Tide of War

by Hunter, Seth

  “Aye, sir, and hoped never to again. She took us off Kinsale Head and we were like to have been pulling oar still or taken for the slave markets in Algiers save for a British frigate that came up on her and they threw us over the side by way of a distraction. I was one of the lucky ones that could swim.”

  Nathan nodded as if in sympathy though it was their present plight that occupied him more. The Barbary pirates operated from ports in North Africa—most notably Algiers and Tunis—and their normal cruising was the Mediterranean but he had heard tales of their atrocities in more distant waters, even as far north as Iceland. They were crewed almost entirely by Moors and Turks but with Christian slaves at the oars. Christians were much in demand, too, as house servants, he had heard, all along the Barbary coast. Many of the Italian states paid them bribes and they were wary of major powers that had a strong navy but the American traders, not having any navy at all, suffered more than most from their attentions. It was said that Americans now formed a sizeable minority among the slaves of the region.

  Nathan raised the glass once more to his eye. She was noticeably closer. He could make out the strange overhangs at bow and stern—and the gun ports along her side. If they kept to their present course and the Speedwell did not alter hers they would be in range within the hour.

  “What guns do they carry? Normally speaking. And crew?”

  “Well now, the ship that took us, sir, she carried twenty-four, mostly 6-pounders, with swivel guns at prow and stern. And a crew of three to four hundred.”

  “As many as that?” Nathan took the glass from his eye. This was a far bigger crew than a frigate in most navies.

  “Aye, sir, not counting slaves. They go for boarding, do you see, sir. They’ll not use the guns ‘less they have to.”

  This made sense. They would not wish to damage a potential prize and with so big a crew they could board even an East Indiaman with impunity, unless she could keep them at a distance with her own guns. Not much chance of that in the Speedwell’s case with three 4-pounders to each puny broadside and the single 6-pounder at the stern. Better to try and outrun her.

  “And fast?”

  “Very fast, sir. Built for speed, you might say. And with that rig they can sail as close to the wind as I have ever seen.”

  “And with the wind on the quarter—as fast as us?”

  “I’d not like to say, sir. That is, I’d not like to stake my life on it, nor any man’s.”

  No. That was Nathan’s job.

  “What do you think?” he asked Tully, when Parker had been dismissed. It was Nathan’s job but he was not above seeking advice on how to do it, not from Tully at least.

  “ We could run for the Azores.” Tully stated the obvious, the only course that would give them any kind of a fighting chance.

  “You think we have the legs on her?”

  “If we start the water, ditch the guns …”

  Even then, they both knew it would be a damned close thing. And every mile would take them far off their present course with a substantial risk of being stuck for days, even weeks, in the Azores Highs.

  “Load the guns with chain shot,” he instructed Tully. “And tell Whiteley to arm his marines.”

  A flicker of surprise. Tully would never question an order but Nathan gave him the answer all the same.

  “We cannot fight her,” he admitted, “but if she comes close enough we might be able to cross her stern, then make a run for it.”

  At least they would be running in the right direction. And he might damage her rigging enough to give them a flying start—if she did not damage them more.

  Tully nodded and was gone. But there had been another question in his eyes and it lingered in Nathan’s mind.

  Would she come close enough without firing on them?

  He could not count on it. Run, his more cautious voice urged him. Run to the south and use the sternchaser when she comes within range.

  He slid down the backstay to the deck. The men were loading the guns under the supervision of Solomon Pratt who had once been a gunner in the British Navy, Nathan had always suspected, and knew what he was about, though he complained a lot. He complained now when Tully told him to load the guns along both sides. Where was he to find the crew to fight both sides?

  And now here was Imlay, out of his chair, his face creased with concern.

  “How can I be of assistance?”

  You may stay below until we are took, was Nathan’s initial thought, after which you will doubtless persuade them to drop you off at a convenient port in return for a substantial ransom to be paid at some future date. But of course he said no such thing but proposed that Imlay put himself at the service of Lieutenant Whiteley and his marines who were now below deck, hopefully preparing for battle. They would be useful in a close encounter but against three hundred … ?

  “Mr. Place.”

  “Sir?” The boy had lost some colour but appeared steady enough considering the future he faced on the Barbary Coast. Not quite the career Mrs. Place had in mind for him when she had brought him to Shoreham but steady employment, for all of that, and a good-looking lad could go far, Nathan had heard, in the seraglios of the beys. “Compliments to Mr. Whiteley …” Was there ever a circumstance where you did not begin every blessed sentence with this courtesy? “And beg him to arm ten of his marines with grenades, upon a short fuse.”

  He caught Tully’s eye.

  “I mean to bring us right across her stern,” he said, “as close as we can get. You will take the con and I will take the guns. And as soon as we are past, bring her back upon our present course.”

  Tully nodded as if it were as simple as that.

  “We will keep the marines out of sight until the last minute,” Nathan said, thinking aloud. And then it came to him. By God. He almost laughed with the sheer reckless wantonness, the absurdity of it. But what could they lose by it?

  Quite a considerable amount, in fact. Best not to think on it.

  “Mr. Tully?”

  “Sir?”

  Nathan nodded to himself as the calculations raced across his brain.

  “I want every man below deck.”

  Tully stared at him. Was he mad? Very probably, Nathan thought.

  “When I was on the Hermes,” he explained, “off the Mosquito Coast, in ‘89, we sighted a schooner without a single soul on deck. Just a cat.”

  Tully inclined his head attentively as if he had nothing better to do than listen to one his captain’s anecdotes whilst a heavily armed Barbary corsair bore down on them with three hundred hostile Moors already calculating their share of the spoils.

  “The wheel was lashed, the sails set and she was moving at three or four knots,” Nathan continued amiably. “But not a soul to be seen. We came alongside, very close, and put a party aboard her. They came back very fast. They had found the crew. Dead, every one, below deck—with the yellow fever.”

  Tully appeared to have grasped the point of the story. “But how will we steer the vessel,” he enquired, “if we are all below decks?”

  “We will steer by the tiller ropes,” Nathan proposed. “You and I will keep a watch from the launch with a tarp thrown upon us and devise some means of signalling so that they will know when to turn.” He looked into Tully’s face. “So what do you think? Is there anything I have overlooked?”

  He meant this to be ironic.

  “I think it is a pity,” said Tully, “that we do not have a cat.”

  “Closer,” murmured Nathan softly. “I need you closer.”

  He was crouched with Tully in the bottom of the launch with the tarp over their heads, but he did not mean his companion. He meant the polacca which was about a cable’s length to leeward. She was bigger, far bigger than Nathan had thought when he saw her through the glass. He could see her people lining the rail and up in the rigging. So many people. Dark faces and beards, turbaned heads. Officers in flowing white. And he could see her guns: twelve 6-pounders in her waist, more of a lesser
calibre on the quarterdeck. One broadside at this range and they would be food for the fishes.

  A flash and a bang. Nathan flinched. But it was just one shot, fired from high in her forecastle. He did not see where it went. He took it to be a shot across the bows, commanding them to heave to.

  “She is using her mizzensail as a rudder,” Tully murmured in his ear, as if they might hear him on the polacca. “A giant rudder to keep her bows up into the wind. If she loses it, she will fall off to leeward. It will give us a few hundred yards at least.”

  Nathan had to think about this. Tully always seemed at least one step ahead of him. But even when he worked it out he could not see what difference it would make, unless they could bring the mast down.

  He could see her officers staring towards them from the quarterdeck. If she was going to fire into them it would be now. His whole body was tensed for the flash and roar of her guns. The thin planks of the launch all that stood between him and …

  A sudden squeal in his ear. Nathan almost jumped. He turned his head. Tully had got hold of a rat. He was holding it by the neck, between finger and thumb, close to his face.

  Nathan stared at it, took in its red eyes and its sharp teeth, then at Tully in bewilderment. Had he gone mad?

  “We have no cat,” said Tully, “but perhaps this will do as well.” With a flick of the wrist he tossed it through the gap in the tarp.

  Nathan watched it drop to the deck, pick itself up, and make a dart for the scuppers. He looked back at the pirate. She was closer. He could discern features clearly now. The ring in a man’s ear, a scar, the jewel on the hilt of a sword, catching the sun …

  “Now!” He jerked the lanyard leading over the far side of the launch and down to young Coyle below deck. For what seemed an age there was no response. What in God’s name was keeping them? And then he felt the lurch to leeward, almost a jolt, as the tiller bit and the bows came round and dug into the trough. He saw the alarm on the faces of the Moors as the unmanned craft came swinging towards them, heard their shouts … And then he was throwing back the tarp and springing down on to the deck and sprinting for the nearest gun.

  It was already primed and loaded, the muzzle raised so high it was jammed up against the top of the gun port. He pushed it open and thrust his head out. They were crossing the polacca’s stern, so close that for a moment Nathan thought he had misjudged and they were going to crash into her. He froze with tension as the Speedwell’s bowsprit caught in the mizzen shrouds but it ripped through and now they were directly astern of her. Faces glaring down from the overhanging poop. There was a crash of musketry and a screech of metal on metal as something struck the breech of the gun by his hand and shot off past his ear. Tully was at the helm, struggling to bring the barque back on her former course, for already the sails were beginning to feather and there was a serious danger she would be taken aback. The hands were already pouring up through the hatches, the marines among them, back in their scarlet coats, and Whiteley barking out orders as they fanned out along the rail.

  At last Nathan felt the barque begin to heel to starboard as Tully brought the bows round. They were running parallel to the polacca now but on the opposite side from before and to his immense relief Nathan saw that the polacca’s gun ports were still closed and all three of the Speedwell’s guns were run out. Nathan glanced swiftly along the muzzle and tugged on the lanyard. He arched his body back like a bow as the cannon came hurtling back under him. The sound of the shot was still resounding in his ears when he heard Solomon Pratt firing the next gun. Nathan had no time to mark the fall of shot. He ran to the third and last gun, with his crew trailing behind him. They ran the gun out in seconds but the polacca was already moving away from them. There was no time to take aim.

  “Fire!” he yelled as he jerked the lanyard, though there was none to instruct but himself. He leaped forward to peer through the smoke. The polacca appeared undamaged and now the Moors were running out the guns, all along her starboard side. Then, slowly, painfully slowly, the mizzen topmast began to fall. Forward and to windward, further, further, bringing the yard and the topsail with it, crashing down into the waist.

  The hands were cheering but Nathan stared in frustration and disbelief for the big lateen sail was still there at her mizzen. How? With the topmast down and the peak halliards surely parted? And he had no more guns, saving the 6-pounder at the Speedwells stern. He had started to move towards it when whatever was holding the boom suddenly parted and it came down like a great signal arm swinging at the mast—and the sail with it. And without its leverage, the polacca was dropping off to leeward, just as Tully had said she would, but faster, further than they could ever have hoped.

  Then Nathan saw the confusion on her decks. The sail had come down into the waist, directly forward of the quarterdeck, shrouding the helm in its folds. He leaped up into the shrouds for a better view, forgetful of the sharpshooters in the rigging …

  And then he saw the flames.

  Whiteley had several of his marines up in the tops hurling grenades down into the collapsed rigging and they had started a fire. Nathan could see men running aft with buckets but it was burning fiercely, burning as only dry canvas and tarred rope can burn. A tongue of flame ran up the mizzenmast shrouds and one of her guns went off as the powder caught.

  The last he saw of her she was still burning but they had managed to bring her up into the wind so the fire would not spread forward.

  “Pity to leave her to prey upon another honest trader,” he informed Tully, as if he considered going back to finish her off.

  “Honest trader?” Tully raised a brow. “D’you think they would call us that?”

  Nathan congratulated Mr. Whiteley on the conduct of his marines.

  “And the crew behaved pretty well, do you not think?” he said to Tully privately.

  “ Very well,” agreed Tully.

  “I will be sorry to lose them when we reach the Havana.” Nathan allowed himself to admit of this possibility. He assumed his captain’s pose, hands clasped behind his back, chin raised to contemplate a distant horizon, in this case smeared with smoke from the burning polacca. He might fool some people even if he did not fool himself. “I only hope the people on the Unicorn behave half as well.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The Havana

  THEY CAME INTO THE HAVANA on the morning tide, forty-two days out of Portsmouth, neither as soon as Nathan had hoped nor as late as he had feared. But it would not have made the slightest difference had he flown on the wings of Pegasus, the British consul informed him, for the Unicorn was not there.

  “Nor has been since early August and I have had no word of her since,” the consul admitted, “for all that I have made enquiry of every vessel that has entered the port these past two months or more.”

  Robert Portillo was a tall, elegant man of about fifty with the dark complexion and distinguished manner of a Spanish grandee who had spent the best part of his life in the tropics—Don Roberto, his servants called him—but whatever his ancestry, he was a subject of King George and had represented His Majesty’s interests in Cuba for over twenty years. His house occupied a corner of the Plaza de Armas opposite the Palacio de los Capitanes-Generales and was a veritable palace itself, built in the Moorish style, its three floors surrounding a large central courtyard with tropical palms and an ornate stone fountain. On this occasion, however, the consul had chosen to entertain his two companions on the roof where he had caused a small garden to be built and where they could talk in total privacy, he assured them, while catching a little of the sea breeze.

  The breeze proved an empty promise but they sat under a striped awning with a magnificent view of the vast harbour from the fortifications of El Morro at its neck to the Bay of Marimelena far over to their right where the Speedwell was moored among a host of other vessels. They had walked some distance in search of the consul’s house and Nathan was drenched in sweat, despite the informality of his dress.

  “Let us have n
o ceremony,” Imlay had begged him as they prepared to enter harbour, “for we shall discover nothing by such means. Rather let us sail under the Stars and Stripes, in the guise of an innocent merchantman. For should we enter harbour in all the dignity of your estate with the Royal Navy ensign streaming proudly at our stern, firing off all our guns in salute to His Most Catholic Majesty—which I am sure you are longing to do—you will be obliged to present yourself to the Captain-General and will become a virtual prisoner in his house, forced to dine every day with Don this and Doña that and you will learn a thousand opinions of their daily lives here and not one fact pertinent to our mission, while every French spy upon the island and its nearest neighbours will know our business before the week is out. So instead, let us sneak ashore like a pair of eager young tars anxious to sample the local harlotry and we may pay our respects to the British consul in total discretion and discover the true situation here and what has transpired since he wrote to their lordships.”

  So no ceremony it was, though Imlay’s notion of what an eager young tar might wear to go a-wooing would have astonished the tarts of Wapping or any other harbour in the civilised world, consisting as it did of white shirt and breeches with a wide red sash at the waist, black Hessian boots with silver tassels and a wide brimmed straw hat. As accessories to this ensemble he clenched a long black cheroot between his teeth and carried a canvas bag over his shoulder with what he called “a few necessaries,” assuring his astonished companion that he would pass unnoticed in the exotic atmosphere of the port. The fact that they were escorted through the streets by a crowd of unruly urchins did not appear to modify this opinion.

  The consul unrolled a map on the table before them.

  “We had information that the missing cutter had been sighted in the Old Bahama Channel some three hundred miles east of here,” he informed them, “among the islands of Jardines del Rey.”

  Nathan was familiar with the Old Bahama Channel: or as familiar as he ever wished to be. It was the route they had themselves taken to the Havana, a narrow strait between Cuba and the Bahamas, several hundred miles long but no more than fifteen miles at its widest, hedged about with hundreds of small islands. Even with the aid of the one Admiralty chart available to them—drawn by Captain Elphinstone in the year of the British siege—it had taken them almost four days to navigate and they had come near to disaster on several occasions. You could hide a fleet in the islands of Jardines del Rey, let alone a small cutter.