guns, always had; he had never used one in earnest but he expected he would now, it was not as if people mattered, not like he had always thought; the Excisemen had taught him that.

  While Smith gave brief training to the larboard boarding party Dick and Luke, both possessing farm skills, set up the grindstone and put an edge to the fifty or so of cutlasses and tomahawks they could find. The Coles sat down with their own oilstones and sharpened their knives until they could shave with them; they did not offer to assist any of the others.

  Next day Tom was set to the great guns, to check and set the lock on each, one flintlock being much the same as any other. He did his best, replacing two springs and balancing the others as well as he could, but he strongly recommended Smith to find slow match and water tubs for each gun as an almost certainly needed back up.

  By the end of their second day on the French coast they were ready for custom, if only they could find it.

  The luck changed a couple of days later, off the Isle de Re and the approaches to Rochefort, the Star on a rare north-easterly wind making a comfortable five knots under courses alone, not wanting the increased visibility of topsails, far less the high pyramid of topgallants, never carried by merchant hulls – the small sails added only a little to a ship’s speed but required extra, expensive hands to set them. Tacking slowly and laboriously from the south came a fat, slow, round-bowed ship, some four or five hundred tons at a distant estimate. Anxious inspection by telescope showed no row of gun ports – she was not an ancient fifth or sixth rate of the French navy.

  “Set topsails,” Blaine shouted, wheezing and hacking under the strain of raising his voice.

  Their speed rose to eight knots, closing a mile every six minutes until their prey should wake up and try to flee. The Star’s crew was too small to consider raising topgallants or studding sails in a hurry, but they did succeed in setting a second jib.

  “Hands to chaser!”

  Five men ran to the six pounder, cast the gun loose and slowly loaded it.

  “Mr Smith, French colours to fore and main, if you please.”

  They had been flying no flag, private men of war generally did not, in common with most merchantmen; there was always the chance that a commercial sailor might see what he wanted to – three or four hours of flight down wind, even if they escaped, would leave perhaps two extra days of tacking to make their port – and would believe the Star to be a French national ship.

  The boarders armed themselves and waited in their two parties, six from the starboard watch and five from the larboard, Smith at their head and giving a running commentary, nervously twitching like a racehorse waiting for the off.

  “Blind, credulous, bloody stupid! If we was Frog navy we would be looking to give them sea room, stand at least two, better three, cables off. Surely to Christ he can see we’re at a dead run for him! Two miles distant. He’s left it too late, it’ll take him at least ten minutes to change tack and we’ll be closing him before he’s round. Ready at the chaser!”

  They acknowledged.

  “First round across her bows. If you fire a second then hull her, no messing about.”

  The gun captain raised his hand in agreement – no naval saluting or ‘aye-ayes’ on a privateer.

  Blaine’s voice rose again as they came within a mile.

  “Strip topsails.”

  The small crew needed a full five minutes to comply with the order, as he had estimated.

  “Lower French flag. Shoot, Mr Smith!”

  The flags dropped and the chaser fired the moment legality was restored – to fire under false colours would make them pirates, the navy might risk shaving it, they dared not.

  A quick series of helm orders, Blaine seeming alive, alert suddenly, and the Star swooped ponderously onto the merchant’s stern as she hovered, irresolute.

  “Thinks we might be navy, ready to put a full broadside into her if she tries to run, expects fifty men in the boarding party, so be quick! Grapnels!”

  The hooks were thrown up onto the taller ship and they scrambled up the four feet and over her rails. There was the normal thin merchant crew, most of them with weapons in their hands, waiting for orders; the bulk of them very obviously hoping the command would be to surrender.

  A minute and it became clear that there was only the small party of a dozen on their deck and a voice called sharply in French. Just three of the armed men jumped forward, unwisely eager for a fight.

  Tom fired three shots in less than as many seconds and the remaining Frenchmen froze, then, as one, dropped their blades and raised their hands, each trying to look innocent of intent, unthreatening, demure.

  Ten minutes sufficed to disarm all of the crew and make a quick search for any hiding. Half an hour more and their one boat was lowered and they were thoroughly searched and then crammed aboard it, the master relieved of all of his keys and the ship’s papers.

  “Take her back to Poole, Mr Smith, starboard boarders as prize-crew. Keep in company.”

  They were too thinly manned to do anything else, and it was wiser to keep enough men aboard Star to man the broadside if necessary, pointless to spread the crew out and have too few men to fight either vessel.

  Smith glanced at the ship’s papers and manifest, hopefully asked whether anybody could read French, was not surprised to discover that none could, tucked the papers carefully away for the benefit of the prize-agent in Poole.

  It seemed possible that they had been observed from shore or from fishing boats, and the French crew would be on land and raising Cain by evening, so they took a course south west to make as great a distance from the coast as they could. The French would not know their home port, would have no clues on which to base a pursuit, so it was most sensible to make their way deep into the Bay and out of sight before turning their head towards Poole. They set the courses and then the topsails, one by one, the minimum set of sails that they could manage, just, and maintain a steady five knots. The wind was veering, gaining an unusual amount of easterly, much to their satisfaction, but they told each other that when the luck changed it generally did so thoroughly, made a whole-hearted job of it.

  They took a glance into the holds, came away quite satisfied with the loading of naval stores for the Atlantic Fleet in Rochefort that filled the fore, not unhappy with the commercial cargo of sheet lead, sacks of flour and beans and rice and barrels of olive oil stored dry in the main hold.

  “Could have done a lot worse,” Smith commented. “Naval stores will always sell – cables, ropes, cordage, canvas, spikes and nails, pitch and turpentine and tar, powder paint – all will go in Poole or even be bought up by contractors to the navy to send to Portsmouth. Foodstuffs, always in demand just before harvest when the store cupboards are thin. Don’t know about the olive oil, foreign muck, don’t seem the sort of thing English folks are likely to have any truck with – though they might sell it in London, they’re queer folk up there.”

  Five slow days brought them
into Poole and saw Blaine at the office of his prize-agent who was as surprised as he was pleased to see him. After two anxious days the prize-agent confirmed that the Bills of Lading showed that all of the cargo had loaded in Bordeaux, having originated in France, and was consigned to French ports; the ship’s papers stated that she was registered in Bordeaux and was French owned – there were no neutrals involved and no reason to suppose that the Admiralty Court would not condemn her as fair prize.

  The local officials of the Prize Court had been notified of the capture and had, provisionally, agreed that it seemed to be legitimate and that some or all of the cargo might be perishable; they had therefore authorised the prize-agent to set the cargo to immediate auction and to disburse the funds so generated, the proviso being that, should unforeseen circumstances supervene, the Court might find against him and he would then be personally liable for the whole value of the cargo and hull and for demurrage and damages, not to speak of prosecution for unlawful killing of the crew members. In time the prize-agent would sue the captain of the prize-taker to recover his losses, but the law tended to be very slow.

  The net effect was that any prize-agent was very unwilling to pay out more than fifty per centum on cargo and hulls generally remained unsold prior to official condemnation. A prize taken in one year might well not be fully paid for another two, and if, for example, some part of the cargo transpired to be neutral then the process could drag on for ten years and the lawyers’ fees would eat up the whole of its value before judgement was ever given. It was not unknown for privateers who discovered they had unwittingly taken a neutral to quietly sink ship and crew and sail off to another part of the ocean, claiming innocence and sometimes being believed.

  Whatever the end result, a couple of thousand was very welcome to the Star, half going to the ship, half to the crew’s shares. It put seven pounds ten into Tom’s pocket, which was a good start to making up his losses, but it was only fifty shillings for each man he had shot – life was cheap, it seemed, but it was their own fault, they had asked for a fight and had no business complaining that they had got more than they asked for. It was surprising, really, just how easy it had been, how little it had mattered; he noticed that the others in the crew treated him with an overtly cautious respect now, recognising him as a ‘bad’ man – one who should not be crossed; heady stuff, for a sixteen-year-old.